Convoy (12 page)

Yorke focused his attention on the commodore’s report. The convoy of forty-two ships had formed up and steamed off in good order at 1635 on the 23rd instant escorted by His Majesty’s ships – and the names were listed, a frigate and four ‘Flower’ class corvettes. The Ship Names Committee deserved to be hanged one at a time for calling such tough little ships ‘the Flower class’ and then giving them names culled from their grandmothers’ gardens – peony, pansy and so on. Many tough seamen after weeks at sea, most meals eaten out of bowls because of bad weather, were not too pleased at being referred to as ‘a Pansy’, or ‘a Peony’.

The forty-two ships, the commodore had noted in his report, comprised three tankers and thirty-nine dry cargo ships. Two were Norwegian, one French, four American and one a neutral, a Swedish ship. The rest were British. All the masters had attended the convoy conference in Freetown, each had copies of the zigzag diagrams, ‘Mersigs’ (the book of Merchant Navy signals) and various instructions. It was, in other words, a routine sailing with an escort of four corvettes and the escort commander in a frigate (which was due for repairs in the United Kingdom but could not be spared to make the voyage home on her own).

The rest of the commodore’s report was brief: eleven nights out of Freetown, with no U-boats detected, the fourth ship in the fifth column was hit with a single torpedo and sank in eight minutes. The wind was westerly, force six, with a moderate to rough sea. Moon in the first quarter, three-tenths cloud… Ten minutes later the fifth ship in the fifth column, which under standing convoy orders had moved up to take the lost ship’s position (and her next-astern had also followed) was hit with a single torpedo and sank half an hour later.

The next night saw a repeat performance: the third ship in the fourth column and the sixth in the second column. Three ships were sunk the third night and another reported sighting the phosphorescence of a torpedo track from the port side which just missed astern. Three more ships were lost the fourth night and two the fifth.

With twelve ships lost in five nights and the convoy zigzagging the whole time, a corvette steaming up and down between the columns just before darkness fell, the commodore admitted that he considered dispersing the convoy: with an average rate of two point four ships lost a night, it would take only thirteen point three nights for the remaining thirty-two ships to be sunk…

Yorke was intrigued by the precision of the commodore’s mathematics but even more so by the position of the torpedoed ships in the convoy: they were all in the middle section: none of the leading ships nor the last in any column was hit; nor were any of those in the outside columns.

The commodore had not thought of – or, rather, did not mention in his report – re-forming the convoy into a broad rectangle of eight columns each of four ships, or a narrow one of four eight-ship columns. What effect would that have made on the U-boat? Four eight-ship columns would have made it easier and quicker to zigzag: the problem with any convoy altering course was that it was like a big wheel – the ships on the outside of the turn had to increase speed while those on the inside had almost to stop (and became very difficult to manoeuvre). It was hard enough in daylight; on a dark night it was a nightmare.

Increasing the convoy speed of six knots was impossible in this case because four of the ships had been unable to guarantee a sustained speed of more than six knots. Again, neither commodore nor escort commander could do anything about that, even though the Admiralty suspected that in dozens of cases the speeds announced by certain masters were not the best speeds they could maintain but their ships’ most economical speed: the one which would save fuel and give the ships’ owners that much extra profit on the voyage. That such parsimony could cost men’s lives seemed not to bother them: a benevolent Ministry of War Transport replaced the ship and men if they were lost… Yorke turned over to the last page of the report. The attacks had stopped suddenly on the sixth night, by which time one more ship had been lost.

The report of the escort commander told Yorke little more. The master of the rescue tug merely listed the numbers of people he had saved from each ship, and to which ships he had transferred them at daylight. He had picked up a total of 272 men, some of whom had been torpedoed two or three times as their new ship was hit. He could not give a total of killed or missing because in several cases the captains and pursers, often the only ones who knew how many had been on board, were lost.

Afraid that he would miss some too-obvious clue, Yorke drew the convoy on a sheet of paper, forty-two dots in seven rows of six ships, and wrote in the names of those that had been sunk, marking where ships astern had moved up to fill the gap and, in several cases, then been hit themselves.

He glanced up to find Jemmy looking down at the drawing.

‘Most interesting, Ned. I’ll tell you one thing, and it’ll cost you a gin.’

‘Consider the gin ordered and paid for.’

‘That Ted was inside the convoy every time he attacked.’

‘That’s not worth a gin; I’d worked that out myself.’

‘All right. Are these numbers against the ships the nights they were hit?’

‘Yes, “1” means the first night; “2” the second, and so on.’

Jemmy traced the sequence of numbers with his index finger, giving an occasional twitch. He reached the last ship and sighed.

‘It’ll cost you two gins.’

‘I hope it’ll be a better-quality pronouncement than the last one.’

‘It is. First, he stopped the attack eventually because he’d run out of torpedoes. He must have been carrying a full load when he found the convoy. Second, in any one night’s attack, he never moved more than the distance between two columns.’

‘I’d spotted that, too; but I’ll count the “full load” as a separate piece of information.’

‘What about the other convoys? The ones you asked me about. Are you drawing them out?’

‘I think so. I can picture it better.’

‘Wise man. One picture, to borrow the Fleet Street phrase, is worth a thousand words. Pity the Navy ever gave up drawing for writing. In Nelson’s day the artist Rowlandson could tell it all in one sketch.’

With that Jemmy ambled back to his plan in a series of twitches and jerks, and a moment or two later the Croupier went over and perched on the edge of the desk, no doubt to see if Jemmy had any ideas on the U-boat movements which were being so carefully plotted.

At that moment Yorke realized how clever Uncle had been in the way he had organized ASIU. Half a dozen experts each working in separate rooms could very easily become pundits or prima donnas – or just plain lazy. Each would be working in a separate, isolated compartment. All in one room, they were eager to ‘try it on the dog’, going over to another man’s desk with an idea or a problem and inviting criticism or an answer.

Jemmy, with his cheerful cynicism, obviously had a very shrewd mind as well as an intimate knowledge of submarines. Anyone spending so long attacking enemy ships in the narrow and often shallow confines of the Axis-held Mediterranean coasts had to be clever beyond all permutations of chance. Jemmy’s twitch showed the price he had paid; but his mind was alert, a violin string. And, Ned thought, in this imperfect world where jealousy had more to do with promotion (or the lack of it) than most people would admit, Jemmy was lucky to be working for Uncle, who was obviously making good use of him. The same went for the Croupier. And for himself, he supposed, providing he produced results.

Results. One docket which had been read and digested, a large pile so far only skimmed, and a diagram. Now Jemmy and the Croupier were coming towards him.

‘Lock up all that bumf for the weekend, Ned,’ Jemmy said. ‘It’s six o’clock and my friend here, who’s the ASIU union shop steward, says it’s gin time on a warm Friday evening. I owe him a gin so you can buy him one of the two you owe me.’

Ned was due to telephone Clare at seven to see if she had been able to get a short weekend’s leave, coming up on the ten o’clock Saturday morning train from Ashford after night duty. His mother had produced a rabbit from some butcher’s hat to augment the meat ration and she had made up a bed for Clare in a guest room next to his own. She slept on the ground floor now the bombing was heavy, having been persuaded to turn what used to be a study into a bed-sitting room. Nothing had been said; the guest room had been prepared, and if Ned had teased her about it being next to his she would have looked blankly and said that she had no intention of putting a guest in a third floor room with only tiles and some plaster and laths to protect her from bombs and fragments of anti-aircraft shells. Mother was sophisticated in – well, a kind and practical way. It was up to Clare, whom she had not yet met, and Ned; she had prepared a guest room; it was up to them what they did.

Outside the Citadel it was dark; the dank November night air was still heavy with the smell of charred wood overlaid with the improbable wet straw odour of sandbags which had been treated with some smelly green substance intended to stop them rotting. The sandbags, Jemmy observed, brought out the worst in St James’s Park, whose earth had been used to fill them and below a certain depth still retained its marsh smells which Ned thought inconsequentially might date from Henry VIII’s day.

‘Stirrup pumps will be worn,’ the Croupier announced in a stentorian voice as they passed under Admiralty Arch, startling two hurrying civil servants. ‘Pub or club?’

‘Pub,’ Jemmy said promptly. ‘I’m bored with seeing our gallant brother officers fighting the King’s enemies in the celibate splendour of their clubs. Let us to an alehouse until night-club time, and hope to find some big-breasted Land Girls who’ll lead us to pastures green.’

‘Land Girls in Whitehall pubs?’ the Croupier exclaimed. ‘You’re a couple of hundred years too late. In good King Charles’ golden days, when lechery no harm meant, I’m sure there were dozens, handing out syllabubs to the thirsty and lecherous soldiery; now you’ll be lucky to find a couple of venereal strumpets.’

‘It’s splendid the way the Croupier lapses into this twentieth-century Elizabethan jargon when he’s thirsty,’ Ned commented to Jemmy. ‘Just listening to him takes my mind off the smell of the pigeons; I swear I’d never hear a siren if he was neighing a sonnet.’

They walked into a public house at the top of Whitehall, carefully slipping between the blackout curtain, and Ned ordered the drinks. The barman guessed they were from the Admiralty. ‘Plymouth or Gordons, sir? Can only let you have one round.’

‘Gordons for me,’ Ned said quickly, regarding Plymouth as being an expensive substitute for petrol.

At a few minutes before seven Ned left the other two men after getting ten shillings’ worth of change from the barman, and went out into the blackout just as the air raid sirens began wailing, the disembodied howling echoing along the streets as though coming from the black sky.

Charing Cross Station was one of the easier targets for German bomber pilots to find: like Cannon Street and Victoria, it was at the end of a shiny grid of railway lines and just over the Thames. As Yorke walked to the telephone kiosk he was thankful not to be sitting in one of the trains waiting to huff and puff out into the night in a cloud of steam and sparks and slowly cross the long bridge to the south bank of the Thames.

He was lucky: he had put the money into the box and was pressing Button A after only seven minutes; the phone had rung, Clare told him, at exactly three minutes past seven. And then they had nothing to say to each other.

‘I was so excited waiting for the call I didn’t think…’ Clare admitted.

‘The sirens have just gone; I was afraid there’d be hours of delay.’

‘How is the new job, Ned?’

‘Interesting – challenging, in fact.’

‘You’re not going back to sea?’ she asked in sudden alarm.

‘No – and’…he paused, knowing he must sound like a nervous schoolboy but finding himself almost terrified that the answer might be no…‘are you – er, can you get away this weekend?’

‘From you?’ she teased.

‘From your other boyfriends.’

‘It’s wonderfully peaceful down here. Just a few bombers going over at the moment – heading your way, I imagine. But walking along the lanes, even though the trees are bare…’

‘Did you get the weekend off?’ he asked stiffly.

‘Yes,’ she said innocently. ‘Until night duty on Monday, which means 6 p.m.’

‘Are you coming up to London?’ His heart was thudding; his palms were wet with tension and he felt he ought to be ashamed that a girl on the end of a telephone line could make him jumpier than a diving Ju 88.

‘I
could
do,’ she said coolly, ‘but no one’s asked me.’

‘What do you mean?’ he flared. ‘Dammit, I–’

‘Asked a bit of crumpet up to Town for a dirty weekend!’

‘Clare!’ he said angrily. ‘I’ve asked you to stay in my house. Meet my mother. Do–’

‘You haven’t, you know! You’ve taken it all for granted. In fact all you said when you left was that you hoped I’d come to London on my next leave.’

‘Well, you knew perfectly well what I meant,’ he said sulkily.

‘I do, darling Ned, but you’ve no idea how nice it is to have someone get angry–’

‘There are the pips: wait, I’ve plenty of change!’

He put in the coins requested by the operator and pressed Button A. ‘Go on, you were saying…’

‘I feel all warm and snug because you are getting angry at the idea you might not see me this weekend. It does me good. I feel all woman.’

‘But you know I love you!’

‘Oh yes, Ned; but it’s wonderful to hear you getting jealous, even if your rival is only a country lane.’

‘I’m jealous of everything and everybody. Ten o’clock train?’

‘Yes, eleven forty-five at Charing Cross.’

‘I’ll meet–’

He dropped the phone and dived out of the kiosk, clear of the glass partitions, as he heard the whistling hiss of a bomb. It burst with an earth-shaking thud beyond the station, among the network of railway lines. He stood up and sheepishly groped for the receiver, hearing Clare’s alarmed voice calling: ‘Ned! Ned!’