Convoy Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Convoy

  First published in 1979

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1979-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755104412 9780755104413 Print

  0755117824 9780755117826 Pdf

  0755119282 9780755119288 Mobi

  0755120418 9780755120413 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer

  Dedication

  For Kay,

  with all my love

  Chapter One

  As soon as the nurse had filled in the details, hung the board back on the locker and turned to the patient in the next bed, he reached out, unhooked and looked at it. The temperature graph was evening out – the upward zig had levelled off and presumably in a few hours would begin a downward zag, back towards normal after oscillating near the top of the page. The line had been spectacular for a week which was now beginning to fade into a distant haze of pain, brief spells of morphia-induced sleep, and dreams that verged on hallucinations. Curiously enough there was no memory of pain; he now knew one did not remember pain, only the circumstances associated with it.

  The hand still throbbed with the pain darting up and down like vibrating toothache or summer lightning in the distance, and seemed to be storing itself in the armpit where, one of the nurses said, there was a gland that intercepted all the poisons being manufactured in that hand.

  It was still dark; dawn was an hour or more away. He glanced up at the big clock over the swing doors. An hour to go before they wheeled in a trolley carrying the long white enamel dish full of scalding water and put the screens round his bed. Fifty-four minutes, to be exact. All important clocks seemed to have Roman figures. Then they would lift the arm off the pillow, undo the bandages, remove the dressings, give him a warning glance so that he could brace himself by gripping the top of the bed with his good hand
and pressing his feet hard against the bottom, then they would press that stinking purple and green left hand into the scalding water and his world would spin and burst into a red sunflower of pain.

  They teased him and told him he always said ‘Christ!’ as his hand went into the water, and perhaps he did; but the worst part always came a couple of minutes later, when the heat of the water had time to soak in. Eat in, really, like a corrosive acid, but to be fair they were saving the arm. The surgeon had given a satisfied sniff yesterday: to begin with he had brought more of his chums and they had gathered round with long faces and muttered like parsons at their patron’s deathbed and there was no doubt they were measuring him up for the saw: should it be at the wrist, across the forearm, at the elbow, or below the shoulder…

  After reading the thermometer and putting it back in the glass of antiseptic, she had to reach across the fellow in the next bed to unhook his chart board, and her legs were spectacular, even in those dreary black stockings. One seam was crooked; she would be furious if he mentioned it. Woollen, they seemed, although she said they were made of some mixture. He pictured black silk on those legs, whose calves seemed almost too thin, but which guaranteed she would have slim thighs. Thinking about them eased the pain; even at this time of the morning a few moments’ erotic thoughts were more effective than a pain-killing pill, though not so long-lasting.

  The charts did not give much away. Edward Yorke, aged twenty-five, five feet eleven inches tall, 164 pounds, had at 0530 on this dark November morning in 1942 a temperature of 100.3, a pulse of 84, and had experienced a bowel movement (‘Yes?’ That polite smile if the patient nodded, the frown if he shook his head).

  Her name was Exton; he had found that out within hours of being brought into the surgical ward at St Stephen’s. And she was a member of one of the nursing associations, probably the QARNNS, and no funny jokes about the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service, which seemed to be a highly efficient volunteer organization for debs who had abandoned the cocktail party circuit to nurse their would-be escorts through wounds and sickness. In peacetime they would be nursing them through hangovers, and their uniforms would be their nakedness, not these starched and rustling dresses out of which black-stockinged legs grew.

  She had been off duty for the day or so before his operation – he would never have forgiven her if she had administered the blasted enema – and the septicaemia had begun almost as soon as he had belched and vomited up the last of the chloroform and ether fumes. Then there had been the haze of pain, the rapidly increasing stink of the septicaemia (the stink of his own flesh) and finally one became absorbed into the routine of the hospital surgical ward with ten patients, five in beds along one wall, five opposite, and a desk in the middle at which a nurse or sister wrote up notes (or love letters) at night by the light of a dim, green-shaded lamp, looking like a Whistler painting of Florence Nightingale.

  A surgical ward – one could be thankful for that. Plenty of pain but no illness; at least not the sort of groaning illness, like stomach ulcers, where everyone had a long face. In this ward people were cheery enough, except immediately after their treatment, which the clock showed was now due for him in forty-six minutes’ time. St Stephen’s was old, the plaster of the ceilings was cracked, the lifts creaked alarmingly, but it was standing up well to being a Navy overflow hospital.

  She was called Clare; he had discovered that on the second night, when the pain had seemed unbearable and she had stood up from that desk as though sensing the agony and glided silently to his bedside, and whispered: ‘Is it really bad, Lieutenant?’

  It had been so bad he had only been able to nod, and she had fetched the night sister. After what seemed like a week the sister had come back and whispered instructions to the nurse, whom she had called Clare, and moments later there had been the prick of a needle and, just before the morphia took effect, he had heard the sister hissing some criticism of the way Clare had used the syringe.

  Clare Exton. Tiny, black-haired, shy, humorous, with the promise of a body he could (and did) only dream about under all that nurse’s uniform, and so officious when necessary, which was frequently enough in a ward of young naval officers who were alternately in pain and bored stiff.

  ‘Lieutenant Yorke,’ she was now saying sharply, ‘please put that board back on the hook.’

  ‘I can’t reach over with my right arm, Nurse.’

  ‘You unhooked it without trouble.’

  ‘The seam of your right stocking, Nurse.’

  She was blushing now. ‘What has that to do with it?’

  ‘It’s crooked, Nurse.’

  ‘That’s right, Nurse,’ a patient opposite confirmed. ‘It twists clockwise. Makes your leg look like a spiral.’

  ‘Like the baldacchino in St Peter’s at Rome,’ Yorke said, hoping to confuse her.

  ‘The turisti never seem to notice they spiral the other way,’ she said calmly as she snatched the board, hooked it up with a clatter and then hissed: ‘Don’t bother asking for a bottle, Lieutenant; I’ve gone deaf.’

  ‘The quack said I’ll be able to get up for an hour today,’ he said, a tentative peace offer.

  ‘Just you wait until you try it,’ she said. ‘Your arm will throb so much you’ll think it’s going to burst and you’ll be so dizzy you’ll probably fall over.’

  The plump paymaster lieutenant in the next bed said in a stage whisper: ‘She’s afraid you’ll start chasing her round the ward.’

  ‘I shall be off duty when Lieutenant Yorke finds how difficult it is to walk after several days of high temperature,’ she said coldly.

  Yorke was suddenly conscious of the drone of a German bomber right overhead as a series of whooshes told of a stick of bombs coming down: brief whooshes ending in heavy thuds that warned that the last two or three might hit the hospital, if not the ward.

  A dull, deep explosion, then another; sudden darkness as the lights went out, a heavy weight on top of him, the shattering of glass, dust in the lungs…and yet another thud as the last bomb in the stick passed over and, from the noise, landed in the road beyond. The weight wriggled, he felt lips on his face and a hard kiss, and a murmured: ‘I’ll give you seams! I hope I didn’t hurt your arm.’

  And then she was gone, flicking on her torch and showing the ward was full of dust like fog. She began checking the blackout screens; and only he knew she had used her own body to protect him when it seemed certain the ward would get a direct hit.

  He saw her shadowy figure following the torch beam from window to window jerking all the heavy black curtains back into position and shaking out the broken glass, carefully screening her torch. A few moments later there was a faint vibration as the hospital’s emergency generator started up, then the lights flickered on and off once or twice and then stayed on.

  ‘Close,’ the paymaster said and was promptly contradicted by a full commander on his other side. ‘Bet it didn’t even hit the building. Whistled too long – obviously going right over us. You barely have time to hear the one that hits you. Hiss, bang and you’re dead. These long whining johnnies – just passing over you. You draw it on a piece of paper and you’ll see I’m right.’

  The paymaster turned and winked at Yorke. ‘You were safe enough,’ he whispered. ‘I saw in the flashes of the explosions.’

  ‘You know what sister says – shove your head under the pillow to protect your face from glass.’

  ‘Think what I’d miss.’

  So now the paymaster was in the conspiracy: not too many winks and sly remarks, please…

  ‘Must have been a late one on his way home, that Jerry. Still, we haven’t had the all-clear, Hardly heard him,’ the paymaster said. ‘You can’t mistake those engines, though; not synchronized, that’s why they seem to rumble.’

  ‘You sound more like an engineer than a paymaster.’

  ‘
Hobby. Not aeroplanes, but motor cars. I’ve a nice little Frazer Nash down at Portsmouth.’

  Yorke remembered the paymaster’s right leg had been amputated, and he had just had a second operation; something to do with the nerves being pinched in the first operation and leaving him in constant pain.

  ‘I’m hoping Archie Frazer Nash will fix it up for me after the war so I can drive with one leg. Put in a handle throttle; shouldn’t be too difficult.’

  ‘Easy, I would think,’ Yorke said, knowing how optimism could keep a man alive; he had only just passed through the dark night of a possible future with one arm. ‘A bit of flexible cable and some practice. Like the Bowden cable on the Lewis gun of a last-war fighter.’

  ‘Hill climb trials will be out, though; I used to enjoy them. Great little bus for trials, the AFN, plenty of acceleration.’ He glanced up at the clock. ‘Be glad when they bring the tea urn round; that bloody dust has left me dry.’

  Clare was taking the last few temperatures. Broken windows and dust were an almost nightly occurrence; the plaster ceiling looked like a reference book picture of leprosy. Soon the real work of the day would begin: after the glass and dust had been swept up the beds would be made, breakfast served, and then sister’s rounds, matron’s rounds, and finally doctor’s rounds. And today the whole ritual would be punctuated by the cheerful cursing of the glaziers replacing the glass in the windows. But before that, the surgical dressings; in another twenty-two minutes, in fact.

  ‘Any letters to be posted?’ Clare asked the ward, and several patients answered and reached into the drawers of their lockers. Yorke held up a letter and as she took it he said, ‘It needs a stamp on it, nurse; here’s the money.’