Convoy (15 page)

Mrs Yorke spoke that pleasant shorthand used by intelligent and self-assured people. Clare sensed, after only a quarter of an hour, that this woman with prematurely white hair, aquiline nose, finely carved features and the hands of a pianist already saw (and accepted) her as a possible daughter-in-law, and while it was still on the ‘Miss Exton–Mrs Yorke’ level she had said, casually, ‘Any relation to Charles Exton?’

‘Yes, he was my father. You knew him?’

The woman seemed to go away for a few moments and then come back as if she had left briefly to glance back over a wall into the past. She gave a slow smile. ‘Yes, quite well. He went to school with my husband; they served together in the same battalion in the First World War. He was one of the most handsome men I ever met.’

Ned sat up, startled. ‘Good heavens mother, I didn’t connect…’

‘There’s no reason why you should: we always referred to him as “Charles”. I doubt if you ever heard us using his surname.’ She turned to the girl. ‘He must have died when you were quite young, Clare.’

‘Seven. But he’d…’

Mrs Yorke nodded. ‘I know. Your mother behaved splendidly.’

‘She didn’t have any choice.’

‘Oh yes, she did, you know,’ Mrs Yorke said mildly. ‘Any woman whose husband deserts her can always comfort herself with drink, a series of lovers, or a mild affair with the gardener. Or she can remarry.’

‘Which is what my mother did.’

Ned, puzzled, asked: ‘What happened to your mother?’

Guessing the girl would prefer not to explain it herself, Mrs Yorke said quietly, the sympathy quite evident in her voice: ‘Clare’s father ran off with another woman, and Clare’s mother married again. Happily, I believe?’ When Clare nodded, Mrs Yorke said: ‘Her new husband, Clare’s stepfather, was badly wounded and captured at Dunkirk. He was not a young man, naturally, but the Germans refused to include him in the exchange of prisoners. I believe that he was in a special camp with others that the Germans might try to use as hostages. Anyway, he died last year.’

Ned tried to remember the details of Dunkirk, but all memories of people, of accounts heard later and wardroom gossip, were blurred by the overpowering memory of smoke over the beaches and the rows of hopeful faces up to their chins in water and shaded by steel helmets as the soldiers waded out to boats which ferried them to the waiting rescue ships. The insane scream of dive-bombers, the raucous chatter of the destroyer’s guns… The dash back each time to Harwich with the decks so crowded it was hard to distinguish the ship for khaki-clad men, all cheerful once they were sure they were on board a British destroyer. Then suddenly it came to him who Clare’s stepfather was. As he glanced up and caught her eyes he realized that the only remarkable thing was that they had never met before.

‘How do you do,’ he grinned, and from her chair she mimed a curtsy. Then, unexpectedly, she turned to Mrs Yorke and said: ‘I was married. My husband was killed in the RAF.’

Mrs Yorke nodded. ‘Your mother told me all about it before she died. We had met at a WVS reception. You know how old women gossip.’ There had been a faint emphasis on the ‘all’.

Clare had noticed it and said: ‘You’re not old; but I’m glad you gossiped. It saves me having to explain.’

‘When people meet and fall in love,’ Mrs Yorke said, a hand going up instinctively to make sure her hair was tidy, ‘there’s nothing to explain. Perhaps to fill in some answers for Donne, but only with affection.’

‘Donne?’ Clare asked. ‘You mean John Donne?’

‘Mother is a romantic,’ Ned said, and quoted:

‘“I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we lov’d? Were we not wean’d till then?

But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?”’

Clare smiled and, watching Ned, said: ‘I can only answer, kind sir,

“Stand still, and I will read to thee

A lecture, Love, in love’s philosophy.”’

Mrs Yorke stood up and looked affectionately at Ned and said ‘Another line of Donne is also appropriate – “Go, and catch a falling star” – and I’ll go and put that scrawny rabbit in the oven: dinner is going to be late.’ Just then the rising and falling of the air raid sirens cut through the night. She looked at her watch. ‘Hmm, they’re late, too.’

On Monday morning as Ned walked through St James’s Park it was not until he saw the Citadel – in much the same way that a marauding band of Tuaregs would see a French Foreign Legion fort in the dark of a sandstorm – that he thought again of the Battle of the Atlantic. The charcoal-burner’s oven smell of charred wood still hung over the city after another night of heavy bombing and left a layer of haze. It was one of those unexpectedly mild and cloudless November mornings when a pale-blue sky brought a few hours’ life to the skeleton parade of leafless trees and emphasized the peeling paint of the buildings. Nurse Clare Exton was having breakfast in bed. In Clare’s own bed, or rather the one in the lower guest room, served by his mother.

It was a situation which had its funny side and he suspected both women knew it. Clare had arrived at Palace Street nearly exhausted by a long spell of night duty, and at Willesborough she had gone for walks with him in the afternoon when she should have been sleeping. Then her weekend in London had been exhausting for her, but in another way: two nights when, as he remembered them in detail only a few hours later, they had made love with the desperation of a couple knowing they would soon be parted, or that the next hissing bomb could kill them both, and it was a desperation which left them exhausted yet, because of the possible ultimatum, not sated.

However, as a smiling Clare had commented when he had kissed her goodbye before setting off for the Admiralty, although it left dark rings under the eyes it did wonders for the complexion. She was glowing with love – and shivering with it, too, because she had gone back to her own room after getting Ned some breakfast, and found the sheets cold. Mrs Yorke had insisted that as Clare was not due back in Willesborough until the evening she should spend the day at Palace Street, sleeping as much as she could, doing any shopping she needed, and catching the latest possible train back.

Ned smiled to himself as he pictured Clare curled up in her bed, now wearing a nightdress and sleepily and pleasantly bewildered by the physical effects of making love. But there ahead was the Citadel, the towers and cupolas of the old Admiralty building beyond emphasizing the eastern atmosphere – almost Byzantine, except that the cupolas lacked the Byzantine boldness and colours.

He collected his dockets, notes and diagrams from the safe and went over to his desk. The room was empty and still chilly, the pipes round the walls gurgling and rattling as if they were doing their best to rouse the building after the brief weekend. He had just arranged the papers on his desk when Jemmy came in, his head jerking with the usual twitch but looking surprisingly rested. ‘Morning, Ned, nice weekend?’

‘Fine, and you?’

‘Went to bed Saturday afternoon, got up this morning. Feel all the better for it. A few aches but the old brain is clear. Joan will be in with some coffee,’ he added, the train of thought all too obvious. ‘Don’t tease her; she’s in a wonderful mood. She should be, too, so let’s make the best of it.’

Within five minutes the Croupier was spreading his gridded German chart of the Atlantic on the table like an Arab carpet-seller displaying his wares and the other four officers were at their desks. Ned took out the docket on the third of the convoys. It was almost a rubber stamp version of the others. Nine ships sunk, five others saw the torpedo tracks of near misses because of abnormal phosphorescence – the German electric torpedoes left no wake of compressed air.

Once again he drew a convoy diagram of the eight columns and marked in the ships which had been sunk. Yes, there was the same pattern – all the ships hit had been in the centre, the third or fourth ships in the third, fourth or fifth columns.

He reached for the next docket and read the details. The brief, almost illiterate accounts of some of the survivors picked up later and interrogated, the terse report of the rear-commodore of the convoy (both the commodore and vice-commodore had been killed when their ships were sunk), the clipped wording of the report of the senior officer of the escort… No one complained, everyone did his best to explain what he saw or did, but it added up to five nights of horror. And, to be fair, the captain of the U-boat must be a brave man.

The convoy had sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, forty-four merchant ships, with three frigates and four corvettes as escort. The convoy commodore was a retired vice-admiral who had volunteered – as had so many other retired officers in their late sixties and early seventies – to ‘serve at sea in any capacity’. The senior officer of the escort was an RN two and a half ringer who had a reputation of being one of the best.

By the last day of February the convoy was close to the southern edge of the Grand Banks as a gale come up astern: a gale verging on a storm. With massive following seas the ships had kept their positions, and Yorke could visualize the corvettes being more like half-tide rocks. Gradually the weather had eased to a near gale with a biting cold wind sweeping down from the north-west, chilled as it came over the icecap. Then the attack had started: two ships the first night, three on each of the second, third and fourth nights and two the fifth. Then a pack had taken over, and surprisingly enough they had sunk only two more ships before the escorts, with improving weather, sank two U-boats. The single U-boat inside the convoy had sunk thirteen ships; the convoy had finally lost fifteen.

But this convoy was different from all the others because during the first three nights of bad weather the insider U-boat had attacked on the surface. First sighted between the third ships in the fourth and fifth columns, stopped and athwart the convoy’s course, it had then apparently fired one torpedo from its bow tubes at the ship ahead and one from its stern tube at the target astern, and both had hit. The nearest merchant ships had immediately opened fire on it – just a black shape on a swirling black sea – with machine-guns and Oerlikon 20 mm cannons, and it had submerged. Probably not, the commodore noted, as a result of the gunfire but because its night’s work was completed.

On the second night it had been sighted on the surface near the head of the convoy. There had been a flash as a torpedo hit (and sank) the vice-commodore’s ship, and a sharp-eyed lookout in another ship had spotted the great black whale-like shape. Almost at once the tanker which had been the vice-commodore’s next astern was hit as she passed the sinking ship, unable to alter course in time to pass on the other side and so use the sinking ship as a shield between herself and the waiting U-boat.

No one had sighted it on the third night – the first anyone knew of the U-boat’s presence had been the hollow ‘bong’ of a torpedo exploding in a merchant ship hull. Then, after five nights, the pack had arrived. And – was this significant? – from then on the U-boat in the convoy had not attacked again: with thirteen ships to claim he had left it to the pack. And, just as Jemmy had said, the escorts could deal with pack attacks…

Yorke reached for the fifth docket, but then decided that first he would draw out the convoy diagram of the fourth to see if he could plot the U-boat’s track for the first three nights. The escort commander’s comments on putting a frigate inside the columns were succinct and correct – there was little or no roam to manoeuvre; dropping depth charges risked having them explode as the next merchant ship steamed over them… The only chance would be for the frigate to ram, should she manage to spot a U-boat on the surface. More important, he pointed out that a surface attack by a single U-boat (even in the bad weather of the winter when high seas made it difficult to use the periscope) was very rare…

He folded the finished diagram and put it in the docket. It all made a packet less than a quarter of an inch thick: all that was known – and a good deal more than most people cared – about one of hundreds of convoys which had been attacked, with ships sunk and men drowned and cargoes lost. Even as he put the docket back on the pile he thought of those euphemistically called ‘the next of kin’. By now they would, after a great deal of arguing with the bureaucrats, be receiving meagre pensions and no doubt the minute the war ended the politicians would cut the rate of the pension and in many cases abolish it altogether. Wars were fought by men who could be killed or disabled, but wars were administered by sycophantic civil servants lurking in ministries at the dictate of politicians who converted fighting men’s patriotism into cheap victories in the Parliamentary voting lobbies. The last piece of irony was that in the dockets the dead men were not even recorded by name; they were merely totals under the ‘Dead’, ‘Wounded’ and ‘Missing’ columns next to the names of each ship.

In all the bureaucratic war there had been one victory for the fighting men, he recalled with a tinge of bitterness. Although the Admiralty was a fighting headquarters in the way that the War Office and Air Ministry were not, the Civil Service Union insisted on regarding it as an administrative headquarters, so that to begin with all the clerical staff had to be civil servants. Yet from here, from the Admiralty building, ships of war of every type and size were dispatched hither and yon by naval officers, who sometimes found themselves directing the battle. The Submarine Tracking Room was just along the corridor, marking the position of every known U-boat, while the Trade Plot gave the positions of all the Allied convoys at sea.

The Air Ministry did not exercise direct tactical control over its aircraft in this way; fighters were controlled from different sector headquarters while the Army was administered from various commands scattered throughout the world. The War Office did not tell a distant battalion to march from place A to place B, yet the Admiralty, by direct wireless signal, did tell HMS
A
to ‘proceed’ to position B to carry out operation C. But at last the Civil Service Union had been persuaded there was a war on; that out there in the Atlantic beyond Bath, beyond the reach of buff official envelopes, beyond letters drafted in that bureaucratic language which is only one remove from illiteracy, there was indeed a war being fought and men were dying by the hundreds, and Wrens were needed inside the Admiralty, highly intelligent and specially chosen girls, many of them university graduates, excellent linguists, mathematicians… Above all, more than willing to work long hours and stand watches.