A Fortunate Life (17 page)

T
HE DATE IS
2 November 1965. My watch, glowing softly in the darkness, tells me that the time is 0050 – ten minutes to launch.

Over the shoulder of the man on my right, I can see the needle on the large red illuminated gauge he is studying so intently. It shows sixty feet. Around me five or six figures, all bathed in a suffused red light,
*
are going about their tasks with quiet and focused concentration. The air is stale and faintly tainted with the unmistakable smell of diesel that mixes indelibly with our sweat and gets into the very seams of our clothes. The intense stillness is broken only by the soft, almost inaudible hum of machinery as we glide towards our launch position.

‘Stand by to come to periscope depth. Keep fifty feet. Up periscope.’

The words come from the ringmaster of all this perfectly choreographed activity. He is in his mid-thirties, rakishly thin and wears a white polo-necked seaman’s sweater, topped off with a battered Royal Navy cap, set at a jaunty angle. I feel the boat
†
tip imperceptibly upwards as we angle towards the surface and watch the periscope column slide noiselessly out of a recess in the deck beneath us. As it passes, the Captain deftly flicks down two handles attached to its sides. They look like motor-bike handlebars and contain the controls for the powerful optics on the periscope, which will by now be slipping like a thin probe out of the waves above us, leaving a thread of white wake behind it. When the rising column reaches eye height, the Captain turns it using the handles and looks into the eyepiece. I watch him as he goes through a full circle, scanning the dark horizon above and satisfying himself that there are no ships or fishing vessels in our vicinity.

‘Stand by to surface. Blow main ballast.’

It is time for me to make my way forward to my SBS colleagues who are waiting alongside our canoes in the forward torpedo compartment. By the time I get there, the submarine has broken surface and the forward torpedo hatch is already open, letting in a gust of cold night air and an occasional spray of sea water. We now have four minutes to get
our canoes through that hatch and onto the submarine casing, jump into them and be ready for the sea before the submarine must submerge again in order to reduce the risk of detection by radar. At 20 inches across, the hatch is only just wide enough to permit torpedo loading, so it is not easy to get four fully laden two-man canoes, together with their crews, through it in a hurry. But we have been well practised in the drill. Once safely on deck and in my canoe, I have just time to take in our new surroundings before we must be ready for the sea. Around me in the dark are my seven companions, their blackened faces, already streaked with sea foam and sweat, shining in the soft refracted red light coming from the open torpedo hatch. All are now firmly in the cockpits of their canoes, to which they have fastened the rubber-edged canoe ‘skirts’ that will keep out the water once we are launched. There is a blustery north-westerly wind blowing in our faces, and the sea is quite rough, with three- or four-foot waves slapping at the side of the submarine casing. In the distance I can see the low dark loom of the land which is our destination, like a wavy black brushstroke on a dark grey canvas. Behind it is the glow of Plymouth, lying unseen over the hill. Here and there are dotted pinpricks of light from houses and the occasional long searchlight beams of cars travelling along the coast road.

The sudden sigh of escaping air below us as the submarine gently vents its tanks tells me that this is no time to be admiring the view. We check that none of us is inadvertently still attached to the sinking craft (I once caught my signet ring in the submarine’s guard rail at this moment and was very lucky to get away with a badly cut finger rather than being dragged down with it) and brace ourselves for the waves as the submarine sinks beneath us. In a moment it is gone, leaving us bobbing on the surface in darkness and in silence. We initially have to paddle hard to get clear of the backwash of the submarine’s descent and then regroup to check that all are OK and no harm has been done to our fragile, canvas-covered canoes. We then turn our little crafts’ heads to the shore and our chosen landing point.

Earlier, during daylight, our submarine had run along this piece of the south Cornwall coast from Rame Head, with its prominent fourteenth-century chapel (Drake, in his time, would have used this as a key landmark, too) to Looe Island to give me the opportunity to carry out a periscope reconnaissance of our target area. From this, and a study of the map, I have chosen a little inlet which seemed uninhabited as our landing point for that night. It is now my job to find it. I have already studied the
local tide tables, to estimate the tidal flow and speed at the submarine’s drop-off point, and have laid off for this and how much I estimate the wind will push us off course. This has given me a course to steer, which I now set on the luminous P11, ex-Spitfire compass mounted on the skirt in front of me, and we start paddling, four dark and almost invisible shapes slipping quietly towards the land five miles ahead.

Our canoes are heavy and cumbersome, but remarkably seaworthy. Each carries two Marines, the one at the back being responsible for steering, via two foot pedals attached to a rudder at the rear. We are heavily loaded tonight. Each craft carries two Bergen rucksacks containing our kit for the three-day operation, our weapons and four dummy limpet mines.

My navigation is not perfect but it is not bad. It needs only a little paddling up and down the shore to pick out our spot.

There is a slight scraping noise on the shingle as our bows crunch on the beach, and then we are out and running up the foreshore, carrying our craft to the shelter of some nearby sea grass. Here we silently strip down our canoes into two loads and, now with around a hundred pounds on our backs, start to climb the steep hill which is the start of our journey across the narrow isthmus separating the open sea from the long arm of the Lynher River, which is tidal at this point and runs into the estuary of the Tamar and Plymouth harbour. By the time we reach Cathole, on an inlet of the Lynher, the tide is ebbing fast, and we have only enough time before dawn to reassemble our canoes and paddle a short way to a patch of deserted swamp grass and scrub in which we will lie up for the day.

The following night we catch the ebb tide, which swiftly sweeps us down to the junction of the Lynher and the Tamar. Here we lie up again during the day, only this time in a good position to observe our target for the following night, a collection of Royal Naval ships moored at buoys and lying alongside the jetties of Plymouth naval base.

The next night we complete our exercise by planting our limpet mines on what we consider the juiciest of these targets and, after hiding our canoes as best we can, head off north in pairs to find our way back to ‘safe territory’.

This exercise marks the end of the training course for the Swimmer Canoeists Class Three (SC3s) who make up the operatives of the Special Boat Section,
*
Royal Marines.

The SC3 course I joined began at the Amphibious Training Unit Royal Marines (ATURM) in Poole in September 1964, following three glorious months’ leave after returning from Singapore in May. Jane and I had spent this with her parents in Somerset. It was one of our most relaxed times together before our children started to arrive. We walked a lot with our new dog, Pip, on the Somerset Levels, one of our favourite excursions being to take a picnic across the flatlands behind Burnham to Brent Knoll, a prominent hill rising some two hundred feet above the Levels, on the summit of which are the remains of a Roman hill fort. Having just returned from my own isolated hill forts in the jungles of Sarawak, I whiled away many summer afternoons speculating about what it must have been like to be the young Roman hill fort commander during those early, untamed days of the Roman occupation.

In August Jane and I had gone down to Poole to stay with friends and try to find a house (we were still under age, and so not entitled to service accommodation). We eventually found one: a wooden bungalow called Barnfield, in a pretty decrepit state of repair, in the middle of some beech and silver-birch woods at Broadstone, five miles or so from Poole itself. It was fine during the summer, but so damp and cold in the winter that our clothes first gathered mildew and then froze, even inside the cupboards in our bedroom. It was also very isolated for Jane – now pregnant with our first child – when I was away (which I was, a lot). We had just bought our first family car, a second-hand mini-van, registration 907 PYD. But only Jane could drive it, as I had failed my first attempt at the driving test (driving has always bored me, and Jane does nearly all the driving in our family). I knew that when the course started I would have to leave at 0530 every morning to be on parade at 0600, and it was, of course, out of the question for Jane to drive me in at that hour. So I bought a very battered Norton motorbike, once a World War Two dispatch-rider’s mount, and rode it in to work throughout the following winter, dressed in a leather greatcoat, topped off with a parachute helmet borrowed from a friend.

I started my five-month SBS course on 6 September. We were ten on the course: seven Marines and three Officers (one was a fellow YO19 colleague, Rupert van der Horst). But this time there was absolutely no distinction of rank; Officers and Marines were all treated exactly
the same and did everything together, including taking it in turns to be in charge of the group.

Our first task was to learn to dive, for which we were sent to HMS
Vernon
in Portsmouth, where we joined a Royal Navy diving course in mid-September. First we learned about the physiology of diving – and especially of the danger of decompression sickness, more commonly known as ‘the bends’. This is caused by the fact that, when a diver descends, the pressure increase allows his blood to absorb more gas (most notably nitrogen). If he then ascends too quickly, the excess gas ‘boils off’ into bubbles causing great pain in the joints and, in some extreme cases, a gas embolism in the bloodstream that can block the blood flow (much like an air-pocket in a central-heating system) and cause death. Next we were taught how to get into the ‘dry’ suits used for diving: one-piece rubber suits with a neck seal to keep out the water. With the aid of a partner, we had to get into and out of these in three minutes. They were supposed to be dry but, no matter how much you tried to mend them, they always seemed to develop little leaks that slowly let in the freezing sea water. After that (for reasons I could never understand) we had to learn to run in them across the mudflats of Portsmouth harbour. These ‘mud runs’ in full diving kit and carrying swim fins (flippers) are about the most exhausting thing I have ever done. Finally, we were allowed to put on compressed-air breathing apparatus and actually go underwater. The rest of this course I remember for its boredom and its cold. We were diving through the early winter months using a diving set that gave us ninety minutes underwater. This was chiefly spent sitting at the bottom of the old torpedo-testing trench on what used to be Horsea Island in the middle of Portsmouth Harbour, beating a rusty shackle with a hammer or pointlessly sawing bits of iron.
*
The only relief from the cold was to save up your pee until about an hour into the dive and then pee into your suit to warm yourself up for the last half hour.

The highlight of the course was a deep dive off one of the Napoleonic forts in the middle of Portsmouth harbour, which we did in late October. The safe diving limit for compressed air is 120 feet, and this depth could only be found in the middle of the main shipping channel north of the Isle of Wight. While I was on the bottom during this dive the
Queen Mary
passed over our heads, shaking the whole sea bed, even at that depth.

When we returned to Poole in November we found that our diving training had actually only just begun. The compressed air sets we used at Portsmouth let off great streams of bubbles when the diver breathed out. Indeed, this was one of the key safety features of this kind of diving, since it was always possible to see the position of the diver, and whether he was OK, from the bubbles breaking on the surface.