Dead and Alive (6 page)

It was Garth and Bill and about half-a-dozen Boscastle fishermen.

“We heard thee were off the rocks,” said Garth.” An’ we thought maybe you’d be in difficulties.”

“We’ve got a lorry up on the cliff-top loaded with ropes,” Bill added.

I looked out towards the incoming tide. “I think she’ll hold,” I said.

“Aye,” Garth nodded. “At the high there’ll be a big swell running—no more. You’ll hold all right. We just thought maybe——” He nodded his head again. “A right seamanlike job ye’ve done, Mr. Cunningham.”

I thanked him for coming. “It was touch and go at one time,” I said. “And I’d still be glad of your help when the tide is in.” And I told him how I planned to use the tide to ease the ship down the cove.

We broached the firkin of beer that Bill had brought
back from Camelford. And we crowded the little wheel-house, drinking till the crash of the waves and the lift of the stern told us the tide was in again.

Outside it was daylight, grey and wet. The seas were still big and they thundered in, to roll crashing in great roars of surf on either side of the ship. But they had lost their power and no longer broke right over the stern.

With two of us to each pulley we began to work the ship out at the flood of each wave. Those on the two long hawsers’ pulleys reeled the chains in, bit by bit, whilst those on the bow and short hawser pulleys eased off as required.

An hour’s work and the ship was nearly twenty yards down the cove, the limit of the pulley chains, and still held fast on all sides.

Stuart cooked us all a terrific breakfast. The strained lines had disappeared from his face. He was in great spirits. Only his bloodshot eyes told the story of the night. He wouldn’t allow them to leave until the firkin was empty and then played them up the cliff-path, singing until they were all singing. Their voices died away in the murmur of the receding surf. Dugan had gone with them. And we were alone. I felt very elated and very tired. We went to bed.

I woke in the sweat of a nightmare. I had dreamed that we were afloat in the cove without ties and the ship was slowly being broken up. I opened my eyes to find the sun streaming in through the open port and Stuart shaking my shoulder and offering me a cup of tea. The noise of the sea filled the stuffiness of the cabin and now and then the ship lifted and then settled gently back on to the sand of the cove.

“Afloat?” I asked.

He nodded.

I put a pair of slacks on and went up on deck. The sea—a quiet, complacent, gentle sea—was reaching up the cove beyond the bows. There was still a swell running, but in that warm dancing sunlit scene it was difficult to recollect the wicked thundering breakers of the night.

“To-morrow,” he said, and there was relief in his voice.

And I agreed.

Right away we began to rerig the pulleys so that we could ease her farther out. The long hawsers we ran direct to the capstan. We rigged ropes to the short hawsers to give them extra length. And we fixed a temporary wheel. At low tide we went round the ship to see what damage had been done. A blade of the port screw was broken and the other blades bent. That was all.

Bill and Anne came over with Dugan very early the following morning. The sea was almost flat calm. “Mr. Garth says, sir, if we’re in difficulties you’re to send to Boscastle,” Dugan told me. “He says there’ll be four boats at call if you need ’em around midday.”

The tide was full at a little before nine. And just after eight-thirty we felt the first jar as the stern lifted and settled back on to the sand. Dugan got the engines going. I cast off the bow lines. Bill and Boo manned the short hawsers which we had lengthened by adding ropes.

It was with a feeling of some pride that I ordered, “Let go, for’ard,” and started the capstan. Stuart operated the port hawser and I handled the starboard and so we guided the ship stern first out to the entrance of the cove. It was as easy as that. In fact the whole operation took no more than ten minutes.

I dashed up to the bridge. “Let go, for’ard,” I called. Then “Let go, aft.” The splash of the long hawsers going overboard told me that we were on our own. Stuart went to the wheel-house as arranged. “Slow astern both,” I called down the voice-pipe that connected direct to the engine-room. I felt the bite of the screws as they began to turn. “Port ten,” I ordered Stuart.

The Elephant Rock slid by, peering down at us over the starboard rail. “Half-astern both.” Then to Stuart, “Steady as you go.”

She came out as sweet as if she’d been coming off a beach. “Half-ahead starboard.” The bows came slowly round as though the coastline were marching by. “Half-ahead
both.” We steamed slowly past the Rocky Valley about a two cables’-length off shore, past the village of Trafalgar with its squat-towered church, past the light on the cliff-top and into Boscastle inlet.

Word of our coming had gone before us. Half the village was out to greet us, cheering and waving as the rusty hulk slid between the two arms of the old stone breakwater. We tied up alongside the hard. Old Garth was the first aboard. And there was a burly man with a cheery grin and mud-caked gaiters with him. “This is my friend Ezra Hislop, Mr. Cunningham,” Garth said. “He’s going to present me with five pound in the bar and you and Mr. McCrae must come along and help drink it.”

As we went down to the pub I caught snatches of conversation—“I mind the first time I saw ’un. I thought I was dreaming” and “I saw ’un come in. I reckoned she’d break up in that cove”—and so on. Some had helped the crew off. Some had put them up for the night. Several had helped the captain to salvage things. The pub didn’t close its doors until near on four o’clock that afternoon and there can have been few sober fishermen in Boscastle by the time it did.

We spent all next day recovering our borrowed gear in Bossiney Cove and loading it into the barge which Garth towed round for us. The cove looked strange without the rusty hulk of the landing craft lodged precariously under the cliffs.

When we got back, Dugan approached us, cap in hand and smothered in oil. He had with him a short, powerfully built young fellow with a mop of unruly yellow hair. He was dressed in what had once been khaki overalls and he too looked as though he’d bathed in the sump of a diesel engine.

“I was thinking that now she’s off the rocks you’d be needing a crew like, sir,” Dugan said.

“Wait a minute,” put in Stuart. “We’re not staying in home waters. We’re going to the Mediterranean.”

“That’s okay with me, sir.” He grinned cheerfully
through the mask of oil that smeared his face. “I ain’t got no ties as you might say. An’ there don’t seem no job for us around these parts. My mate here feels the same way.”

“What’s your name?” Stuart asked Dugan’s pal.

“Eric Boyd, sir.”

“You’re the boy that was in the R.A.S.C., aren’t you?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir. But I were in a Water Transport Company. I had charge of a schooner running cargoes between Corsica and Naples and up to Livorno for more than a year. And I was out with the boats when I was a boy.”

“Speak Italian?” Stuart asked.

“Pretty fair, sir. You had to on them schooners. There weren’t nobody but yourself and a bunch of Ityes.”

Stuart glanced at me. I gave a slight nod. “Right,” he said. “Come and see me in the morning and we’ll fix up details.”

After supper that night Stuart brought out the armoury that Dugan had found. There were three Mauser rifles with a box of a thousand rounds, all tracer, two boxes of grenades and four of those little Italian Berettas complete with holsters and a hundred rounds of ammunition apiece. The rust was only surface rust. He started on the pistols. “Mighty useful find of Dugan’s,” he said, and you could almost hear him purr.

Two months later I was to remember his words. At the time, however, I said, “There’s not a war on in the Med now.”

He looked at me with that slightly humorous lift of the eyebrows. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Remember the arms that were filched from us in Egypt, North Africa and Italy. There are caches of weapons of every kind in practically every country in the Med. And we’re not all that popular in some areas where there wasn’t enough food. I won’t be going ashore without one of these little toys tucked away in my pocket.” And he tapped the pistol he was cleaning.

Whilst he worked at the weapons, we held a brief board meeting. Our salvage worries were over. We had a ship now that could move under her own steam—not a problematical hulk lying on the rocks. And our thoughts were concentrated on how to make the best use of her.

It was agreed there and then that I should run the ship. In matters of seamanship he would come under me as my Number One. But that he should fix cargoes. He’d been in a solicitor’s office before the war and he was confident that he could avoid the normal pitfalls into which a one-ship concern might fall. We agreed to do the trip out with the skeleton crew of four we already possessed—Dugan and Boyd to come in on a profit-sharing basis. The rest of the crew were to be recruited in Italy where labour would go where there was food. We would sail for Plymouth as soon as I was confident the craft could make it and whilst I supervised refitting he was to go to London and get in touch with some Italian contacts he had with a view to our investing in a suitable cargo.

Two days later we said good-bye to our friends in Boscastle. We made Plymouth in just over twenty-four hours. The sea was calm and the engines ran without a hitch. Behind us we trailed our borrowed barge with the tackle that had enabled us to become a going concern.

It was the end of the first phase.

I
T WAS
a big moment for me, coming in to Plymouth again in a landing craft. And this time I was part owner of it. It did not belong to the Government. As soon as we had berthed, we sought Slater out in his office.

“Ah” he said, as we were shown in by his writer, “I’ve been expecting you, Cunningham, for the past two days.”

I introduced Stuart to him. “How do you mean—you’ve been expecting me?” I asked.

For answer, he picked a newspaper up from his desk and handed it to me. It was the Western edition of a London daily and right across one of the inside pages the heading read: Two Men Lift Landing Craft Off Rocks—Amazing Story of Hulk Refloated. There was a picture of the ship on the rocks at the head of the cove and another of her steaming into Boscastle. There were pictures of Stuart and myself and a picture of a man in a slouch hat which seemed vaguely familiar. The story took the whole page and in the middle was the by-line—Bill Trevor. I recognised the man in the slouch hat then—his picture was captioned in heavy type: And I Helped Them Do It.

“So that’s what Bill does for a living,” I said, and handed the feature across to Stuart. I remembered his enthusiastic use of a Leica camera which he carried everywhere. The picture of us coming into Boscastle was probably taken from a tripper. There had been plenty of cameras clicking as we had berthed at the hard that morning.

“I’m glad to see he had the sense not to let on where you got the equipment from,” Slater said.

I nodded. I was wondering whether the Admiralty would try and prevent our sailing the ship and what
effect this publicity would have on our next need—a cargo. “Well, what about this dinner?” I said. “They should be just about opening now.”

“Good,” he said. “Very good idea.” He drove us into town and we finished up at two in the morning on board a destroyer with eggs and bacon, washed down with rum.

The next day Stuart left for London, and Dugan, Boyd and I settled down to the job of refitting. It was a job that completely absorbed me. For a month nothing else meant anything to me. And I was as completely happy as I have ever been.

No dry dock was available so we decided to fix the damaged hull plates ourselves. This suited me, for I was determined that the refit should be thorough and at the same time that it should cost as little as possible. Slater gave me every assistance. He made me free of any equipment I needed, gave me old plates and stanchions, enabled me to scrounge all the things that cost a lot if purchased new and yet are piled, rusting, in any big Navy yard—and we weren’t worrying about getting second-hand stuff. All I had to buy were spares for the engines, paint and the like. He fitted me out with ropes, hawsers, an anchor, door chains and many other things, taken from wrecks and ships that had been broken up. We even managed to get a loud-hailer.

We took the old crate out of the docks and beached her on the sands of the Sound. With winches and jacks we tipped her over on to her side and by the end of three days her hull was sound, the rudders had been straightened out and the damaged screw had been exchanged.

I made a great discovery during those three days—Boyd was no mean hand at engineering. He’d had a year as a mechanic in a garage before the war and for the first three years in the Army had been driving and serviceing transport. And then, of course, in the Water Transport Company he had been the engineer on board his schooner as well as the cargo supervisor.

And so, whilst Dugan worked steadily at the engines
to get them absolutely as perfect as old engines that have seen much service and then been buried in sea and sand for a year can be, Boyd and I set to work to fix the superstructure.

Everything that was broken, bent or twisted we ripped off with an acetyline welder or axes. By the time we’d finished there was virtually nothing left of the deck-housing and bridge except the steel walls.

From that skeleton we began to build—new bridge supports were welded in, a new stack and mast rigged, a gyro compass installed, new steel ladders fitted. And then the bridge—we built that of steel plates and aft of the stack we erected a really roomy chart-house and wardroom that ran out on either side to include the wings of the bridge where the pom-poms had been. This wardroom was constructed of ferro-concrete, curved like an adobe aft to give the least possible resistance to a following sea that might sweep over the bridge. Stanchions were erected round the remainder of the bridge to carry a canvas awning to protect us from both rain and sun.