To commemorate Easter Sunday, the captain has spread word of a ship-wide contest for the best news of 1942, the winner to receive a double tot of rum each evening for a week. The contestants have their work cut out for them. Singapore has fallen. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse have been sunk. The Dutch East Indies have fallen. Burma is in a state of collapse. Darwin has been so severely bombed it had to be abandoned as a naval base. The only combatants in the entire Indian Ocean standing between the Japanese Navy and a linkup with the Germans, who are currently having their way in Russia and North Africa, seem to be us. And one Dutch gunboat we came across a week ago with a spirited crew and a crippled rudder.
We are the Telemachus, as our first lieutenant reminds us each morning on the voice-pipe: a T-class submarine—not so grand as a U, but not so dismal as an S. Most of us have served on S’s and are grateful for the difference, even as we register the inferiority of our own boat to every other nation’s. The Royal Navy leads the world in battleships and cruisers, we like to say, and trails the Belgians in submarine design.
In the chaos following Singapore’s surrender we’ve been provided no useful intelligence or patrol orders. A run through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra ended in a hail of enemy fire on the approaches to Batavia. At our last dry dock the Ceylonese further undermined our morale by invariably gazing out their harborside windows at first light to see if the Japanese had arrived. We have no idea whether we will find any more ports available to us now that we’ve shipped back out to sea. We have no idea whether we will find more torpedoes once we’ve expended our store. “Heads up there, boys,” our captain joked to those of us within earshot of his map table last night. “Is there anything more exhilarating than carrying on alone out on the edge of a doomed world?”
“Sounds like Fisher’s childhood, sir,” Mills responded, and everyone looked at me and laughed.
They view me as a sorry figure even by the standards of their meager histories. As a boy I was a horrid disappointment, pigeon-chested and gap-toothed, and as grandiose as I was untalented. The only activity for which I was any use at all was running, so I ran continually, though naturally not in competitions or road races but just all about the countryside, in fair weather and foul. It brought me not a trace of schoolboy glory, though it did at times alleviate my fury at being so awful at everything else.
The characterization my parents favored for me was out of hand, as in, What does one do when a boy gets out of hand? My stepfather inclined toward the strap; my mother, the reproachful look. Her only brother had been killed in the first war, and her first husband had come to a bad end, as well; and my stepfather never tired of pointing out that a disapproving countenance was her solution to most of life’s challenges. He said about me that by the time I was out of short pants and he was forced to introduce me at pubs or on the street, friends sympathized.
My father had been presumed lost at sea on a bulk cargo ship that had gone missing between Indonesia and New South Wales. When I asked if he had loved me, my mother always replied that it hurt too much to recall such happiness in any detail. When I pressed for particulars nonetheless, she said only that he had been quick to laugh and that no man had possessed a greater capacity to forgive. When I asked my aunts they said they’d barely known the man, and when I asked if he’d been pleased with me, they said they were sure that had been the case, though they also remembered him not much liking children.
My stepfather viewed my running as a method of avoiding achievement or honest labor and marveled at my capacity for sloth. He pressed upon me Engineering Principles for Boys and Elementary Statistics and all sorts of other impressive-looking volumes I refrained from opening. He asked if I was really so incurious about the world of men, and I reassured him that I was very curious about the world of men, and he responded that in such case I must bear in mind that the world of men was the sphere of industry, and I clarified that I meant the adventurous world of men, that arena of tropic seas and volcanic cataclysms and cannibal feasts and polar exploits. He said that if I wanted to grow up a fool I might as well join the navy, which was precisely what I had already resolved to do.
Mills told everyone when he arrived aboard that he’d been one of those posh boys who’d gone to boarding school where at great expense he’d been provided rotten food and insufficient air and exercise, and so submarine duty oddly suited him. His father had been great with speculation and then it had all gone smash and he had hung himself. Mills remembered his mother sitting in the drawing room during the months that followed with all the bills that she didn’t dare to open, since there was no money to pay them, and he remembered thinking that it would be a good thing for her if she had one less mouth to feed. He’d been a chauffeur, a silk-stocking salesman, a shipyard hand, and the second mate of a sailing ship before signing on with Her Majesty’s Navy.
As gunner’s mates we bunk in the torpedo stowage compartment, between the tubes. He calls me “the Monk” because even in our tiny living space I never bother with pictures or photographs. I carry what I want to see in my head. Everything else feels like clutter.
“Our mate here doesn’t know how to take things easy,” he says by way of explanation to our fellow torpedomen. He seems to think he panders to my vagaries with a resigned good humor.
Mills was assigned to us at Harwich as a replacement for a mate we’d lost to carbon monoxide poisoning when a torpedo’s engine had started prematurely in the tube. He asked me confidentially what sort of boat he was joining, and I recounted our most recent patrol, which I described as three weeks of misery that we’d endured without sighting a single enemy ship. We’d run aground and been unsuccessfully bombed by our own air force. We’d damaged our bow in a collision with the dock upon our return. He said that on his most recent patrol they’d surfaced between two startled German destroyers, each so near abeam that their bow wakes had spattered onto the submarine’s deck. He and his captain on their bridge had just gaped up at the Germans above them, since they’d been beneath the elevation of the German guns, and too close to ram without the destroyers ramming one another. He said they’d pitched back down the conning tower ladder with the Germans still shrieking and cursing them. He said they’d mostly worked the arctic reaches out of Murmansk, sinking so much German tonnage that the Russians had presented them with a reindeer.
He said he was pining for a nurse he’d met in the Red Cross who, last he’d heard, had been sent to London and now no doubt was pouring lemonade over the wounded in the East End. Her father upon first meeting him had cordially asked, “And who or what are you?” and her mother, upon his reply, had remarked only that people had been doing dreadful things at sea for as long as she could remember. He said that every time he’d managed to arrange some privacy with the nurse and attempt a liberty with her she’d begged him instead to “do something useful,” though he’d been encouraged by her remark about her father that no man had ever behaved so badly with the ladies and gotten away with it.
Occasionally when he was particularly displeased with the lack of vivacity in my responses he’d say that he didn’t suppose I had any of my own experiences to relate, and I’d assure him I had very few, though I had in fact before I left home conceived an intense and inappropriate fondness for a cousin on my mother’s side. This cousin’s own mother in her house displayed a photograph of herself and my lost father alone under an arbor, peering at one another and smiling, but when I asked about it, the woman appeared faintly stricken and was no more informative than my mother. When I was fourteen and my cousin twelve I lured her into a neighbor’s garden and in my overheated state crowded my face in close to hers, alarming her. Bees drowsed above a flower she’d been examining. She turned to fix her eyes upon my mouth, and when I moved still closer she backed farther away. She was chary around me during our visits afterward but also took my hand under tables in dining rooms and once, having run into me unexpectedly in a hallway, put a finger to my lips. In my fantasies I still imagine an unlikely world in which I would be allowed to marry her and she would want to marry me. In the packet of correspondence I received upon arrival in the Pacific my mother noted that my cousin Margery had let on that I was writing her, at least, and my cousin in her response to my letters asked apropos of nothing if I remembered a day years earlier during which I had acted very odd in the garden beside my home. When off duty I lie in my berth between tubes five and six and wonder what others would make of someone who can conceive of tenderness for only one other being, and a tenderness improper at that.
That hallway encounter occurred the month following my eighteenth birthday, soon after which I served my first sea duty on the HMS Resolution, an elderly battleship that had been hurriedly refitted, and still dreaming of my cousin I stumbled around its great decks on those tasks I was able to execute, grateful for the small mercy of remaining unnoticed. We sailed around the Orkneys in seas so tumultuous that during one gale our captain threw up on my feet. The other excitement about which I was able to write my cousin transpired one calm morning when we all turned out on the quarterdeck to witness the spectacle of the second pilot ever launched from a seaplane catapult. The first had broken his neck from the colossal acceleration. The second had been provided a chock at the back of his head for support.
I detailed for her my impressions of my first submarine, the Seahorse, and the way I’d almost fallen overboard when hurrying across the narrow plank onto its saddle tanks while the chief petty officer watched from the bridge, expressing his displeasure at my insufficient pace. How intimidating I’d found its insides, its lower half packed with trimming tanks, fuel tanks, oil tanks, electric batteries, and so on, and its upper all valves and switches and wiring and cables and pressure gauges and junction boxes, and how I’d had to learn from painful experience which valve was likely to crack me on the head over which station, and the revelation that above the cramped wooden bunks were cupboards and curtains. I described how the conning tower became a wind tunnel when we surfaced and the diesels were sucking in air, and how the diesels themselves were a pandemonium of noise in such confined space. I described a rare look through the periscope, as I glimpsed far more clearly than I’d expected a flurry of tumbling green sea that blurred the eyepiece like heavy rain on a windscreen and then swept past.
There was much I chose to spare her. On our first sea trial the piston rings wore away and exhaust flooded the engine room and everyone had to work gas-masked at their stations, sweating and panting and ready to faint. On our second, one of our own destroyers tried to ram us and then, after we’d identified ourselves, reported that it had pursued without success two German U-boats. On our practice emergency dives everyone threw themselves down the conning tower ladder, trampling each other’s fingers, and not even shouted orders could be heard above the awful Klaxon. On training maneuvers we lost the torpedo-loading competition, the navigation competition, the crash-dive competition, and the Lewis gun competition. On our second practice torpedo attack everything went according to plan, and when I reported accordingly to our torpedo officer he said, “Are you hoping for a prize?”
With nowhere to go we are headed vaguely toward the Andaman Sea off the west coast of Indochina, diving by day and gasping in relief in the cooler surface air at night. Every few days the captain announces our itinerary. He long ago resolved whenever possible to keep the crew informed, since it is his belief that we have a right to know what we are doing and why, and as security is hardly an issue aboard a submarine.
It is impossible to verify whether the wireless silence has to do more with our forces’ standing orders not to give away our positions to the enemy’s direction finders, or with the total unraveling of our efforts in the region. The captain finally patched through to HQ Eastern Fleet and was told to stand by and then nothing more. A week later a Dutch merchant ship we raised on the horizon reported its understanding that the Eastern Fleet had abandoned even Ceylon, and fallen all the way back to Kenya. That, the captain announced, for the time being left the decision to us whether to quit the field or to strike a blow with what we had. He was choosing the latter.
The crew is divided about his verdict. On the one hand, as our torpedo officer advised us, at such a dark time perhaps even an isolated victory could do something to buoy morale. It took only one U-boat to sink the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. On the other hand, alone and unsupported, if we were to attack a fleet of any size at all our chances of escape would be infinitesimal. Run into the right ship, he said, and we could find ourselves in all the papers. Run into the wrong one, Mills replied, and we could find ourselves with seaweed growing out of our ears.
The captain has elected to ignore the few enemy merchant vessels we spy, in order to hoard our likely irreplaceable torpedoes for capital ships. When we’re surfaced and the circumstances seem safe he has the wireless operators continue to request information. Upon crossing the tenth parallel he announced over the voice-pipe that as far as he knew the entirety of the Royal Navy’s fighting strength had now fled the Indian Ocean for the Bay of Bengal.
Despite the limitation of shifts to four hours, with everyone so cramped and hot and miserable it’s an ongoing effort of will to recall what we are supposed to be doing or monitoring every waking second of such a long patrol. Even in the head a lapse in focus can have calamitous results, as any mucking up of the sequence of valve operations to empty the lavatory pan will cause its contents to be pressure-sprayed into the inattentive crewman’s face.
Because of the chaos in Ceylon we were revictualed with one type of tinned food only: a peculiar soaplike mutton that’s been breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past three weeks. Those who complain are reminded that it all tastes of diesel oil, anyway. We have weevils in our biscuits, as if we’re serving under Nelson at Trafalgar.
A bearing seized in one of the engines and the engineers spent three days disconnecting and slinging the piston; the resulting vibration was so severe our conning tower lookouts couldn’t see through their binoculars. Now with that addressed we wait for a ship large enough to engage, and those who complain about the uncanny solitude are reminded what the alternative will mean.
In our berths Mills suggests it’s a miracle we’ve made it this far. He came aboard sufficiently early in our Norway patrols to wish that he hadn’t, and he often compares the two theaters for their relative miseries: off Norway we couldn’t cook on the surface because it was too rough, whereas here it’s impossible when submerged due to the heat. He claims we were even more fatuous then. When the French surrendered we were all upset since it meant the end of shore leave for the rest of the summer, and we spent those months living quietly, fed by wireless rumors, and one day intercepted a plain-language signal pleading for rope and small boats from anyone in the vicinity of Dunkirk. As we were many miles north, all we did by way of response was to wonder at the reason for the break in radio discipline, while we sailed about like imbeciles, amazed at such empty seas.
After Dunkirk the expectation was that the Germans would invade from either Normandy or Norway, and the RAF had to concentrate on France, so that left our submarine fleet to provide adequate advance warning of any flotilla from the north. The Royal Navy had a total of twelve submarines to dedicate to that work, including ours. Together we were responsible for 1,300 kilometers of Norwegian coastline, although the good news was that military intelligence had decided we could focus on those few ports from which a sizable offensive force could be mounted. Our orders upon sighting such a formation were to report and then to attack. To report would require us to surface within view of the enemy, which would render the attack part of the directive irrelevant unless their gunners were blind, and the real question would be whether we’d even finish the broadcast. Each submarine had been provided with a padlocked chest of English pounds and Swedish kronor so that those of us bypassed by the invasion could in the event it was successful refuel in Göteborg or some other neutral port and then cross the Atlantic to carry on the fight from the New World.
To evade Luftwaffe patrols, particularly given the onset of white nights, by June we were submerged nineteen hours daily, and gambling that we could recharge our batteries and refresh our oxygen supply between enemy air sweeps. Those who lost that bet were devastated on the surface. At the end of nineteen hours our atmosphere was so thin that matches wouldn’t light and even at rest we heaved like mountain climbers. American and German submarines were equipped with telescopic breathing tubes that could breach the water like periscopes, but when we proposed the same for our submarines we were told there was no tactical requirement for such a fitting. Our Treasury feared spending a million pounds to save a hundred million, our captain said bitterly, and its ranks were filled with rows of mincing clerks cutting corners.
As our periods submerged lengthened, our medical officer lectured us in small groups about the danger signs of carbon dioxide poisoning. Night after night just as breathing became all but impossible we were saved by a little low cloud providing just enough cover to surface. With the hatches opened, the boat revived from the control room aft to the engine room, though that didn’t do much for the torpedo room, so Mills and I and our mates were allowed to come to the bridge two at a time for fifteen minutes of fresh air.
But we weren’t safe even below. In calm weather the Norway Deep is clear as crystal, and we could be seen down to ninety feet, which we learned on our first day off the coast when six dive-bombers took their turns with us before heading home.
Around the solstice some nights never did get fully dark, and in the horrible half-light one after another of our boats was destroyed when it was finally forced to surface: the Spearfish, the Salmon, the Sturgeon, the Trusty, the Truant, the Thames. By July losses totaled 75 percent of those ships engaged. During one of our agonizing waits on the surface two Me-109s dropped out of the clouds and we could hear the pom pom of their cannon fire over the watch’s screaming as he plummeted down the ladder, and while we submerged a gunner’s mate snapped in his distress and beat himself senseless by pounding his forehead against his torpedo tube. He had doubled his jersey up over the steel first, to muffle the sound.
The invasion failed to materialize but we remained on station nevertheless, weathering the autumn and winter storms. During the worst of them we alternated at the watch, poking our faces and flooded binoculars into the wind’s teeth, riding up wall after wall of steep and chaotic waves, and maintaining a twenty-four-hour vigilance in case the impossible happened and an enemy funnel coalesced, the captain struggling to keep the sextant dry long enough to snatch a star sight and gain a clue as to our whereabouts. In the heaviest gales the breaking waves poured in over the conning tower and filled the control room below, sparking the switchboards and washing through the entire ship. The hatches had to stand open because when the diesels could no longer draw air they stalled, so a stoker with a great suction hose would squeeze atop the tower beside the watch, absorbing the battering as he pumped the water back out.
One moonless night soon after surfacing I was on watch with the captain and two others, and all around in the darkness ship after ship appeared out of the mist, the hulls of transports rising above us like slabs of cliffs. We had run head-on into a full convoy, ascending inside the ring of their escorts, whose attentions were all trained out to sea. There was no time to dive and attack from periscope depth, nor to estimate the correct angles.
“What’s the old rough rule?” the captain whispered, extending his hand toward the first transport. “If the enemy is slow, give him nine degrees of lead, or the width of a human hand at arm’s length.” With his fist as a gunsight over the bow, he set the firing interval through the voice-pipe, then shouted, “Fire!” At the launch of each torpedo we could feel the ship lurch slightly backward, and before leaving the bridge we watched a huge column of water erupt from one of our targets, followed by a thump. He shouted, “Dive!” and plunged down the ladder, and underwater we heard two more huge, far-off bangs at the correct running ranges, and the entire crew cheered. We went deep for hours, hanging silently, those of us off duty forbidden even to move since the clink of a dropped key could expose us, while we listened to the concussions of the sub hunters’ depth charges growing closer, then farther, then closer, until finally the German Navy seemed to run out of explosives.
On my last leave at home after the Norway patrols my cousin Margery insisted on bringing me round to her favorite pub and there a whole series of men with whom she seemed utterly at ease insisted on buying me drinks. “I didn’t know you had a favorite pub,” I told her, and she said, “Why would you?” She added that I should see her friends, and that her background had not prepared her for the amount some girls could drink. I asked if she had a favorite friend and she cited a girl named Jeanette who had an up-to-date mother who allowed them to smoke in the house. I continually had to repeat myself over the din of the place and when she finally asked with some exasperation why I couldn’t speak up, I told her that almost everyone in the crew had what the doctors called fatigue-laryngitis from having reduced our voices to whispers for months in our attempts to outwit the enemy’s hydrophones. She apologized, and when I told her it was nothing she took my hand.
One of her friends from a table nearby after a harangue with his mates asked me to settle the matter of whether the English had in fact invented the submarine. “Not hardly,” I answered, and he said but hadn’t the English always led in naval innovations? Who’d invented the broadside? Who’d converted the world from sail to steam? From coal to oil? And what about turret guns? “What about them,” I asked. And Margery chided him that I wasn’t allowed to talk shop, and that we needed some privacy to discuss family, thank you.
Once we were left alone she asked how my family was getting on, and I told her that my mother had reported she was enduring both my absence and the nightly bombing raids with a puzzling calm. When I asked after her family, Margery reminded me that they all remained greatly concerned about her older brother Jimmy, who was with the RAF and had already lost many friends. She said that now when he returned home on his leaves her mother and sister wore hypnotized looks and their conversations never strayed from speculations about the weather. And that Jimmy had in confidence told her some horrible stories. I suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t have, and she responded that she’d known her entire life that the world beyond her home was stunning and heartless, and that all she’d ever heard from her mother about the protection afforded by an adherence to the rules was wrong. While she was speaking she seemed to scan the room first and then to focus on the nearer details of my face.
On our way home in the darkness of the blackout she said that she’d always been fond of me, and I said that she couldn’t imagine how fond I’d been of her, and she pulled me into an alley and kissed me, and my chest felt like it did when I was running as a boy, and as her kiss continued her mouth flooded mine with pleasure. When I got hold of my senses I gripped her head and kissed her back. Finally she pulled away and said that we had to get home. While we walked she remarked that there was some rule-breaking for you: first cousins, kissing.
We stopped on her front step. She was lit for a moment when someone waiting up for her peeked through a blackout curtain. She said I should take care of myself. I grasped her hands, still dumbstruck and happy. She asked if she could tell me something, and then waited for my assent. She said that during some of the family gatherings we spent seated beside one another at dining tables it had been for her as if the stillness we made together were like a third person who was neither of us and both, and that when she’d felt the most sad and alone it had helped to imagine herself creeping into that third person who was half hers and half mine.
Did I have a sense of what she meant? she asked after a moment. I told her I did, though some part of it had confused me, and I worried that even in the darkness she could hear that. Well, she said, maybe it would come to me, and she said good night, and kissed my cheek, and the next morning I was off to the Pacific.
We sailed for Singapore through Gibraltar with a merchant convoy bound for Alexandria, and left the convoy to stop over in Beirut, which provided our first sight of a camel outside of a zoo, and where we painted our gray ship dark green for its Far Eastern tour, and from there proceeded to Haifa and Port Said and the Red Sea and on to Aden and the Pacific War. The entire time I castigated myself for the inadequacy of my response to my cousin’s overtures. Before we’d left Harwich the captain had addressed the crew, announcing that we could all settle back and prepare ourselves for a long journey filled with indescribable discomforts. We’d taken him to be joking.
Our initial view of Singapore was a towering column of black smoke on the horizon. When we docked at the naval base jetty the captain went ashore in his whites to inquire as to where to lodge his men. He found everyone in headquarters burning records, and was told that our allotted accommodation had been destroyed by bombs that afternoon.
While he searched for an alternative we remained aboard. The bombing resumed, and with the harbor too shallow to dive, the hatches had to be kept shut or the splashes from the impacts would swamp us. A few of the torpedomen beside me who I thought were dozing turned out to have fainted from the heat. Everyone else just waited. We were all losing so much sweat the decks were slick underfoot. After an hour of the concussions one of the stokers went wild and tore down all the wardroom pinup girls before his mates restrained him.
Around sundown the captain returned with the news that he’d finally located the rear admiral for Malaya inspecting the chit-book in the rubble of the officers’ club, and he’d offered us his house in the hills. A commandeered truck transferred those off duty, and the rest of us had to make do in the boiling confines of the boat.
The next morning black clouds hung over the entire waterfront from the burning oil and rubber dumps and we refitted and loaded any supplies that we could in the chaos. The last provisions aboard were crates of Horlicks malted milk and Australian cough drops. When we cast off, one old woman with a spade was digging herself a private air-raid trench in the garden of the Raffles Hotel. To the east the sky was filled with high-altitude bombers, and once clear of the harbor we submerged, and as we rounded the channel buoy the captain at the periscope reported a convoy of our own troop transports arriving. He could make out the standards of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The whole ship went silent at the thought of what they were disembarking into.
We chugged three thousand miles west. We started leaking oil. One night I worked my way back to the wardroom, where the chief and the captain were sitting and talking quietly so as not to disturb the sleepers. They invited me to join them, and as they chatted about where they might be this time the following year, and the perversities of women, and the favorite pubs they had known, I fell asleep with my head on the wardroom table, and for days afterward they joked about how much they apparently had bored me. A gunlayer on his watch at last spotted a swallow, and the next afternoon a stoker sighted an old boot, and in the end we made Colombo Harbor in Ceylon. For two weeks no one had spoken except to give or to acknowledge orders.
The captain suggested we use our week in port to become human beings again. Mills responded that he would commence his rehabilitation with a nice, invigorating fuck. Our chief was carried ashore with dengue fever and instructions to rest up and then to report with a clean bill of health and no nonsense. Despite the direness of our situation those of us on liberty took real showers and shaved our beards on the harbor tender and then escaped to the four corners of the city. I found myself at the Colombo Club, which given the circumstances had been opened to enlisted men. I passed the time strolling about the lawns and staring at the women. I listened to their husbands’ leisurely comments about sporting events. The captain commandeered a deck chair in the mornings, and after a few drinks took to playing something he called bicycle polo, which always left him limping. A lone Hurricane trailing smoke flew over, circled back, and belly-landed on the club green, after which the pilot climbed out and proceeded directly to the bar. Upon drawing any attention I disappeared. Nights I dreamt incessantly and awoke so soaked with sweat I could smell my room from the hall.
I returned to my running, ascending the steep steps to the top of the cable tram, where I’d arrive bathed in sweat and then come right back down while the natives along the way looked on, amazed. They seemed to think Englishmen were prone to this sort of thing.
I went out drinking by myself. One night I happened upon Mills and our stoker petty officer, and the petty officer slipped on some stairs and rolled all the way to the bottom and then vomited. Mills said, “You know what they say: ‘If that’s the navy, all must be well with England.’ ” After I woke in the gutter of a bazaar without my billfold, Mills insisted I go out drinking with them.
We bought rounds for crewmembers of the Snapper celebrating a sunk Jap submarine. The Japs had attacked a Dutch merchant ship and then machine-gunned the survivors in the water, so after the Snapper sank the sub, the crew beat to death with spanners the two Japs they’d fished out. They said that off the west Australian coast they’d been laboring into harbor in heavy seas when an American submarine had surfaced and ripped right by them like they were standing still. They said that in Australia girls welcomed sailors at the gangways with crates of fresh apples and bottles of milk.
We met Mills’s cousin, who’d been left behind in hospital when his ship had fled the port. He’d served as a messcook aboard a destroyer in Manila and loved the Philippines because he’d had multiple girlfriends and Scotch had been seventy-five American cents per bottle. For little more he’d maintained a love shack in the bush, a one-room hut up on stilts. The toilet and shower had emptied below without benefit of pipes and the only running water had been from heaven. All the palm trunks nearby were encircled with steel mesh to keep the rats from stealing the coconuts. In the bar he stripped his shirt to show us his tattoos, including a smiling baby’s face over one side of his chest that was labeled Sweet and another on the other side that was labeled Sour and Twin screws, Keep clear on the small of his back.
He loved the story of the Snapper crew rescuing the Japs to beat them to death. He’d befriended a sampan man in Manila who’d rowed British officers around the harbor to visit the town or to shoot snipe, and for years the man had told anyone who’d listen that soon the Japanese would invade, and he’d been more accurate than any prognosticator in London. And when the Japanese did arrive they’d crucified him on his boat for ferrying the enemy. Mills’s cousin had spied his body as the destroyer fought its way out of the port.
Three more went down with dengue fever before we departed Ceylon: our messcook, which allowed Mills’s cousin to come aboard as his replacement; the junior engine-room rating; and a torpedoman. Mills and I showed the new torpedoman his station, and while he peered with dismay at the hideous and antiquated confusion of corroded pipes and valves and levers, Mills advised him that another way of looking at the situation was that hardly any other crew had been granted our abundance of experience and survived.
A merchantman that staggered into harbor turned out to be carrying a mail packet that included letters for both Mills and myself. Mills had heard from his Red Cross nurse, who’d also sent a photograph. He teared up when he showed me. When he noted my response he protested that just because he was no celibate that didn’t mean he’d forgotten her.
I received three letters posted over a span of eleven months from my stepfather and the prelate’s daughter and my cousin. My stepfather had attached to his note a newspaper clipping of the bomb damage on our street. He wrote that my mother had discovered the neighbors’ cat dead in the rubble of the back garden gate, that she had been keenly hurt by my refusal to write, and that she dispatched her regards nonetheless, along with the news of an old classmate of mine also in the navy whose wife had just given birth. He added that when it came to me he often wondered if I would ever reach the top of fool hill.
The prelate’s daughter had sent a photograph of herself, too, and confided that she’d shared with her father what we now meant to one another and that he’d asked her to leave his house. She wanted to know what she should now do. She was referring to a night I’d been on leave from the Resolution and had encountered her outside a tearoom in Harwich. It had transpired that she was bereft from another sailor failing to meet her as promised, and I had offered to walk her to the navy yard in consolation. She’d dried her eyes and put an arm around my waist and cheered herself with my stories of my own haplessness. We necked next to others in the darkness under the Halfpenny Pier and she opened her skirt to my hands. She whispered how much we liked one another, and it sounded so piteous that I stopped, and she seemed to think we’d gone far enough in any event. She’d saved her chewing gum in her palm and she signaled we were finished by returning it to her mouth. Before we separated on King’s Head Street she’d written down my name and posting and her address, and handed me the latter.
Margery wrote that she hoped I was well, and that she now at her family’s insistence languished in a remote place where nothing momentous was likely to happen. She wrote that previously her nights in London had been long periods of enforced inactivity in her building’s shelter, waiting for the all-clear, and that after one bombing she’d emerged to find a woman’s body covered in soot and dust and had stooped to uncover its face. She wrote that in the middle of a memorial service for one of her mother’s best friends she’d retired to a dressing room and wept at her own cowardice. She said her family often inquired if she had any word of how I was getting on, and that her little niece had asked her if I sank all of the bad people could I then swim home. She said she recognized our relationship had been at times an unconventional one but she hoped that I wouldn’t hold this against her, and that with whomever I chose to share my life I would be happy. She also enclosed a photograph of herself, in a sundress, almost lost in the dappled light and shadow of a willow tree. I began any number of responses to her letter, all of which I kept as insufficient.
When rumors started circulating about our impending patrol I spent mornings looking for myself in the mirror, as if I’d fallen down a well. In the days before our departure a senior medical officer gave us each the once-over. “Here’s an interesting phenomenon,” he remarked. “Let’s have a look at your fingernails.” I held out my hand and he indicated the concentric ridges. “Each ridge is a patrol,” he said. “The gaps between correspond to the lengths of your leaves ashore.” I looked at him. “Purely psychological,” he said.
On our last night in Ceylon all the offshore watch returned in various states of intoxication, and the captain sentenced them, somewhat wryly, to ninety days on our own ship in the loathsome heat and overcrowding. “Very good, sir,” one of the drunken mates said in reply, and the captain answered that the mate could now make it one hundred and twenty days.
After two weeks in the Bay of Bengal everyone is feeling lethargic and suffering from headaches. Some of the crew haven’t shaved during the entire patrol and resemble figures from another century. Running on the surface at night we slip past sleepy whales bobbing like waterlogged hulks. Our medical officer taps out on a tiny typewriter a new edition of his Health in the Tropics newsletter, which he titles “Good Morning.” This week’s tip is: “If you have been sweating a lot, wash it off, or at least wipe it off with a hand towel, since the salt that your sweat has pushed out of your pores will irritate the skin.” The only ship traffic we’ve encountered has been trawlers and junks, and the captain has decided that in such cases we’ll just lie doggo and watch them move past. We find our new torpedoman all over the ship, his eyes around our feet, looking for dog-ends. When we’re off duty Mills can instantly sleep and I lie awake. Sometimes when I can no longer stand my own company I go to the wardroom. There I find the captain or the chief alone at the table with binoculars slung round his neck and his head on his arms.
Mostly we’re immersed in a haze of inactivity. We dove to evade a flying boat sighted by our starboard lookout. A heavy bomber swept directly overhead on a northerly course but did not appear to have noticed us. The 0400 watch reported that three small vessels he couldn’t identify had altered course toward our location, then turned in a complete circle for no apparent reason before continuing on their transit.
We are perpetually in one another’s way, tormented by septic heat sores, bodies that stink, and endless small breakdowns on the ship. The only clean-off available is a little torpedo alcohol applied to the rankest spots. Wet clothes never dry. Condensation is everywhere. Shoes are furred with mold and our woolens smell worse than the head. The batteries have begun to fume and refuse to charge. The periscope gland leaks. In the night we passed one of our own bombed-out merchant ships, listing miserably. The tinned mutton when opened is now often slimed over, and even the roaches won’t touch it. Mills claims he can’t imagine this going on much longer, but his cousin says that if this has to be done it’s better that we should do it, since we know what we’re about, and newcomers would likely cost their friends their lives.
I’m jolted from my bunk by a tremendous blast, and then a second and a third, and when I reach the wardroom everyone is celebrating and I’m told that our target was an ammunition ship. The captain is permitting the crew to go up to the bridge three at a time to enjoy the spectacle, and upon my turn explosions are still sending flame and debris high into the sky. All who’ve been bellyaching for days and begrudging each other a civil word are suddenly thick as thieves and best of friends, since with one solitary success all the clouds are dispelled. But soon after that come the sub hunters, and we hang still for twelve hours at one hundred and eighty feet while they thresh around above us like terriers at a rabbit hole. Off-duty crew lie in their bunks trying to read thrillers or magazines. Those working sit right on the deck at their stations to ensure they make as little noise as possible. The chief pores over a technical journal. The captain draws the green curtains round his berth. With the first depth charge a few lights are put out and a roach falls stunned to my chest. The second cracks a glass gauge before me and the welding on a starboard casing. The third knocks me to the floor and the remaining lights go dark and water spritzes from a joint. Pocket torches flash before the emergency lamps come on. More detonations reverberate, farther away and closer, farther away and closer.
The hunters persist until the humidity coalesces into an actual mist and the thinning air plagues everyone with crushing headaches and nausea, and then our hydrophone operators finally report our pursuers moving away.
When we’re running on the surface again I find Mills contemplating his photo of the Red Cross nurse, his chin on his filthy mattress. I ask her name and he responds only that one of the last things she requested was that he take the time to consider what she might want, and what she might like, but that instead he gave her the sailor’s lament, that he’d soon be shipping out and that they’d perhaps never see one another again, and so she allowed him the kiss and some of the other liberties he’d been desiring. Before his train departed she told him through the carriage window that he was the sort of man who was always at the last second catching his ride in triumph or missing it and not caring. “I think she meant I was selfish,” he finally adds, and then turns to me to discover I have nothing to contribute. “What do you think of selfishness, eh, Fisher?” he asks, and some of the torpedomen laugh. “So here we are,” he concludes. “Sweating and grease-covered and alone and miserable and sorry for ourselves.” And a memory I banished from my time with Margery surfaces: We stood on her front step after our kisses, and she waited for me to respond to what she had confided about the stillness we made together. While she waited she explained that she was trying to ascertain where she could place her trust, and where more supervision would be needed. And when she received no response to that either, she said that if I wanted to swan around the world pretending I didn’t understand things, that was my affair, but that I should know that it did cause other people pain.
Another long stretch of empty ocean, which the captain announces as an opportunity for resuming the paper war, and everywhere those of us off duty get busy with pencils writing our patrol reports or toting up stores expended and remaining. Our boat continues to break down. Each day something or other gets jiggered up and someone puts it right. The chief initiates a tournament of Sea Battle, a game he plays on graph paper in which each contestant arranges his hidden fleet, consisting of a battleship, two cruisers, three destroyers, and four submarines and occupying respectively four, three, two, and one square each, while his opponent attempts to destroy them by guesswork, each correct guess on the grid counting as a hit. I’m drawn to the competitions but decline to participate. “That’s the way he is on leave, as well,” Mills tells everyone. “The Monk likes to watch.”
Off Little Andaman Island we pass a jungle of chattering monkeys that cascades right down to the shore. For safety we stay close to the coast in the darkness, and the oily-looking water is filled with sea snakes and jellyfish so that when we surface at nightfall horrid things get stuck in our conning tower gratings and crunch and slide underfoot. The captain takes a bearing on the black hills in the starlight and those of us on watch can hear nothing but the water lapping against our hull and the fans quietly expelling the battery gases. Every so often a rock becomes visible. A little vacant jetty. In the morning we dive in rain like sheets flapping in the wind.
The mattresses grew so foul the captain had them rolled and hauled up through the conning tower and thrown over the side. The coarse pads left on our bunks rub open blisters and sores and our medical officer recommends cornmeal and baking soda to dry the mess. Our new torpedoman had the fingernails and top joints of his first three fingers crushed in a bulkhead door in a crash dive. I helped the medical officer with the bandaging and afterward was surprised at his annoyance. “You could have answered a few of the boy’s questions,” he complained. “He’s new on the ship and looking for a friend.”
Mills has begun agitating quietly with other members of the crew to petition the captain to head home, wherever “home” now remains, before it’s too late. He explains that his philosophy is to be neither reckless nor overly gun-shy, but to evaluate the situation in light of whether we have any chance at all to make a successful attack and survive to report it. He claims that while the miracle of encountering a lone ammunition ship is all well and good, it’s only a matter of time before we confront an entire convoy. He asks for my help to rally support for his position and I agree, and he says we can start with the torpedo officer since his shifts and mine align for the next few days. Each night when I return from duty Mills asks if I’ve talked to the TO yet and I tell him I haven’t.
The next night the watch reports a debris field and the captain goes up to have a look. When he descends to the wardroom the wireless operator says, “It seems that we’ve finally given them a dose of what they’ve been giving us, eh, sir?” and the captain answers that it’s British wreckage we’re sailing through.
At breakfast there are complaints about the mutton, and to provide perspective Mills’s cousin tells of having eaten in a mess so rancid they’d had to inspect each mouthful on the fork to ensure there was nothing crawling in it.
Twelve bleary hours later I’m seven minutes late for the dawn watch. The captain is on the conning tower, too, and the enraged mate I’m relieving shoulders past me and heads below. The fresh air smells of seaweed and shellfish. In the heat the sea is so calm it looks like metal. Mist moves across our bow in the early sun. I apologize and the captain remarks that as a midshipman he was flogged for “wasting three minutes of a thousand men’s time” by piping a battle cruiser’s crew tardy to its first shift. I tell him that when I’m sleepless for long periods I sometimes don’t properly attend to things, and after a silence he answers that he had a great uncle who always claimed about himself that he didn’t attend to things, and that this great uncle went off to the Crimean War, where as Lord Raglan’s aide-de-camp he was more or less responsible for the Charge of the Light Brigade.
He stays on the bridge with me, evidently enjoying the air. “Did you know that Telemachus in Greek means ‘far from battle’?” he asks. I tell him I didn’t.
In the face of the blank sky and still water I return to the problem of how to respond to my cousin’s letter. I imagine describing for her all these dawns I’ve collected on watch: gold over the Norway Deep, scarlet off Singapore, silvery pink in the China Sea. I imagine recounting the morning the sun was behind us and a spray from the bow was arching across the deck so that we carried with us our own rainbow. In my last attempt I wrote that there wasn’t much I could say about my position, but that things were presently quiet and I was in excellent health and she shouldn’t worry, and then I stopped, since every other man in the crew had the same fatuous and unfinished letter in his locker, as well. I imagine telling her how vividly I could see her face as we left Harwich, the dockyard walls slipping past us like sliding doors, opening up vistas of the harbor, our stem coming round as docile as an old horse. I imagine telling her how some part of me anticipated the Pacific as if a way to discover my father’s fate. The sadness of my final glimpse of our escort vessel as it signaled its goodbye and dropped back to its station on our port beam.
Later that day a commotion pulls me from my bunk. The watch spotted something far off in the haze and the captain has taken us to periscope depth. When I get to the wardroom he’s climbing into his berth and telling the chief that he’ll resume observation in ten minutes and that it’s going to be a long approach. In the meantime the chief is to redirect our course to a firing bearing, instruct the torpedo room to stand by, and order the ship’s safe opened and the confidential materials packed into a canvas bag and the bag weighed down with wrenches.
The torpedomen are excited, since most believe that Thursdays and Saturdays are our lucky days. Mills is not hiding his dismay. He suggests to the TO that the captain use the wireless to inquire if the Admiralty thinks this action worth the risk, but the TO reminds him that such communications would reveal our position. Mills informs the TO that much of the crew shares his unease and the TO looks around at each of us until finally Mills tells me that if I’m not on duty I’m in the way. As I turn to go he asks when I stuck the photograph over my bunk but doesn’t ask who it is.
Back in the wardroom the captain is out of his berth and at the periscope. When the sweat dripping over his eyebrows steams the lens, he wipes it clear with tissue paper the chief hands him. He finally murmurs that the convoy looks to be five miles out and that he estimates it will pass about a quarter mile in front of us. He reports that we’ve chanced across an escort carrier. He reports that the convoy’s rear is lost to the distance, but in its vanguard alone he can make out two destroyers and three sub hunters.
“In this calm and in this channel, once they see our torpedoes’ wakes there will be nowhere for us to hide,” the chief tells him, as though reciting the solution to an arithmetic problem, and the captain keeps his face to the eyepiece. “Perhaps the wise course is to live to fight another day, sir?” our navigator asks. No one answers him. In the silence it’s as if my stomach and legs are urging me on to something.
The chief questions whether we should put on a little speed to close the gap still further, and the captain replies that in this calm any telltale swirl or turbulence would give us away even at this range, and that instead we’ll just settle in and get our trim perfect and let them come to us.
We can hear our own breathing. The captain orders the forward torpedo tubes flooded and their doors opened. Our hydrophone operator indicates multiple HEs bearing Green 175 and advancing rapidly. “Are we really going to do this?” our navigator asks again, barely audible. The captain senses the oddity of my presence and glances over before returning his attention to the eyepiece. “Our shipboard wraith,” he jokes quietly, and the chief smiles, and I feel a child’s pride at the separateness that I’ve always cultivated.
Then the captain clears his throat and re-grips the handles and calls out a final bearing, and issues the command to fire numbers one through six, and the entire ship jolts with each release. Mills reports in a strangled voice that all tubes have fired electrically, and soon thereafter our hydrophone operator reports that all torpedoes are running hot and straight.
And the image of what I wish I could have put into a letter for my cousin at once appears to me, from the only other time I was allowed at the periscope, along with the rest of the crew, when on a rough day near a reef in a breaking sea we found the spectacle of porpoises on our track above us, leaping through the avalanches of foam and froth six or seven at a time, maneuvering within our field of vision and then surging clean out of the water and reentering smoothly with trailing plumes of white bubbles, all of them flowing together, each a celebration of what the others could be, until finally it seemed as if hundreds had passed us, and in their kinship and coordination had then vanished into the impenetrable green beyond our reach.