Alexander Fullerton: Surface!

The coaster’s bridge is well on fire, and the blaze spreads aft where one of the crew has just taken a spectacular and unskilful dive over the side. Later there may be time to pick him up, but now it’s only business, Malacca Straits business. Shells are ripping in, and some of them are getting right inside the coaster’s belly before they burst. You glance at the Captain, and he’s grinning at you as though there was something funny about the way you look, your face black with the cordite smoke; and perhaps your face shows also that this is what you enjoy doing.

The coaster is settling lower in the water, and as you blow your whistle in short blasts that tell the Gun’s Crew to cease fire, her bow sweeps up and her stern goes down, down, the sea hissing as it drowns the flames and swallows the ship. Eleven minutes from the time the Gunlayer first pressed his trigger the submarine is alone on the surface, with a haze of smoke and some rubbish floating where the ripples spread, spreading till they lap the steaming mud-banks where the fishermen’s stakes stand stiff like sentries that have witnessed an execution.

The Gun’s Crew are busy clearing the platform of empty shell-cases, kicking the hot cylinders over the side, then training the gun fore-and-aft and jamming on the clamp. Shells come up from below to refill the water-tight ready-use lockers, the Gunlayer and Trainer unship their telescopes, and the five men drop down through the hatch, which clangs shut as the submarine heads back to pick up the one Jap survivor. He’s clinging to a plank which he must have thrown over before he dived. Two sailors drag him up over the saddle tanks, and he’s so dazed that he tries to bring his piece of timber aboard with him. He’s a lucky man, because everyone knows that the Japs have no healthy interest in our survivors, and he might not be welcomed as a guest were it not that the Intelligence people will like to have a chat with him. Moreover, he ought to be ashamed of himself, because in between being sick he mentions that he was the Captain of the ship. The best captains stay in their ships at least as long as the rest of their men.

The submarine turns and heads out towards the middle of the Straits, twelve knots and the bow-wave curling away as white as spilled milk. White shows clear and far on the dark blue surface, and the sinking will by now have been telegraphed to a Jap airfield, so while the submarine must put herself out in the deep water as quickly as her diesels will get her there, she must also have an eye on the sky. Within a matter of twenty minutes this sky holds three little specks growing bigger from the direction of Penang, but they have little time to get much bigger before the bridge is cleared, the vents drop open in the saddle-tanks and the submarine glides down until the needle in the depth-gauge is steadied at fifty feet. An order from the Captain puts the wheel over to starboard, swings her round towards the South, towards the One Fathom Bank and the minefields that guard the road to Singapore.

Look at a map of the Straits of Malacca and you’ll see, if the map is large enough, that where the Straits narrow about half-way down to Singapore is a light-house marking the One Fathom Bank. South from this point the way is barred by belts of submarine mines strung across the channel between the sandbanks. There are many belts of them swinging to and fro on their wire moorings, live things waiting in the dim, green silence, death in their horns and antennae. For nearly three years no submarine has passed south of the One Fathom Bank. One day, someone will have to be the first.

Back to zero again, with the figure twenty in the front of your mind, or at the back of it. Twenty is the number of rounds it took to sink the coaster and to kill four Japs who would rather have died than lived, which they could have done by jumping with their captain when they knew their ship was one for Davy Jones. Thinking around their preference for dying it was almost understandable that they often killed prisoners instead of marching them into cages, because they seemed to have the impression that a prisoner was a deader man on his feet than he was when stiff. It did not cover their habit of twisting bayonets round in a man’s stomach when he lay with rope round his ankles, though, and it was knowing of such habits as these that made it easy to kill Japs without considering them as being any more than monkeys with a blood-lust.

Twenty was something else as well, more personal, the age of the girl in England. Strange, that while you’re lying on a narrow bunk fifty feet under the surface of the Malacca Straits the girl may be playing a game of tennis in Sussex on a grass court that you helped to weed. To be honest, why think about her at all, when you know that it is only needing someone to think about that makes you do it about her? In your mind you are remembering not the look of her, but the look of Crowhurst, Heathfield, Mayfield and Cross-in-Hand, smelling the sweet tang of an early morning in the woods behind Buckholt. It was having someone, too, that you could know was thinking about you, a contact in the outside world where people used thin china and kept themselves clean and didn’t have destruction as their aim from day to day. When you heard Stuart Someone-or-Other reading the B.B.C. news and saying that a certain tonnage had been sunk by His Majesty’s Submarines in the Far East, you immediately thought of her listening and knowing that this was what you had done, and you were in her mind and she’d care if your letters stopped reaching her. That was why you thought of her, and you knew that when you were home and the war was over you’d see no more of her than of anyone else.

“What colour are her eyes, Sub?”

What colour? Grey, or green, or the mixture called hazel?

“Whose eyes?”

“Don’t tell me you weren’t mooning over Sheila.”

Sheila: she was the girl in Kandy, and you knew about her eyes. Green they were, like a cat’s eyes in the dark. After this patrol you were due for leave, and you hoped to be seeing something of those eyes. When you got back: it never occurred to anyone that they might not get back from this patrol, or the next, or the one after that, and if it did occur to them they thought about something else, because imagination is an enemy under water and there are enough enemies without making your own.

“What’s for supper, Chef?”

The cook shoves his head round the side of the water-tight door, an opener in his left hand menacing the tin in his right.

“Bangers, sir.”

“And mash, I hope.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Captain looks up from the signal-pad over which he has for some minutes been aimlessly waving a pencil.

“Bangers? You mean Soya Links, don’t you?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Christ! Again?”

Chef looks at Chief, the Engineer Officer, an expression of pain and surprise on his unshaven face.

“Don’t like links, sir?”

“I’ll have yours, Chief.” Chef transfers his gaze to the Sub-Lieutenant. His expression says, “Ah, you’re all right: proper sailor’s taste.” He looks at the Captain. “What time we going up, sir?”

“About an hour. Tell the Cox’n I want him.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Captain doodles on his signal pad until the Cox’n heaves himself through the bulkhead door.

“Yes, sir?”

“We’ll surface at eight-thirty, Cox’n.”

“Aye aye, sir.” He pauses. Then, “Nasty little bastard we got for’ard, sir.”

“Which?”

“The ruddy Jap, sir. Sullen cove. They got ‘im peelin’ spuds, but I don’t know as it’s right lettin’ ‘im ‘ave a knife.”

“Make him use a short, blunt one. And have the fore-end watch-keeper keep an eye on him.”