The Shouting in the Dark (7 page)

‘We called our arrival in Trinco the Return of the Nederlanders. Wherever around the harbour you were, you saw impregnable old Fort Frederick, built by our seventeenth-century forefathers, standing on that great massif that rises up from the sea. No matter what we were doing we took comfort just from knowing it was there. Every one of the tiny nugget bricks that went into its building had been transported from the Netherlands in VOC sailing ships as ballast. Traders to the bone, we Dutch, eh Ko? We men of the sea, westerners to the core, competitors to the last. Marching into the Fort for our daily training drill felt like coming home.'

Ko gives a nod, makes a tired gesture with his hand. Har has the floor, he seems to say, he has the best stories.

‘There were four of us up for naval officer training that time and it took four months to knock us into shape. Tom, you'll know what I mean. Chris Donker, Wim Vermeer, Hans van Alphen and I, we worked like devils till finally we were sent over to Colombo to be assigned to our positions. Chris the big fellow, built like a tank, he went to the great minelayer
Willem van der Zaan
. Tall Wim Vermeer found a temporary calling in the machine room of the
Van Galen
, our sister ship, but within no time he was back, joined us under our Frisian banner. Hans stayed quayside. I, glasses or no, became deck-officer on my beloved
Tjerk Hiddes
, as I'd hoped from day one. And I certainly slaved from day one, attached to artillery officer Crommelin who, due to some sickness, panic attack or bowel complaint, stayed often in his cabin when we were on missions. So I made myself handy in his stead.

‘By this stage the Grand Oriental Hotel on Colombo harbour had turned into a sort of Allied Navy HQ, known among the men as the Great Old Hoer. We abused language, us lusty young fellows in Singapore' – Ko nods again – ‘But it was nothing to touch the seafaring folk I now got to know. They called a
hoer
a
hoer
where they saw one, no translation needed, gentlemen. In those days, if you were unable to find a mate around Colombo, then he was sure to be in the courtyard bar of the hotel, knocking them back, arguing the toss. Hans, disappointed at his new land-hugging position, was bar prop number one. They loved the Hoer, the men, especially after our out-of-the-way life at Trinco. Especially after that accidental oil spill put a stop to water sports in the bay.

‘You never heard about that, the oil spill?' The father cocks his head at Tom's raised eyebrow. ‘A visiting dignitary, we never were told who, some know-it-all
idioot
from London or The Hague, he one day experimentally pulled the pin on a torpedo, sped the missile straight into an oil tanker. Pandemonium. For a while we thought a Japanese sub had got into the bay.

‘As for me, well, maybe losing my heart in Singapore had given me due warning about staking too much in Colombo, who knows? Ko has some idea. The sloe-dark eyes of Nancy Leong. I'd worked hard for my placement with our Frisian hero Tjerk. While we were at anchor I stuck on deck, avoided the Great Old Hoer. My task in any case was cut out. There was a massive back-log in our correspondence with British High Command, due to the fall of Singapore. None of us Dutch were great stars in the English language, but I was the best of a bad bunch. I bombed myself into the position of secretary and worked in my spare hours. No sacrifice. I took to your good old English language, Nobby, Tom. I enjoyed being on the side of the English. From the very first day I felt grateful to be on that ship and call it home, to be able to do something in return. I wouldn't have exchanged my place there for the world.'

‘You tempt me yet again to say you fellows were lucky.' Ko blows a smoke-ring and watches it dissolve into the night air. Tom looks up, seems for a moment to listen more closely. ‘Lost generation or no. Bar prop or no. There you were, with your free training, your good berth, in the company of friends. No crawling up the Italian boot for you, Har, as for Tom. Not a detention centre in sight, not a
kamp
, as for me. That's lucky.'

‘Yes, that's lucky,' echoes Tom. ‘The luck of you seafaring Dutch.'

‘Well, we were happy, at least at the time,' Har continues. ‘We were sometimes even lucky. Certainly we were lucky with Klaas Sluijter at the helm. How could we not be happy? The
Tjerk Hiddes
was from the word go a
happy ship
. There's no equivalent for this in our language. She was a plucky trusty ship with a happy crew, and made from top-mast to rudder of good solid steel. Her turbines, navigating equipment, weaponry, all of it was reliable and lethal – the six 12.5 cm dual-purpose cannons set in crafty double formation to welcome enemy planes, the Tommy guns and hydraulic torpedo launchers stuffed into every available corner to deal with attacks from the sea. She was a fighter all right, the
Tjerk Hiddes
. Your people the English knew what they were doing when they built her, Tom. They also knew what they were doing when, after Rotterdam, they transferred her and the
Van Galen
, the other two-tonner, to the Royal Dutch Navy, to give us the extra clout at sea we so desperately needed. Not for the Brits the building of so-called economy ships, second-rate cruisers like the Dutch disgrace the
Sumatra
. She was the ship that very nearly capsized on the Java Sea when she tried to fire her cannons from port and then starboard in rapid succession. Or the Dutch training cruiser
Tromp
 – '

‘The
Tromp
? Didn't you once go minesweeping on the
Tromp
?'

‘Once and once only, in the Gulf of Bengal,' The father casts a searching look at Ko, ‘And never again. That day of minesweeping, a couple of Japaner fighter planes crossed the
Tromp
's path and she tried Emergency Full Ahead. Result, her so-called solid steel mast split in two. What a trough our once-great seafaring nation there faced. The Dutch marines were all good fellows, still are, but our ships this century ailed. Yet to this day the people's representatives in The Hague's Inner Court, restored to their offices, their forelock-tugging Nazi insignia neatly tidied away, do not smoke one cigar the less in consequence . . .'

The father's voice descends to a sour rumble at the base of his throat. Nobby, the one non-smoker, bats at the ceiling of cigarette smoke floating above their heads.

‘So your
Tjerk Hiddes
was a
happy ship
, you say, Har,' Nobby says, squinting, ‘but even with everything you've told us, I don't quite see how. Excuse me for saying, but I'm a planner. After the German occupation she will have been the last ship of any size you Dutch were in a position to staff. Prisons must have been swept out to find those ratings you had. Pure criminals – '

The father clears his throat, knocks back his sherry, straightens up still higher. The sound of the words
Tjerk Hiddes
in an English-speaker's mouth is enough to restore his humour. ‘See, Nobby, any prison sentence you might think of, any crime, theft, manslaughter, it's no hindrance to waging war at sea, not for white men. Any scoundrel can be used in the marine service and turn into a good mate. We two hundred heads, our captain and his merry men, including forty fellows from the British Royal Navy, we all got on despite our motley make-up, maybe because of it. Within six months the excellent Captain Klaas Sluijter had transformed us into a beautiful unity simply by working us hard, all together. There's a moral for us in that, right here in South Africa today.

‘Take my friend, the ordinary seaman Schilperoort. He'd been a bouncer and petty thief back in Rotterdam, or so he often told us. He'd had a starring role in the drinks heist the crew once carried out in Fort Frederick, the time when the sub-captain received a DSO. But he was a firm friend. He remained my friend throughout. He taught me about loyalty. Humour, too. Resourcefulness. Whenever Theo Verwerda and I came down at midnight after our watch on the bridge, wet and tired, Schilperoort always had mugs of
kaai
ready for us, thick, bitter chocolate with a shot of rum. God, I can sometimes still long for that stuff. You could rely on Schilperoort. At full alarm I always forgot my helmet. “Without this pisspot on your head you don't look the part,” he used to say, coming up after me, the helmet in his fist.'

Nobby puts out a hand, wants to say more, but Har talks on regardless. Nobby thuds back in his chair, steals a look at Tom.

‘He was a born leader, Klaas Sluijter,
onze Kapitein
,' says Har, ‘cool-headed in an emergency, a fine seaman, too. On one of the first outings the
Tjerk Hiddes
ever undertook in the Indian Ocean, I'll never forget, we'd been detailed to evacuate three hundred Australian commando-troops from Flores, in the Banda Sea. It was there he first made his name. The night-time evacuation itself proceeded well, but at dawn, moments after the ship set out to sea, the cloud cover broke and a pair of Japaner reconnaissance planes spotted us. For two solid hours they attacked, remorselessly, and for two solid hours, high up in the three-prong mast, holding to a stay, his eyes fixed on the heavens, Klaas Sluijter stood calling out his orders. It was thanks only to his ingenious zigzag course that the ship evaded everything the Japaners chucked down at us. And the only visible effect on Klaas was a bad case of sunburn.

‘After the Flores excursion, for ever after, whenever something serious was the matter, the cry went up:
Klaas zal ons redden!
Klaas will drag us through it!' The father, Ella suddenly notices, has switched into Dutch. The friends look unconcerned. Nobby's eyes are closed. Tom squints at his wrist watch, tips a wink in Ko's direction. ‘And he did, my friends,' Har shouts. ‘Klaas did drag us through it, even when we were once in the direst straits with even fiercer opposition, fiercer even than at Flores. Or as old Schilperoort put it in his usual meaty Nederlands, when Ma's bosoms get caught in the mangle, the Captain'll sort it out.'

The men do not laugh. Perhaps they weren't expected to. Nobby and Tom scrape back their chairs. ‘I'll see them out,' Ko mumbles, rising also. He does not return. Har sits with his head bowed. Ella turns away, her jaw sore with yawning, then looks back one last time. She sees her father suddenly flailing his arms like a madman, as if hitting at a swarm of mosquitoes. He's like Captain Sluijter on his zigzag course, Ella thinks, only her father— she can't see him straight, he tacks erratically across obscure waters.

 

It is the last night of Ko's stay, a cool evening. A bolster of mist lies in the river valley. The two friends keep to their seats till after midnight, restored to the solace of their Singapore brotherhood. They both wear short scarves knotted around their necks, the ends sticking out horizontally like giant bow ties. Ella puts her cheek to the window.

‘Can't let you leave us without my best story, can I Ko?' the father says late on. He pulls a fresh bottle of Old Brown Sherry out of its cardboard sleeve. Now that his audience is reduced back to one he's not as loud as before. ‘Pity that our English friends aren't here to hear it. Concerning how I briefly became an honorary Englishman.'

Ko holds out his tumbler. His yawn, bitten-back, creases his lips into a half-smile. The father seems not to notice. Ko's tumbler stays dry.

‘It was the time when the
Tjerk Hiddes
accompanied the damaged battleship
Valiant
back to England for repairs. When the portable dry dock in Bombay failed and we didn't have anything to fix her in Trinco. Up until that time I'd thought, when it came to ships, I'd seen it all. Like the double-rigged
Silindoeng
, for example – the time we relieved her of a thousand-ton load of coal and in just eight hours replaced it with the purest sugar for our men in Burma. But that Rumpelstiltskin story's for another occasion, for Tom and Nobby. Till that day with the
Valiant
, though, I'd not seen a ship in disguise before. It was then I discovered that war at sea was a different can of Bully Beef altogether.'

Revolving the sherry in his tumbler the father faces Ko, yet seems to be talking to himself. Ko puts his own dry tumbler on the table, lets his head sink back onto the rattan headrest.

‘A big convoy accompanied the
Valiant
that day, including a huge Navy tanker for fuel and four of our N-class destroyers, Britain as ever propped by the Dutch. The better to evade our Brother the Japaner's subs, the ensemble proceeded fast-slow, now at thirty knots, now at fifteen. And, sure enough, on the third day out of Bombay, the
Quebec
wiped out one of their circling evil genies. On the fifth day, a beautiful clear morning, the Indian Ocean like a mirror, it was the turn of the
Tjerk Hiddes
.

‘Theo Verwerda and I had just assumed the 0800 watch on the bridge when the
Valiant
's Commodore called us. The radar had spotted at twenty-five miles a lone ship, direction 010. Interesting, far from routine, very far off the beaten track for merchant convoys. Proceed and Investigate, came the Captain's order. In my best schoolboy English I gave the usual answer, Acknowledged. You had to use English when a quarter or so of the crew knew nothing else.

‘Gathering speed the
Tjerk Hiddes
began to stamp two pure-white arrows on that mirror-like blue sea, the bow wave in front, the wake behind. We'd set off on what would become the most memorable day of my life, bar one – but that's for another day.

‘After a half-hour the blip of the lone ship appeared on our radar screens also. The
Valiant
and her entourage had long since disappeared from view. In about ten minutes, binoculars to the horizon, we also could see it, a regular merchant ship, loaded with red containers. But appearances can be deceptive, especially in wartime. Our Commodore called a full alarm. At a distance of three miles he instructed our Yeoman of Signals to use the Aldis lamp to ask the standard questions. In response the merchant ship raised the blue-and-white Greek flag. And then I spotted it. My shipping know-how clicked on. Captain, I said in my best English, though Sluijter was of course Dutch, Look, unless I'm mistaken, I deem that to be the goalpost silhouette of a Japaner ship.