Decoy

Copyright & Information

Decoy

 

First published in 1987

Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1987-2010

 

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
			0755104420		9780755104420			Print
			0755117840		9780755117840			Pdf
			0755119304		9780755119301			Mobi
			0755120434		9780755120437			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

 

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

In memory of my shipmates killed or wounded when Convoy

SL 125 was caught in the ‘Great Blackout’.

Size and performance of U-boats varied with the type. The one described in this narrative is similar to one version of the Mark IX. The ‘Great Blackout’ occurred exactly as described: a convoy in which the author was serving was caught in it and attacked by a pack of ten U-boats with disastrous results. The criticisms of the Ministry of War Transport, previously the Board of Trade, are made from first-hand experience of their lamentable lifejackets and lifeboats which were probably responsible for more British seamen’s deaths than torpedo hits.

Dudley Pope

Yacht Ramage

French Antilles

Yorke pulled down his tired-looking leather bag from the luggage rack, said a polite farewell to the old lady who had sat beside him in the train for the whole tedious and gritty night journey from Glasgow to London, and joined the crowd shuffling their way to the door at the end of the corridor. It had been a bitterly cold trip: the heat had never come on despite repeated assurances from the guard, and that combined with the blackout blinds ensured that the freezing air stayed stale.

The old lady was intriguing: small (about the same size as Clare, which meant a fraction under five feet), with white hair cut short in a severe style which made it seem she was wearing a Greek helmet. The inevitable venerable but comfortable cashmere jersey worn above an old tweed skirt of a dark green and black tartan matched the silk scarf, which was a folded square knotted at the back in cowboy fashion, with the triangle of material in front. Her shoes were black brogues, the tongues of which showed that they were more familiar with saddle soap than patent polishes.

Blue eyes, fading now; a thin and aristocratic nose which might have been carved from ivory. The lips had lost their colour but the rest of her features had the slight tan of a person who spent much time outdoors and showed that as a young woman she must have been one of the most beautiful in Scotland.

At first glance it was hard to tell if she was very poor and keeping up appearances or very rich and completely unconcerned. They had spent the night spasmodically dozing and waking in the dull blue light to find that one or the other’s head had leaned to rest on a shoulder, and slowly, as was the way with Britons, they had begun to talk when the rattling of the train and sheer discomfort finally drove out sleep in a miasma of grit and locomotive smoke as it plunged through long tunnels.

She had casually asked if he was just starting convalescent leave, and when he had said no she had nodded at his left hand, whose skin was purple and criss-crossed with scars which had just healed.

No, he had been to sea since that happened, he told her and she asked no more: not because of the CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES poster above the seats opposite but because she was leaving him to explain or not, as he wished.

Instead he asked her if she was coming down to London to shop. She had shaken her head ruefully. ‘No coupons left. And at my age fashion is comfort. This skirt — I remember I was wearing it when I took the younger boy off to boarding school. That must be twenty years ago!’

For a few moments, although the blue eyes were looking at him, they were seeing only memories. Of that younger boy? What was he doing now, a grown man?

‘And now I’m wearing it again.’ She might have been talking to herself: Ned was not sure.

‘To meet him?’