A Fortunate Life (21 page)

In between climbing in and out of submarines we did a lot of diving in the crystal waters off Pulau Tioman. This area is well known as a shark breeding-ground, and we nearly always saw a shark or two when
we dived. They were mostly rather small, about six feet long, and no one had ever been known to be attacked by one in these waters. Nevertheless, small and benign or not, you had to be particularly insensitive not to feel your heart beat a little faster when one came to investigate, not least because, underwater, a shark – clean, sleek and swift – was so much in its element, and we – slow, lumbering and clumsy – were so much out of ours. One of my Marines developed such a hearty dislike of these regular companions to our dives that he became a cause of a good deal of gallows-humour ribbing from the rest of us. But he got his own back eventually. One day, when we were preparing to dive together, I noticed he was carrying a long sharpened stick.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘It’s my shark stick, sir.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘that won’t keep a shark off.’

‘I know sir. It’s not for the shark, sir. It’s to poke you and make you bleed, so I’ve got time to get away.’

Our real fear in these waters was not sharks, but sea snakes. These are green, yellow and duck-egg blue with darker bands, a powerful paddle tail and can run up to ten or more feet in length. They are mostly deadly poisonous, but fortunately have only very rarely been known to attack humans. They were, nevertheless, an unpleasant thing to find swimming along with you on a dark night. These seas are very phosphorescent and every paddle or swimming stroke produces clouds of green light in the water. I recall one night paddling in from a submarine launch to find that our canoes were surrounded by six or seven sea snakes, each nearly as long as our canoes, swimming along with us in great serpentine ribbons of phosphorescence.

The other threat was jelly fish, and especially the so-called ‘Portuguese man-of-war’, a curious creature with the ability to put up an air bladder which acts as a sail. Their sting is excruciatingly painful and can kill small children. One of our favourite expeditions in Singapore was to load our friends onto one of the Motor Fishing Vessels (MFVs) we used for diving and sail the 120 miles to Pulau Tioman for a long weekend living on the beach and swimming. The usual routine was to load all the children and families in the hold and on the deck for a night passage up the coast, on which I would do the navigation, returning three days later. On one of these trips, our boat was anchored in shallow water a little way out from the
shore, while most of the families were swimming with their children. I was on the deck with one of the fathers, who suddenly spotted a flotilla of Portuguese men-of-war sailing in on the wind and heading straight for his wife and two young children. He leapt straight in between them and got himself severely stung, while his family got back to the boat.

We spent 1967 honing our new ‘Goldfish’ skills in a series of exercises that tested them to the limit. While we were satisfied that they could now be used in real operations, the shallowness of the coastal waters in this area of the world presented us with a new operational problem. In order to remain safely submerged, the submarines we were using needed a minimum of 10 fathoms (60 feet) of water. Meanwhile, the maximum distance you could reasonably ask a combat swimmer to swim, fully laden with weapons, ammunition, explosives, communications and equipment for three days was, we reckoned, 7–8,000 yards. Beyond this, exhaustion on the part of the swimmers and the effect of tides on navigation made the operation unacceptably hazardous – especially on the return journey, after several days’ potentially arduous operations ashore, when accurate navigation to find the right point in the open sea for the rendezvous with the submarine was critical. However, the shallowness of the sea around the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago meant that the ten-fathom line was often considerably more than 8,000 yards from the shore, which limited our combat swimming teams.

We needed to find a mechanical means to deliver combat swimmer teams over longer distances. We needed, in short, a Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDV), which could be carried in the submarine and which swimmers could unload while the submarine was still submerged and then use for their journey ashore. This SDV would then be sunk in shallow water and camouflaged, ready to pick up on the return journey. The last such ‘swimmer delivery vehicles’ had been the World War Two ‘Chariots’ invented by the Italians
*
and used to attack Valetta and Alexandria harbours; they were subsequently adapted by the British, who used them mostly in the Far East. But these had long since gone out of service. So we had to start again from scratch.

We hit on the idea of down-rating a standard Royal Navy Mark 23 torpedo and fitting it with steering gear at the rear, a buoyancy chamber, a compass, a depth gauge and an attitude indicator. This could be unloaded by swimmers from the torpedo tube of the submerged submarine and used to infiltrate combat swimming teams over longer distances, enabling the submarines to stay further out to sea and preserving the energy of the swimmers. Our modified torpedo was given the code name ‘Archie’, after Archimedes, and it fell to me to try it out. It was fine on the surface, but a bitch to drive under water. No matter how you trimmed the buoyancy, the length of the torpedo in front of the driver (who was at the very back end) meant that, once the nose dipped, it was very difficult to turn the beast round before the whole contraption went deeper than thirty feet, the point beyond which the pure oxygen we were breathing could turn toxic. And, if the nose went up, it was very difficult to turn round before the whole thing, with two swimmers on its back, broke surface like a breaching whale and gave the game away. In the end, however, we became quite skilled at driving it in a moderately controlled manner, even managing some successful simulated night attacks on Royal Navy warships in the harbour of Singapore naval base – on one occasion we left a large (dummy) mine under one of Her Majesty’s aircraft carriers as a calling-card.

We were rather pleased with ourselves, and even grew attached to our distinctly Heath Robinson contraption. But unfortunately (or, I suspect, fortunately – despite our enthusiasm, this was not a machine to be trusted in a real combat situation), the confrontation had by now ended, so we never had the chance to try out our new-fangled toy in anger.
*

In mid-1966 Jane again became pregnant. This time she had a very difficult pregnancy, with such severe sickness that she had to be taken into hospital frequently to be put on an intravenous drip. As a result, she became skeletally thin and had to spend much of the last months of her confinement in bed, causing us all much worry. Our son Simon was, however, born without complications in the British Military Hospital in Singapore on 24 April 1967. At this time it was not usual for husbands to be present at the birth, but the wonderful Chinese midwife who delivered Simon was a woman ahead of her time and
broke the rules to permit me to stay and see him emerging into the world, for which I have always felt in her debt.

Simon was christened on HMS
Forth
, the headquarters ship of the Seventh Submarine Squadron, in June. We had a tremendous party at which Kate, aged two, was discovered drinking whatever she could find from half-filled glasses within her reach. It was only when we left the Royal Naval dockyard in high spirits on our way home that we discovered that we had left the object of the whole affair, my son Simon, back on board HMS
Forth
!

In February 1966 Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defence, introduced a Defence White Paper, followed by a full-scale Defence Review which concluded that all British armed forces east of Suez, with the single exception of those in Hong Kong, should be withdrawn. In October that year Mr Healey visited Singapore, and we were tasked with putting on a demonstration for him involving divers exiting a submerged submarine and some SBS frogmen parachuting into the sea alongside him. Denis Healey never forgot this incident and, unprompted, reminded me of it sixteen years later, when, after my election as an MP, we met in the corridors of the House of Commons.

Towards the end of our time in Singapore, I was given the task of taking No. 2 SBS to Hong Kong and surveying all the beaches on the mainland and larger islands of the Colony. We were told our survey was part of the contingency plans being assembled in case of a Chinese invasion and the need to evacuate British citizens in a hurry. We spent three weeks surveying all the most likely beaches for an emergency amphibious evacuation, recording their gradients, hinterland access and how load-bearing each beach was. We were told to be as unobtrusive as possible, so as not to cause alarm, so we abandoned our uniforms and military kit and appeared as holidaymakers, going about the business in a way which, we hoped, would attract as little attention as possible. In these days of sexual equality I don’t suppose the sight of so many fit young men prancing about the waves together would cause much comment, but it certainly attracted an occasional odd look at the time – a fact which caused us all a good deal of amusement. At the end of our time we changed back into uniform and went up to the border with China to conduct a week’s surveillance operation.

People have often asked me where, as a member of the services, I got my left-of-centre political opinions from. The answer is the SBS.

I inherited from my father a deep dislike of the class system in Britain. I hated the large part this seemed to play in the services in general and especially, at the time, in the Royal Navy – something which I saw at first hand in 1960, when I was responsible for the conditions of our Marines below decks on that first cruise to Mombasa. Since leaving school I had believed that a fairer society – in which people’s ability, not their class, would determine their lives – would best be achieved under a Labour Government. I had declared myself, in consequence, a Labour supporter, something which was not always either welcome, or understood, amongst of my fellow officers. So I felt very comfortable with the culture I found when I joined the SBS, where people were valued and trusted according to their abilities and skills, not their origins. It was my good fortune during my years in the SBS to command a bunch of individuals who were, by any standards, better at the profession in which we were involved than I was. What was more, the things we did together, and our mutual reliance on each other’s skills and courage in difficult moments, taught me a very great deal about the value of structures that are based not on hierarchies but on mutuality. This is not unusual. The services may have a reputation for being the Conservative Party under arms in peacetime, but the mutuality and comradeship experienced on active service nearly always remind people of the value of the things that they hold and exercise in common. It is not an accident that, after experiencing the vicissitudes of war, democracies nearly always turn left, before the selfish gene takes over again.