Sunset (2 page)

Brooke smiled again. The truly important things against the dull panorama of war.

She persisted, ‘They're not expecting you at this hour, sir.'

The girl watched him curiously. At H.Q. you soon got used to sailors, especially the officers,
more
especially the married ones, and the Wrens had a quarters officer who had been a teacher in a very smart school for young ladies at Harrogate. A real battleaxe, and she made sure that her ‘chaps', as she called them, were kept out of harm's way. Most of the time.

This one was different, a bit like some of the other young officers from the battered escort vessels that came and went as frequently as the tides. Young, grave faces; strain in their eyes and around their mouths that spoke of a war she could only imagine, despite the maps and charts in the H.Q. plotting rooms. Crosses to mark slaughtered convoys, or familiar names which had been wiped away like chalk from a blackboard.

When he removed his cap and ran his fingers through his hair as he was doing now, she saw that same look. Inner control, wariness, the inability to relax. He had unruly hair, untidy even for a regular, and she saw small flecks of grey on his sideburns. He was not yet thirty: as a regular he would have been given a more important command otherwise. She saw him start as the sound of a chugging harbour launch broke the silence.

Brooke said, ‘Your NAAFI manager, I believe?'

The lower deck had its own translation of
NAAFI,
he thought.
No Ambition And Fuck-all Interest.
The girl was looking at him with a little smile, as if she guessed what he was thinking.

‘I think I'll cadge a lift.' It was better than waiting and wondering. He moved along the jetty and did not notice her surprise.

She stared past him as the launch puffed into view, followed by morning gulls and surrounded by diesel fumes.

But not before she had seen his eyes. Tawny and very steady. It might provide the old battleaxe with a real challenge, she thought. And me.

The NAAFI manager sent his mechanic to fetch Brooke's luggage from the hut and passed a small parcel to the waiting Wren. ‘Best I can do, love.'

She walked towards the little grey-painted van, then turned and saluted him again.

‘Good luck, sir. I – I don't know how you all do it!'

He looked at her for several seconds. Afterwards she thought he had been trying to remember something, or somebody.

He said, ‘We do it for you, and those like you.' Then he swung himself aboard the launch, which was immediately cast off.

He did not look back, but knew she was staring after the boat.

He said, ‘I hope this isn't taking you out of your way too much.'

The manager grinned. ‘No, sir. I've got a few “rabbits” for the old
Resolution
's wardroom on board.' He darted a glance at his unexpected passenger while the harbour launch lifted and dipped across the endless swell. It was the closest he would ever get to going to sea, if he could manage it. A destroyer type, he thought. Rather him than me.

They moved on in silence while other small craft appeared from the moored grey shapes of capital ships or the dazzle-painted escorts. A harbour coming to life. Another day.

Brooke removed his cap and shaded his eyes while he stared at the neat lines of small buoys that supported the webs of anti-torpedo netting protecting the anchorage. Beyond that there were green wreck marker buoys to show where a huge net had been spread over the sunken shadow of the
Royal Oak
and her sleeping company.

Brooke tested his injured leg on the gratings and thought of the Wren and her black-market stockings.

He could feel his inner excitement rising, as well as the bitterness he had carried for so long. What would the NAAFI manager say if he knew that the destroyer which had been given him to command was his first? At this stage of the war any regular was worth his weight in gold.

He doubted if many cared or even remembered the reasons for the Spanish Civil War, especially now that their own country and survival were at risk. Brooke had been in destroyers then too, a young lieutenant with his life and career stretching out like an adventure. Like his father and grandfather before him: it was something he accepted, took for granted. After a small boarding school in West Sussex, an establishment long approved for the
sons of serving officers, he had joined the Royal Naval College as a cadet. He had been twelve years old.

Even Spain had been an adventure, the closest thing to all that training and preparation he could have imagined.

Then one day it had become very real to the men and ships of several nations who had been trying to protect their own people as Franco's fascist army crushed all government resistance except in the areas of Valencia and Barcelona. Refugees, Britons working at the consulate or for the Red Cross, men and women in all walks of life were ordered to leave. The Royal Navy's ships were given a task they had come to know so well since Dunkirk; but they were amateurs at evacuation in 1937.

While dive-bombers had screamed overhead, piloted, it was alleged, by Hitler's own
Luftwaffe
, the Royal Navy had made up for its other deficiencies with a bluff mixture of courage and patient good humour.

It was said to have been a small mine that had blown Brooke's whaler out of the water, killing all but two male civilians, a woman who had lost her legs, three seamen, and Brooke himself.

Four years ago, and Brooke was not certain which hurt him more: the throbbing pain in his scarred leg and foot, which at one time had almost been removed by a surgeon in Malta, or the despair of being told he was no longer needed for active duty. In a war where he had seen men die in every sort of terrible circumstance at sea it was sometimes hard to believe he had considered killing himself.
Was I the same man
?

‘There she is, sir!'

He nodded, holding on to the moment, not wanting to share it.

The NAAFI manager took his silence for uncertainty.

‘H.M.S.
Serpent,
sir. Don't build 'em like her no more!'

Brooke barely heard him. As the launch began to turn in a wide sweep he watched the moored destroyer, his mouth suddenly quite dry. She was exactly the way she looked in her peacetime photograph, and much the same as the day she had first tasted salt water in that other war in 1916.
When I was four years old.
It was easy to imagine her in this very mooring when Jellicoe's Grand Fleet had been here. Small when compared with the flotilla leader
Murray,
and a good sixty feet shorter, but
Serpent
retained a rakishness which even her old-fashioned straight stem could not fault. Apart from one remaining sister-ship she was the only three-funnelled destroyer left in service.

Newly painted in pale grey, she seemed to stand out from the dull, shadowy shapes beyond her. Her pendant number,
H-50
, was also sharp and clear after her recent overhaul.

Brooke saw two figures by the short accommodation ladder, one of whom had his cap tilted sloppily on the back of his head.

‘I believe they're expecting a new skipper today, sir?'

Brooke watched one of the figures hurry to the ladder as if to wave them away. Then he reached for his cap and jammed it on to his tousled hair.

He smiled, but it did not reach his tawny eyes. ‘Yes. Me,' he said.

Perhaps for the first time, he knew how his father had felt.

On this particular April morning the destroyer's wardroom seemed quite spacious when compared with
Serpent
's cramped and slender hull. As is the way of destroyers, new or old, personal comfort took a poor second place to machinery and fuel, magazines and stores. The wardroom, which was situated well aft of the engine and boiler room and separated from the rest of the ship by heavy watertight bulkheads, was a separate world from the overcrowded messdecks in the forecastle, and the nerve centres of bridge and weapon spaces. It ran the whole breadth of the hull: one side was used mainly for the officers' meals or for snatching a hot mug of something during those precious hours off watch; the other was where they relaxed when, like now, the ship swung gently to her cable. There were comfortable, if worn, red leather chairs and bench seats, magazine and letter racks, a locked glass case of revolvers, and the inevitable portraits of the King, in naval uniform, and Her Majesty on the opposite side of the outdated wardroom stove with its club fender.

In the centre of the bulkhead was the ship's crest, a serpent that looked more like some fairy-tale dragon, with the motto beneath it:
Hostibus Nocens, Innocens Amicus
– Deadly to Foes, Harmless to Friends. Near the small hatch that acted as a bar was the builder's plate: John Brown & Co, Clydebank 1916.

Lieutenant Richard Kerr toyed with a half-empty cup of coffee and considered the silence. As if the ship were still asleep, he thought. It was hardly surprising, with three-quarters of the ship's company of ninety souls on leave of one sort or another. Long leave for many of them while the refit had been completed, local leave for ‘natives' and compassionate leave for two sailors who had been sent home to face the pain of bombed homes and dead families. The small duty part of the watch would be falling in again soon, knowing that by the end of the week every man would be back on board. Kerr was the first lieutenant and had a thousand things to remember. With a new commanding officer expected aboard today it was bad enough, but in addition the ship had lost two lieutenants, Rowley the gunnery officer, and the Pilot, Lieutenant Johns, key members of their little team. A new navigator was supposed to be joining within the next couple of days, but their one and only sub-lieutenant was to have the gunnery department put on to
his
shoulders.

Kerr glanced along the table. It was strange to see the place so deserted. The familiar faces, the nervous jokes after some particularly hairy convoy or air attack, the flare-ups of temper like those within most close-knit families. In the same breath he admitted that within a month or so the two missing faces would be forgotten. He felt envy too. The two lieutenants had been snatched away, one for promotion, another to a brand-new destroyer still being completed.

He dropped his eyes to his cup. Even the captain, Lieutenant-Commander Greenwood, had been promoted to full commander of a powerful fleet destroyer just off the stocks. A dream for any destroyer man.

He looked up as one of the other two occupants cleared his throat and closed yet another gardening catalogue. Ian Cusack had a home in Newcastle but spoke with a Londonderry accent you could cut with a saw. He was
Serpent
's engineering officer, the Chief. It was unusual to see him decked out in his best uniform, presumably because the new commanding officer would need to know the state of the engines as well as the man who controlled them. Cusack had a seamed, polished face, and when he was in his working rig he wore a faded woolly hat with a
bobble on top, so that he took on the appearance of a small, darting gnome. Apart from the purple cloth below his single gold ring which marked him as an engineer, he wore the same rank as the sub-lieutenant. But the subbie and the Chief were separated by more than many years of service. Their worlds were completely different. The former was only eighteen months out of training; the latter had begun as a boy and then gone on from one engine room to another in almost every sort of ship until, as a senior commissioned warrant officer, he had become the head of his own department. Good with his own people, the stokers, mechanics and artificers who kept the screws turning and watched like hawks over the ship's greedy intake of fuel, but he was quick to react to criticism from all others.

Kerr had heard him snap at the gunnery officer on one occasion, ‘If you lot were wiped out on the bridge I reckon I could take over at a pinch! Fat lot of use any of you would be in the engine room – couldn't fit a new battery in a torch, most of you!'

Cusack said now, ‘What d'you think, Number One? About the new skipper, I mean?'

Kerr shrugged. ‘Probably hot stuff. He was first lieutenant in a flotilla leader. And this will be his first command, I'm told.'

Cusack pricked up his ears. Like his engines, he could sense a change of beat or rhythm without even thinking about them. He had detected the hint of bitterness in the first lieutenant's reply. Kerr was a good officer, cool in a tight corner, and never one to let things get slack. With the war spreading in every direction even junior officers were having their promotions advanced for the duration, although how anyone could gauge that must be a magician. He had thought the departing skipper might have persuaded someone to use some influence for Kerr. Cusack's bright eyes sharpened. It was suddenly as plain as a pikestaff: Kerr had been expecting to get this ship for himself. It might seem the obvious solution. Losing the captain and two inexperienced lieutenants, Kerr would have held the team together until his own promotion took him to greener pastures.

Cusack sighed. ‘I'll not be sorry to get back to sea. I'm sick of the stench of all this new paint.'

Kerr forced a smile. ‘I wouldn't have thought a plumber would even notice it!'

The other officer, who was watching the solitary messman pour the last of the coffee into his cup, remarked, ‘I bet they'll take some of our key ratings too when we next attract the attention of some admiral.'

Kerr watched him thoughtfully. Vivian Barlow, who wore the single thin stripe of a warrant officer, was the Gunner (T), torpedo expert, and an old dog for this kind of work.
Serpent
was Barlow's first ship as an officer. He, like Cusack, had come up the hard way, and for much of his service he had been more used to a chief petty officers' and P.O.s' mess than a wardroom.

If it had seemed difficult for himself, Kerr knew how much worse it must have been for a man like Barlow to change everything he had taken for granted since he had joined the navy at the tender age of twelve.