Little did I know that the truce that the ‘powers that be’ had banked on was not going to hold for as long as they’d thought. And as a consequence, though we couldn’t know it, for those of us aboard the Amethyst, the peace would soon be over as well.
PART TWO
Chapter 9
Yangtse River, near the village of San-Chiang-ying 08:00 hours, 20 April 1949
Animals have a way of sensing things, often long before humans. All animals can do this, because we have to rely so much on instinct – even creatures as apparently without wits as Peggy. Who knew why my own instinct was so strong that morning? But it was. I just had that feeling that something was going to happen. That all the mutterings I’d heard might have some substance after all.
But what might happen to us if they did? I didn’t know. Just as I’d never known war, I had never witnessed the extremes of violence that I’d often heard about during my time aboard the Amethyst. Not that I hadn’t seen violence happen. The death of my mother had definitely been an act of extreme violence, even though it had been an accident. I’d also known the kind of violence that was an everyday part of nature; the necessary skirmishes I’d seen animals engage in to protect their territory. But not killing. Never killing. Not the kind of slaughter I’d heard the crew talking about down in the mess. Not killing when you didn’t need to eat.
But I knew such violence and intent to kill existed. How could I miss it when the evidence was all around me? After all, the Amethyst had been originally built as a warship, as the captain had often reminded me. And with all her guns, it would be difficult to see her as anything else. But, for all the battle drills and the regular rounds of maintenance and inspection of her armaments, I had never known her as anything other than a home. So on the morning we set off from Shanghai, bound for the city of Nanking again, the only war I’d known was the one it was my personal duty to wage – the one against the rats that were still my mortal enemy.
My only enemy, in fact. Until now.
We’d weighed anchor at 05:15 hours, under a yellowish dawn sky, only to be forced by fog to drop the anchor again. I remembered the fog that could lie on the Yangtse from the last time we’d travelled up there – a dense, opaque whiteness that would roll out across the river like a blanket. But this fog was different. You didn’t so much see it as have it envelop you, damp and cool and pungent. As the Yangtse was notoriously dangerous to navigate in poor visibility, the captain had decided to stop and wait it out.
Ever mindful of both my mother and Jack’s words (on one thing they were agreed – never pass up the opportunity to take a nap) I’d then taken myself off for a sleep down in the galley, which was always a good choice when the dawn was breaking, both for the warmth of the ovens (always nice after a rat hunt) and the cook, who’d be busy preparing the crew’s breakfast, which inevitably meant there was a good chance of being given a scrap of bacon. I’d been fast asleep, too, it having been a long night and a busy one, what with all the strange comings and goings in the officers’ wardroom and the many signals Jack was sending back and forth to Shanghai.
Most telling was that Captain Skinner seemed to be taking the threat seriously. No, this wasn’t our war – I’d heard that said enough times that I could be in no doubt of it – but as we were going to be in what was agreed to be a potential war zone, he had already taken precautions. As soon as we’d slipped our mooring at Shanghai, headed towards Woosung and the Yangtse, he’d ordered a detail of ordinary seamen to stitch together several tarpaulins, in order to make two enormous flags. These they then painted in a precise pattern of red, white and blue, to match the Union Jack that had already been painted on the quarterdeck.
The new flags, not quite dry, were then rolled up over oars taken from the whalers, and fixed from the guardrails with sailmaker’s twine – both ready to be unfurled again at a moment’s notice, so that no one could be in any doubt that the Amethyst was a British ship, going about its lawful business for the Royal Navy.
My first real taste of war came without warning. And I must have slept deeply, because I was not so much nudged into wakefulness as pitched headlong into it, by the sound of instructions echoing round and round the voice pipes – by orders being relayed with an urgency I’d never heard before; by the furious ringing of the bell that had only one meaning: that the crew were being mustered to their action stations.
Wide awake now, I lifted my nose to see what I could get wind of on the air, but it was the captain’s tone of voice that told me most. Something had happened. Or was about to. Something bad. I could sense it. I stretched long and hard and jumped down from the stove side. While the cook ran off to where he was supposed to be manning a fire hose, I hurried back up to the bridge to see what was going on.
The passageways were busy, everyone rushing to be somewhere, looking preoccupied and tense, and I could almost taste the fear that seemed to travel with them. Keeping close to the bulkheads, and out of the way of running feet, I padded quickly along my usual, now long-familiar route, feeling the same peculiar mixture of excitement and anxiety that had accompanied me on that other journey, almost a full year ago now, when I’d been tucked safely out of sight inside George’s tunic. That sometimes felt as if it was a lifetime ago.
In some ways, it really was a lifetime ago, as I’d now been on the Amethyst for longer than I’d lived in Hong Kong, and, apart from when my mother visited me in snatches of strange, wistful dreams, the memories of that time were fast fading. I’d finally got my ‘sea legs’, just as George had always told me I would, and was now, nose to tail-tip, a sailor. Which no doubt meant I now had something of a sailor’s intuition to go with my animal instinct, because there was definitely a quiver in my whiskers; a sense that testing times might well lie ahead.
Though the fog had now cleared, the morning sky still looked bruised when I emerged out onto the deck, and I wondered if more might be on the way. But not as much as I wondered what other dangers lay in front of us – ones not of nature’s, but of human design.
I padded across the quarterdeck, feeling the dewy dampness on the freshly painted corticene beneath my paws, and thought the time might have come to deploy the Union Jack flags. And no sooner had I taken up my usual post on the electrical box at the rear of the bridge than all the reassurance we’d hung on to of being a neutral party was blown out of the water at a stroke.
Though I’d not experienced war, I had known the sort of terror that grips you when you know someone or something means you harm. Someone meant to harm us now. I just sensed it.
The attack, when it came, though, seemed completely out of the blue. One minute the captain was relaying directions to the wheelhouse via the voice pipe, the next, there was a flash of flame on the shore, followed by a terrible screeching wail, and it was as if the river we’d been previously gliding along was boiling, exploding, rising – up, up, up, up! – before my eyes, in great fountains of hissing, rushing water.
Both the captain and the first lieutenant grabbed their binoculars and raised them, scanning the place from which the eruption of water might have come. ‘Watch for the flashes on the bank!’ barked the captain.
Though the fog had gone, the shore was still distant and murky – a hazy and indistinct bluey grey. And as I watched, another flash came, and another wall of white water exploded, this time so close it almost showered us all. I felt my claws scrabbling for purchase and my heart starting to pound, and wondered if I was about to use up every one of my lives all at once – wondering if we all were; feeling terrified, terrified, for my friends. I hadn’t felt such fear since the day I had watched my mother die, and had never expected to again. I had never experienced shell fire, or anything remotely like it, and the sight and sound – the terrifying nearness of the explosions – came as such a shock that all my fur stood on end. And it seemed they weren’t done with us yet. As I struggled to keep my balance, further licks of flame bloomed on the north bank, and more fountains of water streaked skyward.