Westbound, Warbound Read online

  Westbound, Warbound

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Anna Homebound…

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Postscript

  Copyright

  Westbound, Warbound

  Alexander Fullerton

  1

  The SS PollyAnna, 6,200 gross registered tons and known to her crew more familiarly as the Anna, was five days out of Cape Town, bound for Montevideo – best part of 1,500 miles out from the Cape, nearest land Tristan da Cunha – when in the morning watch a lookout spotted a ship’s boat appearing and disappearing on the long Atlantic swells a few cables’ lengths on the bow to starboard. Dave Halloran, first mate, had this watch, the 0400 to 0800, and after studying the object with binoculars he whistled down the tube to the Old Man, who within seconds came stumping up. Meanwhile, Third Mate Andy Holt, who was due to take over from Halloran at eight and had been in the saloon wolfing down ham and eggs – wolfing because it was seven minutes to the hour and Halloran wasn’t a man to be kept waiting for his relief, his breakfast – heard from the second wireless officer who’d just blown in that something was going on ‘up top’, gulped the last of his coffee and shot up there too.

  Sun well up, PollyAnna under helm, turning her stern out of that already warming orange glow. Rolling harder as she swung beam-on to the blue-black swell. Tending to roll briskly in any case, the 9,000 tons of coal she’d loaded in Lourenço Marques having lowered her centre of gravity to the extent that she was decidedly ‘stiff’, her holds being nowhere near full, in terms of space. Halloran had sent down for a boat’s crew to muster on the starboard side and for the foremost of the two boats that side, the one with the motor, to be turned out ready for lowering. Also for extra lookouts to be sent up. There was after all a war on – and although they hadn’t seen anything of it yet in this ship, they were all well aware that German surface raiders were operating here in the South Atlantic. The Old Man had been briefed on this not only in communications from home over the past weeks, but more recently and specifically by the Sea Transport Officer in Cape Town, where they’d called for bunkers and fresh water, and during the past few days the Marconi boys had picked up several distress calls as well as other less easily comprehensible transmissions: could have been from raiders conversing with their support vessels; could have been Royal Navy ships hunting them.

  Would hardly have been Germans, anyway. If they’d any gumption at all they’d be keeping their mouths shut. Receiving orders and intelligence, no doubt, from Berlin or wherever, but staying off the air themselves. While the Anna’s lookouts would be scanning the horizon primarily for funnel smoke.

  Any funnel smoke. At sight of it, turn stern-on and run, had been the Capetonian advice. No especial kudos in braving it out, likely as not being caught and sunk – really none at all. As to one’s own smoke – unavoidable to some extent in a coal-burning ship – the engineers had been told that if she showed more than a wisp at her funnel-top between dawn and dusk they’d be bloody keel-hauled.

  The ship’s boat, though. Upper strakes on its near side had been splintered and holed, most likely by machine-gun fire, and its stern – counter, rudder-post and rudder – was mostly gone too. Half-swamped, rolling sluggishly on the rise and fall of blue-black ocean, kept afloat only by unpunctured flotation tanks, Andy guessed. He’d seen all that within seconds of focusing the old telescope which Don Fisher, second mate, kept in a drawer of the chart table; now it was the boat’s contents one gawped at – mentally gagged at. The bodies weren’t all intact, not by any means. Explosive shells – pom-poms, Bofors, Oerlikons; whatever raiders used on helpless men in boats – had done that to them. Target practice was what sprang to mind. What else? Sport? What other purpose in slaughtering unarmed, defenceless seafarers whose only endeavour by that time could have been to stay alive? The main bulk of the carnage seemed to be in one cohesive waterlogged heap, while looser elements on the fringes, washing heavily to and fro but as of now more or less tethered as well as enclosed by the splintered timber, would as like as not be washed clear out before much longer. Some, and definitely a whole lot of blood, would probably have been washed out already.

  No sign of sharks. You’d have thought there would have been. And they were close enough not to need the telescope now. Snapping it shut, with his eyes still on that horror, Andy heard his name spoken, Halloran suggesting to his captain, ‘Send Holt, sir?’ Holt jerking round and meeting his captain’s brief glance. Captain shortish, stocky, approaching sixty years of age, not given to idle chatter or unnecessarily speaking his thoughts aloud; having considered the first mate’s suggestion he nodded – might have gone so far as to grunt – reaching a short, thick arm to the binnacle for support against a heavier roll. Another nod, then – ‘See if there’s life in any of ’em, Holt. And what ship.’

  He’d rung down to stop engines by this time, and had port rudder on to turn her starboard side to the boat, forty to sixty yards clear. Grunting to the man at the wheel – Parlance, Able Seaman, red hair and a squint – ‘Midships the helm.’ Halloran had his glasses on the boat again where it slumped with the seas washing through and over it: not his glasses, but the pair that was kept up here for use by the officer of the watch. The Old Man had his own, but that was as far as it went, except for the battered old telescope for which Fisher had paid a few shillings in some pawn shop on Merseyside. The SS PollyAnna’s (and several other ocean-going tramp steamers’) owners, Messrs Dundas Gore of Glasgow – known in the trade, because of the name Gore, as the Blood Line – were careful men, not addicted to lavish expenditure, especially on gear of a kind that was notoriously liable to disappear.

  Andy was on his way down now, hearing Halloran call, ‘You too, Janner!’ Janner was one of the ship’s two cadets – the taller, dusky one who didn’t drink, not even when ashore with his fellow cadet, a hairy little ape by name of Gorst. They’d both come from the training ship Worcester, on the Thames at Greenhithe – which, as it happened, had been Andy’s father’s alma mater too, shortly before the ’14–‘18 war. Despite that personal link to the Worcester, the old man had sent Andy to do his cadet’s time in Conway, on the Mersey, from 1932 (when he’d been fourteen) to ’34, then on to Blood Line ships, circling the globe one and a half times as a cadet before sitting for his second mate’s certificate and getting it at the age of twenty, which was the earliest they’d let you sit for that first one. He was still twenty now, would be twenty-one in three weeks’ time, but had been around, knew his onions – most of them anyhow – only until now had never been given any such job as sorting through a mess of dismembered corpses.

  Please God, let them all be corpses; not bodies still in the process of becoming such. Wouldn’t any live man among that lot be raving mad by now?

  War. One’s first sight of it. Of its actual detritus – and at close quarters. Just get a grip, boy.

  ‘All right, Bosun.’

  Batt Collins was the boatswain. Jockey-like even to the detail of bow legs, and as tough as weathered oak, an ugly little sod with a sheath-knife and a marlin-spike on his belt. Thoroughly decent fellow too. The motorboat was already turned out but held by webbing gripes (or ‘bowsings’) against the padded griping-spar rigged horizontally between the davits, and a five-man crew standing ready, now at a curt order from the bosun swarming up into it: ABs Martin, Crown, Timms and Shuttleworth, and Hart, a greaser, who�
��d see to the motor. Andy sent Janner up, then followed; the gripes were knocked off, Senhouse slips allowing instant release, and control against the ship’s motion now being by fending off from her grey side with stretchers while checking fore-and-aft swing by crewmen’s weight on crossed lifelines. Inboard, three lowerers had moved to each fall and taken turns on the staghead cleats for lowering.

  ‘Lower away!’

  Andy’s call, echoed by the bosun’s snarl: they all knew their business. For’ard and aft in the boat the disengaging gear was in hand: pins out, and at the bosun’s order ‘Slip!’, Collins having judged his moment, she thumped in more or less even-keeled on the rounded crest of a swell and in a sheet of upflying salt. Engine spluttering into life, two of the hands ready with oars in case it hadn’t, and the other two fending off, Janner at the helm. At a seemingly immense height above them, Halloran leaning over the bridge rail, watching. Lifting his glasses now, settling them on the other boat again. Andy, like the rest of them, bracing himself against the violent battering motion as the boat sheered away, and yelling to Janner, ‘Put her alongside bow to bow – other side, eh?’

  Lee side, and for’ard, where the damage was less, where he’d be able to get aboard among them – if he had to.

  * * *

  As it turned out, there’d been no life in any of them – no question of it; couldn’t have been for quite some time. There’d been no ship’s name or port of registry on the boat either, where you’d have expected one. Not even a part of one single letter where timbers had been smashed. No clues by which to identify either the ship or these former inhabitants of her; no personal gear at all, not even the haversacks you were advised to keep ready-packed with private and personal items – papers, valuables, etc. There might have been some such stuff washing around at some earlier stage, but now there was not. He’d made as thorough an inspection as was possible, from around the lifeboat’s sides and over its wrecked stern, had for a short time been in among them, before giving up and telling Janner, ‘Nothing.’ A jerk of the head towards the ship, then: ‘Back…’ Actually relieved at not having to return with even one still technically ‘living’ cadaver, assuaging any stirrings of guilt in that relief with the truth that it was also – retrospectively speaking – in these men’s own best interests that they’d got it over, known the worst and finished with it.

  Three or four days ago, he’d guessed. There’d been gulls around in fair numbers – Arctic terns no doubt among them in these latitudes – but the blood had all been leaked and washed away, so that to a shark the surrounding water might by now be odourless. Which was something the air was not, downwind of that boat.

  He said to Second Mate Don Fisher a few hours later, Fisher being then in the process of taking over for his own afternoon watch, the noon to 1600 stint, ‘Not necessarily the Admiral Scheer, Deutschland or Graf Spee.’ Those were the monster raiders that were reputed to be out here on the loose. ‘Could just as well have been one of their so-called armed merchant raiders. More likely, in fact – wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Don’t much like the notion, but you could be right.’

  Fisher was about twenty-five, a standard-sized, sandy-haired, quiet man, who’d been third mate in the Blood Line’s Burntisland when Andy had been a cadet in her, so they knew each other well. Not that they wouldn’t have in any case, with PolyAnna now more than four months out from the Clyde and then Cardiff, where they’d filled her up with coal destined for Port Said. They’d sailed from Cardiff on 6 August; there’d been a lot of war talk, obviously, and frantic preparations for it, despite hopes in some quarters of averting it, but in the meantime ships couldn’t be left idle or valuable freights passed up, so it was Cardiff coal to Egypt, then in ballast to Calcutta to load manganese ore for Durban. But having been shipmates before did make a difference: Andy certainly knew Fisher a great deal better than he knew Halloran, a cold-eyed bastard who’d as it were sprung from nowhere, performing what was known colloquially as a ‘pierhead jump’ into PollyAnna a day before she’d left Gourock; he hadn’t set foot on any Blood Line ship before, only at the last minute replaced the old first mate (Harve Brown, with whom Andy and Fisher had sailed before) when he’d keeled over with a heart ailment and been carted off to a Glasgow hospital. Old Harve had survived, so the skipper had heard from the owners when they were in Calcutta, but might never get to sea again.

  Fisher had felt uneasy around Halloran from the start. More so than Andy had. Oil and water, those two – Fisher quiet and thoughtful, one might even say ‘reserved’, while the first mate was surly, overbearing and reputedly overready with his fists. That had been no more than hearsay – he looked it, and had that snarling, raw-edged manner, but this could have been about as much as there was to it – until an incident ashore in Calcutta ten weeks ago, since when one had known it for a fact. At any rate he, Andy Holt, knew it. Wished he didn’t – all the more so for the victim having been a girl. A puzzling angle there being that the man had an absolute stunner of a wife. There was a portrait of her in his cabin: knockout, absolutely. A good ten years younger than him: Halloran was thirty-one, by his looks could have been nearer forty, and had confided – boasted, more or less – that she was ten years his junior, which made her pretty well the same age as Andy. He’d found himself becoming more than somewhat attracted to her, catching himself sneaking looks at her picture until caught in the act – by Halloran, of course, who’d seemed more than anything amused – or contemptuous? – and he’d realised it was something he’d better watch. Not only in relation to the distant and of course totally inaccessible Mrs Halloran – which in the circumstances hadn’t been too difficult – but also in general terms, renewal of resolutions made on one or two previous occasions in the light of (a) what he knew by now of his own propensities, and (b) advice received from time to time from his father – who was a Master Mariner and a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, had been running or helping to run defence course for Merchant Navy men since 1937, and who had very recently landed himself a seagoing job as second in command of an armed merchant cruiser. That news had come in a gloomy letter from Andy’s mother, when PollyAnna had been in Calcutta. An overlong stay, the Calcutta call had turned out to be.

  Anyway, the old man’s advice on the subject of girls and so forth had been delivered in instalments over the years, varying from ‘Get your boozing and whoring done before you’re thirty, boy’ to ‘Never play around with another man’s wife. Never, Andy! You’re getting to be a big, good-looking fellow, they’ll be after you – lots of ’em will – but do yourself a favour, lad, tie a bloody knot in it if you have to!’ He’d obviously been talking from experience, going by his adamance, the note of urgency in that warning, and as it happened Andy did know for sure that when the old man – his father, Charlie Holt – had married his mother, Amanda, she’d already been pregnant with him – him, Andy. He’d come to suspect it a long time ago, and at the age of about fifteen had been able to research it in the family archives, namely a locked tin trunk in which such things as marriage and birth certificates were stashed away. The old man’s mates’ and master’s certificates too, and Admiralty notifications of the two Distinguished Service Crosses he’d won in ’14–’18. As to the other business, though, that discovery – or confirmation – had intrigued him more than bothered him, largely because another thing he’d had no doubt of was that at the time of their marriage and his birth his parents had been wildly, recklessly in love. They were proud of it, boasted of it, revelled in the memory – especially after a few drinks, at times of celebration such as anniversaries – and he, Andy, unquestioningly accepted it as justifying the fact that only by a whisker had he avoided being born a bastard.

  1918 had been the year, June the marriage, and 20 December Andy’s birthday. From later stages he also remembered domestic flurries, periods of tension at intervals during the course of his own childhood, which he guessed in his father’s own hindsight must have provoked the advice about giving ot
her men’s wives a wide berth; the old man not having done so, one might assume. This too was therefore genuine and relevant, to be accepted and paid heed to, coming as it did from a man whom one both loved and respected. Would keep it in mind, therefore, and as far as Mrs Halloran was concerned, in the last month or two when visiting the first mate in his cabin – with a message or a report to make, or for an answer to some query – he’d managed not to glance too often at the girl’s portrait in its leather frame.

  She was a stunner, though. Knowing now what sort of man Halloran was, it was astonishing that any girl with her looks should ever have let him within a mile of her – or stayed within a mile of him.

  Didn’t have to now, of course. Already four months apart, and bound to be for several more. Having herself a good time, perhaps? Did look as if she might. The thought had begun to take hold, rather – lubriciously, and involving him. Halloran here, himself there.

  Fisher was saying – on that other subject, whether the Huns responsible for that floating butcher’s shop might have been in a merchant raider – ‘Perhaps more likely. If you’re thinking on the lines that that’d make ’em a crowd of roughnecks? Blokes like us?’

  ‘Not at all like us, thank you very much. Who’s a roughneck anyhow? I’m not, you’re not’ – a jerk of the head, then – ‘and he’s not.’ Meaning the seaman who’d taken over as helmsman a few minutes ago. Ingram, by name. Thick greying hair, craggy features. Admittedly, some of them did look rough – some to a fairly high degree – but by and large they were as right as rain, or as the master, Josh Thornhill, had more than once observed, ‘Every inch as good as God made ’em.’ Andy went on, ‘Whereas Germans – coming back to that – well, Nazis, and merchant raiders with hidden guns sailing under false colours, aren’t they. Predators, and on the sly at that. And look here – they’d have a crew of say forty or fifty, might be, what, thirty hands on deck to see a thing like that boatload being murdered? But then a battleship like Graf Spee – Christ, there’d be a couple of hundred witnesses!’