The late March dawn came wet, cold and grim, the waves changing gradually from night-time black to iron-blue and eventually to a cheerless green-grey.
The war had come exactly as Kelly had predicted. With disarmament and pacifism rampant in Britain, the will to withstand the bullying of the dictators had been sapped. Appeasement wasn’t just the will of the politicians, it was the will of the nation – something that had become obvious from the tumult of joy when Chamberlain had returned from Munich after knuckling his forelock to Hitler – and the Czechs, the Austrians and the Albanians had been sacrificed to the dictators in the hope of buying them off. Unfortunately the dictators had asked for more and, shamed at last into standing up for the Poles, a nation they couldn’t even reach, London and Paris had finally been edged – ‘shoved’ was perhaps a better word – into war. And Kelly, with the bonus of an extra stripe on his sleeve, had been snatched from the shore job at Portsmouth, where he’d found himself after a year on the staff of the C-in-C, Home Fleet, given the Flotilla leader, Feudal, and a group of ill-assorted escorts and thrust into convoy duties across the Atlantic. Like everybody else, he knew little about the job and was having to learn as he went along, but it was better, by a long chalk, than Portsmouth where the house he had occupied – wired like a battleship with naval-type switches and plugs and shades like plantpots – had been furnished by a predecessor with the imagination of a cockroach.
As the light increased, the first things visible were the white crests of the waves, then he picked out the veins that marked where the wind had clawed them down the lee side. The sky was filled from one horizon to the other with close banks of cloud that looked like old hard-packed snow, grey, dirty and ugly, and the rain fell in squally flurries in a steep, slanting drizzle that blew across the ship, blurring the horizon, so that the point where the watery sky met the sea was ill-defined, as if the two elements ran into each other and they were steaming into a sombre moving mass that curved down ahead of them and swept back below.
From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly stared back at the convoy he was leading. As the long steely waves from the south-west swept by in a never-ending succession, the ships bobbed their heads, bowing in obeisance to the gale before lifting them again and falling once more, to raise their sterns as they slid into the trough ready for the next act of obeisance. The smaller ships seemed to vanish entirely in the vast valleys of water until only their funnels and mastheads were visible and they seemed at times to be on their last long journey down to the immemorial ooze two miles below.
Behind Feudal, beyond the commodore ship, there was a forest of moving masts, funnels, samson posts and cargo booms, as freighters, tankers and passenger ships rolled and pitched and danced eastwards towards Britain. As the convoy executed its change of course, it was not at first noticeable, just that the ships appeared to be showing a different profile, and where Kelly had been looking at their bows now he was on the starboard beam as they swung to port. Every ship did the same thing, swinging slowly, adjusting position so that they simply changed lines and faced the stern of a different ship.
As the watery sun sent an unexpected ray down from the packed clouds, the light caught the curve of wet bows. The change of course put the wind in a different direction and instead of the spray swinging back on either side of the bridge, it now slashed directly across it, soaking the men who stood there so that they hitched at the towels they wore round their necks as scarves.
Though to other ships her decks seemed empty and she seemed to be devoid of crew, in fact Feudal was humming with activity. Throughout her length, auxiliary machinery, dynamos and ventilating fans filled the alleyways with background noise, and the cooking smells that pervaded the ship mingled with the smell of oil, vomit, and that curious acrid blend of steam and electricity which was always present where there was marine machinery.
Despite the curious passivity of the front in France – what the Americans with their gift for apt phrases were calling the Phoney War – nobody aboard was kidding himself that Britain had taken advantage of the lull. At home there were still plenty of holidays, and even with the war privilege had not vanished. Though the wealthy younger elements were rushing to the services, their parents were carefully establishing themselves in comfort in safe areas, determined to survive, and there had been little increase in war production. The Air Force was still short of aeroplanes, and the Army was still short of tanks, and there was a story, probably apocryphal, about a staff course at Camberley where an officer had been criticised for an overdeveloped sense of humour for mounting an imaginary anti-tank gun up a tree. He had defended himself briskly with the information that he had no idea what the weapon was like because he’d never seen one and, so it seemed, neither had anybody else.
The Navy was as short of ships. Though Britain had the largest and most professional navy in the world, it was desperately in need of reinforcements. Its strength on paper was misleading because half its ships had been designed for the earlier war, and though some had been refitted, many were obsolescent and some positively obsolete. Of those commissioned between the wars, some were magnificent but there were others, designed in a penny-pinching era, that were useless for fighting yet too slow to runaway.
Though the Navy still remained the darling of the British people, who considered it its bulwark against aggression, the men in it knew that out of fifteen capital ships only two were of post-1918 vintage, and Kelly had long suspected in any case that battleships’ bulk and low speed made them vulnerable to air and undersea attack, so that they could never be exposed without a fleet of smaller vessels as escort. Yet, because only a battleship could confront a battleship and since the Germans had built them too, blue-water admirals, who believed that ack-ack was better for ships than fighters, had been glad to build them in reply and they would have to be housed in secure anchorages until needed, absorbing thousands of men who might usefully have been employed on escort duties. It had not even been a battleship which had scored their only real success to date, the crippling of the pocket battleship, Graf Spee, in December, but three cruisers, every one of them outgunned.
It was a far grimmer war that was being fought by the lighter forces – and even they were far from perfect for their job. A destroyer was not an efficient escort vessel because her torpedoes were pointless for that duty, her low-angle guns valueless against aeroplanes, and her tremendous speed rarely needed. Her enormous engines occupied space that was needed for fuel and she required an unnecessarily large crew. The new escort sloops and corvettes that had been planned, though slower and smaller, were not only less cramped, but also less complex, and they could be built much more easily, while their armament laid stress chiefly on anti-aircraft weapons and depth charges.
From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly could see the ship’s company closed up at action stations. There were many newcomers among them, still going through the shocks of the changeover from peace to war. This war was a different one from the last, with different problems, though war itself remained the same and still brought out the same old human imperfections. The Hostilities-Only men were still struggling to become part of a crew. There still weren’t many of them, but to them everything was horrifyingly new – the sea, the ship, even seasickness – and, with the battle fleets taking all the best destroyers, only the old ones were left for escort duties, so that they were all desperately tired, desperately dirty and desperately overstretched.
His mind busy, even as he was alert to what was going on around him, Kelly glanced to starboard. The old W-class ship, Wrestler, now converted to escort vessel, was just heaving herself out of a trough. To port was the armed merchantman, Sappho, formerly a Lampert and Holt ship. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was another converted destroyer, Vandyke, together with the corvette, Sanderling. By the standards of the day the convoy was well-protected.
To Kelly and everybody else who had taken the anti-submarine course at Portland, it had always seemed that a defensive policy was the only one that could be applied to convoy work: make the U-boats come to the escort, rather than form escorts into hunting groups to search the vast ocean spaces for the enemy. Perhaps the desire to assume the offensive had been implicit in everything the Admiralty had done since the signal, ‘Winston is back,’ had been sent out in 1939, but at a time when the submariners were also still learning, not only were the hunting groups achieving negligible successes but they were certainly not using their new radar sets properly by thundering about the sea after stale scents and false periscopes sighted by aircrews, trawler skippers and old gentlemen fishing from the ends of piers. Judging by the reports that had to be investigated, the sea was teeming with German U-boats, and the radar operators – still nervously believing their sets made them impotent – were new enough to the game to be regularly sick over their dials.
Kelly’s own group had originally included the destroyers, Firebrand and Fortunate, the escort vessel, Wheeler, and the corvette, Dunlin, but these four had been snatched from him to oversee a convoy from Nova Scotia which was supposed to have joined them and never had. But, as everybody knew, when an escort group was named, the only thing that was certain was the leader, while the rest depended on what was available.
There had been a brush with a U-boat during the night. It had come to nothing, but Kelly was in no doubt that other submarines would have been called into the assault, because the Germans were beginning to realise that, against the new devices being used against them, it was necessary to contribute numbers. As full daylight came, he began to relax. It might be possible now to go below, change, and perhaps even snatch a little sleep. He had got over Teresa’s death more quickly than he could have imagined possible, and had wondered uncomfortably more than once if his feelings for her sprang merely from the fact that she looked like his long-lost Charley. It had become still easier when it had dawned on him that she’d never intended to leave Santander with him. She’d gone back again and again into danger because she’d had to, afraid to live and because of her faith unafraid to die. He’d been angry at her sacrifice and bitter at what he felt were her muddled beliefs, but the anger and the bitterness had finally died, and in New York, lonely as he watched his officers and men stream ashore to enjoy themselves with the bright lights and the girls, his thoughts had turned again to Charley Upfold.
Was it six years, or was it seven since she’d sailed in Mauritania for a job in New York? He’d looked her up in the telephone directory under her married name of Kimister and again under her maiden name of Upfold, but there had been nobody who could possibly have been her. The only person he knew who could still have been in contact with her to give her address was her sister, Mabel, but she was in England and married to a retired colonel of the Devons, who had somehow got himself back into the army and across the Channel to France.
‘I’m going below for a wash, Number One,’ he said to the first lieutenant. ‘But don’t for a minute imagine we’ve thrown him off because I dare bet our particulars have been passed to every U-boat in the area not wearing an ear trumpet.’
As he reached his cabin, Rumbelo was waiting for him. The same old Rumbelo recalled to service and happy to be back with Kelly. With a son serving in the destroyer, Grafton, it was hard on Rumbelo to have to return to sea, because he’d just got used to being settled at Thakeham. But he hadn’t grumbled, accepting it as normal, and grateful to be back with Kelly instead of in some unrewarding job ashore. The gap that had appeared between them when, to Rumbelo’s disgust, Kelly had married the wrong woman in 1927, had happily disappeared when the marriage had broken up, and Rumbelo and Biddy and their children had taken the place, with Hugh Withinshawe, of the family that Kelly had never had.
He was just reaching out to take Kelly’s cap when the buzzer went, and his hand changed its direction automatically to lift the instrument and pass it to Kelly.
‘Sir! Bridge! Wrestler has a contact!’
Snatching his cap back, Kelly hurried for the ladder. Below him, as he reached the bridge screen, was the four-inch gun and the forecastle streaming with water, the chain cables rising and falling as the bow drove into the sea.
‘Where’s Wrestler now?’ he demanded at once of the officer of the watch.
‘She’s moved astern, sir.’
‘Very well, we’ll join her. Bring her round to starboard.’
There was silence among the men alert at their action stations. Most of them were peacetime regulars with seven, twelve or twenty-two-year engagements, many of them enlisted in the years of the Depression to avoid unemployment. A lot of them had been awaiting their release when the war had broken out and among them were recalled men like Rumbelo, often middle-aged and in no condition for the spartan regime of a destroyer’s mess decks in the Atlantic. There were also a few Naval Reservists, trawlermen and merchant seamen, who, if not very good yet at their drill, were skilled seamen, and one or two Naval Volunteer Reservists, the Saturday afternoon sailors, mostly pure amateurs with more enthusiasm than expertise. But even they were learning fast, and they all of them – from the captain downwards – belonged to a small and closely-kept community, from which they could never escape. Aboard a destroyer, there was little time or room for pleasure and never freedom from noise or movement. Perhaps it was the one thing that held them together and made them a team.
As Feudal came round on the starboard side of the convoy, they saw that Wrestler had hoisted a signal and the yeoman of signals sang out. ‘Wrestler in contact, sir!’
Kelly’s eyes narrowed. William Latimer, the captain of Wrestler was well known to him. He had met him in 1927 up the Yangtze, when they’d stood alongside each other at Chinkiang with a small group of sailors holding off a mob of Chinese intent on murdering every white in sight. Kelly had been a lieutenant commander then and Latimer had been a midshipman. He’d done well in the intervening years, though Wrestler was his first ship and he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to want to depth-charge everything from a clump of seaweed to a shoal of herring.
Wrestler was steering away from the convoy now, pitching drunkenly, huge sheets of spray lifting over her bridge. She was steaming full ahead and it seemed that Latimer was going to drop something, if only for luck. At that moment, another flag fluttered to Wrestler’s yard arm.
‘Wrestler attacking, sir!’
They all watched, wondering how good the contact was, and saw the depth charges go down. After a few moments the sea bulged and huge columns of grey-green water rose high above them. As the spray settled, they waited with their glasses trained.
‘From Wrestler, sir. “Lost contact.”’
As they came round, the spray slashing across the bridge to coat it with a thin sparkling crust and fill mouths with the taste of salt, they were close to the other ship, and Kelly leaned on the bridge coaming, his eyes narrow and glittering as he watched from under the tarnished gold of his cap.
‘Call her up, yeoman. Tell her to continue her search and ask her the nature of the contact.’
As the stream of flags shot up and the lamp flickered, the yeoman called out. ‘Contact firm, sir. Classified as U-boat, moving to port.’
‘Ask ’em what they think now?’
‘Still think it’s a U-boat,’ Latimer replied. ‘“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”’
Kelly smiled. Where most naval officers relied on the Bible for their clever signals, Latimer used Shakespeare. He’d quoted The Merchant of Venice, he remembered, as they’d stood on the bund at Chinkiang under a shower of brickbats from the Chinese mob.
He guessed Latimer was right. If the submarine had been on the point of attacking the convoy when she was contacted she would certainly have moved in the direction Latimer had indicated.
‘Make “Continue the search!”’ he said.
Together, the two ships watched the convoy pass them, moving slowly through the water, suspecting that the U-boat would continue to follow the merchantmen. As Feudal swung in a wide circle towards Wrestler, the Asdic-repeater’s note was monotonous, thin and featureless above the thump and crash and hiss of the waves, then suddenly it changed to a solid echo that made the operator jump. In his tiny soundproofed compartment, his straining ears were almost deafened.
‘Asdic to bridge! HE reciprocating engines green oh-one-oh!’
Kelly spoke over his shoulder to the yeoman of signals. ‘Make to Wrestler “Have strong contact.”’
The Asdic echo sharpened. ‘Contact moving slowly right!’
‘Starboard twenty!’
As the speed dropped, the Asdic’s note came more clearly. Ping-ping-ping-pong.
‘Good God, we’re almost on top of him!’ Kelly snapped. ‘Full ahead both. Depth charge crews stand by – fire pattern. All guns prepare to engage to starboard.’
‘Target drawing away right.’
As the amatol-packed canisters exploded, the sea was split apart with an effervescent roar. Hundreds of tons of foam-white water rose slowly, hung motionless against the sky, then dematerialised into spray to fall back to the surface in a scum of dirty froth. As it settled, the Asdic operator called out.
‘Lost contact, sir!’
Even as his voice died, however, the yeoman of signals came in again. ‘Wrestler’s signalling, sir. “In contact.’’’
‘Good for Wrestler!’
The excitement was intense, everybody holding his breath. Wrestler was coming round like an express train now, the waves lifting over her bridge in a vast cloud of spray, and they saw the depth charges arc outwards from her stern and drop into her wake. A few moments later, the sea domed, lifted in a colossal mushroom and disintegrated in spray drifting over the foamy circle where the explosive had disturbed it.
‘Contact, sir! Moving left!’
Somewhere below them, the submarine was trying to squirm to safety, and, weaving in at right angles to complete the lethal pattern, Feudal dropped her own charges, and they saw the sea erupt once more.
‘Contact lost, sir.’
But Wrestler was hurtling past at full speed, bunting fluttering at the yardarm.
‘Wrestler still in contact, sir.’
As Feudal swung, Wrestler lay over on her beam ends and they saw the depth charges go again.
‘U-boat surfacing, sir! – port bow!’ The yell came from the bridge look-out, wild and excited, and as the sea settled, from the blur of spray a black shape like a pointing hand rose at a steep angle to the surface, exposing sixty feet of the U-boat’s bows, with the jumping wire and the dark holes of the torpedo tubes and a belly streaked with rust and weed. All round it the sea boiled with the escaping air.
Immediately, X-gun fired and the first shot struck at water level as the lifting steel tube steadied. Then the pom-pom crew got going and, enveloped in smoke and spray, the great helpless metal whale lurched, lifted higher, paused, as though suspended from the sky, then began to slide slowly back. As it went, there was a heavy underwater explosion and it vanished in a swirling whirlpool of water.
This time, as the sea resumed its place, they saw it was black with oil and in it things were floating – bits of wood, clothing, a life jacket. Wrestler stopped, her bow dipping as her speed dropped, and lay surrounded by wreckage, her crew crowding the rails busy with buckets and grappling hooks.
‘Wrestler reports a body, sir. They have it on board.’
As they surged past on the side away from the debris, the two ships looked like wooden horses on a fairground roundabout, moving up and down, one against the other, as they lifted to the waves, two old grey horses with sides that were streaked with rust and caked with salt. Men on both ships were cheering each other and waving congratulations and Latimer was on the bridge of Wrestler as they went past, yelling into the loudhailer.
‘We now have two bodies!’
As they drew ahead, Kelly waved. ‘Make “Well done,”’ he said to the yeoman of signals. Though the submarine would be credited to the group, it was undoubtedly Wrestler’s victory.
The lamp clattered and it was without surprise that Kelly heard the yeoman sing out.
‘Wrestler replying. “I have done service to the state. Othello.”’ Trust Latimer to come up with something clever, Kelly thought. ‘Make “Resume station and confine signals to facts.”’
That ought to shut him up, he thought with a grim smile.
There was no point in squashing enthusiasm but, given a chance, Latimer would be sending sonnets. He’d buy him a drink when they got home to show there was no ill feeling.