Killing Ground Read online

  But for the bitter wind and the spray which leaped occasionally over the little boat’s stem, it was a perfect day, a far cry from the time when Ayres had joined the little Sanderling as she lay in a filthy basin at Chatham Dockyard. Nowhere to sling his hammock, and not much of a welcome from the seamen who were to be his messmates for so short a time. He knew he had been tested to the full. The lower deck’s usual brutal humour, reserved for any would-be officer; the foul language and jokes which made him blush; taunts because of his “posh accent”; contempt for an amateur—he took it all, and more.

  Until that air attack on a ten-knot convoy up the East Coast. The scream of bombs and towering columns of spray and smoke. The old merchant ships keeping formation no matter what, with the minefield on one side of them and shallow water on the other. No room for manoeuvre, and if a ship was badly hit she was ordered to beach herself and keep the main channel open. There were mastheads a-plenty along that coast to show how many had been sunk in the process.

  Ayres had been passing shells from the ready-use ammunition locker as fast as he could to the old four-inch gun while Sanderling and the mixed bag of escorts kept up a rapid fire on the diving bombers until the sky was pockmarked with shell-bursts, the filth of war.

  A bomb had fallen too close to the ship’s side and she had heeled over as the captain swung away from the explosion. Ayres had lost his footing and sprawled on the wet steel plates, his head striking a stanchion so hard that he almost lost consciousness.

  A burly seaman, one of his worse tormentors on the messdeck, had leaped down to pull him from danger, and had shouted above the clatter of Oerlikons and the ceaseless beat of pompoms, “All right, Dick lad? One ’and fer th’ King an’ one fer yerself—just you remember that!” He had added awkwardly, “See me at tot-time. That’ll take your fuckin’ ’eadache away!”

  But that one act of kindness had changed everything for Ayres.

  He caught his breath as he gripped the top of the canopy with both hands. There she was, lying at a buoy alongside her twin, her fresh dazzle-paint gleaming in the arctic sunshine so that she seemed to glow. She was exactly what Ayres had expected, had hoped for while he had studied the mysteries of gunnery and navigation, signals and square-bashing, all in a space of time which had gone by in a flash.

  Gladiator, and he knew she was the nearest one by the pendant number H-38 painted on below her forecastle, was every inch a destroyer, of the type built between the wars when the Royal Navy was paramount throughout the world, and the minds of planners still saw its role protecting the line of battle as in all other wars.

  Dunkirk, Norway, Crete and the bloody campaigns in North Africa had changed all that.

  “Our ship’s over there, sir.”

  “Yes.” It came out too sharply. “Thank you.” But he did not want to share this meeting with anyone. He knew Gladiator’s statistics as well as his own. Three hundred and twenty-three feet long; built at Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow in 1936. Four four-point-seven guns; torpedo tubes; she even had radar in a sort of giant jam-pot above her business-like, open bridge. Two funnels gave her a rakish, dashing appearance—Ayres had got to know her silhouette at school, when Gladiator had been a part of the crack First Mediterranean Flotilla.

  Ayres tried to look calm as the boat tore towards the accommodation ladder, where two sailors were already watching their rapid approach. Closer to it was possible to see the many dents and scars along her exposed side. What a story they could tell—coming alongside some stricken ship in convoy, possibly in pitch darkness, or taking shell splinters after an encounter with an enemy blockade-runner.

  “Hook on, Nobby!” The boat churned to full astern and then idled to rest against the ladder despite the strong pull of the tide.

  Men appeared to pick up Ayres’s bags. Weathered, tired faces, people whom he would know, really know, given half a chance.

  The coxswain grimaced. “’Ere comes Jimmy-th’-One, Nobby—watch out for flak!”

  Ayres ran up the ladder and threw up a smart salute aft where a bright new ensign stood out stiffly from its staff between the ranks of depth-charges. A tall, unsmiling officer, his hands grasped behind his back, leaned over the guardrail and called, “Wait for the mail-bag, Cox’n!”

  The big man peered up at him from the pitching motor boat. “Permission to draw ma tot, sir?”

  “Later.” He turned to face Ayres like someone who had just dispensed with one pest and was about to deal with another.

  “Ayres, right?”

  “Come aboard to join, sir.”

  Ayres felt the man run his eyes over him from cap to shoes. An impassive, strong face, dominated by a large beaked nose.

  “You’re adrift.”

  “Adrift, sir?”

  “The Commanding Officer will want to see you. Right away.”

  “The Commanding Officer, sir?” He had only spoken to the little Sanderling’s captain once and that had probably been an accident.

  The big nose trained round towards him like a gun. “Do you always repeat everything said to you?” He glared at some seamen who were dragging a new coil of mooring wire across the quarterdeck and shouted, “Watch that paintwork, you careless idiots!” He said in a controlled voice, “My name is Marrack. I’m the first lieutenant around here.” Surprisingly he held out his hand and Ayres was further taken back by the two wavy stripes on his sleeve. A “temporary gentleman,” like himself.

  Ayres smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

  “And don’t call me sir, except in the line of duty.” He watched the men with the mooring wire and added, “Number One will suffice.” He did not smile and Ayres guessed that, like the use of words, the smiles were strictly rationed. A strange man—what had Marrack done before the Navy, he wondered? In his late twenties at a guess, but he acted with the authority and experience of one much older.

  As an afterthought Marrack said, “You will share a cabin with our other sub. At the moment anyway. I shall give you a list of duties, watch-keeping and the like, within the hour. But now go and see the Old Man.” His tone sharpened as Ayres made to hurry off. “Not that way! His quarters are down aft, in harbour, that is.” He glanced up at the box-like bridge. “At sea he’s always there.”

  Then, without another glance, Marrack turned and strode along the iron deck towards the forecastle, pausing merely to glance up at the smoking galley funnel as if to sniff out the ingredients of the meal being served.

  “This way, Mr Ayres.” A wiry petty officer steward was watching him from the door of the quartermaster’s lobby beneath X-Gun. “We was expectin’ you yesterday.”

  Ayres gave a tired grin. “So I hear.” He saw that his bags had been taken from the deck. He stepped over a high coaming and entered the white-painted lobby with its stand of Lee-Enfield rifles and a leading seaman, who was obviously the chief quartermaster, reading a magazine which was spread over the deck log. He did not even glance up as Ayres followed the petty officer steward down a steep ladder.

  The new smells rose to greet him. Fresh paint, oil, people.

  He removed his raincoat and the steward took it and folded it expertly over his arm while running his eye critically over his new charge.

  He said, “I’m Vallance, sir. I’m in charge down aft, an’ the Old Man is at the top of the list so to speak.” He saw Ayres smile. “Sir?”

  But Ayres shook his head, “Just a memory, um, Vallance.” He was still thinking of Vallance’s description. Down aft. In Sanderling they had always referred to the officers as “the pigs down aft.”

  He paused and stared at the closed door with the small brass plate. Captain. Well, now he was one of the pigs!

  Vallance watched his uncertainty. Ayres seemed like a nice young chap, as far as you could tell. He didn’t even need a shave after two days on a bloody train. God, they’d be coming aboard in their prams if the war lasted much longer.

  The bright new wavy stripe, the schoolboy haircut; Ayres’s youth made Vallance suddenly de
pressed.

  “A word, sir.” He watched, looking for any hint of arrogance. There was none. Encouraged by Ayres’s obvious innocence, he added, “Just be natural with the Old Man, sir. He don’t like flannel, not from nobody, not even Captain (D).”

  Ayres found himself nodding. Nothing was happening as they had told him it would. A chief petty officer who had at first not saluted him and then confided in him about his son lost at sea; a boat’s coxswain who had asked him point-blank about his experience—even the first lieutenant was not like those steely eyed men in his magazine or in films about the war. And now Vallance was offering advice … or was he testing him to see if he was too weak to snap back at him?

  But instinct made Ayres anxious, and he had to ask, “What’s he like?”

  Vallance relaxed. A nice lad, not somebody to upset his wardroom.

  “He’s had a hard time, sir.” He looked above and around him. “We’ve done some things between us—he’s carried all of it. You can only handle so much … just be yerself, if you’ll pardon the liberty.” He gave a slow grin. “I’ll save a nice bit of lunch for you.”

  He watched Ayres’s knuckles hesitate before rapping down on the door.

  “Enter!”

  Ayres turned to thank the steward but the passageway was quite empty. He swallowed hard and thrust open the door.

  Unlike most wartime-built destroyers, Gladiator’s captain’s quarters were almost spacious. They were situated right aft beneath the quarterdeck and divided into separate sleeping and day cabins. Even here there was a lingering tang of fresh paint, but the comfortable-looking armchairs and carpet still showed the wear and tear of too many Atlantic convoys when these same quarters had been used to accommodate survivors, wounded or otherwise, when the small sickbay could no longer cope.

  Beyond the bulkhead were the other officers’ cabins, and of course, the wardroom. It was the one place they all met, to eat, to hold an occasional party, to wait to go on watch or for the hateful clang of alarm bells. Moving forward further still were the engine and boiler rooms, the ship’s life-blood, which filled almost a third of the hull’s capacity. Beyond them was the two-decked forecastle where the ship’s company were crammed into their various messes, separated only by rate and department.

  Seated at the desk in his day cabin, Gladiator’s commanding officer paused in writing a letter to look at the small old-fashioned coal fire which was kept burning in harbour. It made the place look lived in, or as the PO steward, Percy Vallance, would have it, “more like ’ome.”

  Lieutenant-Commander David Howard was twenty-seven years old, and, like his father and grandfather, had entered the Royal Navy as a young cadet. Nobody had ever discussed it; it had been the thing to do, taken for granted.

  Apart from various training courses in larger warships, he had spent most of his service in destroyers and could visualise nothing else. At the outbreak of war he had hastily taken command of an old V & W class destroyer from the Kaiser’s war, and within no time had been involved in the first shattering defeat in France, and the bitterness of Dunkirk.

  Now it seemed a million years ago, the war as different from those early days as Agincourt. Immediately after Dunkirk he was ordered to take his elderly V & W, Winsby, into the Battle of the Atlantic. He had been in the same fight ever since, and in command of Gladiator for eighteen months. That, too, felt like years.

  He stood up suddenly, light-footed as a cat, and walked to one of the few pictures which hung in the day cabin: the place he could only dream about when he was at sea. His sea cabin on the bridge was little more than a steel cupboard with a narrow bunk and a telephone. When you hit the damp blankets, fully dressed if you had any sense left, you did not sleep; you just died. The place of escape, beyond the anxious eyes on the bridge; away from the heaving grey sea, the pathetic lines of rusty freighters and tankers following like sheep. He smiled bitterly. To the slaughter.

  He reached out and straightened the picture of his first command. Relics from the Great War about which his father rarely spoke, but the V and Ws were excellent sea-boats, and had a sort of jaunty confidence which more than made up for their outdated machinery and overcrowded quarters. Without them, this war might have been lost before it had really begun in earnest. Winsby had been a happy ship, although it was becoming harder to remember all the faces, most of whom had been regulars like himself.

  He turned his head to glance through one of the polished scuttles towards the land, and considered how this ship rated now. Every time she entered harbour, for whatever reason, he lost more and more of his skilled hands. Officers too, for promotion or advanced courses to try and keep pace with the war’s mounting ferocity. It took time to train new ones; and when you did they were taken too.

  All ships were like that now. Bakers and postmen, clerks and errand-boys. Only half of the whole ship’s company of one hundred and forty-five souls were old enough to draw their tot. It made you sweat when you found time to think about it.

  He half-listened to the muted beat of a generator deep in the engine-room and pictured the engineer officer, Lieutenant (E) Evan Price, who had been in this ship since before the outbreak of war. What would happen if they took him? The ship might fall apart. He smiled and groped for his pipe but it was still in the jacket slung carelessly on the back of a chair.

  His was a young face, which might turn any woman’s head; his dark unruly hair needed cutting badly, something else which Captain (D) would most certainly mention when next they met.

  He stared hard at the glass scuttle, which was streaked with salt like frost, but saw only his reflection. Brown eyes, lines at the corners of his mouth, the haunted look which had not left his face since that last convoy from Newfoundland, and which this brief overhaul, at Leith and here, had failed to disperse.

  Some captains would have gone straight ashore after a convoy like that. To hide in some hotel, to get drunk, to seek the company of some bored tart; anything. But here, in this littleused cabin, was his escape. Hot baths whenever he chose; eating alone; listening to music; pacing the cabin to go over it all again as if to punish himself in some way.

  Forty ships had sailed from St John’s on that terrible convoy. They had been attacked by a complete U-Boat pack when they had barely covered a third of the passage. When they had passed the Liverpool Bar there had been only thirteen left. He had seen it all before, but somehow that convoy had affected him more than anything. A big tanker, its cargo of high-octane fuel so precious to this embattled country, had burned for three days, and her company with it. Another ship, loaded to the seams with armoured cars and tanks, had gone down in thirty seconds, her back broken by two torpedoes. It went on and on, as if there was no mercy left.

  He walked back to the desk and patted his jacket for his pipe.

  Muffled by the bulkhead the tannoy squawked, “D’you hear there! Hands to dinner!” The quartermaster would add beneath his breath, “Officers to lunch!”

  He sat down again and began to fill his pipe, his eyes on the photograph of his father which he had given him when their world had fallen apart. Dressed in naval uniform, a young face with the same twinkle in his eyes. He had not wanted his son to have a recent picture. This had been taken before the famous Zeebrugge raid in 1918, when unknown to him the war had only seven months left to run its bloody course. He had lost an arm and an eye, and had been rejected by the service he had loved more than life itself. He still managed to joke about it. “What about Nelson? He managed!” In angrier moments he had said, “Anyway, I couldn’t do much worse than the blockheads who’re running things now!”

  Howard held a match to his pipe and saw the smoke drifting up into the vents. His hand was quite steady, almost stiff, as if he was consciously holding it so, like his muscles when the alarms sounded; how would it be the next time?

  He sighed. He had promised to join Spike Colvin, his fellow captain in their sister-ship Ganymede alongside, for a few drinks before the next orders arrived. Howard looked
at his watch. They would soon know. Convoy escort. But surely not the Atlantic again, not yet … He stood up violently, angry with himself for admitting the weakness to himself.

  He heard himself call, “Enter!” and saw the door open to reveal an unfamiliar sub-lieutenant standing beyond the coaming.

  “Come in—it’s Ayres, isn’t it?” He held out his hand. “Might have had to sail without you.”

  Ayres shifted his new cap from one fist to the other. “I went to Leith, you see—”

  Howard pointed to a comfortable chair. “Take a pew, Sub. Drink?”

  Ayres sat down, completely baffled by this unusual welcome. Howard was not a bit what he had anticipated. He seemed very relaxed, and far more youthful than expected.

  “Perhaps a gin, sir. I’m not much of—”

  Howard opened the cupboard and poured two glasses of gin. The new subbie was no drinker then. The Atlantic would change that.

  “I’ve put you down to share your watches with the navigator. He’s RNR, a good officer, so I expect I shall be losing him too very soon. Number One will fix you up with your action and defence stations, et cetera—have you met him yet?”

  Ayres recalled the big nose, the faint air of disapproval. The first lieutenant behaved more like a regular, straight-laced officer than the captain, who, Ayres observed, was wearing an old jumper over his shirt, and a pair of grey flannel trousers. Ayres looked at the jacket on the nearby chair, the tarnished gold two-and-a-half stripes. His mind fastened on the small blue and white ribbon on the jacket’s breast. The DSC. In destroyers you didn’t get that for nothing.

  “You’ve joined the ship during a bit of upheaval, Sub.” Howard leaned back in his chair and allowed the pipesmoke to curl above him. He saw Ayres hold back a choking cough as he swallowed some of the gin, and tried to contain his disappointment. His other sub-lieutenant had joined the ship just before the refit, transferred from Light Coastal Forces after his motor gunboat had been shelled and sunk off the Hook of Holland. A withdrawn, tense young man he seemed to regard the transfer as some kind of stigma. Even the gunnery officer, an RNVR lieutenant, had only been in Gladiator for four months, and the new midshipman, a youth with a permanent round-eyed look of wonderment, had arrived when they had been in Leith. He continued, “A third of the company are pretty new—a lot of them came on board just before the last convoy.” His voice seemed to linger over the word. Burning ships, men being swept past and swallowed by the racing screws, their cries lost in the thunder of depth-charges. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Close the ranks. The convoy commodore’s signals never ceased. Howard wondered what that fine old man had been thinking when his own ship had been torpedoed and left astern to die.