The healing process began for us in Bassa. Well, the physical healing at least. We were billeted in various houses around the settlement. I went with Freckles and a couple of air force chaps to a home shared by two incredibly kind Dutchmen. One of the first things they did was give me a bath. I was disgusting, covered in salt, oil, weeping sores and deep, putrid ulcers that looked like miniature volcano craters. I’ll never forget the soap. It wasn’t soft, creamy soap. It was hard, like pumice, and just about scraped off what little flesh still clung to me. It was like rubbing stone on bone. That’s all I was by that stage, bone. They got me cleaned up pretty well, though, and gave me a shave, too. It was luxury. They fitted us out with clothes donated by different people in the settlement. The generosity we found in Bassa touched us all deeply.
We were given beds with clean linen in bright, airy rooms, and I spent days in bed, a mosquito net over me, relishing the feeling of safety. And slowly, very slowly, I began to eat again. Freckles put us all on a diet of Quaker Oats, milk and fruit. It was difficult to keep down at first but gradually we began to feel hungry and could eat more and more. We steadily gained strength and started moving about without too much trouble. I put on a bit of weight, but I’ve never been as big and strong as I was before the sinking.
The Dutch brought us medicine and wonderfully soothing ointments for our sores. But they arrived too late for one of us, a soldier, who fell seriously ill when a septic sore on his leg refused to heal. He was in agony and soon developed a raging fever. His face was so swollen he couldn’t speak. A Liberian doctor came to the settlement and arranged for him to be taken to Freetown, the coastal capital of Sierra Leone. A few days later the poor man died of gas gangrene. It was tragic, after all he had endured. So, in the end, only 15 of us survived.
Thankfully, I improved physically, but my mind was still in a bad way. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. We sat around together in our billet playing Ludo and draughts, but I was hopelessly lost with those games, even though they’d been such a familiar part of my childhood. There were books, too, but I had to read a sentence again and again to work out what it meant. So I mostly spent my time lying about, my mind drifting. Once I’d found my feet I took short, aimless walks around the settlement, only half aware of where I was.
I felt utterly lost. I knew I was safe, I knew I wanted to go home, but I had no idea how I was going to get there. I was in limbo, waiting for something to happen, waiting for others to decide what to do with me. Time still held no meaning. I now know that we were in Bassa for 11 days. We had been torpedoed on 12 September and spent 28 days in the lifeboat, so it was well past the middle of October when we were recovering in Grand Bassa. During our time there a message was sent to the British chargé d’affaires in Monrovia, explaining our presence. He eventually sent a ship from Freetown to pick us up.
That ship was HMS Spaniard, a naval support trawler. She was the most rundown ship I’d ever seen, a rust bucket with a pretty rough crew. She anchored a little way off shore and sent her boat to pick us up. When I climbed aboard Spaniard it was immediately obvious that I was back in the navy.
‘Name?’ an officer asked.
‘Able Seaman McLoughlin, sir.’
‘Last ship?’
‘Valiant, but I was torpedoed on Laconia,’ I told him.
‘Very good. Go below, get your rum issue.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
I went below and they tried to get me to drink some rum, but the thought of it made my stomach heave. A navy man had to be pretty sick if he didn’t want his rum! Even though the crew was a rough bunch, they were sympathetic and left me alone. Spaniard was a weary old ship. She crawled along for two days and nights before a frigate drew alongside and both vessels stopped dead in the water. We were transferred to the frigate. We hadn’t been aboard for more than a few hours, steaming full-ahead for Freetown, when a submarine alert was sounded on the ship’s klaxon. There was a frantic rush to action stations. I had nothing to do because I wasn’t part of the crew. I was supposed to go below but there was absolutely no way I was going to do that with a submarine lurking about. If a torpedo hit, I wanted to be up top and ready for a quick escape. So I stayed on deck and watched as the crew set a string of depth charges over the side. Every nerve in my body was on full alert. I was unravelling again.
When we got to Freetown the various military commands and civilian authorities made different arrangements for us, and our little party of survivors broke up. We went our separate ways without any emotion at all. There was no sadness or ceremony. After everything we’d been through together, our farewells were strangely matter-of-fact.
‘Cheerio then, McLoughlin,’ Freckles said.
‘Bye Freckles. Thanks for everything.’
‘We won’t forget our little journey in a hurry,’ she said. At the time I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of her understatement.
‘No.’
‘Good luck.’
‘And good luck to you.’
There were no promises of meeting again, no exchanges of addresses. There was a war on, and we all simply had to get on with it. What had happened to us was, after all, just one tiny wave in the massive tide of a world conflict. So we just said goodbye and that was it.
There was a Royal Navy hospital ship moored in Freetown harbour, the Edinburgh Castle. She was a big, white vessel with red crosses on her hull. I was taken on board along with Gibson, the sailor who had pulled me aboard the lifeboat all those weeks ago. The medical staff gave us a thorough physical examination with great compassion and kindness, and told me I was suffering from malnutrition. I could have told them that. They appeared overly concerned about the festering sores that were still plaguing me.
‘We need to get those fixed up,’ one of the doctors told me. ‘We’ll dress them with lint bandages soaked in salt water.’
When I laughed at that he seemed slightly annoyed. But in my mind it was the constant exposure to salt water that had got those sores started in the first place.
‘Well, you know best doctor,’ I said, and left it at that.
A day or so later some officers came aboard the hospital ship to debrief Gibson and me about the sinking of Laconia. When I told them I’d been aboard U-156 they got quite excited, urging me to give them details of the submarine’s control room, but all I could remember with any clarity was that the diesel engines were made in Augsburg.
While I waited impatiently for my sores to heal I made friends with the medical staff on the Edinburgh Castle. After a few days they suggested going ashore to have a look around Freetown.
‘Come on, Mac. Let’s try some of the local food.’
I was keen for any distraction, so we wandered aimlessly for a while, taking in the sights until we came across a dilapidated little shack that served meals. We decided on chicken, and knew it was going to be fresh when we saw a huge Negro woman chasing a chicken around the ramshackle yard within sight of our table. She caught the frantically flapping creature by the legs and lopped its head off with a machete right in front of us. This didn’t help my already meagre appetite. But she cooked it for us straight away and what little I could eat was very tasty indeed.
Word came while I was resting aboard the Edinburgh Castle that I was being drafted to HMS Hecla, a destroyer depot ship berthed near us in the harbour. She was going to England. With any sort of luck, I might be home for Christmas. I could barely imagine it, seeing my family again, being surrounded once more by people who loved me. I couldn’t wait to leave the oppressive heat and humidity of West Africa. However, within hours of receiving this wonderful news, terrible shivering tremors gripped my entire body. I felt as if I’d been thrust into a freezer, yet sweat poured out of me in torrents. A headache hammered at my temples, my joints became so painful I wanted to scream, and what little energy I had drained out of me. My temperature was 105 and I was delirious with fever. A distant and distorted voice said something about malaria.
The shivers and shakes stayed with me for many days, racking my body for hours at a time and then disappearing, leaving me in a tangle of soggy sheets, totally spent and dehydrated. In those peaceful hours, my mind drifted back to the mosquitoes that had attacked us so viciously while we lay in the big hut in the village. Then the symptoms started all over again. The high fever raged and I was urged to drink what seemed like gallons of water until the crisis finally passed. But it left me as limp as a wet rag, seriously setting back my recovery. I was pretty frail.
‘You might have attacks like that on and off for years,’ the doctor said. I must have looked horrified because he patted me on the shoulder sympathetically. ‘That’s how it is with malaria, unfortunately.’
While I was delirious, HMS Hecla left Freetown harbour without me. I was devastated when I found out. But a few days later, I was lying about in a dark frame of mind when the doctor came to see me.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Pretty awful. I was supposed to be going home on Hecla.’
‘I know how disappointed you must be.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My bad luck, I guess.’
‘It was your very good luck I’d say. She’s been sunk. Torpedoed.’ I went numb. ‘A U-boat hit her west of the Straits of Gibraltar. There’s been a huge loss of life,’ the doctor said.
That terrible news hit me hard. I’d been drafted to two ships that had been torpedoed after circumstances denied me a chance to join them. I’d been aboard a torpedoed ship and survived. I’d been aboard a German U-boat while it was bombed and survived. I’d been adrift in a lifeboat in the Atlantic for 28 days and survived.
What the hell does all this mean? What’s my life all about? How did I survive when I should, by rights, be dead? Am I just lucky or is there something guiding me through all this chaos?
I had no answers, but the first tiny seeds of my faith were planted as I lay in that hospital ship in Freetown.