Convoy (5 page)

Was the Polish captain senior? Did he take command of the
Aztec
? Was he rated RN? Hardly. The point had never arisen, so far as he knew. Even the bloody British liaison officer might be senior and want to play silly buggers by commanding the
Aztec
for the trip back to the UK. Well, he was welcome to argue the point; but unless his name was senior in the Navy List, Lieutenant Ned Yorke was taking this wreck home.

The liaison officer, a VR lieutenant, appeared on the bridge, introduced himself as John Wood, and told him the Polish destroyer was the
Orzel
and that the captain would be along as soon as the last man was off.

‘It’s the passengers,’ Wood said. ‘They’re special people.’

‘Where are they?’

‘I took ’em straight down to the wardroom, out of your way. Civilians. Your steward’s taken charge of them. They’re important political refugees; they’ve had a bad time.’

‘What the hell are they doing in the Bay?’

‘They’d escaped across Europe to Spain and the
Orzel
took them off a fishing boat near Ferrol. All arranged through the Admiralty.’

‘The Jerries spotted you quickly?’

Wood nodded wearily. ‘I reckon the Spaniards gave us away because the fishermen were four hours late so we didn’t stand a chance of getting clear by daylight. The bombers found us at dawn.’

‘At dawn?’

Wood seemed resentful, although it was hard to know who he was blaming. ‘Yes, at first light.’

‘They must have known where to look, because they couldn’t search in darkness. Didn’t you take any evasive action? Surely you didn’t steer direct for Plymouth from the rendezvous?’

‘We did,’ Wood admitted. ‘At full speed. The captain reckoned the less time we stayed within range of those Ju 88s the better. I suggested we left to the south-west, but…’

Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘We live and learn.’

At that moment an officer came on to the bridge and Wood introduced him as the
Orzel
’s captain. Yorke shook him by the hand. ‘You speak English?’

‘Some,’ he said, looking at the two gold rings on Yorke’s sleeve.

‘All your men are off?’

‘Everyone except the dead, Lieutenant.’ Just a faint emphasis on the rank; what the lawyers called ‘without prejudice’.

‘Is she sinking?’

‘Ten minutes at the most.’

‘Depth charges set to safe?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Yorke turned to the lookout. ‘Pass the word to let go fore and aft.’

To Wood and the Polish commander he said: ‘Can your chaps man the small-calibre stuff? We’re a bit thin on the ground. Once we’re out of this smoke we can expect visitors…’

The Polish commander scrambled out to the port wing of the bridge and bellowed a stream of Polish aft along the deck. Wood nodded to Yorke. ‘This chap knows his stuff; he fought the
Orzel
out of Danzig to reach England; air attacks all the way across the North Sea. Losing the ship is like losing their home. And they suspect treachery by the Spaniards, too.’

Yorke had watched the
Orzel
draw clear as the
Aztec
drifted to leeward and said to Wood: ‘Go down and find the torpedo artificer: he’s still alive, the little fat PO with a bandage round his head. He’s helping with your wounded. I want two fish put into the
Orzel
the moment we are at the right range.’

‘She’ll go of her own accord,’ Wood said.

‘I can’t wait around,’ Yorke said sourly, ‘and Their Lordships would love to hear we left a destroyer afloat in the Bay. You made sure all the confidential books have been sunk?’

‘Yes, the captain and I did it together.’

‘Good,’ Yorke said, and added: ‘I’m asking because it’ll crop up at the court of inquiry; it’ll help you to have witnesses.’

It was the next ten minutes that were all telescoped and confused in his memory: the
Aztec
had drifted clear and he had turned her on the screws to make the Polish ship an easy target for the torpedo artificer. There had been the double hiss as the two torpedoes were fired and the double detonation as they hit, but before the pillars of water had subsided and the
Orzel
began to sink both bridge lookouts had reported enemy planes – ‘Red two five…green four five…green two oh…’ Five Ju 88s and all attacking the
Aztec
at once from different directions and heights to avoid mid-air collisions: obviously they had been home and put in some practice.

There was hardly time for the gunners to change targets. Wood shouted in a momentary pause, ‘Let’s hope they collide with each other!’

One bomb burst under the
Aztec
’s bow as she increased speed and Yorke cursed, wishing he had delayed a few moments; the second hit the starboard side abreast the funnel and they were deafened by the safety valves lifting and high-pressure steam screaming upwards. Yorke thought ironically that if he had increased speed a few moments earlier it might have missed astern. The fourth hit the torpedo tubes but by then the
Aztec
was slowing down and heeling to starboard and Yorke saw the Polish commander wrestling with a Lewis gun, obviously trying to transfer it from one mounting to another. At that moment a sudden whoosh like the flight of a bird turned everything black as a bomb burst on the forward side of the bridge.

The bus was passing through Charing before Clare came back to sit beside him and shut off the memories. The rolling countryside was bleak now in the early winter and the paint was peeling from the signposts that stood at each crossroads, white pillars of wood or cast iron, the pointing arms that once gave the names of towns and hamlets now amputated and taken away, so that the stranger, whether a travelling Briton or a bewildered German paratrooper, remained lost.

They played a game and he knew Clare had sensed he had spent the time while she had been away brooding over the past. She had suggested it. They rated each house they passed with up to ten points. Ten meant they could live in it; one meant it was suitable for a troublesome relative or bureaucrat. Most of the houses they could see from the road rated up to five. Every now and again they would see a white card taped inside a window, ‘Stirrup pump kept here’, or the ‘W’ showing where an air raid warden lived.

Suddenly the bus stopped on the outskirts of Ashford and they saw Sister Scotland standing up and glaring at the corporal of Military Police who now climbed on board and asked to see all travel documents. Sister Scotland, more concerned that her patients had enough pillows and blankets, had accidentally left the large brown envelope of documents – including, it now seemed, all the case histories – on her desk.

The corporal took off his cap with its red cover and scratched his head. ‘But, ma’am, a Navy bus loaded with men, and entering a restricted zone!’ He put his cap back squarely on his head and adjusted his red armband, then looked down at the highly polished toecaps of his boots. His flattened nose showed he was a boxer, but neither the ring nor the training course organized by the Corps of Military Police had prepared him for encounters with irate hospital sisters.

‘Forbidden zone fiddlesticks! We’re going to Willesborough. These officers are convalescing and due to have physiotherapy.’

‘I don’t doubt you for a moment, ma’am, but…’

‘I should think you don’t! Count the number of officers, add their arms and legs, and divide by four and you’ll find the answer’s wrong because some have limbs missing.’

‘That won’t be necessary, ma’am, but the only hospital is the civilian one here in Ashford, so…’

‘Oh damn and blast it!’ Sister Scotland said in a burst of anger, ‘we’re opening this new place. We’re the first – staff and patients. Ruckinge Lodge it’s called. Phone somebody and check it – here, I’ll write down my hospital number.’

‘No one told me, ma’am,’ the corporal grumbled, ‘and you’ve no documents, and this is a military area. No one allowed in, civil or military, without a special pass. It’s to do with the Germans invading, you see. And it’s no good giving me that phone number; it’ll be a civil number. It’s London, too, and I ain’t paying for no calls.’

‘The invasion hasn’t actually started, has it?’

‘No, ma’am, and there’s no call to adopt that attitude.’

Yorke leaned forward. ‘Corporal, you know as you go out of Ashford on the Folkestone road there’s a big house with tall brick chimneys that lies back on the left, almost hidden by the beech trees?’

‘With the sort of gatehouse beside the drive, sir?’

‘Yes. The gatehouse has diamond panes in the windows.’

‘I know it, sir.’

‘That’s where we’re supposed to be going. It’s only three or four miles. Why don’t you lead us there with your motorbike. Then you can confirm that we’re expected.’

‘Oh I could do that, sir. I noticed they had builders and removal vans there, bringing in beds and things. That was a week or so ago.’

‘Yes, converting it. It’s going to be an annexe of St Stephen’s Hospital, in London.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be comfortable, sir. It’s a nice house. Bit cold, I expect; them places is usually draughty. Just right for an ’ospital. Mind you, though,’ he said with a sideways glance at Sister Scotland as he climbed out of the bus, ‘‘ospitals depend on the matrons.’

Sister Scotland’s snort of annoyance was partly offset by her sudden promotion, and she looked suspiciously at Yorke. ‘You seem to know this area.’

Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anything that gets us moving. The heating seems to die the minute the bus stops.’

Clare sat on top of the five-barred gate, a picture from a fashion magazine, in a speckled grey tweed suit and black brogues, and as he leaned against it, looking across the rolling fields towards the smooth green folds flecked with white chalk forming the North Downs beyond, she said: ‘Now tell me about the medal, and how you hurt your arm.’

‘How did you know the columns of Bernini’s baldacchino spiral the other way?’

She looked puzzled for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean the twisted stocking. Well, I’ve been to St Peter’s. Before the war.’

‘Obviously! But you were wrong; they spiral clockwise.’

‘Probably. I was contradicting you because I was angry.’

‘Angry? What on earth for?’

‘No girl likes to be told her stocking seam is crooked. Not in front of all those men.’

‘But I was only teasing.’

‘I know, but I’d been on duty all night – and…’

‘And you forgot that at least one of those men at five o’clock in the morning was sufficiently interested in your legs to notice a crooked seam!’

‘Men are always interested in sex.’

‘Not before dawn in a hospital ward after a night’s bombing.’

‘My husband always…’

She broke off and he waited for her to continue, but she ran her hands through her hair and jumped down, smoothing her skirt and twisting her hips to check the seams of the thick, light grey knitted stockings. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s walk.’

Her husband – her late husband, rather – always what?

A blackbird raced along the far side of the hedgerow, raising the alarm, setting the tail of a distant magpie twitching as it pecked at the grass, and starting a plover cartwheeling in the air with its plaintive ‘pee-wit’. A gust of wind whipped up an eddy of brown leaves and across the fields towards Ashford a siren began wailing on the same note and finally died after a minute or two.

‘The all clear,’ Clare commented. ‘I didn’t hear the warning.’

‘The wind’s changed. It carries the sound now.’

‘You’ve changed, too,’ she said quietly, taking his hand as they walked.

‘I’ve grown older,’ he joked, worried at the tone of her voice.

‘No, in the last few moments. When I mentioned my husband.’

‘Is that surprising?’

‘Yes,’ she said in her direct way, ‘you’re simply going for a walk with Nurse Exton, one of the war’s widows. She mentioned – or was going to, anyway – her husband.’

‘I’m jealous,’ Yorke said bluntly. He was conscious that he was wearing old grey flannel trousers, now mud-stained, and a white rollneck jersey that was shapeless, and his left arm was cocked up awkwardly in the sling so that walking was difficult, his body feeling twisted and clumsy. He pictured the smart RAF uniform, wings, the jaunty cap, the wearer slim and moving gracefully, no mark or blemish on him; no distorted arm, no hand that looked as though it had been put through a mincing machine. She would have a framed photograph in her room, probably more than one, and each with some loving message written across the corner.

‘You might well be,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘He was the complete opposite of you.’

They walked another fifty yards in silence except for their shoes occasionally grating on a piece of gravel, before, gripping his hand a little tighter, she said: ‘He was taller, with curly blond hair. He had a mouth that women dreamed of, and a laugh that bubbled. He wasn’t a serious old stick like you. He lived for flying. Died for it, too, three years ago.’

And, Yorke thought to himself, it would be just my luck that I fall in love with his widow and so many years after the crash I find myself walking along a country lane with my head and heart full of romantic ideas, and this bloody flier appears between us like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

‘Are you Mrs or Miss Exton?’ he asked and for a reason he could not understand found himself dreading the answer.

‘Miss. It’s my maiden name. He was called Brown. Mundane. He hated it.’

Another fifty yards. Whoever owned this land had the hedger and ditcher at work early in the season, ready for the winter’s rain. The amount of chalk in the soil – washed down over the centuries from the Downs – was shown by that warren, where rabbits had dug white streaks from the topsoil of yellow clay. Stop talking about the husband, he told himself; do not stir up memories or provoke comparisons.

‘You shouldn’t be jealous,’ she said, almost in a whisper, as though talking to herself.

‘I know; it’s a corrosive feeling. I’m ashamed of myself, but I feel it, and that’s…’

‘He’s dead; there’s nothing to be jealous of.’