There was one further intervention fate made in order to propel Clark into his unusually personal war. Curiously enough it at first seemed to set him upon a course which, for most of his fellows in the Royal Naval Reserve, would have proved conventional. History has given the Battle of the Atlantic a glamour, largely from its attenuated nature, as an epic struggle that lasted from the very first to the very last day of the European war; but for those who endured it and survived, it consisted largely of unremitting discomfort interspersed with intermittent desperate and nerve-wracking action.
The fatal intervention in Clark’s life was entirely circumstantial. A smart young reserve officer whose name is irrelevant, but who occupied the post of first lieutenant of a relatively new corvette, HMS Daisy, fell down an icy bridge ladder one morning in the spring of 1940. His corvette was not at sea, but about to leave the James Watt dock in Greenock, and his trip to the bridge had been for nothing more exciting than to check the vessel’s gyrocompass repeater, but the ice of a raw Scottish morning caused him to slip, and in falling he struck his head. Concussed and with a suspected fracture of the skull, he was sent to hospital in Glasgow.
Under orders to join her escort group, which was assigned to a convoy already forming up off the Tail of the Bank, the corvette’s commanding officer cast about for a replacement. He was not in good odour with the escort group’s senior officer and the loss of his young first lieutenant was a severe blow. The little ship’s previous trip had been her first in attendance upon a convoy and she had not performed well; the only officer the corvette’s captain had found totally reliable was his young first lieutenant, a former second mate from the Blue Funnel Line who, like himself, wore the interwoven braid of the Royal Naval Reserve.
The escort group’s senior officer, Commander Brenton-Woodruffe, was a short-fused regular naval commander whose despair at the inept state of his group, and HMS Daisy in particular, was not improved by his own temper. In sending Brenton-Woodruffe a signal explaining his plight, the corvette’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Hewett, considered the only way of mollifying so ferocious a man was to offer a solution along with the problem.
By the grace of Almighty God, or so he consequently believed, Lieutenant Commander Augustus Hewett had been on a solitary drinking spree at Gourock two nights earlier. He had forgotten the name of the hotel in the bar of which he had run into an old friend, but he instantly recognised a former shipmate. Hewett and Lieutenant Jack Clark had been apprentices together, and shared the half-deck of the Eastern Steam’s oldest ship at the time, the SS George Bass. Later Hewett had been second mate of another of the company’s elderly steamers, the Robert Fitzroy, in which Clark had served as third. His delight was therefore genuine.
‘Jack? Good God, it is you! What in hell’s name are you doing in the uniform of the Reserve? I took you for a blue-eyed boy, Jack, what with Daddy being on the board,’ he guyed, with a familiarity that was only partly due to the drink.
‘Good God, Gus Hewett!’ Jack had exclaimed with equal pleasure. ‘Whatever are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I’ve been in this silly suit for ages, Jack, and tonight I’m drowning my sorrows,’ Hewett had said.
‘Well I knew you were in the RNR. What are you? Not in command?’
Hewett nodded. ‘Yup, ’fraid so. Their Lordships have been pleased to place a brand new corvette in my charge.’
‘Heavens! They obviously have no idea what you did in Surabaya when the old Robert Fitzroy hit the…’
‘Sod off! That wasn’t my fault, Jack, and you know it. I was only second mate and…’
‘You managed to get a mooring wire round the screw…’ Clark laughed. ‘Poor old Huggy Mandeville shoved me out of the way when the ship wouldn’t answer his orders! He nearly dismembered the engine-room telegraph before he grasped that you had a wire fouled round the prop!’
‘Well you could hardly describe it as a collision. We sort of drifted into that Dutch ship.’
Hewett gave a rueful grin and finished his gin. Clark, who recalled his old shipmate as somewhat prone to misadventures, had no idea that Hewett had not lost his habit of ineptitude and had recently repeated his sin. At least Brenton-Woodruffe held him personally responsible, though Hewett blamed one of his two sub-lieutenants, just as he had once blamed the Chinese bosun’s mate of the Robert Fitzroy.
‘The mate let the anchors go far too late,’ Hewett went on in further self-exculpation, referring to the ancient incident.
‘Oh well, at least you only make that sort of mistake once,’ Clark laughed consolingly. Hewett knew better and remained glumly silent. Then, over a few more drinks, he poured out his heart. He had been called up before the war and had been appointed as first lieutenant to a new corvette directly, before she had been completed. His pre-war experience and training with the Reserve had made him an obvious choice for command, at least on paper, and after a few months he moved on. His commanding officer had been glad to see the back of him. Gus Hewett was charming, an asset at a wardroom party, and could be guaranteed to round up some female company in the most unlikely circumstances, but he was not a particularly good first lieutenant. His commander recommended appointment to a bigger ship, where he could do less damage, though he failed to explain his suggestion on paper. Contrary to this intention, Their Lordships, mindful of Hewett’s rank and the need for corvette officers, had appointed him to HMS Daisy.
Lieutenant Commander Hewett hated the name of the ship, hated his senior officer and had found himself at odds with two of his own officers. With the exception of his first lieutenant, they were men of the Volunteer Reserve, the RNVR, men who at best were yachtsmen and at worst had what he called ‘an enthusiasm for the sea engendered by some fucking uncle giving them the Wonder Book of Ships and the Sea for their tenth birthday!’ adding, as he slipped from the general to the personal, ‘One fraternises with the hands, of whom he is fundamentally frightened, thinking he can ingratiate himself by criticising me, while the other is a supercilious little turd who spoke of his privileged ownership of a ten-ton cutter with the gravity of a master mariner describing his last ship.’
Clark pulled a face. ‘Ah, the last ship, eh. Always the best one was on, and certainly always better than the present one.’
‘Exactly! Little cunt.’ Hewett spoke with vehemence.
By the time the war was six months old, Hewett had escorted several convoys and they had lost a few ships. Then had come his promotion into Daisy. The corvette was the least popular ship in the escort group, largely on account of the misjudgements of her commander and her consequent failure to be in the right place at the right time. As other commanders developed instincts for anti-submarine warfare, Hewett remained intellectually obdurate. His ship became known as ‘Drooping Daisy’; ashore his men were in regular fights with their colleagues in the other ships in the group.
Clark was to learn all this later. That evening, acting as Hewett’s confessor, he learned that there were insufficient escorts in the North Atlantic and what there were, were poorly manned by inexperienced ship’s companies. It was a disaster, Hewett explained, and it was getting worse as the Germans got into their stride. During the previous convoy, his first in command of Daisy, they had had a real mauling. Hewett had been blamed for the loss of two merchantmen and his senior officer had said as much, castigating Hewett in a blistering interview in his cabin. It was only with difficulty that Hewett’s failure had not been exposed in Brenton-Woodruffe’s Report of Proceedings.
‘I tell you, Jack, it isn’t the bloody Jerries who fuck you, it’s your own side. My bloody boss, Commander Guy Brenton-Woodruffe, is a scalp hunter and is out to get me shifted, so, here I am, enjoying a quiet one or two beers before I shove off in a day or two to do another stint out there.’
‘If you’re not happy, why don’t you let him transfer you…?’
‘No! It’s a matter of pride, Jack,’ Hewett bristled. ‘Anyway you know I’m no coward.’
‘Of course.’ Clark remembered that Hewett had rescued two Chinese firemen from a nasty engine-room fire aboard the Robert Fitzroy some months after he himself had left the ship. Hewett had received a Lloyd’s medal and the decoration of the Royal Humane Society for the act, though Clark noticed neither ribbon adorned his naval reefer as it had done his Eastern Steam Navigation Company uniform. He imagined Hewett had turned aside the wrath of Commander Brenton-What’s-his-Name by pleading his previous gallantry. No, Gus Hewett was not a bad chap to have alongside in a tight corner when an animal reaction of raw courage was required, but he was no man for quick, cool decisions in a crisis, and his charm masked a congenital laziness.
‘But Gus, this war isn’t going to be over in a few months,’ Clark reasoned.
‘You’re telling me!’
‘Well then, submit to a transfer and time will give you another opportunity.’
Hewett waved Clark’s commiserating advice aside. ‘Oh, never mind, Jack, never mind. I got Brenton-Woodruffe to see that it wasn’t all my fault, that we had developed gremlins in our festering Asdic set at two critical moments, but you do, you really do, begin to wonder which bloody side the gods are on. Fortunately, the Asdic specialist who came aboard when we got in here threw half the bloody thing over the side and wrote a report which exonerated me but, you know how it is, give a dog a bad name… Anyway, enough about me. What about you, you old sod?’ he asked, ordering two more gins.
‘Well, I’m a sort of chameleon at the moment. I’m standing-by the Matthew Flinders as the resident derrick expert…’
‘Ah! I knew you were on your Daddy’s yacht,’ Hewett interrupted gleefully, glad of the change of subject.
‘Well, she’s not quite Daddy’s yacht these days.’
‘Well, she’s one of Dent’s new eighteen-knotters, isn’t she? Pretty much the same thing.’
‘Yes, she’s a cracking ship, but she’s undergoing conversion into a fast transport, so she’s anything but yacht-like. I’m still half wearing my Dent’s cap, but then, as you see, I’m actually wearing the King’s uniform.’
‘She’s a white ensign ship then?’ Hewett enquired.
‘Oh yes. And I’m undergoing some crazy conversion myself, metamorphosing into a King’s officer, with square bashing and sword drill.’
‘Just like the Conway, eh?’
‘Well similar, I suppose. I don’t recall us waving swords. Anyway, I think I graduate, or pass out in a week or two. I certainly hope so, I seem to have been buggering about like this for months. They send me back here to Glasgow periodically to run over the Flinders, then they take no notice of what I say while I’m learning the difference between the bands on an armour-piercing shell and the rings round a commodore’s arse, or something like that.’
‘You are clearly not the stuff of which the real navy is made, Jack…’
‘Please don’t you witter on about the real bloody navy. There seems to be precious little difference between us at sea, though ashore the merchant jacks are treated like shite. Mercifully, most of them are used to it. Anyway, all I want to do is get to sea and do some proper work. I’ve never felt so bloody well wasted. The work on the Flinders has been stop-start, stop-start for months now.’
And in that vein they consoled each other until the barman asked them to leave.
It was therefore of Jack Clark that Hewett thought when faced with the necessity of replacing his first lieutenant. Dictating his signal to his leading telegraphist he concluded with a flourish of his cigarette, ‘Request immediately available services of Lieutenant J.P.J. Clark, currently standing-by HMT Matthew Flinders Govan.’
Brenton-Woodruffe forwarded the request to the flag officer commanding the Clyde. The admiral’s staff, aware that a delay to the convoy was unacceptable and grateful that an officer was readily to hand, drafted Clark accordingly. They made no further enquiries before issuing the order for Clark to shift his traps instanter. Thus Clark, without ever completing his basic induction into the RNR, found himself aboard HMS Daisy in March 1940.
Clark was to spend nineteen months in Daisy and thereby become a veteran of the great battle in its early stages. An administrative flunkey, discovering the irregularity of his appointment, remonstrated briefly, but the exigencies of war soon confirmed the circumstantial wisdom of his post. Commander Brenton-Woodruffe was soon aware that the new first lieutenant of Daisy had transformed the ship and, as the Royal Navy gradually built up the resources with which it was to fight the threat to the survival of Great Britain, anxieties about Daisy subsided. It was no reflection on the abilities of the concussed young lieutenant, whose concussion kept him in hospital long enough to ensure that Clark remained in Hewett’s corvette; upon recovery, he was sent to a newly commissioned ship. The fact was that the old association between Hewett and Clark simply continued. Hewett’s charm and personal courage were impressive; he was also exceedingly tough, in the physical sense. He could stand on the bridge for hours, apparently impervious to fatigue, but he was slow to react, inclined to be indecisive at a critical moment and often failed, through lack of intuition, to understand what Brenton-Woodruffe required of him. Such deficiencies were not uncommon in those first months of anti-submarine warfare, but most escort commanders, honed in the early, inadequately prepared days of total war at sea, rapidly acquired the necessary skills. Later, with the establishment of training facilities at Tobermory, where every commissioning escort was sent for the most rigorous exercises before being despatched on active service, most of this undesirable in-theatre learning was eliminated. Later still, the combat skills of senior officers were developed and honed at the Anti-Submarine Warfare School in Liverpool. But all this lay in the future.
What Clark brought to HM Corvette Daisy was an understanding, adaptable cushion between Hewett and his inexperienced crew. Only a little younger than Hewett, and yet carrying the weight of his pre-war experience in the merchant service as a credential necessary to awe the hardbitten regular petty officers appointed to every corvette in order to help transform the majority of ‘Hostilities Only’ sailors into proper seamen, Clark filled the bill to perfection. He immediately hit it off with the Daisy’s coxswain, who had served on the China station and with whom he shared common experiences of the Far East. Dentco’s ships were as familiar to a regular RN seaman as were those of the P & O, Blue Funnel, Glen and Ben Lines.
But it was in his relationship with Hewett that Clark crucially affected the reputation of Daisy, and it was soon apparent to her consorts that something had happened aboard the corvette. Initially, of course, her late joining of the escort was considered highly typical. Scoffing was common on all the bridges as Daisy approached, but especially on that of Brenton-Woodruffe’s destroyer, HMS Vortex, as he assigned her to her usual rear station. Clark, ignorant of these undercurrents in the group, had nevertheless swiftly realised the poor state of the ship’s company’s morale. A few probing questions had the coxswain spill enough of the beans to reveal the source of the trouble: Lieutenant Commander Hewett was a very nice gentleman, but his idleness prevented him from taking much trouble over details. Sadly, the otherwise exemplary former Blue Funnel officer had not been able to have much effect. As for the two sub-lieutenants, Clark discovered the supercilious yachtsman was only eager to demonstrate his knowledge of seamanship, while his tedious references to his experiences aboard his yacht were essentially only expressions of surprise that the principles of basic seamanship were common to most craft. It was a congruous fact that Their Lordships had acknowledged in their admission of such young men to the brotherhood of naval officers. The other sub was a rather colourless character who, while he lacked a degree of confidence when confronted with the rougher elements of the crew – the like of which Clark judged he had never encountered in his life before – nevertheless possessed an obvious gift for mathematics and trigonometry. Under some wise nudging from Clark, he was soon demonstrating the potential to become an able navigator. Long ago Clark had learned to harness the skills a man possessed, in order to get the best out of him and, within a week of joining, he had succeeded in turning over much of the duties of navigator to the young man. In company with a convoy these were not arduous, but they allowed Clark to concentrate on his own greatest deficiency, a deficiency that exercised the unknown Admiralty clerk who noticed it in Clark’s service record: his lack of any experience of anti-submarine warfare. He had mentioned this to Hewett as soon as he had reported aboard, but Hewett had pooh-poohed his misgivings.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that, Number One. We’ve especially trained ratings for all that sort of thing.’
Then, as they bounced round the Mull of Kintyre and the two of them were on the bridge, Hewett asked publicly as Clark peered into the Asdic compartment tucked away under the forward part of the compass platform, ‘D’you think you’ll get the hang of it, Number One?’
The laxity of Hewett’s approach to his dilemma in losing his experienced first lieutenant, and his present apparent lack of concern, appalled Clark and caused him to undergo a momentary, stomach-churning anxiety. Clearly he himself was supposed to be an expert. Looking at the slightly incredulous faces of the bridge messenger and the lookouts in this very inept and public exposure, he suspected he was supposed to be the expert. He presumed that Commander Brenton-Woodruffe, somewhere beyond the steady lines of grey merchantmen deployed ahead of Daisy, expected him to be one. Doubtless the admiral confirming his appointment to Daisy thought he was. The realisation hit Clark like a blow. It was clear that Hewett’s breezy revelation, unconsciously delivered to further batter the morale of the Drooping Daisies in the mess decks when the word got below that the new Jimmy had no idea what an Asdic set was, had to be turned round.
‘Of course I don’t know anything about it at all, sir,’ he jested. ‘I’m a merchant-navy man in disguise.’
The joke was feeble in the extreme but, linked with the buzz that the new Jimmy and the Old Man had sailed together before, it was taken to be evidence of an irreverent, chi-ike-ing relationship. Mercifully, any lingering notion that the new first lieutenant was as big a prat as the captain was swiftly dispelled in the days to come.
But that evening Clark had quietly and tactfully confronted Hewett in his cabin. ‘You know, what you have done is bloody silly, Gus…’
‘I didn’t know you hadn’t done the Asdic course,’ Hewett expostulated.
‘Oh, I’ve done the basics…’
‘Listen, chum, that’s all there is, for Chrissakes. I told you the bloody box of tricks is unreliable. We’ve had a lot of problems with it. Now I’ll trouble you to remember, for the purposes of good order and discipline, you don’t come bursting in here covered in indignation, and remember that I’m the commander.’
Clark regarded Hewett. ‘Fuck you, lieutenant commander, sir.’
‘That’s more like it. Now have a drink.’
‘No, not at sea.’
‘Then fuck you, Number One.’
In the few hours left to Clark before they reached the open Atlantic, Clark sat alongside the duty Asdic operator, a rating named Carter. As though idly flicking through the operator’s handbook, he surreptitiously observed the man’s technique as Carter swept the surrounding sea with the questing sound beam. The ‘noise’ of the churning screws of the convoy ahead rendered a wide arc obscured, but away out on either beam, the attenuated sound seemed to dissipate into the ocean with an almost mystical beauty.
It was an odd notion, Clark admitted to himself, but he was addicted to such strange things. They were part of what made the sea life so enduringly seductive to him. Just as watching the sweep of a fulmar petrel quarter their wake with motionless wings moved him to wonderment and pleasure, or as the sunlight upon Arctic ice had once struck him with an infinite beauty, or as the aurora had touched him, so that strange, scientific sound of the Asdic impulse, similarly fascinated him.
It was this novel fascination and a natural talent, inherent in most sea officers, for spatial conceptualisation, that caused him to transform Daisy’s reputation on the third day of the westbound convoy. At about ten in the morning Brenton-Woodruffe’s destroyer signalled she had a contact with a submarine, then another of the escorts ahead confirmed she, too, had echo-located a U-boat. The Drooping Daisies closed up to action stations and Clark ducked into the Asdic compartment, where, in a sweat of apprehension, he tried to understand what was going on.
For two hours in the distance the low grey shapes of the two escorts rushed about, busy with their counter-attack as the convoy, stoically maintaining its methodical zig-zag, moved steadily westwards. Although Clark could not see the tall columns of water that the attacking escorts threw up from their detonating depth charges, he was aware of the crumps of the explosions and swiftly formed, in his mind’s eye, a mental picture of the tactical plot. Deprived of sight, he, like Carter, relied upon the underwater sound transmissions, not of Daisy’s transmitted echo-location, but of the incoming noises and the rapid shift in their modulation and azimuth. While Carter unknowingly pulled faces as the noises came in to them through their headsets, Clark had no difficulty sensing what was happening. Afterwards Carter told his messmates the new Jimmy was ‘all right’, that he had ‘the gift’, but for the moment the sounds of combat drifted astern.
As Daisy shifted her station in conformity with the orders that provided for the detachment of escorts attacking contacts, Hewett called him on to the open bridge and pointed out what was happening.
‘They won’t find anything,’ he said. ‘Jerry, if he was there and it wasn’t a bloody whale, will have done a bunk by now.’
Clark picked up a pair of Barr and Stroud binoculars and peered astern. He could see a flurry of wakes criss-crossing, and white columns where Vortex and Nemesia tossed their depth charges. The explosions thundered through the water while the shapes of the attackers faded into the grey murk. The convoy ploughed on and Hewett began a desultory conversation. And then Clark heard it: the echoing ping of a contact nearby.
Long before the fact had registered with his captain, Clark was beside Carter.
‘Green one-one-zero,’ Carter said sharply, indicating the initial bearing of the contact, ‘moving right.’
‘Yes,’ Clark responded excitedly, his heart racing. He repeated the information to Hewett.
‘Very well, er, hoist the attack pendant, Yeoman, and make to Vortex: In contact.’
‘Come to port sir!’ Clark exclaimed. He was closely watching the mean of the arc of bearing in which the echo responded with its greatest magnitude shift as Carter manipulated the questing beam. ‘Hard over! Steer one fifty and reduce speed!’
He said it without thinking, the logic of it simple to him, and Hewett repeated the order as if his own. After a second, as Daisy heeled to the turn, Hewett queried, ‘Reduce speed, Number One? Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’ Clark snapped, almost resentful at the interruption as he continued following Carter’s manipulation of the controls and visualised the track the U-boat was following. It was clear to him that, having successfully evaded the noisy demonstrations of Vortex and Nemesia, she had slipped in immediately astern of the convoy.
‘Depth charges!’ Hewett sang out.
‘Shallow setting!’ shouted Clark. ‘No, mixed pattern,’ he yelled. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked Carter as the operator wound his controlling wheel. The man nodded, unwilling to break his own concentration with speech.
The U-boat commander had no advantage in speed below the surface, he would have to take a peep through his periscope if he intended to attack. Unless he sought the shelter of the convoy’s collective underwater noise, the fact that he had turned inwards towards it argued he might be intending to attack before he lost the chance. He was clearly a bold man and Clark did not think Daisy’s Asdic had deterred him amid the noise of the convoy’s screws and the bangs of the depth charges exploding astern. It was a gamble but, even if he had gone deep, another depth charge going off over his head would not hurt.
Clark heard the response of the coxswain on the wheel below inform Hewett they were steadied on the new course. Sweat was pouring off Carter’s forehead as he kept the Asdic beam on the target. ‘He’ll be hearing us now sir. He’s bound to dive.’
Concentrating, Clark detected the imbalance of arc as Carter adjusted the machine. ‘He’s moving left… And diving!’
‘Yeah!’ Carter agreed.
‘Port twenty, sir, and increase speed!’ Clark yelled.
‘Port twenty and nine-oh revs!’ Hewett sang out obediently.
For a few long seconds they waited as the ping interval shortened. Then Carter called out: ‘Instantaneous echo!’
Clark never heard the order to fire, nor the clang of the gongs that sent the depth charges out from the mortars on each quarter and over the stem from the after racks. He was staring into Carter’s eyes as the rating ripped the headset off with an intensity that, in any other circumstances, would have been indecent.
The explosions rocked Daisy as she made off from her handiwork. Without prompting, Hewett turned her round to retrace her steps as Carter and Clark bent again to their task. Carter caught an echo, then it was gone.
‘The wake’s fucking it up, sir,’ he explained.
‘Yes, I see that.’ They waited. ‘There it is again…’
‘No, I’ve lost it…’
The faint noise of cheering came to them and then Hewett’s bulk loomed in the doorway. ‘We’ve got the bugger, Number One!’ he said with a broad smile.
Clark and Carter looked at each other. ‘I can smell diesel oil, sir,’ Carter said.
Clark was unconvinced. ‘We may have damaged a tank, or they may have released some…’
‘There’s oil on the water, Number One,’ Hewett was calling. ‘We have got the bugger, by God!’
Clark and Carter remained unconvinced. As the word spread like wildfire through the corvette, and the news was flashed to Vortex, rushing up in a smother of foam, the sense of exhilaration was almost tangible.
‘I’m not convinced,’ Clark muttered to Carter. ‘Keep looking.’ Carter bent to his controls again.
‘We’ve got the bugger,’ Hewett was repeating, ‘we’ve got the bugger! We’ve got the bugger!’
‘Christ, it sounds as though they’re fucking dancing! He must think his DSC’s in the bag,’ Carter muttered as he sent the sound wave out all round them.
‘Pay attention,’ Clark reproved him gently.
But the echo resonated out into the vastness of the ocean unimpeded. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Carter as the captain’s bulk filled the doorway. Clark patted Carter on the shoulder.
‘Well done, anyway. At least none of the convoy were lost.’
‘Come up here you two and fill your lungs with that glorious stench,’ Hewett commanded.
They lost three ships in the next few days, and the Admiralty would only credit them with a ‘possible’, but the Daisies drooped no more. Vortex and Nemesia had lost the contact and, as far as they were concerned, the Daisy had saved the day. Moreover, Lieutenant Commander Hewett was generous enough to attribute the success of the attack to his new second-in-command: Lieutenant Clark had established himself as a man with a potent skill.
It was the nearest Daisy came to glory. Later, in the summer of 1941, Vortex ‘killed’ a U-boat and Daisy was mentioned in complimentary terms in Brenton-Woodruffe’s report, but for the most part victory went to the enemy and the Vortex’s escort group grew weary with their inability to prevent heavy losses in the slow convoys under their protection. But they made hundreds of attacks and, though most were unsuccessful and a few achieved the ambiguous status of ‘possibles’, Clark’s expertise as a submarine hunter remained undiminished. In fact, though he was not to know it at the time, promotion was withheld from Clark because, as long as he was saddled with Hewett, Brenton-Woodruffe wanted Clark riding shotgun.
But Norway, Denmark and France had fallen under German occupation by the summer of 1940, the British Expeditionary Force, minus its equipment, had been evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, and Fascist Italy had joined the Germans. Britain, under threat of invasion until the Luftwaffe was defeated in its attempt to gain control of English airspace, stood alone.
Clark had been in London on leave when the blitz began. He had learned that Magda was in the capital with Diana Cranbrooke and the two women were attending meetings in connection with plans for dealing with the expected intensifying of air raids. To his relief, for he feared a rebuff, she had agreed to join him for dinner, after which they had gone dancing.
‘It is so good to hold you again,’ he had whispered as they moved among the other dancers.
He felt her press against him as she had once done at the Adelphi. ‘I am glad too,’ she whispered back. ‘I was horrible to you before. I’m sorry.’
He drew back and looked at her. He had never seen so beautiful a creature. It was as though the misery to which she had consigned him vanished in an instant. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I am only glad that you remember me,’ he said, thinking of the broken romances and shattered marriages among the Daisy’s complement, revealed by his censoring the men’s private mail. ‘This war has made people different.’
‘I could not forget you, Jack. You were very kind to me.’
‘And Kurt?’ He asked.
She did not hesitate. ‘As you say, people change in war. Kurt belongs to another time. Besides, we were never actually engaged. We had, I think you would call, an understanding. It is all in the past now.’
‘Can we go somewhere?’
‘I have a room to myself. Diana is close, but it is quite private.’
‘And you will not shut the door in my face?’
She smiled, a beguiling curve of her wide and lovely mouth. ‘I did not shut it in your face before.’
‘Oh, I rather thought you did.’
‘You should have discovered that I did not lock it.’
‘You mean, had I come to you that night, you would not have turned me away?’
‘Perhaps that night I would, but as you’re asking me now, all this time later, I do not think I should have.’
For Clark, the brief interlude he enjoyed during Daisy’s boiler clean proved the happiest period of his life. As London submitted to German bombing he was caught up for a few days in the intensity of life lived under such extraordinary circumstances. They revelled in the wild, hedonistic, devil-may-care atmosphere. With the clubs, restaurants and pubs full of the remnant pride of expatriate Poles, Norwegians, Free French, Czechs and Belgians, he imbibed a slightly manic defiance that was in stark contrast with the dour aspect of the grey North Atlantic.
Magda and Diana Cranbrooke returned to the Wirral a day before the expiry of his short leave. He travelled back with them, his attachment to Magda clear to anyone who cared to notice.
But if his affair made him happy on land, it made him miserable at sea. He had experienced similar pangs before, but nothing so excoriating, so demoralising as this. He was wracked by the misery common to lovelorn sailors, intensified by the risks of war.
‘Marry her,’ advised Hewett, observing Clark’s dejection on the eve of sailing when they were enjoying a glass of gin together. Hewett had himself long since tied the knot to a pleasant, dumpy young woman who had reminded Clark of a younger version of Jenny O’Neil. It did not prevent him flirting extravagantly with other women, but, as far as Clark had observed, Mrs Hewett possessed the ability, even at long range, to keep her husband faithful. ‘Otherwise she’ll run off with someone else, mark my words,’ Hewett concluded.
Clark grunted. He had proposed to Magda as he had lain beside her after their last night together. He could not believe his good fortune in making love to so sublime a creature, and had taken her acquiescence for reciprocated wonder. But his proposal had met with less eagerness and he had been disappointed, if not entirely surprised, by her response.
‘Perhaps, darling,’ she had said in her husky, post-coital voice, ‘when this war is over and if we are both still alive.’
‘We could be so happy…’
‘We are happy now, aren’t we?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then that is all that matters.’
And with that he had had to be content.
‘Well, she won’t agree until the war’s over,’ he said now to Hewett.
‘Bloody shame,’ said Hewett. ‘If only because I don’t think I can stand the sight of a lovesick first lieutenant mooning about my bridge. You’re too old for such nonsense, Jack. Next time we get a break I’ll get Dierdre to ask you both to stay and we’ll see what we can arrange.’
‘You’ll do no such bloody thing!’ Clark protested.
‘Don’t forget who’s in command here, Number One,’ Hewett said with his engaging grin.
‘How can I, sir?’ Clark said with an expression of mock pain upon his face. ‘Anyway, I’d better go and do my rounds,’ he said, rising and picking up his cap.
‘You ponder my advice, Jack,’ Hewett said as Clark drew aside the door curtain. And when he had gone, Hewett murmured, ‘or you’ll be too bloody late, old chap.’
The war in the Atlantic dragged on. After the debacle of Norway and the occupation of France, from which U-boats now operated, merchant-ship losses mounted alarmingly. But so too did the loss of escorts. Brenton-Woodruffe’s Vortex was torpedoed one night in May 1941 as she hunted a contact. As she steamed past a burning tanker, silhouetted against the blazing oil, she had formed an irresistible target to Kapitänleutnant Johannes Petersen, peering through the periscope, his white-covered hat reversed. Round his neck he already wore the Ritterkreuz.
In the aftermath the corvette Daisy was assigned the task of searching for survivors. She picked up twenty men. Brenton-Woodruffe was not among them and Hewett was profoundly disappointed. He should have liked ‘old Bee-Double-You’ to have owed his life to him. But this indulgent dream was cut short by the cry of ‘Torpedo!’
Hewett watched as the pale streak missed Daisy’s bow by a few feet.
‘God damn the bastards!’ Hewett raged as he watched the trail disappear into the darkness, compelled to hold his ship stopped while Clark and the seamen scrambled over the side and helped Vortex’s oil-soaked survivors inboard. It was not a battle that men of Hewett’s courage could shine in; Hewett wanted the bruising contact of aggressive action. For Clark, superintending the wounded and saturated wretches, it had simply assumed the qualities of a bad dream. Their struggle had ceased to be a battle in the sense that they had imagined a battle to be; it was simply a matter of endurance, of warding off attack, of countering it when it came and of picking up the survivors when they failed, as they so often did. For Clark it seemed like some inglorious playground scrap against a monstrous bully from which one could only emerge beaten; except that the metaphor was too trivial.
They were all growing tired, increasingly aware of the looming possibility of defeat, their only respite the boiler cleans which kept the Daisy operational. A month later they were ordered to the Clyde for their next.
During that leave in June of 1941 Clark was with Magda when they heard the news that Hitler had turned on his ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Russia had reeled under the blow.
‘Can Hitler be as stupid as Napoleon?’ Magda asked as they listened to the BBC news. They had the family home to themselves, apart from Captain Clark’s staff, for he himself had gone to Glasgow on company business.
‘Can he win?’ Clark countered. ‘At least we are not in this alone any more,’ he added, brightening, ‘and hitting at the communists is going to make things awkward for their sympathisers here.’
Despite the fact that Russia shared in the dismemberment of Poland, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, offered Stalin help, and in the succeeding months convoys began to sail north, into the Barents Sea, round the North Cape of Norway, taking war supplies to the Red Army and the Soviet air force by way of Archangel and Murmansk.
HMS Daisy took no part in this new theatre, though Clark entertained a vague hope that he might go north once more. He had long ago forgotten his interview with Inglis and Gifford. Those events of the first few days of the war seemed to belong to another age. But the tales that filtered back from the Barents Sea, of the convoys being hemmed in to the north by ice and attacked from the south by the Luftwaffe’s aircraft from their bases in occupied Norway, began to persuade them that perhaps the North Atlantic was not such a bad place to be after all.
‘We’ve only got submarines to worry about,’ Hewett remarked as they steamed towards the convoy with its lines of merchant ships, each flying their column numbers in the bright colours of the International Code of Signals above their rusty grey hulls. ‘The poor buggers in the Arctic have got the lot: U-boats, ice, the Luftwaffe and a frosty reception when they get to Uncle Joe’s wonderful bloody Workers’ Paradise.’ Hewett lifted his binoculars and studied one of the merchantmen, a Ropner tramp. ‘And, of course, there’s all that midnight sun and midwinter gloom that you’d remember, Number One,’ he added conversationally.
‘Oh, I was only up in the Arctic during the summer,’ Clark replied.
‘Damn me, but isn’t that a bloody periscope?’ Hewett suddenly cried. ‘Wheelhouse! Ring on the revs! Action stations! Hoist the attack pendant! Make to Seymour…’
And so it went on until, berthed in Londonderry in December, they heard two pieces of news. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and Clark was to leave the ship.
‘I must say I find it difficult to be downhearted,’ said Hewett, referring to the news of Pearl Harbor as he handed Clark the signal. ‘This’ll bring the Yanks into the war properly, by God!’
Clark read the signal, his heart beating. He hoped for promotion and a command. Or just a ship of his own; several corvettes were commanded by lieutenants. From down in the wardroom, where the wireless was on, came cheers as the import of the news sank in.
‘The Admiralty?’ Clark said, looking at Hewett. ‘What in Hades can I do at the bloody Admiralty?’
‘Have a gin, Number One. I’ll be sorry to lose you.’
‘Thanks,’ Clark said, raising his glass to Hewett. ‘It had to come, I suppose, but I rather expected a command, or a half stripe…’
‘Or even both, you deserve ’em…’
‘Good of you… But the poxy Admiralty… I just don’t understand it.’
‘Well, it only says “Report to the Admiralty”. Doesn’t mean they’re going to give you a desk there.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ replied Clark, somewhat mollified.
‘Anyway,’ Hewett went on flippantly, ‘what do you know about what goes on at the Admiralty?’
‘Bugger all…’
‘Oh my, Number One, that could qualify you for flag rank!’ Hewett laughed and refilled his glass. ‘By God, it’s beginning to look really serious!’ Hewett held out the bottle. ‘Such rapid promotion calls for another gin.’