So were torpedoes — to me!
I waved the drooping sandwich at him, ‘Maybe you’d like me to send Mister Brannigan below for a deck-chair, Conway?’
He jerked as his mind came back to 1941. ‘Thanky… er… No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.’
I looked grimly disapproving. ‘Just remember where you are, lad. This is the bridge of a ship in a war zone — not the aquarium at Blackpool.’
He nodded silently. I noticed the big eyes under the drooping lock of fair hair and tried to smile a little more reassuringly. He was shaping up to be a good lad one day, but good lads got killed just as often as bad ones in a war at sea.
‘Flying fish will be there ten, twenty years from now for you to watch, Conway. If you miss one you’ll see the next. But torpedoes…? They’re different! You only get one chance to sight them and, if you do, and God’s in an expansive mood, then you might, just might, get enough time to put your helm hard over and…’
But it seemed He wasn’t feeling so tolerant that morning. The column of dirty, yellow-stained water seemed to climb ever so slowly up the side of the Commandant Joffre, just abaft her tall, wire-stayed funnel. Nervous reflex made me bite another half moon out of the sandwich as I watched the spray reach its zenith and hang, suspended momentarily like a slow motion shot from some old film. It was a silent film, too, for a few eternal seconds. Nothing seemed to mar the noiseless passage of the four ships through the whispering sea, yet I knew that great mushroom of atomised water just shouldn’t be there. Then the clap of the explosion rumbled across the thousand-yard gap and the Frenchman’s funnel jetted a high spurt of white steam as she started to swing broadside, out of control, right across the bows of Athenian.
I didn’t wait to see any more.
My deck shoes pounded across the coir matting of the wheelhouse as I threw myself at the telegraphs. The brass handles felt surprisingly cold as I grasped them and, swinging them fore and aft, gave two rings for ‘Full ahead both.’ This was our emergency full speed warning and, while perhaps I should have waited for Mallard’s instructions, I wasn’t going to leave room for regrets while I sat on a wet backside in a lifeboat— if I ever made it to one in the first place.
Before the answering jangle had come from below I was slamming my palm against the engine room phone buzzer. I heard the metallic clack as it was ripped off its hook sixty feet below me. ‘Engine room! Second speaking!’
The shocked white face of the quartermaster at the wheel stared at me as I answered, ‘The Mate here. I want full revolutions immediately, Bert. Open her right up. Check?’
The voice sounded tinny and distant. ‘Aye, aye, John… was that a torpedo, f’r Christ’s sake?’
I nodded at the phone, ‘The Froggie.’
‘We guessed as much, it seemed to come from the starboard quarter.’
I wasn’t surprised they’d heard it, an explosion like that must have sounded to the white boiler-suited men below like being in a metal dustbin when someone was hitting it with cymbals. It wasn’t the time for chat, though. ‘I want you standing-by on the platform for manoeuvring down there, Second.’
‘I’ll adjust the governors…’
I slammed the hand set down with a crash and blew down the voice pipe to the Old Man’s quarters while, under my feet, I could feel the vibration increase as the engines built up the revolutions. Somewhere behind me something started to rattle irritably. Impatiently holding the brass bell of the pipe to my ear, I took a swift glance at McRae, the helmsman. He looked scared and I didn’t blame him.
‘Just keep her steady as she goes, McRae,’ I said, still waiting anxiously for the Captain to answer. ‘Be on your toes for helm orders though, we might have to do a bit of dancing.’
He smiled weakly, ‘Jus’ like at the Palais.’
I didn’t smile back; it wasn’t that funny anyway. Then the Old Man charged up the port ladder, still shedding shaving soap from a half-finished toilet like an angry dandelion in a high wind. I shoved the voice pipe back in its brass clip and stepped aside.
Captain Evans was stark naked except for his gold-braided cap — and the shaving soap. Obviously the U-boat had picked an inconvenient time to introduce itself. I suppose I must have looked a bit startled as I stared at the Old Man, noting detachedly how his red beefy face and tanned bull neck faded away into a bleached expanse of snowy skin under matted black hair. Ship’s masters never sunbathe of course, but then, neither does God, I suppose, and they are more or less on a par.
Somehow I’d never imagined Evans would shave in the nude. It seemed a bit obscene and disloyal even to think about him like that and I was glad he’d had the time to put his cap on to maintain decency, what with Brannigan and young Conway and McCrae staring at him out of the corners of their eyes. Or maybe he shaved with his hat on every day?
‘The Captain’s trousers will be in his cabin, Conway,’ I murmured discreetly as I turned to follow the Old Man’s gaze aft.
The sunlight reflecting from the water sprinkled the grey hull of the Commandant Joffre with dancing patches of light as she lay tiredly over on her side. The two deck cargo railway engines, stopped down to rails welded on her foredeck, leaned right over at a crazy angle never allowed for by their designers. It was the only length of permanent way they were ever going to settle on, and not for much longer at that judging by the way the wire lashings must have been humming under the impossible strain of arresting over one hundred tons deadweight.
The boats on her port side were the only ones they could hope to use owing to the list, and we could see a cluster of gnome-like figures mobbing round her davits, looking like orange hunchbacks in their bulky kapok life-jackets. The steam from the funnel had died to a trickle, but she was on fire round her number four hold, with the thick, oily smoke climbing almost vertically into the clear blue sky.
Suddenly I remembered Athenian, our Company sister ship, and swung quickly round, looking for her. Somehow they’d managed to shave past the careering Frenchman and there she was now, drawing up on our port quarter. The 4.7 on her poop was already manned by her D.E.M.S. crowd, and the long barrel glared wickedly, if a bit pointlessly, out over the empty, burning sea. They were really pushing hard in her engine room judging by the way the white foam belched and tumbled under her rounded counter — she was going like a bomb, to use an unfortunate phrase under the circumstances. I grinned a bit to myself, despite the tension. It reminded me of the story I’d heard last time in about the Wellington that landed with a fused thousand-pounder still stuck in her bomb bay— the truck that hurried the crew away from the scene at top speed was overtaken by an L.A.C. on a bicycle.
Athenian was a beautiful ship though, almost as smart as my own, and, as she swept up abeam of us, a figure raised a hand from her bridge. I waved back. It was Bill Henderson, her First Mate and my opposite number. We loved each other like brothers, Bill and I, apart from an occasional twinge of professional jealousy, and I hoped nothing was going to happen to the second-best ship in the Company. Not with Bill aboard her.