‘Sub!’
Nick took his eyes off the wilderness of black, grey-flecked sea. It was still dark, but greyer eastward as dawn approached. The glow from the binnacle lit the bony sharpness of his captain’s face.
‘Sir?’
‘What’s the date?’
‘May thirtieth, 1916, sir.’
All destroyer captains were mad. One knew that; everyone did.
‘Sure it’s not the thirty-first?’
‘What’s the displacement of this ship?’
‘Eight hundred and seven tons, sir.’
‘How d’ye know that?’
‘Looked it up, sir.’
‘Devil you did… Where were we built?’
‘Yarrow, sir.’
‘What’s our horsepower, d’ye look that up?’
Sub-Lieutenant Nick Everard, Royal Navy, with salt water streaming down his face, neck and inside his shirt nodded as he grabbed at a stanchion for support. ‘Twenty-four thousand, sir.’ Lanyard lurched, staggered, her stubby bow seeming to catch in a trough of sea like a boot-toe in a furrow; spray rattled against splinter-mattresses lashed to the bridge rail. Nick had forgotten, until now, that the bridge of an eight-hundred-ton torpedo-boat destroyer, when she was steaming head-on into even as moderate a sea as a Force Four wind kicked up, was like the back of a frisky horse only wetter. Mortimer, her captain, spat a lungful of salt water down-wind; he’d appeared on the bridge a few minutes ago wearing a long striped nightgown and a red woollen hat with a bobble on it; he’d looked like something out of a slapstick comedy even before the nightgown had been soaked through, plastered against his tall, angular frame like a long wet bathing-suit. He spat again, and laughed.
‘You’re wrong, Sub! Twenty-four thousand five hundred!’
The inaccuracy seemed to have elated him. Nick stared back, not yet sure of him, wary that what looked like a friendly grin might turn out to be a grimace of fury. One couldn’t be sure of any of these people yet. Nick had joined Lanyard only forty-eight hours ago ‒ he’d been ordered to her suddenly, without any sort of warning, transferred at a moment’s notice from the dreadnought battleship that had housed him for the last two years. It had seemed so unbelievable that there’d had to be some snag in it. In spite of the sensation of relief and escape, he was still ready to find the snag, and meanwhile all his experience of officers senior to himself warned him to be cautious, to look every gift horse in the mouth.
‘Everard’
‘Sir?’
‘My first lieutenant informs me that you have the reputation of being lazy, ignorant and insubordinate. Would you dispute that?’
Nick stared straight ahead at the empty, foam-washed sea. Johnson, Lanyard’s first lieutenant, was a contemporary and friend of Nick’s elder brother David. He was standing behind, and holding on to the binnacle, beside Mortimer and within about three feet of Nick’s own position. You couldn’t be very much farther from each other than that, on a bridge about as large and which seemed just about as solid as a chicken-house roof. Johnson was officer of the watch, and Nick, who lacked as yet a watchkeeping certificate, was acting as his dogsbody. In the last few minutes the first lieutenant had been listening to Nick’s exchanges with Mortimer while pretending either not to hear or to have no interest in them.
Nick said stiffly. ‘No, sir.’
‘You don’t dispute it?’
‘I’d rather not contradict the first lieutenant, sir.’
‘Hear that, Number One?’ Johnson nodded, poker-faced. He had a thin, pale face, dark-jowled, needing two shaves a day by the looks of it. Rather a David-type face, Nick thought gloomily. Lanyard had her bow up, scooting along like a duck landing on a pond; Mortimer asked Nick. ‘What’s cordite, when it’s at home?’
‘Blend of nitro-glycerine and nitrocellulose gelatinised with five per cent vaseline, sir.’
‘Vaseline?’
‘Petroleum jelly, sir, to lubricate the bore of the gun.’
‘What’s the average speed of a twenty-one inch White-head torpedo when it’s set for seven thousand yards?’
‘Forty-five knots, sir.’
He was wondering when the difficult questions were going to start. But Mortimer was apparently satisfied, for the time being.
‘Number One!’
Johnson turned to him. ‘Sir.’
‘I suspect you may have been partially misinformed. This officer is neither wholly ignorant nor pathologically insubor-dinate. Only time will tell us whether or not he’s lazy. Give him plenty to do, and if he shirks it kick his arse.’
‘Aye aye, sir…’ Johnson pointed out over the starboard bow. ‘Everard. Fishing vessel there, steering east, bearing steady. What action if any would you take?’
‘Alter course to starboard, sir, until past and clear.’
‘Right. Come here.’
Nick stepped closer.
‘Our course is south fifteen west two hundred and sixty revolutions. Take over the ship.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘I’ll be in the chartroom.’ He tapped the starboard voicepipe’s copper rim. ‘This pipe. Let me know the minute we raise May Island.’
Nick watched Johnson and Mortimer leave the bridge together. Things really did seem, so far, to have changed quite strikingly for the better!
Not that one could count on it. Johnson, until he proved otherwise, was an enemy. He’d obey Mortimer’s orders to the letter, but whether or not a man was ‘lazy‘ was a matter for individual interpretation, and ‘kicks’ came in different shapes and sizes. Most disconcerting of all was the fact that this Johnson was a friend of brother David’s who was up in Scapa as navigating officer of the cruiser Bantry. Bright, successful, correct brother David, whom one tried not to let into one’s thoughts too often. Johnson’s decision to leave one up here alone in charge of the watch wasn’t any sign of trust or encouragement. An officer in a destroyer who couldn’t keep a watch was a semi-passenger, leaving a lesser number of watchkeepers on the roster, and since the only way to get a watchkeeping certificate was to acquire experience it was in Johnson’s interests to make sure he got some.
It was in Nick’s too, though ‒ for present convenience, not career reasons. He’d decided long ago that he’d quit the Service when he could. There’d been no point in mentioning it to any one, not even to Sarah, his stepmother, to whom he confided most things. As long as the war lasted, one was stuck; one could only think of it as something that mercifully wouldn’t last for ever. Like a prisoner sitting out a gaol sentence. And in those terms, the events of the past two days had left him feeling like a long-term convict unexpectedly offered parole.
He’d been in his battleship’s gunroom, writing a letter to Sarah, at Mullbergh. She was the only person he ever did write to. He wrote about once a month, and never mentioned the Navy or the war. What would there have been to say about it? There was no action – only pomposity and boredom. Somewhere distant, other men were fighting and being killed.
He wrote a lot about the Magnussons – he’d never told another soul about these Orcadian friends of his ‒ and fishing, and the landscape of the Orkneys, that kind of thing. The Magnusson family and fishing provided the escape which as a midshipman and then junior sub-lieutenant in a battleship in the Grand Fleet he’d so badly needed; escape from boredom drills, bugle-calls, and from such horrors, too as ‘gunroom evolutions’.
Being well able to look after himself physically, he hadn’t suffered much from the bullying rituals which were justified by the word ‘tradition’: but he’d had to witness them, and pretend to take part in them. And they’d be in full swing again now, in the gunroom he’d just left. When he’d been promoted sub-lieutenant and become mess president, he’d stopped it all: but he knew the man who’d taken his place, and there was no doubt the ‘evolutions’ would have been re-established; evolutions such as ‘Angostura Trail’. A midshipman would be blindfolded, forced to his hands and knees and made to follow with his nose a winding trail of Angostura bitters; if he lost the scent, all the others would lay into him. Or ‘Running Torpedoes’, which involved a boy being launched off the gunroom table as hard and fast as his messmates could manage it; if he tried to shield his head or break his fall, he’d be thrashed.
Nick thrashed a sub-lieutenant, once. The evolution had been ‘scuttle drill’. The victim had to haul himself out of one scuttle and swing along the outside of the ship to the next, and pull himself back into the gunroom through it, and only a well-grown midshipman had the length of body or arm-reach for it. The reigning sub-lieutenant was insisting on a particularly small lad ‒ barely fifteen, and undersized ‒ attempting to perform the impossible. The boy was shaking with fright, close to tears, and what broke Nick’s self-control was that in the faces of the other midshipmen, this small one’s friends, he could see the same sadistic excitement as in the sub-lieutenant’s. He grabbed the sub-lieutenant by an arm, swung him round and hit him: within a minute the mess president had been knocked down three times and lost several front teeth.
Midshipman Everard was awarded twelve cuts with a cane, and a dozen more unofficially with a rope’s end, and three months’ stoppage of shore leave. He was also given extra duties which meant that during those three months he had only short periods of sleep and never time to finish a meal. And with that, it was pointed out, he’d been let off lightly; for an attack on a superior officer he could have been court-martialled and dismissed from the Service.
There’d been two possible reasons for the leniency. One was that Nick’s uncle. Hugh Everard, had just returned from the Falklands battle, the destruction of Admiral Graf von Spee’s squadron. Only a week before he hit the sub-lieutenant Midshipman Everard had been summoned to pace the quarterdeck beside his godlike captain, and to listen to a summary of the battle and its results. What it had boiled down to had been that the name of Everard was in favour at that higher level; Nick, the captain told him, had ‘a great deal to live up to’. The other point was that the investigation into what had provoked the assault had established that the little midshipman could not have reached from one scuttle to the other, would therefore have fallen into the Flow, and quite likely might have drowned.
Killed on active service, would his family have been told? So many shams, right from one’s earliest memories. Mullbergh: being woken in that freezing mausoleum of a house with his father’s bellows of anger echoing through its corridors… Sir John Everard was a man of power and influence; Master of his own hounds, magistrate. Deputy Lieutenant of the county. He was a brigadier now, and doubtless he’d come back from France a major-general, covered in medals, even more of a respected figure. With his young wife ‒ Sarah was twenty-eight, closer to his sons’ ages than to his own ‒ at his side. So beautiful and so loved!
Poor, lovely, Sarah…
To whom he’d been starting a letter, two days ago. He’d sat down at the gunroom table which was no longer used as a launching ramp for human torpedoes and he’d got as far as putting the date, 28 May 1916, at the head of the first sheet of paper, when a messenger had arrived to summon him to the ship’s commander. He’d hurried up two decks, to the senior officers’ cabin flat, and knocked on the wood surround of the commander’s doorway.
‘Sir!’
The commander was three parts bald; his face was dark red and he had ginger hair curling on his cheekbones.
‘You’re leaving us. Everard. Or did you know it already?’
‘Sir?’
The commander growled. ‘The destroyer Lanyard sails for Rosyth tomorrow. You will join her this afternoon. Now.’
Nick failed to understand.
‘Sir, d’you mean I’m taking passage to—’
‘Who the blazes said anything about taking passage?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I—’
‘You are joining Lanyard. You are to report aboard her forthwith. Pack your gear, then present my compliments to the officer of the watch and ask him kindly to provide a boat.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
This was actually happening…
When those three months of stopped shore leave were over, he didn’t give the Magnussons any reason for his not having seen them recently. It would have been difficult to explain, something so foreign to them that it wouldn’t have made sense.
They’d probably thought he’d been away at sea and couldn’t speak of it. Ships came, ships went; there were so many of them, and why should the crofters know their names, or care?
Greta almost referred to his long absence. She’d told him, ‘The spring run were grand, Nick. Ye’d no’ve believed the fish we took!’
‘Very glad to hear it.’ He’d hesitated. ‘I wish I’d—’
‘Och, ye’ll get your chance.’ Her father had put an end to the need to talk about it. Nick could read the thought in the old man’s eyes; if you had something to say, you’d say it, and if on the other hand you preferred to hold your tongue…
‘I’ve missed you all.’
Greta had laughed; ‘So I should hope!’
‘Come intae the hoose, lad.’ The old man stooped, leading the way into his gloomy little cottage. Greta stood back, smiling, making Nick go next.
He’d met the old man fishing. Over a period of months they’d encountered each other from time to time, at first with no more than a wave, a grunt. Then they’d begun to exchange a word or two – the weather, or the fish, or how the sheep were doing. Finally one afternoon Magnusson had invited him to the croft for ‘a dram tae keep the cold oot’, and he’d met Greta and her mother.
Escape and a lack of any kind of sham. The Magnussons had made Scapa bearable. They’d be wondering in a day or two where he’d got to; there’d been no way to send a message.
Peering into the binnacle he saw suddenly that Lanyard had swung nearly ten degrees off course.
‘Watch your steering, quartermaster!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Searching the horizon again, he checked suddenly: on the beam, that dark smear was the low protuberance of Fife. ‘Sub-Lieutenant, sir!’ The signalman was pointing ahead. ‘May Island, sir!’
Everything came in sight at once, as if a curtain had been rung up suddenly on the day. May Island’s lighthouse was a white pimple poking out of a grey corrugated horizon. Nick put his face down to the other voicepipe.
‘Chartroom!’
Johnson’s voice floated out of the copper funnel: ‘Chartroom.’
‘Fife Ness is in sight to starboard, sir, and May Island’s fine on the port bow.’
There was silence for about three seconds. Then Johnson told him, ‘I’m coming up.’
He was chewing, when he reached the bridge and his lips were wet. He crossed to the starboard side of the bridge and studied the land; glanced ahead, frowning, at the clearing shape of May Island.
‘How long have you had land in sight?’
I suppose a minute or—’
‘Look’ Johnson pointed. ‘The Ness is well abaft the beam. It was no further from us ten minutes ago than the nearer land is now.’
Nick agreed. ‘Visibility’s improved a lot in the last few minutes.’
‘Hardly that much.’ Pale eyes flickered at him, and away again. Judged ‒ condemned. Nick, smarting, held his tongue.
The destroyer’s motion eased rapidly as she closed May Island; there was shelter from the gradually engulfing land and at the same time the wind was dying. Johnson turned to him again.
‘Go down and get some breakfast. Back up here in thirty minutes.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
And the hell with you, too!
But he was still a damn sight better off, he told himself, than he’d been two days ago. He moved to the back of the bridge, over the lower level that served as signal-bridge and was dominated by the searchlight above it and, a few feet abaft the searchlight mounting, the slanting tube of the foremast. He nodded to the port-side lookout ‒ a man of about his own age, with a freckled face, a missing tooth, a gingerish tinge of beard. The sailor asked him, ‘Yon’d be the Forth we’re enterin’, would it sir?’
‘It would yes. What’s your name?’
‘MacIver, sir.’
MacIver. Ginger, freckles, tooth missing. There were a lot of names to learn; he’d start a list, add a dozen a day until he knew the whole ship’s company. He let himself down the ladder from the destroyer’s salt-wet, black-painted bridge, down to the upper deck. Turning aft, he passed the ship’s boats lashed and gripped in their turned-in davits, with the galley between them. Now the foremost of the pair of funnels: Lanyard was one of a small number of her class that had only two instead of three. Walking aft, he scanned the deck layout as he went, passing the midship four-inch gun and then the second funnel, and aft of that the first pair of twenty-one inch torpedo tubes, now the after searchlight platform, and the other pair of tubes. Mainmast: and an inch-wide brass strip marked the start of the quarterdeck. There was superstructure amidships here, a sort of deckhouse with a door in it, and inside the door a ladder led down to the wardroom and the officers’ cabin flat. Abaft it was the stern four-inch.
Nick paused and leant beside the door. The land was easy to see now, even from this lower level. Lanyard was only about five miles offshore, and the sun rising in the east was floodlighting that coast for her at the same time as it would be blinding anyone ashore: the light-gauge, Uncle Hugh had called it, explaining how an admiral would try to deploy his ships so as to have the advantage of it. It was strange how thinking back to Uncle Hugh’s talk about the Navy still gave one a whiff of excitement and enthusiasm; it was as if Hugh Everard’s own attitudes were infectious, strong enough to break through one’s own more recent disillusionment and renew the longing for things which one now suspected to be myths. Daydreams; rose-coloured, like this sunrise flush that was turning the sea milky while a pink glow seeped through slats of cloud low on the diffuse horizon. But how could one explain Uncle Hugh’s attitude to a Service that had treated him so shabbily?
In any case, thanks to the boost which the Falklands success had given to his resumed career, he was back now almost to where he would have been if they hadn’t forced him out. Hugh Everard was captain of the brand-new battleship Nile, one of the crack Queen Elizabeth class super-dreadnoughts. Nile, with the others of the fifth Battle Squadron, had left Scapa for Rosyth only a day ahead of Lanyard; and might Uncle Hugh, Nick wondered, have had something to do with this move of his? Might he have pulled a string with the admirals before he sailed?
There was no reason why he should have. Nick hadn’t asked for anything, or complained; he hadn’t said a single word to anyone, not even to Sarah ‒ from whom, if he had told her anything about his feelings of dead-end hopelessness, it might have got back to his uncle.
He shrugged. It had happened, that was all. All he had to do was take advantage of it, make a go of things here in Lanyard ‒ if they’d let him. And meanwhile ‒ breakfast. Nick shot down the ladder, almost colliding with the surgeon lieutenant, Samuels, who’d been starting up it.
‘Sorry―’
‘If you break your neck, don’t ask me to mend it.’
They seemed a friendly bunch. Reynolds, whose quiet voice and high forehead made him seem more like an academic than a naval officer, was eating breakfast. Hastings, a Reserve sub-lieutenant who was Lanyard’s navigator, had just finished. Tall, fair, with the skin of his cheeks pitted, presumably by smallpox; he’d pushed his chair back and he was stuffing a pipe with tobacco.
Nick sat down. ‘Good morning.’ He nodded to the steward: ‘Morning, Blewitt.’
‘Morning, sir. Bacon and egg, sir?’
‘Please.’ Nick told Hastings, ‘We’re almost up to May Island.’
‘I know. I looked.’
‘You’d imagine—’ Reynolds addressed Nick ‒ ‘that a pilot worth his salt would be up there looking after this vessel’s safety. Eh?’ Nick didn’t commit himself. Reynolds shook his head. ‘Not this one. He sits here eating hearty meals while we officers of the watch do his job for him. What truly aggravates him is to have to use his sextant ‒ should stars happen to become visible at night, or a sun at noon or—’
‘Don’t worry.’ Hastings raised a hand in greeting as the gunner, Mr Pilkington, joined them. Wizened wiry like a jockey. ‘I’ll con the old hooker in for you, by and by.’
‘My dear fellow, how kind you are!’
Nick told them, ‘I’ll be up there too.’
‘Haven t you just come down?’
‘I gather I’m on permanent watch until I’m considered safe to do it on my own.’
‘Well, that’s reasonable.’
Hastings asked him, ‘Haven’t you done any destroyer time before this?’
‘A few months, earlier on. Most of that in the Flow and Lough Swilly.’
‘Ah.’ The navigator winked at Reynolds. ‘Reckon he’ll be getting some destroyer sea-time soon enough.’
Reynolds frowned. ‘Even if there was anything to it, Hastings—’
‘To what?’
Hastings answered Nick, ‘I had to go with the CO to a briefing before we sailed. Carry the chart for him, you know? Anyway, it seems there’s the makings of a flap. Or there may not be, but—’
‘Flap?’
‘It’s no more than the weekly buzz, Sub.’ Reynolds was testy. ‘Meaningless, like all the others.’
‘The Hun sailed sixteen U-boats on May seventeenth. Thirteen days ago. And none of ’em showed up anywhere. Not so much as a tip of a periscope. Well, a fortnight at sea’s about their limit; so if it’s some fleet operation they’re out to cover, it must be about due. Right?’
‘Unless—’ Reynolds sighed – ‘they’ve sailed right back again, and our clever cipher boys only think they’re still out. Or they’re out and looking for targets and haven’t found any yet. Or—’
‘The other titbit, Everard—’ Hastings raised his voice, to drown out Reynold’s attempts to cut him off ‘the other meaningless item of intelligence is that there’s been the devil of a lot of wireless signalling going on over there. As one knows, our wireless interception’s quite hot stuff these days.’
‘Your breakfast, sir.’ Blewitt put a plate in front of Nick. ‘Take my advice, sir, eat it while it’s ’ot. Cold, it’s ’orrible.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Hastings, with the steward present, had stopped talking. Reynolds muttered, getting to his feet, ‘I’ll see you lads up there, by and by.’ He looked at Nick. ‘Here’s advice for you, Sub. Before you come up topsides, treat yourself to a shave.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Our captain may adopt a somewhat bizarre appearance when at sea, but informality is not encouraged in his officers.’
‘Right. Thank you.’
‘Good day.’ Worsfold, the commissioned engineer, slid into a chair at the end of the table. Dark, small-boned with deepset eyes. The others nodded to him: ‘Morning, Chief.’ Reynolds had gone. Nick, chewing bacon, stared at Hastings, thinking U-boats, wireless activity: we do hear it once a week.