The Silence of Ghosts (3 page)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t sent to sail on a lake, but on the Norwegian Sea, heading into Vestfjorden bound for Narvik on board the HMS
Hotspur
. The
Hotspur
was an H-class destroyer, and I was a barely-trained gunner stationed at one of her four Mark IX guns. It was when we reached Narvik that things heated up. The Germans had invaded Norway at the start of April, and there was naval fighting outside Narvik on the 8th and 9th. The next day we reached Narvik in the early morning, under cover of a snowstorm. The rest is history, as they say. We sank some German ships, but Jerry returned in force with larger destroyers. The
Hunter
was sent to the bottom by torpedoes, the
Hardy
was badly damaged, and we were hit quite badly, but not enough to finish us off. It might have been better for me if we had been holed below the waterline.

The
Hotspur
was towed off for repairs with a skeleton crew. Along with some others, I was transferred to the HMS
Resolution
, which had also suffered bomb damage. I stayed with her through to June, when we joined Force H at Gibraltar, and then on to Mers-el-Kebir in July. That was my greatest moment. Our fleet destroyed the Vichy French fleet in Algeria, to stop their ships falling into the hands of the Germans. I’m sorry about the French sailors who were killed, for in a way they were our allies; but this was war and we could not afford to go soft when we were fighting a ruthless enemy.

We sailed down the coast of West Africa and reached Dakar
on the 24th September. This time our fleet met more severe opposition than we had anticipated. The day after the main battle, my ship was hit by a torpedo from a French submarine and I felt a shock of pain. I remember nothing of what followed. I must have passed out and stayed unconscious for days.

When I came to my senses I found myself in bed on board a hospital ship. I had a raging thirst and a strange feeling of mugginess. On top of that I was thoroughly confused, having no idea how long had passed since the battle or what had happened to me that had led my hospitalization. Only the rolling of the ship and the sight of white beds on either side of me brought home where I was, on an anonymous ship heading in God knew what direction.

I was just thinking about where I was when a pretty young woman in the uniform of a Queen Alexandra Naval Nurse arrived at my bedside. She smiled at me, and I felt better at once.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’ve come round, I see.’ She had a lovely Scottish accent, and I thought for a moment I’d been taken to one of the Highland Casualty Clearing Stations or a hospital in Inverness or Aberdeen, though I was aware that it was a long way from West Africa to Aberdeen.

‘Where am I?’ was my first question. Not ‘How am I?’ or ‘How did I get here?’ I guessed something must be wrong for me to have been invalided out from the
Resolution
. Had the ship been sunk after all? Was I just one of the survivors, suffering from exposure in Dakar’s shark-infested waters?

‘You’re on board the SS
Aba
,’ she said. Her freshly starched uniform and friendly manner reassured me after the shambles at Mers-el-Kebir. ‘The
Aba
’s a hospital ship, Lieutenant, the best in the fleet. Lucky we were nearby when your ships got beaten up. You’re in safe hands now. But if you’ll excuse me, I have to report to Matron that you’re back in the land of the living.’

‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘won’t you tell me why I’m here? What’s wrong with me? Was I hurt in the attack? Apart from being knocked out.’

Her manner changed at once. The banter went out of her voice.

‘That’s not for me to say, Lieutenant. A doctor will be along soon. He can tell you in a lot more detail.’

With which she trotted off. She hadn’t even told me her name. She seemed very young, and it chilled me to think of her in this place, among so many injured, so many dead or dying, so many crying out for help, as I might cry out once I came fully to my senses.

A naval orderly brought me some water to drink and a plate of light food. As I started to eat, I noticed that the man in the bed to my right was in distress. I called for the orderly. He closed the curtain round the bed and went off to fetch help. I felt helpless, not knowing if there was anything I could do. Moments later, three nurses arrived with a doctor in tow. They went behind the curtain and remained there for about half an hour, all the time talking in whispers. When they came out at last, their faces were grave. The nurse who had welcomed me did not even look in my direction. The curtains remained shut. I left my supper untouched: my appetite had gone.

My nurse returned a little later. I knew better than to ask her about what had happened, but I did say I was lost without my watch, a Soway Prima my father had given me before I set off for Norway (though none of us knew where we were headed at the time).

‘It’s a quarter past ten, dear,’ she said. ‘We’ll be putting the lights out soon. Matron’s very strict about the lights. She’s on loan from the RAMC, and she’s a terribly strict woman. She has no sympathy for nurses, patients and, least of all, doctors.
They’re all afraid of her, especially the doctors, even the chief surgeon, Sir Ian McKenzie; but they all respect her. They say we should get the War Office to send her to Germany as a secret weapon. Before lights out, you need to have a word with Dr O’Neill. He’s Irish, but we’ve trained him to behave properly to his patients.’

‘Do you have a name?’ I asked, feeling very bold.

‘Nurse MacDonald to you, sir. But if a wee cadet like you has a big brother, he can call me Alice. Now, I’ll fetch Dr O’Neill.’

He was close by and came to me in under a minute. I recognized him from the drama earlier. He brought a chair and set it by my bed. I thought he looked tired. Very tired.

‘Lieutenant Lancaster. May I sit down?’

I nodded. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, middle class, well-meaning. I smiled at him in the expectation of some of that prattle well-meaning doctors use. Instead, he was very formal.

‘Lieutenant, the good news is that you’re alive and generally sound. Your ship was hit by a torpedo from a French submarine called the
Bévézier
, and some of your colleagues were killed. Your gun fell on top of you, but a friend pulled you out and got you into the drink with him. You were in a lifeboat in seconds, which is why you haven’t suffered the effects of prolonged immersion in the sea and haven’t been eaten by a shark. That’s the good news. Tomorrow, you can write to your parents saying you’re well and you’ll soon be on your way home.’

‘If it’s that simple, why was I brought here in the first place?’

In a soft Irish burr that I was shortly to hate, he explained.

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll call you Dominic. The thing is, you’ve been here for three days. Until today, you’ve been sedated, and you still have a heavy dose of morphia in your veins. I’d like to taper that off, but you’ll need some to deal with the pain.’

‘But if I’m not badly wounded . . .’

‘I didn’t say that, Dominic. I’ll be quite honest with you. The only way we could save your life when we took you on board was to amputate your left leg below the knee. I’m sorry for your bad luck. It’s a very serious thing to happen to a man, a fit young man your age. But the worst is over, and now we must concentrate on getting you back to health and learning what you can do on one leg, which, as it happens, will be much more than you can guess.’

He took leave of me with his good wishes. Moments later, the lights were extinguished. The morphia helped me sleep, but when I woke up the next morning I wanted to scream when I remembered what Dr O’Neill had told me.

Sunday, 17 November

I was explaining how I came to be here, at home, in London. We tied up at the King George V Dock in Glasgow, and most of us were transferred to Mearnskirk Hospital, a sanatorium that had been altered to enable it to take soldiers, sailors and airmen injured in the war. The lucky others, men with light injuries, were sent off home or told to rejoin their regiment or find a new ship. By the time we got to Blighty, heavy air raids were hitting the larger cities, and not just London. I almost wished a bomb might end my misery. I had started to devour myself with grief for my leg, a leg that would no longer let me walk or run or jump.

They started to reduce my dose of morphia, and at times the pain would hit me like a racing car slamming against a careless bystander. The stump was dressed in a huge swaddling of cloths and bandages. Part of me wanted to see the leg itself, to take in the reality I would now be faced with, and part of me
wanted nothing to do with it. I feared the pain removing the bandage would cause. Nurse MacDonald had been ordered to stay in order to work with her patients from the
Aba
. Every few days she would inject me with morphia, remove my sheets, set up a screen, and unroll my bandages and packing. She cleaned my wound – or that is what she
said
she did – and bandaged me again. It was uncomfortable. My leg was regaining some feeling. All that kept me together was the knowledge that so many others in the ward where I lived had suffered much greater injuries. Then Alice MacDonald came to see me one day and kissed my forehead and sailed away on another boat. A succession of new nurses took over, none as pretty and none as kind. I regretted her going very much.

I stayed about a fortnight, to the second week in October, and then one of the doctors said I was fit enough to go home, where a district nurse would see to me. I felt suddenly fearful of going back to our house in Bloomsbury, afraid to let my parents and sister see what the war had done to me. I was not, surprisingly, much afraid of the air raids. I had left London amidst such expectations, such promises of medals and fanfares and a job well done, and I would pass again through our front door a miserable failure, someone who would spend his life in a state of dependence on others. I might never find a job, never earn my crust, never find a girl to marry, never have children, never kick a football again, or run on the rugger field. My father’s opinion of me would have been proved right after all. It would be crutches or a wheelchair for me from now on. I was twenty-four years old. I had my life ahead of me. Of course, I know our boys had a pounding in France and that this Blitz is killing hundreds, maybe thousands. But if I can’t get out and take some revenge on the Germans, then I don’t know what is the point of me.

*   *   *

My mother and father met me at King’s Cross, where I arrived on board a much-delayed troop train. They brought my little sister Octavia with them. The smile on her face when she saw me made up for a lot. She’d been in floods of tears when I last saw her, on the dock as my ship pulled away on the first stage of my journey. They were all in good spirits to see me alive. But I could see Mother glancing again and again at the hump where a cage sat over what was left of my leg, and I sensed that her bonhomie was forced. She would never accept an imperfect man as her son. They had to take me off on a stretcher carried by two porters. There were a lot of wounded on the train, but I was scarcely considered serious. Mother has always been a proud woman, sometimes excessively so, and I knew as well that she’d wanted grandchildren from me, the last of the male line. That was, I knew, unlikely to happen now. Who would marry a one-legged man, half a man?

Octavia held my hand as soon as she could and looked into my eyes, but said nothing of my amputation. She made a slicing motion once at the start, and I nodded. That was all she needed to know. The concern she felt was evident on her face, as her emotions always are. She is an extremely sensitive child, feeling things more acutely than others, especially other people’s suffering. I have often found her instinct for pain uncanny. To balance this, she’s vivacious, animated and cheerful most of the time, even though she can’t communicate most of her emotions through words. Not even my parents have been able to repress her natural instincts for trouble and passion, for her condition inhibits the discipline they would like to impose on her. They do not love her, of course. As I have just written, my mother cannot abide anything with a defect, so Octavia’s deafness and my amputated leg are both curses to her. As for my father, he remains as remote from her as custom and duty allow.

We drove back to Bloomsbury in the Hispano. I joked that my father must have obtained enough petrol for the trip on the black market, Army petrol as likely as not. Of course, Bloomsbury is next door to King’s Cross, so he would only have needed a teaspoonful or two if he’d been in any other car. He sneered at my impertinent sense of humour, as he had done so many times in the past. I said nothing in reply; I was glad enough to do the journey in private transport.

We made good time: there was very little traffic on the road. The bombs were scaring people away, but Father was confident that Bloomsbury wouldn’t be hit as hard as the East End, or perhaps not at all. ‘There’s nothing of strategic importance here,’ he said. Octavia could do nothing to cheer me up: in the front passenger seat, I couldn’t see her hands move or her lips make words, but she did what she could in speech. I think I’m the only person who understands some of what she says. My parents couldn’t care less and leave her in the keeping of a succession of tutors who try to remedy her ‘defect’ with little science and no art at all.

We got back to Bloomsbury in time for the blackout. This was only brought in about a month ago, and I’d been put asleep early in the hospital, so it was completely new to me and very disconcerting. With the winter coming in, the heavy curtains hemmed us about and gave a sense of darkness to everything. Father had installed a shelter in the living room, pinning corrugated sheets to the ceiling and reinforcing it all with stout wooden posts. He said these indoor shelters were a better option than the Andersons that let in water and were cold and damp. The square management committee had debated whether they should put an Anderson in the garden at the centre of the square, but someone had suggested that we’d be invaded by the occupants of all the flats around us, so the residents had opted for the indoor style instead.