They left me then, and I could hear their steps echoing down the passageway. And they left me thinking. Yes, perhaps it had been a miracle.
Well, either that or I’d used up one of my nine lives.
Chapter 11
Yangtse River, near Tan Ta Chen, Friday 22 April, 1949
Following my visit from Frank and the man he’d called ‘Doc’ the previous day (who turned out to be in the Air Force and was called Flight Lieutenant Fearnley), I had finally found the wherewithal to try to move. I had puzzled long and hard over why – and how – this doctor had come on board the Amethyst. How did he get to us? Or had the ship made it to Nanking without my realising? And where was our own doctor? Had he been injured as well? I didn’t allow myself to consider the other possibility.
I hadn’t moved much, not the first time, because it was still excruciatingly painful. Only sufficient to confirm what I already knew instinctively; that I’d been badly burned, and that my hips and back legs had been lacerated by pieces of shrapnel. Beyond that, I didn’t know, and decided I didn’t want to.
But I was alive, and could hear still – despite the persistent ringing – and my survival had been declared to be a miracle. I wondered if the rest of crew felt the same about it, and doubted it. As Frank had said, I was a ship’s cat, and sailors were superstitious, believing not only in feline powers of survival that went far beyond the credible, but in our ability to keep the crew from harm, too.
I wished I’d never learned that, because the weight of it felt heavy on my shoulders, suffusing me with difficult, distressing feelings. What if I’d stayed up on the bridge? Would I still be here to ponder it? And what of the protection I was assumed to have conferred on the Amethyst? Where had that gone?
‘You’ll bring us luck, little feller!’ I could hear dear George saying it. And that made me feel desperately sad.
I tried to console myself. George was safe somewhere else. Well, I hoped he was, anyway. I wondered where he was and what he might be doing now. And who knew? Had that luck – however scant, however tenuous – not been with us, perhaps even more would have perished. In any event, I felt humbled and all too aware of my own luck, and for those reasons knew I must bear my pain stoically. For in the time that had now passed since the explosion that had changed everything, I had learned of fates so much worse, so much more final, than mine.
Captain Skinner – brave Captain Skinner – was dead. I had already heard Petty Officer Griffiths discussing that with Lieutenant Weston in the adjacent wardroom; he’d died ashore, on the way to hospital. I’d also deduced – both from what they’d been saying and the way they’d been saying it – that Lieutenant Weston must be quite badly injured too.
Worse still, at least twelve of the crew were apparently dead also. Some had died instantly, some had been shot down in the water, one had died of his injuries on the way to the field hospital with Captain Skinner; others were still there now, badly wounded and shaken – some of them still at risk of dying too.
It was all such shocking news that I had not fully taken it in. Indeed, during the period when I was drifting in and out of consciousness in the cabin, I had hoped that the pictures that kept coming back to torture me were just the product of a fevered imagination. But they were not. They had happened.
I had managed to piece together some more of what had happened to the Amethyst simply by watching and listening. But it wasn’t enough, and I felt useless and desperate for information, so much so that the previous night, in the eerily silent small hours, the Amethyst still motionless, I had finally dared test the limits of my strength and resolve again, and tried to leave the cabin to find out more.
I had made it further that time, but still not very far. In fact, dragging my stiffened limbs proved to be a little beyond that limit. By the time I had managed to make it out of Griffiths’ cabin and into the passageway, such plans as I’d had, which were admittedly unformed to start with, became buried under fresh waves of pain.
Another thought had hit me then. I’d heard nothing of Petty Officer Griffiths since the previous day. Where might he be sleeping? Was he even sleeping? Was he safe? Something jerked inside me then – some primeval tug I had no control over. And I realised that whatever I had expected to achieve it was all cast aside. Instinct took over. A sudden, powerful, overwhelming instinct, as welclass="underline" to hide away somewhere where nothing and no one could get to me, to find a place where I could retreat – where I could hide away, and curl up and retreat into myself; somewhere I could go and lick my wounds.
The ship had remained still. Still in the water, clearly anchored. I knew that she must have been still for some time, as well. It had been more than a day, in fact, since I’d last heard the throb of the engines, and, from the spot I’d found – behind a tangle of ropes in the corner of one of the forward gun decks – all I could hear above the whirr of bats and flying insects was the sound of the river lapping gently against the hull.
Here, gasping but finally on my side again, I was at least cooled a little by the corticene beneath me. Being able to see something other than a blank cabin wall was at least a distraction from the pain.
And what a distraction it turned out to be. Because the state of the Amethyst stunned me.
There was evidence of the shelling and machine-gunning everywhere – even the ensign flying at the stern hadn’t escaped it. It flew limply, forlornly, stirred by only the smallest of breezes, half torn off and riddled with bullet holes.
But it was the Amethyst’s hull which horrified me the most. Always ghostly in the moonlight, she was now all sooty smudges – smudges that resolved themselves into evidence of major damage: scores of ragged scrapes and rents and gaping holes. One – the biggest I could see from my vantage point – gaped high above me, just below the bridge, like a monstrous jaw. A blackened fissure, deep and shocking in the middle of the pristine whiteness, it was half-stuffed with what looked like piles of hammocks. It took a few moments for the realisation to sink. I realised with a gulp that I was looking at the captain’s cabin.
I stayed laid up for the rest of that night and all the next morning, even when, at some time when the moon was high in the sky, wreathed in a yellowy mist, I felt the engines come to life again and the ship begin to move upriver. It wasn’t for long, however, as very soon we were the target of yet more firing from the north bank – though as I lay there, it was without the least inclination to try to move, but simply to await whatever fate was now to befall me. I was done in. And now I was out here, there was nowhere to run to, even if I could. I’d stay put, I decided, and take my chances.
The gunshots, which had been sporadic, soon stopped altogether. I must have dozed then, despite everything (perhaps the vibration of the engines soothed me) and then slept more deeply, because when I woke up it was to a gradually lightening sky, and the boat was once again soundless and still.