Dead Man Talking by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788636209
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2019-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

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The next morning they went through the modest ceremony of commissioning. The crew were paraded on the quay, watched by a small group of managers and typists from the builder’s offices, a handful of chargehands and a few of the men who had built the ship. Clark read his commissioning order, the ensign and commissioning pendant were hoisted and Frobisher dismissed the ship’s company. It began raining again, with a keen wind blowing off the North Sea. The courtesy of their presence over, the shipyard’s personnel dispersed, the shivering girls running off bare-legged in the chilly breeze, the men with a resigned air. For them the esoteric act was of no great significance; there were more ships to build and their task lacked any glamour, even that attaching to a small warship: their world was bounded by the grey of their industrial landscape, not the sharp monochromes of a warship’s paintwork with its bright gleam of red, white and blue fluttering over the stern in the bitter wind.

Marching off, the seamen’s square collars blew up round their heads as they went up the gangway, boarding the ship officially for the first time. There were fewer than thirty of them, officers included.

Next day they were gone, the berth empty, awaiting its next, transitory visitor, the only evidence of their passing the quickening in the wombs of three careless and unknowing young women. In distant Liverpool another, not-so-young woman, was growing anxious.

As she steamed north, none of the ship’s company aboard His Majesty’s Armed Whaler Sheba gave a second thought to the River Tees, nor to those who dwelt upon its banks. Young they might be, but after over two years of war they had become accustomed to departures and inured to the pain of parting. The unthinking shaggers among them would find other willing girls and even the few disposed to fall in love could repeat the process elsewhere. In the meantime they would beat the bishop, in the time-honoured fashion.

The Admiralty, through the agency of some two dozen first lieutenants and captains scattered throughout the fleet, had done its work well in selecting the crew of HMS Sheba; some had viewed the request seriously, most had got rid of their bad-hats. But not one of the young men who slipped easily into the routine of sea duty that raw morning was known for his sentimentality. On the contrary they were taking stock of the future and, to a man, were wondering why they had been assigned to this odd little ship with its odd and preponderant assortment of officers. All they knew with anything like certainty was what Leading Seaman Carter told them, that the Old Man was a whizz-kid on the Asdic.

As for the Old Man, Lieutenant Commander Jack Clark stood on the starboard wing of the bridge, his back to the ugly Hotchkiss gun, staring ahead. His mind was on the far north, full of his responsibilities and the intended encounter with his enemy.

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