HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (9 page)

Quick steps rang on the bridge ladder, and he turned. It was the Chief: in the failing light his face looked grey and defeated.

‘That bulkhead can’t take this, sir,’ he began immediately. ‘I’ve been in to have a look, and it’s started working again – there’s the same leak down that seam. We’ll have to stop.’

The Captain shook his head. ‘That’s no good, Chief. If we stop in this sea, we’ll just bang ourselves to bits.’ A big wave hit them as he spoke, breaking down on the bows, driving them under.
Marlborough
came up from it very slowly indeed. ‘We’ve got to keep head to wind, at all costs.’

‘Can we go any slower, sir?’

‘No. She’ll barely steer as it is.’

Another wave took them fair and square on the fo’c’sle, sweeping along the upper deck as
Marlborough
sagged into the trough. The wind tugged at them. It was as if the deathbed scene were starting all over again.

The Chief looked swiftly at the Captain. ‘Could we go astern into it?’

‘Probably pull the bows off, Chief.’

‘Better than this, sir. This is just murder.’

‘Yes … All right … She may not come round.’ He leant over to the voice-pipe. ‘Stop starboard.’

‘Stop starboard, sir.’ The telegraph clanged.

‘Adams, I’m going astern, and up into the wind stern first. Put the wheel over hard a-starboard.’

‘Hard a-starboard, sir.’

‘Slow astern starboard.’

The bell clanged again. ‘Starboard engine slow astern, wheel hard a-starboard, sir.’

‘Very good.’

They waited. Those few minutes before
Marlborough
gathered stern way were horrible. She seemed to be standing in the jaws of the wind and sea, mutely undergoing a wild torture. She came down upon one wave with so solid a crash that it seemed impossible that the whole bows should not be wrenched off: a second, with a cruelty and malice almost deliberate, hit them a treacherous slewing blow on the port side. Slowly
Marlborough
backed away, shaking and staggering as if from a mortal thrust. The compass faltered, and started very slowly to turn: then as the wind caught the bows she began to swing sharply. He called out: ‘Watch it, Adams! Meet her! Bring her head on to north-west,’ and his hands as he gripped the pedestal were as white as the compass-card. The last few moments, before
Marlborough
was safely balanced with her stern into the teeth of the wind, were like the sweating end of a nightmare.

Behind him the Chief sighed deeply. ‘Thank God for that. What revs do you want, sir?’

‘We’ll try twenty.’

It was by now almost dark.
Marlborough
settled down to her awkward progress: both Adams and then Tapper wrestled steadily to keep her stern to the wind, while the waves mounted and steepened and broke solidly upon the quarter-deck. That whole night, which the Captain spent on the bridge, had a desperate quality of unrelieved distress. All the time the wind blew with great force from the south-east, all the time the seas ran against them as if powered by a living hate, and the vicious spray lashed the funnel and the bridge structure. At first light it began to snow: the driving clouds settled and lay thick all over them, crusting the upper deck in total icy whiteness.
Marlborough
might have been sailing backwards off a Christmas cake … but still, with unending, hopeless persistence, she butted her way southwards.

Five days later – one hundred and twenty-one hours – she was still doing it. The snow was gone, and the gale had eased to a stiff southerly breeze; but the sea was still running too high for them to risk turning their bows into it, and so they maintained, stern first, their ludicrous progress. The whole afterpart of the ship had been drenched with water ever since they turned; the wardroom had been made uninhabitable by a leaking skylight, the alleyway in which the men slept was six inches awash with a frothy residue of spray. It was hardly to be wondered at, thought the Captain as he slopped through it on his way back to the bridge: poor old
Marlborough
hadn’t been designed for this sort of thing.

He was very tired. He had hardly had two consecutive hours of sleep in the last five days; the strain had settled in his face like a tight and ugly mask. The doctor had done his best to relieve him, by taking an occasional spell on the bridge when the remaining four serious patients could be left: but even this seemed of no avail – his weariness, and the hours of concentration on
Marlborough
’s foolish movements, pursued him like a hypnosis, twitching his eyelids when he sought sleep, making his scalp prickle and the brain inside flutter. Hope of rest was destroyed by a twanging tension such as sometimes made him want to scream aloud. When he sat down in his chair on the fifth night of sternway – the ninth since they were torpedoed – and hunched his stiff shoulders against the cold, he was conscious of nothing save an appalling lassitude. Even to stare and search ahead, in quest of those shorelights that never showed themselves, was effort enough to make him feel sick in doing it.

He had no idea where they were. They had seen nothing – no lights at night, no aircraft, not a single smudge of smoke anywhere on the horizon. The sextant had been smashed by the shellfire, and there was no sun anyway to take sights by. Even at two knots, even at one and a half, they should have raised Butt of Lewis light by now, if their course were correct. That was the hellish, the insane part of it. Probably it wasn’t correct: probably the torpedoing and the weight shifting had put everything out, and the magnetic compasses were completely haywire. Probably they were heading straight out into the Atlantic instead of pointing for home. And Hell! he thought, this bloody cock-eyed way of steaming … you couldn’t tell where the ship was going to. They might be anywhere. They might be going round in circles, digging their own grave.

Bridger, the admirable unassailable Bridger, appeared at his elbow. The cup of cocoa which seemed to be part of his right arm was once more tendered. While he drank it, Bridger stood in silence, looking out at the sea. Then he said: ‘Easing off a bit, sir.’

‘Just a little, yes.’

There was another pause: then Bridger added: ‘It’s a lot drier aft, sir.’

‘Good.’ It was impossible not to respond to this effort at raising his spirits, or to be unaffected by it; and he said suddenly: ‘What do the hands think about all this?’ It was the sort of question he had never before asked any rating except the Coxswain.

Bridger considered. It was entirely novel to him, too; what the lower deck thought of things, and what they said about them to their officers, were two different aspects of truth. At length: ‘They’re a bit sick of the corned beef, sir.’

The Captain laughed, for the first time for many days. ‘Is that all?’

‘Just about, sir. But we’re having a sweepstake on when we get in.’

For some reason the Captain felt like crying at that one. He said, after a moment:

‘Has your number come up yet?’

‘No, sir. Six more days to run.’

There was much more that the Captain wanted to ask: did they really think
Marlborough
would get in: were they still confident in his judgment, after all these days and nights of blundering along: did they trust him absolutely? – questions he would never even have thought of, save in a light-headed hunger for reassurance. But suddenly Bridger said: ‘They hope you’re getting enough sleep, sir!’

Then he sucked in his breath, as though discovered in some appalling breach of discipline, took the cup from the top of the compass and quickly left the bridge. Alone once more, the Captain smiled tautly at the most moving thing that had ever been said to him, and settled back in his chair to take up the watch again. He
wasn’t
getting enough sleep, but the fact that the ship’s company realized this, and wished him well over it, was as sustaining and comforting as a strong arm round his shoulders.

On the morning of the tenth day since they were torpedoed he had a conference with the Chief on the bridge. They had seen little of each other during the preceding time: five days of having the reversing gear in continuous action had proved an unaccustomed strain, and the Chief had been kept busy below, nursing the one remaining engine through its ordeal. Now, at nine o’clock, he had come up with some fresh news.

‘Have you noticed the fo’c’sle, sir?’

‘No, Chief, I hadn’t.’ After yet another night on the bridge he felt no more and no less tired than usual: he seemed to be living in some nether hell of weariness which nothing could deepen. ‘What’s happened to it?’

‘The bows have started to bend upwards again.’ He pointed. ‘You can just about see it from here, sir. There’s a kink in the deck, like folding a bit of paper.’

‘You mean the whole thing’s being pulled off.’

‘Something like that, sir. It’s a slow process, but if it gets any worse we’ll lose the buoyancy of the forepeak, and that may bring the screws out of the water again.’

‘What’s the answer, technically?’

‘Either slow down to nothing, or turn round and push them on again.’

The Captain gestured irritably. ‘My God, it’s like fooling around with a bundle of scrap iron! “Push the bows on again” – it sounds like some blasted lid off a tin!’

‘Yes sir.’ While Chief waited for the foolish spasm to spend itself, he wondered idly what the Captain
really
thought
Marlborough
should be like, after what she had gone through. ‘Bundle of scrap iron’ wasn’t far wide of the mark: she could float, she could lollop along backwards, and that was about all. ‘Well, that’s the choice, sir,’ he said presently. ‘I don’t think we can carry on like this much longer.’

The Captain got hold of himself again: at this late hour, he wasn’t going to start dramatizing the situation. It was all this damned tiredness … ‘We could just about turn round now,’ he said slowly, looking at the sea with its long rolling swell and occasional breaking wavetops. ‘It was a lot worse than this before we turned last time.’

‘About how far have we got to go, sir?’

‘I don’t know, Chief.’ He did not make the mistake of admitting his ignorance in a totally normal voice, but he managed to imply that there was nothing to be gained either by a full discussion of it or by surrendering to its hopeless implication. ‘If we were on our proper course we should have raised Butt of Lewis a long time ago. Probably the compasses are faulty. I’m just going to keep on like this till we hit something.’

Stopping, and turning the bows into the wind again, was an even slower process than it had been five days earlier: at times it seemed that
Marlborough
, lying lumpishly off the wind and butting those fragile bows against the run of the waves,
would not
come up to her course. The Captain dared not increase speed, in order to give the rudder more leverage; and so for a full half-hour they tumbled athwart the wave troughs, gaining a point on the compass-card, sagging back again, wavering on and off the wind like a creaking weathercock no one trusts any longer. Down in the wheelhouse, Leading Seaman Tapper leant against the wheel which he had put hard a-starboard, and waited, his eyes on the compass-card. If she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t: no good worrying, no good fiddling about … All over the ship, during the past few days, that sort of thing had been growing: things either went right, or they didn’t, and that was all there was to it. Between a deep weariness and a deeper fatalism, the whole crew accepted the situation, and were carried sluggishly along with it.

At the end of half an hour a lull allowed
Marlborough
to come round on her course. She settled down again slowly, as if she did not really believe in it, but knew she had no choice. South-east, it was, and one and a half knots. It
must
bring them home. It had to.

It did not bring them home: it did not seem to bring them anywhere. They steamed all that day, and all the next, and all the next, and all the next: four more days and nights, to add to the fantastic total of that south-easterly passage. But
was
it a south-easterly passage? – for if so, they should by now have been right through Scotland, and out the other side: eleven days steaming, it added up to, and thirteen days since they had been torpedoed. It just didn’t make sense.

The weather did not help. It did not deteriorate, it did not improve: the stiff breeze held all the time, the sloppy uneven sea came running at them for hour after hour and day after day. The ship took it all with a tough determination which could not disguise a steady, progressive breaking down. The bulkhead wavered and creaked, the water ran down the splitting seam, slopping about the deck, increased in weight till it began to drag the bows down to a fatal level. The noise mounted gradually to an appalling racket: clanging, groaning, knocking, protesting – the whole hull in pain, ill-treated as an old galled horse sweating against the collar, fit only for the knacker’s yard but hardly strong enough to drag itself there. Gallant, ramshackle, on her last legs,
Marlborough
bumped and rolled southwards, at a pace which was itself a wretched trial of patience.

Above all, there was now a smell – a sweetish, sickish smell seeping up the ventilators from the fo’c’sle. It penetrated to every part of the ship, it hung in the wind, it followed them till there seemed to be nothing around them in the sea or the sky but the gross stink of the dead, those seventy-odd corpses which they carried with them as their obscene ballast. It could not be escaped anywhere in the ship. Every man on board lived with it, tried to shut it out with sleep, woke with it sweet and beastly in his nostrils. It became the unmentionable horror that attended them wherever they went.