The Cruel Sea (1951) Read online

  The other major snag, from his own point of view, had already shown itself: that was, her behaviour at sea. In any kind of seaway at all, Compass Rose rolled abominably: she had given an appalling demonstration of it on one of their first trips outside harbour, when, running down to the Isle of Arran in a very moderate sea which should not have bothered her at all, she had achieved a forty-degree roll and, apart from other damage sustained to movable gear below decks, had put one of her boats underwater and nearly lost it altogether. High up on the bridge, hanging on grimly while Compass Rose swung through a drunken, eighty-degree arc, Ericson had found himself wondering what it was going to be like when they met real Atlantic weather and had, perhaps, to hold their course and speed through it . . . This light-hearted frolic was not the best augury for that future.

  But that was a test which need not yet be met: and on the day when Compass Rose turned homewards after her final trials and began the smooth ran up the sheltered Firth of Clyde, Ericson was conscious only of an exhilarating satisfaction. The ship went forward at an easy ten knots, with the flood tide adding a couple more: the winter sunset, a lovely red and orange, made the bracken on the surrounding hillsides glow like fire. Moving through the still evening, parting the cold keen air with a steady thrust, the ship seemed to have a living purpose of her own, a quality of strength and competence: and Ericson found it hard to exclude from his voice, as he gave the helm orders that would lay a course through the defence boom, the eagerness that possessed him. For Compass Rose was clear: her engines and her armament were all in order: in a few days they would go north for their final working-up, and then she would be ready.

  That evening, in his cabin, Ericson signed for the ship and formally took her over from the builders. He was well content: there had been a good many flaws to start with, as was natural with a new ship of a new design, ranging from navigation lights that could not be seen, to the usual crop of weeping rivets; but one by one they had all been set right, and he could find no more to complain of. Now it was his responsibility to say so, in unmistakable terms.

  The shipyard representative, a small brisk man whose badge of office – a bowler hat – he was reluctant to part with for more than a few seconds at a time, laid the printed form of release in front of him, and after reading it through Ericson put his signature at the bottom. Then he sat back.

  That’s that,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to thank you for all you’ve done for us. It’s been a great help.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, Captain.’ The small man snatched up the paper, folded it, and thrust it in an inner pocket, all in one swift movement, as though he feared Ericson would change his mind. ‘I hope she’ll not disappoint you, and you’ll have good luck in her.’

  Ericson nodded. ‘Thanks . . . How about a drink?’

  The small man shook his head and then, rather surprisingly, said: ‘Aye.’ When the drinks had been poured he raised his glass formally and said: ‘Not too late to wish you a Happy New Year, Captain.’

  Ericson drank to it in silence. So much depended on Compass Rose: in fact everything depended on her – perhaps even the bare fact of their survival through 1940. But that evening, when the ship at last was his, he did not want to share this thought with anyone.

  9

  On her way north to Ardnacraish, Compass Rose spent her first night at sea.

  She was lucky in her weather: when she slipped through the boom during the late afternoon it was raining heavily, with the promise of a hard blow as well; but by the time they had passed the odd, conical mass of Ailsa Craig, and turned northward again, the sky had cleared and the wind gradually dropped to nothing. Later still, the bright moonlight gave them a visibility of several miles, and by midnight they were ploughing along at a steady twelve knots, with the mass of land to starboard as clearly discernible as if it had been full daylight. Compass Rose, with no sea to bother her and only a long gentle swell to surmount, had an easy motion: the pulse of the engine, and an occasional vibration from forward, served as reminders that she was now on passage instead of swinging round her anchor in harbour, but apart from that the night was as peaceful and as free from stress as any they had yet spent.

  Lockhart, muffled against the keen air in a kapok suit and seaboots, shared the middle watch – from midnight to four a.m. – with Bennett: it passed without incident or interest save that at two o’clock they met a southbound convoy and were fiercely challenged by one of the wing escorts, and that Bennett spent most of the watch dozing inside the asdic hut, leaving Lockhart to keep the lookout and write up the deck log every hour. He did not mind: indeed, he would have taken it as a compliment if he had not known that it sprang from pure laziness and not from any particular confidence in his ability. But the brief period of authority, when the ship was handed over to him as his personal charge, was helpful to his self-confidence, apart from its value as a first experience of watchkeeping. He had been wondering just how sure of himself he would be, when the moment came for him to handle Compass Rose: now he knew, and the answer was reassuring.

  Ferraby and the Captain came up together at four o’clock, to take over the morning’s watch: Lockhart was amused to note that Bennett handed things over with an air of weighty responsibility, as if he had been on tiptoe throughout the entire four hours and would, even now, hardly dare to close his eyes . . . For the first couple of hours Ericson dealt with everything there was to be done, leaving Ferraby to watch him, or stare at the horizon, and occasionally to check a buoy or a lighthouse on the chart inside the asdic compartment: but towards six o’clock, when they were set on a straight, trouble-free course which would need no alteration for thirty miles or so, he decided that he’d had enough of it. He had been on the bridge from dusk until midnight – about eight hours altogether – the previous evening, and he badly needed sleep.

  He yawned, and stretched, and called Ferraby, who had wandered to the wing of the bridge.

  ‘Think you can take her now, sub?’ he asked. ‘This is our course for the rest of the watch, and there’s nothing in the way. How about it?’

  ‘All right, sir. I—I’d like to.’

  ‘You can get me on the voice-pipe if anything turns up. Just watch out for those fishing boats, and if you have to alter course, go to seaward of them rather than inshore. But you’d better call me if there are a lot of them about.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘All right, then . . .’ He stayed for a few moments, watching the hills still looming clear to starboard, and the flashing light, which had been their mark for changing on to a new course, now just past the beam, and then he said: ‘She’s yours, sub,’ and turned to go. His seaboots rang on the bridge ladder, and died away, and Ferraby was left to himself.

  He had never known such a moment in his life, and he found it difficult to accept without a twinge of near panic. The whole ship, with her weapons and her watchful lookouts and her sixty-odd men sleeping below, was now his: he could use her intricate machinery, alter her course and speed, head out for the open Atlantic or run straight on the rocks . . . He felt small and alone, in spite of the bridge lookouts and the signalman and the asdic rating who shared the watch with him: he was shivering, and he heard his heart thumping, and he wondered if he could bear it if they met a convoy, or if some accident – like the steering gear breaking down – brought on a sudden crisis. He wasn’t really fitted for this: he was a bank clerk, he was only twenty, he’d been commissioned for exactly eight weeks . . . But the minutes of uncertainty passed, as Compass Rose held her steady course and nothing happened to disturb it: she was, it seemed, a going concern, and possibly he knew just enough to supervise her without some catastrophic blunder which nothing could retrieve.

  Presently he began to enjoy himself.

  Leaning over the bridge rail, he could see the whole forepart of the ship clear in the moonlight: above him, the mast rolled through a slow, gentle arc against the dark sky: astern, their wake spreading and stretching out behind them was bounded by
a thin line of phosphorescence which gave it a concise, formal beauty. He felt himself to be in the middle of a pattern, the focal point of their forceful advance: here was the bridge, the nerve centre, with its faint glow from the binnacle and the dark motionless bulk of the two lookouts marking each wing, and here was himself, who controlled it all and to whom all the lines of this pattern led. Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby, Officer-of-the-Watch – he grinned suddenly to himself, and felt, for a moment, almost heroic. No one in the bank would believe this. But he must write and tell Mavis about it, as soon as he could. She would believe it.

  The half-hourly relief of the bridge personnel interrupted this train of thought, setting the seal on his responsibility.

  ‘Port lookout relieved, sir!’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Starboard lookout relieved, sir!’

  ‘Very good.’

  And up the voice-pipe from the wheelhouse, where the quartermasters were changing over: ‘Course North, ten West, sir – engine half ahead – Able-Seaman Dykes on the wheel!’

  ‘Very good.’

  At that moment he would not have been anywhere else in the world.

  Presently the signalman of the watch, who had been standing by his side staring through his binoculars, straightened up and said: ‘Flashing light to starboard, sir.’

  When Ferraby found the light he counted the flashes carefully. ‘That’s our next lighthouse,’ he said, when he had made sure of it. ‘It’s still a long way ahead, though.’

  The signalman stamped his feet on the grating that ran the length of the forebridge, and said tentatively: ‘Bit cold up here, sir.’

  It was the first remark he had volunteered since they came on watch, and Ferraby looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He knew him by sight already: his name was Rose – a young, newly-joined rating, younger even than Ferraby and only just qualified as an ordinary signalman. He was something like Ferraby in manner, too: shy, unsure of himself, ready to believe most of what he was told in totally new surroundings. Earlier, at the change of the watch, Ferraby had heard Leading-Signalman Wells handing over to him, using an encouraging, almost fatherly tone which must have been reassuring to a boy standing his first night duty. ‘Now you don’t need to get rattled,’ Wells had said, ‘you know the challenge, and the reply, and that’s about all there’s likely to be, when we’re routed independently. But if we meet anyone, and there’s a signal, sing out for me straight away, and I’ll be up to give you a hand.’ The contrast between this friendly backing, this verbal arm-round-the-shoulder, and the sort of thing he himself had to endure from Bennett, had been so marked that momentarily Ferraby had found himself wishing that he could be an ordinary signalman, with Wells to help him, instead of a sub, with a tough First Lieutenant bullying him all the time. But he was not so sure of that feeling now, after half an hour in charge of the ship. If only it could always be like this . . .

  He said: ‘Yes, it’s damned cold,’ and feeling the need to lead the conversation, he added: ‘What’s it like below?’

  ‘Warm enough, sir,’ answered Rose. ‘But it’s very crowded. And the walls’ – he corrected himself hurriedly – ‘the bulkheads sweat all the time. Makes everything wet through. It takes a bit of getting used to.’

  ‘Is this your first ship?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How long have you been in?’

  ‘A month, sir. Just the training.’

  ‘What were you before you joined?’

  Rose hesitated, and then answered: ‘I helped with a van, sir.’

  A van boy . . . A van boy, and now a signalman in a ship that might go anywhere in the world and meet God-knows-what hazards . . . There was enough of a parallel between Rose’s change of status, and his own, for Ferraby to be conscious of a strong fellow feeling with him. But was that a relationship which was encouraged by the Royal Navy? He shied away from the thought, and, hunching his shoulders which were stiffening with cold, said: ‘I wonder if we could get some tea?’

  ‘There’s some cocoa on in the galley, sir,’ Rose volunteered. ‘Shall I ask the bosun’s mate?’

  ‘Yes, do.’

  The cocoa, when it came up, was sweet and strong and very comforting. They drank it together, side by side under the cold sky, while beneath their feet the ship lifted gently to the swell, and the sea fell back from her cleaving bow and turned outwards in a mile-long furrow, and their track was lost in the darkness astern.

  Later in the watch, a cluster of lights low in the water told Ferraby that they were running into another bunch of the fishing boats which were all round the coast that night. This fleet of them lay directly on Compass Rose’s course, and he wondered if he ought to call the Captain: but his spell on the bridge had given him plenty of confidence, and on an impulse he bent to the voice-pipe and spoke his first helm order.

  ‘Port ten.’

  The quartermaster’s voice answered him. ‘Port ten, sir . . . Ten of port wheel on, sir.’

  ‘Midships.’

  ‘Midships . . . Wheel’s amidships, sir.’

  ‘Steady.’

  ‘Steady, sir . . . Course, north, twenty-five west, sir.’

  They held the new course for five minutes, till the fishing boats were abeam and well clear of them. Then he brought the ship back on her former course, and was just about to make a note of the manoeuvre in the deck log when from the Captain’s voice-pipe there came a sudden call: ‘Bridge!’

  ‘Bridge, sir,’ answered Ferraby.

  ‘What were you altering for, sub?’

  ‘A fishing boat, sir,’ he said, compromising with the strict truth. ‘We’re clear of it now.’ His surprise made him add: ‘How did you know, sir?’

  He heard the Captain chuckle. ‘The steering engine makes a lot of noise down here . . . Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The next light’s coming abeam now.’

  He waited for a comment, but none came, and presently a slight snore told him that he need not wait any longer. Obscurely, he felt rather proud of that snore. It was the most definite compliment he had had so far in the ship.

  It grew lighter: the sky imperceptibly paled: to the eastward, the land took on a harder outline, and beyond the nearest hills others began to come into view, their snow summits waiting to catch the first shafts of the sun. Matching the sky, the sea round them paled also, turning from black to a livid grey; and a distant lighthouse, which had been beckoning them towards the horizon, struggled against the coming of daylight and faded till its beam was a faint, wan flicker against a mist of rising land. The whole length of the ship gradually emerged, from a dark outline into a three-dimensional and solid structure, with frost glistening all along the upper works: on the bridge, figures and then faces came up sharp and clear – lined faces, grey with cold and fatigue, but relaxing now as the dawn cheered them.

  Below, the ship stirred and came to life, welcoming or accepting the end of the watch. The smoke from the galley chimney thickened, and bore with it a coarse and cheerful smell of frying: feet rang on ladders and along the iron deck: from a hatchway aft, the grey bristly face of Chief E.R.A. Watts peered at the daylight as if scarcely believing in it. The first night at sea was over.

  Just before eight, Lockhart came up to the bridge to take over the watch. He had had nearly four hours’ sleep and was feeling fresher than he had expected.

  ‘All alone?’ he asked, when he had had time to look round him.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ferraby. He could not resist elaborating. ‘I took the last two hours myself.’

  Lockhart smiled. ‘Is that so? And to think that I slept peacefully through it all . . .’ He looked at the nearest point of land. ‘How far have we got?’

  Ferraby, showing him their position on the chart, asked: ‘Are you taking over? Where’s Number One?’

  ‘Eating breakfast,’ said Lockhart tonelessly. ‘Snorkers. Good-oh.’

  For a moment they stood side by side in the cold morning air. The sun was now
just under the rim of the hills; it was a lovely morning. Still steady, still as tranquil as the day, Compass Rose ploughed northwards past magic islands. Lockhart sniffed the faint breeze. ‘Fun, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ferraby. ‘Yes, it is.’

  10

  Vice-Admiral Sir Vincent Murray-Forbes, K.C.B., D.S.O., R.N. sat at his desk on the Operations building overlooking Ardnacraish harbour, playing despondently with a silver paperknife engraved: ‘Presented to Lieut.-Commander V. Murray-Forbes, R.N., on relinquishing command of HMS Dragonfly. From the Ship’s Company, October 1909. Good luck.’ He did not see the engraved sentences: indeed, he had not read them for many years; but they had a direct connexion with his despondency, and especially the date, which was incontrovertible. It was something he carried with him always, like an unlucky charm; for it meant, by inference, that he was in his sixtieth year, and was too old to go to sea again.

  The Admiral looked what he was: an old sailor, and surely due for retirement after a lifetime of distinguished service in the Navy. It was a lined face, strong, tremendously wrinkled round the eyes: the broad stretch of gold braid on his sleeves was impressive, and the rows of medal-ribbons seemed no more than the face deserved. The D.S.O. was Jutland, the K.C.B. represented a long and brilliant serial story, from C.-in-C. China to C.-in-C. Home Fleet and then to a notable shore appointment: the rest of the ribbons signified that he had managed to stay alive a long time in various odd parts of the globe. Too long, indeed, for his present peace of mind: the year 1918, when he was captain in command of a destroyer flotilla, had been the peak of his fighting days, and now this new war had come too late for him to start them all over again. For though he had managed to defer his overdue retirement, it had not been for the reason that he had hoped.