Decoy (16 page)

Shipowners, excluding the respectable and well-known lines like Blue Funnel, Shaw Savill, New Zealand Shipping Company, Royal Mail and a few others, regarded the war as a good thing: they were carrying assured cargoes at high rates, which was the first consideration. But if their old ships, the depreciation long ago written down on the companies’ books, were sunk by the enemy, the government replaced them with new ships and new crews drawn from the Pool of seamen organized by the Ministry of War Transport. And, Ned remembered bitterly, supplied them with those infamous life jackets and lifeboats.

Once the
City of Norwich
was out in the open Atlantic, her engines throbbing comfortably and the ship pitching slightly as she met swells which could be the distant outriders of yet another depression sweeping across the Atlantic to the north-east, a seaman knocked on the door of the cabin with a request for Ned to visit the
City of Norwich
’s captain.

Yorke was surprised to find that Captain Painter was a tall, thin-faced and ascetic man who looked as though he would be more at home in a pulpit than on the bridge of a ship. Then he remembered that Painter was the City Line’s senior captain and that he had taken the
City of Norwich
through an out-of-season typhoon, reputedly breaking only half a dozen teacups.

‘Commander Yorke,’ he said after they had shaken hands, ‘I do believe these orders, every spare inch of which is stamped “TOP SECRET”, are the oddest I’ve yet received, and I’d be glad to go over them with you, so there’s no chance of mistakes.’

Ned nodded as Painter went to his desk, sat down and unlocked a drawer, taking out several sheets of paper clipped together. He read through them, after putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

‘We’re not unused to picking up survivors from lifeboats – in fact we rarely make a crossing without sighting a boat, though now winter’s here again I’m afraid we often arrive a few days too late: the poor beggars have died of exposure.’

Ned waited, nodding understandingly.

‘It’s bitter in an open boat out there in mid-Atlantic. We go up as close to the ice as we dare, you know.’

‘Yes I know,’ Ned said. ‘I went over your routeing chart for this voyage.’

‘But abandoning some twenty men in one of our own lifeboats – it’s asking a lot. It goes against what I’ve been trained to do since I first went to sea.’

‘Think of it as “delivering”, not “abandoning”,’ Ned said. ‘And I’ve no need to assure you that there’s a very good reason for it.’

‘I’m sure there is, and I’m certainly not questioning it, but I just want you to be sure you know what you’re doing. In gale force winds, you’ll need all you’ve got to survive in one of those dam’ lifeboats. If it gets up to storm force…’

‘We shall be very uncomfortable,’ Ned agreed. ‘But please don’t worry.’

‘But you don’t realize what it’s like in a lifeboat!’ Painter exclaimed.

‘Not a lifeboat, no; but in a lifejacket, yes.’

‘Oh, then you’ve…’

‘We are all picked men. Several of my chaps have things like DSCs.’

‘It’s impossible to tell since you’re all wearing, ah –’

‘Fake Merchant Navy uniforms,’ Ned said, grinning. ‘There’s a reason why the officers have them, and anyway the seamen and Marines very sensibly prefer thick jerseys. When the time comes probably we’ll all be wearing oilskins!’

Painter looked at him closely. ‘I don’t want to pry into whatever it is you are doing, but does it depend on people thinking you are a boatload of survivors?’

Ned thought for a moment or two and then nodded.

‘Well,’ said Painter, ‘if we spotted you through glasses, I’ll tell you straight, we’d alter course ninety degrees away and leave you to it!’

A puzzled Ned tried to think what would raise Painter’s suspicions and finally shook his head. ‘Tell me why!’

‘Oilskins! Most survivors split into two types: the few chaps on watch or who had time to drag on some clothes – they’ll be wearing uniform if officers, and anyway lifejackets. The rest will be in whatever they can scrounge – engineers, greasers and so on would have been down in the engine room in shorts, singlet and sweat rags round their necks. A few might be wearing those yellow survival suits, but they rarely do.’

‘Why? Surely they help to keep spray and the wind out.’

‘Yes, in theory anyway they should help, but the chaps can’t be persuaded to carry those little packs around with them everywhere they go. So when the torpedo hits they’re in one place and the packs in the other. Anyway, they’re flimsy things, just what you’d expect from the Ministry of War Transport. Row a lifeboat in bad weather wearing one of those things and first you get soaked with perspiration because the material doesn’t “breathe”; then it chafes across the shoulders and under the arms; then it splits; and one size fits all. They’d be all right if everyone wearing them crouched in the bottom of the boat without having to row… But it’s not like that. Comes of having these Ministry chaps having war-winning ideas…’

Ned thought back to the convoy he had been sailing in only a few weeks earlier. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I know it’s not going to be easy. But please don’t worry about us. If we weren’t sitting in a lifeboat we’d be doing something else equally uncomfortable.’

‘Your hand,’ Painter said. ‘You need a glove for it. Hasn’t had time to heal properly. Skin’s too soft. What happened?’

‘Destroyer in the Bay of Biscay…air attack. We zigged when we should have zagged.’

‘The Bay’s no place to be these days,’ Painter commented. ‘Still, I have my special charts and my zigzag diagrams, so I’m quite content: Halifax and back with another brigade or two of Canadians.’

He took a pipe from the rack on his desk and began stuffing it with Three Nuns Empire blend. As soon as he had puffed the pipe into life he said conversationally: ‘Great things, those Admiralty routeing charts. The courses they give seem to keep us out of trouble. Do you know how they find out where the U-boats are concentrated?’

Ned shrugged his shoulders, and thought of all the signals being tapped out between the U-boats and
B der U
at Kernével in the new Triton cipher using the four-rotor Enigma. Signals that BP could not now read. In two or three weeks the effects of the Great Blackout would be felt. Routeing charts from there on would be merely inspired guesses, as much use as giving Red Riding Hood written instructions about how to avoid the Big Bad Wolf. There would be no more enciphered signals sending a ship like the
City of Norwich
, or even a convoy, on a sudden jink to avoid a concentration of U-boats. Captain Painter, like everyone else, would be playing blind man’s buff. He could be steaming along in broad daylight, with the
City of Norwich
fitting accurately between the graticules of a U-boat periscope.

Fortunately, Captain Painter had no idea of the danger he and his ship (and his country, for that matter) were now in; nor did he, or could he, know how important it was for all of them that he abandon one of his lifeboats in mid-Atlantic with twenty-three men in it.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Ned said. ‘There’s a whole section in the Admiralty dealing with routeing ships: I expect it’s them.’

‘It’s a great responsibility they have,’ Painter said admiringly, relighting his pipe. ‘After all, they could easily route a ship or whole convoy –’ he paused as there was a knock on his door. ‘Excuse me a moment: time for blackout, and the lad’s come to close the deadlights. Come in!’ he called.

A steward came in and swiftly worked his way round the cabin, swinging the deadlights, solid metal covers hinging over the glass portholes, and screwing them down tight. They had originally been fitted as protection in case enormous seas broke the thick glass of the portholes; now they were used not to stop great seas coming in, but chinks of light getting out. The steward went into the other cabin to screw down the rest of the deadlights and Painter relit his pipe.

‘A drink – whisky, gin or something?’ he asked Ned, who replied that he had some paperwork to finish up, refusing the offer.

Once the steward had left the cabin, Painter said: ‘Is there anything special I can provide for your chaps?’

At that moment Ned contemplated exactly what was meant by the fact that in a few days they would be living on lifeboat rations, and the success or failure of the whole operation might ultimately depend on how long they could last out physically. In the rush of planning, learning cipher data and commando tactics, getting to know the inside of a U-boat and how to lob black bangers and all this being cut short by Captain Watts’ telephone call to say that Triton was now being used, the question of survival in an open boat had somehow been pushed to one side.

The more he thought about it, the more absurd the omission became. There were plenty of excuses – he or Jemmy or the Croupier would have worked on it had the training and planning part of the operation not been speeded up. But even when they were doing extra physical jerks and balancing exercises – running up and down the casing of the prize U-boat and scrambling up the welded steel ladder of the conning tower, everyone obsessed with stopwatch times and noting whether or not a Sten slung over the shoulder caught one of the rungs – they forgot to ask one question: are you sure you can survive, for a couple of weeks if necessary, in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic in the depth of winter? Not just survive, but still function rapidly and efficiently at the end of it.

‘Yes, perhaps,’ Ned said ‘First, your doctor – you do carry a doctor, don’t you? – could provide a crash menu so that we can get as many proteins or carbohydrates, or whatever they are, tucked under our belts to help us through the long winter nights rowing that dam’ boat. Perhaps he can also draw up a list of the special things – which I hope your Chief Steward can provide – which will help keep us in as good condition as possible? It’s not a question of cheating and not wanting to live on just lifeboat rations, but –’

‘I understand,’ Painter interrupted. ‘Whatever it is you’re up to (and I know better than to enquire), obviously your health is the main concern. “Winter North Atlantic” is, as you know, one of the marks on Mr Samuel Plimsoll’s load line, but it’s not the time to go boating!’

‘No, I’d prefer the one at the other end of the scale, “TF” – Tropical Fresh,’ Ned admitted.

‘The tropical sun can scorch you black: I found a boat full of bodies down close to Freetown and even though they’d cut up a sail for an awning, they were so dried up they reminded me of some biltong I saw in South Africa – sun-dried meat.’

‘So we have the choice – sun-dried or refrigerated!’ Ned laughed but, with the
City of Norwich
’s engines making the whole ship throb, and the chosen lifeboat hanging in the davits outside his cabin door, the diagonal gripes holding it in so that it did not swing sideways out and back with the ship’s roll, the joke was hollow.

Not refrigerated, but more probably so sodden with bitterly cold sea, flung at them as spray hour after hour, day after day, that they might die of exposure; the body unable to stand more wet, cold, exhaustion. The sheer effort of rowing the lifeboat to keep its bow heading into the seas to avoid getting the boat sideways on, so that it broached by rolling down the side of a wave or was capsized by a crest, was the greatest danger they would face: greater than U-boats, starvation or exposure.

‘Very well,’ Painter said. ‘You chaps go on a special diet. And doc will prepare some special lifeboat rations, in addition to the stuff already in the lockers. By the way, those galvanized food lockers under the thwarts – you know them?’

Ned shook his head. ‘I’ve seen them, that’s all. In the RN we have Carley Floats – balsa frames with nets across.’

‘Well, these galvanized lockers are bolted on under the thwarts and you get at the food inside by unscrewing a circular plate on one side, about the size of a tea plate.

‘I once found a lifeboat with ten survivors in it. They were only just surviving. They were starving – with both food lockers full, and the water breakers nearly empty.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was almost tragic. Instead of having the food locker lids unscrewed once a week, greased and put back on every trip, and the water breakers topped up – they’re made of wood, of course, and in hot weather there’s seepage – the chief officer on this ship had the lockers checked and the breakers topped whenever he thought of it, which was at the beginning of a trip: every three or four months, often longer.‘

‘He must have cursed himself,’ Ned commented.

‘He did. His carelessness killed him. When the ship was hit, twenty-nine got away in this one boat, including the chief officer. But they couldn’t get at the food because the threads on the lids had rusted up. They broke all their knives trying to dent a locker and make a hole. Then they bashed with an oar, but the lockers were too tough. So after a week or so the weaker men began to die. As I said, only ten left when we sighted them, and one of them died after we got him on board. So watch the threads of those lids – anhydrous lanolin’s what you need. I’ll add a tin to the list.’

Dying of starvation while separated from concentrated food by a sheet of galvanized steel – Ned reflected on the thoughts of that chief officer: dying because of his own negligence, and knowing his shipmates were dying too. He was unlucky not to have died at once, in the blast of the torpedo.

Painter looked at his watch. ‘Nearly dusk – we copy the Navy and go to action stations at dusk and dawn. We don’t have many guns but there’s no harm having everyone at action stations – more eyes watching for periscopes. They tell me the German torpedoes don’t leave a track.’

‘No, they’re driven by electric motors, not compressed air,’ Ned said, and there was an apologetic note in his voice.

Painter opened the door and all the lights went out automatically: Ned thought irrelevantly that the small metal hinge forming the on-off switch, and which was pushed back and forth as the door opened and closed, was like a kissing-gate. Lovers’ gate, some called it.

Climbing the steps of the companionway up to the bridge with dusk closing in on the ship like a noose tightening and the sea cold and unfriendly and spattered with white horses, inviting more victims to drown in its grasp, it was almost impossible to imagine that hundreds of lovers’ gates still punctuated hedgerows in Britain; lovers’ gates now rarely used and sitting in a silence broken by the occasional hysterical squawking of a blackbird frightening itself, or the metallic warning of a jay, and perhaps occasionally the methodical tapping of a woodpecker.