Hydroplanes – fore ’planes and after ’planes – to all intents and purposes horizontal and barely shifting: depth-gauge needle
flickering at 29 feet, bubble in the spirit-level one degree aft of centre.
Twenty-eight and a half feet: twenty-eight. Hart easing a few degrees of ‘rise’ off his fore ’planes. McLeod said, ‘Twenty-eight
feet, sir.’
‘You’ve got her well trained, Number One.’
‘Eats out of my hand, sir.’
It was as good as you’d get it anyway. One man coming aft from the fore ends now would be enough to upset it slightly, and
if they’d been remaining submerged, all hands moving from diving stations to the routine state of ‘watch diving’ – one-third
of them on watch, the rest with their heads down or playing Uckers, Cribbage, or whatever – the trim would be thrown out completely;
whoever was taking over as officer of the watch would speed up enough to hold her close to the ordered depth until he’d got
things back under control.
McLeod suggested, ‘Want to tell ’em what we’re doing, sir?’
It was a good idea – the right moment for it too, having
some peace and quiet, which presently on the surface with the diesels hammering away you wouldn’t have. ‘Yes.’ Mike took the
microphone of the Tannoy broadcast system from its hook on the deckhead and tested it for sound. Then – ‘D’you hear, there?
If you don’t, get closer to a speaker. Listen – we’ve had darned little harbour-time, I know – sorry, fact is they want us
out there on the billet. Had an easy enough time of it swanning around Haifa, Port Said and Alex, haven’t we. And there’s
sound reason to be getting on with it now – Rommel on the Egyptian frontier – right? The more of his supplies we can deprive
him of, better chance the Eighth Army has of reversing that situation. OK, that’s nothing new, only happens to be about twice
as urgent – hence the rush to get us out … So – our billet’s off Palermo on Sicily’s north coast – as you’ll no doubt have
heard. Means getting under the Marettimo–Cape Bon minefield – which we’ve done so often she’d practically find her own way
under the bloody things if she had to.’ He took a breath. ‘And – well, surfacing now, three and a half hours at ten knots,
we’ll dive on the watch at 0430. Dived all day then, spend tomorrow night getting the box up for the minefield passage, should
be on the billet first thing Friday.’
Looking around as he spoke – never all that keen on his own voice droning on – across the compartment he was face to face
with CERA McIver. The Chief as he was known having no doubt been there all the time – one of the others must have moved sideways,
as it were exposing him where he stood close to Ellery the Outside ERA, in
his
usual position at the diving panel. McIver being the best part of a foot shorter than Ellery – shorter than most, in fact
– and dark-visaged, angry-looking – a permanent anger at being so close to the ground or deck-level? He and Ellery – who’d
worked for the Austin Motor Company, at one time – were both extremely competent, and McIver was a highly efficient
chief engineer. Still there and glaring as Mike finished with, ‘Likely targets – toss-up, obviously, but anything southbound,
aiming to get round that end of Sicily – on its way to Tripoli for instance.’ He shrugged – ‘Just hope our luck’s still running,
uh?’
He switched off, hung the mike on its hook close to the trimming-order telegraph, and moved towards the big periscope – for’ard
one – glancing at Ellery whose reaction was as always instant, bringing the glistening brass tube rushing up, shiny with grease
and salt-water droplets, rivulets … Dark up there for sure, but it was routine and essential to take a pre-surfacing look around:
even in pitch blackness you
might
catch sight of the white flare of an enemy’s bow-wave, if there happened to be one and asdics for some reason hadn’t picked
it up. Mike throwing a glance at Fraser the asdic man – HSD, Higher Submarine Detector – as the periscope rose into his hands,
‘Anything?’
Shake of the yellow head. ‘Only the sweeper, sir – on oh-two-five, seven hundred yards, low revs.’
He found
Hebe
visually on that bearing, then made a circle with the ’scope in low-power first, then high, and found nothing else. As with
Hebe
in company one might have known there wouldn’t be. Belt
and
braces, though … He pushed the big ’scope’s handles up, and Ellery depressed the lever that sent it down, telemotor pressure
achieving that. Mike nodded to McLeod. ‘Stand by to surface.’
‘Check main vents …’
En route
, now, on one’s own. Course 315 degrees, revs for ten knots but making about nine, diesel generators rumbling steadily, replacing
amperes the motors were devouring.
Ursa
at half-buoyancy with ‘Q’ quick-diving tank, just for’ard of her centre of gravity, filled to its capacity of ten tons. With
‘Q’ to help her down, she could be under in less than fifteen
seconds – performing what journalists and script-writers liked to refer to as a ‘crash dive’.
Jarvis had the watch until 0215. On Mike’s left, bulky in sweater and weather-proof Ursula jacket, hunched in the bridge’s
port for’ard corner with binoculars at his eyes. Lookouts – Parker and another – further aft, one on each side of the after
periscope standard, also with binoculars, searching their own sectors of the dark, lazily heaving seascape. Lookouts were relieved
on the hour, officers of the watch at a quarter past – to reduce traffic in the tower and hatches and an overcrowded bridge,
also to ensure there was always at least one pair of eyes up here adjusted to night vision.
Visibility wasn’t bad. No moon, but a sky full of stars and very little cloud to hide them, wind no more than the Beaufort
scale category of ‘light airs’.
Ursa
pitching rhythmically as she drove across and through the swells, black Med surface broken only where her stem carved into
it, whiteness rolling away left and right and flooding aft over her pressure-hull inside the casing, wake broadening astern
where it fizzed away to nothing. Steady throbbing of the engines – audible to surface craft at maybe a thousand yards? Malta
hidden in the night five miles to port, to be succeeded during the next hour by the smaller islands of Comino and Gozo at
ranges of more like eight. Sicily – Cape Scalambri – forty miles due north.
Time to go down, anyway, leave it all to Jarvis.
‘All right, Sub?’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Call me for anything at all.
Dive
, for anything.’
He’d probably have given his sub-lieutenants that instruction several hundred times, he realised. They’d both, after all,
earned their watchkeeping certificates seemingly so
very
recently. In fact, casting one’s mind back, during the workup period back home – in Scottish waters mainly – and a
single work-up patrol off Norway, then the passage out, a week in Gib and a blank patrol from there off the French south coast,
aimed at giving a new boat and its crew some initial Med experience. Admittedly neither of them had been
entirely
green when they’d joined him and
Ursa
in Chatham dockyard, they’d both put in at least
some
sea-time – in surface ships – before completing the submarine course at Blyth. And since then of course, on top of that period
of what might be thought of as an extension of basic training, the real thing – sixteen patrols of it, some of them quite
memorable, in conditions as tough as submariners had ever known.
Might say that made them veterans?
Might. Even in one’s own somewhat rigorous view of it – stemming from long-term
total
responsibility as well as the isolation which in the function of command in stringent war conditions was inescapable. Plus
maybe a tendency still to see them as one had a year and a half ago in that builder’s yard – one trainee stockbroker from
Colchester or thereabouts, and one former Merchant Navy cadet – Bristolian – then so recently promoted from midshipman to
sub-lieutenant that you could still see where the blue patches of an RNR snottie had decorated the lapels of his reefer jacket.
It was a fact they’d both come through it all very well. Climbing slowly down through the tower, telling himself
So give the poor sods a break
.
Meaning, effectively, give
oneself
a break?
Which was not to say
relax
, exactly. Nor in fact that there could be any harm in telling them
Call me for anything, dive for anything
– basically a reminder that it was better to dive for a seagull than stay up and be bombed or strafed with cannon-fire.
In the control room now, off the ladder and out of the furious rush of wind the diesels were sucking in; taking in at a glance
that it was Leading Torpedoman Brooks on the
wheel, Ordinary Seaman Sharp control-room messenger – Sharp being a newish member of this crew, actually an SD, asdic rating,
back-up to Fraser – although it was ERA Coldwell taking his ease on the asdic stool, cigarette in the fingers of one hand,
tin mug in the other.
‘Kye, sir?’
Hector Bull, PO of the watch. Pudding face – blunt nose, round chin – eyes questioning, with this offer of pusser’s cocoa.
Mike nodded, on his way to the chart table – to check the log, chart and whatever he’d noted in his night order book. ‘Nice
idea, Bull. Thanks.’
No problems here. Starting-point off Tigne Head where they’d surfaced within a few minutes of 0100 to start the thirty-five-mile
run northwestward, hourly positions marked along the pencil track and culminating in the projected 0430 diving position: sunrise
in fact nearer 0500, but false dawn putting a shine on the surface well before that. Danvers would have his head down now,
would be shaken for his watch at 0200 and when relieved by McLeod at 0415 would have a quarter of an hour for starsights –
if he found he had a usable horizon at that time.
‘Thank you, Bull. All well with your lot?’
‘All hunky-dory, sir, thank you.’
Home-town Cardiff, a fiancée who was a WAAF, two brothers at sea in the Merchant Navy – which by all one heard was
not
having anything like a hunky-dory time of it.
McLeod was at the wardroom table reading an Edgar Wallace thriller;Mike having removed his Ursula jacket joined him with his
mug of kye. ‘Thought you’d have crashed it, James.’
Meaning got his head down. McLeod nodded. ‘Will do in a jiffy, sir. Thought I’d just read one chapter.’ A shrug. ‘Plenty of
zizz-time between here and Marettimo, touch wood.’
If they were left to themselves, there would be. In fact any interruptions were most likely to be encountered tonight or tomorrow
night. When you went deep for the QBB minefield, its borders extending from Marettimo to Cape Bon, thence down the Tunisian
coastline to Hammamet and from there via Pantellaria to Cape San Marco, you were to all intents and purposes going into oblivion
for as much as fourteen or fifteen hours – neither expecting interference nor thinking about mines. They were
there
, allegedly several thousand of them, but you’d be simply minding your own business, passing under them in the course of getting
from A to B.
Thinking
about the bloody things didn’t help. As McLeod had observed, it was ‘zizz-time’ when off-watch, dreamland while the hours
crawled by.
He’d smoked most of a cigarette and about finished his kye when McLeod shut his book. ‘Pretty good cock, but somehow holds
one.’
‘Courtesy of Eleanor again?’
‘Well, yes. Small private library she uses.’
‘In all that schemozzle you found time to see her.’
‘Spoke briefly on the blower, was all. She’d left this for me – knew we were coming in, so –’
‘Well.’A smile, more or less congratulatory. Eleanor Kingsley was a 3rd Officer WRNS, a redhead with a lot going for her. She
worked in the Combined Services HQ in Valetta and was a frequent visitor to Lazaretto. Mike sent smoke pluming at the lamp
that swung gently above the table: ‘Lucky man, Jamie.’
‘Competition’s fierce enough, I may say.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Ah. Well.’ A shrug. ‘Turn in now, anyway.’
‘Give me a shake, will you, before you go up at four?’
‘Aye, sir. Incidentally, did I hear right, you mentioning a new boat joining us shortly, named
Unsung
?’
He nodded. ‘CO’s Charles Melhuish – know him?’
‘Actually, I
have
met him – I think. Odd name though,
Unsung
?’
‘Scraping the barrel for new U-names. Yes. Pleasant enough, in its way though – slightly poetic even?’
‘Meaning uncelebrated. Unheard-of. How about
that
, though –
Unheard
?’
‘Not bad at all. Might suggest it. After all, we’ve got
Unseen
. But
Unsung
– silent service, all that?’
He’d talked about U-class names with Ann, he remembered. The second night – the Sunday, when they’d been on the tiles on their
own, and of course should not have been. November of 1940, when he’d been standing by
Ursa
’s building at Chatham, and Charles Melhuish on the point of starting his Perisher – Commanding Officers’ course – at Blockhouse.
Ann, though – it had been her suggestion, murmured into his ear in the Coconut Grove night-club, and he’d been rash enough
to respond with something like ‘Ann –
Ann
… You don’t mean it –
do
you?’Whereas he
should
have said, ‘Smashing idea, but of course we can’t. You know darn well we can’t!’ Giving reasons then, if necessary – as indeed
it
would
have been, since she certainly
had
meant it, was meaning it like nobody’s business quite suddenly on that crowded, half-dark dance floor – smoochy saxophone,
her bare arms tight around his neck, lips actually in contact with that ear and
in general
close contact suddenly, whereas until then everything had been quite proper. At any rate reasonably, normally so – with Charles
most likely only a few feet away, dancing with Chloe, Mike’s little sister, as it happened. He’d had her with him because
some other girl hadn’t been able to make it, and in any case having her along had fitted in with other plans. That was one
reason he could have given her – given Ann – if he’d had his wits about him; the fact it was arranged that he’d
be taking Chloe up to Buckinghamshire in the morning to stay a few days with their father, who’d be bitterly disappointed
if they let him down. In the event he had been, too. In fact he
had
mentioned it to Ann, come to think of it: and might have thought better of himself if he’d told her more forthrightly, ‘Because
you’re Charles’s wife, and he’s a brother officer. We’d be
insane
!’