Submariner (2008) (6 page)

Eleven-forty now. He went on down to the boat. There was a berthing party of four men standing by to divest her of her ropes
and wires, and at Mike’s appearance someone in or close to the fore-hatch called, ‘Captain coming aboard, sir!’ Jarvis, third
hand, emerged then, followed by McLeod;
Mike by this time halfway across the narrow, swaying plank, returning those two’s salutes.

‘Ready for sea, sir. All hands on board.’ That from McLeod; Jarvis asked him, ‘Single up, sir?’

‘Yes please. We can do without the forespring.’ He ducked into the hatch, swung himself down into the fore ends, the crowd
and fug of it: torpedoes in the racks both sides, their bright-blue shellac paint almost dazzling where it wasn’t hidden by
mounds of gear around them. Men were still stowing gear, finding room for things there wasn’t room for. When those hammocks
were slung, you’d only get through this compartment on your hands and knees.

‘Evening, sir.’

‘Evening to
you
, TI.’

Coltart – Chief Petty Officer and actually Torpedo Gunner’s Mate, TGM, but invariably referred to on board as the TI, which
was the older term for it, the letters standing for Torpedo Instructor. Straightening, having come through the oval of the
watertight door in the after bulkhead below this ladder: he was tallish – about Mike’s own height and build – had boxed for
the Portsmouth Division at one time. Mike asked him – knowing the answer but still asking, ‘Routines done, I suppose?’

‘All done, sir. Mark IVs an’ all, but oughter run straight.’ Touching wood, Mike agreeing that that was the main thing, and
adding, ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never known one of yours that didn’t.’

It would have taken Coltart all afternoon and evening, carrying out maintenance routines on the fish they’d had on board to
start with. He’d have had one or two of his torpedomen assisting him, but his own were the expert hands. The Mark VIIIs they’d
embarked this morning would have been attended to ashore, and were now in
Ursa
’s tubes. Sunny Warne hadn’t been all
that
generous with his fish, but at least
had gone that far, you were no worse off than you had been when leaving Haifa. Mike heading aft now with McLeod on his heels,
along the passageway down the boat’s starboard side, passing on his right, port side, the POs’ and Leading Seamen’s mess,
ERAs’ mess, then the even narrower slot of the galley – in which AB Cottenham, loader in the gun’s crew, also ship’s cook
– unqualified but not bad at it, considering the problems – paused in clattering his pots and pans around.

‘Evening, sir …’

‘All set, are we? Big eats?’

‘Well – make do, I reckon –’

‘Darned sure you will.’ Moving on. A smallish but important element in submariners’ rations came from the farm which Shrimp
had set up on Manoel Island early in ’41, using his own money to buy two pregnant Middle White sows and basic equipment such
as troughs and the materials for building pens. At one time there’d been as many as seventy porkers on the flotilla’s strength;
nothing like that now, the blitz having taken its toll, but there was a lot of pork in cold storage and the farm had diversified
into rabbits, poultry and at times fresh vegetables, all such produce being free of charge to the base and to submarines.

Wardroom, now: having exchanged brief greetings while squeezing past a few other individuals. The passage wasn’t wide enough
for two men simply to pass each other without manoeuvring. Wardroom now, anyway – about seven feet square, when you drew the
curtain that screened it from the gangway. Square wooden table in the middle, settee berths around it, Mike’s being the one
on the for’ard bulkhead, with drawers and lockers fitted in below it and wherever possible, no inch of usable space being
wasted. He slung his rucksack on to his bunk and went on through, past the chart table into the control room, where young
Danvers was taking the
wooden cover off what was called the ‘Fruit Machine’ – looked something like a one-armed bandit, was actually a calculating
machine for the aiming and firing of torpedoes. Mike had a word with Danvers about their route to Cape San Marco, then moved
on aft – passing the oily-shining pillars of the two periscopes on the centre-line, hydroplane controls and depth-gauges port
side, diving and blowing panel starboard; at the compartment’s after end he paused to look into the W/T office, chat for a
moment with Lazenby the Petty Officer Telegraphist – grey-headed, former schoolmaster, married with three school-age children.
All of them doing well, apparently, although Plymouth had come in for rather too much of the Luftwaffe’s attention in recent
months.

One knew about that. Including the fact they’d bombed the famous distillery, allegedly sending the best gin in the world running
through the town’s gutters and giving rise to jokes about Hun atrocities. But London had been getting it too, of course –
as both Ann and Chloe had mentioned in letters.

He didn’t go any further aft – eight minutes to the hour now, no point getting into conversations there wasn’t time to finish.
Looking aft from that latched-back bulkhead door though, past ERA Coldwell and Stoker PO Franklyn chatting there in the engine-room,
the big Paxman diesels’ glittering steel port and starboard, narrow steel walkway between them; motor room then with its rank
of shoulder-high copper switches. PO Hector Bull and two of his LTOs there, smoking while waiting for the ‘off’ – and beyond
them
another watertight door giving access to the boat’s narrowing aftermost compartment – known as the after ends – where stokers
lived amongst a variety of auxiliary machinery.

Home, one might call it. Length just under 200 feet, beam 11 feet, displacement surfaced 600 tons, dived 800. Completed in the
Royal Docks at Chatham about twenty months ago.
A brightly-lit, overcrowded, iron and steel tube, most of its interior surfaces finished in gleaming white enamel, polished
brass hand-wheels here and there on the maze of piping; and in the control room and living spaces a deck-covering of brown
corticene that was regularly buffed-up with shale oil. Shale was the fuel on which torpedoes ran; the boat reeked of it and
so did her crew. All submariners smelled of shale.

In the control room, he checked battery readings – voltage, and density of the electrolyte – as recorded in chalk on a blackboard
on the curve of deckhead. The submarine’s huge battery – two sections of it, under this deck, each consisting of fifty-six
four-foot-high cells weighing a quarter of a ton apiece, each section contained in its own tank – and electrics generally
were another responsibility of McLeod’s, as supervisor of electricians known as LTOs – PO Bull and his boys back aft there,
denizens of the motor room. McLeod and CERA McIver had had
Ursa
’s diesel generators pounding away all afternoon and early evening, and the figures on the blackboard reflected this – readings
well up, as they needed to be.

He checked the time. ‘All right. Harbour stations.’

A quiet departure – few spectators, and certainly no brass bands; only Shrimp and a few others watching from the Lazaretto
balcony while below them in the arcade the berthing party dragged the plank ashore and stood by to haul in the rope breasts
when they were cast off. The only wire still in place being the back spring, running tautly from the boat’s knife-edge bow
to a point on shore level with her stern. Mike would turn her on it, the steel-wire rope restraining her from forward movement
while a thrust ahead on the outer screw sent her stern swinging out into the stream. Coxswain Swathely at the bridge wheel,
McLeod, Danvers and Signalman Walburton also up there with Mike, Jarvis on the casing with PO Tubby Hart and his henchmen.
Shrimp
had called, ‘Good luck,
Ursa
!’; Mike thanked him, said to McLeod, ‘Let go the spring’ and to Danvers at the voice-pipe, ‘Stop port, slow astern together.’
On the fore casing, on McLeod’s order they were taking that wire’s turns off the bollard, to let it splash away. On war patrols
you didn’t take berthing wires to sea with you; even tightly coiled and lashed inside the casing they could be blasted loose
by depth-charging, and loose wires had a tendency to wrap themselves around propellers and propeller shafts, which was – well,
best avoided. Anyway, the berthing party ashore were hauling it in and
Ursa
’s screws were imparting stern-way to her, a flood of black water washing for’ard along her slim, blue sides; Mike told Swathely,
‘Port ten, Cox’n’, and Danvers as she swung faster, turning near enough in her own length, ‘Stop port.’ The motors at this
stage were ‘grouped down’, which meant the two batteries connected in series, as distinct from in parallel which provided
more power but used the amps up faster. She was clear of the mooring buoys and the floating brow now, and pointing seaward:
Mike told Swathely, ‘Midships the wheel’, and stooped to the voice-pipe: ‘Group up, half ahead, start engines.’

Ursa
on her way. Her seventeenth Mediterranean cruise, this would be.

He’d made by light to
Hebe
, the minesweeper which had taken them under its wing soon after they’d passed out of Marsamxett through the defensive boom,
which by now its attendant trawler would have dragged shut again behind them,
Intend making trim-dive now before proceeding
. A trim-dive being essential in view of the entirely changed distribution of weights on board – stores, torpedoes, everything.
McLeod would have got her as near right as he could, working it out with a trim diagram, established formulae and his own
dexterity with a slide-rule, and putting things into balance
by adjusting the contents of internal compensating and trimming tanks, but there were bound to be further small adjustments
necessary, to get it exactly right. U-class were tricky beasts, tended to get out of hand if it
wasn’t
exactly right.

Walburton had passed that message, and now took in the reply:
I’ll stick around, see you on your way
. Mike too had read the flickering light. They were a mile down-channel, a mile from the Castile signal station, and it was
Wednesday, half an hour past midnight. He lowered his binoculars, murmured ‘Very kind of you.’
Hebe
was one of the four fleet minesweepers whose arrival had made such a difference here; the flotilla leader, who’d met them
and escorted them in, was
Speedy
. Seemed more like an hour ago, than thirty. He told Walburton and Danvers, ‘All right, clear the bridge.’ The hands were
already at diving stations, and McLeod was down there ready to control the dive, as always concerned to see how well or otherwise
his trimming plan worked out. If he’d made a real cock-up of it, for instance, you could find yourselves nosediving for the
bottom.

Unlikely. Wouldn’t be all that far to nose-dive, either – less than a hundred and fifty feet of water here. The only hazard
anywhere near was the Dragut shoal with barely thirty feet on it, but that was a quarter of a mile back on the port quarter
now. Mike glanced around the empty bridge and quiet, dark seascape:
Hebe
wallowing a couple of cables’ lengths ahead, Malta’s jagged black fortress shape two thousand yards astern.

Into the voice-pipe: ‘Open main vents.’

Fairly quickly then shutting the voice-pipe cock. Vents crashing open, the rush and roar of released air, main ballast filling,
hydroplanes hard a-dive to ’plane her down. He was in the hatch, on the vertical steel ladder in the tower, feeling the dive
now as well as hearing it, grasping the handle of the hatch above his head and dragging it down shut on top of him. Clips
now, to secure it …

‘One clip on!’

For McLeod’s reassurance that it was safe to continue the dive. Whereas if he’d somehow bungled it – been shot or had a fit,
knocked himself out somehow – they’d either have reversed the dive – shutting main vents and blowing tanks instead of flooding
them – or more likely by that stage had no such option, only time to shut the lower hatch, saving the boat but drowning him
by the time they could get her up again. Second clip on, however – and finding the cotter-pins dangling on their short chains,
shoving them in to lock the clips in place. Done – for the thousandth time – and clambering down to the hatch at the bottom
of the tower, through it on to the control-room ladder. As he stepped off it, into the motors’ hum, glow of lights and circle
of familiar faces, Walburton shot up it to shut and clip what was known as the lower lid.

‘Twenty-eight feet, sir.’

Periscope depth, that was. If he was holding her at that depth without much effort from the ’planesmen, the trim couldn’t
be too bad. Why make it too easy for him, though? Mike said, glancing at Barnaby – wardroom flunkey, a lad of about nineteen
with the look of a startled rabbit, who was on the motor-room telegraphs – ‘Group down, slow together.’ The faster she moved
through the water, the more effect the hydroplanes, which were effectively horizontal rudders, had in holding her at the ordered
depth. Whereas if she was in fore-and-aft balance and neutral buoyancy – i.e. perfect trim – you might in ideal sea conditions
achieve a ‘stop trim’ – screws stopped, the boat simply hanging, immobile, neither light nor heavy.

The motors’ note had fallen to something more like a whisper than a hum. Swathely, on the after ’planes – controlling them
by means of a brass wheel about eighteen inches in diameter, with an image in a dial in front of him showing
the angling of the hydroplanes as he adjusted them, commented in a tone which in his own judgement might have been classifiable
as
sotto voce
, ‘Touch heavy aft, sir.’

‘I’m pumping from aft, Cox’n.’

‘Ah. Beg pardon, sir …’

Mock-reproving glance from Tubby Hart on fore ’planes – precisely similar controls, on the cox’n’s right. Cox’n aware of the
glance, ignoring it. McLeod with his hand up on the electric trimming telegraph, by means of which he’d ordered the stoker
on the after pump to shift some ballast from the stern trimming tank to the midships one. Guessing that that should be about
enough, switching to ‘Stop pumping, shut “Z” and “O”’ – and now assessing the effect of it.