Ride Out The Storm (2 page)

Number Thirteen was a small detached house that contained a kitchen-living room, a sitting room that was never used, and three bedrooms, one of which was Tremenheere’s, one his landlady’s, and one her fifteen-year-old son’s. When he arrived, his landlady, Mrs Noone, after a morning at church, was belatedly making the beds and, as the door slammed, she appeared at the top of the stairs and stared suspiciously down at Tremenheere.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

It was by no means an unusual question because during normal summers he was often away with
Athelstan
and they saw each other only when he appeared to bring washing and collect clean clothes. She was three years younger than he was and had been widowed since 1930, but she’d not yet lost her good looks and between them for some time had been growing an awareness of each other that had gradually become the size of a house.

He stared up at her, then he grinned and started to march up the stairs towards her. She moved back as he reached the top step. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘You know damn’ well what I want, Nellie Noone,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t.’

But she did and they both knew she did because he’d caught her eyes on him more than once, speculative and thoughtful.

‘There’s a war on, me dear,’ he pointed out. ‘And before long we’ll all be dead. So we’d be daft to waste what time we’ve got left, wouldn’t we?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure.’

But she moved back again in front of him until she was inside the bedroom.

‘We might not be allowed to, if them Nazis win,’ he pointed out.

‘Might not be allowed to
what
?’

‘You know damn’ well what.’

She caught the gleam in his eye and, as he made a grab for her, she shrieked and scuttled round the end of the bed. ‘You randy old donkey,’ she said.

He grinned and, jumping on the bed, boots and all, ran across it to trap her by the wardrobe.

‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘Makes a man eager.’

She pushed his hands away but, as he pulled her to the bed, her struggles grew less convincing. ‘I’ve been a widow for nine years,’ she said, her voice coming in harsh little gasps as she wriggled beneath him, her legs waving. ‘What’ll the neighbours say? What’ll happen if Teddy comes home from Sunday School?’

Tremenheere kicked the door shut. ‘That’ll stop him,’ he said.

As Alban Kitchener Tremenheere and Nell Noone happily slept off their passion clutched in each other’s arms in the afternoon sun at Littlehampton, in Dover harbour nearly a hundred miles to the east, Kenneth Harry Pepper was watching a party of naval armourers fitting an ancient Lewis gun on the stern of the naval auxiliary
Daisy. Daisy
had originally been a Suffolk trawler working out of Lowestoft but the coming of the petrol engine had long since swept away her sails and now, with a topped mast and a little cabin built round the wheel, she was an ugly bald-headed vessel. Because she was solid, roomy and reliable, however, she’d recently come under naval orders, her duties to carry stores, messages and personnel to more noble ships. And since it was intended that she should, if necessary, carry them as far as the Goodwins to the north where the German hit-and-run raiders sometimes struck, she’d become entitled to a gun.

The fact that the Lewis had been rejected by everyone else as useless made no difference to Kenny Pepper. It was a gun. With a gun you could shoot Germans, and it was Kenny’s dearest wish to shoot a German. He was still only fifteen and knew nothing of war beyond what he read in boys’ magazines.

‘How do you fire it, Sy?’ he asked.

Simon Brundrett, the ship’s engineer who doubled as cook, and had been considered by the navy to be the only man likely to be capable of firing the gun, pushed him away. ‘You’re too young to worry about that,’ he said. ‘You got to be a bit older for this lark.’

‘You can be
too
bloody old,’ Kenny said.

His eagerness to see the gun was placing him in the way of the working party, and the petty-officer in charge turned.

‘Do you mind?’ he said pointedly, and Brundrett gave Kenny a shove. ‘Go on, kid,’ he said. ‘Fuck off!’

The obscenity didn’t worry Kenny. Although he was only fifteen he heard it hundreds of times every day.
Daisy
’s
crew were a rough lot and the Williams brothers, who ran her, a vulgar, bawdy, cheerful pair who used the word as naturally as drawing breath.

‘Fuck off yourself,’ Kenny retorted.

Brundrett scowled. ‘You shouldn’t be here.
Daisy
’s
a naval auxiliary now and there won’t be no room for kids.’

Kenny stared about him frustratedly. Surrounded by the backdrop of the high chalk cliffs with the ancient castle nearly four hundred feet above the town, the old Cinque Port was crammed with shipping. In the main harbour there were between forty and fifty mooring buoys all occupied by ships taking on stores. Some of the ships had been damaged trying to bring soldiers out of Ostend, Boulogne and Calais, and workmen were already at work aboard them with acetylene welders. On one of the buoys an oil tanker was berthed; on one side of her a destroyer was refuelling while on the other was an oil-burning cross-channel steamer and several pleasure boats.

Kenny knew what was going on across the Channel. He’d even heard that the Germans would soon start erecting guns at Calais to shell Dover, and it seemed to him that it wouldn’t make much difference whether he were killed at sea or within half a mile of the shabby house he called home.

‘I’m not scared,’ he said loudly. Nor was he, because he wasn’t close enough to the hospital ship across the harbour to see the frightful work the war had done on some of the men being lifted off, and the magazines he read showed conflict only in terms of glory in which none of the heroes ever seemed to get very much hurt.

He glanced again at the ships about him, aware of anger and shame. The naval armourers had almost finished now and were applying grease to the ancient gun. Privately, they’d long since decided that, with its smooth barrel, worn breech block and battered pans, anybody who could get it to fire more than a couple of rounds without it jamming was not just a good gunner, he was a bloody miracle.

Kenny stared at them for a moment, aware of a strange excitement. To hell with Brundrett, he decided. If
Daisy
went out of the harbour, he was going with her.

He glanced aft. Brundrett was bent over the gun with the naval men and there was no sign of Gilbert Williams or his brother, Ernie. So, lifting the hatch of the forepeak, he dropped quickly down among the anchor chain and the new rope that was stored there, and made himself comfortable.

‘They’ll need everybody they can get,’ he said aloud.

Unknown to Kenny Pepper, the same view exactly was held by the vice-admiral in command at Dover.

He was a man of medium size, quiet, and so unemotional he was considered by some to be rather a cold fish. Before the war he’d been regarded as a failure because, having disagreed with his last chief, he’d thrown up his appointment and had been on the retired list when the demands of the time and his unquestioned ability had brought him back. Appointed to Dover, he’d reported a devastating neglect and said coldly that the place had gone to seed, with the harbour silted up, the facilities inadequate, and the defences and communications deplorable.

His face was grave as he went about his work. The British Government had been faced with the hardest of decisions in the last few days but for the first time, under its dynamic new leader, Churchill, it was dithering no longer. Already there was a new confidence about the signals coming from London, and even the propaganda hand-outs seemed to be recognising that the British people had sufficient intelligence to face facts. The battle in France was finally being spoken of as a major disaster and the government was at last accepting its responsibilities.

Naval headquarters were set up in deep galleries hewn by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, in the cliffs below Dover Castle. The admiral’s office ended in an embrasure at the cliff face and small rooms nearby housed his secretary, flag lieutenant, chief of staff, and the staff itself. The large room beyond, which had once been used to hold an auxiliary electric plant was known as the Dynamo Room.

On that early Sunday morning, as Kenny Pepper made his decision, these offices were full of grim-faced men trying to bring some order out of the chaos. As the situation across the Channel had begun to develop, thoughts had turned naturally to removing the allied troops as the Royal Navy had done in countless earlier campaigns, from one point of contact to another. Up to four days ago nobody had been considering a panic evacuation, and Lord Gort had given instructions to his staff only to get rid of the ‘useless mouths’ of the army who filled the ground between his fighting regiments and the coast. Now, however, with the distant rumble of gunfire audible from Calais, the men in those offices at Dover all knew that this plan had already been terminated.

‘We can no longer expect an orderly evacuation,’ the admiral commented dryly. ‘We must plan for emergencies. What ships are available?’

The chief of staff began to turn over papers and no one spoke because they all knew there were already less than there had been.

‘
Keith
and
Vimy
both hit at Boulogne,’ the chief of staff was saying. ‘Both captains killed.
Venetia
hit. We don’t know yet about damage. On the other hand,
Vimiera
brought out one thousand four hundred, which seems pretty good considering all cargo handling’s ceased. The French lost
Orage, Frondeur
and
Chacal,
with
Fougueux
damaged.’

The admiral’s face was expressionless. His experience of war went back to 1903 and he was not the type to be dismayed by losses. ‘And at Calais?’ he asked.

The chief of staff frowned. ‘At Calais,’ he said, ‘we lost
Wessex,
with
Vimiera
and
Burza
damaged.’

The admiral studied the papers in front of him. His chief problem at that moment was to secure the area through which the merchantmen moving across the Channel to evacuate the troops would pass. It was going to be difficult because the Germans could already bring guns to bear on a lot of it, and they had light craft operating from Flushing, while he only had a bare flotilla of destroyers to guard the east, cover the routes, establish a protective counter-bombardment and anti-aircraft protection, and sweep the approach channels and the area round Dunkirk itself.

‘Isn’t
Vital
at Portsmouth?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. Undergoing repairs.’

The admiral nodded. ‘Draft a signal,’ he said. ‘We’ll need her.’

As the admiral’s signal started on its way,
Vital
was already struggling to get to sea, and her officers, aware of what was coming and conscious that perhaps it was their last chance for a drink, were toasting their chances in the wardroom. Nothing official had been said, and though the newspapers were still admitting nothing beyond the fact that a battle was being fought in France, in Portsmouth, with its antennae reaching out to the Admiralty, it was well known that the British army had suffered a major defeat and was now waiting for the navy to lift it off, as it had at the Dardanelles and a dozen similar operations before.

Vital
was small, weighing only just over 1,000 tons, and her armament consisted of four 4-inch guns and six torpedo tubes. She was supposed to be capable of thirty-nine knots but could do only thirty-two because she was long past her prime, and she had just returned from an up-Channel escort voyage limping badly with condenser trouble.

What was of more importance to Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant James Barry Hatton, however, was that she was thin-skinned, and not even on her bridge, where it was his duty to station himself, was there much in the way of protection.

Hatton glanced round him at the rest of the men in the wardroom – the captain, Lieutenant-Commander Neville George Hough – pronounced Huff – the torpedo officer, the navigating officer, the gunnery officer and all the others. They were all regulars except the navigating officer – who wore the twisted braid of the Reserve and came from the Merchant Service – and Hatton was the only man among them who’d not previously followed the sea for a living.

At that moment the chief engineer was making his report to the captain. Despite the gin in his hand it was urgent and forceful. ‘We’ve fixed the condenser, sir,’ he was saying, ‘but there’s a bearing that’s running warm that we ought to look at. If it got really hot, we’d have to stop engines.’

Hatton studied the chief, a square, hairy Scot called MacGillicuddy who’d come up from the ranks. His speech was thick and at meals the way he held his knife and fork wasn’t the way Hatton had been taught. Hough seemed indifferent to such faults, however, and Hatton knew it was because the chief, whatever else he might lack, had a thorough knowledge of his job.

Which was something Hatton did not possess.