Authors: Derek Beaven
Perhaps the creature made straight for the Pacific, to disport himself there awhile, in that watery waste half the size of the planet.
The true Ocean that floods the earth, the Pacific, lay almost unknown for millennia. All routes to it from the little peasant monarchies of Europe were legendary, mysterious and fraught with danger. The westward passage, by the southern tip of the Americas, was the Horn. That, as everyone knows, is a monster whose teeth are giant waves, whose beats lurk for the lee shore and whose refrigerant breath loads spars, masts and rigging top heavy with ice, bursts sails, breaks hearts.
When the Horn proves too terrible, as it did famously for Bligh, there is nothing for it but to run eastward past the Cape of Good Hope. A ship under sail can hammer round the globe in the Forties, if she has good food and good faith. This is the navigator’s route, an emptiness with nothing in your way. Sooner or later, coming clear south of Tasmania and then New Zealand, she may turn up into the vast blue yonder. For what? Breadfruit? A cheaper pap for slaves? And in all that time before the wind, Fletcher Christian’s imagination has been turned gnawingly inward: between the Devil and Antarctica. It is a recipe for cooking up an event. No Transit of Venus here. No spirit of exploration.
The other gateway into the Pacific is through the Orient. In the
Armorica
, we had only just entered that region, docking at Singapore, before we nudged out again. Those who before steam or battleships went on up into the South China Sea found every assumption challenged. They were captivated, enchanted, intrigued, appalled. They fell in love and died of fever. If they came away it was bragging or blinded. The Pacific would not receive them, it fought them all the way with hostile winds and currents. They found themselves put about where the desperate whalers roamed, at the mercy of pirates and cannibals, in an emptiness dotted with coral as the heaven is with stars.
That is a dangerous gate. A string of islands stretches down across the Equator in a graceful curve: the East Indies. By the reef-littered Torres Strait, the cordon is made fast to a boulder, once thought part of a nameless land mass,
Terra Australis Incognita.
Australia promises comfort. The Armorica’s official route was to skirt around the west of it, as if to reassure ourselves that we had after all made it British. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney. Only then need we concede to the Pacific at journey’s end. The big regular thousand-mile swell is manageable there. We give it a swimsuit and pretend it is less like death.
Yes. Once across the last leap and through the convergence zone, where the monsoons debate with the trades, once safely past the old atomic test-site of Monte Bello Island, and in the imagined lee of Australia’s North West Cape – there promises comfort.
So from the Sea of Whispers we struck due south at last. By breakfast we were threading the Sunda Strait close between Java and Sumatra. By mid-morning we had started across that corner of the Indian Ocean which contains its deepest pit, the Java Trench; and which fades into the comparatively shallow, shark-infested, crab-infested Timor Sea. Everything felt different: fresh, warm, and if anything, quite English.
My own troubles were forgotten. Standing in the bright sun, I reminded myself idly that there would come a time when Mr Chaunteyman would fly over us, as Achilles must pass the tortoise. I recalled our Singapore moment during the row, when we stopped beside the bicycle crab-stall and looked out to sea at the destroyer. I did not quite understand the dancers I had seen, Mr Chaunteyman and MrsTorboys at the big hotel. They were the image of that picture I had cut out and kept with me, and then dumped in Colombo. I knew it was a version of love: I knew that was what had made Erica so angry that she was moved to speak of my father. Yet I did not fully grasp that it was fatal to our project; or that the embrace was anything other than what he kept protesting – nothing. She was surely being difficult. Love.
And then there were the Cootes.
I wrenched my mind away. I amused myself with comic speculation. Chaunteyman was a spy. He was using Cheryl to spy on Lucas. He was a rubber spy with my shrunken head in his pocket. He would come over our funnel sometime or other while we were still at sea, like a breath, like the spirit of rubber solution when you mend a puncture; his pockets would be stuffed full of rubber money.
I looked up. There were long cat-tails of cloud. High winds up there – my dad had taught me. But down here all serenity. And even had we been able to glimpse over the horizon, we should still have been unable to foresee such a thing as a succession of tropical squalls. Not yet. Nor should we have had the faintest idea of a building sea, funnelling through on a gathering blow from the north-east, unfiltered by any such breakwater as the East Indies might make. A touch unusual for the time of year.
We hurried on. We made haste without seeming to. For there was only this one stretch. In a manner of speaking, home from home lay just across the bay. We had made up our schedule, so now there was no actual rush, nothing of that sort. There was in no sense of the word a chase. We wore our future like our pennants, with a confident air, a jauntiness. And as for the unpleasantness over the cargo, well, that was over and done with. The greater part of the embarrassment had been unloaded, after all. The part that mattered, surely. Yesterday everyone had just been under the weather. Tropical fatigue. Mr Barnwell had given the impression that after Singapore there would remain of mat consignment only odds and ends – the very unimportant bits and pieces to be ferried on to Maralinga. Kittens, Vixens and the like.
Below us, under our keel, was a seabed ridge named Christmas Rise. Nothing to do with Christmas Island where, before the Test Moratorium, the British government had just managed to cram in the world’s largest thermonuclear explosion ever seen through pressed fingers. That Christmas was out in the Pacific. This was a different Christmas, just on the edge of the Java Trench, whose depths, by the way, had we tried to plumb them, would have required a piano wire five miles long.
And below us in the hold was merely a little local electrical difficulty, possibly an awkwardness in the main power circuits.
The first explosion occurred at about four in the afternoon. Its dull crump had a deep metallic note which rang the
Armorica
from stem to stern; with the result that no one knew precisely where the disturbance had come from. Some hurried forward, while others began to assemble aft near the swimming-pool area, enquiring of each other what might have happened.
After a few minutes a certain unreality developed. For nothing appeared to have altered. The ship remained on course, ploughing dutifully ahead. The wind, which had been freshening all day and was now a stiff nor’easterly, continued to work at the swell. But all ahead was blue, the water foamy, colouring up underneath to a blue-black. And behind, the wake was regular and intact. No freak rock had been struck; no radarless rust-bucket had lain breached across our bows. On the port quarter horizon, back in the direction of the Spice Islands, a line of clouds appeared to bubble slightly here and there into brightly lit heads, like the gentle distance in a Constable painting. Perhaps there had been some mistake.
Then the people at the rear concourse heard screaming. Three children came struggling out of the rear staircase, burnt and incoherent. At the same time the ship herself began to screech as the fire hooters were triggered. The rushing air became full of noise.
It happened to be Robert Kettle who grasped what it was the children were trying to indicate. He dived down the stairs against the flow of passengers rushing up. By the time he returned carrying the girl, Finlay Coote, the deck was crammed with folk in all conditions, flushed from their cabins, bars and saloons, some angry, some bored or sceptical; some wearing life-jackets, some immaculately turned out in their best casual clothes, as if at the sound of the alarms they had spent precious minutes going below to make their toilette. And some were obviously panicked, rushing about half dressed.
He was himself begrimed and flame-marked, his black curly hair singed away; but the girl was the centre of attention. She was conscious, though only just. From head to foot she was a hideous black scorch. Her play clothes were shredded, still hot, and burnt to her body. Every now and then she opened her mouth as if to cry out in pain, but no sound emerged above the din of voices and the constant squawking of the hooter. Some announcement was being made over the tannoy, but it was impossible to make it out.
Between them, Robert Kettle and Mary Garnery got the girl through the press of people and into the swimming-pool, holding her level, and splashing the cold salt water over her. Queenie Parsons clung on to her husband. He shrugged her off, trying to force his way along the run of the pool seating.
A woman beside Penny began screaming too. Penny grabbed her, and held her shoulders still.
‘What’s happened? What’s going to become of us? I knew something terrible would go wrong. What is it? I must know.’
‘Clearly, there’s been an accident,’ Penny replied. ‘Clearly, something’s on fire and somebody’s hurt.’
The woman shook herself free and opened her mouth again.
‘Look here. You can’t do that,’ a man was saying to Robert. ‘Where’s the medical officer here?’ Then he was lost in the general confusion. The screams were taken up at the far side of the pool. They gave way to an exchange of shouts and threats lifted above the general clamour. From down behind our aft wall, too, there were calls coming up from the tourists. ‘What’s up? What’s going on?’ Then the knowledge that the engines had stopped – learned eerily through the soles of the feet – brought everyone to a sudden silence.
Abruptly the hooter stopped, too. A moment of uncanny quiet followed, filled only with the sea sounds and the wind in the wires. On the boat deck above us a white-uniformed figure stood holding a loud hailer, like an angel with a trumpet. His voice rang out, electric, artificial. He called for calm.
‘I’m grateful for your prompt attendance, ladies and gentlemen. There seems to have been a problem below decks. We are in the process of investigating. Specially trained units of the crew are at this moment combing the ship systematically, ready to identify and deal with any difficulties they should find, and to make sure all personnel are accounted for.’
The
Armorica
had slewed round. The low sun bucked behind the officer with the dead rise and fall of the swell.
‘As you will know from your own cabins the ship is fully fitted with a fire-sprinkler system which is designed to isolate and contain any excessive heat source as it occurs – until the crew can bring full-scale fire-fighting equipment to bear. I can assure you the whole business is in safe hands, and would ask you to rest assured that everything that should be done is being done.’
A chair was brought for the old dowager lady who had passed Penny in the dining-room at the start of the Atlantic storm.
‘Could someone bring me a rug?’
‘But any fire at sea, ladies and gentlemen, is a matter of the utmost seriousness. You will be inconvenienced until the accident has been dealt with, and I would remind you that this is for your own safety. Officers and members of the crew will soon be moving among you to answer any questions you might have, and to attend to your needs. In the mean time I would ask you to remain completely calm, and to organise yourselves as best you can to cope with present difficulties and conditions.’
As soon as he finished speaking it became generally known on the concourse that the
Armorica
was not alone on the sea. Not far away to windward there was a small smoke plume, and under it, plainly visible in the illumination of the fast-westering sun, lay the low grey shape of a destroyer. But above that, and still miles off though plainly arriving with equally unsuspected and far more dramatic haste, the mass of cloud filled now a great part of the sky. It boiled white and cream, in magnificent shapes and domes, some of which were just beginning to slip over sideways at the top of their reach. And at their far bases the band of blue-grey; that too was expanding almost by the minute, into a heavy leaden bag heaving at its own weight. The wind at sea level had dropped to nothing. So we passed the next subdued hour, feeling the sky change on us.
On the lull the sun set. Against the interior glow from the Verandah bar the crew could be seen moving through the crowded deck space. They brought reassurance, sustenance, handed out blankets, hot drinks. The floodlights came on, and then failed. The lights inside failed. Then the storm wind proper sprang up in the starless dark – and the first of the rain squalls, a merciless deluge hurled nearly sideways.
The second and third explosions occurred. As if by cruel orchestration, they were intermixed with the start of the thunder bursts. The play of lightning revealed snapshots of endurance: two families huddled under one blanket, an old woman trying to stand, a father and child. In the pool seats where there were no tarpaulins, no bits of cover nor makeshift protection, a whole section of the crowd was shiveringly exposed – oddly cowed and quiet.
There was, of course, not the remotest danger of anything ‘nuclear’ taking place – Mr Barnwell had been explicit about that. His speech, as anyone could have recalled, was categorical. Nothing of that sort had ever been, at the wildest degree of human error even, on the cards. And this was quite true. To liberate the energy of pure matter takes a precise configuration of shock waves. There is a rigmarole of tampers and seals. Even in the simpler weapons metallic casings must be machined absolutely, the chemical high explosives precisely configured – tolerances are minute. Electronic detonation is synchronised to the microsecond. And the big thermonuclear devices require their own atomic trigger. Each system must be delicately assembled, armed – or it is of no account. Remember my grandmother with her fingers in those cartridges. She was quite safe.