The Restless Sea

Charlie braces himself against the heavy swell. The Atlantic Ocean stretches mile after choppy mile in every direction – every crinkle in every wave could hide a U-boat. The first British ship was sunk out here in the North-western Approaches, just hours after Chamberlain’s radio broadcast, and not much later than the sleeper train was pulling away from London towards Inverness all those days ago. It was an unarmed passenger ship, torpedoed as the evening meal was being served.

He scans the flight deck, flat apart from the island with its shiny black pom-pom guns. What a sight an aircraft carrier is! She carries the might of fifteen hundred men and more than fifty folded planes anywhere in the world, transporting them safely in her enormous belly like a battle-ready whale.

Charlie steadies himself again: even a ship this size bounces like a cork on these waves. The planes are being brought up on the lifts from below. This is what he’s been waiting for. No more exams. This is the real thing. Squadron 843’s stumpy Blackburn Skuas appear first. He scratches his head and runs his fingers through his hair. He’s glad he’s not flying one of these new fighter planes. Give him a good old-fashioned bi-plane and an open cockpit any day.

He shakes his legs and arms out to get the circulation going. His sheepskin-lined clothes are warm but cumbersome. He smiles to himself as he remembers target training. He has always been a good shot. Calm and steady, like his plane. And she may be slow, but boy, does she respond to his touch. He can make her do whatever he wants with the lightest pressure from his hands and feet. They can swoop and climb, turn and stop, bank, dive, soar, roll, loop the loop … although that’s a court martial, of course – if you’re caught.

‘Either you’re young and brilliant or young and stupid,’ one of his instructors had said.

‘A little bit of all three, I suspect, sir,’ he’d answered, grinning. But he isn’t. The one thing you can’t call Charlie is stupid. He’s sensible, and he can assess a situation in a split second. He knows what he’s capable of and he knows what his plane’s capable of. That’s why the training was a doddle.

‘Thinking about a pretty lady again, boyo?’ says Mole, his words whipped away by the wind.

‘You could say that,’ says Charlie. And actually, he has allowed himself to think of the girl from the train, but not out here on the flight deck. Here, he needs to focus. He slips his arms into the Mae West, wriggling to make it more comfortable on his shoulders. ‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘Too many damn straps and buckles and safety clips.’

‘Mind your language in front of young Billy the Kid,’ says Mole. He nods at the boy standing next to them. Bill is actually a little older than Charlie, but he seems younger without Charlie’s breezy self-confidence. He is their TAG. The plane’s telegraphist–air gunner. He is quiet and respectful. But then, he is only a lower-deck rating. He is also perpetually unflustered. Important if you find yourself in a sticky situation.

Bill smiles and makes a gesture like firing a gun with his hands, before he slips on his leather gloves.

‘Come on, Billy. Let’s do this,’ says Mole. The Welshman has taken the Kid under his wing. He takes everyone under his wing. He’s an astute observer, and has a gift for making people feel at ease. Both traits useful when you’re the navigator in a cockpit flying at almost two thousand feet.

The fleet has received a distress call from an unarmed and lonely cargo ship two hundred miles away. It is being chased by a German submarine. It is too far for the fleet’s ships to get there quickly, but the pilots will.

The airmen were immediately at the ready. They are always at the ready, whether they are standing by in the ready room or writing letters in the wardroom or asleep in their cabins. The flight deck crew indicate that the Skuas are good to go. Charlie says a silent prayer for them. There is ribbing in the wardroom about Charlie’s squadron’s old Stringbags, but out here on the wind-lashed flight deck, there is nothing but respect for each other.

Charlie shivers: part anticipation, part wind chill. There is no dread: this is what it’s all about. At last he can put the training into practice.

‘Number four crew, stand by to scramble!’

Charlie nods at Frank and Paddy – the other two squadron pilots – and their crew. The Fairey Swordfish have been run into place. They rise and fall at the far end of the ship. The flight deck crew unfurl their wings as the airmen lumber towards them like bears in their thick boots and Irvin jackets – but in a moment they too will be weightless, as graceful as the most delicate of insects.

Charlie can see the bombs strapped in racks beneath their plane. Mole and Billy disappear behind her wing and haul themselves up into the cockpit. Charlie nods at Tugger, solid and windswept on the deck. He reaches for the handholds, climbing up above the wheel, over the wing and into the front of the cockpit. He hands Tugger the crank handle, sits down on the parachute, clips himself in, yanks his goggles down, pulls his harness tight, starts his cockpit checks.

Tugger, his large body squeezed between a strut and the body of the plane, fits the handle into its hole and starts to turn, slowly at first, then faster. Danny, wedged further down, helps him. Through the howl of the wind Charlie hears the whizz of the motor. Tugger and Danny wind, faster and faster. Their arms become a blur. Charlie gets ready with the throttle, mixture, switches, trim. He can tell from the sound that it’s time to flick her into life.

With a cough and a splutter, the propeller starts to rotate. The men still crank. The smoke from the plane’s engine belches out and is whisked away on the wind. The propeller is a spinning blur, just the paint on its tips visible, a yellow circle. Tugger and Danny can finally stop. They jump down on to the deck. Tugger runs around the wing to the rudder. Danny does the same on the other side. They lie on the struts beneath the tail fin, holding the plane steady as Charlie does his final checks. The legs of their overalls ripple and flap in the slipstream. The engine warms up to a throaty roar. Tugger and Danny can feel she’s ready. They glance back at Charlie. Thumbs up. As one, they run to the wheels. The chocks are away. Charlie is free.

The deck stretches out in front of him. Beyond the deck, the sky and the ocean. The ship is head to wind, ready for take-off. The sound of wind and machine is thick in his ears now, and Mole’s voice, through the rubber Gosport tube that links them together. ‘Steer two six zero.’

‘Roger, two six zero.’

Charlie opens the throttle and the Swordfish answers with a growl. He checks the revs, the pressure, the temperature. He gives the thumbs-up to the flight deck crew, and they’re away, the world slipping past faster and faster, the wheels bumping. And then all is clear and smooth and they are dropping off the end of the ship and up, up into the sky.

‘Steer two one zero,’ says Mole in his ear.

‘Roger, two one zero,’ he replies.

Charlie has perfected his deck take-off, but every flight is like the first. The sky opens up before him as the ship disappears behind until it is a dot among the shifting waves. It is beautiful. Breathtaking. Nerve-wracking. Exhilarating. It is like nothing else in the world. The sea sparkles miles below. He fancies he sees the curve of the globe. He trusts his plane implicitly, as he trusts Mac and the Kid, Tugger and Danny, almost more than he trusts himself.

Mole starts to hum some ditty down the tube, Charlie catching parts of the tune before they are snatched away on the slipstream. The observer is always singing as he scratches away with his pencils and compass on the charts. Charlie has no idea how he manages to balance the boards and the rubbers and all the other paraphernalia, since he isn’t really sitting down at all. It is only Charlie who gets a proper seat. The others perch on nothing more than a cross bar.

It is an hour’s flight to the merchant ship. Nothing to do but enjoy it. He uncricks his neck, rolls his shoulders to loosen them up as much as he can in the cramped seat. The sky is a patchwork of dark and light. Visibility is good. The sun breaks out, and Charlie could be four years old again – on his first flight: there’s the same roar of the wind, the rumble of the plane – and him, weightless, soaring into the endless sky, his father behind him, beaming with pride, his mother’s face receding way, way below, creased with worry. His thoughts drift to the girl he met on the train. Olivia. Perhaps he could bring her up here one day. She is the kind of girl his mother would have approved of. Or at least, he thinks she is. He remembers his mother talking about families, and how she hoped that one day he would meet the right person, like she had. She had laughed, imagining herself as a grandmother. In his memory, they are stretched out on a picnic rug on the beach. His father must have been swimming in the sea. The air is warm, and he is lying looking up at her, and she is stroking his head, her curly hair a hazy halo of gold around her smiling face. He is not sure whether the memory is true or false. It feels real, but he must have been only five or six. The year before they both died.

Mole has stopped humming. ‘Dead ahead.’ The words bring Charlie back to the present. As usual, the observer’s calculations are spot on, and already they are closing in on the merchant ship. Charlie pushes all thoughts from his mind. The world shrinks. As they approach, one of the Skuas flies past them, back towards the carrier. ‘Must be low on fuel,’ Mole yells down his ear. Charlie nods, concentrating. Ahead, he sees another Skua wheel around like an angry seabird. He sees the tiny bombs fall and the plumes of smoke and spray as shrapnel bursts from the sea where they land. It swoops in low – too low – next to the ship. As the mess clears, he can see that the plane is in trouble: smoke trails from its nose. Damaged by its own bomb, it splashes into the sea.

‘Bugger,’ says Charlie. ‘Where’s that U-boat?’ All he can see is the merchant ship, a long and low smudge on the sea, her drab sides a dusky contrast to the red ensign that flutters at her stern. She is hove to, rocking in the waves.

‘Must have dived,’ says Mole.

Charlie loops around the merchant ship. He needs to assess the situation as quickly as he can. It looks as though some of the crew are still on the ship. But the ship’s lifeboats are in the water – and full of crew waving at them frantically. There is a lot of debris around them, some of it from the plane that just crashed. But another plane is missing. Did that go down too? There are two yellow life jackets – the missing airmen? – swimming towards the merchant ship; a third bobs inertly on the waves. Charlie has swung the plane right back out to sea. He works the port rudder and they turn towards the ship again. They must be eight hundred yards away when, ‘There! There!’ Mole suddenly yells.

The submarine is rising. Its conning tower and gun break the surface first as water cascades off its back. Charlie’s heart thumps. This is not a dummy run with pretend bombs. It’s the real thing. He swallows. His mouth is suddenly dry. Time moves slowly. Second by second. His thoughts are clear as a reflection in a puddle on a still day.

It’s all in the timing. He drops the plane lower over the water. Closer and closer. The submarine lies alongside the merchant ship, sleek and black. Wait, wait. Wait. Now! Charlie presses the button, and, as they pass over, the Kid starts to fire, clack-clack-clack, manoeuvring the gun into position. There is a thud that resonates in their chests as the bomb Charlie released explodes, and spray spatters the back of the plane.

Mole cranes his neck to see behind. ‘Good shot, boyo,’ he shouts. ‘It’s dived again. Won’t go far. It’s Germans on the ship. Five of them. Must have boarded before we got here.’ Charlie knows the Germans will take whatever provisions and information – and British – they can and then scuttle the ship with their torpedoes.

He circles again. He can see the life jackets have reached the ship and are being hauled out of the water. The third life jacket still bobs near to where he first spotted it. The Kid keeps his finger on the trigger as he swings the gun back and forth, always ready. Sure enough, the U-boat resurfaces. Charlie goes in for the attack. This is their last bomb. He needs to make it count. Five hundred yards. His hand is on the button. ‘Steady, boy,’ says Mole. Four hundred yards. Three hundred. He presses the button. The charge dislodges from its bracket. Another thud resonates through their bodies and seawater spurts into the air as the bomb explodes. They can’t see anything through the smoke and the froth.

‘Spot on!’ says Mole.

‘Thanks for the shower,’ says the Kid.

‘You were beginning to smell.’

‘That’s it. We’re all out,’ says Charlie.

The sub is on the surface again. The German crew are scrambling to get off the captured ship and back to their submarine. There is a kerfuffle, and the British airmen leap off the ship and into the water, yellow blobs in the dark sea.

The Kid yells from behind, ‘Take us in closer, Charlie. Let me have a go.’ But Charlie doesn’t dare. It’s a mess down there. The submarine is trying to pick up her German crew, who in turn are trying to grab the British men from the water. Training doesn’t prepare you for this.

Mole is in his ear. ‘Here comes back-up, boyo.’

Frank and Paddy are here at last. But too late: the greedy shark has swallowed its German crew and its British prize. Charlie is relieved that he doesn’t have any more bombs to drop. He doesn’t want to make that decision. Frank and Paddy go in for the kill. But the submarine sinks back into the ocean with its catch. As a final goodbye it sends its own torpedo to take out the merchant ship. Charlie spots the track of the missile under the water but there is nothing he can do. The merchant ship flinches, spewing black smoke up into the air. Her back is broken, and, as dark clouds cascade into the sky, she too sinks deep into the sea.

It is as if she were never there.

Mole doesn’t sing on the way back to the carrier. There is just the sound of the air rushing past, and the hum and rattle of their aeroplane. Charlie has kept his crew and his plane safe, but seeing a ship die leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. He tries not to dwell on the captured airmen, men whose hands he grasped only moments ago on the flight deck, who will either never wake again, or find themselves in an enemy camp.

They are about eight miles from the rest of the fleet, close enough to see the carrier in the distance, when suddenly Charlie hears Mole’s breath catch in his throat. At the same time, Charlie sees it too.

‘Forty-five degrees starboard,’ says Mole.

Charlie presses the foot pedals to operate the rudder. The plane responds immediately. He dips the starboard wing. There is shadow, and above it a mark like a white scar in the water. Charlie feels a shiver of anticipation. There’s no mistaking the track of a periscope.

The U-boat is heading straight for the rest of the fleet, approaching at a ninety-degree angle. It is almost close enough to attack. The British ships won’t have seen it yet, but Charlie can’t warn them: radio silence must be kept at all times in case the Germans pick their messages up. They have no bombs left, either. There’s only one thing to do.

‘Take me in!’ yells the Kid.