Alexander Fullerton: Surface!

The dentist’s drill in the middle of the night, the harsh buzzing of the Night Alarm. It’s hardly necessary to wake up: you could do it in your sleep. Gear ready, wait. The order, “Boarding Party on the Bridge.” Up the ladder, the thin rungs biting into the rubber soles of your shoes which were designed to be worn on a tennis-court. Tennis: they’ll be playing, now, in Sussex, in the soft English summer while they wait for the war to end. For most of them it’s ended already, ended on the day they called “VE Day”, and that night the people danced in the streets of London, Lewes, Hastings: the little pub at Pevensey was full, so you’d heard. You’d heard too that they gave a cocktail party at home that night, no doubt on the war-time civilian lines where the only drink was a cocktail that was less alcoholic even than war-time beer. Some beer was not so bad, though, when you could get an occasional pint of “Old” which the landlord kept for his friends and regular patrons. Remember Mr Oast, who kept the Ram’s Horn and was always glad to see you when you were home on leave? Dear old Mr Oast, so proud of his son in the Hartillery, in Foreign Parts.

“VE Night”: that was the night you sank two junks, and one of the Chinese came up to you afterwards in the Control Room, bowed and smiled, handed you a grubby card with his name printed on it: “High Class Officers’ and Gentlemen’s Outfitting” it said underneath, and gave an address in Singapore. He had wanted to come back to Trinco with you, and he had been very upset when you put him in a fishing-boat instead. That was “VE Night”.

You’re on the bridge with your belt round your waist, the .38 and the bayonet heavy at your side. You peer for’ard between the Captain and the Navigator, who was on watch when he sighted the junk, and you study the dim shape ahead. It looks big, and you think it may have a Jap guard on board: the big ones very often have, although nowadays they’re getting short of Japs and it’s always a surprise to meet one. No pleasure in the meeting.

“Down you go,” comes the Captain’s order, and you slide down the side and take your men up for’ard, warning them again to crouch down so that the Captain can see over their heads and so that you present a smaller target in case it’s a booby-trap with a machinegun. That has been known, and also the trap of a guard with a bunch of grenades which he tries to lob into the hatch as the submarine draws alongside.

“Slower, for Christ’s sake!” you think to yourself as the junk looms closer too fast, but the Captain can’t see very well in the moonless night, and there’s a hell of a crash as you touch. Before the crash you jumped, and now you’re there on the junk, thuds behind you as the Boarding Party follow. You jump to the door of the cabin, but the Chinese crew are in the way, yelling blue murder and getting knocked over in the rush. You’ve missed the Jap guard, who has come round the other side of the shelter and moves towards Shadwell, tugging at the automatic on his belt. Shadwell is quicker than the Jap and shoots him dead before the gun is more than half-way up. You rush out to do something useful when you hear the shots, but you see at once that there’s nothing to be done. Shadwell says, “It’s all right, sir,” and you go back to collect the papers. If Shadwell says it’s all right, it is all right.

Only routine from then on, only drill as you place the charge, but there’s a slip in the drill when you find that there’s nothing movable to put on top of the charge before you leave it. It’s necessary to tamp it down, to make sure that the blast of the explosion goes downwards through the bottom of the junk and not upwards where it’s wasted. Shadwell is with you, tries to shift one of the big crates, but it’s too heavy.

“’Alf a mo, sir,” he mutters, and climbs quickly up out of the hold, drops back again with the body of the dead Jap.

“This’ll do, sir.”

“Clear the junk!” you yell, and they go, Bird just ahead of Shadwell. You jump back into the dark hold, set fire to the fuse and lug the body over on top of the charge. Shadwell had picked up that corpse like a baby, but you find it as much as you can lift.

Back on deck, you jump for the casing, flash the torch as a signal to the Captain and hurry aft in the dark as the submarine backs away from the junk which hasn’t long to float.

As usual it seems a long time before the bang, and before it comes the Captain looks irritably round at you as though you’ve bungled the job. But you haven’t, not this time or any other. The junk lifts with the blast and drops back smack in the water as you lean quickly over the side of the bridge and bring up your supper. It was a picture in your mind that did that, a picture of the Jap with his stomach blown out of his back: you know what guts look like, because you saw what happened to Wilkins, and so you’ve been sick down the side of the bridge, on to the swelling curve of the saddle-tanks. The mess won’t matter: when the submarine dives before dawn, it’ll be washed off in the same way that Wilkins’ blood was. The sea is clever at cleaning things up. What matters is that you needed to be sick: after all, you’ve come of age, you’re twenty-one.

In the for’ard Mess, at breakfast next morning, Rogers looked reprovingly at Shadwell.

“Shaddy,” he said, shaking his head, “I ’as to mention that wot ‘as come to my ears about your flippin’ bloodthirsty carry-on last night causes me no end of displeasure.”

“Ar, eat y’ flippin’ bangers, an’ shut up. Flippin’ windbag, that’s all you are.”

“Last night, Shaddy, you done a thing as you may well regret. ’Ow’d you like to think in a few months as ’ow you’d shot a poor little co-belligerent, eh?”

“Co-belligerer be flipped. It was a flippin’ Jap, and ’e’d ’a conked me if I ’adn’t ’a swiped ’im first.”

“Remember when we was in the Med. together, Shaddy, the go we ‘ad with them Eye-Ties off Spartivento? When they near finished us?”

“What of it?”

“Six months after that they was dear little co-belligerents, see? Now these Japs: you’ll ’ave ’eard the buzz as they’re goin’ t’ jag in soon?”

“I ’eard a buzz, but I dunno where it come from.”

“Never mind where it flippin’ well come from, Shaddy. You mark my words: come six months, they’ll be flippin’ co-belligerents.”

Shadwell looked contemptuously at his shipmate.

“Don’t be soft. There ain’t nobody left to belligerate against.”

“‘Ow about the Ruskies?”

“Wot, Uncle Joe? You’re daft. You’re flippin’ well barmy, d’ye hear?”

Early morning: the Sub lay on his bunk, knowing that in half-an-hour he would be called to take over the watch. The submarine was south of the minefields, nosing in at periscope depth towards the port of Malacca. From the remarks and orders that he could hear from the Control Room, where the Navigator had the watch and the Captain was keeping an eye on the approach, Sub gathered that the morning fog was still thick: he could picture the woolly blanket encircling the upper lens of the periscope, the water shining as though it had been wiped with an oily rag. He heard the Captain’s breathing as he leant over the chart-table, heard him softly curse the low visibility.

There ought to be something worth sinking, down here. No submarine had been here for a long time: it was as though they had been given the first licence to shoot in what had been a game preserve. The Captain was keyed up, anticipating a target: Sub thought, I ought to be, too. He felt as Chief always professed to feel: what in hell did it matter if there was a target or if there was nothing? It was the low mood, one of the times when you looked round and noticed how squalid the surroundings really were: you thought of other men fighting in the open air, living more normally, not creeping about, eating and sleeping and peering through a blasted tube at the empty sea. The jokes were stale, the news was old, breakfast was always the same, hurried at that when it had to be gulped down quickly in order to take over a dreary watch.