Wreckers Must Breathe

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Hammond Innes

Dedication

Title Page

Part One: The Disappearance of Walter Craig

1. Interrupted Holiday

2. Suspicion

3. The Gestapo

4. U-Boat Base

Part Two: The Disappearance of Maureen Weston

Part Three: The Wheal Garth Closes Down

1. Plans

2. Action

3. Surprise

The History of Vintage

Copyright

Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller,
The Doppelganger
, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four-book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continu-ing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.

Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience – his 1940s novels
The Blue Ice
and
The White South
were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while
The Lonely Skier
came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the
Mary Deare
, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.

Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10 June 1998.

Air Bridge

Atlantic Fury

Attack Alarm

The Black Tide

Campbell's Kingdom

Dead and Alive

Delta Connection

Golden Soak

High Stand

Isvik

Killer Mine

Levkas Man

Maddon's Rock

Medusa

North Star

Solomon's Seal

Target Antarctica

The Angry Mountain

The Big Footprints

The Black Tide

The Blue Ice

The Doomed Oasis

The Land God Gave to Cain

The Last Voyage

The Lonely Skier

The Strange Land

The Strode Venturer

The Trojan Horse

The White South

The Wreck of the Mary Deare

To

The village of Cadgwith in Cornwall.

Where I spent my last holiday before the war and where

I hope to spend my first holiday when it is all over.

CORNWALL IS A
wrecker's coast. But when I left for my holiday I thought of the wrecker as a picturesque ruffian of several centuries ago who lured ships to their destruction with false beacons and waded out into the angry seas to knife the crew and unload the cargo as the vessel broke up. I did not think of Cornwall as being still a wrecker's coast, and I knew nothing of the modern wreckers I was to find havened beneath the shadow of those grim cliffs. I had intended going to the Lakes, but fate decreed that the gathering storm of the Polish crisis should keep my companion at his desk in the newsroom and that I should pick on the Lizard for my holiday.

I stayed at Church Cove, where white, thatched cottages, massed with flowers, straggled down a valley to the dark cleft of the cove with the round capstan house on its shingle beach rotting because no boats came. The Kerris's cottage, where I stayed, was at the upper end of the village and backed on to a farm.

The cottage was really two cottages thrown into one to make a guest house. Kerris, who had done the knocking together himself, was very proud of the result. Before I had been there half an hour he was taking me over the place, showing me with his toothless mouth agrin all the pieces he had obtained from the
Clan Malcolm
which had been wrecked that winter. He had relaid the floors throughout the cottage during the winter and as far as I could gather the work had all been done with wood from the
Clan Malcolm
. There were brass doorsteps, chairs and ship's lamps, all from the same luckless ship. He was a great wrecker, was Kerris. When I expressed my amazement at the amount of stuff he had collected from that one ship, he shook his head with a rueful smile. ‘Ar, she were a grand wreck,' he said. ‘We'll never see the like o' her again, sir—never. She came ashore this side of the Lizard. Caught on the rocks, she was, and broke her back. She was no use for salvage purposes, so Lloyd's told the Cadgwith people that if they liked to go out and salvage what they could and put it up for auction in the village they might collect a percentage of the proceeds.' He shook his head again. ‘Ar, she were a grand wreck, sir. If we had one like that every winter, we'd not have to work.'

I spent five days there in a pleasant haze of bathing, lazing, pubs and Cornish cream. Then Thursday dawned, and with it the shock of a newspaper placard at the Lizard—Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. I stopped the car and stared at it unbelievingly. Groups of holidaymakers stood about outside the newsagents' reading the papers and talking in low tones. Europe, Hitler, the whole world-fear of Nazism seemed suddenly to have enveloped the place like a sea mist. I jumped out of the car and bought a copy of my own paper, the
Daily Recorder
. It was true enough, and, what was more, Britain was calling up reserves and there were reports of mobilisation in France.

I tossed the paper into the back of the car and drove on to Gunwalloe Church Cove, the other side of Mullion. What was the use of spoiling a holiday by getting upset about the international situation? Wasn't this what I had expected—the usual autumn crisis? But I had not expected a Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact and I knew that it might well throw all calculations out of gear. The fear of a war on two fronts removed, the German High Command might well decide to make a lightning thrust against Poland and then, if necessary, fight it out with the democracies on the Western Front.

I thought it all out as I drove across the Goonhilly Downs with the warm heavy scent of sun after rain in my nostrils, and by the time I had convinced myself that the pact was not as serious as it had at first seemed, it was twelve o'clock, and I was at Gunwalloe Church Cove. Two days ago there had been at least three hundred cars in the park. I counted a bare fifty. The beach seemed empty. Yet it was a glorious day. I had a bathe and then strolled along the beach. A tubby little man in grey flannels with a panama stuck squarely on his head nodded to me. ‘Things look pretty bad this morning, don't they?' he said.

‘Not too good,' I replied. ‘But it's a fine day.'

‘Aye,' he said, ‘that's raight, it is. And we'd best make the most of 'em. Two men in our hotel have been called oop. Wired for last night.'

Five minutes' conversation with this gentleman left me with a feeling of utter depression. I had lunch and tried to settle down to read, but my mind would not concentrate and I was conscious all the time of the emptiness of the beach. I had my third bathe of the day and went home to tea to find the cottage empty of visitors. The two couples had gone; one of the men was in the emergency reserve of officers and the other had received a telegram from his office.

And yet, as I had driven back, I had seen the harvest being gathered in and had passed cows being driven to the farms to be milked. It had only touched Cornwall through the visitors. It had not touched the real Cornwall. The everlasting struggle of man to extract from the soil and sea a winter's living went on just as before. That was reality. While that other life of diplomacy, propaganda, machines and herded populations tense and fearful with the sense of impending catastrophe was artificial, a complicated nightmare conjured by civilization. I sat for a while over my tea, wrapped in the horror of it. Before my mind's eye swept fragmentary pictures of the last war. I had been at school, but it had not passed me by entirely. I remembered the cadet corps, the boys who left never to return, the dark nights in London and the searchlights flickering like pencils across the sky; the troop trains and the hospital trains; Summerdown Camp, Eastbourne. And then I remembered the books and the plays that had followed—Sherriff's
Journey's End
, Remarque's
All Quiet,
now banned in Germany, and Henri Barbusse's
Under Fire
. It could not happen again. But I knew it could. A new generation and the horror is lost in the glory that is cried to the rooftops by a ruthless propaganda machine, and from the rooftops echoes back to a nation steeped in Wagnerian idolatry.

The radio interrupted my thought and the bland voice of the announcer gave me the weather forecasts. I waited, fascinated, yet wanting to get away from the damned thing and enjoy my holiday. More incidents on the Polish frontier. Berlin report of ten German soldiers shot on their own side of the frontier. Polish customs officials seized in Danzig. Mobilisation in France. More British reservists called up. I got up and went out into the quiet of the evening. The announcer's voice followed me down the street. I made for the cove and then struck away to the left towards Cadgwith.

I reached the top of the cliffs and paused for a moment to look down at the calm leaden sea that heaved gently against the rock-bound coast. The cry of the gulls was balm to the turmoil of my thoughts. That high screaming cry had always been synonymous with holidays to me, for from my earliest childhood I had always spent them on the rocky coastlands. There was peace here and quiet. I looked back at the little group of cottages huddling down the valley to the cove. It was satisfying to think that whatever happened this coast and the cottages would remain to bring peace of mind to those who lived on and to other generations. Two gannets swung effortlessly down the coast, their black wing-tips showing clearly in the slanting rays of the sun. The air was still and breathless. Not a ripple stirred the burnished surface of the sea and the white streaks of the currents setting from the Lizard were plainly visible. Every now and then a little patch of dark troubled water showed as a shoal of mackerel or pilchards broke the surface in their evening play.