Sea Fury (1971) (3 page)

Lycett examined his cards. “I’ll stick.”

R
ADIO OFFICER
Victor Maggs was sitting in the wireless cabin and brooding. Maggs did a good deal of brooding. He brooded on all the things in life that had combined against him from the day of his illegitimate birth to the present time; and these things were innumerable. Always, so it seemed to him, he had been struggling against a malignant fate, with every man’s hand turned against him. The chip on Maggs’s shoulder was so big that it enveloped him completely in its malevolent shadow.

Maggs was thirty years old and looked ten years older. He had an old man’s stoop and his dry, mousy hair was thinning; already there was a bald patch on the crown of his head and an increasing area of bareness at the temples. His face was narrow, the nostrils pinched in, cheeks hollow, jaw pointed; he had the kind of prominent front teeth that give to the owner a rabbity appearance; the skin had a sickly, yellow tinge, and dotted about its surface were a number of unsightly warts.

Maggs was not prepossessing and he knew it. Whenever he looked in a mirror he was reminded of the fact and it seemed only to make him more ill-disposed to a world in which he felt at so great a disadvantage.

He hated the father he had never known and he hated the mother who had given him so little love. He knew that she had never wanted him, that he had simply been a nuisance to her. Even his physical appearance had been a cause for reproach; many a time she had yelled at him, “Ugh, you ugly little bastard. Get out of my sight; you make me sick.”
Perhaps
if he had been a handsome boy she might have been more kindly disposed towards him; but was he to blame for his looks? In part he had inherited them from her; in part, no doubt, from the father who had planted the seed and had not stayed to see it germinate. Freda Maggs, a short blonde woman with a voice like a coffee-grinder, had seldom
mentioned
him. When she had, she had referred to him merely as “That bloody sailor”. Maggs doubted whether she had ever known his surname.

Well, she was dead now, and good riddance to her. She had never done anything for him; he had had to fight for himself always; and if he had not been a tough as well as an ugly little bastard he would never have got as far as he had.
Nobody
had ever helped him, that was certain; plenty had tried to hold him back. Even as a qualified wireless operator he had still found difficulty in getting a job. He supposed it was his appearance again; which was all so damned unfair, because he could do the work as well as, if not better than, any of the pretty boys. So in the end it had been the Barling-Orient, and the s.s.
Chetwynd,
with a swine of a captain and a bigger swine of a mate, cramped quarters as hot as hell and radio equipment that might well have come out of the Ark.

Victor Maggs sat with his hands resting on the arms of the wooden chair that was all the seating accommodation there was in the wireless cabin and stared blankly at the apparatus in front of him—dials, plugs, switches, headphones. He had an impulse to take a hammer and smash it all to bits.
It was so hot in the cabin; sweat beaded on his forehead and his head throbbed maddeningly. He wondered gloomily whether he had picked up some bug in Singapore and was sickening for a fever. That would be just fine with no doctor on board. There was, of course, that little foreign passenger—Menstein or some such name; he was supposed to be a doctor of some kind. If he was, he did not appear to be a very prosperous one, and he was not the sort of man Maggs would have trusted. With foreigners you never knew where you were. Jewish too, by the look of him. Still, even at that, he might be better than that half-caste steward with the Welsh name, Dai Jones. A couple of aspirins and a black draught, that was Jones’s standard remedy. God help any poor devil who broke a leg or developed acute appendicitis; you needed more than aspirins and black draughts for that sort of thing.

Maggs put both hands to his throbbing head and felt blind hatred inside him gnawing like a canker; hatred not for just one person or two but for all the rest of mankind. He felt himself to be one apart, a loner, having no friend in the whole world, nor wanting any. He hated everyone; given the chance he would have destroyed them all, every last one of them. Perhaps only some act of destruction such as that would stop the hammer beating in his head.

In their cabin Saul and Sara Menstein were conversing in low tones. It was not that they were afraid of being overheard; there was nothing in their conversation that needed to be kept secret; it was simply that they always did keep their voices low. When you had gone through the kind of experiences that the Mensteins had gone through you no longer raised your voice; you did not assert yourself in any way; if you were struck you did not strike back, for you had learnt that
retaliation
led only to worse persecution.

Mr. and Mrs. Menstein belonged to a race of people that had known much persecution; over the centuries they had endured it; under kings and emperors, tsars and dictators; in almost every land they had been strangers within the gates, the mistrusted, the envied, the abused, the feared, the spurned, the hated, the tortured, the martyred. When a scapegoat was needed they were there; when money was wanted, from them it was extorted; when a sacrifice was required theirs was the blood that stained the altar. Never fully accepted by the communities in which they lived, they kept to their own ways, their own customs, their own god; and thus they were all the more easily picked out for affliction.

Saul and Sara were born on the same day in the same street in the same town in Poland. Their families were well-to-do, and Saul went to the university in Warsaw and qualified as a doctor of medicine. It had always been understood that he and Sara would marry, and as soon as he had begun to practise the wedding was arranged. It was the summer of 1939; for Poland a time of menace. The happiness of the young couple was all too soon to give way to heart-rending misery.

On the First of September Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and on the Third of September Saul Menstein was conscripted into the hard-pressed Polish Army as a surgeon. He and his wife were not to see each other again for more than six years.

Menstein’s military career was brief. By the end of
September
the war in Poland was over and the bleeding carcase of the country had been ruthlessly carved up between
Germany
and Russia. Menstein was a prisoner and Sara was on her way to a concentration camp.

In the long years of suffering that were to follow perhaps the hardest thing of all to bear was the utter lack of
knowledge
each had of the other’s fate. Knowing what was
happening
all over Europe, it was difficult to keep alive the hope that
they would ever see each other again. It was a miracle that both survived. Starvation, maltreatment, disease—these were enough to kill thousands even of those who had escaped the ultimate horror of the gas chamber. The Mensteins, with a toughness none would have suspected from their physical appearance, endured all the hardships and were spared the final solution. When the war ended they were both alive, but both ignorant of the whereabouts or even the fate of the other. In the chaos of war’s aftermath, the ruined towns, the vast armies of the homeless, another year was to pass before they were reunited.

It was in a camp not far from Essen, a miserable collection of comfortless huts, a place of waning hopes, of shattered lives, of bitter memories. Everywhere Saul Menstein went he saw despair in men’s eyes. The war was over but to
countless
thousands it had brought only another kind of
concentration
camp.

When Menstein saw his wife he scarcely recognised her. Seven years ago she had been a lively, brilliant girl with a dark, vivid beauty, glowing eyes and a skin like silk. Now she looked twenty years older, her face thin and lined, her hair lifeless, turning grey, gaps in her teeth.

But he knew that time had dealt harshly with him also; from him, as from her, youth had fled all too quickly away, leaving the dry husk of a man. He was no longer the eager young doctor of those early, ecstatic days of married life. But love itself had not died; it had been based on stronger foundations than mere physical attraction. They needed each other now perhaps more than ever.

“We will start a new life,” they said. “Things will be better now.”

But it was not so easy to start again. Menstein did not know whether it would have been possible to return to Poland; he
did not even know that he wished to do so. It was not the Poland of the old days; it was under Communist rule now. He had had no great love for the former régime, but he detested Communism. He discussed the matter with Sara and they decided to try to get to England.

“There are many Poles in England now. We shall be among friends.”

There were, however, difficulties in the way. It was not merely enough to put in an application; there were so many displaced persons trying to get to England; only a proportion could be accepted, and that proportion was distressingly small. The years of waiting began.

Menstein understood that his name had been put on a list. He did not know how long the list was. At first he was
hopeful
that in a very short while he and Sara would be out of the camp and on their way to England. Later he became less hopeful; life in the camp began to take on the awful
appearance
of permanence. It was so many years since he had
practised
medicine that he had fears that all his knowledge, all his skill, might be slipping away.

“We are the forgotten people,” Sara said.

And indeed it seemed so. They were like flotsam that had drifted into a backwater while the great tides of progress rolled on and left them untouched, rotting. In such
circumstances
it was difficult to keep hope alive. In the early days, in the belief that they would soon go to England, they had learnt to speak English with the help of a Hungarian who had been a teacher of languages. Later these efforts were to seem a mockery.

It was this Hungarian who suggested that they might try to get to Palestine. “You are Jewish. The Jews are going to make a national home there.”

“But the British allow only a few to enter.”

“There are ways of getting in. Palestine has a sea coast.”

The idea had not occurred to him before, but now it took root in his mind. Yes, that was what they must do; that was surely the answer.

It was not easy; there were many obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was the lack of money: the people who ferried Jews from Europe to the coast of Palestine did not do so for love; they were in it strictly for the profit. Menstein was never quite sure where the money had eventually come from, but he suspected that it had originated as dollars; there were many wealthy Jews in America sympathetic to the cause of Zionism, and there were organisations doing all they could to step up the pace of illegal immigration.

There came a day when the Mensteins found themselves with two or three hundred other Jews of both sexes and all ages from the very young to the very old, herded like cattle in the holds of an ancient steamship of about eight hundred tons. It was a wretched voyage. When the ship approached the coast of Palestine they were not allowed on deck. There were, it was explained, British warships on the lookout for this kind of human smuggling, and a crowd of people lining the bulwarks would have been conspicuous.

The conditions in the holds were unspeakable; sanitary facilities were almost non-existent and the only bedding
consisted
of a few straw-filled mattresses. The provisions they had had to provide for themselves; many of the people were frail and in poor health; others suffered terribly from
seasickness
; but all were buoyed up by the prospect of a new life in the land that Jehovah had promised to their
forefathers
.

They were put ashore from the ship’s boats in the early hours of a July morning. The captain of the ship, a bearded and villainous-looking Portuguese, was nervous and anxious
to get away out of territorial waters. His nervousness
com
municated
itself to his officers and the motley crew, and they hurried their human cargo into the boats with brutal haste. The immigrants had to wade the last few yards of the way up the beach, but there were men there to help them; they were among friends.

Many of the newcomers wept unashamedly; others knelt down and kissed the sand. All of them felt that they had come home at last.

The Mensteins were soon to discover that it was not exactly a land flowing with milk and honey. They were
destitute
; their very presence in the country was illegal; and since, in those circumstances, it was impossible for Saul to practise as a doctor, they were dependent on the charity of others.

Moreover, they who had seen so much violence were appalled by the atrocities committed almost daily in the name of Zion by such terrorists as the Stern Gang and others. They desired certainly a country of their own, but not at the cost of so much bloodshed; surely the object could have been achieved by less brutal methods.

But it could not be denied that the brutality paid. The British, sick at last of striving to keep the peace between Arab and Jew, and of being shot in the back by both sides, finally decided to pull out. The new Israel became a fact.

In this young, vigorous state Saul Menstein, after so many years, was again able to practise his profession. Sara bore him a child, a son, and it seemed that at last God was being good to them. They called the child Mark and idolised him. In him lay all their hopes for the future; he would grow up in this new land among his own people, without persecution, without fear.

When the boy was six years old they moved to a village near the Jordanian border. One night a band of guerrillas
attacked the village. They threw a bomb into the room where Mark Menstein was sleeping. When Saul and Sara rushed in their adored son was an unrecognisable mass of bloody, mangled flesh.