The collision bulkhead was bulging with the pressure of water on the other side of it. This seamen’s messdeck with its ranks of scrubbed tables was at the best of times a cramped, gloomy cavern; now, sparsely lit by emergency lamps and with the deckhead crushed downwards and water seeping, it was a trap, coffin-like, echoing to the noise the sea made hurling itself against the thin steel plating, and the frightening racket from the damaged bow. You could imagine the compartment being crushed: the bulkhead splitting, a rush of sea… He said, ‘Paint locker’s flooded. Presumably all for’ard of this point is.’ Watson, the commissioned engineer, nodded. ‘Dunno about down below. Cable locker, an’—’
‘We’ll have a look, in a minute. Meanwhile—’ Nick looked back at the cluster of tense faces behind him and the engineer – ‘we’ll get this shored. Allbright?’
‘Sir?’
Leading Seaman Allbright squeezed forward, between two seamen. He was thin, young-looking for his leading hand’s rate; now he could demonstrate his right to it. Nick told him, ‘Get the bulkhead shored. Tables, mess-stools. Send to the Chief Buffer if you want spars or planks. He’s on the foc’sl. Right?’
Allbright nodded, running his eye over the job and the men at his disposal. The ship’s motion seemed more pronounced down here, and the noise – particularly the clatter and scrape of the ripped stem – added to the sense of danger. Imagination was half the trouble: better if one were bone-headed, solid. White-enamelled bulkheads glistened, ran with condensation; there were leaks from the perimeters of scuttles, dribbles from loose rivets. In bad weather, the for’ard messdecks were never dry. Dirty water, vomit, swept rubbish and gear to and fro across the corticene-covered deck: a shoe, a battered cap, empty cigarette packets, a half-written letter. Stench: and men lived in this hole! Watson, his round face almost as white and as shiny as the bulkheads, pushed his cap back with a black-nailed thumb and ran the other oily palm across a dome of forehead. ‘See what’s what below, then?’
‘Yes.’ Nick, pushing aft through the crowd of men and with the engineer behind him, heard Allbright starting briskly, cheerfully: ‘Right then – clear all this muck aft! Then let’s ’ave them two tables flat ag’in the bulk’ead: mess-stools to ’old ’em… Jarvie, fetch us ’alf a dozen ’ammicks out o’ the nettin’… Slap it abaht now, lads!’
Eyes wandering to that for’ard bulkhead. Shoring might strengthen it enough to make it hold. But if it didn’t—
If it didn’t, the compartment would have to be surrendered to the sea; the next bulkhead that could be shored, after that, would be this one through which they were passing now, leaving the big messdeck and going aft into the leading hands’ space. From here a hatchway and steel ladder led down to the stokers’ and ERAs’ messes.
‘Mid.’ Nick stopped on the ladder. ‘Tell the captain there’s flooding for’ard, I’m still checking and I’ll report soon as I can. Tell him I’m shoring the collision bulkhead and for the time being will he for God’s sake not use the engines. Then come back ’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Grant shot away. Nick, followed by the hard-breathing engineer, went on down. At the bottom, he turned for’ard, through the bulkhead door.
This stokers’ messdeck was smaller than the seamen’s mess above it; at its for’ard end, ten feet short of the collision bulkhead which now one could hear them working at overhead, was an engineer’s store. Watson opened its steel door. Dark, wet-smelling, echoing like the inside of a drum; Prior, the stoker PO, peered in over Watson’s shoulder. Nick passed him a lamp; they all went inside, and Watson held it up against the suspect bulkhead. He whistled, shook his head, glanced at Nick.
‘We’re in trouble, all right. An’ all the way down, I’d say, would you.’
It was worse here than on the higher deck. The bulge was so pronounced that it looked as if the steel had actually stretched.
It wouldn’t do that, though; when the strain reached a certain limit, it would split.
Watson banged his heel on the rectangular hatch that led down to a lower store. ‘Try it, shall us?’
Nick hesitated. He suggested, ‘Leave one clip on, and just crack it.’
‘Aye aye.’ The engineer knelt down. Mackerel was rolling harder than she had been, and erratically; Nick realised she must be beam-on to the south-wester, which in any case was obviously blowing up still. He hoped Wyatt wouldn’t be tempted to use the engines to keep her head into it. Watson had freed one of the two butterfly clips; now, squatting, he was using his heel to start the other one.
‘God almighty!’ Fighting to screw it down again, with water spurting in a thin, hard sheet… ‘Purchase-bar!’ Watson looked round for help. ‘Prior—’ A savage lurch of the ship flung him back: Stoker O’Leary pushed in past Prior, jammed a section of steel tubing on one arm of the butterfly clip, wrenched it round; Prior stood on the hatch, and Watson, cursing fluently, joined him. Eventually they had it tight again and the spray of icy, dirty water stopped. Watson was dripping wet; he told Prior, ‘Shore this bulkhead and the deck too while you’re at it. Some bloody ’ow… But solid, make it rock ’ard top to bottom, can do?’
‘Do me best, sir.’ O’Leary, whom Nick remembered seeing in that pub brawl last night, muttered as he got off his knees, ‘An’ a very very happy Christmas to us all.’ He got a laugh, for that. Nick went back into the messdeck and asked Grant, ‘Did you tell the captain?’
‘Yes, sir. He said will you be as quick as you can, please.’
No – I’m trying to give her time to sink… ‘Chief—’ he pointed downwards, as Watson came through and joined him – ‘No. 1 oil-fuel’s down there, right?’ The engineer nodded. ‘Well, if there’s any leakage to it from the store that’s flooded—’
‘Wouldn’t say it’s likely.’
‘If there is, there’ll be an upward pressure here, this deck we’re standing on. Isn’t that so?’
‘Could be, but—’
‘We’ll shore it, then.’ He staggered, half fell across a mess table as Mackerel flung over. Watson, as if he was talking to a horse, ‘Whoa-up!’ He was holding himself upright on the open door. ‘Fine time to blow up a force eight, ain’t it though … ’Ere. Spo—’ Prior, he was talking to – ‘when you got that done, shore this deck down, right?’ He looked around: ‘Only joking, lads, it’s no force eight.’ Nick said, ‘Let’s check the magazine now.’
Aft through the bulkhead door, and down through the four-inch ammunition hatch to the lobby with shell-room to port and cordite room to starboard. All dry: and there was no indication of any straining of the bulkhead. On the way up again he said, ‘We’ll get her back all right, Chief… Now what’s this?’
They were bringing the Germans down. Lister, one of the crew of the foc’sl four-inch, asked him, ‘Where’ll we keep ’em, sir?’ Nick looked at Watson, who suggested, ‘Fore peak?’ Men laughed: the fore peak was flooded. Nick said, ‘ERAs’ mess.’ Watching them troop aft, Watson answered Nick’s remark about getting back: ‘Aye. Be all right if he keeps her slow an’ steady, and the weather ’olds.’
‘lt is blowing up a bit.’
‘Oh aye?’ Rubbing his bald head. He’d got it well blackened, all it needed was a polish. ‘How far ’re we from ’ome, then?’
‘About – sixty miles.’
‘That much?’
Watson looked unhappy. ‘Three, four knots is all that bulkhead’s goin’ to stand. Shored or not shored.’ He pushed his cap on again. ‘Fifteen, twenty hours – an’ blowin’ up, you say?’
Wyatt, feet wide apart for stability and an arm crooked round the binnacle, was using binoculars one-handed, whenever the ship was on a more or less even keel, to sweep the black sea-scape that surrounded them. Beside him McKechnie, feet similarly straddled, clutched the wheel although she was only drifting without steerage way. It was her beam-on angle to wind and sea that was making her this lively; so far it was only quite a moderate blow.
Enough to make that smashed-in stem sound like a busy smithy’s shop, though.
‘How long?’
‘Perhaps another ten minutes, sir.’
He’d left Grant down there, with instructions to keep him and the captain informed, in particular to report when Allbright and Prior were satisfied with their areas of shoring, so that Mackerel could go ahead – or try to. Coming up from below a few minutes ago Nick had been disappointed not to find other destroyers standing by; he’d expected that Moloch and Musician would have found them by this time.
Dark all round: only white foam and wave-crests, close-to, broke up the blackness. The oil-patch must have burnt itself out.
‘No signals, sir?’
‘Wolstenholme’s uncertain of the receiver. Transmitter’s all right – so he says.’
Not so marvellous, Nick realized. He’d been quite confident they’d have had help close by. What if the transmitter was not working – if that signal hadn’t in fact gone out, and nobody knew anything of what had happened?
‘Do you know if he’s checked the aerial, sir?’
‘Yes.’ Wyatt muttered furiously, under his breath, ‘Come on, come on…’ He twisted round: ‘Reeves?’
‘Sir!’
Reeves was the next senior signals rating after Porter. Porter was dead. So were a dozen other men, according to McAllister’s preliminary count, and there were more than twenty wounded. Wyatt asked Reeves, ‘Have you got a lamp there, and do you know the challenge and reply?’
‘Yes, sir, I do.’
‘H’m…’ Studying the compass card, glancing up to check the wind’s direction and the ship’s head. ‘Coming up stiffer, Number One.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He’d left out the ‘sir’. He didn’t give a damn for Wyatt, he realised, or for Wyatt’s opinion of him. The only thing that mattered was to get this ship back to Dover; for the sake of the men in her, particularly the wounded, and because it was a natural instinct to fight to keep one’s ship afloat. Not to please Wyatt, though; nothing to please Wyatt.
‘Can’t they get a damn move on, down there?’
‘They are trying to.’ He added, ‘Sir.’ Wyatt was staring at him across the black, swaying, rackety bridge. ‘You said the paint store’s flooded?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then the cable locker—’
‘The bulge seems worse at that lower level.’
The collision mat was in place, over the outside of the crumpled bow. Swan had secured it there with steel-wire rope, and it would help, so long as it stayed in place; but with the motion of the sea increasing steadily, and when Mackerel went ahead –
The wireless office voicepipe: Nick answered it. Pym reported, ‘Signal received from Moloch, saying Use your searchlight to guide me to you. Leading tel says it was a very faint transmission.’
Nick told Wyatt. It was a relief to know they could receive at all; and that the other signal had gone out. He added, ‘Have to be the after searchlight.’ This one over the back end of the bridge was part of a tangle of junk which must still have parts of men in it. Daylight would be welcome, if Mackerel was still afloat to see it; but it would have its horrors to offer too.
‘Have the light switched on, Number One. Point it upwards.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Nick got Gladwish on the voicepipe, and told him what was wanted; the gunner (T) answered flatly, ‘Not a chance. Cables are shot away, and we can’t rig jury connections until we’ve some light to work by.’
Nick wondered if he was trying to be funny. The situation seemed to be singularly unamusing. Except for the fact that Moloch and others knew Mackerel was in trouble and were looking for her… Wyatt was calling down to Pym, who seemed to have established himself in the wireless office, ‘Pilot, take this down and send it off to Moloch repeated Captain (D) and FO Dover: Have no searchlight working. Am hove-to while shoring collision bulkhead. Intend proceeding south-westward at slow speed shortly. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir… Captain, sir?’
‘Well?’
‘Barometer’s falling fast, sir.’
Wyatt snorted angrily as he straightened up. As if it had annoyed him to be given information of that kind. His manner, Nick thought, suggested that he regarded the shoring of the bulkhead as a mere formality, a ritual drill he had to allow before he shrugged it off and shaped a course for Dover. As if he didn’t realise that without the support of shores – and well-placed, evenly distributed ones at that – the bulkhead could rip open like a sheet of cardboard: might do so even when it was shored… But Wyatt perhaps felt superior to this kind of detail: his prayers had been answered, he’d met the raiders and sunk two of them – on his own, with no senior officer present to claim a share of the glory. He’d be expecting a D50 and a brass hat; he’d have liked now to be steaming proudly into Dover – not drifting, crippled, in a rising sea.
‘Everard.’
‘Sir?’
‘Go down and see what’s happening. Tell ’em I’m giving ’em five more minutes and not a second longer!’
Nick hesitated.
‘Do you mean that, sir?’
A bull-roar: ‘What?’
‘If the shoring’s not done, would you risk carrying away the bulkhead?’
Wyatt was a black mass hunched, head forward over massive shoulders, eyes gleaming in the binnacle’s small light. McKechnie’s head was turned towards him too. The questioning of orders was not an everyday occurrence. Nick added, ‘We’ve only the Carley floats, and two dozen wounded men. If the bulkhead goes—’
‘Everard!’
‘Sir.’
‘Do what I told you. Go down and tell’ em to get a damn wriggle on.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Climb-down. Nick thought, He won’t love me for it. But what difference, for God’s sake, did that make… ‘Everard.’
‘Yes, sir?’ He stopped at the top of the ladder, clung to the rail as Mackerel rolled and shipped green water that swamped across her gun’l and exploded against the bridge’s battered side, swirled, came pouring out of the holed chartroom and over the side again as she hung for a moment and then flung herself the other way. You didn’t need a barometer to tell you what was happening with the weather. Wyatt said, ‘By daylight we may have a full gale on our hands. In the state we’re in, we couldn’t stand it. So we have no option but to make port at our best speed and as soon as possible. Understand?’
Best speed?
How much warning would one get of the bulkhead bursting? Time enough to evacuate the messdeck and the lower – stokers’ – deck? He didn’t think so. If it went there’d be a split and a sudden rush of sea… Might the answer be to finish this shoring operation and then clear everyone out from between the two bulkheads, shore up the second one as well?
He thought about it on his way below, weighing pros and cons. Grant met him in the leading hands’ mess. ‘Just about done, sir, except for the deck down there.’ The midshipman was pale, ill-looking. Nick thought, Poor little bastard… He put a hand on his shoulder: ‘Let’s take a look.’
Wyatt staggered, caught off-balance as he moved to answer the wireless office voicepipe; he fetched-up in the corner of the bridge like a drunk colliding with a fence. ‘Bridge!’
Pym reported, ‘There’s been a signal from the West Barrage patrol, sir. They met two enemy destroyers and damaged one by gunfire, both last seen retiring north-eastward at high speed.’
‘What ships are on West Barrage?’
‘Swift and Marksman, sir – but Attentive, Murray, Nugent and Crusader are close by in the Downs.’
It was surprising that the Germans had pressed through that far, after losing half their force up here. The Hun raids were aimed at quick and easy killings with no losses to themselves, the ‘fox in the hen-run’ technique. This time, the foxes had got bloody noses.
Nick hauled himself off the ladder into the bridge. His seaboots were heavy, full of water; he’d timed his sortie from the screen door up on to the foc’sl badly, and a sea had caught him in the open, on that lower ladder.
He saw Wyatt at the voicepipe. Pym’s voice was a faint gabble in the tube; Wyatt yelled, ‘What’s that?’ The navigator told him, ‘Signal just coming through from Moloch, sir, addressed to us.’ Wyatt, holding himself at the voicepipe with an arm hooked round its top, the other hand grasping the bridge rail, shuffled his bulk around and stared towards Nick: ‘Number One?’
‘Yes, sir. The shoring’s complete, as good as we can make it. Mr Watson’s view is the bulkhead should stand up to a speed of three or even four knots, sir.’
He’d thought that to quote the engineer would be the best way to make the point about low speed. Wyatt wouldn’t want his opinion.
‘That’s his view, is it… Yes, pilot?’
‘From Moloch, sir: I will continue to search for you. Are you under way yet. That’s the signal, sir.’
‘Make to him: Proceeding now course west-sou’-west.’ Wyatt straightened. ‘How’s her head, McKechnie?’
‘North sixty west, sir!’
‘Starboard ten, then.’
‘Starboard ten, sir.’ How she’d steer, with her bow askew as it was, remained to be seen. Wyatt, back at the binnacle now, called down to the engine-room, ‘Mr Watson?’
‘Sir?’
‘I’m about to go ahead, Chief. I’ll start at one hundred revolutions and work up to two-fifty.’
Ten knots?
‘Sir—’ hearing the engineer’s instant reaction, Nick could imagine the alarm on his pallid, oil-smeared face – ‘sir, that collision bulkhead—’
‘Chief, I’m sick to death of being told about that bloody bulkhead! Slow ahead, one hundred revolutions!’
‘One hundred revs, sir, aye aye!’
Wyatt might reconsider that intention, Nick thought, when he saw the sea’s force on the damaged area for’ard. The man wasn’t mad, he couldn’t want to sink her… The turbine’s low drone was a welcome sound, a stirring of life and purpose; the last hour’s helpless wallowing had been far from pleasant.
‘One hundred and twenty revs!’
‘One-two-oh revolutions, sir!’ Watson’s acknowledgement came as a wail, a cry of despair from the ship’s steel guts. Nick told himself Imagination… He raised his glasses, watched the movement of her stem against the background of white breaking sea; she seemed to be answering her helm quite normally, swinging steadily round to port. But the turning motion involved pushing that damaged bow against the resistance of the sea, adding the ship’s own movement to the weather’s force. He watched closely; he could feel the impact, the thudding jars crashing against split plating – and worse, forcing in, into the already flooded ‘watertight’ spaces and the cable-locker and paint store: already the pressure on the shored bulkhead would have increased considerably.
Wyatt too was angling his binoculars downward, watching the ship’s stem. Nick heard him ask McKechnie, ‘How’s her head?’
‘Just passing west, sir.’
‘Ease to five.’
‘Ease to five, sir… Five of starboard wheel on, sir.’
‘Still swinging?’
McKechnie checked the lubber’s line’s movement round the card. ‘Aye, a little, sir.’
‘Bring the wheel amidships when you’ve ten degrees to go. And steady on south-sou‘-west.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The point being that she was turning so readily to port, and she might need compensating helm for the distortion for’ard, starboard rudder to keep her on a straight course. She was rolling less and pitching more as she came round closer to wind and sea. It wasn’t good at all, that pitching. Wind, Nick estimated, about force four, rising five. Rising… If you had a huge net – say a single section of mine-net as the drifters handled it, which would be a hundred yards long and thirty feet deep – and filled it with scrap-iron and then swung it from a crane against a solid wall time and time again, that would be something like the noise the sea was making against Mackerel’s bow. So what would it be doing to the bow, he wondered, and what must it be sounding like to the men who were watching the shores down there?
‘Captain sir.’
‘Well?’ Wyatt kept his glasses at his eyes. Nick said, ‘l’d like to go down and see how the shoring’s holding up.’
‘Go on, then.’ Wyatt bent to the voicepipe. ‘One hundred and fifty revolutions!’
They’d brought some of the tables aft, out of the for’ard messdeck, to use them as bases for the shores on this second line of defence. They were working on it now, here in the leading seamen’s mess and, at the foot of the steel ladder one deck down, the leading stokers’. CPO Swan had taken charge; the faces of the bulkheads were lined with upended mess tables, and hammocks placed to cushion the butt-ends of benches and spars which, with their other ends jammed against angle-bars and centre-line stanchions, held the tables firmly against the flat steel surface. Not too hard, because there was no pressure yet – hopefully never would be – on the other side of it… Planks had been criss-crossed where space didn’t allow for tables. Swan shouted, over the fantastic volume of sound, ‘That’s all me timber, sir. The lot.’ In the confined, below-deck spaces, the Chief Buffer looked bigger than ever; and without his beard, quite a different character.
Nick went into the stokers’ messdeck. It looked something like a shaft of a coal-mine, only with more pit-props than any mine would have; Prior had hammered wedges in at deckhead level to jam spars down on to upturned tables that covered practically every square foot of deck. Now he was squatting on the sill of the door to the engineer’s store at the compartment’s for’ard end. He stood up, as Nick joined him.
‘How are things here?’
He meant the shoring inside the store. Prior ushered him in to see for himself.
‘Needs watchin’ all the time, sir. You’d think nothing ’d shift it, wouldn’t you, but – well, it’s this pitchin’ does it, the ends of the shores seem to keep slidin’, sort o’ – look, see there?’ He used his mallet to knock it back. ‘Wouldn’t ’ve thought it, would you, sir. See it slide, did you?’
‘Could you brace the feet from below?’
‘If we ’ad more spars, I could,’ Prior shook his close-cropped greying head. He had a reddish face, black-stubbled now, and very calm, steady eyes. The noise here in the store was appalling, to most people it would have been almost unendurable, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He shouted, ‘Chief Buffer’s brought out all ’e’s got, ’e says.’ One eye winked. ‘Not my part o’ ship, sir, I can’t tell.’ He turned away, watching the shores again, mallet ready, as Mackerel plunged and shook. ‘Be all right, sir, long as I’m ’ere wi’ this.’ He meant the mallet. And he was alone here, with the shored-up messdeck a dark and uninhabited cavern behind him; if the bulkhead gave way, the odds were he’d never reach the one aft, the one they were shoring now.
Nick said, pitching his voice up high, ‘I’ll ask for someone to relieve you presently. Every half-hour, say, watch and watch?’
Prior smiled. ‘I’m quite ’appy, sir. We done a right good job on ’er, sir, don’t you worry.’
Nick doubted whether it was a job to make anyone ‘happy’, hammering in shores as the ship’s jolting shifted them, watching that bulkhead that had a whole sea’s force only needing a bit of elbow-room on the other side of it – and the noise, the deafening metallic crashing, crashing… He was on his way aft and up to the other messdeck, and he found it much the same except that it was only the for’ard bulkhead, not the deck, that was shored; in spite of being stove-in at its for’ard end where the deckhead caved downward it seemed less gloomy, less of the trap-feeling about it. Grant had come into the messdeck behind him; he shouted, thin-voiced, ‘Seems to be holding up, sir.’
Grant seemed to be holding up, too. Perhaps he’d just been sick; one always felt better, for a while. He was up close to the bulkhead now and he could see where a spar or two had shifted; by this time Prior would have knocked them back into position, but Allbright didn’t seem to have noticed the change. Nick asked him, shouting above the din. ‘Those need tightening, don’t they?’
‘What’s that, sir?’
Allbright looked dead tired. Dark rings under hollow, dull eyes, and face thinner, paler than ever. Nick shouted in his ear, ‘Time you had a rest, Allbright.’
‘Rest, sir?’
The killick smiled. He seemed drugged, stunned – by the noise, perhaps – and puzzled at the suggestion that he might take a breather from this job of keeping sentry-go against the sea. Grant made an offer: ‘I’ll take over, for a spell.’
He took the mallet out of the leading seaman’s hands, and began to knock the shores back into their original positions. Nick yelled, ‘I’ll send someone along, in a minute.’ Allbright objected, ‘Look, sir, I can—’ Grant shouted, with his eyes fixed on the shore he was about to belt, ‘Leave me to it, I’m perfectly all right.’
Nick took Allbright aft. He told Swan, ‘Midshipman Grant wants a turn at the bulkhead. Give him half an hour, then have someone relieve him.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Swan peered for’ard through the shadowed messdeck. He glanced at Nick. ‘Not the most salubrious of spots, sir.’
‘You looked better with your beard, Buffer.’ Mackerel was rising, rising: it was time she stopped and came down the other side. Here in the half-light, enclosed, ears ringing with the noise and mindful of what could happen at any moment and what could or could not be done to counter it, surrounded by men whose eyes were either alarmed or carefully controlled into showing no alarm as they watched the bulkheads and the props they’d placed – props which, in comparison with the weight and power of the sea out there, were really matchsticks – you could visualise the ship suspended on a wave-crest, hanging, tilting ready for the great rushing plunge: and then the feel of her moving, the downward slide, accelerating, falling almost as if through air not sea, and as suddenly brought-up hard, her bow deep in the next oncoming wave, sea rolling white and green, high, right over her, drowning the foc’sl gun and exploding in a mountain of foam against the foreside of the bridge superstructure: you heard it, felt it, knew that it had been the first big one of the night and that before long they’d be coming bigger.
Swan asked him, ‘Don’t really say so, do you, sir?’
Nick yelled back, 'l’d grow it again, if I were you.’
The flurry of sea ahead as Mackerel ploughed into it was all the wilder because of her misshapen bow; instead of a stem slicing knife-like into the waves it was a partly flattened, unwieldy mess of steel that smashed instead of cut, bludgeoned instead of lanced. From the bridge one looked down on a mass of white, a huge lathering that surrounded, smothered and moved with the ship, rose up around her as she wallowed into the troughs and fell away again as she climbed the slopes. Through the froth solid seas, piles of black water, rolled like battering rams, racing aft and bursting against the gun and superstructure, cannoning by and cascading aft on to the iron deck, boiling around the torpedo-tubes, ventilators and the bases of the funnels. Down below, one had been conscious mostly of the pitching, because that was the greatest danger to the shoring, with water hurling itself to and fro inside the flooded area; up here one realised that the weather was on the bow and she’d got into her familiar corkscrew action: bow up, roll port, bow down, roll starboard… You could look down on that seesawing, foam-covered foc’sl and mentally see right into it, see the timber reinforcements to the bulkheads, the messdecks like narrow, ringing tunnels, and the men waiting, trying not to eye the bulging steel too often… Wyatt moved, as if he’d suddenly become aware of his first lieutenant’s presence.
‘Satisfied with your shores, Number One?’
‘Holding all right at the moment, sir.’ He added, ‘But the motion’s tending to dislodge them, we’re having to keep a close eye on it.’
‘Naturally. But so long as it is holding—’
He was leaning towards the voicepipe, the tube to the engine-room. Nick, seeing the movement blurred by darkness, said quickly, ‘With respect, sir, it might be premature to—’
‘You’re like an old woman, Number One!’ Wyatt shouted, ‘Engine-room!’
‘Engine-room!’
‘Two hundred revs, Chief!’
Wyatt straightened. He told Nick, ‘That’s revs for six or seven knots, Number One.’ Pointing at the sea. ‘We’ll be making good – what, three?’ He nodded. ‘We’ll do better, by and by. I’m going to berth this ship in Dover on Christmas Day – we’ll have our evening meal alongside, d’you hear?’
What one heard was the rise in the turbines’ note as they came up to the ordered speed. From one-fifty to two hundred revolutions per minute meant a third more thrust, a third more pressure on the bulkhead. Christmas Day? It was Christmas Day, it had been for the past hour. What did that have to do with seamanship and common sense? Wyatt shouted, ‘Your fears, Number One – or Mr Watson’s – are unjustified. I’ve been at sea in destroyers a great deal longer than you have. You might remember that, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He wondered, as he watched the sea battering her stem, whether it would be practicable and helpful to lighten her for’ard, so the bow would float higher and take less punishment. But there was really only the ammunition that one could shift. One might empty the for’ard shellroom and magazine, move the stuff aft or ditch it? The only other movable heavy weight was the cable, and that was inaccessible. Wyatt bellowed, ‘Watch your steering, helmsman!’
‘Aye aye, sir, but she’s—’
‘Pilot!’
He’d lurched over to the wireless-office voicepipe. Pym answered, and he told him, ‘Make this signal to Moloch: Happy Christmas. Am steering sou’-sou’-west at revs for seven knots. Owing to weather conditions regret may be late for turkey and plum pudding. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Send it, then. Repeated Captain (D) and FO Dover.’
‘Aye aye, sir. And a happy Christmas to you, sir!’
Wyatt groped back, chuckling, to the binnacle. Good humour faded abruptly as he checked the compass card.
‘McKechnie, d’you want to lose your rate? I said watch your steering!’
‘Aye aye, sir. Sorry, sir. Only she’s been gettin’ a wee bit cranky. There’s a change, sir, she’s—’
‘Rubbish, man! Just watch what you’re doing!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Then the bulkhead went.