Mother’s Boy, page 24
Charles hoped against hope that time would somehow have cured his seasickness or that the Mediterranean would prove kinder than the Atlantic had, but a keyed-up dread had seized him the moment his transfer papers came and was made worse by his panicky claustrophobia on returning, after two years of fresh air and open skies, to a world of clanging metal, diesel fumes and sweating paintwork. And though the sea was indeed a little calmer at first, they were soon back in the all-too-familiar plunge and clank, plunge and clank pattern, and he was back at the coding desk with a gash bucket between his thighs.
Several of the faces in the signalling mess were unchanged and he was welcomed back with the usual mix of mockery and affection. He soon learned, however, that his replacement, by all accounts an outstanding coder and linguist, had died of wounds during the attack that had recently sent them limping back to Gibraltar. The sense of filling a recently dead man’s shoes, and indeed his bunk, was horrible.
The days that followed their departure were the hardest Charles had known, so frightening, so relentless that, despite the rigid keeping of their allotted watches, he lost all sense of night and day or even of how many days had passed. They were a small part of a great convoy escorting essential food and fuel supplies to Malta, which had effectively been under Italian siege for months. If Malta could be brought to surrender, the Axis powers would be that much closer to seizing control of the Mediterranean, so it felt as though the combined might of German and Italian forces had gathered to stop any relief getting through.
The noise during attacks was beyond belief, the din of the Starburst’s own guns seemingly magnified by the ship’s steel plates and made more alarming still by the yelling and sometimes screaming of men and the stamping of boots. Then there was the terrifying shrieking of diving aircraft and the sickening vibration of detonations in the water or direct hits on boats nearby. And all of this came to Charles in the ferociously hot, windowless little Signals office where the only way of knowing what was happening was from the signals coming in or going out or from bulletins stammered out by swearing visitors on errands from the bridge. All of this while feeling constantly sick and struggling to fix the fraying thread of his concentration on his coding and decoding.
He knew they could all die at any moment. He had sat through long conversations with Cushty and the others about best and worst ways to go. Having seen first-hand the maiming injuries of survivors, he sometimes thought he’d like to die swiftly if he must, to be so directly in the path of a landing shell or line of strafing fire as to have mere seconds or half-seconds in which to register what was happening. The unlucky were scalded alive or roasted in flaming fuel. Drowning alone in the ocean scared him, especially drowning in an effort to avoid burning oil on the surface – he had given this all too much thought – but he had agreed with Cushty that the worst would be to be trapped on a sinking ship, unable to free yourself for whatever reason as the water level rose around you and the structure groaned as it began to plunge. This, they had decided, was the very worst fate, as it combined drowning with the horrible powerlessness of being buried alive.
He came off duty in what felt like the dead of night because he longed for sleep but was actually just before dawn. Heading to empty his bucket over the side, he found an inferno on deck. A great chunk of the boat had been blasted by a shell and men were still fighting the fire in the jagged crater left behind. Miraculously neither the fuel tanks nor Cushty’s magazine had been hit, but the air was acrid with smoke from whatever had been burned. Simultaneously around sixty men had been hauled on board from another ship in the convoy that had been less lucky. Those that could walk were being led to the messes or found spots where they could sling hammocks. The numerous wounded were being tended by the exhausted MO and his short-tempered number two.
Charles offered to help.
‘Can this one have your bunk?’ the number two asked. ‘Sick bay’s overflowing now.’
‘Of course.’
‘Good man,’ said the MO. ‘Cotter? Help Causley with the stretcher, would you?’
The figure on the stretcher looked little more than a boy, he was so slight, though it was hard to tell as his face was so heavily bandaged, as were both his hands. Burns, presumably. He had the unmistakable porky smell of a recent burns victim.
‘He’s had morphine,’ the MO said. ‘So he’ll sleep like a baby. At least I hope he will, for his sake, poor kid.’
Charles had never carried a stretcher before but Cotter was about his height, so keeping the patient level wasn’t too great a challenge.
‘What do we do when we get to a ladder?’ he asked Cotter.
‘Fireman’s lift, I suppose,’ Cotter said.
Charles had no idea how to give a fireman’s lift to someone conscious, much less to someone dead to the world, and knew, too, that to clamber down a ladder with the boy over his shoulder would have been beyond him. But his messmates were all prepared, along with several rescued marines draped in borrowed towels and blankets, and the bandaged boy was neatly slid from the stretcher on to a kindly bed of outstretched hands and borne, with only one heavily drugged moan, to Charles’s bunk.
In his shattered, sleep-deprived state, Charles thought the graceful motion of the boy through the dimly lit cabin, and the tenderness with which the men laid him on the mattress and tucked a blanket over him, one of the loveliest things he had ever seen.
Cotter and he helped carry four more wounded men to borrowed bunks, then joined the others at the Signals mess table for an impromptu feast of bread and butter, tinned ham and the beefy condensed milk tea he was coming to depend on to keep him alert, despite his jittery stomach.
Even with the tea, however, and for all the chat around him, he fell fast asleep where he sat. When he came round, his neck stiff and his face crumpled from being pressed into one of the mess’s leather cushions someone must have given him for a pillow, it was to find he was being summoned back on watch, just as another air onslaught was getting underway. To judge from the signals, the same enemy submarine suspected of torpedoing their neighbours earlier was now being fought off with depth charges.
It was only as they finally limped into Valletta harbour, what remained of the convoy greeted by cheering crowds, wildly rung bells and the hooting of tugs, that the sorry state of the Starburst was revealed. As well as the blast Charles had seen already, there was a gash on the other side, which had been taking in water as fast as it could be pumped out. The prospect of shore leave was welcome, but the excitement was shot through with the threat that all, or many of them, might be assigned to other ships if the repairs could not be made swiftly. Supplies to the island had been so choked off by the enemy that no one seemed entirely sure of the capacity of its dockyard to mend so many ships in need. Still, they had got off more lightly than one of the supply ships, which had to be rescued by tugs and was already low in the water as crews raced to unload her cargo.
The washroom was steamy bedlam with so many men keen to wash and shave in readiness for Valletta’s welcoming nightlife. Relief at a safe arrival lent a manic edge to the usual horseplay in there. Charles found the washroom made him shy at the best of times and he couldn’t face all the joking and buffeting when he was so sleep-deprived and feeling stripped of protective layers even without peeling off his stinking uniform, so he retreated back to the Signals mess to let the eager get ahead.
When he came down the ladder and found the MO in there, sitting on the edge of his bunk, he realised that since the drama of getting the boy into bed, he had given no further thought to him. The MO was checking the lad’s wrist then neck for a pulse before glancing at his watch. He didn’t look round but sensed he had an audience. Charles stood quietly to one side as the MO noted the lad’s rank and serial number in his little book and drew the blanket up over his face.
‘Probably for the best,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have been much of a life after those burns. We’ll take him ashore to the mortuary with the others once you’re all gone. Are you all right, Causley? You look done in.’
‘Just tired, sir.’
‘Get a shave and shower. Fresh uniform and a good night’s sleep will sort you out.’
‘Yes, sir.’
It felt all wrong that the death had happened among them so quietly and quite unnoticed. Charles didn’t know the boy’s name and had never even seen his face but felt compelled to pull up a chair and sit beside him, quite as though keeping watch at a sick bed. The ship lurched abruptly, tugging at her anchor perhaps, and the boy’s left arm, the one the MO had briefly checked for a pulse, fell out from under the blanket, the bandaged hand slapping quite hard against the floor. He still wore a wristwatch, a cheap-looking one, a boy’s birthday present. The dial was misted over from his time in the water but, now that Charles could see it, he realised it hadn’t stopped ticking. Perhaps it would continue to keep obedient time long after its owner had been slid into the mortuary dark. He realised he had no idea what happened to the possessions of dead sailors and soldiers. Perhaps some painfully slow bureaucracy saw to it they were removed from the body and posted home to loved ones still numb weeks after receiving the dreaded telegram? He imagined bodies were buried on the nearest dry land. Malta, to which the boy almost certainly had no ties, would receive him into some sun-bleached military burial ground his family might never visit, just as Mother would almost certainly never travel to Canada to lay flowers on Uncle Stanley’s grave.
Hearing loud voices approach, he reached down to lift the boy’s arm by the wrist and tuck it back beneath the blanket. To his shock, the flesh was still warm and yielding, cooling but warm.
Two messmates clambered down in their towels, clutching washbags and smelling of hair oil, faces pinked back to innocence from shaving.
‘He didn’t make it,’ Charles told them, watching how his words killed their laughter. ‘MO was just here.’
The men swore softly. Like Charles, neither had known the boy. Perhaps for that reason, his face blanked by bandages, he stood in for all their friends who had died or gone missing, or for their brilliant coder friend, who had also died of wounds so very recently in that very bunk. Then they set about dressing, and Charles, about undressing, as there was nothing to be done and there would be a gharry to catch to shore for a respite from Hell.
He caught what must have been one of the last boats taking men ashore, even as repair crews were getting busy fixing what they could of the ship until she could be towed to a dry dock. There was nobody he knew on the launch. Most were officers and he was content to be ignored. He felt afresh, as he had on boarding, that his time ashore in Gibraltar had estranged him to the crew. He had no arrangements to meet anyone in this place or that, though it was an article of navy lore that Strait Street was where one went, or ended up, at least. They had twenty-four hours’ shore leave although it was hard to believe the ship could be made seaworthy again in that time.
The officers were going to a party at the Chancellor’s lodge of the Anglican pro-cathedral, whose dramatic shore-side tower they pointed out to each other. The Chancellor, who had a spectacular residence built into the church’s seaward side, was apparently a cousin of the skipper’s mother. Hearing the officers chat lightly, discreetly adjusting their uniforms as they spoke of family, architecture, the history of the beleaguered island and of the wiliness of the Chancellor in laying down plentiful stocks of sherry, claret and whisky before hostilities broke out, it was hard to believe these were men who had just emerged from prolonged and bloody battle. How did public schools instil this insouciance? In classrooms or on playing fields? And was it real for any of them, or was the apparent calm a game, obliging each to maintain a poker face for the morale of all?
They had no sooner arrived on shore and clambered – you first, sir – up a slippery flight of stone steps than an air-raid siren sounded.
‘Bloody hell,’ said the skipper. ‘Follow me, men.’
He somehow knew to lead them to what seemed to be a wine cellar, deep beneath an old honey-coloured house. Where barrels and bottles would once have been stacked, perhaps a hundred people were already huddling – men, women, ragged children – the space lit by just two cobwebbed light fittings. Far more than had the Spanish of Gibraltar, they all looked hungry, dusty and exhausted, the young aged before their time, the old, impossibly weary. And yet their faces lit up on seeing the officers’ brilliantly white uniforms, presumably because they represented the arrival of longed-for fuel and food. To Charles’s astonishment, several of them, led by the older men, burst into applause until bombs began to fall, showering them all with ancient dust and leaving the only sounds in the shelter the fervent rosary-telling of the women and the outraged weeping of a startled toddler.
Then the all clear sounded. The officers went off to their lunch party at the Chancellor’s Lodge, dusting off one another’s shoulders, and the Maltese to check on their shops and houses. Charles, dazed, was left to wander.
The last thing he wanted was the bars of Strait Street and a heaving mass of drunken servicemen. What he really craved was to drink a pot of tea at Mother’s kitchen table with a plate of her bread and butter, then to climb between clean white sheets and lose himself in sleep. He might find an approximation of that – without the bread and butter – in a small hotel or rooming house later. He had done so on shore leaves before, in Londonderry and Freetown, simply for the luxury of a quiet, louse-free bed in a silent room after days of interrupted sleep at sea. For now, he wandered away from the harbour and up the steep hill through Valletta, taking the place in and relishing being back on land.
Conditioned by long exposure to Gibraltar, he had pictured Valletta as being little bigger, so was taken aback to find it a proper city, however blasted by months of air raids. It was handsome and dramatic, with tall houses and a rigid grid system imposed on the sharp rises and ravines of the limestone. As in Gibraltar, newer houses had been built on older ones, but here they often seemed to have truly ancient foundations. Just up the road from where they had been sheltering, he saw another air-raid shelter emptying. Maltese were emerging from what looked like a catacomb – a tunnel deep into solid rock in the rough base of what, at a higher street level, became a small palazzo. At every turn there were unexpected changes of level, often glimpses of bright blue water at the end of a street, or unnerving craters where a bombed house had tumbled in on itself and down into a cavern beneath that.
Charles had heard the officers say that water was scarce on the island and, sure enough, trees and gardens seemed rare; there were only the pots of herbs and scarlet geraniums on windowsills and doorsteps he knew from Gibraltar. Charles had only seen photographs of the blitz damage in Plymouth, Bristol and London in out-of-date papers from home. Seeing it at first hand, from street level, terrible little mountains of rubble with, here and there, an ironing board, bedstead or rag of bright curtain to show people had lived, and probably died there, was far more shocking. And yet the urge for order, or the urge to fight back against ugly chaos, was clearly deeply ingrained, for he saw an old woman carefully tending her plants with dirty dishwater and there were already teams of men and older boys at work with shovels and barrows, even household brooms, clearing streets blocked with rubble from the latest raid.
Charles wandered as far as a grand square and the cathedral, admired the remains of ramparts and a terrific old wall, then instinctively turned back into the warren of streets in the old part of town. If Valletta had an architectural signature, he perceived it was big, glazed-in balconies, often several to a building, for all the world like glass-fronted wardrobes jutting out from the stone. Presumably they gave sheltered sun in winter and somewhere to catch a badly needed breeze in high summer. Most of their glass was broken now, of course, and most had their internal shutters closed against further damage. Some had been blasted open and revealed perilously balanced furniture or a glimpse of bedroom or grandly marbled saloon.
As he walked, Charles composed a card to Mother in his head. Knowing how dust was her enemy, how to dust each room anticlockwise so as to miss nothing was an article of faith in her, he imagined how all her Vallettan sisters must be suffering in their daily effort to keep the dust of conflict at bay. I passed a woman who might have been the older Miss Jackson, but with a farm labourer’s tan and a crucifix, he wrote in his head, dusting the few lemons and apples outside her shop one by one, as though they weren’t fruit but pieces of family silver.
Deeply weary, he took refuge in a church that seemed tiny from the street but became cavernous within. He sat and stared at the gloomy paintings, the guttering candles and cheap grandeur in which the statues had been dressed, and felt extremely Cornish and far from home.
He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew was being nudged by a sacristan, who tapped at her watch, shook her bunch of keys, and glanced at the door, which she wanted to lock.
‘Oh. I’m so sorry,’ he told her, getting up and rediscovering solid ground beneath him.
‘English,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he told her.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now go fight, Bulldog!’ and she let out a cackling laugh as she ushered him back on to the street and bolted the door behind him.
The light had changed and was casting long shadows. Charles glanced at his watch and saw it was now early evening. He climbed the steep little lane from the church to regain a grander street. Turning on to this, he saw a cluster of sailors ahead, including one he thought he recognised.
The explosion seemed less deafening than the ones he had been experiencing at sea. It came from above him and slightly behind him. He saw pieces of stone and plasterwork landing in the road all around him then, in quick succession, heard Cushty shout his name from far off and was hurled savagely to the ground and pinned by a great weight, his arms flung out, his face ground into the dusty stone. It was only then he realised the blast had deafened him, because he saw pieces of masonry and two of the big window structures crashing to the ground in a soundless explosion of wood, dust and glass. There was a sharp pain in the forearm flung out in front of him and he saw a shard of glass had gone into it. Trying to move his other hand to pick the glass out, he realised it was pinned down by a person, not masonry, that someone was flattened over his back, one of their arms stretched out in an attempt to shield his. He could feel their breath hot against his ear, their heavy legs hard against his. Were it not for the pain in his arm, it would have been oddly comforting.
