The Restless Sea. Vanessa de Haan

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СКАЧАТЬ is woken by a loud bang. It is 0104 in the morning. The night is black as coal. He stumbles to the door of his cabin. A signalman trots along the corridor. ‘It’s the battleship, sir,’ he says. ‘Some fuel or ammunition gone up in the bows.’

      Charlie nods. Through his porthole he can hear a faint tinny voice. Probably a message on the ship’s Tannoy system. ‘OK. Thanks, Walker. Let me know if they need help.’

      ‘Will do, sir.’ Walker jogs back along the corridor, his feet reverberating through the metal tunnel.

      Charlie turns back to his cabin and closes the door. He isn’t concerned. After all, this is a naval base. They couldn’t be safer. He has almost reached his bunk when there is another almighty boom. There is no mistaking that noise. It is an explosion – and a large one. He opens the porthole and sees flames across the water. He grabs his clothes, his boots, and runs up on deck still clambering into them. He pushes past the crowd of men to the rails. The battleship is listing like a drunk. Everyone is shouting at the same time: ‘Away lifeboat’s crew! What else can we do? Hurry!’ Charlie runs for the tender they used only a few hours ago. But it has already cast off with Frank and a petty officer to go and help. The aircraft carrier has switched on her searchlight and aims it at the water where the vast ship is now floundering, almost flat on her side.

      Men and boys are scrabbling from every part of her in desperation. They are sliding down her hull, jumping into the water, crying out from where they are trapped inside. Fierce white flames rip out of the vents and portholes as there is another echoing blast. Suddenly the ship heels further, the weight of her guns pulls her over and under and she vanishes from sight, sinking towards the mud of the harbour floor, with so many men still screaming from within. The bitter stench of cordite stings Charlie’s nostrils. The sea thrashes with survivors and debris. Cries. Flames. Frank’s tender joins a converted drifter moving among the objects in the water. The drifter has managed to rescue several people. More clamber at the sides to be hauled in by their friends. They cry out in terror. Other bodies float face-down in the water. A few of the men strike out for land. It is less than a mile’s swim. The sea is an oil slick. Deadly and viscous. There is smoke everywhere.

      Charlie helps transfer the rescued men from their own tender on to the deck. Many are wearing only their nightclothes: vests and pants. They shiver uncontrollably. Their skin is covered in oil. Some are burnt. Their skin is blackened, blistered, bubbled. Some of them die there and then on the deck. The oil has coated their lungs and they can’t breathe any more. Others whimper and cry out. The legs of the men who slid along the hull of the ship as she went down are shredded: the barnacles have ripped into their skin. Their teeth chatter with cold and shock. Among the faces of the survivors Charlie cannot find one that he recognises – not Bruce or the officer with the narrow nose.

      At four in the morning they give up looking for survivors. The sea is ominously quiet. There is no life left upon its dark and indifferent surface. ‘Any sign of Summers?’ Charlie says to Frank when he hauls himself back on to the ship. ‘Summers? With the freckles?’ Frank shakes his head, tries to say something, but it comes out as a gurgle. Charlie gets him a drink and a blanket. ‘Come on, Frank. Have some of this.’ He holds the drink to Frank’s lips, but before he can drink, Frank turns and retches violently. ‘They were stuck in the gangways. We could hear them. They couldn’t get out …’

      For a moment Charlie hears again the voices of those boys and men who cried out as they sank and the icy water filled the corridors and they scrabbled to get past each other. It was too crowded and dark and they were half asleep or in a nightmare, and they gulped great mouthfuls of air, and then water, until they were silenced for ever.

      They give the survivors whatever clothes and rum they can find. No one knows what caused the explosion, although there are rumours that the impossible has happened and a U-boat has sneaked like a wolf into the lambing shed. More than eight hundred men have drowned within yards of them. Many were only boys, asleep in their hammocks. It is impossible to comprehend. They were supposed to be safe. Charlie sits in the yellow light of the wardroom in silence. Tonight he has stared death in the face and he will never forget it. It doesn’t matter how old or experienced you are. In the eyes of death, all men are equal.

      That a German U-boat managed not only to infiltrate the impregnable Scapa Flow but also sink an iconic battleship is a devastating blow not just to the Navy, but to a nation that believed it ruled the waves. The men fret about the families and friends they have left behind in the towns and cities, the villages and hamlets of home. The odds of war are stacking up against them. The Germans have pushed relentlessly on, into France, the Netherlands, Belgium. Sometimes it feels as though the Navy is all that stands between the enemy and Britain.

      Charlie’s aircraft carrier is assigned a new captain as Captain Turnbull is promoted to commodore, his expertise needed elsewhere. Captain Pearce is a mean little man, cross that he’s been called back from retirement; already fed up with the constant demands of life at sea, particularly on his weary old bones. He had imagined his life would end differently, preferably in the garden with his prize dahlias, but another war has put paid to that. He has no experience of flying, and the pilots cannot stand him. Worse, he believes the Fairey Swordfish to be outdated relics of the past: he cannot see their advantages. He makes them fly in the most terrible conditions, unaware of the finely-tuned capabilities of individual pilots and planes. He sometimes makes them fly without their accompanying plane guard, which means a downed crew would be left to fend for themselves in the water. The carrier is deployed to the African coast to search for a German commerce raider that has been causing havoc. Captain Pearce sweats and grumbles about the heat. Then they escort a damaged cruiser back to Britain, ending up a few months later – and after the turn of the new year – back at a windswept Scapa Flow. The captain shivers and moans about the cold. They say goodbye to the Blackburn Skua squadron, who are left – to their delight and everyone else’s envy – to add to the defences in northern Scotland.

      The only joy at this joyless time is another letter from Olivia. Charlie thinks longingly of a visit to Loch Ewe, but there is not time to get there overland for a day’s leave, and Captain Pearce won’t allow them longer: they have been assigned to the Mediterranean fleet for exercises. He consoles himself over the weeks by savouring every word that she has written. It sounds as if she is settling in, as he knew she would. His mouth waters when she talks about how rationing doesn’t affect her because she has milk and butter and fresh eggs in exchange for helping on the Macs’ farm, and later there will be honey from Mrs Ross’s bees. She has been preparing the ground for vegetables in the walled garden under Greer’s beady eye, and the housemaid, Clarkson, has been teaching her to forage for young shoots of nettles and wild garlic. There is even talk of trapping rabbits.

      Charlie’s aircraft carrier is called back from exercises soon enough, and near to Scotland: it is to make up part of the large British fleet trying to prevent the Nazis from taking Norway. The Germans are pushing into Scandinavia, creeping closer to Britain every day. The first British civilian is killed: a young man the victim of an air raid on Scapa Flow. Charlie shudders: his anxiety about Olivia’s safety rises. He has received another two letters from her, and they are fast becoming the only things he has to look forward to, apart from the hours spent flying. He rereads the letters daily. They warm him up and pour a little colour back into the grey and white world of snow and ice that is life on the Norwegian Sea. She is expert at painting a picture of the landscape. When Charlie closes his eyes, he can see the liquid gold of autumn bracken, the spring riot of red and orange and white magnolia, rhododendron and azalea, the gnarled silver alder trees all hung with pale green lichen and the changing colours of the loch.

      Conversation on board often turns to home, and now Charlie feels he can join in. Mole talks about his young son and wife. Billy wants to get back to his childhood sweetheart. They gently tease each other. Mole and Billy quiz Charlie about Olivia, and he smiles and tells them to mind their own business, but that she has hair the colour of the rising sun and eyes the colour of the morning sky, and they laugh and say he hasn’t СКАЧАТЬ