Down The Hatch (7 page)

The Exercise Orders, when first issued, were thought to be a little too bulky, particularly for ships which had small operations rooms, but by brilliant cutting and inspired paraphrasing (at the risk of losing some of the nuances of the language) the Combined Staffs had succeeded in reducing the final edition to one more manageable volume equivalent in size, without Amendments, to the first two volumes of the London Telephone Directory. Amendments followed the Orders themselves at weekly intervals although many ships received the Amendments some weeks before the Orders. One destroyer from Rosyth received neither Orders nor Amendments but still acquitted herself with distinction in the Exercise; her Captain, a firm churchman, taking his part from the Second Book of Kings and Hymns Ancient & Modern.

When The Bodger received his copy he read the first page, where he noted the date the Exercise started, the last page, where he noted the date the Exercise finished, thumbed hopefully through the rest (once, as a young midshipman, The Bodger had come across a brand new ten shilling note in a copy of
Orders for Disabling Fleeing Luggers, Smacks & Jolly-Boats
published before the war), wrote “Action-- Navigating Officer” on the cover and then pitched the Orders on Gavin’s bunk and forgot about them.

The ship’s company, and the officers, had all done fleet exercises before. They knew the form: days of waiting, a few brief hours of excitement, and more days of waiting for the exercise to end, which it normally did twenty-four hours early because the planning staff had run out of incidents and wanted to catch the midnight train to London. But “Lucky Alphonse”, under The Bodger, was not just another exercise. The Bodger’s drive began before
Seahorse
left harbour. The polished fittings on the bridge and the casing were painted black and the wires, guardrails and ladders were landed. A full outfit of torpedoes was loaded and a false deck of stores laid out along the passageways. The periscopes were realigned, the torpedo tube firing mechanisms overhauled, and the radar sets recalibrated. When she finally left,
Seahorse
was stored for war.

When the ship was on patrol, The Bodger left nothing to chance. The submarine surfaced for nothing. The batteries were recharged by snorkelling and the rubbish which accumulated inside the submarine was fired into the sea through the gash ejector. The Bodger watched the smallest details, to the extent of personally supervising the weighting of the rubbish bags before they were ejected. “I once followed a Yank submarine three hundred miles across the Arctic, just by the ice cream cartons,” he said.

The Midshipman was given a special job of his own.

“I want you to make out a Recognition crib, Mid,” The Bodger said. “Get out
Jane’s Fighting Ships
and write down the tonnage, water-line length, funnel height and masthead heights of every Blue ship in the exercise. When you’ve done that, write down by each ship any special features she may have. Almost every ship has something. The arrangement of the gun turrets, prominent radar aerials, lattice masts, cutaway quarterdecks, side lifts on the flight deck--anything I’ll be able to recognize quickly through the periscope. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Midshipman sat down with
Jane’s Fighting Ships
and began work. It was only after The Bodger had left the wardroom that he ventured his question.

“Why am I doing this?”

“Recognition mostly,” said Gavin. “And ranging. The Boss ranges on the heights of things. That’s why he wants the height of funnels and radar aerials. He may be able to range on them when he can’t see the actual mast itself.”

“Oh.”

The Midshipman returned to
Jane’s
with a renewed feeling that he was indeed a tenderfoot on a strange range. Hard though he tried to gain experience he was again and again reminded that he was now in a private world, incomprehensible to outsiders, demanding techniques and knowledge of its own. When the Midshipman tried to trim the submarine, for instance, his first attempts were disastrous.

“Have a go at the trim, Mid,” The Bodger said with a cheerful smile one morning when
Seahorse
had been on patrol for two days.

“Aye aye, sir.”

The Bodger remained in the wardroom, mentally crouched in the slips, his eyes fixed on the depth gauge and his finger-nails drumming on the wardroom table.

“There’s only one way for the chap to learn and that’s by doing it by himself,” said The Bodger to the rest of the wardroom, his face drawn in agony and his eyes straying again to the depth gauge. Almost at once he hit the control room deck at the double as the submarine, hitherto in perfect trim, responded to the Midshipman’s tentative experiments by heading purposefully towards the bottom, a thousand fathoms below.

The rest of the wardroom were unnerved by the spectacle of their captain torturing himself in the sacred name of training. Wilfred, who was Trimming Officer and the most experienced trimmer in the ship, took it upon himself to give the Midshipman a special lecture on trimming.

“First of all,” he said, “you’ve got certain things to help you trim. There’s the depth gauge. That tells you how deep you are. There’s the bubble on the inclinometer. That tells you whether you’re level or not. And then there’s the bathythermograph which tells you about the sea outside, but let’s not worry about that for the time being. You’ve got two planesmen, to keep the boat at the right depth, and level. The ballast pump, to shift water into and out of the boat, and the trim pump which shifts water round and about the boat. You use all these things when you’re trimming. There are people who can trim by the seat of their pants. They’ve been doing it so long they can tell what’s wrong just by looking. But there’s one sure-fire way anyone can use.”

“What’s that?” the Midshipman asked, soberly conscious that he was being initiated into one of the world’s obscurest sciences, a mystery understood only by a tiny number of people.

“Go to a hundred feet if you can, where it’s relatively calm and peaceful. Slow down. Put the wheel amidships. Put the planes amidships. Then watch the depth gauge. If you’re light, the boat will rise. If you’re heavy, the boat will sink. So you pump or flood, using the ballast pump. Always get the bodily weight right first. Then watch the bubble on the inclinometer. If it runs forward you know you’re light forrard and heavy aft. If it runs aft, you know you’re heavy forrard and light aft. So you pump water whichever way you need with the trim pump. It’s useful to remember, always pump towards the bubble. Eventually you should get to the state where the boat stays at the right depth and the bubble stays amidships, without using the planes. You see, you may have been keeping depth before but the planesmen may have been sweating blood to keep you there. What you’re trying to do is to achieve a state of neutral buoyancy so that the boat has no tendency to go up or down.”

“Where does ‘Q’ tank come in then?”

“ ‘Q’ has got nothing to do with the trim. It’s either empty or full. It’s an emergency tank which you flood when you want to go down in a hurry. Then you blow it out when you reach depth. The things that have an effect on the trim are the weight of fuel, water and stores, the number of people on board, the density of the sea water, and whether the boat is speeding up or turning under wheel or firing torpedoes. Even the weather up top has an effect down to a certain depth. Mind you, once you’ve got a good trim that doesn’t mean it’ll last for ever. You might run into a patch of denser sea water, people move about, the weather might get a bit rougher. You’ve got to keep at it the whole time.”

“As well as looking through the periscope,” said The Bodger, who had been listening unobtrusively from the passageway. “I’d rather you had a bloody awful trim and kept a good look-out.” The Bodger had been struck by a curious common factor in the reports of dived submarines which had collided with surface ships. In many cases the First Lieutenant, the Trimming Officer, had been on watch at the time of the collision and had been obsessed with the trim, taking a couple of gallons from one tank and putting a couple of gallons into another, while all the time the
Queen Mary
and the entire Home Fleet bore down on him at thirty knots.

The Midshipman took The Bodger’s remarks to heart. He was indeed a little too zealous. The following afternoon the Midshipman was at the periscope by himself. It was the dead time of the afternoon. The planesmen yawned in their seats. Everyone except the watch was asleep. The Bodger himself was in his cabin, lightly dreaming of fat aircraft carriers steaming towards him on steady courses, when he was awakened by the sound of water flushing into “Q” tank. The deck was tilting and the depth gauge already showed seventy feet.

“Six helicopters, sir!” cried the Midshipman.

The Bodger’s eyebrows rose.

“Six choppers!”

Seahorse
was three hundred miles from land and had met nothing but merchant shipping for three days.

“Have you blown ‘Q’ yet?”

“Oh, no sir, I’m afraid.”

The depth gauge was showing a hundred and twenty feet and the needle was still swinging rapidly. The Outside Wrecker, on the blowing panel, had the look of a man about to explode into a thousand pieces.

“Blow ‘Q’. Sixty feet.”

At periscope depth again, The Bodger searched sea and sky meticulously.

“Damned if I can see any bloody choppers,” he growled.

The Bodger shook his head.

“Either you’ve got stereoscopic eyes or I’m going blind in my old age, Mid.”

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

“That’s all right. You did the right thing. Always go deep for six choppers. Especially in the middle of the bloody Atlantic,” The Bodger added, to himself.

The Bodger left the periscope, climbed back into his bunk and composed himself for sleep. Just as he felt the warm comfortable recession of his senses, the deck tilted once more.

“They’re back, sir.”

The Bodger gave the shame-faced Midshipman a curious look. Again he searched the sky. Again, he could see nothing but a wheeling seagull and the eternal grey waves rolling towards him at eye level.

“You feeling O.K., Mid?”

“Yes, sir. They’re there, sir.”

“Oh, I’m sure they are.” The Bodger looked again. “Ah. . . . Wait, I see them. Is that them?” The Midshipman looked through the periscope and nodded. Flying steadily eastwards, looking neither to right nor left, were six large geese in line ahead.

The Bodger conceded that they did resemble helicopters to an untrained eye but the control room watch had not heard a better joke since the Coxswain got food poisoning. The helmsman tittered. The Outside Wrecker smirked. Ripper, on the foreplanes, grinned at his depth gauge. Even the Radio Electrician, a naturally sombre individual, sitting at the after planes, permitted himself a faint enigmatic smile.

“Never mind, Mid,” The Bodger said. “Always go deep first and ask questions afterwards.”

Nevertheless, The Bodger could not avoid a feeling of disquiet. The affair of the Six Geese smacked suspiciously of bird-watching and bird-watching through the periscope was the submariners’ traditional symptom of impending insanity. In The Bodger’s experience, the feathered friends were normally followed closely by the men in white coats. The Bodger had once served with a captain who was actually murmuring: “Strange to see black-backed gulls so far south” while a Japanese destroyer threshed past two hundred yards away. The Bodger resolved to keep a sharp eye on the Midshipman.

But when he had thought more deeply about the matter, The Bodger was not very surprised that the Midshipman should make mistakes on the periscope. The periscope was much more than a complicated optical instrument and to use it successfully required much more than mere good eyesight. A periscope demanded the ability to deduce facts from limited data, the ability to see a whole room through the keyhole, in short it demanded “the periscope eye”. The task was hard enough in daylight. At night it was trebly difficult. Here again, the Midshipman provided the control room watch with some much appreciated entertainment.

The night following the affair of the Six Geese the Midshipman came on watch with Wilfred while the submarine was snorkelling to recharge the batteries. The Midshipman had no sooner taken over the periscope for the first time when he rang the “Stop Snorting” Alarm and ordered “Q” flooded. Once again, The Bodger tumbled out of his bunk. “What’s up, Mid? Luminous shite-hawks?”

“Aircraft dead ahead sir, coming straight towards!”

“Golly.” The Bodger scratched his head. “Funny we didn’t get any indication of it before. Was it lighted?”

“Very bright red light like a port wing light, sir.”

“Did you see anything, Number One?”

“No, sir.” Wilfred, too, was perplexed, it was a clear night with a sharply defined horizon and excellent periscope visibility. Surely he could not have missed a brightly-lighted aircraft?

“Well, we’ll stay down for half an hour or so and see what happens.”

After half an hour The Bodger brought
Seahorse
back to periscope depth. As the periscope broke surface The Bodger swivelled round in a quick sweep.

“There’s your aircraft, Mid,” he said, at once. “It’s Mars.”

The Midshipman blushed; what with flying geese and hostile planets, The Bodger must be beginning to think him a little touched in the head. But The Bodger seemed quite unconcerned about it.

“It’s quite understandable,” he said. “It’s by far the brightest star in the sky and it could well be an aircraft light. Don’t worry Mid, there’s many a good submariner stopped snorting and gone deep for Mars or Venus, let me tell you. As I said before, I’d much rather you went deep unnecessarily a thousand times than stayed up once too often and got us clobbered by an aircraft. Go deep first, ask questions afterwards.”

The ship’s company were grateful to the Midshipman. He provided them with almost their only source of innocent amusement as the days of the patrol crept by. They had already settled to the strange twilight existence of a submarine on patrol. They slept through the day and came awake at nightfall for the one hot meal of the day which was normally cooked and eaten while the main engines were running to charge the batteries. Twice a day they went to maximum depth to take bathythermograph readings of the sea layers. The rest of the time was spent patrolling at periscope depth.