The River Flows On (51 page)

Robert Baxter was sound asleep when the first torpedo hit the hull of the Royal Oak about an hour later. So were most of the ship’s company - well over a thousand men. After all, everyone knew that the Flow was impregnable - didn’t they? There was no need to expect an attack in here, no need for nerves to be on edge. They were at night defence stations of course, the hatches battened down. That was to prove fatal.

Woken by the first explosion, Robbie was not at first too alarmed. It didn’t sound like anything serious: a piece of machinery blowing somewhere on the ship. That would give the men on watch something to do, make the night pass quicker. He closed his eyes and settled himself more comfortably, trying to imagine himself back in bed with Kate.

Twenty minutes later the U-boat fired three torpedoes at the Royal Oak. They all hit home, tearing into the battleship. The lights went out and the ship quickly began to list to starboard. Everyone was awake then, all right, hastily pulling on clothes and making for the upper deck. With most of the hatches closed, there were only really two effective escape routes for those on the lower decks.

There was, however, little panic. Officers and men with torches stationed themselves at strategic points and urged their comrades to keep moving and keep calm.

Robbie, following others along an alleyway, groping his way towards the beam of a torch which seemed a long way off, heard a disturbance: raised and frantic young voices.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked, stopping at the door of a cabin and peering into the gloom. As long as nobody panicked and started a stampede, they might all get out of here.

The voices stopped.

‘We don’t know how to get out, sir.’

He allowed himself a smile in the darkness. ‘I’m not one o’ the officers, son, but if you walk along this alleyway there’s a man with a torch who’s pointing the way up to an open hatch. Then I reckon we’re all going for a nice swim.’

‘It’s Eric,’ came another young voice. ‘We can’t leave Eric. Something’s come loose and crushed his leg. It’s bad.’

Robbie stepped over the high threshold. ‘Can you lead me to him? Where are you?’ He could distinguish their shapes in the darkness. He put out his hand and it was seized and guided to the shoulder of a man slumped against the bulkhead. Robbie’s fingers passed over his face. It was smooth. Not a man, then, just a boy. Some mother’s son. His hand travelled gently downwards, over the young sailor’s chest and onto his legs. There was no response. The lad must be unconscious.

Robbie drew his breath in sharply at what he felt next. One knee was smashed, the leg beneath it almost severed, the other trapped against the bulkhead by something that felt like a heavy piece of metal.

‘We can’t move it, sir. We’ve tried.’ The speaker was close to tears.

‘Let’s all try.’

They were right. There was no budging the object. It seemed to have lodged itself in the bulkhead. The only way this boy was leaving the ship was without his legs. His friends, thought Robert Baxter, didn’t need to know that. They were dangerously close to hysteria as it was; all credit to them for staying with their injured comrade.

He was moaning in pain now, having regained consciousness during their attempts to free him. Robbie rose to his feet and spoke calmly.

‘You two go on,’ he said ‘and tell the first officer you come across that we need a medical team down here. All right? I’ll stay with your mate till help comes.’

They argued, but he insisted, asking only that when he crouched down, they help guide the boy’s head onto his lap, so that he could give him comfort. The ship gave another list to starboard. One of the boys whimpered.

‘Go!’ Robbie ordered. ‘There’s no time to lose!’

One of them gripped him soundlessly by the hand. Then he heard a ‘God bless you, sir,’ and they were gone. Hadn’t he told them that he wasn’t an officer? Ach well, maybe he deserved the promotion at that. He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, a bit of human contact. The moans were growing quieter now.

He heard the water coming. It was whooshing along the alleyway, although it was some distance away yet. The great ship gave another lurch.

‘Not long now.’ He patted the boy’s shoulder, but there was no answer. He must have slipped back into unconsciousness. That was a mercy, at least.

The sound of the approaching water was growing louder. He knew that it was completely unstoppable. Funny, that. He had never felt so alive. Robert Baxter muttered a prayer and squeezed his eyes tight shut.

She was there, turning her head to smile at him, her green eyes bright and her bonnie hair being blown across her face by the wind off the river... His last conscious thought was of Kate, her name the last word on his lips. Then the sea took him.

Kate sat bolt upright, heart racing, blood pounding through her ears. She was in Perthshire, visiting Grace and Jessie.

‘Mammy?’ Grace’s voice was puzzled. Jessie, in the other bed in the room, hadn’t stirred.

It’s all right, pet,’ Kate said, patting her daughter’s hand. ‘Go back to sleep.’

Soon the quiet breathing told her that Grace was asleep again, but she herself slept only fitfully, rising early to open the blackout curtains on the misty October dawn. Icy fingers were clutching at her heart. Something had happened. She knew it had.

Chapter 34

Her grief was to be overwhelming - so total that Jessie Cameron began to secretly worry that her sister might never recover from the blow fate had dealt her. Grief was not, however, the first emotion that Kate was to experience in those terrible days.

The first one was fear - a wave of cold terror which swept through her body when she heard the official announcement on the wireless, delivered in the measured tones of a BBC broadcaster.

‘This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce that
HMS Royal Oak
has been sunk, it is believed by U-boat action.’

Kate’s frozen brain heard one more word. Survivors. She heard it and she clung onto it, so there was hope - for a while. As the days wore on and lists of survivors’ names were published, she searched in vain for his. Even when the official letter finally came, she refused to give up.

‘What if he managed to get ashore?’ she speculated feverishly. ‘Maybe he was hurt - or ill after being in the water. Maybe somebody up there’s looking after him, in some wee isolated farmhouse on one of the islands. There’s a lot of islands - Robbie told me there were. They can’t have checked them all, can they?’

The people who loved her shook their heads, reluctant to take the lifeline away from her but not wanting to give her false hope either. Only Agnes Baxter, devastated by the loss of her eldest son, agreed with Kate. Something like that could easily have happened. In the weeks that followed the two women clung to each other in their shared grief.

Eventually, as winter drew on, Agnes began to shake her head too, frowning as she regarded her pale and thin daughter-in-law. The lassie was going to make herself ill if she went on like this. She said as much to Jessie Cameron, called home to Clydebank to see what she could do, on this occasion having left Grace with their landlady in Pitlochry.

‘Can you not do something, hen?’ Agnes asked, her face lined with worry. ‘She’ll listen to you.’

Jessie didn’t have Agnes’s confidence, but she was desperately worried about Kate. So she simply told her sister that she was coming back to Perthshire with her. Kate turned huge eyes on her.

‘I can’t, Jessie. What if he comes home and I’m not here? That would be terrible, don’t you see?’

Jessie, crouching on the floor in front of Kate’s chair, spoke gently.

‘Aye, that would be terrible, but we’ll tell all the neighbours where you’re going. We’ll leave our address in Pitlochry. There’s a telephone there, as you know, so he could go to a box and get in touch straight away.’

Jessie stopped short. Robbie was never going to get in touch, but Kate wasn’t ready to admit that yet. She forced down the lump in her throat and reached for Kate’s hand, lying lifelessly in her lap.

‘Come on, Kate. Come with us. It would be good for you and it would be good for Grace.’ As she had hoped, the mention of Grace’s name had roused Kate. ‘She misses her Daddy too, you know.’ Wondering though she was if she was a monster to push her sister so hard, Jessie pressed her advantage. ‘Grace needs you, Kate.’

Kate’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Jessie!’

‘Wheesht now. Come on.’ Rising swiftly to her feet, Jessie slid an arm around Kate’s shoulders. ‘You’ll come back with me, then? For Grace’s sake? And to help me entertain all the wee horrors at the weekend? So they don’t run wild and have all the posh folk in Pitlochry looking down their noses at us.’ She put on the pan loaf. ‘ “Oh dear, look at all these dreadful little working-class children.” ’ Jessie reverted to her own voice. ‘I need your help, Kate. Honest. For the honour of Yoker. That’s better.’

For Kate had managed a watery smile.

So she went to Perthshire. Anniversaries came and went. Six months since the
Royal Oak
had sunk. A year. Kate found that you couldn’t put a time limit on grief. One day she would realize that she had laughed at something Jessie had said. The next she would be once more in the depths.

Being Kate, she kept most of it to herself. Jessie had been quite right. Grace did need her Mammy.
I need you to be strong
. That’s what Robbie had said that last morning. For Grace and for him Kate did her level best. She made herself useful around the house too, taking on her share and more of the housework, cooking and shopping.

With Jessie, she began to build up a circle of acquaintances in their new home. They were billetted on a Mrs Robertson, a middle-aged widow who lived in a spacious Victorian villa in Pitlochry. Set on a road which climbed steeply up from the main street, it had a terraced garden at the front and a large green sward at the back surrounded by trees. Grace was clearly entranced by it all. In the winter she and the three other children staying with them played endless games of hide and seek in the rambling old house. When the spring arrived she followed Mrs Robertson and her gardener about like a little dog, delighting their hostess by her eagerness to learn the names of all the flowers and by the charming little drawings she made of them.

Mrs Robertson, kind and inquisitive and sympathetic to the young widow and her teacher sister, declared that it had given her a new lease of life having the young people in the house. She invited her friends to meet the Cameron girls and took them with her when she went visiting.

People wanted to be kind, but they didn’t always know what to say to Kate, so she made it easy for them, forcing herself to make conversation about things which didn’t seem to matter very much any more. Gradually that got easier.

Only with Jessie, once Grace and the other children were in bed and Mrs Robertson had retired for the night, did she really feel she could be herself.

‘I torture myself,’ she confessed one night, choking back the tears, ‘wondering exactly how it happened. Did he know he wasn’t going to get out? I wonder what he was doing, what he was thinking about.’

Jessie smiled. ‘If I know Robert Baxter, he was probably trying to help someone else get out. That’s the way Robbie was made. As for what he was thinking about... He was thinking about you, Kate. I’m sure of that.’

Kate took her handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose, staring into the flames of the fire at which she and Jessie sat. It was autumn again and they were beginning to need the heat at night. She looked up, about to say something, but was stopped by the wistful look on Jessie’s face.

‘Have you ever thought, Kate, that... Well, I don’t know if this is any consolation to you or not, but at least you’ve known what it is to be loved. Some people never do.’

Kate was instantly contrite. Jessie, she knew, had received three letters from Andrew Baxter during the past year. She knew because Jessie had let her read them all. There had been no reason not to. They were friendly and chatty - and contained not one single word of love. Kate leaned forward.