Eight

Wango, wango, wango.

The shock of the naval guns, like a set of doors being slammed one after another along a corridor, seemed to jerk the Starboard Cross Passage aboard Banff with vibration, and the men crowded in there looked up quickly as the swift tonk-tonk-tonk of the quickfirers followed on its heels.

‘Sounds nice and reassuring,’ Ginger Bowen said cheerfully.

‘From this end of the gun,’ Private Snaith commented laconically from among the tangle of packs, weapons, hammocks, clothing and equipment that filled the alleyway. ‘How about from the other end?’

That thought had never occurred to Ginger and he subsided, frowning and suddenly disturbed.

He seemed to have been penned up in the area round the Starboard Cross Passage and the fragment of deck that had been assigned to them to enable them to draw rations and get to the heads, for what seemed weeks now. They had been herded in there by the ship’s First Lieutenant, had hammock rolls thrown at them by a disgusted petty officer, and told to make themselves comfortable, because, in an attempt to overcome the shortage of transports, Banff – like the other naval vessels in the convoy – was jammed with troops. They were in messdecks, alleyways, store rooms – even in the petty-officers’ recreation room – much to the disgust of the petty officers and those sailors who had had to double up or, at the very least, bypass in their movement about the ship, the corridors like the Starboard Cross Passage which were now in use as living quarters.

Meals were difficult sitting on the crowded deck, and ablutions worse as they scrambled round the few wash-basins inadequately supplied with water only at limited periods of the day, and the men of Lieutenant Jinkinson’s section – and Ginger Bowen especially – were cramped, bored and tired with insufficient sleep because the hard deck didn’t make a good bed, while the air in the Starboard Cross Passage was foul with the odour of sweating bodies.

There had been a few jeers as Ginger had arrived, escorted to the watertight doors at the end of the alleyway by Sergeant O’Mara himself, but while he had enjoyed the notoriety, it had left him with a vague feeling of being out of things. Private Leach had had a feeling, not without foundation, that, notwithstanding his capacity for getting into trouble, Ginger would have disapproved of everything that had been planned and, with Snaith and Malaki unwilling already and Ginger in a position to tip the scales, he had threatened to knock the block off anybody who might be tempted to split to him.

The result was that, cut off from the rest of his section by an invisible barrier, Ginger had been thrown on his own company for too long. No one had avoided him but he had been very conscious of the strained relations between them, and he had put it down to the fact that his absence in detention had caused the others extra work and that they were therefore naturally a little anti towards him.

To amuse himself, he had struggled through two letters, quite an achievement for Ginger who was never normally inclined to put pen to paper. He had written to his family at home – the usual ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me at present’ and a somewhat tedious missive that contained little affection, because Ginger didn’t feel a great deal of affection for his family; and a more torrid epistle addressed to Miss Sulfika Achmet, care of the Moyama Bar, Passy, Pepul, Malala, West Africa. Into this one, in disjointed phrases full of misspelt words, he had poured all his feelings. It was prompted not so much by loneliness or by love as by the heat and the memories and the incandescent dreams that persisted in coming every time he fell asleep. It had relieved his feelings a little but he still hadn’t posted it and he wasn’t sure now that he would.

Most of the men in Operation Stabledoor had spent the voyage writing letters during the long hours of waiting. They had been penned up for so long now that the task gave them some sort of emotional release.

They were huddled all over the ships; on the decks; in, on top of, and underneath their vehicles. They smoked, played cards and talked longingly about women. They were nervous and a little scared, and in the high, clumsy landing ships they were exhausted by the lurching motion and were fighting against the continuous nausea of sea sickness that came from the swell and the motion of the waves and the smell of diesel oil, vomit and blocked-up latrines. They were abominably crowded and, where they could, they glumly lined the rails and stared at the other ships in the convoy, which came rank after rank, to port and starboard, ahead and astern.

Most of them by this time had grown introspective from boredom, and the concerts that had been arranged had not been a success. They all knew now that they were within striking distance of their destination, and at irregular intervals the ships seethed with boat drills and ARP exercises. The mornings were spent with wireless training, in a formula of communication, or in stripping and cleaning arms, filling magazines and overhauling equipment – all for the most part with a great deal of reluctance.

To Ginger Bowen, it had been a period of boredom interspersed with a series of flaps, all of which had been made more wearisome and frustrating in the encumbered alleyway by the crowding packs, Sten guns and other equipment that lay about the deck with boots, clothing and ammunition.

The sky had been heavy all day, with lowering clouds damping down the swells, so that the sea heaved like glue. From time to time, heavy showers had fallen, only to be followed by sunshine and sweltering heat that left them gasping for clean air. Where Lieutenant Jinkinson’s section were huddled, they were unable to see the daylight but they could tell every time it rained by the water gurgling in the scuppers and down some sort of escape pipe just above their heads.

For about the tenth time that day, Ginger listened as the last of the rain gurgled away, ending in a steady drip-drip-drip which he knew now would continue for approximately ten minutes before it finally stopped. Around him, the other men were gloomy and limp. Private Spragg, at that moment out of reach in cells, had not been missed. They had simply closed ranks and filled his place.

Private Leach, however, had by no means finished complaining of Spragg’s stupidity. He sat with his back to a pile of hammocks sucking at a brown-stained cigarette end, his brows down, staring at a scrap of paper on which from time to time he made secretive notes which he would permit no one else to look at. Private Snaith was reading a paperback history of the Civil War in England. Ginger wasn’t sure what the Civil War in England was about, though he knew it had been a sort of Mods and Rockers affair between a lot of men in kinky lace who wore their hair long, and a lot of men in kinky leather who wore their hair short. Beyond that, he knew remarkably little about the Civil War in England, and Snaith, on the one occasion when he’d tried to make conversation, hadn’t seemed disposed to be informative.

Acting Lance-Corporal Jesus-Joseph Malaki, his black face almost invisible in the shadows, sat quietly, staring in front of him, neither reading nor writing, neither happy nor unhappy, fatalistically waiting as his ancestors had done for hundreds of years along this coast they were now approaching. Of all the men in the Starboard Cross Passage, perhaps Malaki seemed most at peace. Privates Griffiths, McKechnie and Bolam were involved in the same old pointless discussion that had been going on ever since soldiers had first put on uniforms, their argument going round and round, boring and repetitive and getting rapidly nowhere.

‘She does, you know.’

‘She doesn’t, you know.’

‘She bloody does!’

‘She bloody doesn’t!’

Nobody paid them the slightest attention. In fact, they were probably never noticed even, and Privates Wedderburn, Welch and Michlam were even playing a three-handed game of cards, though it didn’t appear to be very successful judging by the disputes that seemed to spring from it. Though he had never played it in his life, Ginger suspected it was bridge, and he had long since come to the conclusion that if bridge produced as much discord as it appeared to do with Privates Wedderburn, Welch and Michlam, then it wasn’t much of a game.

For a while he stared at his companions, then he took out the letter he had written to Sulfika the day before and read it through again. After a lapse of twenty-four hours, it made his hair stand on end, and he found himself grinning as he read the feverish lines.

‘Christ,’ he breathed, delighted with it.

After a while, the silence in the alleyway grew oppressive. The gunfire had lasted only long enough to rouse them all from their somnolence, and then had stopped. For those on deck it had probably been quite a spectacle, but for those like the group in the Starboard Cross Passage, it had been nothing more than a frustration.

Ginger pulled a diary from his pocket and studied it, working hard at amusing himself. He had once promised himself that he would write it up each day but, every night, when he had sat down to the task, he had found himself staring at the empty pages with a blank mind and a complete inability to unearth anything from the day’s events that might remotely be worth recording. He stared at the entries for a moment but they were singularly uninspired.

‘Went with Sulfika,’ one said. ‘All right.’ ‘Jinkinson is a bastard,’ said another. Nothing much appeared to have happened.

Ginger flicked the pages idly, glancing at the dates.

‘Guns have stopped,’ Wedderburn commented, his eyes on his cards.

Snaith looked up from his book. ‘The gunners say it’s a prize balls-up,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Every time they mark their targets down, they get a lot of amendments and have to rub ’em all out and start again. It’ll be fine if they’re still rubbing ’em out as we go in.’

‘If we go in, brother,’ Leach growled from his corner, and Ginger turned his head quickly. Even now, it had never occurred to him that the subtle mood below decks had started from a chance comment of his own, uttered in the nature of a complaint rather than an attempt at sedition.

He was aware that something was afoot, but as he was not by nature rebellious against authority, except to avoid work, he still wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Aren’t we going in?’ he asked. ‘I thought we was.’

‘You might be surprised,’ Leach observed. ‘One of the radar operators was saying in the heads that we was being followed by Russian subs.’

There was a shout of derision, but Leach insisted.

‘He – said – they – was – Russian – subs,’ he said loudly. ‘They got orders to watch ’em and report ’em. Nobody was saying anything, but they all knew they wasn’t our subs. And if they’re not ours, brother, OK, ’oo’s are they?’

‘Malalan,’ Snaith hazarded.

‘They haven’t got any,’ Wedderburn said.

‘Yes, they have,’ Michlam joined in, more than willing to liven things up with an argument.

‘They bloody haven’t!’

‘They bloody have!’

‘OK,’ Wedderburn said, flinging his cards down in a show of temper that drew looks of approval from Griffiths, McKechnie and Bolam. ‘If that’s how you feel, play by your bloody self.’

Michlam sneered. ‘Jumpy?’

‘Who’s jumpy?’

‘You are.’

‘I’m bloody not!’

‘You bloody are!’

Ginger watched them all, puzzled. He had been aware for a long time of the increasing tension, and it was beginning to worry him now. Something was in the wind, he knew, but no one in the Starboard Cross Passage seemed eager to enlighten him.

For a while there was silence, then Welch made an attempt to break the awkwardness caused by Wedderburn’s nervous outburst.

‘Church parade tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It’s in orders. You know what that means: The ball starts just after.’

‘We haven’t got a padre,’ Ginger said.

‘Don’t matter,’ Michlam assured him. ‘Skipper can take it. Navy’s good at that sort of thing. “Eternal Father, strong to save.” Always sing that. “From storm and tempest, fire and foe, oh, Lord, protect us wheresoe’er we go.”’

‘Much better if it was “The Red Flag”,’ Leach growled.

Ginger shuffled himself to comfort on the hard deck. Beyond the card game which somehow seemed to have got going again, Bolam and Griffiths were now staring goggle-eyed at a white-backed book with a half-naked girl on the front. They were all trying to relax, grasping at borrowed time with the knowledge that some fateful moment was just ahead in the future.

Ginger pulled his cap down over his eyes and tried to remember Sulfika, and the thought of her slim dark body sent shudders of misery through him. Ginger had always had a reputation with the ladies and his last conquest before leaving England had been along the canal bank near Chichester – where he had been stationed in the Rousillon Barracks – with a strapping girl from one of the villages around who’d been fighting him off for two days. Sulfika, with her simpler morals, had been a much easier victory and much more willing, so that Ginger had almost enjoyed the rare privileges of a husband.

The sudden din of the ship’s alarm bell brought him back to sudden reality with a start that almost lifted him from the deck.

It was a noise fit to wake the dead and flung off-watch sleepers from their bunks all over the ship; and started a torrent of men up and down ladders, still dragging on clothing as they ran; filling the wheelhouse with telephone talkers, messengers and duty officers, and doubling up the crews at the guns. Down in the Starboard Cross Passage it set Ginger and his companions scrambling to their feet and diving for clothing and equipment in a frightful tangle of bodies and equipment straps among the scattered cards.

‘We’re there!’ Welch shouted. ‘I thought it was some time tomorrow night!’

Men bolted past both ends of the alleyway and above their heads they could hear the sound of running feet as the crew hurried to their stations, and they all reached for their weapons and hastily began to buckle on their packs.

‘We’ve been spotted,’ Snaith said.

‘That’ll be fine,’ Leach snarled. ‘Especially with us lot stuck in here.’

There was the sound of watertight doors clanging shut then a long uneasy silence as they all listened. The running had stopped abruptly and all they could hear were the normal sounds of the ship, the deep humming from the turbines, and the creaks and sighs as she shifted in the water. For a long time they sat still, catching the smell of fresh paint and holding their breath and wondering what had happened, then Ginger cautiously put his head round the end of the alleyway. There was no one about but there didn’t appear to be any sign of alarm. A sailor in faded blues, moving expertly past the end of the cramped corridor with what appeared to be a bundle of laundry, stared at Ginger, with his helmet over his eyes and girded for battle.

‘What’s up, mate?’ Ginger asked.

The sailor stopped and gazed at him, the planes of flesh on his face tinted by the red lights in the deckhead.

‘Ship’s cat gev birth to seven little ’uns,’ he said solemnly. ‘Been expecting it a long time. ’Ad us worried. Captain promised to let us know.’

Ginger slipped back into the alleyway, vaguely ashamed at his alarm, and as the tension slowly relaxed, the men sat down again. The card players picked up their cards once more, unable to do anything but sit where they were and use their imagination about what was happening on deck. Suddenly, the deckhead lights went out, and the dim secondary ones came on.

‘’Ello, ’ello,’ Leach said. ‘’Ere it comes, brother. Eyes down for the count. Bombers probably.’

The period of semi-darkness lasted for about a quarter of an hour then the lights came on again abruptly.

‘Flap off,’ Ginger observed.

The loudspeaker started to crackle and they heard the voice of the Ship’s Captain. ‘Captain speaking,’ it said. ‘I’ll tell you what that was all about. We have bumped into the United States Eighth Fleet who have been evacuating American nationals from Khanzi. There has been an exchange of signals and the Americans have changed course. They are now out of sight. That is all.’

There was dead silence for a moment as the loudspeaker clicked off, then Leach dropped his Sten gun with a clatter to the deck.

‘That’s bloody marvellous,’ he said loudly. ‘If the Yanks know we’re here, they’ll be waiting off the beaches for us. They’ve been going on about us for weeks. It’s time we called this thing off.’

‘You do,’ Ginger said sarcastically. ‘Enjoy yourself. Have a word with the general. I’m sure he’ll agree.’

‘He’ll have no option, brother,’ Leach pointed out.

Something in his manner startled Ginger. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because he’ll find himself leading a bloody invasion force that won’t invade. That’s why.’

For a long time there was silence as half-a-dozen pairs of accusing eyes fastened on Leach. After all his blowhard threats against anyone letting out the secret, it had been Leach himself who had spilled the beans.

He became aware of the distrustful stares. ‘Well, it won’t, will it?’ he said loudly.

Ginger studied the others, aware that he was on the threshold of a discovery but uncertain what it might be. He gave a short laugh.

‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to, if they say so.’

‘No, we haven’t, brother,’ Leach insisted. ‘It’s all worked out.’

‘Worked out? How?’

‘Never you mind. You ain’t heard yet, but you soon will.’

Ginger stared at Leach, beginning to frown as a suspicion formed slowly in his mind. ‘That’s bloody mutiny,’ he said.

‘It’s a strike,’ Leach corrected him. ‘For better conditions. It’s been decided that, what with pay, disagreement over this here operation, and a few other things, it’s time we drew the attention of the authorities to our grievances.’

‘Who’s decided?’

‘Committees aboard ships. Strike committees.’

Ginger stared at him for a second. He was never a clever man but he was no fool and he saw through Leach’s reply at once.

‘In the Army, mate, that’s mutiny,’ he insisted.

Leach gestured. ‘You should talk,’ he shouted. ‘You were the one to start it.’

Ginger got to his feet. ‘Listen,’ he said angrily. ‘I’ve done some bloody funny things in my time, but one thing I ’aven’t done is go in for mutiny. I’m not that daft. You can get shot for that.’

Leach jeered. ‘Not these days, brother,’ he said. ‘And nobody can do a thing if everybody’s in it. This is political, man, not military.’

Ginger wasn’t sure what he meant, but he wasn’t having any. ‘Well, you can count me out,’ he said.

Snaith grinned and Malaki’s eyes brightened, but just when it seemed that in Lieutenant Jinkinson’s section at least the mood might change, Leach grasped at his last argument.

‘Christ, man, you started it. You turning yellow?’

Ginger had no idea what Leach meant, and he did the only thing his limited intellect suggested to him. He drew his fist back and dropped Leach to the deck like a log.

Immediately, the alleyway exploded into uproar. The cards went flying once more as Welch grabbed Ginger’s arms and dragged them behind him, but Ginger knew a trick worth two of that. He tucked his head down and Welch shot over his shoulders, and there was a yell as a flying boot caught Wedderburn at the side of the jaw. A fist flew and, in seconds, everyone in the alleyway was involved, elbows and boots swinging, with the deep resonant voice of Malaki coming from the other side of the turmoil.

‘Stop it,’ he was yelling at Ginger. ‘Stop it, man!’

Then a single shot rang out and Malaki’s yells changed to a cry of pain, and as the turmoil came to a sudden frightened stop, there was a clatter of boots along the Starboard Alleyway and Sergeant Frensham stood framed in the end of the cross passage, his brows down, his eyes glittering with disgust.