Convoy Read online

  She took the coins and glanced at the address. ‘You’ve been writing sweet nothings to your girlfriend, Lieutenant?’ she teased.

  ‘Yes, the writing’s a bit wobbly because I can’t hold the pad steady.’

  ‘She’ll understand,’ Clare said, and Yorke knew she would, because the superscription on the envelope said: ‘Nurse C Exton.’

  Sister Scotland put the last of the eleven stitches into the white enamel kidney bowl and then dropped the forceps and narrow pointed scissors with a clatter, as if to signal that the job was done. ‘Wipe his face, Nurse,’ she said to Clare, who reached for the towel on the rack behind the locker and patted his brow, which he knew was covered with pearls of cold perspiration.

  The Sister cradled his hand gently as she wiped the scars with surgical spirit. It was bruised and bright pink with matching pairs of small purplish spots along each side of the long scars where the stitches had been. ‘The incisions and cuts have closed nicely,’ she said. ‘In six months you won’t notice anything, unless your hand gets cold. Then the scars will show up white.’

  Yorke looked at the hand, remembering when it exuded yellow and green pus; when the putrid smell made him vomit. The hand was still there and he could just move the fingers and the only discomfort was that the skin seemed too tight, as though he was wearing a thick glove which had shrunk and become a size too small. It was still hard to believe the arm was his; it was a strange, alien limb, joined to him only by pain.

  ‘An artist’s hand, eh Nurse?’

  Clare glanced up. You could never be sure with Sister Scotland.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said warily.

  ‘Aye, and the last of his sun tan’s wearing off now.’ She flipped up the other pyjama sleeve. ‘See? The skin’s quite white. But all this–’ she pointed at the left forearm ‘–this dark brown will peel off; it’s from all the hot water. Scalded, really. It must have hurt.’

  ‘It did; I remember saying so at the time.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ignoring his sarcasm, ‘and I seem to remember your bad language. Now you’ve got to start the remedial exercises for the arm; otherwise it can wither and leave you with a useless hand.’

  Clare glanced at him in alarm: no one had mentioned this before.

  ‘Wither, Sister?’ He tried to keep his voice flat but no man faced with that could be a hero in pyjamas.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, Lieutenant; the physiotherapists at Willesborough will sort it out; you’ll soon get your grip back again.’

  ‘Willesborough?’

  ‘Down in Kent; we’re opening an annexe there in a day or two. An old country house, just the place for convalescence. Plenty of draughts, no doubt; but you’ll get a good night’s sleep, which is more than can be said for up here, with all the bombing and the guns. And anyway, the surgeons need your bed.’

  Clare was staring down at his hand. Had she known about Willesborough?

  ‘And you’ll not be escaping from me either, Lieutenant,’ Sister said with an arch smile.

  ‘Are – will you be going to Willesborough, too, Sister?’

  ‘Yes, I shall be in charge of the unit. Three staff nurses, two physiotherapists, and six beautiful young ladies to powder your bottoms and make sure you don’t get bedsores.’

  The paymaster was quick; he seemed to guess Yorke’s anxiety and from the next bed said: ‘Don’t say we’re losing Nurse Exton, Sister?’

  ‘Yes – no, rather, because you are coming to Willesborough, too, so Nurse Exton can continue to record your chronic constipation. We’ll fit you out with a wooden leg and you’ll soon be cadging free pints at the local pub. Anyway, Mr Yorke will need someone to fit his cufflinks and studs and you’ll need someone to prop you up for a bit. Jack Sprat and his wife; I can see the pair of you escorting Nurse Exton to the Willesborough church fete. They’ll put you in charge of the lucky dip,’ she said to Yorke, ‘you only need one hand to dip into a bran tub.’

  ‘When do we go?’ Yorke asked. ‘We might miss the three-legged race.’

  ‘The staff and the first batch of patients go tomorrow. By bus. One of your nice Navy buses, painted grey and with all the seat springs broken. It’ll be like a Sunday school outing, won’t it, Nurse?’

  The bus juddered its way up the long hill and the movement made Yorke wince while the paymaster, lying in a nest of pillows across the back seat, swore quietly and monotonously, trying to steady the stump of his leg. Sister Scotland, sitting in the front offside seat, suddenly stood up, rapped on the window behind the driver and, having attracted his attention, shouted in a piercing voice: ‘Change down, you bloody fool!’

  The driver obediently dropped into a lower gear, the juddering stopped, and Sister Scotland sat down to a round of applause, which she acknowledged with an airy wave of her hand.

  It seemed odd to Yorke to be back in uniform again. The hospital authorities thought they would all wear hospital blue for the journey and found they had seven almost mutinous and certainly truculent naval officers who were in any case not mobile enough to pack their own uniforms and had no intention of admitting that any nurse could, and intended using the whole episode as a reason for not going down to Willesborough in flimsy hospital wear, even though assured the bus had good heating and they would have blankets.

  So Yorke sat alone in uniform trousers and half-length mess boots, a white rollneck woollen jersey, his left arm in a sling, and his uniform coat and cap on the seat beside him. He saw Clare and another nurse get up in response to instructions from Sister Scotland and walk slowly back along the bus, talking with each patient. The other nurse sat beside one man, then walked forward again and spoke to the sister before resuming her walk.

  Yorke put his jacket across his knees, leaving the other seat empty, and in a few moments Clare sat down, the paymaster at the back telling her cheerfully, ‘Leave me to your mate; I’ve no complaints and I don’t want a bottle.’

  Clare took his jacket and put it across her knees and, turning back one of the sleeves, ran a finger along the gold stripes. ‘You’re regular Navy, then. I thought you were Wavy.’

  Her eye caught a flash of colour and she turned the coat and pointed to a single medal ribbon, red with blue edges, on the left breast.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a DSO.’

  ‘I haven’t yet; only the ribbon. Have to collect it one day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘It’s like virginity, one doesn’t go on about having it.’

  ‘I would,’ she said impulsively and blushed as he looked round at her. ‘That medal, I mean.’

  She looked down and pointed at his bandaged hand, and murmured: ‘Was it anything to do with that?’

  Yorke laughed. ‘The chicken or the egg! I’m not sure why they gave me the gong; the hand was a piece of something from an explosion.’

  ‘A torpedo?’

  ‘Bombs. Now tell me why a lovely girl like you isn’t married. Or engaged.’

  ‘I was married. I’m a widow now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He had been clumsy but there had been no warning; no rings. Was Exton her married name?

  ‘He was a pilot,’ she said. ‘Killed in an accident. It was a long time ago.’

  She spoke in a curiously flat, unemotional voice. If she was my widow, Yorke thought, I would have liked her to have continued wearing my wedding ring, even if on the other hand. ‘…A long time ago.’ And obviously the memory still hurt. She was still in love with – well, a ghost. No living man could compete with that; the Rupert Brookes always stayed gilded youths, never to be supplanted, never ageing, or becoming unpleasant, their personalities never changing; flies in amber.

  ‘I’m afraid this is a gloomy conversation, even for a bus,’ he said.

  ‘You’d prefer soft lights and sweet music and the air thick with t
obacco smoke and night-club prices?’ she asked.

  ‘Or sitting on a five-barred gate along a country lane. Or on a rock watching the waves breaking on a shingle beach.’

  ‘Why shingle?’ she asked. ‘Why a five-barred gate?’

  ‘There are lanes and gates around Willesborough. I like the sound of water rolling the pebbles, and the nearest beach is shingle. At Hythe,’ he added. ‘Probably with barbed wire on it now, and land mines, but…’

  Sister Scotland looked round and Clare caught her eye and got up. ‘You know Willesborough?’

  ‘Yes, fairly well. Fine old windmill, one of the best in the country.’

  As Clare walked away he did not say that Ashford, into which Willesborough merged, was the railway centre of Kent and one of the Luftwaffe’s main targets, and the windmill was white and enormous and the sort of thing a bolting German bomber pilot was likely to aim at, just for the hell of it.

  He saw down to the right, through trees now bare of leaves, Leeds Castle sitting four-square like a fairy-tale fortress in a great oval moat. A castle had stood there for more than a thousand years – the first made of wood and built, if his memory served him, at the time of William the Conqueror, and the present one, now a mellow stone, creamy and smoothed by the centuries. Another potential target for a bolting German pilot; a thousand-pounder in the middle of that should kill the gardener and his wife who served as housekeeper, and a dozen ducks; a victory Goering’s boys could hardly afford to miss. From up here on the main road the water in the moat seemed calm and a faint blueish-green as though distilled by age.

  It was just three months ago; exactly twelve weeks the day after tomorrow. August, long days and short nights, not the time of year for destroyers to be steaming close to the Bay of Biscay, not with Junkers and Dorniers using those French airfields around Brest.They were reckoned to have a range of 1200 miles – five hundred out, two hundred to play with and five hundred back.

  Death passed by so smoothly, just as Leeds Castle had slid into sight through the trees. You did not always have to see it; if you were reading a book or had been asleep it could pass unnoticed and touch someone else. The signalman had come up to the bridge and handed the page from the signal pad to the captain who read it and walked over to the chart.

  Yorke had seen him glancing at the latitude and longitude scales and then putting an index finger on the chart – on a position well into the Bay of Biscay.

  ‘Number One – here a moment. We have some trouble with the Teds.’

  ‘The Teds’ – a relic of the Aztec’s recent time in the Mediterranean and her association with the Italians, mainly ferrying them as prisoners. The Italians had no love for their allies, and their word for Germans, Tedeschi, provided the Royal Navy with an obvious abbreviation; a change from the usual ‘Jerry’.

  The captain smoothed out the signal for him to read. It was from the Admiralty and came ten minutes after the Aztec had herself picked up garbled signals from a ship being attacked in the Bay.

  The captain, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe, was a deceptive man: at first glance he seemed a ruddy and chubby-faced prosperous farmer dressed up in naval uniform. He smoked a foul pipe (originally, before the charring really got to grips with it, a distinctive Peterson of Dublin) and was given to using seagulls as targets when he felt the need to exercise one of the pair of 12-bore hammer guns he kept cased under his bunk. He did it less frequently since Yorke asked him, with well-simulated innocence, if he had ever used one of the pump guns that were becoming popular with American sportsmen. But, seagulls or not, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe had been a fine shot.

  His orders once he read the signal had been quiet and complete: warn the engine room that they would soon be going on to full speed, alter course now to east, get the navigator up on the bridge, and make sure that all the small-arms ready-use ammunition lockers were full, and have the galley make enough bully beef sandwiches to provide everyone with three – there was no telling when they would have time for a proper meal.

  So the Aztec, a Tribal class destroyer on passage from Gibraltar to the Clyde on a sunny day in the late summer and with orders to stay at least four hundred miles from the French coast once abreast of Ferrol, increased to thirty knots and steered for a little pencilled X the navigator had put on the chart.

  Bascombe was thorough; he had ordered another lieutenant to decipher the signal again; he had no wish to have the Aztec dashing off to the wrong position. And Yorke guessed that in the Operations Room at the Admiralty the little disc, or whatever they used to mark ships on the big plotting board, and which represented the Aztec, would be moved towards this other ship.

  The Aztec – this one was a mighty warrior, despite the peaceful origin of the name: four U-boats sunk so far, thanks to Henry Bascombe’s quite uncanny knack of seeing into a Ted submariner’s mind. Or was it the farmer’s instinct for outwitting a weasel, or even knowing over which holes to drape the nets before putting the ferret into a rabbit warren? But using a Tribal to hunt U-boats: it was an awful waste of a Fleet destroyer.

  The first of the Ju 88s had picked up the Aztec some fifty miles from the position given by the Admiralty, and Bascombe had given the sequence of helm orders for evasive action as though he was at the local market bidding for a few ewes in which he was not really interested but knew the seller needed the money for some particular purpose, like paying a doctor’s bill. Bascombe would have been that sort of a farmer. Prosperous, cheerful – and thoughtful. Squire Bascombe – that was the nickname he had picked up at Dartmouth many years ago.

  The twin-engined Ted had let down its dive brakes – the first time Yorke had ever seen them used on a Ju 88 and they looked like latticed trapdoors opening downwards on the underside of each wing – and tried to line up on the Aztec as she jinked below at high speed, probably appearing as a grey dolphin leaving a wide white ribbon of wake.

  ‘Port fifteen, quartermaster,’ Henry had said, ‘that should do it this time… And now starboard twenty, that’ll break some china in the galley…’

  But it had turned the Aztec into the last of a stick of five bombs which the despairing German pilot had dropped across the destroyer’s mean course. The mean course: Henry had been so keen to go to the other ship’s help that he had not deviated more than thirty degrees either side of the course at a time when a few circles and figures of eight might have helped to confuse the bomber.

  They were small bombs, no more than 250-pounders, but this one had hit B turret, landing on the breech of a gun and just in front of the bridge, blasting up thousands of metal splinters that riddled it like a pepper dredge. The captain, navigator, lookouts, signalmen – every man on the bridge had been killed or badly wounded, and the word had been passed that Mr Yorke was in command – and a fire had started under B turret.

  The next four hours had been a nightmare: Yorke could remember nothing beyond standing – crouching, rather – in the wreckage of the bridge smelling burning paint and shouting helm orders down the bent and battered voicepipe, calling engine-room orders to a rating who had managed to rig up a telephone, and leaving the men at the guns to fight as best they could under whichever warrant and petty officers survived while he tried to keep the ship afloat, which meant twisting and weaving like a wounded fox being attacked by eagles.

  He had managed to dodge the next two Ju 88s and a Do 217, each of which, after dropping six bombs, had tried to rake the ship with machine-guns, but the Aztec’s own light armament had driven them off, a raucous barking of cordite which cheered up the ship’s company. The clatter of empty cartridge cases rattling across the deck with every roll was music; the gunners’ brass band.

  But the only surviving officers were himself and the lieutenant ‘E’, who was busy down in the engine room trying to deal with blast damage, keep some pressure on the hoses for fire-fighting, and making sure Yorke had speed in hand.

  Soon, as
the fire was doused under B turret and casualties were carried below, Yorke retrieved the chart and brought the plot up to date more by guesswork than anything else. The soccer fans among the ratings had the score: twenty-two misses for the Aztec – bombs she had managed to dodge – and one hit for the Teds. They were arguing how many points should be scored for a miss and for a hit when lookouts sighted the ship they were supposed to be rescuing – an old Polish destroyer. God knew what she was doing in this corner of Biscay, but enemy bombers were circling her like a swarm of gnats, either ignoring the Aztec or because they had not sighted her.

  And so he had steered for the Pole; steer for the sound of guns, the fighting instructions said, though presumably Their Lordships in their wisdom had meant ‘sight’ not ‘sound’.

  There was no need for radio silence now: that was one of the few advantages of being in direct contact with the enemy. A sighting report to the Admiralty on Fleet wave full power, giving their position, and reporting in cipher the damage and casualties, brought an order in cipher that the civilian passengers on board the other ship must be rescued at all costs. It did not matter that the Ted direction-finding stations could pick up the transmissions and plot the Aztec’s position; the bombers knew well enough and must be sending back a running commentary.

  The engineer had turned up the wick in a bid for every knot of speed and Yorke was thankful that the stokers, or whichever of the survivors were down there handling the sprayers, were a bit heavy-handed because for a few moments they let in more fuel oil than the furnaces could burn, so that a stream of black smoke poured out of the funnels.

  Smoke. He had not thought of it. There was not much wind – a breeze of perhaps ten knots, but every little helped. He took the telephone from the rating and talked to the engineer, and as he spoke he saw two gnats leave the Polish destroyer and head for the Aztec.

  At the same moment he realized that the Polish destroyer was now stopped, fought to a standstill, and one of the lookouts with binoculars confirmed that she seemed low in the water, although not listing.