Dawn was silvering the sky to starboard and putting a polish on the sea as Mackerel followed Musician and Moloch north-eastward at ten knots between the Outer Ratel and East Dyck banks. Against that growing light Nick – leaning on the bridge rail while behind him at the binnacle Midshipman Grant performed the routine duties of an officer of the watch – could see quite clearly the low, black silhouette of the Belgian coast. From La Panne a searchlight poked at the sea like a nervous, probing finger; there’d be a monitor anchored inshore there, a nightly guardship with an attendant destroyer, watching and protecting with her guns the few miles of flat coast that lay immediately behind the Front – in case of a German landing or an attempt at one, a quick strike to turn the British Army’s flank. The Huns guarded their backyard similarly, but with an armed trawler known to the destroyer men as ‘Weary Willie’. Willie came out of Zeebrugge each evening at dusk and pottered the ten miles down-coast to drop his hook three miles off Middelkerke, on the eastern edge of the Nieuwpoort Bank; and just about now, as daylight arrived, he bumbled back again. Ostend would have been a more convenient base for him, but the Germans had abandoned Ostend as a port now, used it only as an entrance and exit for Bruges, the inland base to which like Zeebrugge it was linked by waterways and locks. Ostend had been too hard hit too often, for the Germans’ liking, by Admiral Bacon’s monitors.
That searchlight had been switched off. Dawn pressed up, streaked the sky: the line of the land was darkening, its edges hardening under a pinkish glow. Starshell still broke intermittently over Nieuwpoort’s eastern perimeter. Nieuwpoort itself was only ruins now. Artillery fire was a steady mutter with occasional pauses and crescendos: like, Nick thought, a malfunctioning wireless receiver with erratic volume-control. Directly east, German ack-ack guns were providing a firework display over Qstend, engaging aircraft from naval squadrons which must either be attacking Ostend itself or returning over it from raids elsewhere. St Pol, the main RNAS airfield at Dunkirk, had been badly strafed a month or two ago by Hun bombers and there’d been some dispersal to other airfields and to RFC squadrons; in any case the naval fliers worked a great deal with the RFC. But they were still part of the Dover Patrol. Eight squadrons of fighters – Sopwith Camels had replaced Pups now – and four of Handley Pages and two of daylight bombers; plus odds and ends, including one huge American flying-boat that spent its time on anti-submarine patrols. That ack-ack fire might have been at RNAS fighters on their early-morning Zeppelin hunt: pilots got up there early after pre-dawn take-offs to intercept Zeppelins returning from attacks on London. Nick, watching the little sparks of fire puncturing a still half-dark sky over Belgium, wondered whether Johnny Vereker, who a few months back had bagged a Zeppelin of his own, was with his squadron or on leave again. When Vereker was in Flanders, Nick and another of Johnny’s friends, Tim Rogerson, had the use of his motor-car in Dover, and if Mackerel was going to be allowed her boiler-clean and three-day rest period now it might come in handy.
If on the other hand Johnny was on leave, he and his motor – a 1909 Swift, with a two-cylinder water-cooled engine – would be in London. He was going great guns with a girl who called herself Lucy L’Ecstase; she was a dancer in the musical show ‘Bric-a-Brac’, which was still showing to packed houses at the Palace Theatre.
If Johnny was not on leave – might one motor up to Town oneself, take the lovely Lucy out to supper?
Intrigued by the idea – it was already almost a decision – Nick turned from the rail to glance ahead and check that Grant was keeping Mackerel in her proper station; at the same moment, Wyatt stepped into the bridge from the port-side ladder.
Wyatt had been down in the chartroom, eating breakfast. But an intake of food and hot coffee hadn’t helped his mood. Grant jumped back smartly from the binnacle: just in time, since if he hadn’t Wyatt would have walked through him or over him, as if the boy was non-existent or at least invisible.
A quick, testy glance ahead…
‘You’re astern of station, Number One!’
Nick didn’t agree, but there was no point disputing it. Wyatt glanced round, small eyes and bull-head swivelling like a rhino suspecting the presence of some enemy on its flank, towards Grant.
‘Who has the ship? You or Grant?’
‘I have, sir,’ Nick said it quickly before the midshipman could answer. He reached the voicepipe: ‘Engine-room!’
‘Engine-room…’
‘Two-seven-five revolutions.’ He looked at Musician’s stern again. The revs would have to be reduced again pretty quickly, he realised, or they’d be running up on her quarterdeck. Wyatt said bitterly. ‘More signals have been coming through. Looks as if we lost seven drifters and a trawler sunk, with two drifters and a P-boat damaged. Hardly a shot fired from our side, and not a single report that could’ve been any use to anyone.’
Nick frowned. Quite a few U-boats must have got through, too, while all that was going on. It was difficult to understand how such a shambles could have come about.
He called the engine-room: ‘Two-six-oh revs.’
Wyatt muttered, turning his shoulder to the helmsman, ‘And yet I come up here and find you practically laughing your head off.’ His voice was low, but his eyes were vicious. ‘Some-thing to be pleased about?’
‘It was – a personal thought, sir. Nothing connected with the Service.’
‘Indeed.’
Wyatt’s breath smelt of kippers. Mick glanced at Musician’s stern and at the compass-card, then back at the small, censorious eyes. Wyatt told him, ‘Last night was a damned disgrace. A shame on every man-jack of us. The Patrol’s in disgrace – and the Patrol includes this ship. There’s no making light of it and no time for personal thoughts, Everard. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want this ship smartened up. In every way. You’ve been allowing things to slack off – and I shan’t stand for it, d’you hear?’
If one hadn’t been at Dartmouth and then in a battleship for a few years, one wouldn't have believed a man could talk such hot air and rubbish. He nodded politely. 'I’m sorry, sir.’
He thought he knew what part of the trouble was. Wyatt had made himself a reputation in the Dardanelles campaign; first as a destroyer captain, and then, after his ship had been sunk under him, commanding a naval landing-party. He’d won himself a DSC leading a bayonet attack on some vital Turkish gun battery. It had left him – Nick thought – with the impression that he was Francis Drake reborn in the hour of his country’s need.
He’d brought Mackerel down from Harwich about six months ago, at a time when M-class boats were taking over at Dover from the older L-class. This had been partly as a result of America coming into the war in April and, by accepting her share of Atlantic convoy escort work, releasing dozens of British destroyers for other duties. Wyatt’s own first lieutenant had been invalided; he’d been going deaf, with flattened eardrums from the effects of gun-blast, and it had reached a stage where he couldn’t hide it any longer. Nick, appointed in his place, had moved over from one of the departing L’s, where for the previous twelve months he’d been navigator. He’d been delighted to get a No, 1’s job so soon – particularly as he’d blotted his copybook somewhat, just after the rather startling success – for him personally – at Jutland.
Jutland had won him promotion to lieutenant. ‘Noted for early promotion’ had been the official phrase; and promotion had come within weeks. They’d also given him a Mention-in-Despatches, and its oak-leaf emblem was on his shoulder now. If he hadn’t fouled things up just afterwards – a piffling business, no more than sending a man on leave when he’d no leave due to him, but it had raised the roof – they’d have awarded him a DSC. So someone at the Admiralty had confided to Nick’s uncle, Hugh Everard, who’d also distinguished himself at Jutland and now had his own cruiser squadron in the Grand Fleet… But a week before Jutland Nick had been in the gunroom of a battleship: bored to distraction, and marked down as a failure, a useless sub-lieutenant who’d almost certainly never be promoted. Loathing just about everything about the Service: sure, by that time, that the Navy he’d dreamt of all through his childhood and adolescence – the Navy which Uncle Hugh had told him about with such pride – didn’t exist, even if conceivably it had many years ago.
And then he found it, at Jutland.
But there was another navy too. He could see it in Wyatt’s eyes, hear it in his tone of voice. It reminded him of that Scapa gunroom, and of Dartmouth. Pomposity: more than a hint of sadism: and so much sham…
But one could not afford to fall foul of Wyatt. To be here, second in command of a modern, quite powerful destroyer in what was the most active and hard-worked sector of naval operations – one had, finally, a sense of one’s own worth and competence and of a job worth doing. And Wyatt, if he felt so inclined, could destroy all that with one ‘adverse report’. He had, naturally, all his officers’ Service documents; he knew that Nicholas Everard had been a flop at Dartmouth, a misery as a midshipman and – until Jutland – a dead loss as a sub-lieutenant. One really bad report could make Nick’s performance at Jutland look like a flash in the pan, a circumstance where luck had shown him up in an entirely false light. He’d be back to where he’d started, then. A failure. Wyatt knew it, knew he knew it. He also knew that nothing was ‘slack’ in Mackerel, that she was run about as smartly as a destroyer in Dover Patrol conditions could be run.
He stumped heavily across the bridge. The wind was astern on this course and the funnel-smoke was acrid in one’s eyes and nostrils. He muttered, ‘You’d better go down to breakfast, Number One.’
McAllister had wrapped Skipper Barrie’s leg like a limb of an Egyptian mummy. He’d also given him Nick’s old woollen dressing-gown to wear. Well, someone had.
Barrie was a thickset man of about fifty, with grey hair, grey eyes and a square-shaped, weather-darkened face.
Nick leant against the doorway, inside the hanging curtain. Admiralty-issue, blue… He nodded at the trussed-up leg. ‘How’s it feel? Doc done you any good?’
Barrie said, without smiling, ‘I’d as soon have a vet to it.’
‘What?’
‘Pullin’ your leg, lad… This your cabin, eh?’
‘Not really. According to the builders’ plans it’s spare, for cases of serious illness. I use it, but I’m supposed to bunk with the others in the wardroom.’
‘First lieutenant, eh?’
‘Right.’ The skipper’s thick eyebrows were black, not grey, and hooped; they gave him a permanently enquiring look. The other thing Nick had noticed was that when he spoke his lips hardly opened, hardly seemed to move at all.
‘Where you from? Your home, I mean?’
‘Yorkshire. West Riding… Are your men being looked after all right, skipper?’
‘Look after ’emselves, my crew can… Yorkshire, eh?’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to have to talk about Mullbergh, that great mausoleum of a house with its seven thousand acres of keepered shooting and stables for thirty or forty horses, and more gaunt, freezing-cold rooms than anyone had ever bothered to count. Sarah, Nick’s young stepmother, had turned part of it into a hospital; Nick thought it might have been kinder to wounded soldiers to leave them in their Flanders trenches.
He was heir to Mullbergh, now that his elder brother David was dead. David had drowned at Jutland.
He asked Barrie, ‘Where are you from?’
‘Tynemouth. Know it?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘You’d be afraid, all right. We eat Yorkshiremen, up there.’
Nick stared at the deadpan, grey-stubbled face. He nodded. ‘That explains why you have vets instead of doctors.’
Barrie chuckled. Nick pushed himself off the bulkhead. ‘They given you any breakfast yet?’ The grey head shook, briefly. He said, ‘I’ll see you get some.’ He was hungry, suddenly, in need of his own. He added, ‘I expect the captain’ll be down to see you presently.’
‘Oh, aye?’ He hesitated: as if he’d been about to add something, and then changed his mind, He asked Nick, ‘Know Teddy Evans, do you?’
‘Captain Evans?’
‘Aye, if ye like… He’s a right ’un, is Teddy.’
Evans of the Broke, he was talking about. He added, ‘No damn side to him. You could do with more like that one!’
‘Yes.’ Another Evans, perhaps, and one less Wyatt. But the drifter crews and trawlermen all liked Captain Evans. He always had a word for them, or a joke over the loud-hailer, and his cheery, forthright manner appealed to them. That and his alarming way of bringing a destroyer alongside a jetty at twenty-five knots while he himself made a show of lighting a cigarette before murmuring ‘Full astern together…’ Seamanship: and style… The skipper patted the dressing-gown: ‘This your’n?’
‘What?’ Trying to look as if he hadn’t noticed. ‘You’re welcome. Keep it to use in the hospital ship, if you like.’
‘Hospital ship, be buggered!’
‘Eh?’
‘They’ll not keep George Barrie laid up, lad!’ Nick glanced at the wrapped-up leg: the skipper shook his head. ‘I’ll hop about, all right… Listen – you brought a ship back from Jutland, did you? Everard, is it?’
He nodded. Everyone in Dover knew everything about everyone else, of course. One tended to forget it.
‘Yes. Destroyer – Lanyard. I had a lot of luck.’
‘Know Snargate Street?’
The conversation seemed to leap about, somewhat. But of course he knew Snargate Street; you could hardly be in Dover for half an hour without knowing it, and he’d been based there for some eighteen months. He nodded, wondering what might come next.
‘Know the Fishermen’s Arms?’
‘I know where it is.’
The only pub Nick and his friends used much was called The First and Last. It was handy to the naval pier.
Barrie said, ‘Back o’ the Fishermen’s, lad, there’s a bit on its own – a bar hid away, you wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know to look. It’s – well, you might say it’s us drifter skippers’ club.’
‘Ah.’
The skipper stared at him. Then he nodded. ‘Welcome, any time.’
‘Very kind of you. Thanks.’
Barrie rubbed his jaw. ‘What’s breakfast, then?’
Odd cove… Nick went past the foot of the ladder and the door of Wyatt’s cabin, and into the wardroom. Charlie Pym glanced up from his kippers, and nodded affably; Mr Watson, the commissioned engineer, raised a butter-knife in salute and muttered a ‘good morning’; Percy Gladwish, the torpedo gunner, winked over a tilted coffee-cup.
Cockcroft was on the bridge. The system of bridge watch-keeping in the straits was that Wyatt and Pym took turns at sharing the navigational responsibility, while Nick and Cockcroft did the same for gunnery control. That was the general principle, when Mackerel wasn’t closed-up for action.
Pym murmured smoothly, with a slight lift of the eyebrows, ‘Hardly the most successful night in living memory, h’m?’ He touched his lips delicately, fastidiously with his napkin. Nick called the steward as he sat down; then he glanced across the wardroom at the prone figure of McAllister, who was dozing in an upper bunk. The oval table was set centrally; there were bunks like shelves – with curtains that could be drawn across them – against the ship’s sides.
‘Doc!’
An eye opened, shut again. A hand came out of the blankets to ward off the light.
‘God’s teeth. What time is it?’
‘Time you were up… Are the drifter’s crew all fit, bar their skipper?’
‘Fit as horses. Swan found ’em hammocks or somesuch.’ The surgeon-probationer rolled over the other way, and yawned. ‘The old man’s wound’s clean as a whistle too. Marvellous stuff, salt water.’
Gladwish was pouring himself more coffee. He asked Nick, ‘Huns havin’ it all their own way, weren’t they?’ A dark, quick-eyed man. He added, ‘Made us look silly, I rec on.’
Nick told Hatcher, ‘Kippers, please, and I’m in a hurry. Then take breakfast on a tray to Skipper Barrie in my cabin. No short rations, or he might bite you.’
He didn’t want to spend too long down here, with Wyatt in his present mood. And he’d have to shave before he went up again. Gladwish seemed to read his mind: ‘Skipper suckin’ his teeth a bit, is he?’
Nick shrugged. ‘He’s not happy.’ He looked at Watson, the engineer. ‘All well in your department, Chief?’
Watson was three-quarters bald, and his skin had an engine-room pallor that would have taken years of sunshine to dispel. He mumbled with his mouth full, ‘Couple o’ weeks in dockyard ’ands, then we’d be all right.’
‘We’ll get our three days, if we’re lucky.’
‘But not right away, let’s hope.’ Pym wiped his lips again. ‘I want to be on terra firma, this Christmas.’
Plump, always clean-looking, with carefully manicured fingernails and hair always smoothed down, Pym was more like some shore-based admiral’s flag-lieutenant than a Dover destroyer officer. Nick had no idea how he found time to groom himself so well – or why he bothered, for that matter. The fact that Wyatt always seemed well-disposed towards his navigator and surly with him, Nick Everard, who was his second in command, didn’t exactly encourage friendship. He tried to ignore it and treat him equably, but the simple fact was that Pym was not Nick’s sort of man. He didn’t think much of him as a destroyer officer, either.
Wyatt… Nick remembered an interview in the captain’s cabin a few days after he’d taken over as first lieutenant. Wyatt had told him, glowering, ‘I’ll be watching you, Everard. You won’t let me down twice, I promise you!’
Incredible… He’d been asked down for a chat and a glass of gin!
‘I’ll do my best not to let you down at all, sir.’
Wyatt had pursed his lips, set down his empty glass and stared at the faintly-pink liquor still in Nick’s as if suggesting it was time he drank up and left. He hadn’t said another word. That was the whole interview: one drink, one threat.
Had he felt insulted, perhaps, at having so young an officer appointed as his first lieutenant? Possibly tried to have the appointment cancelled, and been obliged to take him?
Nick pushed his kipper plate aside, and buttered a triangle of toast. He’d been down here too long already.
If Mackerel was to have her stand-off and boiler-clean now, she’d be ordered to a buoy or to a jetty. Otherwise, she’d be sent alongside the duty oiler to replenish with fuel, and as likely as not straight out again as soon as her tanks were full.
Nick stood by the bridge rail to starboard and watched Dover’s cliffs and castle loom up ahead. It was a grey, cold morning, but there was very little wind now. What there was of it was still in the south-west, raking the crests of low, close-ranked waves.
From here, the grass slopes around the castle looked like deep green velvet.
‘What’s the set, pilot?’
‘Very little, sir. Eastward about one knot or less.’
At some stages of the tide, the tidal streams could make for problems. In a real wind it wasn’t much of a harbour anyway; a night’s ‘rest’ at a buoy in the destroyer anchorage, for instance, could mean a night of rolling twenty degrees each way. About as restful as being out on patrol. And in a south-westerly gale – well, the distance from the outer edge of the Admiralty break-water to where the hospital ships berthed inside it was a hundred and fifty feet, but the ships still found solid sea, green sea, crashing down on their decks.
A light was flashing from .the end of the naval pier in the main harbour. Mackerel’s pendants, her identification signal, already fluttered from the starboard yardarm; now her search-light’s louvred shutter clashed in acknowledgement of each word as it was received. Nick read it for himself: Berth on west jetty, tidal harbour.
Wyatt glanced at Pym. ‘Boilers, then.’ Pym said sourly, ‘And back at sea for Christmas, no doubt.’ Mick asked Wyatt, ‘Close up sea-dutymen, sir?’
‘Yes, please.’
Nick glanced over his shoulder. ‘Pipe it, bosun’s mate!’
Wyatt bent to the voicepipe: ‘Three hundred revolutions.’ As Mackerel got inside she’d have to spin round hard to port, under the stern of the western blockship, to enter the commercial harbour between the Admiralty and Prince of Wales’ piers. At the top end, half a mile up from the harbour mouth, was the narrow entrance to the small – twelve-acre – tidal harbour. It was a basin for drifters and trawlers mostly, but destroyers in their stand-off periods also used it sometimes, and there was an old steel lighter there fitted as a workshop and with a dynamo that could provide power to ships whose fires were out.
Gladwish called up the voicepipe, ‘Permission to withdraw charges?
‘Yes, please.’ They were almost in harbour; no need to ask Wyatt’s agreement to removing the firing-charges from the torpedo tubes. Nick saw Cockcroft waiting for orders, and Wyatt studiously ignoring him; he beckoned him to come over to his side.
‘Probably port side to, Sub. But have springs ready both sides, just in case. And an anchor ready, of course.’
Cockcroft nodded, and went down. Chief Petty Officer Bellamy had the wheel now. Wyatt muttered to him, squinting across the compass-bowl, ‘Steer two degrees to port.’
‘Two degrees to port, aye aye, sir!’
Wind was over the port quarter on this course; Mackerel was hammering the small waves with the starboard side of her short, black stem, flinging up intermittent bursts of spray to infuriate Cockcroft’s cable party as they veered the anchor to its slip, a-cockbill from the hawse. If Wyatt got himself into any sort of trouble when he was manoeuvring inside there, one slam of the blacksmith’s hammer could knock the slip off and send the cable roaring out. Nick watched the entrance seeming to widen as the destroyer ploughed up into it; then, as she thrust in between the sunken blockships, it seemed to close in on her again. The blockships, at right-angles to the gap in the harbour wall, were two old Atlantic liners, both stripped, cut down to their main decks and fitted with iron supports for the torpedo netting to hang from. The one to starboard as Mackerel entered harbour was the former SS Montrose; aboard her a passenger by the name of Crippen had been arrested on a charge of murder. Wyatt straightened. ‘Two hundred revolutions!’
‘Two hundred—’
‘Starboard fifteen!’
‘Starboard fifteen, sir.’ The coxswain span his wheel. ‘Fifteen o’ starboard wheel on, sir!’
‘Stop port.’
‘Stop port, sir!’ Biddulph, bosun’s mate acting as telegraph-man, jerked the brass handle forward and back again. Mackerel began to fairly spin around, and Wyatt said, ‘Slow starboard, one hundred revolutions. Slow ahead port. Midships the wheel.’
Cockcroft had his men fallen-in on the foc’sl, properly at ease. At the back of the bridge the searchlight began to clash again, as a new message came stuttering from the naval pier. Signalman Hughes scrawled it on a pad, at Porter’s word-by-word dictation. Then he bawled it out:
‘Signal from Captain (D), sir! You may grant shore-leave this afternoon. Boiler-cleaning party will board you noon tomorrow.’
A cheer floated up from the waist, the iron deck, where Swan’s berthing party must either have picked up the dots and dashes for themselves or heard the signalman yell it. Shore-leave: it was a rare thing, and to be prized. Destroyers got three days like this between twenty-four days of sea duty, and ten days for docking and bottom-scraping once in four months. Between those periods there was no shore-leave at all.
‘Port ten.’
‘Port ten, sir…’
Rounding the end of the Prince of Wales pier. Transports lay on the other side of it. To port, coal hulks rocked at their buoys. Tomorrow would be the 22nd, and a boiler-clean took three whole days; so with luck, they would have Christmas Day in harbour.