Surface! Read online

  Surface!

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note, 2017

  Author’s Note, 1953

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Copyright

  Surface!

  Alexander Fullerton

  Publisher’s Note, 2017

  Originally published in 1953, this book contains views and language on nationality and ethnicity which are a product of the time. The publishers do not endorse or support these views, but they have been retained in order to preserve the integrity of the text.

  Author’s Note, 1953

  This story is the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity between characters mentioned in the story, and actual persons, whether living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Nor is there any connection between the ships and submarines which are mentioned in this story and any ships or submarines which actually existed. True, there was a flotilla of submarines with their Depot Ship at Trincomali, in Ceylon: but the flotilla described here is entirely imaginary, and none of the officers or men of that flotilla are represented in any way in this book.

  To A. H.

  Preface

  One summer evening, a few years ago, three or four of us were leaning on the rail outside the Wardroom of a submarine Depot Ship. We stood smoking cigarettes and looking down on our submarines which lay alongside. It was just after tea, and we were the Duty Officers of those submarines. You had been dead a year.

  One said, “It’s time someone wrote a novel about life in submarines. There have always been lots of books about surface ships: people’d be bound to be interested in these things.”

  “Don’t think it could be done. The story would be so enclosed, so limited.”

  “Yes,” agreed another. “And it’d be damned hard not to bring in all sorts of technicalities that’d be more than most people would trouble to read.”

  I said that I thought it could be done, one way or another. I’d thought about it, for a year.

  “Have a go, old boy. But if you get it published, I’ll eat my hat and give you a fiver into the bargain.”

  Well, I’ve tried, and this is it. I wish I could remember who it was that laid the bet: I’d like to see anyone trying to digest a well-used submariner’s cap, and what’s more I’d have that fiver. Nobody could say then that the book hadn’t paid. Everything has to pay, in peace-time: that’s one of the things you learn.

  But that conversation was not the real reason for doing this thing. It was only the excuse for letting go on something that I’d wanted to do ever since I’d heard that you had been killed, so unnecessarily, in an accident, when the war was over. A stupid way for you to die. You would so much rather have had it in the way that you had so often seen it coming. But you were too good for them, then. They got you a mean way: alone, out of your element: none of us were there to share it with you.

  So I wrote this. It’s an odd sort of wreath for you, Sir: but you wouldn’t have wanted flowers.

  Chapter 1

  The submarine creeps quietly along, patrolling a mile or so off the coast of Sumatra, in the Straits of Malacca. This is the northern end, the widest part, the entrance to the Straits.

  A fisherman on the shore stands for a moment staring out across the water that lies beyond the mud-banks. He is emaciated, this man, and clothed in rags, because most of the fish he catches are taken to feed the Japanese occupying troops. Lately they have increased their demands, since junk after junk, laden with rice and other food, has failed to arrive in the river-mouth. Some of the junks’ crews, landing later in fishing-boats to which they have been transferred, have carried strange tales of Englishmen boarding them in the middle of the silent night, taking them into their ships which float under water, and later putting them into any other smaller craft that they have encountered. They were given fine food in the Englishmen’s ships, and some have said that they would be happy to repeat the experience.

  The fisherman cannot understand these things. Turning slowly away towards the fringe of palm-trees, he remembers the pall of smoke that darkened the horizon a few days ago. The Japanese were always more angry when these things happened: no man could call anything his own, in Sumatra, when the Japanese were angry.

  A haze of heat hangs over the mud-banks. There has been no breath of wind for many days.

  * * *

  Thirty feet under the surface of the Straits a young man lay dreaming on his bunk: he lay on his back, moving as little and as seldom as was possible, following the habit that he had learned in the interests of keeping cool. There was little comfort in a bunk soaking and reeking of sweat, even when it was your own. Yet this bunk was comfortable: he knew it well, saw it as a sort of haven in which he could think his own thoughts, dream his own dreams. On patrol, the bunk was the nearest, the only approach to privacy. There were five bunks lining the sides of the submarine’s tiny wardroom, and the space was such that any two officers could have stretched out their arms from their respective bunks and shaken hands across the wardroom table. When you were used to it, the lack of space was no disadvantage: you learnt to take up as little room as possible, you learnt to do what you needed to do with a minimum of inconvenience to your fellows.

  You learnt to lie in your bunk and dream. Many people more or less live on dreams, and most people entertain them to a greater or lesser degree. At periscope depth the silence and the warm inaction of being off watch are conducive to deep and happy dreaming: being young, wanting something softer than steel, more understanding than regulations, you dream mostly about the next leave and about getting back to England, the girl on leave and the girl in England being of course distinctly different people. The one on leave is in Kandy, the ancient capital of Ceylon, where unless you’ve had the best part of a bottle during the evening you’re liable to be woken and kept awake by the drums from the Temple of the Tooth. This girl in Kandy is surrounded by at least four hundred other officers who appreciate her as much as you do, and as a result the drums are rarely loud enough to wake you up, which is in its way a consolation. The girl in England is in many ways quite different, one of the ways being that she is fond of you, worries about you: she writes letters frequently, and she has none of the attraction of the girl on leave. She is, however, linked in your dreams with an old car, freedom of movement in a countryside dotted with your favourite pubs, the fact that you can rub your hand along the old wood of one of her father’s five-barred gates and feel all England under your hand. That’ll be when the war’s over, and another dream is the actual going home and telling them you’re on the way. This one takes you to sleep, where a real dream tells you there’s a target, and when Jimmy wakes you by kicking you in the side as he slides down from his bunk, it’s true, there’s a target and the order’s Diving Stations, stand by Gun Action for the nineteenth time.

  A coaster steaming through the Straits with food for a Jap garrison, shells for Jap guns, clothes and comforts for Jap soldiers, and it’s going nowhere except to the bottom. From forty feet the submarine comes up like a cork, a rocket that hits the surface in an explosion of flying spray, wallows with the water streaming off her flanks. The hatches were open when they were level with the water, and the first thing the coaster knows of it is a shell that smacks in below the bridge: if they had a chance of living, that’d teach them to keep a better lookout. The shell kills the helmsman, smashes the steering-gear, and the coaster begins to swing off her course.

  It makes a difference
that she swings, because it throws the deflection out and the next round misses, while the coaster opens up with a light weapon mounted on the after end of her bridge. The water is perforated down the submarine’s starboard side and something clangs off the aftercasing to scream away astern. Shift target to stop the danger, and when the fourth round goes home, the back of the coaster’s bridge is shattered in an orange glow of flame. It was more than well placed, it was a lucky one and hit an ammunition locker. The submarine’s gun is used like a surgeon’s knife, shifts to a new point of aim, the water-line, to let some water in.

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

  “Aye aye, sir. Shadwell’s looking after him now.” Everyone smiles. Shadwell could look after an army of Japs and they still wouldn’t try anything.

  The Cox’n turns and walks for’ard. You slide off your bunk, tighten the belt of your shorts and go barefoot into the Control room to take over the watch. The Captain’s buzzer buzzes and you nip back to the Wardroom.

  “Red lighting at eight, Sub.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” No dreams now, only trim, course, speed, position, and a careful periscope search as the light fades over the Straits. Keep an eye on the man with the headphones: what eyes can’t see, ears can hear. They are big, hairy ears, and even the frequent wearing of headphones for hours on end has failed to prevent them standing out at right-angles to the man’s head. He’s a nice lad, Saunders, a farmer from Dorset, and he’ll be glad to get home one day to a decent pint of bitter, if it’ll ever be decent again, and not just coloured water. That’s what the Germans have done, thought Saunders, watered the bloody beer, them and the Nips between them. Tortured old men and women too, killed little kids, and you couldn’t sit by and let ‘em do that, not without having a bash at them, the dirty bastards.

  Eight o’clock on the Admiralty-pattern electric clock. White lights are out in the Control Room and in the Wardroom, red ones glowing in their place. Red light, say the scientists, accustoms the eyes to seeing in the dark; so do raw carrots, which are eaten whenever anyone remembers to eat them. The Captain wears dark goggles as he pulls on a waterproof jacket, then gropes behind the water-tight door for his binoculars. The First Lieutenant takes over the watch, and the Sub, who will have the first watch when they surface, gets dressed and studies the chart in the dim orange light.