Maddon's Rock (17 page)

But letters to Jenny were more difficult. We fell into a regular correspondence. And whilst I looked forward with the excitement of a school kid to a letter from her, keeping it in my pocket unopened for days, trying to make it bridge the gap to the next, they were a weakness in the armour of acceptance and indifference I was building to my condition. For she wrote to me of the Highlands, of
hunting, of sailing in the lochs, she sent me plans of the
Eilean Mor
, took me all through her reconditioning almost plank by plank. It was hard, because she wrote of things I loved which were out of my reach. But her letters were a real contact with the outside world. They were my one form of dissipation in the routine of forgetfulness that I had planned. They made me think of the future, of what I should do at the end of my three years. They made me unhappy. And yet I loved them as the one bright thing to look forward to from day to day.

So the spring warmed into summer. VE Day came and went. Then VJ Day. The leaves turned on the trees behind the church and blew in gay clusters around our marching feet as we turned in at the prison gates. Then winter clamped down, hard and black. The moors became thick with mists. In November a drift of powdery snow stung our faces on an early parade. The walls of our cells streamed with damp. Our clothes never seemed dry. The moors, so pleasant to summer visitors stopping for tea in their cars, became a mysterious, frightening void. The mists closed down on the prison for days at a time so that the great rocky battlements of the surrounding tors were seen as dim glimpses through fleeting gaps in the murk.

All this time Bert and I were in constant contact. Messages passed back and forth between us through the intermediary of a burglar who occupied the cell between us. This burglar had been on the Moor before. He was a hardened criminal, a mixture of Scot and Irish with a small bullet head and a wicked temper. He had been in R.E.M.E. till he burgled the till of a Naafi canteen in a big military camp near Carlisle. He was always planning escape. He never did anything about it. But he’d work it out to the last detail and then pass it on to Bert and myself. It was his way of passing the time. He might just as well have done cross-word puzzles.

Sometimes Bert and I managed to talk to each other. I remember one day he was in a great state of excitement. We were in the same work party and he kept on catching my eye, his face all a-grin. As we fell in to march back
to the cells he pushed his way alongside and whispered, “I seen the dentist, mate. They’re goin’ ter give me me denchers.” I looked at him quickly. I’d got so used to him without them that I couldn’t visualise him with teeth. The screw in charge of the party told us to stop talking.

Then one day about a month later I met Bert on our cell landing while on the way to empty some slops and barely recognised him. The wizened little monkey face was gone. His mouth was full of teeth. They grinned at me like horse’s teeth. It was as though he had filled his mouth with some white pebbles and was afraid of swallowing them. It made him look grotesquely young. I’d never thought about his age before. But now I realised suddenly that he could not be more than thirty-five. The teeth moved up and down as he spoke.

However, I think I got used to them quicker than he did. Scotty, our burglar chum, spent hours relaying to me Bert’s comments on those teeth. Bert came in for a lot of chaff, but he gave as good as he got. He was popular with everybody. With or without his teeth he continued to grin and crack jokes.

Christmas came and the snow began to pile up on the Moors. For a week in January we seemed to do nothing but clear the snow, shovelling a way through the drifts to keep the roads open. “Huming snowploughs, that’s all we is,” Bert grumbled. But I enjoyed those days out in the snow. It was warm working and if we made good progress discipline was relaxed and we were able to talk and sing.

Then suddenly the snow was gone and the moors glowed a warm golden brown in crisp sunshine. Life began to stir even up on those bleak hills. An occasional bird began to sing. The men became restive. They smashed up their cells. Fights became more frequent. The Borstal Boys started organised rioting. I was infected by the general spring malaise. The limitations of my cell began to irk me more and more. I wanted to smash it up. But I was scared—scared of chokey. I couldn’t face solitary confinement. I had fits of terrible depression,
violent longings to get out and walk in freedom across the moors. I found my thoughts becoming dominated by memories of shady walks in summer woods, meadows of buttercups beside a river and the sparkle of water in sunlight as my sailing dinghy trod the wavelets in Cornish estuaries. And all these longings began to focus on Jenny. I started counting the days to each letter, getting miserable and angry when they were late, or what I chose to consider as late. I found myself upbraiding her in my letters and then tearing them up. And then one day I woke up to the realisation that I had fallen in love with her. I cursed myself for a fool. I was a prisoner in Dartmoor, disowned by my fiancée, a failure to my parents. What future could I possibly have? What could I possibly offer her? In a fiendish debauch of mental masochism I didn’t write to her for three weeks, so that she wrote to me asking why I hadn’t written, was I sick, should she come down and see me? I hated myself then, hated myself even more when I wrote a dull, impersonal letter in reply.

And then suddenly the world changed and my cloak of misery and frustration fell away from me in the eager burst of enthusiasm with which I concentrated all my thoughts on one single idea.

It happened this way. I got hold of papers whenever I could. One of the screws, a jailer named Sandy, was a decent sort and used to slip me one now and then. I read them avidly. They gave me great satisfaction. It was an impersonal contact with the outside world. They produced the illusory feeling that I was sitting by my own fireside. On the 7th of March, it was—7th March, 1946. I managed to see a copy of the previous day’s issue of one of the London dailies. I was glancing through it with the pleasant absorption that went with the illusion that I was part of the world about which I was reading, when my eye was caught by the single word
Trikkala.
It was in the second head to a down-column story on the front page. It was quite short, a paragraph or two, but it started my brain racing with a thousand half-digested thoughts and suspicions.

I tore the story out and the worn fragment of newsprint lies on my desk as I write. This is what it said:

N
EWCASTLE
, T
UESDAY
—Captain Theodore Halsey, master of the Kelt Steamship Company’s 5,000 ton freighter,
Trikkala
, at the time she was sunk, plans to salvage the half-million pounds worth of silver bullion that went down with the ship some 300 miles north west of Tromso. He and several other survivors of the
Trikkala
have pooled their resources to form a limited company called Trikkala Recovery. They have purchased an ex-Admiralty tug and are equipping it in a Tyneside dock-yard with all the latest deep-sea diving equipment. It is already fitted with azdec which will be used to locate the wreck.

When I met Captain Halsey on the bridge of the tug, which has been christened the
Tempest
, he said, “I’m glad you’ve come along to-day, for it is exactly a year now since the
Trikkala
was mined and sunk.” Captain Halsey is short and stocky with a neat black beard and sharp, restless eyes. His movements are quick and decisive. His manner is confident. “I don’t think there is any secret now in the fact that the
Trikkala
carried a valuable cargo of silver bullion. I intend to lift that bullion. I know where she went down. It happens to be in an area where the depth is reduced by a wide shelf of rock. I believe she lies on that shelf. If I am right then I am convinced that with the help of the improvements in diving equipment and methods achieved during the war, we shall be able to raise the bullion.” He described the expedition as the first post-war underwater treasure hunt.

He introduced me to his officers, both
Trikkala
survivors. Pat Hendrik, a Scot, had been first officer. He looked tough and competent. Lionel Rankin had just come out of the Navy after fourteen years. He was a
Warrant Officer. Two other
Trikkala
survivors are among the crew. All are in the syndicate. “We feel that those who had the misfortune to be on board the
Trikkala
when she was hit and who survived a three weeks’ voyage in an open boat in winter should be the ones to claim salvage on the recovery of the bullion,” Captain Halsey said to me. “And I think we’ll do it. We aim to leave on 22nd April, all being well.” He refused to reveal who was backing the expedition, merely repeating that the five survivors had a financial interest.

God knows how many times I read that story through. I went over it word by word. And all the time something at the back of my mind kept fidgeting my brain with the thought that there was something phoney about it. For the first time since I had been in prison I let my mind roam over the events and conversations on board the
Trikkala
. And all the time the thought rattling round my mind was,
why are all these survivors still together?
Halsey, Hendrik, Rankin, Jukes and Evans—they were together on the deck of the
Trikkala
when we were put on to the raft, they were together in the open boat that was twenty-one days afloat in the Barents Sea before being picked up, they were together at our Court-Martial, and here they were together again on board a tug going in search of the
Trikkala’s
bullion. Rankin had even got out of the Navy to be on that tug. They must be very sure of recovering the bullion. And why hadn’t some of them got jobs? That Halsey and Hendrik should be together in the venture was reasonable. But Jukes and Evans might have been expected to ship on other boats and be at the other end of the world. Was it chance that brought them all to England at the same time to ship with Halsey? Or was it something else? Suppose they were afraid of each other? Suppose they shared some awful knowledge? Suppose the boats had been tampered with?

Thoughts like these shot like electrons through my brain. And out of the chaos emerged one decisive view—there was some compelling force, outside of the natural
desire to hunt for treasure, that kept these five men bound irrevocably to each other. Of that I became convinced. And all my subsequent reasoning was based on that assumption. The name
Penang
began to stand out in my mind as large as
Trikkala.
I began to recall the details of that story. The old cook drifted into my cell, his apron floating in water, his hair like short strings of seaweed, and his lips framing the word PIRACY. Then he was gone and my mind grasped at the straw my imagination had produced. The money for the purchase of the tug—where had that come from? What would it cost to purchase and equip a salvage tug—£20,000, £30,000? Halsey had refused to say who his backer was. Suppose it was Captain Halsey of the
Penang
who was backing it? Jewels fetch high prices now. Jewels are a cash transaction in many places in London. Jewels might well have financed this expedition.

I communicated the contents of the paragraph to Bert. We spent the rest of the evening discussing it through the medium of our burglar chum. Next day, I remember, it was bright and clear. The moors lay all about the prison, warm and brown and friendly. The tors were no longer black, mysterious battlements, but sun-warmed rock cresting the hills. The sky was blue.

It was on that day I decided to escape.

At what moment I made the decision I cannot recall. It was an idea that grew within me. And the focal point of my idea was Rankin. I don’t think I had any feeling about Halsey or Hendrik, certainly not about Jukes or Evans. But Rankin had grown in my imagination to the size of an ogre. The long winter of captivity had taught me to hate. And though by my effort of will, I had suppressed all conscious thought of these men or the events on the
Trikkala
, yet when the flood tide of recollection was released from my pent-up brain by the story of the salvage attempt, I found myself with a violent hatred for Rankin. His heavy body, soft hands, white face and little eyes seemed stamped in my memory, together with every action, every gesture so that I felt him to be the embodiment of everything unhealthy.
He wandered in and out of my brain like a big, white maggot. And because I knew he would be afraid of me if I suddenly accosted him when he thought me safe in Dartmoor, I became feverishly excited with the idea of doing just that. From him I would get the truth. And I would get it before the
Tempest
sailed, if I had to smash every bone in his body. Dartmoor had done that for me. It had toughened me mentally as well as physically. I felt there was nothing I would not dare, nothing I would not do to come at the truth which had forced me to spend almost a year in that dismal place.

It was typical of my frame of mind that at first I thought only of what I would do after I had escaped, not of how I was going to escape. All that evening I planned. I would make for Newcastle. I would find the tug. Rankin would be on board, or if he had not yet taken up his quarters on board, he would be in the vicinity, probably at one of the hotels in Newcastle. I would lay in wait for him. And then, when he gave me the chance of a lonely spot, I’d wring the truth out of him. I visualised it all so clearly. I never stopped in my dreaming to consider the snags that might arise to prevent my reaching him, or to wonder if the truth might not be just as they had stated and all my suspicions and uneasiness the imaginings of an over-wrought mind.

But next morning dawned cold and chill, with the moors hidden in a thick mist. The cold damp of the grim, stone blocks pressed upon my spirits and I suddenly began to have doubts. How was I going to get out? I’d need money and clothes. As we went out on the parade ground the great prison wall seemed to mock at my plans. How was I going to get over it? How was I to get clear of the moors? I knew the prison routine for escapes too well—the tolling of the great prison bell, the patrol cars, the warders out beating across the moors, and the dogs. There had been several Borstal escapes quite recently. They’d got caught in the end. And I knew what happened outside. I’d seen it on holidays before the war. All the towns around Dartmoor warned. The few roads through it patrolled. Police checks at every road exit. An escaped
prisoner had to walk off the moors and at night. I knew enough about the moors to reckon the chances of succeeding pretty slim. I began to feel depressed.