Ride Out The Storm (40 page)

‘
Oui
,’
she said.

At Dover, they were still trying to assess the losses of the day, balancing them against the numbers brought to safety. The news of the disasters made grim reading.

‘
Keith
,’
the SOO said, first listing the destroyers, the most precious asset of the Dover command. ‘
Foudroyant. Basilisk. Eager.
With
Ivanhoe
and
Worcester
damaged.’

He paused and the admiral lifted his head.

‘To say nothing,’ the SOO went on, ‘of the gunboat
Mosquito,
the minesweeper
Skipjack,
the tug
St Abbs. Salamander
and
Prague
also damaged,
Scotia
damaged and sinking, and
Brighton Queen
and the trawler
Jacinta
holed and stranded. Those are the ones we know about.’

He stopped to let the grim list sink in and the admiral frowned, well aware that the slaughter could not go on much longer. Up and down the roadsteads off the coast of France ships were on fire and sinking, and new wrecks littered the sandbanks all the way across the Channel.

‘Four destroyers sunk,’ he said. ‘Four damaged.’ He stared at a signal which had arrived from the Admiralty in London. ‘
Discontinuation of the use of destroyers by day off the French coast
,’
it directed, and then suggested the suspension of the evacuation at seven o’clock the following morning.

The admiral considered the problem. ‘I understand the French have formed a line behind our people,’ he said, ‘and we’re to retire through it.’ He picked up a list and studied it. ‘We must change the emphasis to night loading, and all small craft must work the beaches up to a mile and a half from the town. The harbour will be served by eight destroyers and seven personnel ships.’

The SOO frowned. ‘Some of them have been at it for a full week, sir,’ he pointed out.

The admiral was unmoved. ‘Then we must put fresh crews aboard. What’s the score for today?’

‘It’s going to be in the region of sixty thousand, sir. Most of those coming in now are French, but we’re having difficulty finding them and I understand there’s a little difficulty over language. Think we ought to put someone ashore who can speak French?’

The admiral shook his head. ‘I think they’ll have to manage now,’ he said.

Everything that would float was approaching the coast now, and odd pockets of men who had failed to get into Dunkirk were still being picked up from beaches outside the town. Small miracles were performed. Men adrift in dinghies made sails with clothing and waterproof capes, and in waterlogged engine rooms engineers stuffed holes with mattresses and stood waist-deep in water to watch their gauges. The Casino and the Kursaal were blazing now, and there were so many wrecks in the fairway by this time that boats were circling them for survivors – and sometimes finding them. Though the patient lines of men still waited along the length of the mole, ships were being hit again and again by shellfire and it was very quickly becoming clear that lifting at that point was too dangerous and the men must be turned about to file back to the beaches.

As the light increased, in the
Queen of France,
Lije Noble began to take off the lid of the engine hatch. Because no one had any matches, they’d been unable to examine it during the night. Now, in the first hours of the day, Noble stared at the old Ford engine and frowned heavily. To Gow, who was no mechanic, it looked merely like a squarish lump of metal with pipes attached.

As they peered at it, Angelet woke. The long blackringed lashes that many a girl would have given her eye-teeth for, fluttered and his head turned. His eyes fastened on his rifle lying alongside him and he snatched it to him at once and sat up.

‘
Où sommes-nous
?’
he demanded. Then he saw Gow’s face and just beyond him Noble’s and he smiled ‘
Monsieur le Sergent
,’
he said. ‘
Et Monsieur Nobelle.
’
He glanced around. ‘
Où est le caporal
?’

Gow gestured. ‘He didnae come,’ he said.

Angelet stared, uncomprehending, and Gow turned to Marie-Josephine. ‘Better tell him, Miss,’ he said. ‘You hae the French, I think.’

Marie-Josephine explained and Angelet’s big eyes blinked so that they thought he was going to burst into tears. ‘
Que faisons-nous maintenant
?’
he demanded.

‘
Nous allons en Angleterre
,’
Marie-Josephine said. ‘We’re going to England.’

‘Join the army,’ Noble said. ‘Fight the Jerries.
Killay les Boches.
’

‘Mebbe I could get y’in the Guards,’ Gow said stiffly.

Noble was staring at the silent engine again, then he swore and jumped to the petrol tank. There was a stick in the scuppers and he snatched it up and thrust it through the hole. It reappeared barely wet.

‘Oh, charming,’ he said. ‘Bloody charming!’ He kicked the side of the boat savagely. ‘Sodden old tub! The bloody fuel pipe’s come adrift!’ He gazed round him at the lifting sea. To a man born and brought up in the busy streets of London, it seemed the emptiest place in the world.

The sun was lifting above the horizon now, laying a golden pathway of sparkles towards them, and Gow squinted into it, frowning heavily, his face tense with concentration.

‘There’s a big launch yonder,’ he said slowly, gesturing with a bony white hand. ‘She’s drifting and she looks empty, and she has what look like cans o’ petrol on her deck. Mebbe we could get her to go.’

Noble lifted his head from where he was trying to attach the fuel lead. ‘How do we get to her?’ he asked. ‘We ain’t got no engine.’

Angelet spoke to Marie Josephine who turned to Gow. ‘The soldier Angelet say he can swim,’ she said. ‘He say he will swim to discover if the other boat has the motor which will march.’

Angelet had already stripped off his tunic and trousers and stood stark naked in front of them, slim as a willow wand and just as white. Gow looked at him disapprovingly but Marie-Josephine, being French, didn’t seem to find it at all odd.

As he’d said, Angelet was a good swimmer and they watched him pull himself with strong strokes through the water to the big cabin cruiser whose sides were riddled with bullet- and splinter-holes. Hauling himself on board, he disappeared from sight. Eventually he reappeared and began collecting heaving lines and mooring ropes which he tied together. Then, carefully paying them out into the sea, he dived overboard and began to swim back, holding the end. As they dragged him on board, he gasped out his story.

‘He say there are two men,’ Marie-Josephine translated. ‘One is dead and one is broken–’ she touched her shoulder ‘–here.’

Angelet had started pulling energetically at the rope and the distance between the two boats was already diminishing. Gow looked at him, frowning.

‘F’r God’s sake,’ he said severely,’ ‘tell him tae put his troos on.’

As they bumped alongside
Athelstan,
Tremenheere was still lying on the well deck. His face was grey and drawn and he was clutching his arm to his chest. It had taken half the night to get it there.

‘Is yon petrol?’ Gow asked, indicating the cans on the deck that they had taken from the drifting cutter – years ago now, it seemed.

Tremenheere nodded. ‘I tried to tell your mate but he didn’t seem to catch on.’

‘He’s French,’ Gow said.

‘Oh!’ Tremenheere blinked at Angelet’s nakedness. ‘It didn’t show.’

With Gow tearing sheets from the cabin into strips, Marie-Josephine gently secured Tremenheere’s arm into position against his body. His face was wet with sweat when she’d finished but he lifted his good arm and rearranged the medals hanging from his lapel so that they were not obscured by the sling. ‘Thanks,’ he whispered.

Noble, who was staring into the engine room, turned his head. ‘This bugger’s not going to get us home,’ he said quietly. ‘I think she’s sinking.’

‘Too right she is, me dear,’ Tremenheere said weakly. ‘She’ll go any time.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Noble scrambled to his feet in alarm and they hurriedly helped Tremenheere to the
Queen of France
and hefted the petrol cans across. By the time they’d finished,
Athelstan
was down by the bows and seemed to be going faster all the time.

‘Better let go,’ Tremenheere whispered, ‘or she’ll take us with her.’

Noble jumped forward. But the knot he’d tied was no sailor’s invention and it wouldn’t give.

‘There’s a knife in my pocket,’ Tremenheere said.

It was Gow who snatched it and sliced through the ropes. As they parted with a twang,
Athelstan
rolled over as though she were tired. The stern came up so that they could see the propeller. A length of grass line was twisted round it, jammed by the turning blades until it was as hard as steel.

‘I thought there was something,’ Tremenheere murmured.

It was as they got going again and swung in a wide sweep towards the east to avoid a mat of wreckage that they saw the figure clinging to the buoy. It was Gow who saw it first.

‘Yon feller’s alive,’ he observed. ‘We’d best pick him up.’

‘I’m not so bloody sure we can,’ Noble said, struggling with the tiller.

‘Mon, you just point the nose towards him.’ Gow’s experience of boat handling was confined to rowing on the Serpentine but to him everything was simple, whether it was driving a car or steering a boat or killing Germans. You just did it.

They tried without success, swinging round the weakly waving figure, frustrated in their efforts to draw near.

‘Go up-tide, me dear,’ Tremenheere suggested gently.

This time they were more successful but the boat’s bow hit the buoy so hard the figure fell off into the water, and it was Marie-Josephine who snatched up the boathook and held it out. The man just managed to grab it as he drifted past.

‘Hatton,’ he whispered as they hauled him aboard. ‘Sub-lieutenant.
Vital.
’

‘You hurt anywhere, mate?’ Noble asked.

Hatton raised his eyes to the four faces staring down at him.

They were blurred by his own exhaustion. ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘But not so’s you’d notice.’

Gow frowned. ‘Ye’ll be a wee bit tired, mebbe?’ he said and Hatton almost laughed. It seemed to be the understatement of the year.

The
Queen of France
was chugging steadily through the wreckage now, picking her way through the bodies and the floating debris, and they thought they were safe when the aeroplanes came over again.

Gow immediately sprang to the Bren and hoisted it up against the angle of the built-in foredeck, but he got in no more than two or three bursts before the planes swept past towards the shore. As he dropped the gun and peered after them, one of them began to send out puffs of smoke from its starboard engine and curved away in a flat bank, losing height all the time. They saw it crash into the sea about a mile away.

Gow’s white face cracked in a bleak smile. ‘I got one,’ he said.

Since the destroyers and minesweepers had also been banging away and were a lot nearer than Gow, it didn’t seem to Lije Noble for a minute that it was Gow who had brought the plane down, but, as he carried the Bren over his shoulder all the way from the frontier, Noble felt he deserved some reward.

‘Yes,
mon fils
,’
he said in a flat voice. ‘Good shot!’

Gow was turning to Marie-Josephine, as though expecting her to add her mead of praise, when she pointed excitedly. Just ahead of them was a small boat with two men in it. They seemed to have no oar and one of the figures started waving. Noble shut off the engine, waiting to see which way the tide was carrying them, then he swung the heavy rudder and manoeuvred the boat round.

‘I’m getting the hang of this thing now,’ he said proudly. ‘I reckon I’ll transfer to the navy when we get ’ome.’

Glad to see the back of the tiny pram, Horndorff scrambled gratefully to the
Queen of France.
There was a man asleep in the bottom of the boat whom he at first thought dead, and he moved stiffly past him to the bow and sat down. Conybeare followed him, the Luger still tucked into his trouser top.

Noble watched them. The bruise over Conybeare’s eye was every colour of the rainbow now and his eye was almost closed. He looked exactly like the illustrations for
Just William.

‘You any good with one of these things, sir?’ Noble asked.

‘Not really.’ Conybeare said.

Horndorff turned, his eyebrows raised. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘I have found something you cannot do.’

He turned his back and gazed stiffly out to sea and Noble stared at him. ‘He all right?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Conybeare said. ‘He’s all right.’