Authors: Derek Beaven
What remained on board the
Armorica
was non-fissile, idle in itself. There was no question of chain reaction, that technical phrase which had slipped luridly into common speech. And among these experimental bits and pieces the only one which could in any real way be described as controversial, if it existed on board at all, was an expensive plum-coloured metal. Plutonium uningested is relatively harmless. Pyrotechnically speaking, its curiosity value lies in its rate of neutron emission. If it was going anywhere it was only for the sake of tests: about handling, toxicity, flammability, contaminative permanence – that sort of thing. Everything would be under control. As a substance it was here to stay, it was the future, a positive boon, both militarily and, much more importantly, in the civil sphere – where it was produced in power stations.
That was why it was
en route
to Australia. Safety testing. If indeed it was. Whatever, it could not, of itself, get out of hand. At normal temperatures and pressures it was as reluctant to burn as any ordinary metal. Chemically, that required activation – by duller substances which, as to the
Armorica
, no necessity had been found even of mentioning. The complexities of that side-issue simply had not come up. And why should they? Experimental protocols were exceedingly technical, after all. Specialist stuff. And the risks, such as they were, had been very fully assessed prior to outset. Any ill-informed, open-toed flapping about nuclear matters was, in a word, laughable.
Something deep down in the lower reaches of the hold, however, was showing a very great propensity to burn, explode, and otherwise get out of control in an entirely conventional way. The explosions were not ‘earth-shattering’, nor did they appear to endanger the structure of the ship; and there were no more than five in all. Beside the insistent thunderclaps hammering the eardrums on into the night, they were a nothing.
But they were enough. By ten o’clock it was clear, and announced as soon as conditions permitted, that the
Armorica
was uncontrollably alight deep down below the shop on D deck; and that a plan for controlled evacuation was to be put into effect. The destroyer hung off, flashing and signalling.
The rain came in bands, each lasting about half an hour. In between, the blow maintained its force. It was during one of the so-called dry spells, when the pitch-black wind chilled through our soaked clothes and our meagre protection, that the word went round there had been casualties. Many casualties. Most were due to asphyxiation by smoke of people trapped in cabins in the after part of D, C and even B decks, when the flames had first caught hold of a crew-only stair route and a flue, and had blocked escape from two directions. These parts of the fire had subsequently been doused – before the new explosions.
But the damage had been done. The bodies had been found, and were being brought out, along with the injured, even as the renewal of the fires below had forced the working parties to retreat again upwards, as high as B deck in some places. Of the tourist class there was little information, beyond the fact that their steel bulkhead had so far protected them from the tragedies afflicting our side. They too were all crowded up on their highest decks, and we could sometimes hear them, down behind the amphitheatre wall, coping much as we were.
The news of the deaths was horrifying. It turned a managed, and almost manageable calamity into a living nightmare. Paul Finch-Clark recognised the quartermaster as the beam of a gesturing torch flashed momentarily across his features.
‘What ships are in the area? Do we know what ships are in the area?’
‘There’s the destroyer, sir. She’s going to start taking people off via the boats. The boats are the next thing, sir.’
‘Nothing else in the vicinity? This is a regular shipping lane, isn’t it? You’ve put out a general distress call, of course. There must be something else that could help.’
‘The Navy is going to look after us, sir, as far as I’m aware.’ The quartermaster compressed his lips in the mockery of a grin. ‘That’s all I know. The boats, sir. We’re going to begin moving people up to the boats any minute. If you wouldn’t mind, sir. As far as I’ve been instructed everything’s been taken care of.’
‘And anything else, I said? Have any other ships answered the Mayday? Please could we be kept informed? What are Darwin saying? Jakarta? My daughter has had a terrible shock. We feel so isolated.’ He spoke almost as if at a large railway station where the train had been cancelled. The scale of the situation lacked appropriate words. It was ridiculous.
The quartermaster compressed his lips again. ‘I’m instructed to make it clear to you, sir, that everything is being done to ensure as safe and orderly an evacuation as possible. As to distress calls,’ he fixed Paul Finch-Clark’s eye with an intense and troubled gaze, ‘I’m afraid we have no information. Beyond the fact that there’s an Australian Navy ship, I believe, will be able to make it up here by morning. And a frigate coming up from Remade.’
With that he moved off.
The rain came pelting across at us once more, driving into the eyes. It was debatable which was worse: the cloudbursts, or the terrible wind-chilled parch of each interim.
Fire-fighting was taking place, however, somewhere deep in the lower regions of the ship. The problem had been localised and contained, if not yet neutralised. The fuel tanks were at present in no danger. Command, it appeared, felt there was time to use the boats, in each of which there was a supply of oars, to convoy the ship’s company across to the safety of the destroyer. That vessel’s now blazing lights showed her to be riding about four hundred yards off the
Armorica
’s starboard beam; and also showed in graphic detail the increasing fury of the waves.
But the operation to evacuate the ship proceeded with neither speed nor facility. Everything was against it. Because each boat had at least to be partially crewed; which reduced its capacity. Moreover, its complement had to include some men, rather than the priority groups of women and children and casualties, in order to make up the power necessary to negotiate such a sea.
Nevertheless it was begun, and proceeded with. The chosen boats were lowered away, one by one. We watched them inching across the gap – like waterlogged moths caught white by the arc-light beams. Two rapid inflatables which the destroyer sent out hovered around the action, detectable sometimes by their buzzing engines, as insects of another dark. Soon the whole stretch of sea dividing the two ships became a painful toing and froing, as the little craft persisted doggedly at their task. It was a grim operation.
And, to be fair, it was certainly a situation foreign to any concept the captain had of seamanship and proper practice. That it was forced upon him by other considerations must go without saying. Considerations which can only be conjectured at. Considerations where, several ranks above him, an overruling priority to limit leakage of information was at war with duty, principle and honour. Taken out of the captain’s hands, the thing had become political, in the worst sense of the word. It bore all the hallmarks of a panic – an agonised, long-winded, drawn-out loss of grip.
Whether command lay with Barnwell, or by tortuous radio link higher still, must remain uncertain. Truly, the more the project surrendered to its shameful premise, the more the net of disaster drew tight around it. It began as folly and turned into gross irresponsibility. Any seaman will tell you what happens when crucial decisions are taken out of a competent master’s hands.
Of the lifeboats themselves, only four were aft of the dividing bulkhead between the two classes of traveller. They were held in reserve. Only twelve of the eighteen in all lining both sides of the boat deck were lowered – to avoid cluttering the seas with more flailing traffic than the situation could bear. For reasons of discipline and good order, the command was given that the fire doors in the dividing bulkhead should temporarily remain completely sealed, until such time as the flotilla of boats was ready to begin evacuating the tourists. Nor could the cries and disturbances behind the steel barrier be attended to, in any case, above the din now made by the tropical storm.
Perhaps we were supposed to draw comfort – that there was no thought as yet of ‘Abandon ship’; no ‘Every man for himself’. Perhaps there was an underlying strategy: to lighten the eventual loading of the boats. If the worst came to the worst. As we sat in that frightful sluice we had present evils enough to cope with. We had already calculated a hundred times the number of survivors a single destroyer could possibly cram on board; but there was an unspoken collusion among us never to voice the answer. Somehow we would not bring ourselves openly to admit that for many of our own contingent, let alone our emigrants, ‘evacuation’ would be a euphemism for something else. But then surely the lights of a tanker would appear on the horizon, a cargo vessel threading through from Japan or the Philippines, a Dutchman, a South American. They would all have been alerted by now. They would all be racing in our direction.
All night the boats kept at it. The exercise took on a significance of its own, almost as if its delicacies and manoeuvrings in the dark threw a charmed circle that fended off the world beyond. How many brave acts were performed, how many feats of endurance by both crews, and by the shivering passengers, it was impossible to know.
Nor was there opportunity to gauge accurately what point the process had reached. That there was a widespread, silent valour of waiting goes without saying, for the crush of ship’s people filled the boat deck and the promenade deck. We knew we lay on the wooden lid of a furnace. By an occasional throw of the destroyer’s floodlights we could not but be aware of the unnatural blur of smoke surrounding the mouths of the aft ventilator-shafts. We could even smell it when the slew of the ship brought the wind across our stern.
Caught between the choreography of the boats and a slow fire, the
Armorica
put a brave face on it. A paralysing pincer grip tightened infinitesimally, of the two converging pressures – God forbid they came together – the point at which the destroyer said: No more, and the sudden storm flash by which we should notice steam in the rain sluice. And as the night wore on, the void of this horror dramatised itself in glimpsed spaces on deck – caused by the creeping exodus of first class passengers. What those aft of us felt – the emigrants locked in their own cage – we had no way of telling. Occasionally someone addressed them by megaphone. There arose sporadic hymn singing. But by and large they were quiet, as were we.
Finlay was stretched on the deck under a makeshift shelter, a broken cane table with a blanket over it. So the burns were to some extent protected. Her head rested on Robert’s thin pullover – he stood guard. She was alive, and kept whimpering and trying to turn herself on to her damaged skin. Mary Garnery knelt beside her. The parents still had not been located.
Penny clutched at the lapels of her linen jacket and tried to imagine being warm. The material was soaked through, of course. She picked her way past where the Finch-Clarks were sitting on the deck sharing a raincoat, and craned out over the rail. Peering forward, she could see the fragile structure of the passenger ladder, the same one they had used in Aden and Colombo, strung close against the side. It was focused in the destroyer’s light. All night it had hung from A deck, and the people had been dark insects creeping down into boats that threatened to crush them against the hull.
‘I’ll go and look again.’ The wind in the wetness turned the stitching of her clothes to thread ice. Ignoring the cold as best she could, Penny made her way across the uncertain teak, waiting for the lightning flashes before picking a route among the remaining huddled shelterers. She had already tried three times but had got no further than the entrance to the Verandah bar, because the press at the stairway down to the boats had completely blocked the route forward on both the port and starboard gangways. But now she found it easy enough to slip through and along the deck – as far ahead as the side doors to the dance space. She noticed that the queues had turned and now stretched along the promenade deck itself, facing forward instead of clogging towards the concourse. ‘It’s all right.’ She elbowed her way grimly along. ‘I’m not pushing in. I’m on business. Somebody’s child.’
At the rail amidships an officer was talking to a group of engineers. One of the lifeboats was being brought to, somewhere down there. But she guessed they must be trying to rig the passenger ladder one deck higher. A confusion of ropes and wires lay on the decking. Perhaps all the stairways had become impossible and even A deck was alight below them. She imagined going over the top from this height. The drop down to the boats would be unnerving, a descent right past the fire. The sailors gave a heave and made something fast. There were shouts. She envied the men their activity. It was, she thought for a second, what sailors did in films.
A huge electrical streak parted the sky behind the destroyer. And as if the storm read her mind the scene was offered in a photographic instant: the foreground desperate faces bleached white against black; the distance waves, with the other vessel tossed in stark silhouette. Then thunder went off for a shell burst. A hit, she said to herself. A very palpable hit. But she knew she loved him. They were being forged in the fire.
Inside the lightless dance space the quiet was eerie. The
Armorica
was creaking again, softly to itself. Penny struggled to keep her balance. She was reminded of the Atlantic storm, so long ago. Like a lifetime.
Men’s voices boomed suddenly from the darkness, where the doors gave access to the stairways. There was another tangle of torch beams – she assumed they were a relay of fire-fighters coming up. Then a hand grabbed her arm. ‘No passengers. Haven’t you been listening? You can’t come in here.’ A light flashed in her face.