Convoy (18 page)

When Clare arrived back in her room at Willesborough annexe later on Monday afternoon she found that the village a couple of miles away where Ned had spent his childhood had taken on a new atmosphere or, rather, that she felt a part of it. Ned and his mother had told several stories of happenings there, of disasters at Yorke House when they had given fetes in aid of local charities, of the day an elephant from a passing circus lumbered through the gate and sat down on the lawn, sucking water from the ornamental pond and squirting it out of his trunk at his distraught trainer who rushed round picking up the goldfish.

Of Ned as a little boy running out ‘to smell the traction engine’ – two breweries still used the coal-fired steam engines for delivering barrels of beer to local public houses. And how he was always excited by the red Trojan van which had solid rubber tyres and a chain drive and belonged to a tea company. And the ting-a-ling of the bells of the tricycles belonging to two rival ice-cream companies, and the tension for Ned as to whether he could get some money from his mother before the ice-cream man had pedalled past. A penny for an Eldorado vanilla, Ned had remembered, or twopence for a Walls choc ice. A jolly fat man had the Eldorado tricycle and always opened and closed the lid of the icebox between the two front wheels with a cheery bang, and occasionally let Ned climb up and peer in at the mysterious white block which smoked inside – solid carbon dioxide, the man had told a disbelieving Ned, who had never heard of ‘dry ice’. The red Post Office van still passed the house at half past seven in the evening, as it had years before, indicating the time by which Ned had to be home, and the trouble there was the night when Ned, having climbed a difficult tree a mile away to get at a magpie’s nest, had been too terrified to get down because a branch had split – too terrified, that is, until he saw his angry father approaching through the gathering darkness. That, and the knowledge that it must be ten o’clock, had made him brave the branch – which did not break. The trouble was, Ned had added ruefully, that the crack was on the upper side of the branch and could not be seen from the ground, and his father had not believed his story.

There was the village shop, Mr Wilkinson’s, that sold Barrett’s sherbet dabs for a halfpenny each, a thin tube of liquorice sticking up from the yellow cylinder, and on one wall was a big poster advertising a blend of tea and showing ‘Peter the Planter’, a handsome man heavily sun-tanned and wearing a rakish topee. ‘Not a drop of perspiration on his face,’ Ned had commented, ‘and in the tropics now no one wears a topee, except certain regiments, and Peter the Planter’s type of topee blows off in anything over a five-knot breeze.’

Mr Wilkinson’s shop was so tiny that three customers had to stand with their elbows tucked in and be careful their shopping baskets did not upset the advertising display cards the old man could not resist, lodging one behind the other on the shelves so they looked like thin gravestones in a crowded cemetery.

Rheumy-eyed, with flowing hair and an immense white walrus moustache stained brown on the left side from the Woodbine that perpetually smouldered, rather than was smoked, Mr Wilkinson treated small boys with the utmost gravity as they came in with their pennies, starting the bell fixed to the top of the door by a short piece of leaf-spring steel tinkling merrily. ‘What can I get you, young sir?’ he invariably said, looking over the top of tiny, rimless pince-nez, the Woodbine giving him the air of a raffish Mr Pickwick.

The whole shop always smelled of paraffin, which he stocked (few houses had electricity at that time) and sold from a leaky can, along with lamp wicks, complete Valor stoves and Aladdin mantles.

The shop was still there – Clare had visited it half a dozen times – but ‘T H Wilkinson, Prop., Licensed to sell Tobacco’, was long since dead and so was the angular woman he always referred to as ‘the wife’ and summoned with a stentorian ‘Bella’ when the shop became crowded and he needed help. Only Mrs Fox (who ran the little sub-post office) knew that when letters arrived for ‘the wife’ they were addressed to ‘Miss Bella Morrell’, and Mrs Fox made a point of never revealing the secret to anyone from another village; people, she had once said, did gossip so.

Sherbet dabs, Liquorice Allsorts, along with Sharp’s toffees, aniseed balls and gobstoppers still sold from tall glass jars which lined a high shelf – the memory had been vivid for Ned when he described it over dinner in Palace Street, and Clare had confirmed that they were still there.

Then there had been the local forge where a curious Ned, aged perhaps five or six, spent hours watching Mr Ludgate, the blacksmith. A farmer would bring in a great carthorse and Mr Ludgate, a tall and painfully thin man with arm muscles that stood out below rolled-up shirt sleeves like heavy rope wound round a stick, and wore a waistcoat but never a jacket, would tie the halter to an old worn post and then shove against the horse’s flank until its rump was near the fire. Then he would bend and lift up a hoof, one after the other, and inspect the old shoes. Clare could not remember the exact sequence, although Ned’s word picture had been vivid enough. The great pincers would remove old nails and shoe from a hoof, and the worn shoe would be inspected before Mr Ludgate, giving a non-committal sniff, would toss it with considerable skill halfway across the forge to a corner where it joined an imposing pile.

Then out would come the paring knife and with the horse’s hoof held securely against his knee, hard against the leather apron, the blacksmith would pare away some of the hoof, shaping it for the metal shoe. When he started on the last hoof, Ned would move forward a step or two, to make sure Mr Ludgate remembered he was there, and the smith would look up and nod, saying ‘Give ’er a blow then, lad.’ Ned would rush to the long handle of the bellows and work it up and down, watching the fire change from a dull red pile to a bright red glowing mass as the draught from the bellows roared through it. And then the banging started as Mr Ludgate heated the shoe, hammering and finally slapping it on to the hoof amid smoke and the smell of burning glue. And then the nails would be driven home and each time Ned found it hard to believe it did not hurt the horse, even though the animal stood there quietly enough.

Clare put a match to the fire which had been laid in her room and sat down in the single armchair with her coat on until she was sure the fire had caught. The single bed was Spartan, the blankets of the grey drabness that could only be produced to a Government specification, but the room was large with low ceilings and the uneven oak-planked floor usually found in old houses.

Would Ned ever see Yorke House again? Would she ever see Ned again, or would the Admiralty suddenly send him off to join a ship? She tried to shut off the racing thoughts with the memory that less than twelve hours ago she held him in her arms; she had circled his body with her arms and legs and felt him secure inside her. Secure – for two nights. One day, perhaps, Mrs Yorke would telephone her, or send her the official telegram, and they would be alone again, two women, one a childless widow, the other a mistress without a lover. Maudlin thoughts, but war widows were a commonplace these days and it was impossible to believe that having met Ned the war would leave them alone.

At that moment she saw a buff envelope on the small table, secured against random draughts by an ashtray. It was addressed in handwriting to ‘Nurse Exton’ and she opened it to find a brief note from Sister Scotland saying: ‘See me when convenient, JMS’. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was only five thirty so now was a ‘convenient’ time. She checked the blackout curtain, put the wire guard in front of the fire, picked up her torch and went along the corridor to Sister Scotland’s room.

The smile was neutral. ‘Ah, Nurse Exton – you had a pleasant weekend, I trust? And how is Lieutenant Yorke’s arm – he’s still doing the exercises, I hope?’

There was no point in telling Sister that the scars were now in his mind; that the pink and purple bands and white lines lacing his forearm and hand left him embarrassed; he had seen too many young women look and suddenly glance away; he had heard too many young and old women gush and sympathize in stereotyped phrases. Embarrassed? She had the feeling that he was nauseated by it, with all the horror an otherwise completely healthy person had for a deformed limb. Not that there was any deformity; simply that Ned could not (or would not) understand that within a year the flesh would return to its normal colour; that by then scarcely anyone would notice it – and even if they did, what did it matter: had he not seen the terrible facial scars of aircrews?

‘Yes, Sister, he’s doing his exercises and there seem to be no adhesions. He wished to be remembered to you, by the way.’

Sister Scotland nodded in acknowledgement as she walked over to the table which served as a desk. ‘Matron telephoned from London late this afternoon. Did you meet anyone from St Stephen’s while you were in London?’

The question was casual – too casual, Clare realized. ‘No, I spent most of my time with a former patient and his mother!’

Sister Scotland smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter – it’s simply that Matron gave instructions for you to return to London tomorrow and be ready to start day duty at St Stephen’s on Wednesday. I was afraid that – well, that you had run into some kind of trouble, but she assured me all was well. She was suitably mysterious as to why Nurse Exton’s services were so urgently required, but she did mention that a request had come from outside the hospital.’ A request, Sister Scotland had guessed from the tone of Matron’s voice, though she did not mention it to the nurse standing in front of her, that had both impressed and puzzled Matron.

‘I shall be sorry to leave here.’

‘And I shall be sorry to lose you. I don’t envy you going back to the bombing, but you’ll be able to see more of Mr Yorke.’

‘I hope so, Sister, but his new job at the Admiralty takes up most of his energies.’

‘Is it a secret, or can one ask…?’

‘Secret – he’s never hinted to me what it is.’

‘Well,’ Sister Scotland said grimly, ‘at least he’s not at sea. He’s done his share.’

At noon on Tuesday, just as the London train for which Clare was waiting on the platform of Ashford Station slowed down after passing the signal box at Smeeth, Ned Yorke looked at the eleven dockets piled in front of him. He had gone through them all, and no revealing pattern had emerged. At what point, he wondered, did he report to Captain Henry Watts, DSO, DSC, that he had no ideas? It was all right for the man at Number Ten, Downing Street, to talk to Uncle about mud settling and ideas springing up through the clear water, but solving the problem of the convoy insider was not like waiting for the inspiration to write a book. He had never written a book, but he was sure it bore no relation to checking through dockets – more like plodding police work, surely?

Jemmy had twitched his way through all Ned’s diagrams showing the position of the ships in each convoy when they were torpedoed; he had gone over each zigzag diagram with Ned. They knew on which leg of which zigzag diagram each convoy had been when the attack started. They had examined carefully the fact that no convoy had zigged or zagged while an attack was in progress and both he and Jemmy had agreed that it would have made no difference; zigzagging a convoy at night was like trying to get a herd of blindfolded elephants to do the Palais Glide; they were keen to oblige but lacked the finesse.

‘It’s position that matters, not speed…’ The phrase from the Admiralty’s current Fighting Instructions came to mind and although it had been proved wrong time and time again from Jutland onwards and most recently in the sinking of the pocket battleship the
Graf Spee
, did it have any relevance for these convoys?

Position…his own diagrams had shown the position of the torpedoed ships. They had been torpedoed at random, it seemed, within the limits of being more or less in the middle of the convoy. The middle of the convoy…who chose which ships were to be in the middle? Usually it was a matter of chance; only the leaders of the columns were specially picked, ships whose captains were known to be steady men and good station-keepers, because in gale or calm, fog or the darkest of nights, they were expected to keep the ship on course with the leaders of the columns on either side usually two hundred yards away. That distance, a cable in seamen’s language, normally governed a convoy’s life: each ship was a cable astern of her next ahead and a cable from the ships on either side. So the insider’s victims were chosen at random – chosen, that is, by the commodore of the convoy and the escort commander, who drew up the convoy plan, with the ultimate selection being made by the Ted captain of the U-boat, the ghost who could materialize in the middle of a convoy with a dozen or more torpedoes under his arm.

Cargoes – were the victims carrying particular cargoes, like tanks or planes? He could check by going through the dockets again, but it would be impossible for a U-boat to pick out specific ships during the night attack. Yet…

There was one last thing he could do, which was to draw up a table giving all the details of all the ships in each convoy, and marking those that were torpedoed. It was the last chance of noting a pattern and he would include apparently irrelevant things like whether a ship was a motor ship or coal-fired; single or twin screw…

Jemmy was humming to himself as he worked at ways of beating the zigzag diagrams; the Croupier was sharpening a pencil before drawing in more bearings on his gridded chart. The other four officers were at their desks, absorbed in their tasks. The pipes running along two sides of the room gave an occasional gurgle; in the distance there was a sporadic whoosh as a message carrier sped along the pneumatic tube. A man who had used this desk at some time in its long life had a habit of resting a burning cigarette along the edges so that in places the wood had blackened, scalloped sides.

He walked over and cadged an old chart from Jemmy: the back of it would provide a large enough area for him to draw out the spaces for the entries in his list. Now, what facts did he want? Nationality? Hardly important, since they were all sailing in an Allied convoy, but the information was given in the dockets so he might as well include it. Tonnage – gross, net registered, and deadweight. The length wasn’t given but he could get that from Lloyds Register. Steam or motor. Single or twin screw. Cargoes – no need to do much more than differentiate between one ship laden with tanks, guns and lorries and another bringing home grain. Which zigzag diagram the convoy was using at the time of the attack (Jemmy would never forgive him if he omitted that). Details of the escort. Total torpedoes fired in a complete attack, with the number of hits and misses (misses where the torpedo tracks were sighted of course). When, where and how the U-boat was sighted during an attack (it had happened only three times, all during bad-weather attacks at night, when the U-boat could not use its periscope effectively because of the height of the waves). Weather conditions during the attacks – including the amount of phosphorescence when any was present. Date on which the convoy sailed and the port. The identity of the Ted U-boat skipper where the Submarine Tracking Room had been able to discover it from his signals, ciphers or other secret methods. Whether or not the ships and escorts used parachute flares to light up the convoy – this was occasionally done when attacks were made on the surface. He continued noting down headings and then drew out the diagram.