Killing Ground (19 page)

Ayres stared away, seeing nothing. “My brother's missing, sir. In the desert.”

Howard watched his despair. “I'm sorry.” How stupidly inadequate it sounded. Like all the other times.
I saw him go.
“It's not definite, is it?”

Ayres shook his head wretchedly while the quartermaster and gangway sentry tried to melt away. “Not yet, sir.”

He touched his arm impetuously. “Keep your chin up. Come and talk if you feel like it.”

Treherne appeared in the lobby door and saluted. “Orders have arrived, sir.” They fell in step and Treherne added quietly, “I'm keeping the kid busy. Take his mind off it.”

They reached the door marked
Captain
and found Petty Officer Vallance hovering by his pantry.

Howard tossed his cap on to a chair and sat down at his desk where Ireland the PO writer had lined up his papers in order of importance.

He said, “Drinks, if you please, Vallance.” His eyes skimmed the neatly worded signal and pictured one of the Wrens typing it, watched over perhaps by someone like the girl with green eyes.

“Day after tomorrow, Number One.” He glanced at him. “It's
confirmed, by the way. The Boss just told me he would do what he could to keep you with me, until—”

Treherne grinned. “We can discuss
that
later on, sir. Thanks a lot!”

He was thinking of Joyce, her supple body taking him, holding him.

Howard turned over another sheet. “Send for Sub-Lieutenant Bizley.” He waited for Treherne to speak on the bulkhead telephone and then said calmly, “He's getting a gong after all.”

Treherne tried to look pleased, although he could not bring himself to like Bizley. He replied, “There'll be no holding him now!”

There was a tap at the door and Bizley entered the day cabin, his features filled with curiosity, or was it something else? Like guilt?

“It's just been put in orders, Sub. You are being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross at their lordships' convenience. Suit you?”

But Bizley seemed unable to speak or take it in. His eyes moved instead to the solitary blue and white ribbon on Howard's reefer.

Howard smiled. “‘Like yours,' were you going to say?”

Bizley stammered, “T-thank you very much, sir! I never expected …”

Treherne looked at his empty glass.
Not much you didn't, you little twit!

“More good news.” Howard ignored Treherne's expression. “You are to be made acting-lieutenant on the first of the month. So you can put up your second stripe any time after that. You'll get all the bumf about it after we've done our next convoy.”

Bizley did not even hear him. He muttered something which made little sense and then found himself on the mat outside the cabin door.

He had done it. It was even better than he had dared to dream. He stared wildly at the single stripe on his sleeve.
Lieutenant
Lionel Bizley.
It even sounded right, and he wondered dazedly if the King would make the award personally. He thought of Finlay and the others, and found himself laughing but making no sound. He was on his way.

The wardroom steward, PO Vallance, watched him around the curtain that hung across the pantry entrance. There would be no more peace down aft after this, he thought gloomily. Bizley was a proper little toe-rag, and would be a bloody sight worse now.

Two days later as
Gladiator
's narrow hull throbbed steadily to the deeper beat of her main engines, Howard sat at the same desk and thought of the sea cabin on the bridge where he would have to snatch his catnaps whenever possible. There was still a lot to do, and there should have been more time for the flotilla, or escort group as it was now termed, to work together. But Vickers had made his thoughts clear to each commanding officer. “There
is
no more time. So let's get out there and beat the hell out of them!”

Treherne entered the cabin and waited for Howard to look up. “Special sea dutymen closed up, sir. Postman's gone ashore with the last mail.” He hesitated. “One man absent, sir.”

“Stoker Marshall?” He saw him nod. The rating who had lost all of his family in an air raid. Where was he? What would he be doing?

Treherne spoke for him. “He should be here, with
us,
sir. A lot of the men have lost relatives.” He added harshly, “My God, it seems as if the civvies get all the casualties in this war!”

Did he mean the people who crouched in their primitive air raid shelters, Howard wondered. Or was he still thinking about the merchant seamen?

He asked, “What about young Ayres?”

“He's heard nothing more, sir.” He glanced up as a mooring wire was dragged noisily over the deck. “Bit of a breeze across the dock. We may have to use the back spring to work her clear.”

More quivering from Evan Price's engine-rooms. The beast
stirring herself, getting ready to face her old enemy. At least they were in better weather this time.

Howard stood up and began the routine of patting his pockets for the things he would need. He wore a comfortable grey roll-necked sweater he had bought in Reykjavik, his oldest reefer and battered sea-going cap with a paint-stain on the peak. Binoculars, fresh towel. He glanced at himself in the mirror. Hardly what they might expect at Dartmouth or Greenwich.

“Fifteen minutes then, Number One.”

Treherne smiled through his beard. “The old firm, sir.”

Howard nodded, remembering.

And so once more HMS
Gladiator
went back to war.

For many of
Gladiator
's ship's company the days that followed their leaving Liverpool were more of a strain than if they had faced immediate action. Day in, day out, with a convoy of some forty vessels of every type and size, the escorts swept ahead and abeam of them seeking the tell-tale “ping” of Asdic to betray a submarine, or, if half the rumours were true, a whole pack of them.

But apart from exercising action stations and testing guns, the hands worked watch-and-watch, four hours on, four off, a kind of stumbling sleepwalk in which they ate the greasy meals brought down to the messes, catching a few moments of rest where they could. Sometimes they slept on the steel decks where cursing watchkeepers stepped over them in the darkness, or faced a torrent of abuse from the ones who were forced to sleep by the vertical ladders which linked the messdecks to the world above.

Lashed hammocks stood like monks in their nettings in each crowded mess, not to be used in case they jammed a hatchway, or were needed as lifesaving floats if the ship bought it.

It was a dawdling convoy, the speed of which was that of the slowest vessel in it, in this case a Greek freighter that looked as if she had dropped out of a picture book from the Great War.

The old sweats were not surprised at this or much else either. Every kind of hull was needed, and those which should have been scrapped years ago were ploughing the Atlantic with all the rest. Long tankers in ballast which with luck would be almost awash on the return trip, every bunker filled to the brim with fuel, the life-blood of any war-machine.

Ships which had come from the Clyde and the Solway Firth, from Liverpool Bay and Londonderry to join in this great array of salt-smeared and rusty silhouettes, around which the escorts plunged and harried like terriers. The merchantmen were more used to it, while for the lean destroyers the slow passage was hard to take, and for the new hands it was an introduction to the Atlantic roll and the seasickness which went with it. The slow lift of the bows, so that the ship seemed to hang motionless while the sea surged against one side, before giving that terrible corkscrew plunge down again, hurling water high over the bridge and sheltering gun crews.

Many a meal went flying, or untouched; personal possessions clattered about the messdecks in a mixture of spilled tea and vomit.

This, then, was the world Ordinary Seaman Andrew Milvain shared with the old hands—old to him anyway—and those like himself who had joined straight from the spit-and-polish of a naval training establishment.

Apart from the usual quips about his very youthful appearance and what the seamen called his “posh” accent, he was accepted far more easily than he had expected. His quiet dedication and almost fanatical efforts to learn all he could, even when he was laid low with seasickness, won him both respect and curiosity.

As the forenoon watch was relieved on this particular day Milvain climbed down the ladder to join his new companions in the mess. Nine Mess was little more than a scrubbed wooden table, which was covered in oilcloth for the main meal of the day. There were benches to sit on, and the curved side of the mess
was lined with cushion-covered lockers, above which the lucky ones stowed their cap-boxes and other personal items on shelves.

Leading Seaman Bruce Fernie, “killick” of the mess, sat on one of the lockers reading an old newspaper while the meal was passed down from the deck above by the duty cooks. He glanced up and said wearily, “All out of bloody tins again! I'll bet them buggers in the barracks do better!”

The plates were passed along the table where fiddles were fitted to restrain them when the ship rolled, which was often.

Fernie watched the boy tucking in busily, as if he had not eaten for a year. Tinned potatoes, tinned sausages, tinned carrots, with some kind of plum duff and watery custard to follow. “Don't they feed you at 'ome?”

Milvain gave his shy smile. He was thinking of the letter he had written to his mother before the ship had sailed from Liverpool.
His first ship.
What she was like, and a piece about these very same men. Rough and tough for the most part, but always ready with grudging praise when he did something properly. He wrote of the captain, but left out the piece about mistaking him for a petty officer. He still blushed about it. But mostly he had told them about Sub-Lieutenant Bizley, the talk about the medal he was going to receive. They would like that. He often thought about his dead brother; he had been something like the captain in a way. A face full of experience, a match for any occasion from taking over the bridge to facing Bully Bishop across the defaulters' table, where he had indeed dipped his hook as Leading Seaman Fernie had prophesied.

He felt his stomach heave as the deck lifted again. If only the sea were visible. But the scuttles had the deadlights screwed tightly shut. That was hardly surprising as the mess was the closest one to the bows, directly below the main messdeck which ran the full length of the forecastle. They had pulled his leg about that too. He glanced at the deck between the messes. They had told him that some of the main fuel tanks were under there. Some joker had said, “You won't feel a bloody thing, Wings. Straight
up to the pearly gates!”

It was a Sunday, and as bridge messenger Milvain had been kept busy with tea or kye for the watchkeepers, up and down the steep ladders, gauging the moment so as not to be drenched by an incoming sea, or flung bodily to an unyielding deck. He made up little sketches in his mind as he bustled about and tried to keep out of everybody's way.

The captain, hatless, his hair thick with spray as he chatted to the yeoman of signals, an unlit pipe between his teeth. The officer-of-the-watch, in this case Lieutenant Finlay, as he passed his helm and revolutions orders, or shouted over the loud-hailer at one of the merchantmen as they thrashed abeam.

On the bridge there was always a sense of purpose, whereas elsewhere the ship seemed to exist on rumour. The latest buzz had been about Bizley and his medal … Milvain could not fathom it out. Nobody seemed to like him. Even the bear-like leading seaman with his newspaper, usually a tolerant man, had remarked, “That's all I need, a bloody 'ero! That sod will get your arse shot off and still expect a salute!”

Milvain was astonished and overwhelmed by the sea itself. It was like nothing he had seen, even in the cinema. This summer's morning when the watch had changed, and the weary lookouts and gun crews had scattered to their messes, the ocean had seemed all-powerful and fierce. Dark, dark waves and troughs broken only here and there by fans of spray, the whole lifting and falling, it seemed level with the bridge itself. When the sun found its way across the horizon he had felt no warmth, just salt hardening on his cheeks and lips. Then the sea would change, the colour a shark-blue which rolled along the columns of merchant ships with disdain, as if merely to display its latent power. He could not imagine it in a full gale as one of the boatswain's mates had described it.

Fernie had interrupted scornfully. “That's right, Bill, swing the bloody lamp, will you?” To Milvain he added, “Bill talks so soddin' much you'd think he was vaccinated with a gramophone
needle!”

At first Milvain had flushed at some of the language he had heard, the embellished experiences some had had on runs ashore, but not now; not too much anyway. It was like the sea and the danger. It was there all the time. Something you had to accept.

One by one the men of Nine Mess found corners to lie or crouch into, their life-jackets worn loosely and uninflated. Just in case.

As it was Sunday, there was a make-and-mend for the afternoon. Then on watch again for the first dog at four o'clock. Order, routine, and, many said, boredom. But not Milvain.

He watched as the big leading hand opened his ditty box and produced some intricate ropework, turk's heads which he had fashioned into handsome handles for a chest he kept somewhere. Milvain was fascinated by it. Fernie's hands, like the man, were huge, scarred by his work as captain of the quarterdeck and in charge of the depth-charges there, and yet he could produce delicate mats of twine, and carving from old packing cases which would put a joiner to shame.

Fernie looked at him thoughtfully. “You don't mind talking about it, do you, laddie?”

Milvain flinched. He knew now what
it
meant. “No. Not really.”