Remember Me (3 page)

Never did any burden feel heavier. Never did fishing feel less like a sport.

A
N EXTRACT FROM
‘T
HE
B
URDEN OF
R
ESPONSIBILITY
’

Mack’s smile faded and he seemed to turn grey in front of my eyes. He started to shake. His reaction scared me—I began to wonder if he’d had a heart attack or something. He heard me out, attempted a smile, then got up and walked out of the kitchen into his back yard. I hesitated, not knowing what to do. In the end I followed him. I found him sitting on an old wooden chair between his tomatoes and his marrow patch, crouched over, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

When I asked he said he was all right. I didn’t know what to make of things so I said I had to go home. He told me to hang on, said he’d be all right in a couple of minutes. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

‘I didn’t know you was a writer,’ he said, which was a lie
because I sometimes used to read my essays to his wife when she was confined to bed. ‘At least I didn’t know you was a good one.’ Mack told me to sit tight while he went and poured himself a beer. The way he was behaving had me worried so I spied on him through his kitchen window. He filled his glass and drank it straight down. His shoulders slumped and he sighed as if he was carrying the weight of the world, a burden of responsibility beyond anything I could imagine. I’m ashamed to say it but I couldn’t help suddenly thinking there was another essay there, one with which I would amaze everyone all over again.

There was, but it wasn’t the one I expected.

Mack poured himself another beer and turned to walk out to the yard. I bolted back to the beer crate I’d been sitting on. In those days beer came in wooden crates as opposed to the cardboard cartons you get nowadays and people usually only bought crates of beer when they were having a party or a celebration. Mack bought his beer in crates all the time, which was one of the reasons he’d earned his reputation as a drinker and why there was always something for me to sit on.

‘Your story reminded me,’ said Mack heavily. ‘I’ve got a story, too. Never told a soul, not even Anya. Not on your life. Spent years trying to put it out of my mind.’ Anya was Mack’s late wife.

I didn’t say a word. I just sat there quietly waiting for him to elaborate. I didn’t know at the time that this is a
standard technique for reporters. It just seemed the right thing to do. Mack stared at his beer, stared at his hands, stared at his feet, clearly trying to make up his mind whether to tell me.

‘I got picked up by a submarine,’ he said eventually. ‘June, 1940. A German submarine. Can you believe it, a U-boat, straight out off Medlands Beach?’

It was as though he’d drawn a cork out of a bottle that had been sealed sixteen years earlier. It took a while for the story to realise it had finally been set free and the words came hesitantly, uncertainly. For me it was like slow torture. I knew Medlands Beach was on the southeast coast of Great Barrier Island. There was a map of Great Barrier Island on the wall of the school library and my pals and I knew it by heart. We’d studied it while teachers had tried to teach us about Latvia and Estonia, where the school’s newest arrivals—three astonishingly blond kids—had come from. And Mack had been picked up by a German submarine straight out from Medlands Beach. That was—and still is—the most enthralling, amazing, wonderful, stimulating, earth-stopping snippet of information anyone has given me. My pal, Mack, had been picked up by a German U-boat.

To put things into perspective, in those days a trip from the North Island to the South Island of New Zealand almost qualified as an overseas trip. We were twelve hundred miles from Australia, twelve thousand from Britain. When my parents went back to England in
1958 to honour a promise to their families, it rated a mention in the daily paper. New Zealand was so far away from everywhere. Even with a war on, you’d have to have said that the chances of being picked up by a German submarine in New Zealand waters was about the same as a Martian spaceship landing in the school playground. And here was Mack telling me that was precisely what had happened to him.

I’d been raised on war stories. I was born in London on the day the first flying bomb slammed into the city. When I was in Standard Two we were asked to write an essay about ourselves and I’d begun mine with that line. Talk about a showstopper. I earned a gold star for that essay. My father hadn’t been allowed to enlist because he made anti-aircraft predictors and the authorities told him he was making a bigger contribution to the war effort doing that than he ever would carrying a rifle. Even so the Luftwaffe nearly got him half a dozen times when they dropped bombs through the roof of the factory where he was working. He ducked under his workbench and that was all that saved him. One night he was riding his bike home from the late shift when a V-1 flying bomb ran out of fuel right behind him. It hit less than four hundred yards up the road. One less cup of kerosene in the V-1 and he’d have been a goner. All our English friends had stories like that.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that war movies were my favourite. I saw
The Dam Busters
four times.

Names like Guy Gibson, who led the raid on the dams along the Ruhr, and Barnes Wallis, who invented the bouncing bombs, were as familiar to me as the names of my classmates. I read every book about World War II I could get my hands on, knew the names of all the Spitfire fighter aces and the names and silhouettes of every plane in the British and German air forces. I was brought up believing Churchill and Britain won the war, Montgomery was a military genius and the men of the merchant navy were heroes to the last man, including Mr Gillespie who’d survived being sunk by a German U-boat. But in all my reading about the war and all the movies I’d watched, there was nothing more threatening, more deadly, more fearsome or more calculated to send a shiver up my spine than tales about German submarines. And Mack had been picked up by one.

Holy cow.

‘What happened?’ I said.

Mack was miles away, lost in thought, with the expression on his face people get when they’re recalling unhappy or bitter memories. He gave no indication he’d heard me. He wasn’t even drinking his beer. I sat as still as a shag drying its wings.

‘Bloody motor conked out,’ he said eventually. ‘Some bastard had siphoned the diesel out of my tank. Reckon I know who it was, too. Didn’t find out till I was on the six-mile reef ready to come home. Jesus Christ, what a mess.’

Bloody? Bastard? Jesus Christ?
Mack never swore or blasphemed, certainly not in front of me, but there was no way I was going to cover my ears.

‘It was probably about eleven at night, a westerly was blowing, not hard but enough to cause a bit of a chop. There was no moon and the night was as black as the lining of a mullet’s gut. I’d got onto a school of good snapper, all the perfect size, between three and four pounds.’ Mack took a massive swallow from his glass and retreated back into his thoughts. I kept up my shag impression while I waited for him to continue.

‘Couldn’t believe it when the motor conked out. Last bloody thing I expected. Nothing ever went wrong with it. Never thought for a second I was out of diesel. I’d upanchored and only gone about a hundred yards when she died. My torch battery was on its last legs and my running lights were no help. I wasn’t allowed to use them anyway. The last thing I checked was the dipstick in the tank, and I only did that because I’d checked everything else. By then the westerly had pushed me out another couple of miles and it was too deep to anchor. I threw out my sea anchor to slow the rate of drift and tried to figure out what to do. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going because it was a spot I’d found and didn’t want to share. Even with the sea anchor out, I figured I’d be twenty to thirty miles out to sea by morning. I was in a right pickle, let me tell you.

‘I suppose I drifted for a couple of hours. The submarine was on the surface but I never saw it coming.

The first I knew was the sound of its diesels and, because the wind was offshore, I never heard them until the sub was less than fifty yards astern. I shone my torch towards the sound. I didn’t give much thought as to what kind of boat it was. I just wanted to make sure it saw me and picked me up. Next thing I know I’m pinned in this searchlight. Strewth! Talk about going from the sublime to the bloody ridiculous. One second I can’t see my bloody hand in front of my face, next I’m staring into the sun. Just as quickly it’s dark again. I thought the boat was one of ours, some kind of naval craft or a small coaster. I called out and someone called back. Suddenly there’s this dark shape moving up alongside me, and people running around with torches and shouting at me in some foreign lingo. I hadn’t a clue what was going on but I threw them a line anyway. What else was I supposed to do?

‘The boat had eased up between my boat and the shore. Next thing I know, a rope ladder drops down into the bow. Before I get a chance to climb up it, this bloke climbs down. I can see by the light of the torches he’s holding a rifle and, do you know what, it still doesn’t dawn on me what’s happening. “Am I glad to see you,” I say. Instead of shaking my hand he points his bloody rifle at me and starts yelling at me in Kraut. Bloody hell! I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was going to shoot me. I looked up to where the blokes with the torches were, hoping someone would sort things out, and that was when I noticed the curved sides of the hull and
realised I was looking up at a submarine; a German submarine. Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Someone threw me a stern line and I tied it off.

‘I’m standing there with my hands in the air when this officer type climbs down the ladder. Bugger me if he doesn’t speak English. He asks me my name and introduces himself. Christian Berger his name was, and it sounded like he was some kind of lieutenant. He finds my snapper and says, “Do you mind if I take these?” What difference did it make if I minded or not? He was taking them anyway. I told him I’d swap the snapper for some diesel. I know it was a bit cheeky but he grinned and started talking Kraut to someone in the conning tower, then turned to me.

‘“No one can know we are here,” he said. “So I have a choice. I can shoot you now and sink your boat, or I can let you drift for the same result. Or I can take you prisoner.” He studied me for about fifteen seconds although it felt longer. “Or I can give you the diesel you want. Are you a man of honour, Mack?” It threw me, him using my name like that, like we was pals. But I could see he was serious and weighing up the decision. I nodded and told him my word was my bond. He took this in. His eyes weren’t hard or anything but they were unnerving. They never wavered. “If I give you diesel,” he said, “you must give me your word that you will tell nobody about us, about the U-boat, for forty-eight hours after you reach the shore. No one must know we are here. No one.

Understand?” I nodded. “Do you understand your choices?” I nodded again. “Can I rely on your word?”

‘I told him he could and we shook on it. Then he said the strangest thing. “Tell me about your home,” he said. So, as briefly as I could, I told him about Great Barrier. I swear he looked envious. Someone passed down a jerry can. I poured the diesel into my tank and handed the can back. “We are civilised people,” the officer said. “I am giving you your life in exchange for your word. Break your word and you put my life and the lives of my comrades in jeopardy. Do you want to kill us?” I told him I didn’t. I promised I’d keep my word. I gave him every reassurance I could. I still wasn’t convinced they wouldn’t blow me out of the water as soon as I’d untied. “Go home,” he said and shook my hand again. “But you must go slowly,” he added. I think that was his idea of a joke.

‘By the time I’d cast off and started my motor they were gone, swallowed up by the night. I drew some comfort from the fact that I’d be just as invisible to them. The horizon began colouring up as I headed in and it was half light as I swung around the point back into Medlands. By then I’d had plenty of opportunity to think. I had no doubt about the seriousness of the promise I’d made and its implications. On one hand I had a clear duty to report the presence of the submarine; on the other I’d given my solemn promise that I wouldn’t. There was a policeman waiting with my wife and a couple of my mates on the beach. They were about to
launch their boat to go out looking for me. One word to the policeman and I knew he’d be straight on the radio back to Auckland and they’d have aircraft up looking for the U-boat within the hour. I couldn’t do it. The Germans had done the right thing by me and I was obliged to do the right thing by them.

‘Of course, my wife, my mates and the policeman wanted to know what had happened. I told them I’d fallen asleep. They didn’t believe me, but was that any less believable than saying I’d been picked up by a German submarine? I felt terrible about lying and it probably showed. My mates looked in my boat and saw I had no fish and, more to the point, no fish boxes. I saw them looking at each other, puzzled, trying to work out why that would be. They knew something had happened but I also knew they’d never guess what, not in a million years. I made my apologies, pulled my boat up onto the beach, and let Anya drive me home. I am a man of honour who kept his word. But I left that beach feeling like I’d betrayed my country, that I was a traitor.

‘The following day a liner, the
Niagara
, was sunk by German mines in the approaches to the Hauraki Gulf. Just inside the Mokes. It took fourteen souls with it when it went down. Fourteen!’ Mack buried his head in his hands again and his shoulders heaved suddenly as though he was sobbing. I didn’t know where to look.

‘I knew exactly who and what had laid those mines. I felt responsible for the deaths of those poor souls.

The next day I climbed Mt Tataweka and watched minesweepers working to and fro across the Gulf. It was too late. The damage had already been done. My fortyeight hours passed but I still didn’t tell anyone about the submarine. I was too ashamed. I never told anyone about it. After the war I found out a troopship left for Europe the same day I saw the U-boat. Some said it was the
Queen Mary
. I knew then it would have been the U-boat’s real target, why it had been sent all the way down to New Zealand. My silence could have cost the lives of thousands of soldiers. Jesus Christ! Imagine having that on your conscience. You talk about a burden of responsibility, laddie, but put that in your pocket and see how it feels!’ He turned away from me, his eyes brightly rimmed with red.