Decoy (17 page)

‘Evenin’, Mr Harding,’ Painter said as he came on to the port side of the bridge and greeting the Chief Officer. ‘About ready, eh?’

Harding, a burly man of perhaps fifty, deliberate in his movements and slow of speech, who gave the impression of enormous reliability but no imagination, dug below the folds of his duffel coat and brought out what looked to Ned like an enormous hunter. He pressed the knob at the top of the winding stem and the solid front hinged down to reveal the watch face.

‘Four minutes to go, sir,’ he announced, and replaced his watch.

‘We’ve none of your Navy loudspeaker system – what do you call it? Tannoy? – so we use the action station bells but starting with a “G” in Morse. The dash-dash-dot gets their attention and tells them it’s not actually an air, surface or submarine attack, but the regular call to action stations.’

Painter pulled his cap more firmly on to his head as he walked to the forward side of the bridge. The
City of Norwich
’s speed of sixteen knots, straight into a westerly wind of fifteen or twenty knots, meant that looking over the fore side of the bridge was like standing up in an open sports car doing more than thirty miles an hour – at twilight, a month before Christmas.

‘Glass is going down,’ Harding commented. Yes, it was a Newcastle accent, Ned decided. Usually ships’ engineers were Geordies; deck officers came from anywhere between the Orkneys and Westward Ho.

‘Hmmm…the forecasters before we left said there was a low which’d go up over Iceland.’

‘Must be passing south a bit.’

‘Maybe,’ Painter said, and turned to Ned. ‘We’ll probably run out of it by the time we reach your spot.’

Ned shrugged his shoulders and wished he was wearing his duffel coat. ‘We’ll see. As the poet said, you can break the glass, but it won’t hold up the weather.’

‘Aye, that’s true,’ Painter said, ‘but what if it
is
blowing a gale when we reach your spot?’

‘If you can heave-to and give us enough of a lee to launch the boat, we’ll go.’

‘But if we can’t,’ Painter persisted.

Ned grinned to soften his words. ‘If this ship was torpedoed, you wouldn’t have any choice.’

‘Touch wood while you’re saying something that that!’ Painter exclaimed. ‘But he’s right, isn’t he, Mr Harding.’

‘Aye, he’s right,’ Harding said. ‘Not that I trust those boats. Nothing approved and required by the Board of Trade – the Ministry of War Transport, rather, though a tatty leopard can’t change its spots – is any good. Ha!’ he snorted, ‘d’you remember that last Ministry fellow we had on board?’

‘Straight off the boards of a music hall, he was,’ Painter told Ned. ‘Anyway, he had to inspect the lifeboats. We got the covers off for him. He climbs into the first one – and he loses his bowler hat, which the wind blows over the side into the Queen’s Dock, Liverpool. Bald as a badger, he was, so we find him a knitted balaclava. Then, getting out of that first boat, he rips the seat of his trousers – the seam split, so he’s strutting round with a balaclava on his top and his bottom hanging out. Then he complained he couldn’t find the bung, didn’t he, Mr Harding?’

‘Aye, he did that and I waited until he’d brushed himself down and someone found some safety pins for his split trousers, and then I led him back into the lifeboat and showed him the bung stowed just where the Ministry of War Transport regulations said.’

Painter returned to his original question. ‘You’ll embark in the boat more or less whatever the conditions, even if it’s going to get worse?’

Ned considered carefully, because it was a good seamanlike question and (although Painter did not know it) really boiled down to how important it was that the lifeboat be launched at the exact latitude and longitude they had decided on back in the Citadel. That was after poring over the ASIU charts and looking at the Trade and Operations plots, seeing where the heaviest sinkings were and where the U-boats seemed to be most heavily concentrated. Or, rather, where they had been until the Blackout started.

Yet Ned remembered how they had grouped round the chart in ASIU, Captain Watts, Jemmy, the Croupier and himself. One of them had jabbed a finger down here, another favoured there… In the end they decided that there was a great square in the Atlantic, probably 800 miles from east to west, and 400 miles from north to south, which was agreed to be ‘most favourable’. They picked on a latitude and longitude exactly in the middle.

The rest of the box stretched away to the west of them, so they had about 400 miles of westing in reserve: the
City of Norwich
could steam for a day and night after passing their chosen position before she passed the western end of the ‘most favourable’ area. If it was blowing a full gale at the chosen spot – they could wait twenty-four hours, particularly since the ship would probably have reduced speed considerably because of heavy seas heading her. In twenty-four hours the centre of the low should have moved nearly 700 miles or so, since ship and low would be approaching each other at a combined speed approaching thirty knots and the weather would be improving. Damn, it was cold standing out here on the open bridge, but Painter knew better than to discuss this sort of thing in the wheelhouse, where the quartermaster at the wheel, being human, would be listening.

‘It’s very hospitable of you not to want us to go, Captain! The position I’ve given you is the ideal one for our purpose, but if it is blowing too hard, we can move it four or five hundred miles westward. No more, though.’

‘Ah, that should find a clearance in the weather. Or at least save you a couple of very uncomfortable days during which, whatever you’re
supposed
to be doing, I’m dam’ sure you
couldn’t
!’

Harding nodded his head vigorously. ‘In those kind of conditions, Commander, I can tell you that you’re rowing for your lives like madmen just to keep the boat heading into the seas. Get beam-on and you broach. Only takes a few seconds, and then it’s all over: you get washed out, the boat is gunwales under or upside-down, and away you drift in your useless Ministry of War Transport lifejackets, and you die of exposure or you drown because you don’t have the strength to keep your head up out of the water.’

‘The Mate should know,’ Painter said. ‘He was in one of our sister ships, the
City of Winchester
, when she was hit by two torpedoes last year.’

‘Any tips?’ Ned asked Harding.

‘Watch the men rowing. A good man will keep rowing until he collapses exhausted – and then he lets go of the oar. Double-bank if necessary. The inboard man can be resting as he sits on the thwart, and all he has to do is keep a couple of hands on the loom of the oar, so when the outboard chap passes out, the oar isn’t lost.

‘Keep the chaps cheerful, obviously. If there’s a lot of spray there’s no point in bailing out the boat all the time: every quarter or half an hour. Better to sit with the water swilling around your feet a bit than have half a dozen men sloshing away with bailers like kids on the beach. If anyone is wearing boots – rubber Wellingtons, half-boots, mess boots, call ’em what you will – watch the feet: they swell and then it’s damn difficult cutting boots free without drawing blood. Jacket sleeves wet at the cuffs: they chafe the skin and start salt water boils. Roll-neck wool jerseys do the same round the neck, so cut ’em into a V. That’s about all. Watch for the moaner!’

‘The moaner?’

‘Yes, there’s usually at least one man in a crowd – rabble-rouser, union shop steward, Bolshie, sea lawyer, Trotskyite, radical person, call him what you will – that starts making trouble. Argues about the water ration, length of the spells at the oars, any wretched thing he can turn into a grievance. Jump on him quick – not
too
quick though, because sometimes the other men shut him up, and save you the trouble.’

Ned thanked the Mate. There was good advice in what he had just said, information learned at first hand. Obviously just surviving in bad weather was a full-time occupation for survivors, he thought grimly, without the added task they had been given! And at least he did not think any of his picked men would turn out to be moaners.

Harding looked at his watch again, glanced round the horizon and walked to the forward side of the bridge, jabbing the heavy metal button that sounded action stations throughout the ship, shrill bells which, Ned knew only too well, scared the wits out of you even before the enemy put in an appearance.

Dash-dash-dot: the Morse letter ‘G’, indicating that what followed was routine, not emergency. Action stations, and the bells sounded through the ship, fast and urgent. Almost at once doors slammed, the switches automatically shutting off the lights before they swung open, and he could imagine cursing men pulling on duffel coats and grabbing lifejackets and steel helmets before running to their action stations.

Several were coming up the ladder to the bridge, dodging round Painter and Harding to get to the square box at the end of the bridge, overhanging the sea and containing the two Hotchkiss machine guns. With an ease obviously coming from long practice, they unlaced the canvas cover and pulled it off the guns. While one folded it and put it in a corner out of the way, another man pulled a heavy leather belt round himself, grasped the pistol grips of the two machine guns, and leaned back against the belt. At the same time the first man checked the belts of ammunition.

Both said something to the third man: Yorke guessed it meant that they were ready.

Hotchkiss…there must have been a great store of them somewhere, relics of the First World War, because most British merchant ships seemed to be armed with them. They were reliable guns and, like most (except the ubiquitous Lewis, which was without peer), worked well apart from one nasty trick. The Hotchkiss’ trick was that the lever putting the action on Safe or Repeat (when the gun fired a single shot each time the trigger was squeezed), or Automatic, was at the end of the breech. The sequence was anticlockwise as you faced it, Safe, Automatic and then Repeat, which meant that in a rush, or in the dark, it was easy when slapping the lever across from Safe to Automatic to go one click too far so it stopped at Repeat. This meant in turn that as the gunner (nestling against the leather belt, a hand on each of the butts, an index finger round each trigger and tracking the target) squeezed the triggers, instead of a stream of fire, each gun fired one round; a defiant ‘bang-bang’ of Repeat instead of the tearing calico, racing belts and metallic clicking of ejected cartridges of the guns firing on Automatic. The gunner’s curse as he wrenched the two levers back to Automatic usually indicated that he could no longer track the target, which was most likely to be a diving bomber. Ned reflected that strangers listening to merchant ship gunners might well wonder why they had never previously heard of an arms manufacturer called ‘Soddinotchkiss’, the name by which the guns came to be called. This became almost as much part of the nautical vocabulary as ‘tramsmash’, the usual description of tomato ketchup when asking someone farther along the table to pass it, or ‘slide’, the more usual word for butter or margarine.

Ned looked round the horizon. Astern it was already nearly dark; ahead, to the westward, the sky was still light. He then looked at his watch, comparing the time with sunset.

Captain Painter seemed to read his thoughts. ‘We’re a touch late, eh, Commander?’

‘Ten or fifteen minutes later than we’re accustomed to do it in the RN,’ Ned said tactfully, ‘particularly since you haven’t zigzagged for twenty minutes or so.’

‘That’s a good point. Mr Harding, make a note that we go to action stations a quarter of an hour earlier, and are we following the zigzag diagram from the book?’

‘Yes, sir: number seven. It’s one with short legs to the south-west and longer legs to the north-west, so we increase our northing and westing.’

‘Ah yes, of course.’

‘But I agree with the Commander,’ Harding said. ‘I’m glad we’ll be going to action stations earlier: I’ve often felt we left it a bit late.’

‘But you didn’t mention it because you were too shy,’ Painter said sarcastically, although with no malice in his voice.

‘See a grey goose at a mile,’ Ned said suddenly, and was as startled as if someone else had spoken.

‘What’s that?’ Painter asked.

An embarrassed Ned searched his memory. ‘I read somewhere that in Nelson’s day – perhaps even earlier – the lookouts at dawn were sent aloft, and brought down on deck again at night, when they reckoned they could see a grey goose at a mile.’

‘Good enough yardstick,’ Harding commented.

‘Old naval family, yours?’ Painter enquired, obviously interested.

‘Seafaring, if not always Royal Navy.’

‘Some pirates back there hanging from the family tree, eh?’

Ned laughed at the allusion, which was almost correct. ‘A buccaneer or two in Jamaica before Henry Morgan’s day.’

‘Buccaneer, pirate – what’s the difference?’

‘Quite a lot, particularly if your eighth great-grandfather was a buccaneer,’ Ned said lightly. ‘I’d happily own up to a pirate, if we’d had one in the family, but the best we can do is a buccaneer – with the same name and nickname as myself.’

‘What’s that, then?’

‘He was Edward Yorke but, like me, usually known as “Ned”.’

‘Ned Yorke…Ned York…’ Painter repeated. ‘Wait a minute, I’ve read about him.’

Harding chuckled happily. ‘Raided Portobello, didn’t he? Captured so many Spanish pieces of eight that when he got back to Jamaica, they made them the official currency. And he’s an ancestor of yours, by gum!’

‘With respect, Commander,’ Painter said, ‘what’s the real difference – what
was
the real difference,’ he corrected himself, ‘between a buccaneer and a pirate?’

‘In spirit I doubt if there was much,’ Ned explained, ‘but legally a great deal. Think of the buccaneer of my eighth great-grandfather’s day as being the equivalent of the privateer of Nelson’s day.’

‘Oh, I get it: he had a sort of licence to capture enemy ships!’ Painter exclaimed.

‘Exactly. My forebear (and the rest of the buccaneers whom at one time he led) had a commission signed by the Governor of Jamaica allowing him to make war against the Spaniards, using his own ship.