The White Guns (1989) (27 page)

Rae had been an errand-boy for a local grocer's shop before joining up. Riding a bicycle with a basket of groceries on the front for fifteen shillings a week. It seemed unlikely he would be content to go back to that.

And at the end of the line, strangely subdued, Ginger Jackson, who apart from the bridge-team Marriott probably knew better than any of them.

'I've arranged for you to be with us, Jackson.' Marriott studied his homely features, the bright ginger hair flapping in the harbour breeze. 'After that, well, it will be up to you.'

A quick grin, but sad all the same. 'Not Kentish Town, sir, never in a thousand years, not after 801!'

As Marriott moved along the second rank he saw the figures staring down from the dockside. Petty Officer Evans was there, as he had known he would be. Harder for him perhaps? He had been so much a part of her. The hinge on which all else had depended.

Usually calm, always dependable no matter how bad the circumstances. Marriott had once believed Evans to have no feelings at all until the occasion when tracer shells had ripped just feet above the bridge to sever Silver's halliards like cotton threads. It was the only time he had heard the impassive Evans drop his guard and let loose a stream of curses in voluble French.

Marriott paused and faced Leading Signalman Silver. Like most of his breed he had shared just about everything with those who stood their watches on the bridge. In battle, he was as exposed and as vital as anyone in the tiny nerve-centre where the protective plating was not thick enough to withstand a heavy bullet's direct hit, let alone a cannon shell.

'What about you, Bunts? Will you go back to the dogtracks when you finally get demobbed?'

'Shouldn't wonder, sir. It's as good a bit 'er graftin' as any, an' I reckon they'll all need somethin' to take their minds orf fings.' He gave a sad grin. 'Still, I'll miss the tots an' the 'ot kye an' runs ashore in Alex.'

Fairfax followed closely on his heels, missing nothing, sharing each contact, and just as quickly feeling it slip away.

He had been right through the boat followed by one of the B.E.Q.'s officers. The latter had done everything but cluck with impatience, as if it was just another job number, an irritating formality.

But to Fairfax it was stark and moving, like these last farewells. For even if they worked together again while they remained in Germany it could never be the same. No longer of one company.

The messdeck, the largest space in the hull apart from the engineroom. Stripped bare; they had even taken their beloved pin-ups with them. And yet still filled with sounds and faces, movement, and the comings and goings of shadows.

Empty tables where they had written their letters, done their 'jewing', and sometimes slept when the whole deck was awash in heavy weather. The W/T office, the only place with a lingering air of life, but with an unknown telegraphist from the passage-crew sitting in White's metal chair.

Lastly the wardroom. Again so empty, without glasses in 'the bar', no pistols in the rack by the King's portrait, or where the picture had been.

Did boats really have their own personalities? Did they care or sustain hurt? After this, Fairfax knew they did.

He thought of his interview with Commander Meikle. He had gone to his new offices, all smelling of fresh paint and raw timber, hopes high after his application for transfer to the regular navy.

Meikle's attitude had been a disappointment; worse still, he had made Fairfax think of his father, blunt and uncompromising.

'You know what I think, Fairfax? I believe it would be a waste of your time and experience. Even if a transfer is effected, it may not be for very long, or until the navy settles down again to its peacetime torpor.' Fairfax had been astonished by his scornful tone. 'Then where will you be? Out in the cold, no job, and few prospects, unless you are well connected with the Old Boy network.' He had added sharply,
'Are you?'
Without waiting for a reply Meikle had finished by saying, 'Think about following your father's advice. Medicine. We will always need good doctors.'

Fairfax saw Marriott's expression as he walked towards him. As if he was reliving what he had just lost.

'Ready, sir?'

Marriott glanced past him at the silent watchers. 'Yes.' Just one word.

Fairfax looked at Lowes. 'Carry on!'

The hands arranged themselves into a new formation and faced aft.

Silver stood by the empty depth-charge racks, his cap at his feet as he loosened the White Ensign's halliards. In the bows the telegraphist was doing the same with the Jack.

Marriott climbed on to a ready-use locker and stared across their heads, his back towards the people on the dockside, excluding them.

'No speeches.' It was surprising how his voice carried. It was as if the dockyard din of cranes and pumps had been hushed for this final moment. 'We did a lot together. Few will ever know how much.' For the first time he dared to look at their faces, now blurred and indistinct so that others seemed to replace them. 'I shall miss you all, and I shall miss the boat, more than I could have believed. Later on, perhaps
much
later on, she will stand us in good stead when things go against us, no matter how or where we all end up.
We shall remember,
each and every one of us, and we will gain strength from it.'

He turned quickly to Fairfax. For just a few seconds he felt himself freeze, as if he could not move or speak again.

It was not Fairfax who stood there watching him, his eyes in shadow from his cap. It was Tim Elliott. He was back. To share it.

Fairfax saw some of the men moving uneasily and called, 'Ready aft, sir!'

Marriott nodded. 'Yes. Thanks, Number One. Carry on.'

The calls shrilled the
still
and then very slowly the ensign and the Jack crept down their staffs, each keeping perfect time with the other.

'Sound off!'

The two boatswains' calls shrilled the
carry on
and the small masthead pendant vanished from the truck.

Marriott heard a launch start up its engines and knew the passage-crew had been hanging about nearby, waiting for this last, sad ritual. Like undertaker's men they would come and make it respectable and final.

Leading Signalman Silver strode up and saluted.' 'Ere it is, sir.' He handed the tattered little pendant to Marriott and added, 'It's not much to show what you done, sir.'

Marriott took it and returned his salute. Then he stepped down from the locker and walked to the brow.

Only once did he look back. There were boiler-suited figures already on her deck, eager to go, unaware perhaps of what they had done.

Then he walked past the faceless figures on the dock wall and saw no one until Beri-Beri blocked his way and said, 'I've got the car. We'll go somewhere and get an enormous drink.'

'Thanks for coming.'

They walked together to the road, the various groups of figures parting to let them through. It was all there, curiosity, indifference, sympathy. Beri-Beri had been watching with all the others, knowing what it was costing his friend, as it had once cost him.

He glanced at the young girl he had seen working at HQ, so pretty with her coiled black hair and brown eyes.

He had not noticed her on the dock until he had heard her sobbing quietly as she had watched the MGB's last rites. When some Germans had asked her to translate what Marriott had been saying she had not appeared to hear, but had kept watching him. In retrospect, it had seemed as if she had been willing him the strength to get through it.

She saw his glance now and lifted her chin as if to show she was all right. But her eyes returned to Marriott and told a very different story.

Marriott rested his elbow on the table and looked out of a nearby window. It was a small office, as yet unallocated for any particular purpose, and like most of Meikle's headquarters smelled of paint and floor-polish.

He said wearily, 'I don't see why I need to have a German driver. What's the point of it now?'

Beri-Beri lowered a newspaper and eyed him gravely. 'Orders. It's the same for everyone.' Two days since MGB 801 had left Kiel on probably her last passage anywhere, and Marriott was still feeling it badly.

Perhaps that was why Meikle had given him barely time to settle in to his new quarters at Plön. Nobody could argue with him on that score, he thought. Meikle himself seemed to work right around the clock.

Marriott watched a man watering some flowers and saw him glance up as if he could feel the scrutiny. Was he thinking perhaps of the officers who had worked here just three months ago?

A tall white mast and gaff had replaced the one smashed down in a final attack by RAF fighter-bombers. A large White Ensign curled lazily in the hot breeze while, from the masthead, Commodore Paget-Orme's broad pendant would act as another reminder that these premises were under new management.

Marriott turned back to the six folders of ex-German sailors who were available for use as drivers. All the rest, he assumed, had been selected by senior officers and military government officials. They had to be whiter-than-white, able to speak good English, and be capable of driving all the usual types of military or commandeered vehicles. One of Meikle's staff had explained tersely, 'The choice must finally be yours, old chap.'

Marriott had been in the navy long enough to know that, translated, that meant,
so too was the final responsibility.

'They've been checked right through, of course, no dyed-in-the-wool Nazis or that kind of fellow. Still, you can't be sure.' He had finished brightly by adding, 'After all, you're the one who'll be stuck with him!'

Beri-Beri said suddenly, 'You'll be with me for some of the time. So you'll need a driver who knows the whole of Schleswig-Holstein, not just round here.'

That was another mystery, Marriott thought. His new job required an officer with a watchkeeping certificate and some experience of command. A small-ship man.

He tried not to think of that last farewell. The way the once-familiar faces looked so out of place now whenever he passed one in the barracks. It was a demand on his own nerves too. To awake each morning without the usual standing orders, requestmen and defaulters, the routine of running a compact fighting unit with each man's problems your own. He had never believed he could have missed it so much.

Beri-Beri crossed the room and looked at the six folders. Marriott had seen three of them already. Impassive, well trained, withdrawn. He knew that Marriott would never get along with any of them.

'Try the next one. He seems to be, or
have
been, a regular.'

Marriott pressed a buzzer and a tall, broad-shouldered man in the now-familiar 'civilianised' uniform reefer jacket entered and waited across the table from him.

From his folder Mariott knew that his name was Heinz Knecht, and he was twenty-nine years old. Like Townsend he had been an acting-petty officer when the surrender had been announced. He had been doing an advancement course in Kiel where he lived with his young wife and daughter.

Meikle's aide had confided briefly that this man Knecht was a doubtful choice, in his opinion. The folder explained that he had been a member of the Party, although like most servicemen he had had little to do with outside functions. Knecht had spent all his war in U-Boats, mostly in the Atlantic, and had been a survivor from one of them; his submarine had been depth-charged by an unseen Sunderland flying-boat when they were all but in sight of home. With casualties so high in the U-Boat arm of the
Kriegsmarine
he was lucky to be here at all.

'How long have you been in this command, Knecht?' The man looked like many people's idea of the typical German sailor. Light brown hair, neatly cut, blue eyes which although troubled by this interview showed a hint of humour.

'I was six months in Kiel before the end, Herr Leutnant.'

His voice was as Marriott had expected. Low and rounded, what he had already come to recognise as local.

'You have answered all the questions in the folder.' Marriott made no attempt to speak slowly or carefully, and the man named Knecht had no difficulty in following every word.

'You speak good English.'

'I wanted to do well in the navy, Herr Leutnant.' He gave a small shrug. 'We were expecting to win, you see. English would have been a great aid for promotion.'

Marriott stared at him. But there was neither insolence nor resentment in the blue eyes.

Knecht added, 'I have driven several cars here. I am good mechanic also.'

Marriott glanced at Beri-Beri who was looking at a newspaper at the other table, his head propped in his hands. He doubted if anyone else would realise that he had fallen fast asleep.

'It says here, Knecht, that you were a member of the Nazi party.'

A cloud seemed to pass across his features. 'That is so, Herr Leutnant.'

None of the others had been classified as ex-Nazis. They had professed to know little about anything which had happened in Germany before the surrender.

Marriott said quietly, 'Tell me about it.'

Again the shrug. 'There is nothing to tell. I entered the navy as my career, a life's work. I wanted to,' for the first time he groped for the right phrase, '– wanted to
get on.
So I joined the party. Those who say differently –' he looked at the floor. 'May I go, Herr Leutnant?'

'Do you have a family?'

Knecht looked up at him, surprised by his prolonging the interview.

'We have a little girl, Herr Marriott. Her name is Friedl. She is three years.'

Marriott frowned. 'How did you know my name?'

Knecht smiled, but it made him look vaguely sad.

'I was there when you came into the dockyard. That first day. I was near the one with the white flag. I saw and heard everything. When I heard about Kapitän von Tripz's son I was curious. I was there also when you –' He hesitated, 'Pay off your ship.'

Beri-Beri's elbow slipped off the table and he exclaimed, 'What? What was that?'

Marriott stood up and held out his hand. 'I've just got myself a driver.'

The German stared at the out-thrust hand and then his face slowly split into a huge grin.

'Danke sehr,
Leutnant Marriott!' Surprisingly, he wiped his face with the back of his hand.
'Danke!'

Marriot said quietly, 'Report to me tomorrow, and I'll see what sort of Rolls-Royce they're going to give me.'

The door closed silently and Beri-Beri said, 'Good. He'll give you something else to worry about!' But inwardly he was glad. Companionship, anyone's, was what his friend needed above all else. He thought of the black-haired girl and wondered if he should mention that she had been on the dockside too. But he decided against it.

They left the bleak office together and walked across a patch of grass in the shadow of Paget-Orme's broad pendant. There was a small board which proclaimed that this place was called the
Quarter-Deck
henceforth, so they both saluted.

Beri-Beri chuckled. 'You always know when the Royal Navy is around. If it moves, salute it, if it doesn't, paint it white!'

They mounted the steps of the new wardroom and paused to hang up their caps with all the rest.

It was then that Marriott looked at the open doors where the other officers were sitting or standing at the bar, but nobody was speaking. It was like going stone deaf.

Then as the hubbub of voices boomed out again, Meikle left the big room and picked up his cap before saying, 'I'm afraid you missed my announcement.' His eyes moved from Beri-Beri to Marriott and stayed on him.

'It has just been cleared by Operations. Today, the American air force dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.'

Marriot grappled with it. He was not even certain what the news implied. 'What happened, sir?'

Meikle dusted the peak of his cap with his sleeve before replying. 'The city was completely wiped out. Not a brick left standing, not a soul expected to be alive.'

He walked to the other door and took a deep breath as if to rid himself of the knowledge.

'It
means,
gentlemen, that to all intents and purposes, the war is over.'

Neither Marriott nor his friend moved or spoke for several seconds after Meikle had disappeared.

Then Marriott said, 'It's hard to take in, bloody nearly impossible.'

There was a burst of cheering from the wardroom and Beri-Beri said, 'That'll be the new subbies who arrived from England yesterday. Never heard a shot fired and now they're
all for it!'

Marriott looked at his clean-cut features, the sun-bleached hair which usually poked from either side of his cap like wings. The sort of face you noticed, young but no longer young.

Beri-Beri said, 'They never stop to think, do they? Suppose it was London, or my old stamping-ground, Winchester?' He spoke with such anger and bitterness Marriott hardly recognised his voice. 'And it had to be our side to use a weapon like that, didn't it?' He snatched his cap from the rack and said, 'Let's just walk, shall we? If I go in there right now, I think I'll kill someone!'

Marriott fell into step beside him as they crunched along a broad gravel driveway.

Some would hail the news as brutal justice, punishing the enemy which had shown little respect for the rules of war. The Americans might claim that it was worth it if only to prevent more of their sailors and marines dying in the Pacific as they winkled out each Jap-held island with bayonet and flamethrower.

Marriott might have expected Beri-Beri to be one of the former; he had been in the Far East and Burma, had lost his own command in the fighting. But his clear-sighted comparison between his home town and a hitherto unknown place called Hiroshima moved him more than he could say.

They reached the side of the great lake and Beri-Beri dragged out his worn and blackened pipe and waited for Marriott to produce his pouch. 'We'll be doing this when we're old men.' Beri-Beri shaded his pipe with his hands and held a flame above the tobacco like a true sailor. Then he said abruptly, as if he was giving himself no time to change his mind, 'You've done a lot for me, Vere, over the years, I mean.'

Marriott gripped his unlit pipe and watched the change of mood. 'For each other.'

'Maybe. But the war's finally over. Something which we knew must happen, and yet probably we still can't accept it. We were lucky.' His eyes moved to Marriott's decorations. 'And I don't mean the Glory Boys.'

'I know that.' Marriott looked at the shimmering water which stretched endlessly past the tall trees. 'All the blokes who bought it. Others back in hospital right now who most likely wish they had. It's that kind of luck.'

Beri-Beri nodded. 'I feel it's been given to us for a reason. Not because we
won The War,
not as a reward. But as some kind of second chance.' He smiled suddenly. 'That's why I'm going fishing when I get demobbed. A labrador, maybe two, that's all I'll need.'

'No girl?'

'Well, maybe later.' He said quietly, 'That girl at HQ was on the dockside when you paid-off.' He felt as if he had betrayed some kind of trust, but knew instantly he had done the right thing.