Decoy (23 page)

Purpose – that was important, too. A genuine survivor getting into a lifeboat had only one hope, or purpose: to be picked up. Yet he knew the odds were against him. For a start there was the Admiralty order that no ship in the convoy was allowed to stop to pick up survivors. That order had been accepted by the Merchant Navy because it made good sense: with a pack of, say, a dozen U-boats attacking a convoy (and by today’s standards that would be a small pack), an individual U-boat could, and often did, torpedo one ship and then wait for the next astern in the column to stop to pick up survivors. The second ship had to stop almost alongside the victim – providing the U-boat with a second target: a stopped sitting duck needing only a single torpedo to bring the score to two.

So the survivors now sat in their lifeboat and waited. Did they hope or did they despair? Probably half of them despaired and half hoped, when the weather was bad. The important point was that they did not know whether or not they would ever be picked up – and fear, Ned knew only too well, is
not knowing
. Once you know for certain one way or the other, fear usually disappears. Knowing for sure that you were going to die did not mean you danced and cheered, but it gave life some certainty, if only the certainty that circumstances had put a term on it, and helped most men to keep up a brave face. But a survivor in a lifeboat was never certain until he was either rescued or eventually lost consciousness from exposure, hunger, thirst or cold, or a combination of them all. Thus, from the time he found himself in a lifeboat, a survivor was really in a state of shocked apprehension. He might laugh and joke to keep up the spirits of his shipmates, but beneath it all he knew his chances of rescue were low.

What about his own men, now hunched on their thwarts, some taking off their duffels like bears shredding their furs, in the hope that their clothes beneath would start to dry out? First of all, they had not suffered the shock of a torpedo sinking their ship, so they still felt invulnerable. And they were in the lifeboat for a reason they knew all about and for which they had been trained, so knowing that, they had no reason for fear. No shock, no fear, just a few uncomfortable days to be endured, and which were probably preferable to conditions in their early commando training, which was designed to weed out the men who were tough from the men who thought they were.

Two weeks of this, and then if nothing had happened, they’d open the special suitcase that contained a wireless already tuned in to 500 metres, the distress frequency, and start calling every hour on the hour. A corvette at sea and specially detailed for the task would be listening and, all being well, would find them. All being well. If there was not another gale lasting a week, and if the corvette left Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the appointed time. And if her wireless was working properly and her operators were listening all the time and not looking through copies of
Men
Only
, or
Razzle
, or playing uckers. Why the Navy had taken to ludo, renaming it, he did not know. What was apparently a mild dice-and-counters game for children brought out the worst in adults on the Navy’s messdecks.

‘You know,’ Jemmy said suddenly, in a conversational tone of voice, ‘I went back to my old school just before we left.’

‘Did you?’ Ned responded, knowing that the series of violent twitches showed that whatever Jemmy had to say was important to him.

‘Yes. The headmaster wanted me to give a talk to the boys, and the Admiralty loved it. Submarine ace stuff all makes good propaganda, and we’ll eventually need these kids, the way this war is dragging out.’

‘And they cheered the hero home from the wars, eh?’

‘Yes, and it was all very embarrassing. But I told ’em a few tales about some of the Med operations. If I could have signed ’em on then and there the whole school would have volunteered for submarine service.’

‘Bit young, though.’

‘It’s a young man’s game. You’re old at thirty. Twenty-five is middle-aged. Twenty is good.’ He twitched again and added gloomily: ‘I reckon about sixteen is ideal. Plenty of dash and fire and you think you’re immortal.’

‘What,’ Ned enquired, ‘brings on this bout of bullshit and misery?’

‘Oh, yes, well, in the assembly hall, where the whole school starts off the day with prayers, a hymn, and the headmaster’s announcements, there’s a large wooden panel, with the school’s crest carved at the top. In the middle of the panel are three columns of the names of all the school old boys who were killed in the Great War. I remember as a kid I used to read them, while the headmaster said the prayer, trying to picture what they looked like. I remember I visualized them as being as old as sixth formers.’

Jemmy stopped, having clearly slipped back in time, his eyes dull as he looked unseeingly across the toppling waves.

‘Yes,’ he said suddenly. ‘the headmaster was the same chap that used to give me the whack – six whacks, rather; he always awarded them in half-dozens – every week. He’d retired, then come back when the new headmaster that replaced him went off into the Army for this war.

‘What was I rattling on about? Oh yes, the war memorial. There were sixty-three names on it. Three were the same, brothers, all in the same battalion, all killed on the Somme. There were four pairs of brothers.’ He paused a moment. ‘My own family’s surname was up there three times – my father, in the RN, one uncle in the Royal Flying Corps, and the other a soldier who won a posthumous DSO commanding his battalion at Gallipoli. He raised the battalion as a territorial unit, and took it into action. Must have been gratifying.’

Ned nodded, and noticed that the Croupier and Sergeant Keeler were listening.

‘Sixty-three names,’ Jemmy repeated. ‘Lot for such a small school. Mostly Army of course: when you think we lost a million and a half in the trenches. That’s why we’re so short of leaders in their forties and fifties today: the chaps that should be leading are lying in all those great war cemeteries.

‘Then the headmaster showed me a list of the chaps already killed in this war. Seventy-eight. Nine of them were from my class. Made me feel guilty to be still alive. The eerie thing was that in bed that night, and just before I went to sleep, I found I could remember the names of everyone in my class, and in alphabetical order…’

‘Most of us can,’ Ned said, ‘and as you recite them to yourself you see them as the kids they were, and then you remember the ones that have been killed. That spotty little chap you never liked was a fighter pilot, killed in the Battle of Britain; the fellow who was captain of the cricket team and bowled faster than cannon balls died at Dunkirk, covering his men with a Bren gun as they waded out to a cabin cruiser brought to the beaches by a drunken yachtsman.’

‘What you’re saying is that I’m not telling an unusual story, eh?’

As Ned nodded, Sergeant Keeler coughed and said: ‘Beggin’ yer pardon, sir, it’s the officers.’

A startled Ned raised his eyebrows. ‘Not all the chaps from my school who were killed in the Great War were officers.’

‘Oh no, sir, I didn’t mean that. This war’s what I’m talking about. More officers and more of them get killed. Take the RAF blokes. When the war began only the pilot and perhaps the navigator of a bomber was commissioned: the rest were sergeants.

‘Then, as the Germans shot down more and more of our bombers and the aircrews were taken prisoner, so they started commissioning the sergeants so they’d get better treatment. So all those bombers and fighters shot down – it’s officers what get the chop. Not that being commissioned means much if you’re dead. But the Navy’s the same. More small boats – take Coastal Forces. Blow one up and you’ve knocked off three officers, and a mid, and six or eight seamen. Twenty-five per cent officers. All mounts up. In the last war it was the Army slugging it out in the mud of the trenches. This time the Army, apart from Dunkirk, can only get at the Jerries in the Western Desert. S’pect they’ve heavy casualties to come, but not so far. Hope I ’aven’t spoken out of turn.’

‘You’re quite right,’ Jemmy said. ‘Never thought of it like that.’

‘Yes, well sir, I expect your school provided more officers than mine, too. You got to know sums to get into the Air Force – if you want to fly, that is.’ He eyed the three officers who looked like three down-and-outs drinking meths. ‘And to get through Dartmouth, too. And Keyham,’ he added, nodding towards Yon in the bow.

‘If we win the war –
when
we win the war,’ the Croupier corrected himself, ‘it means in about thirty years’ time Britain is once again going to be short of leaders: all the good ones will have been killed in this war, just like the last. I suppose that frightful little Aneurin Bevan, who keeps attacking Churchill, and places like the Ministry of Fuel and Power are riddled with some pretty weird chaps. They’ll come out after the war – T E Lawrence was right.’

‘Wait!’ Ned exclaimed. ‘
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, the Introduction where he says “we were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for.” He says something about living many lives in those campaigns but “when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew…” Then that bitter phrase, “we stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”

‘But if we win, it’ll be very different this time. It won’t be “old men” creeping out, it’ll be the young men who have been hiding in reserved occupations in the ministries, reading Karl Marx or Fabian Society pamphlets. They’ll make damned sure that no one who was away achieving anything in the war will get a look in.’

Ned stopped suddenly. A lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic was not the place to express contempt for the dodgers, nor criticize the weird crowd who had a firm grip on such curious organizations as the Army Education Corps, most of whose members were either incapable of coherent speech or were mousy men wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and nervously clutching Fabian pamphlets as though they were lucky charms.

‘Sergeant,’ he said briskly, ‘mark the day!’

Keeler slid a hand inside his duffel and brought out a heavy knife. He moved along the thwart and then twisted round to cut another notch alongside earlier ones.

Ned reflected that the earliest calendars were probably notches cut on twigs, recording the passing of the day and the seasons, and perhaps some were specially marked, indicating the time for sowing certain seeds and reaping harvests. Oddly rural thoughts in a giant meadow of a sea.

The next meal would be plain lifeboat rations. The three days’ extra sustaining food from the
City of Norwich
had gone. Assuming she too found good weather, she should be approaching Halifax, Nova Scotia, by now. Apart from a fondness for her officers and men, Ned had other grounds for hoping that she arrived safely: Captain Painter was to report where he had finally launched the lifeboat, well to the west of the anticipated position, so if the operation failed, the corvette would know roughly where to search at the end of the two weeks. Where – in which five hundred square miles – to begin looking!

He looked round the horizon again. The whole operation when they talked it over in the Citadel had seemed extraordinarily simple: its great merit was that so little could go wrong. Most operations that foundered did so because they were too complicated, each successive part resting on its predecessor, so that one failure doomed everything else. Training in the captured German U-boat had been an unexpected bonus for everyone, particularly Jemmy, and finding Yon, who was still a bright and cheerful fellow, as though being in the infernal din of an engine room had left him unmoved, quite able to tease the men who did not share that life. The commando training had been tough, but it left the team (particularly those not commandos) with enormous confidence, certain that Stens, black bangers and the heavy commando knives would carry the day. Ned’s own feeling of confidence had held until they had sailed in the
City of Norwich
. There once again he had realized how enormous was the ocean, both in area and weather.

Here he sat on the thwart of a lifeboat, wet (well, now simply damp because the heat of the body, which one could hardly credit, had helped dry at least the inner layers), tired, every muscle aching as the body moved erratically to compensate for the pitching and rolling.

The buttocks were long since numbed as they tried to stay four-square on the hard thwart; feet had long since stopped communicating with the body, and when inspected (as Ned had insisted daily) were sodden and white, like a woman’s hands after a day’s laundry… Yes, out here in the middle of the Atlantic it all seemed absurd: he felt a sudden and violent resentment against Captain Watts for letting them attempt such a piece of absurdity.

Supper tonight would be lifeboat rations. From now on, there would be a slow weakening of all the men. Suddenly, as though sitting high above the lifeboat and looking down at himself, he realized that his morale was probably the lowest of all the men. He was supposed to be the leader, the one who kept them cheerful, alert for instant reaction to whatever might happen. At the moment he seemed more like an old lag weeping into his beer.

He shook his head and sat up straight and looked round just in time to catch Jemmy’s eye. Jemmy winked and murmured. ‘Happens to all of us, like constipation. Better now?’

Ned nodded, then grinned as Jemmy confided: ‘I had my attack yesterday. You lasted out the longest.’

Sergeant Keeler chopped the eighth notch in the thwart, and as he returned his knife to its sheath commented to no one in particular: ‘What I miss most is Naafi tea.’

‘So do my kidneys,’ said a Marine called Taylor. ‘They’re convalescing. But now it’s a bit warmer, I’d like to spend an evening in the pub, playing darts. A hundred and one up and the loser buys the beer.’

Another Marine, Andrews, said jeeringly: ‘That’d mean you’d be paying. You have enough trouble hitting the board, let alone a double top.’