Battlecruiser (1997) (3 page)

During the journey he had found himself recalling the funeral and the aftermath, the sandwiches and the sherry, and the first nervous laughter as the tension had begun to wear thin. What had he really expected?

And why could he not accept that nothing would ever be the same?
Pyrrhus
was gone. All the faces, the weaknesses, and the rough camaraderie which made any ship were no more.
Eight survivors.

He had passed the journey north going through his notes, putting names to people who would soon become an everyday part of his life. Whenever he had glanced up from his papers, a ruddy-faced brigadier had tried to force him into conversation about the war. What the navy, ‘the blue jobs’ as he called them, really thought about it, while he took occasional sips from a silver flask which certainly did not contain tea. He had not offered it to Sherbrooke. He felt his mouth relax into a thin smile.
Just as well. I’d probably have told him!

The operations officer was speaking again. He had seen
the glances passing between him and the Wren petty officer: like the old vice-admiral and his Wren driver, wanting to be the man he once was.

Sherbrooke turned towards him. He was doing his best: they all were.
It’s me.
‘What is it?’

The operations officer replied, ‘Nothing, sir. Just a young chap joining the ships. Asking about boats. I told him to report to . . .’

‘I’ll take him.’

He caught sight of a young lieutenant with a pile of ill-assorted luggage and an instrument case, a banjo, by the look of it. His stripes were wavy: another R.N.V.R. officer, hostilities only, who overnight had become the largest part of the navy.

But there was something different about this one, a gold-laced letter ‘A’ in the curl of his upper stripe, and when he responded to the operations officer’s reluctant offer, Sherbrooke saw the pilot’s wings on his left sleeve.

‘Great! Thanks!’ He stared, obviously dismayed as he saw the oak leaves around the peak of Sherbrooke’s cap. ‘Gee, I’m sorry, sir! I didn’t realize!’ He added helplessly, ‘I’m joining the
Reliant
, you see.’

Sherbrooke nodded, momentarily off-balance. The easy use of her name. Had he really been avoiding it?

Then he smiled. ‘So am I, as it happens.’

The lieutenant slipped the raincoat off his shoulder and saluted.

‘Rayner, sir. R.C.N.V.R.’

Sherbrooke returned his salute, and glanced at the word
Canada
on the lieutenant’s shoulder. It was a different navy now: errand boys and bank clerks, brick-layers and bus conductors. A miracle which had been performed without any one noticing, or so it sometimes seemed to him.

The operations officer looked up from his watch. ‘The launch is coming, sir.’

Sherbrooke shivered again, but not because of the cold. ‘Right on time.’

The operations officer sounded relieved. His part was almost over. ‘She would be on time, sir. In
that
ship.’

Sherbrooke barely heard him. He was feeling in his pockets, half expecting to find his pipe there, but that had gone too, probably when they had cut his frozen clothing from his body. All the time, he had been trying to hold onto the other man, hearing his voice.
Help me. Somebody help me.
And another voice, a stranger’s. ‘No use, Captain. He’s gone.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’

‘
What?
’ He swung on the Canadian almost blindly. ‘What is it?’

‘I just realized what a stupid goddamn fool I am. Who you are. What you did.’ He shook his head. ‘And all I do is . . .’

Sherbrooke held out his hand. ‘Don’t say it. This is an important day for both of us.’ He slipped out of his new raincoat, feeling the bitter air through his uniform, and stinging his face. This young Canadian temporary lieutenant would be the replacement pilot for the ship’s Walrus amphibian, affectionately known throughout the navy as ‘the Shagbat’, which was used for both reconnaissance and rescue. He had made a good start; he had just rescued his captain, without even knowing it.

He heard the throaty growl of the launch as it swung around a ponderous tug and headed straight for the jetty.

Very smart: it could have been Spithead in peacetime. The bowman with his raised boathook, a petty officer as coxswain, and some other face beside his in the cockpit. There was a rear-admiral’s flag painted on either bow.
Stagg was doing him proud. He would . . . He almost smiled. In
that
ship.

Sherbrooke watched as the boat’s engines coughed astern, and the hull came to rest against the jetty’s fenders with barely a shudder.

A midshipman scrambled ashore and saluted. ‘Ready when you are, sir.’

Sherbrooke turned to shake hands with the operations officer. A few passers-by were hanging about to watch. He could almost hear them.

All right for some, eh?

He found that it did not worry him. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Good luck, sir.’ The other man saluted.

The midshipman was staring at the Canadian lieutenant, confused, angry perhaps, that something unrehearsed was happening. The pilot was gathering up his bags, and lastly the banjo, if that was what it was.

‘After you, sir.’

Sherbrooke did not raise his voice. ‘It’s not vital, Mr Rayner, but senior officers go
last
, right?’

More confusion, until a seaman ran to help carry the bags into the launch.

He could feel the scrutiny, the curiosity, perhaps the understanding, too. The navy was a family, after all.

He touched the peak of his cap and stepped down into the boat.

‘Bear off forrard! Let go aft!’ The midshipman’s voice was just a little too loud. He would be watching everything, preparing what he would say to his fellows in the gunroom when he was dismissed from this duty.
The new captain, what’s he like?

The boat tore away from the jetty and caught the Canadian off-balance; Sherbrooke heard a twang as the
banjo fell onto the deck. A face he would get to know, and the man behind it, like all the rest of them. He gripped the safety rail until his hand throbbed. But not too intimately. Not again.

He thought suddenly of his last visit to the Admiralty, the barrage balloons like basking whales in the washed-out sky, uniforms everywhere, representing every country imaginable, all fighting the same war with their homes under German occupation.

When he had been told about
Reliant
, he had heard himself ask, ‘Why me, sir?’

The admiral’s face had crinkled. Relieved, perhaps, that it was a question he could answer without personal involvement.

‘Her flag officer, Rear-Admiral Stagg, asked for you himself. Insisted, I should say.’

Spray lanced over the glass screen, and he wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was exhilarating, without threat. What had he expected? The question always repeated itself.

Fear, perhaps? Some manifestation of the horror that might have scarred him more deeply than even the experts realized?

He looked up again, and saw her for the first time. It had happened so suddenly that it was hard to take in, to accept. H.M.S.
Reliant
, a battlecruiser, one of the giants, and to the public a surviving symbol of a world which would never be the same again.

She was huge but graceful, with the speed and agility of a destroyer, and the fighting power of a battleship. At the outbreak of war Britain, with the largest fleet in the world, had retained four battlecruisers. The
Hood
, and
Reliant
’s two sisters,
Repulse
and
Renown.
The
Hood
, probably the most beautiful warship ever built, and in her
day the largest afloat, not only represented the strength and majesty of the peacetime Royal Navy, to the general public she
was
the navy. But she was a battlecruiser, built for speed, for a style of warfare already outdated at Jutland, if not even before that. In 1941, she was destined to meet with
Bismarck
, Hitler’s most powerful battleship, and unsinkable, as her German builders had claimed. On that bitter day in the North Atlantic,
Hood
, in company with a battleship,
Prince of Wales
, so new that she still carried dockyard workers on board, had opened fire on the enemy. It had taken only one direct hit from
Bismarck
’s great shells, which had exploded inside a magazine after piercing
Hood
’s thinly armoured deck, to sink her like her forerunners at Jutland. Out of a complement of some fourteen hundred men, only a midshipman and two ratings had been found alive. Just months later, off the coast of Malaya,
Repulse
, in company with the same ill-fated
Prince of Wales
, was attacked by Japanese aircraft. Within an hour, both great ships were sunk, with terrible loss of life. A different theatre of war, but the same sacrifice, the same fatal weakness.

The launch was slowing down but Sherbrooke did not move, although his reefer jacket was shining black with spray.

The young Canadian, Rayner, stared at him, wanting to understand, needing to remember this moment for all time.

A full captain, he thought, a sort of god to most junior ranks, and yet so youthful himself. A face you would trust. Believe.

Sherbrooke saw the figures on the battlecruiser’s quarterdeck. Marines, officers, people whom he must meet, and who should see him before the darkness closed in across the Firth of Forth.

Then he stared up at the grey superstructure, still
graceful and unaltered, without the massive tower-bridges given to several of the older capital ships.

It was like being held, taken over; like nothing he had ever experienced.

‘Hooked on, sir!’ They were waiting, and up there on deck the boatswain’s mates would be moistening their silver calls. Ready for the captain.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

Captain Guy Sherbrooke was thirty-nine years old, twenty-seven of which he had been in naval uniform. Whatever had gone before, and no matter what it had cost him, this was his future. Perhaps his only future.

Pride, then? Satisfaction? If anything, he felt only disbelief. He saluted the coxswain and reached for the safety lines.

He might have spoken aloud. ‘I survived.’ He looked up at the after funnel, and the mast with the rear-admiral’s flag standing out in the breeze like painted metal. ‘I’m back.’

Captain Guy Sherbrooke leaned his elbows on the desk and massaged his eyes with his fingers. Like the nearby chairs, the desk was almost covered with books, folders, and separate pads of signals, arranged in order of importance or urgency. He stared around the day cabin, where he had been working without a break since he had been piped aboard only this afternoon. The cabin was huge, but
Reliant
had been built at a time when allotted space was often measured by rank. And so quiet. Even with half the ship’s company on a week’s leave, there were still enough people aboard to be heard.
Reliant
carried a total of twelve hundred officers, ratings and marines, and yet beyond the cabin bulkhead he could barely hear the occasional tannoy announcement, or the twitter of a boatswain’s call.

He tried to remember the ship as she had appeared when he had first stepped aboard in peacetime. The Mediterranean, regattas, parties, and receptions. Showing the flag. Like the time when the squadron had been at Naples: he could see it as if it were yesterday, perhaps because he wanted to erase what had happened so recently. Suntanned shoulders and daring gowns, officers in their ‘ice-cream suits’ falling over one another to entertain and impress all the ladies. One had been Jane, in Italy with her father,
who had been on some important trade mission. Another world . . .

He was on his feet, although he did not recall having left the desk. He looked at the ship’s crest, an upraised double-edged sword surrounded by a victor’s laurels. And her motto,
Gedemus Nunquam.
We will never give in.

It must have been in this same cabin where he had said goodbye to the captain of the day, the vice-admiral he had met at the funeral. Surely he was not that old . . . But then, all senior officers had seemed ancient to him in those days.

There was a picture of the King in uniform, and several spaces left by others which had been removed recently. He glanced at a pile of boxes and packages, discreetly covered with a tartan rug near the door, the personal effects of his predecessor, Charles Cavendish. In a separate cardboard box was a photograph of Jane in a silver frame; the glass was broken. The captain’s steward had told him that Cavendish had always taken the picture to the upper bridge with him when the ship was at sea, in an oilskin bag. He had added as an afterthought,
just in case.

Sherbrooke held the photo to the desk light. The same poise, the candid eyes. The woman he had once hoped . . .

He swung round. ‘Yes?’

It was the steward, Petty Officer Arthur Long, doubtless nicknamed ‘Dodger’ by the members of the petty officers’ mess. The navy’s way. Long had been in the ship since she had recommissioned at the outbreak of war, and had already served two captains. Prematurely bald, with bent ears, he had the appearance of a mournful pixie. When Sherbrooke had asked if he would like to continue with the same duties, he had not even hesitated.

‘Of course, sir.’

At first, Sherbrooke had wondered why he had accepted
the job so readily. It would not be a soft number, with some captains.

He was glad, nonetheless. All his new clothing, uniforms and shirts had been pressed and stowed away as soon as they had arrived: it seemed as though a part of him had already been here. Waiting, like the ship.

Long paused in the doorway and regarded the tray, on a small table, still covered with a napkin. He shook his head sadly.

‘Won’t do, sir. They’ve just piped Rounds, an’ you’ve not eaten a scrap!’

Sherbrooke sat down and glanced at his gleaming new pipe, and the tobacco pouch. He had used neither. He touched his face. Not since . . .

‘Sorry. I got a bit bogged down.’ He stared at the mass of books and ledgers, brought and sometimes removed by another face he would soon come to know. A chief petty officer writer, a dry, austere man, who had not once looked him in the eye.