The popular press went overboard about the battle. ‘We’ve been to Heligoland and back,’ the Daily Express crowed with glee. ‘Please God we’ll go again.’
‘No great feat really, of course,’ Poade allowed casually. ‘But it was carried out under the Germans’ noses and that establishes our ascendancy. Once we can get their High Seas Fleet into the North Sea, they’ll be wiped off the face of the earth.’
Within forty-eight hours they were back on their patrol, the Dartmouth boys still queasy from the smell of blood left behind by the wounded Germans, and, almost immediately, Poade’s enthusiasm was diminished by the news that a U-boat had shocked the Grand Fleet by penetrating the Firth of Forth as far as the railway bridge.
‘At this moment, I suspect,’ Kelly grinned, ‘there’ll be battleships and battle cruisers dashing in every direction for the safety of Scapa Flow.’
Four days later they heard that another U-Boat had torpedoed the flotilla leader, Pathfinder, in the Channel, and Poade’s gloom increased.
‘These submarines are becoming a bit of a bloody nuisance,’ he decided heavily.
Only Kelly seemed to lack surprise. He knew his father and had met many of his contemporaries, and he suspected that the setbacks they’d suffered so far could well be laid at their door.
The Broad Fourteens patrol continued in increasingly bad weather. It was a curiously remote kind of life. Apart from the days in harbour, they were entirely out of touch with the world, keeping lonely company in the southern North Sea. The blazing excitement of action that they’d all anticipated, which had been encouraged by the sinking of Königin Luise in the first hours of war, had simply not materialised and the war had begun not with the almighty smash they’d all been expecting but with a mere shift of scenery. They’d expected to thunder into battle with smoke pouring from the funnels and the guns blazing in some dramatic action filled with the roar of high explosive and the smell of burnt cordite, but, instead, all they’d done was sink a few German trawlers in the Channel which, unaware that the war had even started, had cheered them as they’d approached. As they’d taken the crews on board, the only difference had seemed to be that they’d had fresh fish to eat for a change, and now all they’d got were humdrum patrols without anything positive to show for them. It was hard even to feel useful.
Towards the middle of the month the equinoctial weather became bad enough to lash the hundred-and-twenty mile stretch of water from Dover to the Hook of Holland to a fury and stir its grey waves to a cauldron of stinging spray and opaque spindrift.
‘In for a spell of bad weather,’ Poade observed. ‘Admiralty’s radioed that the Dogger Bank patrol needn’t be continued and that the seas are too bad for the destroyers, so that we’ve got to watch the Broad Fourteens on our own.’
‘Oh, bloody marvellous!’ Kelly glared out at the grey murk, uneasy, uncertain and angry. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the submarine had advanced long since from infancy to pugnacious adulthood and to leave the old cruisers unescorted seemed to be a mistake of the highest order. ‘That leaves us without any protection at all and, on this beat, with the Dutch coast on one side and a minefield on the other, there’s no room for any variations of course. The Germans must know exactly where we are at any time.’
Spray lashed across the deck and his eyes narrowed as he peered into the mist. Cressy was lurching through the waves, massive, ponderous and threatening, but they’d all heard the nickname they’d been given and he guessed that their threat was an empty one. The squadron was even under strength because Euryalus was in dock, and the flagship was running out of fuel and would soon have to turn for shore.
‘What happened to Winston’s idea that the Broad Fourteens could be abandoned?’ he said to Poade. ‘Are they using us to entice the Germans out so that Tyrwhitt can get at ’em, or are we here just because we’ve always had ships here?’
Poade shrugged. ‘I expect our elders and betters know more than we do,’ he said. ‘Though I’ve been told that Roger Keyes was heard on the telephone saying “For God’s sake, take these bloody Bacchantes away.” We’ll be all right,’ he ended. ‘In these waters, submarines’ll be at a disadvantage and, if the weather moderates, one of Tyrwhitt’s flotillas will join us tomorrow morning.’
The following morning, however, the weather was still bad and the message they received announced that Tyrwhitt’s flotilla had had to turn back to Harwich. ‘The flagship’s returning to base as well,’ Poade said. ‘For coaling. Drummond in Aboukir’s in command.’
The wind was coming in fierce short gusts now, plucking the funnel smoke downwards across the bridge to make them cough and dab at streaming eyes, and the sky was high without a scrap of warmth to it, its empty greyness turning the water into an angry pewter that seemed to reflect the tall dark sides of the old cruisers. Square, ungainly, their high freeboard blunt and blank as cliffs, they dug into the short steep seas like angry bulls butting at a gate. There was a hard chill in the air and Kelly was in no mood to be forgiving.
‘Why doesn’t Aboukir signal increased revolutions?’ he demanded. ‘At this speed we’re a sitting target.’
‘Conserving coal,’ Poade said. ‘Admiralty order.’
‘It’s asking for trouble. Pity we can’t just zig-zag a bit. I always found it a damn’ sight harder to hit a rabbit when it jinked.’
Staring at the chart, Kelly wasn’t as convinced as Poade that the situation was a safe one. As the three old ships steamed in line ahead, the eastern horizon was still dark with the gale blowing into their faces. The Chief Yeoman appeared and, as he handed a signal form to Johnson, Kelly noticed that his fingers were stained blue by the duplicator he used to issue the captain’s orders.
‘Germans are out again, Johnson announced bluntly. ‘Light cruisers, destroyers and submarines.’
Under the narrow, old-fashioned cap, his face was keen, but there was an element of strain and worry, too, behind his eyes which indicated that he was as aware of danger as Kelly was.
‘They’ve been seen from Esbjerg, South Denmark, heading north. Jellicoe’s coming out, too, heading south past Flamborough Head towards the Horn Reef. It doesn’t involve us.’
‘It still leaves us isolated, sir,’ Kelly pointed out.
‘I doubt if we need to worry in this weather.’
Late in the evening, another signal was received, saying that Tyrwhitt had started off again for the Broad Fourteens with his flotilla of destroyers and should arrive the next day. At first light the following morning, the Bacchantes were still heading northwards, anxious eyes on the western horizon for the first sign of the destroyers’ grey shapes to appear through the mist. As the middle watch ended, Kelly was staring round him, frowning. The waves looked black, racing in towards the ship like dark mountains of water, and he felt a tingle in his guts as he watched the sullen crests rolling past, exhilarated by the angry sea yet at the same time depressed by the absence of colour and the deep sense of foreboding in his mind.
Poade was also clearly uneasy. ‘Seas are dropping,’ he said. ‘And that’s no help. It’s to be hoped Tyrwhitt arrives before the submarines start getting awkward.’ He glanced at the chart. ‘I’d have thought we’d be safer to head towards the destroyers instead of continuing on this course.’
Kelly peered through the mist across the broken seas towards Aboukir. The old ships one behind the other reminded him for all the world of three elderly circus elephants performing a routine march.
‘What’s the course, Pilot?’ Johnson demanded.
‘Oh-four-five, sir,’ Poade said.
‘Speed?’
‘Ten knots.’
‘How far are we from the Hook of Holland?’
‘Twenty miles on the beam, sir.’
‘We’ll have to change soon or we’ll run aground at Ijmuiden.’
The sky was the colour of old lead, darkening in the north to the colour of wet Cornish slate. Every time the ship pitched, the screws raced out of the water and there was a shuddering groan as the whole vast structure creaked and gave to the strain. There was a curiously depressing feel in the damp, salty air, and oddly there seemed no sensation of surprise as Kelly saw a fountain of water rise from the port side of Aboukir leading the line. It seemed somehow to fit in with the prevailing mood of the day.
He had just turned away to glance at the chart when, through the murk, he saw the column of water and spray lift in a sudden mushrooming shape, a grey-white tower soaring high above the decks, almost as high as the funnel, thick, sullen and ominous; then he saw smoke coiling upwards, and with surprise, saw the cruiser appear to lift into the air with it. There seemed to be no flame and no explosion and it was a moment or two before he realised that Aboukir had been hit by something. Then Cressy shuddered as a vast shock wave punched at her massive hull and, immediately, men crowded the decks to stare across the dark uneasy water.
‘Aboukir’s struck a mine, sir!’
The roar of the explosion came across the misty sea as he spoke and, as the smoke cleared, through the murk they noticed Aboukir had stopped and Kelly was surprised to see she was already heeling so far over to port her starboard plates were visible, glistening wet and red in the increasing morning light. The iron-grey water alongside her, churned to foam by the explosion, was dotted with black heads, and more men were appearing from below until her decks were teaming with running sailors.
‘I think they’re abandoning, sir!’
Johnson snatched at his telescope. ‘Already?’
Some of Aboukir’s boats, smashed by the explosion, swung in shattered wreckage from the davits. One of them had been lowered and stopped half-way down, and it hung lopsided and awkward-looking. A light began to flicker from the stricken ship’s bridge.
‘She’s signalling, sir. It is a mine and they want us to come closer to pick up survivors.’
‘She’s going, by God!’ Johnson said in surprise. ‘Stop engines! Get the boats away! Maguire, go with them! You’ve got a sound head on your shoulders! It’s got to be done quickly. Paymaster, we’ll need blankets, soup and hot coffee, and warn the surgeons to be ready! And double the look-outs! Aboukir might be wrong. It might have been a torpedo.’
As the way went off Cressy a bugle blared. The alarm gongs were sounding through the ship and she came alive with men running along the broad decks to the boats. Bosuns’ mates urged the men along, their pipes twittering as they ran.
‘Away first and second whalers!’
The boats swung clear over the black water and the oarsmen and coxswains fell into the narrow wooden hulls. The second whaler was already dropping down the ship’s side, the falls screaming as if they were alive. Kelly clambered into the pinnace. ‘Lower away!’ he shouted.
The waves shot up towards them, the wind snatching at their crests.
‘’Vast lowering! Out pins! Let go!’
The boat dropped with a lurch on to the crest of a wave and, as it began to veer away from the black bulk of Cressy’s beam, Kelly saw that Aboukir was now down by the bow, the watery sun shining on the white figures of naked sailors walking inch by inch down her sides as she heeled over, some of them standing, others sitting down and sliding into the water which was already thickly dotted with the heads of swimming men and the sprawled white shapes of the already dead.
Every one of Cressy’s boats had been lowered and mess tables, stools, spit kids, chests of drawers and chairs were being hurled overboard for Aboukir’s survivors to cling to. The main derricks, prepared in record time, were hoisting out boom boats and Kelly was just heading away from the ship’s side when there was another terrific crash. Hogue, cautiously approaching like Cressy to pick up the swimming men, also seemed to lift out of the water, and the shock jarred Kelly even through the timbers of the pinnace. A second or two later there was another crash, deeper sounding and heavier, and a great column of water and a cloud of smoke lifted from Hogue’s side. The third of her four huge funnels collapsed at once like a pack of cards and, as she began to heel over, she appeared to have been cut almost in two.
‘We’re in a minefield!’ the coxswain of the pinnace shouted.
‘Minefield be damned!’ Kelly snorted. ‘I’ll bet it’s a submarine and Cressy’s a sitting target.’ He turned to stare back at his ship, expecting her to get under way and move off, but she lay still, wallowing in the grey choppy water.
‘For God’s sake,’ he burst out, as though issuing orders himself. ‘Get going!’
Above the crash of the water, he could hear a sound from Hogue of breaking and splintering, as though every fragment of crockery, every chair and table, anything that wasn’t riveted to the bulkheads was being fragmented. She was already well over to starboard.
‘There must be half a dozen of the bastards,’ one of the seamen yelled, then guns started to fire over their heads from Cressy and they could see the shell splashes in the sea.
‘They got her,’ someone shouted.
‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kelly yelled. ‘Pay attention to what you’re doing!’
Aboukir was low in the water now, the sea lapping the bridge, and they could see men jumping from it into the waves.
‘She’s going!’
Slowly, with ponderous majesty, Aboukir began to turn turtle. The dark water heaved and great gouts of it shot upwards from open scuttles, then there was a rending sound as her boilers tore loose, and she fell over on her side and settled upside down, rocking gently, lifting to the surface again so that men started to climb back on to her slimy red keel. Not many succeeded because it was too steep and too slippery and those who did were cut by barnacles, begrimed and exhausted, and choking from the sea water and oil they’d swallowed. Then, slowly, she slipped beneath the waves, taking with her most of the wild-eyed survivors who clung to her keel.
Hogue, also by this time heeling to port, was firing at shadows and from below, as the pinnace pushed through the wreckage and began to haul gasping men aboard, Kelly could see deadlights being closed and more mess stools, tables, timber and anything else which would float being thrown over the side. Boats were swung out on their davits and yelling petty officers were shouting a mixture of orders. Hammocks splashed into the sea and men began to jump.
At first it seemed that Hogue was not going to sink, but then they saw that the quarterdeck was awash and she, too, began to roll dizzily to starboard, flinging men across the broad decks to break arms and shoulders as they fetched up against bulkheads and stanchions. An explosion deep below water lifted her port side up and she lay almost on her beam ends, and as her gunners ceased their pointless firing they could hear shouts above them of ‘Abandon ship.’
Putting the pinnace astern to clear the great leaning bulk, Kelly stared upwards. Hogue made him think of some vast block of buildings slowly tilting sideways towards him, then, as they drew away, he saw the captain walk over the side of the bridge and on to the bilge keel where one of Cressy’s cutters took him off almost dry-shod. Falling heavily on to her side, Hogue set up a great swell that swept towards them, lifting them on its crest as it rolled past. For a moment, the water lashed at the sides of the pinnace then, as the huge keel showed, wet and red and barnacle-covered, swinging slightly as the ship settled, Kelly drove in among the swimming men again.
Awakening at last to the danger, Johnson had begun to take Cressy away at full speed in a zigzag past the area of wreckage and swimming men where her consorts had sunk. Her guns were still firing wildly and shells were dropping near her own boats.
‘Give her all she’s got,’ Kelly yelled to the pinnace’s engineer and they moved among the swimming men, dragging them aboard and distributing them among the cutters as they filled up.
One of Hogue’s Dartmouth boys, wearing only a singlet, was shivering with cold and Kelly shook him to life.
‘Grab an oar, boy!’ he shouted at him. ‘Double bank! It’ll warm you up!’ and he saw the boy climb into a cutter and reach out to start heaving alongside a bearded, ear-ringed sailor.
Cressy was firing over their heads now and he saw the splashes grow nearer. He turned to wave a hand in warning but at that moment the pinnace’s bows seemed to lift from a vast concussion below the sea and he saw seamen and planks and a brass ventilator hurled through the air. As the bows dipped again, he saw the timbers were shattered, then he was swept out of the boat by the rush of water that flooded along it, and was swimming for his life, the one thought in his mind the unfairness of it all – he seemed to be seeing more bloody war than was his share and to be sunk by his own side was just too much.
He came to the surface, spluttering furiously. Cressy was hurtling past, a vast black steel bulk towering above them, pushing men and wreckage aside with her bow wave. He could see her rivets picking up the light, and her ungainly turrets trained to port, the guns moving slowly like the antennae of a great steel beast, stupefied and worried, but without the intelligence to discover the whereabouts of her undersea tormentor. On the bridge officers were staring down at him over the steel coaming, and barefooted sailors were running along the decks with ropes. Then, as she moved past, he saw an explosion lift her stern and the shock came through the water like a blow from a fist. Once more, in a sickening repetition of the other two torpedoings, a great column of smoke, as thick and black as ink, shot skywards as high as the towering funnels, and, working up to her best speed, the great ship came to a halt like a charging rhinoceros hit by a high velocity bullet. As her bows went down, an angry wave of water foamed over the forecastle head and she stopped dead, steam roaring from the funnels in a shrieking din. Then she heeled, righted herself momentarily, and finally, like Aboukir and Hogue never designed to withstand torpedoes, began the same dismal, taunting sequence of keeling over to starboard.
Spitting water, almost weeping with rage, Kelly saw her start to dip below the waves like an oil drum split open at target practice, and men on her decks tossing over rolled hammocks to cling to as she began to sink. Slowly, she leaned over, checked, then went still further, the men at the guns still firing at an invisible foe. The Dartmouth boys, still in their pyjamas and looking like children, began to run for the side, and Captain Johnson, tall, wing-collared and old-fashioned- looking, appeared to be calming them as he walked among them, or instructing, directing, as though nothing had happened.
Then, as her boilers tore loose in a devastating explosion, she turned turtle in the same sickening manner as her sisters, leaning over like a ponderous pendulum to splash down on her side in the water and continue turning until she was upside down. As she floated keel-up, a few desperate men, gasping and shouting for help, tried to scramble aboard but then, still rocking after her wild swing, huge fountains of water driven upwards through her scuttles by the compressed air inside her, she slipped quietly below the sea.
As she disappeared, Kelly heard a rush of water like surf breaking on a beach and realised it was suction. He hardly had time to fill his lungs with air before it was upon him. His chest seemed to be bursting, and he had almost given up fighting when something told him to keep on trying and he started struggling afresh.
As he shot to the surface, something bumped against him in the icy water and he found it was a hammock. He looked round for something more substantial and as a coir fender bobbed up he grabbed it and pushed himself on it to a piece of floating timber which seemed to be the centre of one of the ship’s targets and managed to flop across it.
Clinging to the baulk of timber, he was consumed with angry bitterness. What bloody luck, he thought, to become a casualty after only six weeks of war!
He was cold and numb and quite certain that all the feeling was going from his limbs, and he had almost resigned himself to drowning when he came to life with a jerk. This was a damn silly way to behave, he decided – giving up the ghost before he was properly gone. Once, as a boy, he’d fallen out of a tree and knocked himself unconscious, and had come round staring at the sky, convinced he was already dead. Then his brother Gerald, worried at his stillness, had given a nervous little kick at his behind. He had heard his voice – ‘Come on, young ’un, you’re not hurt – and had literally forced himself back to consciousness.
Looking at his watch, he realised it had stopped exactly an hour after Aboukir had been hit. Only Cressy had launched her boats and the other two ships had gone down with nothing more in the water than a cutter or two. All round him were struggling men and he began to move among them, calming them, telling them not to try too hard, but to grab something that would float, and kick with their legs.
‘It’ll help keep you warm,’ he panted, ‘and it’s too bloody far to swim to England from here.’
A few weak grins answered him and some undefeated spirit yelled ‘Fuck the Kaiser!’ Treading water, he stared around him, unable to believe that three great armoured cruisers had disappeared so quickly. Gasping, shouting men were fighting their way through the wreckage to grab at anything substantial enough to float, trying as they swam to divest themselves of seaboots and the heavy wool clothing that was dragging them down into the darkness, and there were screams as huge spars, freed below water, shot to the surface to break limbs and backs.
Exposure was already taking its toll and the stokers, who had rushed on deck from the overheated confines of the boiler room, were the first to succumb, lying back in the water as if going to sleep. A headless body drifted past, and Kelly saw two Dartmouth boys, neither more than fifteen, swimming desperately towards a raft, terror in their eyes as they breasted the corpses in their path. One of them was Boyle and, heading for them, he grabbed him and towed him to a lattice-work target that had floated free as the ship sank. A crowd of sailors clung to it and he pushed them aside and handed the boy over to a bearded petty officer before setting off back for the other. By the time he arrived at the spot where he’d seen him, however, there was no sign of him.
The water seemed to be crowded with men clinging to withy fenders and Kelly passed the ship’s surgeon clutching the top of a small table and the chaplain hanging on to a lifebuoy. Beside him was the engineer commander, gasping in agony from two broken legs. Some of the swimmers seemed to have given up the ghost already and he called to them as he pushed among them, ‘Come on, you chaps, who’s for a dip?’ and a few of them managed a cheer and struck out for floating wreckage.
Moving away, struggling to remove his clothing so he could swim, he found a life raft and climbed aboard. As other men arrived, he tried to organise it so that wounded and injured could be laid flat on it while the unwounded clung to the sides. As more appeared, it was clear the raft couldn’t hold them all and he went over the side again to organise groups of men to cling to floating planks and spars.
How long he was in the water he didn’t know but eventually someone shouted that he could see a mast and Kelly saw a Dutch fishing smack to windward. Immediately, the men grouped round the raft started singing – that compelling hymn all sailors demanded, sometimes in cynical enjoyment when securely shorebound, but always somehow with the feeling at the back of their minds that its words were their appeal to the Almighty not to forget them.
‘Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave…’
The tune welled up stronger and, driven by its plea, Kelly set off swimming towards the lifting mast. As it drew nearer, he became aware that he was surrounded by dead bodies that carpeted the surface of the sea in grisly groups. They were bent over the spars and fragments of splintered wreckage to which they clung or had lashed themselves for safety, some of them stokers who had died blinded or sobbing with pain after being enveloped in a scalding miasma of steam. Shouting and swimming alternately, he pushed through the crowding bodies until he caught the attention of the crew of the smack at last and a small boat was launched to drag him aboard.
Soon afterwards, two small Dutch steamers and an English trawler arrived and began to haul the dead and dying on deck. They were all practically naked and some were so exhausted that, with the rolling, it was impossible to lift them aboard and a tackle had to be hoisted out. The Dartmouth boy, Boyle, was among those huddled on deck and as Kelly handed him his own mug of tea, he gave him a grateful look and drank, only to be promptly sick into the scuppers. Unaware that all he wore was his underwear and his uniform cap, Kelly nagged the smack skipper to put him aboard the British trawler, where Cressy’s engineer commander lay on the deck, his broken legs at an odd angle, the ship’s chaplain alongside him.
He looked up as he saw Kelly. ‘Hello, my boy,’ he said. ‘I was watching you there with that raft. That was splendid work you did,’
The trawler was crowded now but no one seemed to be angry except Kelly. Poade appeared, covered with oil but still enthusiastic and, like so many others, apparently regarding the sinking as a good sporting event.
‘Bloody hard luck,’ he said. ‘And jolly well played, the Hun!’
Kelly turned on him furiously. ‘Hard luck be damned,’ he snorted. ‘And bugger this “Jolly well played” nonsense! We got what we asked for! It was too damn silly for words waiting there like that to be torpedoed!’
‘You couldn’t leave all those men to drown!’
‘By not leaving ’em, we added another seven hundred to the score!’
It was mid-morning when Lowestoft, flying Tyrwhitt’s broad pendant, arrived, and the survivors on the trawler were pushed aboard the destroyer, Malice. Someone handed Kelly a cup of cocoa and he found himself staring into a familiar face.
‘Kimister!’
‘Ginger Maguire! Were you in one of them? The last I heard of you, you were in Clarendon.’
‘I’ve had rather a varied career since then,’ Kelly growled.
Kimister’s expression was one of mingled thankfulness and envy. He was never sure quite how he wished to be treated by the war, whether he wanted to be kept safely out of danger or be flung into the middle of the fray so he could find out about himself. Since he was very doubtful about how he’d behave if he were called on to prove himself, he was grateful that so far he’d not been involved in anything very risky. His ship had just arrived from the West Indies and he was still suffering from a certain amount of anxiety because Tyrwhitt, alone among the British admirals, seemed to be showing any eagerness to get at the Germans.
He waved a hand. ‘Look, come to my cabin. I can fit you up with my spare uniform.’
‘You don’t have to.’
Kimister smiled. ‘You stopped Verschoyle bullying me lots of times,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have packed the whole thing in. I often thought in those days I wasn’t cut out for the Navy.’
‘What happened to Verschoyle anyway?’
Kimister’s expression changed. He had always been terrified of Verschoyle as a boy and now as a man he still was. Once it had been Verschoyle’s fists, now quite simply it was his tongue.
‘He’s at Gib, lucky devil,’ he said.
Kelly was unimpressed by Verschoyle’s luck. ‘I bet he’s crawling round the admiral,’ he said.
By the time they disembarked at Harwich, Kelly was looking reasonably respectable again in Kimister’s second-best uniform, but most of the men around him were shoeless, and still in shirts, pyjamas and underwear, clutching blankets or sacks to them. A few wore white canvas trousers and navy issue sweaters and a lot of the officers had saved their thick llama watch coats, but many wore nothing underneath.
The Great Eastern Hotel had been commandeered as a hospital and all those who could stand up and walk lined up for steaming baths. Already the news had got around the town, and outside the building and in the lobby women waited, weeping or frozen-faced, to hear what had happened to their men. Other women were handing out mugs of tea and cocoa laced with rum.
As Kelly shared his mug with a shivering grey-faced Dartmouth cadet, his father appeared. ‘Thank God you’re all right, my boy!’ he said. ‘What happened?’
Kelly turned an angry face towards him. ‘Some damned fool at the Admiralty left us out there like sitting ducks,’ he said. ‘They picked us off one by one.’
‘Cruisers?’
‘Cruisers be damned, Father! Submarines.’
‘Rubbish, boy.’ Admiral Maguire frowned. ‘Submarines can’t have done all that damage!’
Kelly stared at him. Up to adolescence, to George Kelly Maguire, God had been represented on earth by his father, a vague, gold-encrusted minor deity smelling of leather and tobacco and fine soap. When he was at home he had administered the law somewhere not far below Heaven, hearing everything, seeing everything, missing nothing; while the rest of the family, the dogs and the servants had hovered in the depths with nothing to lose but their chains. Now he could only regard him as a middle-aged, not very bright naval officer who had been indulged by his profession for far too long.
‘Submarines, Father,’ he insisted. ‘And I dare bet, just one.’
Some idea of the size of the disaster was filtering through now. Nearly fifteen hundred men had died within an hour and the war had come shatteringly home to the Navy. Weaned on the exploits of Drake and Nelson, the disaster seemed to have stunned everybody.
A few cheerful spirits still managed to smile. ‘One thing,’ Kelly heard a half-naked gunner say. ‘We’ll get survivors’ leave,’ and he immediately realised that the leave he’d been owed since before the outbreak of war might at last be possible.
He was just wondering where his father had gone so he could tap him for a loan, when someone touched his shoulder. It was a captain with black side whiskers who was carrying a large sheaf of papers.
‘You’re young Maguire, aren’t you?’
Kelly hadn’t the slightest idea how he knew but he admitted that he was.
‘Good. Come with me. I’ve got a little job for you. I didn’t know you were in Malice.’
‘Sir, I’m not–’
But the captain had turned away, striding on long legs down the stairs. It was clear he had assumed from his dry clothing that Kelly was not a survivor but part of the crew of the destroyer which had brought him ashore. He was talking to himself as he walked.
‘What a bloody way to conduct a war,’ he was growling. ‘Germans sinking every bloody ship we’ve got and Winston over in Antwerp playing at bloody soldiers with the army!’ He half-turned. ‘They’ll need to send in the Naval Brigade there, boy, did you know? Half of ’em still without equipment, too, with their bayonets down their gaiters and their ammunition stuffed into their pockets. Someone’s got to stop the Hun getting the place. It anchors our left and guards the Channel.’
Kelly hadn’t the slightest idea what the whiskered captain was talking about and he had to keep breaking into a run to keep up with him as he stalked along, throwing words over his shoulder.
‘There’s going to be a hell of an uproar in the press about sending all those kids from Dartmouth and Ganges to sea,’ he was saying. ‘No bloody landlubber’ll ever believe a boy can learn more in ten minutes about his profession at sea in wartime than he can learn in fifty years in a classroom.’
There’d be a few parents, all the same, Kelly thought, who might have preferred that their sons had had the chance to learn something about life first. His mind went back to the Dartmouth boys running across the deck of Cressy and Boyle’s terrified eyes as he’d towed him through the water towards the raft.
The captain was still arguing with himself. ‘They’ll all be writing to the papers,’ he was saying with the fine arrogance of a man allowed to live a life that was entirely separate in thinking, behaviour and standards from the rest of the country. ‘I wonder what those boys would have said if their parents had taken them out of the ships. They’d never have been able to face their friends again.’
He stopped dead abruptly and pointed. ‘Audacity’s down there,’ he said. ‘She’s got a whole slop room full of blankets and uniforms. I want ’em. Now! Tell ’em I sent you. They know who I am because I’ve just put the bloody things aboard.’
‘But, sir–’
‘Go on, boy! Don’t argue.’
Audacity was an old destroyer, and she was lying alongside the quay with a look of alertness about her, her springs taken in and held to the shore only by her bow and stern ropes. As Kelly searched for the lieutenant in charge of stores, he could hear the throbbing of her engines, smell the odour of hot oil and steam, and catch the hum of engine room fans. Whether the whiskered captain was known aboard or not, the lieutenant, who was a reservist, clearly had no intention of giving up his newly-acquired stores in a hurry.
‘We need ’em,’ he said. ‘We’re due for sea. We’ve been warned to stand by with steam up. Get ’em from your own ship.’
‘I haven’t got a ship. I’m from Cressy.’
Despite the urgency, the lieutenant was still not inclined to move quickly, and, unfamiliar with new procedures, was keen to keep his nose clean.
Kelly was almost hopping with rage at his casualness and pettiness. He’d obviously been brought up in the same school as his father, concerned with the ritual rather than the spirit, and he could well see why he’d been placed on the reserve.
As they talked, a motor car drew up alongside the ship, its brakes squealing, and Kelly heard shouted orders. Immediately, bumps and clangs above his head began to alarm him, then the quivering that had been running through the ship ever since he’d stepped on board increased.
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.
The lieutenant looked up. ‘I told you. We’ve been warned to come to immediate notice for sea.’
Kelly’s head jerked round. ‘Then, look, please, for God’s sake, can we hurry?’ He endeavoured to bring home the urgency of his request. ‘There are eight hundred men standing round in their birthday suits at the Great Eastern in need of clothing. They’re cold. They don’t have a thing–’
The clanging above his head interrupted him. As it increased he heard running feet – a lot of running feet. It sounded only too familiar.
‘That’s the gangway!’ he bleated, and bolted for the deck.
He was just too late. The ship was already a yard from the quay. There was still time to jump but, as he cocked one leg over the rail, someone grabbed him by the neck. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you bloody fool?’
He crashed to the deck with another officer on top of him. Struggling free, he sat up at last and pushed aside the other man, a lieutenant like himself.
‘You benighted stupid idiot,’ he shrieked. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
‘I’ve saved your bloody life,’ the other officer snorted. ‘You ought to be grateful!’
‘Well, I’m not.’ Kelly yelled. ‘This isn’t my blasted ship! My ship’s at the bottom of the North Sea with two others when she ought not to be, if anyone had had any bloody sense!’
Almost weeping with fury, he stared at the quayside now twenty feet away and receding rapidly. ‘I think the Navy’s full of bloody fools!’ he stormed. ‘Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve ruined my survivor’s leave! I was swimming around in the bloody North Sea only a few hours ago and the only thing that kept me warm was the thought that I’d be able to go home and have everybody dance attendance on me. I’ve even got a girl to hold my hand and now I’m off to sea again because you’re a silly fathead with his brains in his backside. If this bloody ship gets sunk, I’ll never get my leave.’ His fury died abruptly. ‘Where are we going anyway?’ he asked.
‘Gibraltar.’
‘Gibraltar! For God’s sake, why?’
‘Well, after all, old man, there is a war on.’
‘Do you think I haven’t noticed? What the hell are we going to Gibraltar for?’
‘Take some bigwig, I understand. I’m damn sorry, of course, old fruit, but how was I to know you were a survivor? You don’t look like one.’
Kelly stared back at the receding port, cursing Kimister’s generosity. The ship was passing the seaplane base at Felixstowe now, her stern down in a welter of white water, her bows up as she headed for the Sunk Lightship.
‘Gibraltar,’ he said, faintly awed at the way the war was managing to sweep him along with it. ‘My God!’