Decoy (18 page)

‘If he lost or damaged his ship, that was his affair. But if he took prizes, whether sacks of gold from some town on the Spanish Main or Spanish ships, he had to bring it back to Jamaica and in effect declare it, paying the King and his brother (Charles II and James) their share.’

‘A private navy, in fact,’ Painter said. ‘I’m beginning to remember now. Weren’t those buccaneers given a special name?’

‘They called themselves “The Brethren of the Coast”.’

‘And their leader – he was called something special, too.’

‘Yes. My eighth great-grandfather was given the title of “Admiral of the Brethren”.’

‘Good for him,’ exclaimed Harding, obviously reaching back into boyhood memories of books he had read; florid Victorian histories condemning piracy competing with overblown Edwardian novels describing the buccaneers as heroes and the Spanish as villains. Few books that he had ever read gave any hint of the story told in ancestor Ned’s letters, written in the 1670's. Buccaneers, pirates… Standing on the bridge of the
City of Norwich
as she zigzagged her way towards Halifax, Nova Scotia, a lone and almost insignificant protagonist in the Battle of the Atlantic, he found that the Ned Yorke of three centuries earlier had suddenly become closer.

The
City of Norwich
, a tiny moving island of steel carrying a few men who were caught up in a great war now affecting most of the world, thanks to the Japs bringing in the Americans and Hitler’s megalomania involving the Russians – yes, some of the phrases in the Restoration Ned’s letters took on, well, not a new meaning but somehow a real life: Ned seemed to be looking over his forebear’s shoulders as the quill pen scratched.

‘We are so few,’ he had written, ‘about a thousand undisciplined men hailing from half a dozen countries, to dispute the might of Spain. We have the tiny island of Jamaica while Spain holds the Main, thousands of miles of coast from Trinidad in the east round to the Strait of Florida, and the great islands of Cuba and Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Yet even as a tiny horse-fly can make a great plough horse bolt with pain, so can we sally out from Jamaica in our little ships (as sorry a collection as you could assemble for a debtor’s sale at the Nore on a windy day in midwinter, vessels on which no mortgagor would bother to foreclose nor any insurer write cover: a score of men to each and perhaps a couple of small guns) and keep the Spaniards away. If only the King would send up a ship or two: we are defending his possessions with our own ships, lives and pennies, and yet he does not abate by one penny his and his brother’s share in the prize money.

‘Picture us, if you will.’ (This phrase was always very clear in Ned’s memory: a quiet voice echoing through centuries like a whisper in a cathedral.) ‘Jamaica is situated about like Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, and all the land around (be it France or Britain, Spain to the south or the Netherlands and Denmark and Sweden to the north) belongs to Spain, who is determined to possess this tiny speck in the ocean.

‘Yet we who defend this speck are given no assistance from England. We have had to capture our cannon and our ships, our powder and our shot, and more recently the very gold coins we now use as currency with which to trade, to buy food and clothing, the very necessities of life. Yet we are called pirates by some, even though we do possess the only thing the King grants us for our defence – our commissions. With these flimsy parchments (for which we have to pay, of course) we defend his island and capture prizes which yield a goodly share for the King’s purse.

‘Yet all the time we wonder if the King has a secret agreement with Spain to hand back the island after a decent interval as his reward to the King of Spain for allowing him to live there in exile while Cromwell ruled Britain.’

Well, little has changed in three centuries, Ned thought: Britain had been completely unprepared for Hitler’s attack, and judging from the dockers’ recent strike and the Civil Service union’s attitude over Wrens, the unions had taken over the role held in Restoration days by absentee landlords enjoying themselves at Court while others kept the country secure. What would the dockers have thought as they stopped unloading the merchant ships, which had reached British ports only because the convoys had been fought across the western ocean, if the anti-aircraft gunners defending the ports in which their homes were situated had gone on strike for more sugar in their tea, and the German bombers had flown in unopposed?

‘Hope you still have some of the old boy’s money left,’ Painter said enviously. ‘Should keep you in the best Havana cigars!’

‘Very little. Gets a bit watered down in seven or eight generations, you know, and my direct line lost a fair sum of money as shipowners.’

‘Yes, I can see that, and I suppose it needs only one eldest son to blow his inheritance at the backgammon table!’

‘Yes, but luckily most of it was – and still is – heavily entailed: old Ned (then a young lad of course) saw the family lose everything to the Roundheads, although they got some of it back at the Restoration, and made sure his buccaneering and later landowning wealth was well tied up.’

‘Inherited wealth,’ Painter said vaguely, ‘I’ve often wondered about it.’

‘Have you any children?’ Ned asked casually.

‘Son and daughter, both at school.’

‘Do you believe in saving money?’

‘Of course! Don’t want to leave my wife without a penny when I go, and I want the boy to have a decent education, with something left over to set him up in a little business when this bloody war is over.’

‘That’s inherited wealth,’ Yorke said gently. ‘What’s the difference between your son inheriting it from you, and me inheriting it from my father? Who do most men struggle and save if not to give their children a better chance than they had themselves? That my eighth great-grandfather took enormous risks which let him provide for his descendants is really the same as you commanding this ship and dodging U-boats while your pay accumulates in your bank for the benefit of your family.’

‘So, I’m a buccaneer, eh?’ Painter asked humorously.

‘No different from the Commander’s ancestor,’ Harding said unexpectedly, ‘except you’re paid regularly in English quids and he got his irregularly in pieces of eight!’

Painter looked round the horizon: night had fallen except for a lighter patch ahead, to the west.

‘Different scale, surely, Commander?’

‘Yes, up to now. I shan’t have much to leave any children I might have (I’m a bachelor at the moment), but say you leave £5,000 to your son, who becomes a clever businessman and dies of old age leaving £500,000 to
his
son, who is a clever financier and leaves a couple of million…’

‘Some hopes, with taxation the way it is!’ Painter said.

‘My buccaneer forebear complained bitterly that the King took ten per cent and the Lord High Admiral, the King’s brother, fifteen of the gross, not net. So buccaneers were paying twenty-five per cent income tax in the 1660's, and no doubt they took the same view as you!’

Painter laughed heartily. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. “Inherited wealth” is someone else doing it, but when you do it yourself it’s looking after the wife and kids!’

Ned held up his hand. ‘I didn’t bring my glove, and this is beginning to feel a little frail.’

Painter shivered. ‘That’s a polite way of saying it’s bloody cold! Very well, Mr Harding, stand ’em down.’

The depression was small and quickly slid up to the north-east to bring more gloom on Iceland, thickening the snowfalls and sending bitterly cold winds scouring the bare and striated hills forming anchorages like Seidisfjord, where merchant ships and escorts were assembling.

The convoys to Murmansk were sailing again now that the nights were long, with fourteen hours and more of darkness, increasing through the winter until at the latitude of northern Norway half an hour’s twilight was the day’s ration.

The
City of Norwich
steamed westwards – seemingly in increments, Ned thought, when she turned a couple of points to port as the buzzer attached to the special clock in the wheelhouse signalled the next leg of this particular zigzag. The wind waves superimposed on the broad swell gave the ship an awkward roll, and glancing astern at the wake he saw that the quartermaster was still settling down to the different conditions as he tried to keep the ship on the new course.

How the
City of Norwich
’s quartermaster must hate that zigzag clock and buzzer! It was usually the second officer’s job, as the man responsible for navigation, to set the clock, which was like an ordinary ship’s clock but had a rim round the outside of the face along which small sliding metal contacts could be adjusted. Using details for a particular zigzag diagram listed in the manual, the contacts were set at various times, so that a buzzer sounded when the minute hand touched them. At each buzz the ship zigged or zagged on to a new course, the theory being that a lurking U-boat sighting the ship would be manoeuvring into a firing position just as the ship turned away on the next leg of its zigzag, steaming out of range. Ned, like a number of naval officers, had grave doubts about zigzagging. By all means change course every few hours – especially at dawn and dusk – so that a U-boat sighting a ship could not make an accurate estimate of her future position and alert other U-boats farther ahead – but these shorter zigzags were just as likely to bring a ship into range of a U-boat as avoid it. With the U-boat able to move underwater only at nine knots, a 16-knot merchant ship steering a straight course was likely to pass out of range of a random U-boat faster than another which was zigzagging. Perhaps the mathematics showed zigzagging gave a slight advantage, but Ned reckoned the longer distance steamed over the zigzag course gave the ship many more chances of getting within the range of torpedoes than a straight course. Jemmy, with all the experience of having very successfully commanded a submarine, could not make up his mind for sure but tended to agree with Ned. He reckoned he had lost many chances of sinking enemy ships because they were passing too far off, and he had also sunk ships that started off too far away and then zigzagged into range. But he had also had a promising target zigzag out of range minutes before he was going to fire.

‘Our torpedoes are too slow,’ Jemmy had said. ‘The dam’ things go only a knot or two faster than a Tribal class destroyer with the wick turned up… Let’s fit destroyers with explosive bowsprits and go back to battering rams!’

Both Jemmy and the Croupier were sitting back in their bunks, legs hanging over the bunkboard, as they reported the day’s activities. Yon, the engineer, sat along the settee from Ned, working on a drawing and occasionally getting up to sharpen some crayons into the wastepaper basket.

‘The men,’ the Croupier reported, ‘are living like fighting cocks. Enormous breakfasts, steak for lunch and steak for dinner: seems the doctor once advised in preparing a Welsh boxer for a title fight. Two hours’ PT in the morning, and two hours’ scrambling round the ship, up and down vertical ladders. And the cricket balls are a success.’

Ned nodded, having thought of them before they left England. He had been watching the men sitting in the lifeboat and trying to lob the balls into a bucket perched on top of the radio operator’s cabin just above the inboard of the boat. It was somehow typical of the British Civil Service, fighting the war behind the armour plate of reserved occupations, that they could not supply a couple of dozen cricket balls for the present enterprise. Ned had finally hired a cab, driven round central London finding sports shops which had some left in stock, and paid for them with his own money. The Triton cipher might well be broken by a couple of dozen cricket balls, paid for by Lt Cdr Edward Yorke, because (as the bureaucrats delighted in telling him) cricket balls could not be supplied “for the public service”.’

‘Yes,’ the Croupier continued, ‘one in a dozen lands in the bucket.’

‘No coconut!’ Jemmy said. ‘They have to get at least half in the bucket to win a coconut.’

‘Done!’ the Croupier exclaimed. ‘A couple of ’em, that hefty Marine corporal, Davis, and the skinny hooky, leading seaman Jarvis, can get nine out of a dozen in the bucket. I was giving you the figures allowing one man one throw. But if a man can throw a couple of dozen obviously he gets his eye in.’

‘Whoa, there!’ Ned said. ‘We’ll award the coconuts on the basis of one man, one throw. That’s what it’ll be on the day of the village fête. No one will be able to shy even half a dozen balls, let alone a couple of dozen.’

‘So how does it work out with each man throwing one?’ Jemmy asked.

‘Well, only one or two actually land in the bucket, but I’ve had ’em paint a circle a yard in diameter with the bucket in the middle, and all the throws land inside the circle,’ the Croupier replied.

‘When thrown from a stationary lifeboat,’ Jemmy pointed out.

‘We can’t avoid that,’ the Croupier protested. ‘Anyway, the ship and lifeboat are rolling or pitching. We can only train the horses and enter them in the race. We can’t guarantee the bloody winner. Not every penny gets a coconut, mate. That’s why bookies drive Rolls Royces and punter pedal bicycles.’

‘So the bowling is good. What about the batting?’ Ned asked. ‘None of ’em have heard a shot fired for a fortnight.’

‘Ah, well, that’s been the subject of some delicate negotiation between the Chief Officer and me,’ Jemmy said.

‘
Negotiation
?’ Ned repeated, as though unable to believe his ears. ‘It’s war that’s broken out, not peace!’

‘Don’t get alarmed,’ Jemmy said, ‘I was trying to get a laugh, guv. Any time we want, we can roll an oil drum off the fo’c’sle and blaze away with the Stens as we hurtle past it, but Harding has never fired a sub-machine gun and he fancies himself at the butts shooting grouse.’

‘Blasting away at the fairground at sixpence a time, using a .22 with a wonky sight,’ growled the Croupier. ‘That’s more his mark!’

‘Agreed, agreed,’ said Jemmy, ‘but since the Chief Officer’s our only source of big oil drums, we need him on our side. Remember, one drum is one blast from the Stens, and if we’re doing sixteen knots we pass it in, let me see, three and three-quarter seconds. So it’ll be in effective range of those shuddering gas pipes for between a minute and a minute and a half.’