As soon as the nurse had filled in the details, hung the board back on the locker and turned to the patient in the next bed, he reached out, unhooked and looked at it. The temperature graph was evening out – the upward zig had levelled off and presumably in a few hours would begin a downward zag, back towards normal after oscillating near the top of the page. The line had been spectacular for a week which was now beginning to fade into a distant haze of pain, brief spells of morphia-induced sleep, and dreams that verged on hallucinations. Curiously enough there was no memory of pain; he now knew one did not remember pain, only the circumstances associated with it.
The hand still throbbed with the pain darting up and down like vibrating toothache or summer lightning in the distance, and seemed to be storing itself in the armpit where, one of the nurses said, there was a gland that intercepted all the poisons being manufactured in that hand.
It was still dark; dawn was an hour or more away. He glanced up at the big clock over the swing doors. An hour to go before they wheeled in a trolley carrying the long white enamel dish full of scalding water and put the screens round his bed. Fifty-four minutes, to be exact. All important clocks seemed to have Roman figures. Then they would lift the arm off the pillow, undo the bandages, remove the dressings, give him a warning glance so that he could brace himself by gripping the top of the bed with his good hand and pressing his feet hard against the bottom, then they would press that stinking purple and green left hand into the scalding water and his world would spin and burst into a red sunflower of pain.
They teased him and told him he always said ‘Christ!’ as his hand went into the water, and perhaps he did; but the worst part always came a couple of minutes later, when the heat of the water had time to soak in. Eat in, really, like a corrosive acid, but to be fair they were saving the arm. The surgeon had given a satisfied sniff yesterday: to begin with he had brought more of his chums and they had gathered round with long faces and muttered like parsons at their patron’s deathbed and there was no doubt they were measuring him up for the saw: should it be at the wrist, across the forearm, at the elbow, or below the shoulder…
After reading the thermometer and putting it back in the glass of antiseptic, she had to reach across the fellow in the next bed to unhook his chart board, and her legs were spectacular, even in those dreary black stockings. One seam was crooked; she would be furious if he mentioned it. Woollen, they seemed, although she said they were made of some mixture. He pictured black silk on those legs, whose calves seemed almost too thin, but which guaranteed she would have slim thighs. Thinking about them eased the pain; even at this time of the morning a few moments’ erotic thoughts were more effective than a pain-killing pill, though not so long-lasting.
The charts did not give much away. Edward Yorke, aged twenty-five, five feet eleven inches tall, 164 pounds, had at 0530 on this dark November morning in 1942 a temperature of 100.3, a pulse of 84, and had experienced a bowel movement (‘Yes?’ That polite smile if the patient nodded, the frown if he shook his head).
Her name was Exton; he had found that out within hours of being brought into the surgical ward at St Stephen’s. And she was a member of one of the nursing associations, probably the QARNNS, and no funny jokes about the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service, which seemed to be a highly efficient volunteer organization for debs who had abandoned the cocktail party circuit to nurse their would-be escorts through wounds and sickness. In peacetime they would be nursing them through hangovers, and their uniforms would be their nakedness, not these starched and rustling dresses out of which black-stockinged legs grew.
She had been off duty for the day or so before his operation – he would never have forgiven her if she had administered the blasted enema – and the septicaemia had begun almost as soon as he had belched and vomited up the last of the chloroform and ether fumes. Then there had been the haze of pain, the rapidly increasing stink of the septicaemia (the stink of his own flesh) and finally one became absorbed into the routine of the hospital surgical ward with ten patients, five in beds along one wall, five opposite, and a desk in the middle at which a nurse or sister wrote up notes (or love letters) at night by the light of a dim, green-shaded lamp, looking like a Whistler painting of Florence Nightingale.
A surgical ward – one could be thankful for that. Plenty of pain but no illness; at least not the sort of groaning illness, like stomach ulcers, where everyone had a long face. In this ward people were cheery enough, except immediately after their treatment, which the clock showed was now due for him in forty-six minutes’ time. St Stephen’s was old, the plaster of the ceilings was cracked, the lifts creaked alarmingly, but it was standing up well to being a Navy overflow hospital.
She was called Clare; he had discovered that on the second night, when the pain had seemed unbearable and she had stood up from that desk as though sensing the agony and glided silently to his bedside, and whispered: ‘Is it really bad, Lieutenant?’
It had been so bad he had only been able to nod, and she had fetched the night sister. After what seemed like a week the sister had come back and whispered instructions to the nurse, whom she had called Clare, and moments later there had been the prick of a needle and, just before the morphia took effect, he had heard the sister hissing some criticism of the way Clare had used the syringe.
Clare Exton. Tiny, black-haired, shy, humorous, with the promise of a body he could (and did) only dream about under all that nurse’s uniform, and so officious when necessary, which was frequently enough in a ward of young naval officers who were alternately in pain and bored stiff.
‘Lieutenant Yorke,’ she was now saying sharply, ‘please put that board back on the hook.’
‘I can’t reach over with my right arm, Nurse.’
‘You unhooked it without trouble.’
‘The seam of your right stocking, Nurse.’
She was blushing now. ‘What has that to do with it?’
‘It’s crooked, Nurse.’
‘That’s right, Nurse,’ a patient opposite confirmed. ‘It twists clockwise. Makes your leg look like a spiral.’
‘Like the baldacchino in St Peter’s at Rome,’ Yorke said, hoping to confuse her.
‘The turisti never seem to notice they spiral the other way,’ she said calmly as she snatched the board, hooked it up with a clatter and then hissed: ‘Don’t bother asking for a bottle, Lieutenant; I’ve gone deaf.’
‘The quack said I’ll be able to get up for an hour today,’ he said, a tentative peace offer.
‘Just you wait until you try it,’ she said. ‘Your arm will throb so much you’ll think it’s going to burst and you’ll be so dizzy you’ll probably fall over.’
The plump paymaster lieutenant in the next bed said in a stage whisper: ‘She’s afraid you’ll start chasing her round the ward.’
‘I shall be off duty when Lieutenant Yorke finds how difficult it is to walk after several days of high temperature,’ she said coldly.
Yorke was suddenly conscious of the drone of a German bomber right overhead as a series of whooshes told of a stick of bombs coming down: brief whooshes ending in heavy thuds that warned that the last two or three might hit the hospital, if not the ward.
A dull, deep explosion, then another; sudden darkness as the lights went out, a heavy weight on top of him, the shattering of glass, dust in the lungs…and yet another thud as the last bomb in the stick passed over and, from the noise, landed in the road beyond. The weight wriggled, he felt lips on his face and a hard kiss, and a murmured: ‘I’ll give you seams! I hope I didn’t hurt your arm.’
And then she was gone, flicking on her torch and showing the ward was full of dust like fog. She began checking the blackout screens; and only he knew she had used her own body to protect him when it seemed certain the ward would get a direct hit.
He saw her shadowy figure following the torch beam from window to window jerking all the heavy black curtains back into position and shaking out the broken glass, carefully screening her torch. A few moments later there was a faint vibration as the hospital’s emergency generator started up, then the lights flickered on and off once or twice and then stayed on.
‘Close,’ the paymaster said and was promptly contradicted by a full commander on his other side. ‘Bet it didn’t even hit the building. Whistled too long – obviously going right over us. You barely have time to hear the one that hits you. Hiss, bang and you’re dead. These long whining johnnies – just passing over you. You draw it on a piece of paper and you’ll see I’m right.’
The paymaster turned and winked at Yorke. ‘You were safe enough,’ he whispered. ‘I saw in the flashes of the explosions.’
‘You know what sister says – shove your head under the pillow to protect your face from glass.’
‘Think what I’d miss.’
So now the paymaster was in the conspiracy: not too many winks and sly remarks, please…
‘Must have been a late one on his way home, that Jerry. Still, we haven’t had the all-clear, Hardly heard him,’ the paymaster said. ‘You can’t mistake those engines, though; not synchronized, that’s why they seem to rumble.’
‘You sound more like an engineer than a paymaster.’
‘Hobby. Not aeroplanes, but motor cars. I’ve a nice little Frazer Nash down at Portsmouth.’
Yorke remembered the paymaster’s right leg had been amputated, and he had just had a second operation; something to do with the nerves being pinched in the first operation and leaving him in constant pain.
‘I’m hoping Archie Frazer Nash will fix it up for me after the war so I can drive with one leg. Put in a handle throttle; shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘Easy, I would think,’ Yorke said, knowing how optimism could keep a man alive; he had only just passed through the dark night of a possible future with one arm. ‘A bit of flexible cable and some practice. Like the Bowden cable on the Lewis gun of a last-war fighter.’
‘Hill climb trials will be out, though; I used to enjoy them. Great little bus for trials, the AFN, plenty of acceleration.’ He glanced up at the clock. ‘Be glad when they bring the tea urn round; that bloody dust has left me dry.’
Clare was taking the last few temperatures. Broken windows and dust were an almost nightly occurrence; the plaster ceiling looked like a reference book picture of leprosy. Soon the real work of the day would begin: after the glass and dust had been swept up the beds would be made, breakfast served, and then sister’s rounds, matron’s rounds, and finally doctor’s rounds. And today the whole ritual would be punctuated by the cheerful cursing of the glaziers replacing the glass in the windows. But before that, the surgical dressings; in another twenty-two minutes, in fact.
‘Any letters to be posted?’ Clare asked the ward, and several patients answered and reached into the drawers of their lockers. Yorke held up a letter and as she took it he said, ‘It needs a stamp on it, nurse; here’s the money.’
She took the coins and glanced at the address. ‘You’ve been writing sweet nothings to your girlfriend, Lieutenant?’ she teased.
‘Yes, the writing’s a bit wobbly because I can’t hold the pad steady.’
‘She’ll understand,’ Clare said, and Yorke knew she would, because the superscription on the envelope said: ‘Nurse C Exton.’
Sister Scotland put the last of the eleven stitches into the white enamel kidney bowl and then dropped the forceps and narrow pointed scissors with a clatter, as if to signal that the job was done. ‘Wipe his face, Nurse,’ she said to Clare, who reached for the towel on the rack behind the locker and patted his brow, which he knew was covered with pearls of cold perspiration.
The Sister cradled his hand gently as she wiped the scars with surgical spirit. It was bruised and bright pink with matching pairs of small purplish spots along each side of the long scars where the stitches had been. ‘The incisions and cuts have closed nicely,’ she said. ‘In six months you won’t notice anything, unless your hand gets cold. Then the scars will show up white.’
Yorke looked at the hand, remembering when it exuded yellow and green pus; when the putrid smell made him vomit. The hand was still there and he could just move the fingers and the only discomfort was that the skin seemed too tight, as though he was wearing a thick glove which had shrunk and become a size too small. It was still hard to believe the arm was his; it was a strange, alien limb, joined to him only by pain.
‘An artist’s hand, eh Nurse?’
Clare glanced up. You could never be sure with Sister Scotland.
‘I suppose so,’ she said warily.
‘Aye, and the last of his sun tan’s wearing off now.’ She flipped up the other pyjama sleeve. ‘See? The skin’s quite white. But all this–’ she pointed at the left forearm ‘–this dark brown will peel off; it’s from all the hot water. Scalded, really. It must have hurt.’
‘It did; I remember saying so at the time.’
‘Aye,’ she said, ignoring his sarcasm, ‘and I seem to remember your bad language. Now you’ve got to start the remedial exercises for the arm; otherwise it can wither and leave you with a useless hand.’
Clare glanced at him in alarm: no one had mentioned this before.
‘Wither, Sister?’ He tried to keep his voice flat but no man faced with that could be a hero in pyjamas.
‘Don’t be alarmed, Lieutenant; the physiotherapists at Willesborough will sort it out; you’ll soon get your grip back again.’
‘Willesborough?’
‘Down in Kent; we’re opening an annexe there in a day or two. An old country house, just the place for convalescence. Plenty of draughts, no doubt; but you’ll get a good night’s sleep, which is more than can be said for up here, with all the bombing and the guns. And anyway, the surgeons need your bed.’
Clare was staring down at his hand. Had she known about Willesborough?
‘And you’ll not be escaping from me either, Lieutenant,’ Sister said with an arch smile.
‘Are – will you be going to Willesborough, too, Sister?’
‘Yes, I shall be in charge of the unit. Three staff nurses, two physiotherapists, and six beautiful young ladies to powder your bottoms and make sure you don’t get bedsores.’
The paymaster was quick; he seemed to guess Yorke’s anxiety and from the next bed said: ‘Don’t say we’re losing Nurse Exton, Sister?’
‘Yes – no, rather, because you are coming to Willesborough, too, so Nurse Exton can continue to record your chronic constipation. We’ll fit you out with a wooden leg and you’ll soon be cadging free pints at the local pub. Anyway, Mr Yorke will need someone to fit his cufflinks and studs and you’ll need someone to prop you up for a bit. Jack Sprat and his wife; I can see the pair of you escorting Nurse Exton to the Willesborough church fete. They’ll put you in charge of the lucky dip,’ she said to Yorke, ‘you only need one hand to dip into a bran tub.’
‘When do we go?’ Yorke asked. ‘We might miss the three-legged race.’
‘The staff and the first batch of patients go tomorrow. By bus. One of your nice Navy buses, painted grey and with all the seat springs broken. It’ll be like a Sunday school outing, won’t it, Nurse?’
The bus juddered its way up the long hill and the movement made Yorke wince while the paymaster, lying in a nest of pillows across the back seat, swore quietly and monotonously, trying to steady the stump of his leg. Sister Scotland, sitting in the front offside seat, suddenly stood up, rapped on the window behind the driver and, having attracted his attention, shouted in a piercing voice: ‘Change down, you bloody fool!’
The driver obediently dropped into a lower gear, the juddering stopped, and Sister Scotland sat down to a round of applause, which she acknowledged with an airy wave of her hand.
It seemed odd to Yorke to be back in uniform again. The hospital authorities thought they would all wear hospital blue for the journey and found they had seven almost mutinous and certainly truculent naval officers who were in any case not mobile enough to pack their own uniforms and had no intention of admitting that any nurse could, and intended using the whole episode as a reason for not going down to Willesborough in flimsy hospital wear, even though assured the bus had good heating and they would have blankets.
So Yorke sat alone in uniform trousers and half-length mess boots, a white rollneck woollen jersey, his left arm in a sling, and his uniform coat and cap on the seat beside him. He saw Clare and another nurse get up in response to instructions from Sister Scotland and walk slowly back along the bus, talking with each patient. The other nurse sat beside one man, then walked forward again and spoke to the sister before resuming her walk.
Yorke put his jacket across his knees, leaving the other seat empty, and in a few moments Clare sat down, the paymaster at the back telling her cheerfully, ‘Leave me to your mate; I’ve no complaints and I don’t want a bottle.’
Clare took his jacket and put it across her knees and, turning back one of the sleeves, ran a finger along the gold stripes. ‘You’re regular Navy, then. I thought you were Wavy.’
Her eye caught a flash of colour and she turned the coat and pointed to a single medal ribbon, red with blue edges, on the left breast.
‘I didn’t know you had a DSO.’
‘I haven’t yet; only the ribbon. Have to collect it one day.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘It’s like virginity, one doesn’t go on about having it.’
‘I would,’ she said impulsively and blushed as he looked round at her. ‘That medal, I mean.’
She looked down and pointed at his bandaged hand, and murmured: ‘Was it anything to do with that?’
Yorke laughed. ‘The chicken or the egg! I’m not sure why they gave me the gong; the hand was a piece of something from an explosion.’
‘A torpedo?’
‘Bombs. Now tell me why a lovely girl like you isn’t married. Or engaged.’
‘I was married. I’m a widow now.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He had been clumsy but there had been no warning; no rings. Was Exton her married name?
‘He was a pilot,’ she said. ‘Killed in an accident. It was a long time ago.’
She spoke in a curiously flat, unemotional voice. If she was my widow, Yorke thought, I would have liked her to have continued wearing my wedding ring, even if on the other hand. ‘…A long time ago.’ And obviously the memory still hurt. She was still in love with – well, a ghost. No living man could compete with that; the Rupert Brookes always stayed gilded youths, never to be supplanted, never ageing, or becoming unpleasant, their personalities never changing; flies in amber.
‘I’m afraid this is a gloomy conversation, even for a bus,’ he said.
‘You’d prefer soft lights and sweet music and the air thick with tobacco smoke and night-club prices?’ she asked.
‘Or sitting on a five-barred gate along a country lane. Or on a rock watching the waves breaking on a shingle beach.’
‘Why shingle?’ she asked. ‘Why a five-barred gate?’
‘There are lanes and gates around Willesborough. I like the sound of water rolling the pebbles, and the nearest beach is shingle. At Hythe,’ he added. ‘Probably with barbed wire on it now, and land mines, but…’
Sister Scotland looked round and Clare caught her eye and got up. ‘You know Willesborough?’
‘Yes, fairly well. Fine old windmill, one of the best in the country.’
As Clare walked away he did not say that Ashford, into which Willesborough merged, was the railway centre of Kent and one of the Luftwaffe’s main targets, and the windmill was white and enormous and the sort of thing a bolting German bomber pilot was likely to aim at, just for the hell of it.
He saw down to the right, through trees now bare of leaves, Leeds Castle sitting four-square like a fairy-tale fortress in a great oval moat. A castle had stood there for more than a thousand years – the first made of wood and built, if his memory served him, at the time of William the Conqueror, and the present one, now a mellow stone, creamy and smoothed by the centuries. Another potential target for a bolting German pilot; a thousand-pounder in the middle of that should kill the gardener and his wife who served as housekeeper, and a dozen ducks; a victory Goering’s boys could hardly afford to miss. From up here on the main road the water in the moat seemed calm and a faint blueish-green as though distilled by age.
It was just three months ago; exactly twelve weeks the day after tomorrow. August, long days and short nights, not the time of year for destroyers to be steaming close to the Bay of Biscay, not with Junkers and Dorniers using those French airfields around Brest.They were reckoned to have a range of 1200 miles – five hundred out, two hundred to play with and five hundred back.
Death passed by so smoothly, just as Leeds Castle had slid into sight through the trees. You did not always have to see it; if you were reading a book or had been asleep it could pass unnoticed and touch someone else. The signalman had come up to the bridge and handed the page from the signal pad to the captain who read it and walked over to the chart.
Yorke had seen him glancing at the latitude and longitude scales and then putting an index finger on the chart – on a position well into the Bay of Biscay.
‘Number One – here a moment. We have some trouble with the Teds.’
‘The Teds’ – a relic of the Aztec’s recent time in the Mediterranean and her association with the Italians, mainly ferrying them as prisoners. The Italians had no love for their allies, and their word for Germans, Tedeschi, provided the Royal Navy with an obvious abbreviation; a change from the usual ‘Jerry’.
The captain smoothed out the signal for him to read. It was from the Admiralty and came ten minutes after the Aztec had herself picked up garbled signals from a ship being attacked in the Bay.
The captain, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe, was a deceptive man: at first glance he seemed a ruddy and chubby-faced prosperous farmer dressed up in naval uniform. He smoked a foul pipe (originally, before the charring really got to grips with it, a distinctive Peterson of Dublin) and was given to using seagulls as targets when he felt the need to exercise one of the pair of 12-bore hammer guns he kept cased under his bunk. He did it less frequently since Yorke asked him, with well-simulated innocence, if he had ever used one of the pump guns that were becoming popular with American sportsmen. But, seagulls or not, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe had been a fine shot.
His orders once he read the signal had been quiet and complete: warn the engine room that they would soon be going on to full speed, alter course now to east, get the navigator up on the bridge, and make sure that all the small-arms ready-use ammunition lockers were full, and have the galley make enough bully beef sandwiches to provide everyone with three – there was no telling when they would have time for a proper meal.
So the Aztec, a Tribal class destroyer on passage from Gibraltar to the Clyde on a sunny day in the late summer and with orders to stay at least four hundred miles from the French coast once abreast of Ferrol, increased to thirty knots and steered for a little pencilled X the navigator had put on the chart.
Bascombe was thorough; he had ordered another lieutenant to decipher the signal again; he had no wish to have the Aztec dashing off to the wrong position. And Yorke guessed that in the Operations Room at the Admiralty the little disc, or whatever they used to mark ships on the big plotting board, and which represented the Aztec, would be moved towards this other ship.
The Aztec – this one was a mighty warrior, despite the peaceful origin of the name: four U-boats sunk so far, thanks to Henry Bascombe’s quite uncanny knack of seeing into a Ted submariner’s mind. Or was it the farmer’s instinct for outwitting a weasel, or even knowing over which holes to drape the nets before putting the ferret into a rabbit warren? But using a Tribal to hunt U-boats: it was an awful waste of a Fleet destroyer.
The first of the Ju 88s had picked up the Aztec some fifty miles from the position given by the Admiralty, and Bascombe had given the sequence of helm orders for evasive action as though he was at the local market bidding for a few ewes in which he was not really interested but knew the seller needed the money for some particular purpose, like paying a doctor’s bill. Bascombe would have been that sort of a farmer. Prosperous, cheerful – and thoughtful. Squire Bascombe – that was the nickname he had picked up at Dartmouth many years ago.
The twin-engined Ted had let down its dive brakes – the first time Yorke had ever seen them used on a Ju 88 and they looked like latticed trapdoors opening downwards on the underside of each wing – and tried to line up on the Aztec as she jinked below at high speed, probably appearing as a grey dolphin leaving a wide white ribbon of wake.
‘Port fifteen, quartermaster,’ Henry had said, ‘that should do it this time… And now starboard twenty, that’ll break some china in the galley…’
But it had turned the Aztec into the last of a stick of five bombs which the despairing German pilot had dropped across the destroyer’s mean course. The mean course: Henry had been so keen to go to the other ship’s help that he had not deviated more than thirty degrees either side of the course at a time when a few circles and figures of eight might have helped to confuse the bomber.
They were small bombs, no more than 250-pounders, but this one had hit B turret, landing on the breech of a gun and just in front of the bridge, blasting up thousands of metal splinters that riddled it like a pepper dredge. The captain, navigator, lookouts, signalmen – every man on the bridge had been killed or badly wounded, and the word had been passed that Mr Yorke was in command – and a fire had started under B turret.
The next four hours had been a nightmare: Yorke could remember nothing beyond standing – crouching, rather – in the wreckage of the bridge smelling burning paint and shouting helm orders down the bent and battered voicepipe, calling engine-room orders to a rating who had managed to rig up a telephone, and leaving the men at the guns to fight as best they could under whichever warrant and petty officers survived while he tried to keep the ship afloat, which meant twisting and weaving like a wounded fox being attacked by eagles.
He had managed to dodge the next two Ju 88s and a Do 217, each of which, after dropping six bombs, had tried to rake the ship with machine-guns, but the Aztec’s own light armament had driven them off, a raucous barking of cordite which cheered up the ship’s company. The clatter of empty cartridge cases rattling across the deck with every roll was music; the gunners’ brass band.
But the only surviving officers were himself and the lieutenant ‘E’, who was busy down in the engine room trying to deal with blast damage, keep some pressure on the hoses for fire-fighting, and making sure Yorke had speed in hand.
Soon, as the fire was doused under B turret and casualties were carried below, Yorke retrieved the chart and brought the plot up to date more by guesswork than anything else. The soccer fans among the ratings had the score: twenty-two misses for the Aztec – bombs she had managed to dodge – and one hit for the Teds. They were arguing how many points should be scored for a miss and for a hit when lookouts sighted the ship they were supposed to be rescuing – an old Polish destroyer. God knew what she was doing in this corner of Biscay, but enemy bombers were circling her like a swarm of gnats, either ignoring the Aztec or because they had not sighted her.
And so he had steered for the Pole; steer for the sound of guns, the fighting instructions said, though presumably Their Lordships in their wisdom had meant ‘sight’ not ‘sound’.
There was no need for radio silence now: that was one of the few advantages of being in direct contact with the enemy. A sighting report to the Admiralty on Fleet wave full power, giving their position, and reporting in cipher the damage and casualties, brought an order in cipher that the civilian passengers on board the other ship must be rescued at all costs. It did not matter that the Ted direction-finding stations could pick up the transmissions and plot the Aztec’s position; the bombers knew well enough and must be sending back a running commentary.
The engineer had turned up the wick in a bid for every knot of speed and Yorke was thankful that the stokers, or whichever of the survivors were down there handling the sprayers, were a bit heavy-handed because for a few moments they let in more fuel oil than the furnaces could burn, so that a stream of black smoke poured out of the funnels.
Smoke. He had not thought of it. There was not much wind – a breeze of perhaps ten knots, but every little helped. He took the telephone from the rating and talked to the engineer, and as he spoke he saw two gnats leave the Polish destroyer and head for the Aztec.
At the same moment he realized that the Polish destroyer was now stopped, fought to a standstill, and one of the lookouts with binoculars confirmed that she seemed low in the water, although not listing.
‘May have low freeboard, sir.’
There was no time to look her up again in the identification books – even if they could be found in this tangle of bent metal. Grab the boys and girls and bolt, said Their Lordships; thank goodness there was no question of taking the Pole in tow.
And here was the first of a new wave of Teds diving down from ahead. Ju 88s, silvery in the sunlight despite camouflage on the upper surfaces, the black crosses easy to see, the reflection of sun glinting from the flat pieces of Perspex forming the cockpit canopy. Was the pilot right-handed or left? That had been Bascombe’s last mistake; Yorke was sure that for some reason the commander had guessed the pilot was right-handed, but he had been left.
The plane, dive brakes down, was now beginning a shallow dive towards the Aztec, which for the moment was steering a straight course. The Ted pilot did not know before he began his bombing run whether the destroyer would jink to his left, his right – or carry straight on. If she turned to port (to his right) and he was right-handed, the plane’s alteration of course to aim his bombs would be easy to make, an instinctive move. Was it any harder to the left? What did their bomb sights look like, anyway? Was it like a car driver pulling out to pass?
‘Now!’ he shouted at the rating holding the engine room telephone and saw the man’s mouth twist into the word ‘Smoke!’; then he called, ‘Starboard thirty!’ into the voicepipe and held on as the Aztec heeled violently in response to full effective rudder applied at full speed. He glanced aft through the splinter holes and saw a gush of black smoke streaming up from the funnel; just enough (he hoped) to divert that Ted pilot’s attention for a few seconds when he should be concentrating on his bombing run. From aloft, the Aztec might look for a moment as if she had been hit by a bomb not yet dropped.
The score went up to thirty misses, though the engineer complained that two of the six had been close enough to start some rivets below the waterline and there were a few trickles of water round skin fittings. And, he grumbled, all this high-speed steaming was raising the engine-room temperatures…
The next was a Dornier 217, and the score rose to thirty-six; the third and fourth were Ju 88s, which dropped only two bombs each and then tried to spray the Aztec with machine-guns.
‘Only forty – they must have used the rest of the sticks on that bloody Pole,’ grumbled the starboard lookout, who had appointed himself scorekeeper.
At that point a petty officer scrambling across the wrecked bridge came up to Yorke, who recognized him despite a grubby and bloodstained bandage round his head.
‘The torpedoes, sir: is there any chance…?’
Yorke thought of all that explosive and compressed air sitting amidships – as well as the depth charges aft. The Admiralty seemed very concerned about whomever was on board the Polish destroyer. Were the torpedoes so much extra weight? Would there be a chance to use them? Perhaps to make sure the Pole sank – the Teds might send out tugs, or even a destroyer.
‘For the moment, no; but make sure all the depth charges are set to safe.’
The order about the depth charges should have been given long ago; there had been more than one case already of a destroyer sinking and, with her men swimming in the water above her, reaching the depth to which the hydrostatic valves in her depth charges had been set, where they had automatically exploded. Water being incompressible, the men were found unmarked but dead, the shock wave rupturing something inside them (Yorke watched the last Ju 88 turn away to the north-east), the diaphragm, he supposed.
‘No Teds over the Pole, sir,’ one of the lookouts reported. ‘But – yes, two more approaching him from the east.’
It was little short of a miracle that the Pole was still afloat. Judging from the Aztec’s losses, when she could still steam and evade at full speed, he dared not think of the dead and wounded in a ship which had been fought to a standstill.
These latest two Ju 88s seemed determined to sink the Pole before the Aztec arrived; then no doubt they or their mates would deal with the intruder. They wheeled and dived again, like vultures over their prey and uncertain what to do, greed fighting fear.
The wind was south-east, and he gave the quartermaster a course that would bring the Aztec passing to windward of the Pole. The breeze was perhaps ten knots; the smoke should drift about one mile in six minutes although it was impossible to guess if this wind was constant; the Aztec, thundering along at over thirty knots, prevented anything more than guesswork. A young man standing up in a sports car tearing down the Brighton road at about forty land miles an hour would have the same difficulty…
One of the Ju 88s suddenly banked away from the Pole, but there were no bomb bursts. Were the Teds just waiting patiently for her to sink? The Aztec was vibrating as the engineer tried to get the last knot out of his engines, so that it was hard to see through binoculars.
Now the Ju 88 was darting for the Aztec in the same shallow dive from ahead. Was this the Luftwaffe’s standard procedure for attacking ships? The pilots were (thank goodness) unimaginative: the Aztec was steaming towards this one at over thirty knots and he assumed that the Ju 88 with air brakes down was making 100 knots, so the Aztec would pass beneath on an opposite course at a combined speed of 130 knots. But if the pilot came up astern in the Aztec’s wake, the destroyer’s speed would be subtracted; the Ju 88 would pass the destroyer at 70 knots, giving the Ted bomb aimer more ‘time over target’ and therefore a better chance. He stopped thinking about it; one could not be sure about telepathy, and anyway, there was no need to walk under ladders any day of the week, least of all on a Friday.
This pilot is left-handed! He’s coming down in a gentle curve to his left, a difficult job for a right-handed man. Wasn’t it? Wouldn’t a right-handed man make a single larger alteration to line himself up, so that he could then approach in a straight line?
‘Port thirty,’ he snapped down the voicepipe, staking everything on his guess. If the bridge communications hadn’t been so badly damaged he’d be reducing and increasing speed too, like a plover shamming injury to lure the enemy away from the nest.
But he might guess wrongly, like Bascombe, and bring a bomb down to shatter the bridge. ‘Port thirty’ had been enough; five bombs burst in a neat line on the port quarter.
‘Forty-five for one,’ remarked the signalman as he reported to the engine room. ‘Be a while before we get “Bad light stopped play”, though.’
Now Yorke could make out the Polish destroyer’s outline clearly with the naked eye. The ship had paid off in the wind and sea so that her bow was heading to the north-west.
‘She’s a bleedin’ wreck, sir,’ reported one of the lookouts with binoculars. ‘Hits on A turret, B turret and the bridge, both funnels riddled, torpedo tubes smashed… No fires though, and no steam neither… Reckon her boilers are out.’
‘Any floats?’
A group of lozenge-shaped Carley floats, the simple rafts which were little more than rope nets over wooden frames, would be the clearest indication that the Poles were abandoning ship, and knowing the kind of men they were it would mean the destroyer was at last sinking fast.
‘No, sir. Still a lot of tracer going up. Bet them gun barrels is hot.’
Yorke could just see the three or four thin red lines of tracer curling up towards the single plane still circling the stricken ship. It was light stuff; more likely stripped Lewis guns than anything else; guns which could be aimed and fired by hand: no electrics or hydraulics would be left working. And there would be only so many pans of Lewis gun ammunition remaining, however fast they were loaded.
She was now perhaps a mile away. The remaining Ju 88 seemed undecided what to do. The Ted pilot had no bombs left; that much seemed certain. Almost certain, he corrected himself.
Using the Aztec to circle the Polish destroyer a mile off, laying smoke, meant steaming round in a circle for just over three miles. At thirty-five knots – that was what the engineer now reckoned – it would take a little over twelve minutes to lay the screen. How many Ju 88s could – would, rather – arrive in that time, a flock of screaming vultures determined to stop the Aztec from spoiling their party?
Now a sick berth attendant was waiting to report.
‘Surgeon, sir – he says we’ve eight so badly wounded they won’t last, no matter what we do, and fifty-three other wounded.’
‘How serious are the fifty-three?’
‘‘Bout twenty bad; the rest cuts and fractures, sir; no amputations.’
‘Very well; thank the surgeon. The dead?’
‘Twenty-seven, sir. Leastways, them we know about; but there ain’t been time to search everywhere yet; the surgeon said to get out the livin’ and leave the dead, sir. For the time being, anyway.’
‘Quite right,’ Yorke said, watching the Polish destroyer now lying like a log on the port bow. The last Ju 88 was heading away north, rapidly growing smaller, exasperated or out of ammunition. Twelve minutes, that was all he needed now. A clear blue sky – that had its advantages because the Ted bombers could not sneak in above clouds and suddenly dive through a gap to bomb. It seemed strange, though, that gulls wheeled under a warm sun while around them men were blowing each other to pieces.
He called to the rating at the telephone: ‘Tell the engine room to make smoke.’
He could imagine seamen spinning valves so that more fuel oil poured out of the sprayers than could burn properly, and the extra would – like a smoking paraffin lamp in a draughty room – be sucked up the funnel and poured out in a thick black cloud.
He glanced aft through a splinter hole and saw the smoke streaming astern to lie on the water as an oily black coil barely moving in the wind, a bulging thick snake, writhing slowly, almost languorously.
Senior surviving officer. Only surviving officer except for the engineer and surgeon. Not even a blasted midshipman to lend a hand, run errands, take over responsibility for a part of the ship. And somehow he had to get ‘the passengers’ off that damned destroyer. Not just passengers, of course, but the whole ship’s company. Well, he could do with the men; the Aztec was like a ghost ship, just thundering along with a handful of men on the bridge, a few at the remaining guns, some in the engine room, a lot in the sick bay… But the Pole would have few survivors too; she had taken a terrible beating. But if a Pole could crawl he could fight; Yorke had met enough of them to know that.
A few words down the voicepipe to the quartermaster and the Aztec began her turn; an Aldis lamp winked from the bridge of the Polish destroyer and Yorke ignored it; one of the signalmen would report the message and he could already hear the metallic chatter showing that the man had found an undamaged lamp and was acknowledging each word.
Now the Polish destroyer was on the port beam and the smoke was hiding a quarter of the horizon; now she was coming round to the port quarter and the smoke cut off half the horizon and was rising slowly.
‘Sir, ship says “Thanks for smoking; we’ve given it up.”’
Must be the British liaison officer. Still, it was a good signal; they were still cheerful.
‘Signalman, have you a pad? Good, make this: “When smoke covers us am coming alongside stop expecting more visitors so cannot stay long.”’
The Aldis chattered away while Yorke continued turning the Aztec. She seemed to be towing a great black tail of smoke. No planes yet, but the two ships could not stay in the smoke for ever; the Teds could chase them – the Aztec anyway – the moment she came out of it and made for home. That was assuming the smoke hid them anyway: was it rising high enough to hide the tops of the masts? Perhaps the Teds would get short of planes; maintaining a flying circus over a sinking ship three hundred miles from their base must need plenty – a couple of hours out and two back, half an hour or more to fuel and bomb up – say five hours. It would take twenty planes to keep one arriving over the target every fifteen minutes. That was nearly two squadrons by the British measure; twelve planes per Imperial squadron. Did the Teds use the Metric system? By now Hitler might have followed Napoleon’s example and invented his own system of weights and measures.
Half a mile to go and then the Aztec and the Pole would be snug inside the smokescreen. Suddenly it went dark and he began coughing as he breathed in the smoke, shouting a new helm order to turn the Aztec inwards out of the tail of her own screen. Just as suddenly it was bright sun again and the two destroyers were like two wounded chicks inside the rim of a nest, hoping the sparrowhawks would not see them through the leaves of the hedgerow.
The Pole, her ensign flapping sporadically as a gust of wind stirred the cloth, was deep and sluggish in the water: he could now see that her decks would soon be awash and as she rolled the sea sloshed down one side then the other like breakers along a sandspit. Men seemed to be gathered like limpets on the upper deck – her captain would have everyone up from below.
‘They’ve got the casualties ready just abaft the bridge on the port side, sir,’ one of the lookouts reported. ‘I can see ’em clear. A dozen stretcher cases; the rest can move. Bandaged up, a lot of ’em.’
Very little sea; for once the Atlantic was not pushing swell waves across the Bay, and he was thankful: swell waves were the ones that would pick up the Aztec as she stopped alongside the Pole and smash the two ships together so hard they would hole each other.
The wind and sea, what there was of it, was on the Pole’s starboard side. He had better come alongside her port side – as the Polish captain had anticipated – so that the breeze would be trying to blow the high sides of the Aztec away from the stricken ship and getting clear again would only be a matter of cutting ropes… Everything that saved time would be a help – already the smoke was drifting gradually and perceptibly thinning; the bombers might be back any moment.
And, he thought to himself, it had worked: he had brought the Aztec alongside the Pole – it was only in the last few moments of the approach that he realized just how much she was rolling, the result of all those hundreds of tons of water sloshing around inside her, the ‘free surface liquid’ that caused instability.
As the Aztec came alongside, with ratings throwing heaving lines, Yorke guessed the Polish ship was in effect a mirror image of the Aztec: her bridge, too, was riddled; it looked like what was often to be seen along a country lane, a can on a stick riddled by shotgun pellets. The rust was there, too; the scorching heat of blast and the impact of splinters left a neglected and rusted effect, burning or chipping off the paint.
That it worked was a tribute to the way Henry Bascombe had trained the ship’s company. Yorke spoke into the voicepipe and called to the rating at the engine-room telephone and did very little more than that. One of the lookouts, the one on the starboard side of the bridge, had a strident voice and relayed orders to both ships’ companies like a loudhailer fitted with a five-second delay, the time it took for the man to absorb Yorke’s orders and repeat them.
The heaving lines were hauled across the narrow gap of water between the two ships, heavier ropes followed and were secured, holding the two ships together. The wounded men, cocooned in the slatted stretchers, were hoisted on board the Aztec with the surgeon standing there, white overalls so bloodstained he looked as though he had spent a busy morning in a slaughter house.
The torpedo artificer had taken command of his section of the Aztec’s deck, under the surgeon, and the wounded were first put down beside the torpedo tubes.
Now someone was shouting from the Polish ship’s bridge: a British voice. The signalman repeated it: ‘Gennelman asks if it’s all right for the rest of their ship’s company to board now.’
Like the Gosport ferry, Yorke thought: ‘Yes, if all the wounded are over.’
‘They are, sir; they’ve seen to that.’
‘Very well, pass the word.’
The Polish ship’s company boarded as though they were a Whale Island team working under the fiercest of gunnery instructors, in preparation for the annual Earl’s Court Show. Whale Island GIs were the fiercest animals in Britain not kept behind bars, but they would have found little to criticize in those Poles.
Yorke watched the sky as the smoke thinned round them; the black hedge was grey now, almost transparent in places, like fog or mist dispersing. The whole ring had drifted to the north-west, and the south-eastern edge was only a hundred yards or so from the two ships. Was it worth making more smoke now so that it would blow to leeward, a long black column into which the Aztec could dart if the bombers came back? No – the Poles would give him enough men to fight the ship; there was no merit in hanging about: their only chance was a high-speed run from now until darkness.
Was the Polish captain senior? Did he take command of the Aztec? Was he rated RN? Hardly. The point had never arisen, so far as he knew. Even the bloody British liaison officer might be senior and want to play silly buggers by commanding the Aztec for the trip back to the UK. Well, he was welcome to argue the point; but unless his name was senior in the Navy List, Lieutenant Ned Yorke was taking this wreck home.
The liaison officer, a VR lieutenant, appeared on the bridge, introduced himself as John Wood, and told him the Polish destroyer was the Orzel and that the captain would be along as soon as the last man was off.
‘It’s the passengers,’ Wood said. ‘They’re special people.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I took ’em straight down to the wardroom, out of your way. Civilians. Your steward’s taken charge of them. They’re important political refugees; they’ve had a bad time.’
‘What the hell are they doing in the Bay?’
‘They’d escaped across Europe to Spain and the Orzel took them off a fishing boat near Ferrol. All arranged through the Admiralty.’
‘The Jerries spotted you quickly?’
Wood nodded wearily. ‘I reckon the Spaniards gave us away because the fishermen were four hours late so we didn’t stand a chance of getting clear by daylight. The bombers found us at dawn.’
‘At dawn?’
Wood seemed resentful, although it was hard to know who he was blaming. ‘Yes, at first light.’
‘They must have known where to look, because they couldn’t search in darkness. Didn’t you take any evasive action? Surely you didn’t steer direct for Plymouth from the rendezvous?’
‘We did,’ Wood admitted. ‘At full speed. The captain reckoned the less time we stayed within range of those Ju 88s the better. I suggested we left to the south-west, but…’
Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘We live and learn.’
At that moment an officer came on to the bridge and Wood introduced him as the Orzel’s captain. Yorke shook him by the hand. ‘You speak English?’
‘Some,’ he said, looking at the two gold rings on Yorke’s sleeve.
‘All your men are off?’
‘Everyone except the dead, Lieutenant.’ Just a faint emphasis on the rank; what the lawyers called ‘without prejudice’.
‘Is she sinking?’
‘Ten minutes at the most.’
‘Depth charges set to safe?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Yorke turned to the lookout. ‘Pass the word to let go fore and aft.’
To Wood and the Polish commander he said: ‘Can your chaps man the small-calibre stuff? We’re a bit thin on the ground. Once we’re out of this smoke we can expect visitors…’
The Polish commander scrambled out to the port wing of the bridge and bellowed a stream of Polish aft along the deck. Wood nodded to Yorke. ‘This chap knows his stuff; he fought the Orzel out of Danzig to reach England; air attacks all the way across the North Sea. Losing the ship is like losing their home. And they suspect treachery by the Spaniards, too.’
Yorke had watched the Orzel draw clear as the Aztec drifted to leeward and said to Wood: ‘Go down and find the torpedo artificer: he’s still alive, the little fat PO with a bandage round his head. He’s helping with your wounded. I want two fish put into the Orzel the moment we are at the right range.’
‘She’ll go of her own accord,’ Wood said.
‘I can’t wait around,’ Yorke said sourly, ‘and Their Lordships would love to hear we left a destroyer afloat in the Bay. You made sure all the confidential books have been sunk?’
‘Yes, the captain and I did it together.’
‘Good,’ Yorke said, and added: ‘I’m asking because it’ll crop up at the court of inquiry; it’ll help you to have witnesses.’
It was the next ten minutes that were all telescoped and confused in his memory: the Aztec had drifted clear and he had turned her on the screws to make the Polish ship an easy target for the torpedo artificer. There had been the double hiss as the two torpedoes were fired and the double detonation as they hit, but before the pillars of water had subsided and the Orzel began to sink both bridge lookouts had reported enemy planes – ‘Red two five…green four five…green two oh…’ Five Ju 88s and all attacking the Aztec at once from different directions and heights to avoid mid-air collisions: obviously they had been home and put in some practice.
There was hardly time for the gunners to change targets. Wood shouted in a momentary pause, ‘Let’s hope they collide with each other!’
One bomb burst under the Aztec’s bow as she increased speed and Yorke cursed, wishing he had delayed a few moments; the second hit the starboard side abreast the funnel and they were deafened by the safety valves lifting and high-pressure steam screaming upwards. Yorke thought ironically that if he had increased speed a few moments earlier it might have missed astern. The fourth hit the torpedo tubes but by then the Aztec was slowing down and heeling to starboard and Yorke saw the Polish commander wrestling with a Lewis gun, obviously trying to transfer it from one mounting to another. At that moment a sudden whoosh like the flight of a bird turned everything black as a bomb burst on the forward side of the bridge.