‘And we keep this up all day, Buffer?’
Turnham glanced at him, enjoying the officer’s despair. ‘Aye, we do, sir. Up this way, drop our dan buoys in case some careless geezer decides to take a short cut through the swept channel an’ misses itjike, then back to do it all over again.’
Hargrave wanted to remain silent and not display his uncertainty by asking questions. But the Buffer was a professional seaman, and a regular of the old style, although you would hardly think so to see him in his patched jacket with its faded red badges, and a cap which looked as if he slept in it.
He persisted, ‘And at night?’
Turnham gestured savagely at a seaman who was casually coiling some wire.
‘Not that way, you numbskull! Like I showed you!’ He seemed to realise what Hargrave had said. ‘Well, sometime we ’ave to sweep at night.’ He grinned at a sudden memory. ‘We ‘ad some Yankee brass ‘ats visitin’ the flotilla a while back, and one of ’em says we’ll soon ’ave the know-how to sweep in pitch-darkness.’ He shook his head. ‘The Old Man gives ’im a saucy look an’ says, we bin doin’ that for months, sir.’
Hargrave knew that the Buffer was quite a bit older than Ransome. Old Man did not seem to fit.
The leading seaman called, ‘All secure, sir.’
Turnham nodded. ‘’E’s a good ’and, sir. Bit too much mouth, but knows sweepin’ inside out.’
Hargrave heard feet on the deck and saw the gunnery officer striding aft with one of his men hurrying to keep up.
Bunny Fallows would take some getting used to, he thought. Like now, for instance. He was wearing a bright balaclava helmet on his trim red hair, and on the front of his headgear he wore a large knitted rabbit. It seemed out of character for an officer who spent his time trying to be more pusser than any gunnery officer at Whale Island. At the same time Hargrave sensed that if Fallows was no good at his job the Old Man would get rid of him. It was an odd mixture.
Turnham had seen his glance, and had guessed what he was thinking. He would have liked to add his own twopennyworth, but he knew better than to push his luck. Nobody on the lower deck, and in the petty officers’ mess in particular, had any time for Fallows. A good woman would snap the little bugger in half.
Instead he said, ‘We’re due for a spot of leaf soon, sir.’
It was the first Hargrave had heard of it. ‘Really?’
Turnham almost licked his lips. ‘Six days up the line with a nice little party.’ His eyes gleamed at the prospect. ‘Beats cock-fightin’ anytime!’
Hargrave turned and looked up at the bridge as the signal lamp began to flash towards the other ships.
He said, ‘They’ve sighted wreckage ahead.’
Turnham strode aft and called to his team. ‘Stand by on the winch, wreckage ahead!’
The leading hand called Guttridge eyed him with surprise. ‘I always thought you said you can’t read morse, Buffer?’
Turnham showed his teeth. ‘Can’t neither, Gipsy. But the new Jimmy can!’
The telephone buzzed in its case below the gun and the communications rating called, ‘From the bridge, sir. Wreckage ahead!’
Turnham grinned even wider so that he looked like a small ape. ‘We knows that, sonny! The first lieutenant told us!’
Hargrave dug his hands into his pockets and looked away. He did not belong here. He must not allow himself to fall into the trap. And yet he knew that Turnham’s obvious pleasure at knowing something before being told by the bridge had made him feel just the opposite.
The wreckage was no hazard to the sweep-wire; it was all too small and scattered for that.
Turnham watched the pathetic remains drift down either beam: broken planks, some charred, a few lifebuoys, great disconnected patches of oil, and a solitary deckchair.
He said, ‘Last convoy that went through, I ’spect, sir.’ He shaded his eyes and added, ‘No dead-uns though, thank Gawd. We got no room for corpses in this ship. The convoy’s tail-end Charlie would ’ave picked ’em up.’
The watches changed, soup and sandwiches were carried to the gun crews while the work continued with a new dan buoy to mark each section as they swept it.
Planes passed occasionally overhead, some of them probably hostile, but today nobody was interested in the staggered line of minesweepers.
Hargrave knew that he was being watched by the men working around him, and tried not to show any emotion or surprise when he saw the extent of this largely unknown war. The masts and upperworks of so many ships which had been mined, shelled or torpedoed in sight of safety. The wrecks were marked on all the charts, but seeing them like this was totally different from a dry correction in A.F.Os. Some had tried to struggle into the shallows to avoid blocking the swept channel, others had run amok, on fire and abandoned, to line the channel like gravestones.
Turnham occasionally pointed out a particular wreck which Rob Roy had tried to help, or from which they had taken off survivors.
Hargrave was stunned to find that he felt cheated, as if all the promise and training at Dartmouth, and later when he had served in two different cruisers, had been a complete waste of time. That until he had joined this slow-moving, poorly armed ship he had seen nothing and done nothing of any use.
Wrecks, stick-like masts, and mournfully clanging green buoys to mark those which lay in deeper water – it was a battleground, no less than the broad Atlantic.
The communications rating called, ‘From the bridge, sir. Take in the sweep.’
Hargrave looked at him without seeing him. All we do is clean up the mess, and leave the fighting to others.
By dusk they had swept the channel six times without finding a single mine. For Hargrave it had been a long, long day – and his first lesson.
Ian Ransome wriggled his muffled body against the back of his bridge chair and began to wipe the eyepieces of his binoculars for the hundredth time. It was bitterly cold on the open bridge and against the moonlit rim of a cloud he could see the starboard look-out’s hair ruffling in the wind like grass on a hillside. Like most of the watchkeepers, the look-out disdained to wear any form of headgear. Some sailors swore that it hampered the faint sound of danger, and others hated to wear their steel helmets anyway, no matter what Admiralty Fleet Orders had to say about it. Some six months back Rob Roy had been under a surprise attack from an aircraft, and their only casualty had been a seaman whose nose had been broken by his companion’s helmet rim as he had ducked for cover.
Ransome fought back a yawn. It was three in the morning or thereabouts, and the ship was still closed-up at action stations. At night their duty was to patrol the swept channel, not to look for mines but to watch out for any stealthy intruder or aircraft trying to drop them.
The worst part was over. An hour back they had received and acknowledged the brief challenge of the eastbound convoy’s wing escort. It was amazing when you thought about it. One convoy forging around the North Foreland, with no lights, hugging one another’s shadows like blind men, and they would soon pass another convoy coming down the east coast. Because of the narrowness of the swept channel between land and their own huge minefield, the convoys would have to gridiron through each other. No lights, and only a few with radar, and yet Ransome could recall only one serious collision.
He listened to the slow, muted beat of engines and pictured Campbell and his men sealed in their brightly lit world. Almost everyone else was above decks, huddled around the gun mountings and shell-hoists, trying to keep awake, praying for the next fanny of steaming kye and some damp sandwiches.
Fawn and Firebrand, the two Smokey Joes, had returned to base to re-bunker; they would be back on the job tomorrow.