The Restless Sea, page 48
The attacks are relentless and indiscriminate, but Olivia is not afraid any more. It is simply part of life.
There is still no communication from Charlie. Olivia hunts for information through every channel she can, but news coming out of Germany is scarce. It is as though he has simply disappeared. He has already missed Alfie enjoying his first ice cream, and now dim-out, when lights are allowed to be left on unless there is an air raid; the boy thinks that the nights are festooned with lights shining especially for him. But Olivia cannot sleep. Disturbed by the unfamiliar brightness in the dark, she prays for news.
The year stumbles on; the three of them stumble on, held together by Alfie. He is something they can focus and agree on, with his innocent smile and his eyes wide with wonder, always trying to reach for what he wants, however hard it is, learning to stand alone, to walk, balancing on both feet, determination etched into his face. Alfie, who reminds Olivia of Charlie every day that she sees him.
There is a small garden in the communal square outside the house. Its railings have been removed, supposedly to be melted down to make weapons. Olivia and Betsy sit on the grass while Alfie gazes open-mouthed at the barrage balloons floating in the sky. He wants to join the young boys searching for shrapnel in front of coils of barbed wire, just as his mother and uncle once did, but he is too small and unsteady to keep up with them. Betsy distracts him with an orange she has procured. It is the first he has ever tasted, and they laugh as he bites into the juicy flesh, screwing up his nose and sticking out his tongue, and then his hand, asking for more. Suddenly there is a streak of silver through the March sky. Though far away, the explosion is so loud that Olivia huddles Alfie up into her arms and they run inside. Together they stand at the window, Alfie perched heavily on her hip. He presses his nose to the glass and watches through the criss-crosses of tape as the ambulances pass by at full speed, bells clanging, stretchers piled in the back.
‘I just wish it would stop now,’ says Olivia. ‘I’m fed up with it. I want to get on with my life.’
Betsy bites her nails, distracted. Her eyes are fixed somewhere a long way away. ‘It’s not much of a life,’ she says, and Olivia is not sure whether she is talking about her past, present, or future.
They find out later that the rocket fell through Smithfield Market and on to the railway below, killing another hundred people, many of them women and children who were hoping to buy from a large consignment of rabbits, just as Jack and Betsy might have done only five years earlier.
And then, two weeks later, the rockets stop and the sound of the doodlebugs is replaced by the music of a song thrush in the garden outside the house. And a week after that, they receive the official news that Lieutenant-Commander Charlie FitzHerbert is dead.
Olivia is at Greenwich, chatting to fellow Wrens. Officially it is VE Day, a public holiday, but many have congregated here to listen to Churchill’s official announcement of the surrender signed in France the day before. There is relief that these harsh years are over, but some of them are also wondering what an end of war means to women who are mechanics and radio operators, torpedo Wrens, mail officers, night vision instructors, and couriers. Olivia has received a letter from Charlie’s bank manager stating that he has left all his money to her as his next of kin. It was almost too much to take in, but she has already made enquiries about setting it up in trust for his son. And now there is a messenger pressing a handwritten letter into her hand from a recently repatriated POW. Olivia examines the writing, prays that it might be Charlie, miraculously plucked from the confusion in Europe. But of course, it is not. She opens it slowly, dreading what she will find inside.
The letter is from a German officer, Otto Weber. He writes briefly of Charlie’s story, and includes his address, saying that he has marked the coordinates of Charlie’s grave so that she will be able to find it when peace allows. He tells her how he hopes one day to be able to explain to Charlie’s child how his father died, a true, selfless hero, a father to be proud of. Inside the envelope is a handful of soil and the pale, dried petals of a primrose. Olivia holds the letter to her lips, hoping that she might find a last scent of Charlie there, but she can smell only the earth and the ink. Charlie has gone.
Olivia leaves the building for the last time then, making her way home through streets hard to negotiate. The pavements are teeming with people, but they are also cracked and marked with craters, remnants of war. The crowds are growing, men and women, old and young, gathering together in tentative celebration, for VE Day is not just a celebration, it is also a memorial to the men who won’t be coming back.
The shop windows are full of bright rosettes and buttonholes. People are climbing ladders, hanging bunting and flags and streamers above the battle-scarred buildings. The city is no longer grey, but fluttering red, white, and blue, and lit by the smiles of thousands of people who can finally contemplate a future.
Jack is waiting with their cases. Olivia changes out of her uniform and folds it on to the bed, where she intends to leave it. She takes hold of Alfie’s hand, and the three of them make their way to the train station. Once again they are travelling up to Scotland, this time to the church at Poolewe, where Aunt Nancy has arranged a small service in memory of her godson.
Her aunt meets them at the station and drives them along the now-familiar single-track road. Olivia sits in the back with Alfie, with the windows open, pointing out where the buzzards soar and the cattle cool their hooves in the burns, watching the breeze lift his hair as he giggles in delight. She hopes the landscape will imprint itself in that same part of his mind as his father.
They pass Gairloch, and rise up towards Loch Ewe. The sky is deep blue, the hills are rich green flecked with pale rock, and there at last is the loch, sparkling and glimmering, empty of all but fishing trawlers, oozing out towards the sea. Alfie points and bounces up and down. It is his first glimpse of the wide ocean, of the far-reaching horizon, and the hint of infinite possibilities.
They stop next to the tiny stone church, where the river tumbles and froths towards the sea. A faint scent of wild thyme lingers in the air. As they enter the churchyard, Olivia is astonished to see that so many people have congregated here that they cannot fit into the little church. They are standing in clumps among the gravestones, quietly talking among themselves. There are all the locals, of course – Mrs Mac, whose face crumples as soon as she sees Olivia, before encompassing her in her thick arms and kissing her hair. There is Mac, eyes bright and body wiry as a bird, smiling up at her from beneath his cap. ‘This is Callum, and these are Hamish and Mary and wee Gus. Not so wee any more,’ he says. He does not mention Angus. The children are dressed in their Sunday best and they smile at her with ruddy cheeks, and she wonders which of them don’t have a father any more, and she smiles a greeting at their mothers. Then Greer shakes her hand, and she notices he shakes Jack’s hand too. And then there are Mrs Campbell and the Rosses, Mrs Ross dabbing at her eyes. And the MacGregors, and beyond them more men, young and old, who she does not recognise, returned from the war. Everyone murmurs a greeting, and she allows their support to wash over her.
They move onwards, into the cool, dark church. As Olivia’s eyes grow accustomed to the light, she sees that even in here, there are people standing at the back and along the sides, because every pew is packed. The air is heavy with the scent of flowers from the garden at Taigh Mor.
As they move down the aisle, she sees Carl rise and nod at them, and she recognises the pretty girl sitting next to him and Betsy as Agnes Stoogley. And around them are other men representing the Merchant Navy – crew and officers that Jack has worked with, proudly wearing their Merchant Navy badges on their jackets. There is Julia, lifting her hand in a brief wave, and Maggie, her face painted, her lips red as the rowan berries, a new man on her arm. Next to her is Gladys, holding her pregnant belly protectively, William’s arm around her shoulder. They are almost at the front. Olivia recognises Ned, the young observer who was captured at the same time as Charlie. He has fattened up now. In the pew next to him and behind him are numerous men of the Fleet Air Arm and the Navy, a sea of naval uniform, gold braid, and polished buttons.
And there, on one side at the front, are her parents – her father older and more drawn than she remembers, her mother apologetic, eyes searching for hers – and her older sisters, Amelia and Grace, all of them virtual strangers to Olivia after so much time apart. And finally, on the other side, there is Aunt Nancy again, with space next to her for Olivia and for Alfie and Jack, her eyes filled with a sadness for the man she thought of as her child. Olivia kisses the older woman on both cheeks and threads their arms together as they sit down. She understands only too well that bleak chasm in Aunt Nancy’s soul. On her other side, she grips Alfie’s hand more tightly as he settles between her and Jack, his little feet swinging, a solemn look on his round face. Jack glances across at her over Alfie’s blond head and smiles his reassurance before taking hold of the boy’s other hand as the vicar clears his throat and starts to speak.
Afterwards, a Royal Navy bugler sounds the last post in the graveyard, while Alfie roams down to the river with wee Gus. The boys play among the thorny clumps of gorse, throwing stones into the river. No one cares that their best clothes are getting dirty.
Aunt Nancy grips Olivia’s hand. ‘Are you going to come back to the house for food and drink?’
‘Of course,’ says Olivia, squeezing back.
She walks over to her parents. Her mother is wringing her hands, her father is resplendent in his captain’s uniform. ‘Father, this is Jack.’
He nods and sticks out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Are you coming home?’ says her mother.
And Olivia thinks about the years that have passed. The ships and the Wrens, the bombs and the wrecks, the drinks and the parties, the weddings and the funerals, the loch and the ships, the loch before the ships, the touch of a man’s hand.
She leans against Jack’s shoulder. ‘We’re going to make our own home,’ she says.
Before she joins the reception at Taigh Mor, Olivia goes for a walk on her own – not to the bothy, but up into the hills behind. She leaves her shoes, relishing the feel of heather and rock beneath her feet. She passes the rowan pool where she spent so much time with Jack. She dips her toes into the icy water, sees their pale shape distorting against the stones. Then she continues to climb, past the rock that she scrambled out on to when Mac’s sheep got stuck. Past the outcrop where she first saw Hans. She climbs until she reaches the warm, flat rocks and the cairn she built to her baby. Now she stops and turns to survey the world beneath her. The sky is empty of planes. The loch is empty of ships. The world is as it should be. It is such a gloriously clear day that she can see everything. She can see the bothy, white against the Scots pines, the rickety boat that she fished in with Jack, the crescent of sand where she swam with Charlie. She crouches down, reaching out to touch the stiff roots of heather, breathing the smell of the earth deep into her heart; the mixture of peat and bog myrtle, crushed beneath her feet as she climbed. She spreads her fingers across the rocks, feels the heat of the sun in their ancient roughness. Then, from her pocket she pulls the dried primrose from Otto, and she places it carefully beneath the cairn.
She stays there for a while, where she feels as close to her lost baby and her lost friend as she is to the living. As she turns to walk down the hill, she sees the same red deer stag with the scarred flank and the majestic antlers. They stare at each other for a moment, before it bounds away inland, towards the great expanse of undulating hills that make up the Highlands. Before her, the sun is a path of gold, illuminating the sea that she is about to cross with Jack. Above her, an eagle soars on the thermals; the whole world curves beneath it, and the sky is endless.
Historical Note
This book began with family stories, but grew into a fascination with not only the Arctic convoys but also the journey to adulthood in a time of crisis. My grandmother and her sisters, aged between nine and eighteen, were on holiday with their Aunt Nancy in Scotland when Neville Chamberlain declared that the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. Their father, a captain in the Royal Navy, sent word that they were to stay where they were rather than coming home, in case of a Nazi invasion. Aunt Nancy returned to London, and the five girls were left alone – something that many other young girls might have found frightening, but not the FitzRoy sisters.
I always took the story of my great-grandfather surprising them in their Scottish idyll when he arrived for tea in his minesweeper sloop (and later entertained his bored daughters with a tour of the guns) with a pinch of salt, thinking that it was a myth shrouded in the fog of time. But of course, when I eventually looked into it, the truth was far more astounding. For ironically, that safe haven became Port A, a secret naval base for Royal Navy and then Merchant Navy ships to refuel and assemble in. Sometimes the loch was so full of ships that locals said you could have walked from one side to the other across them.
Winston Churchill was not wrong when he described the Arctic convoys as ‘the worst journey in the world’. They suffered comparatively more losses than any other Allied convoy, the majority of those merchant ships. In fact, the Merchant Navy lost proportionally more men than any of our armed forces during the Second World War. The youngest of these were children – a boy rating would typically be fourteen or fifteen years old, and inevitably some were even younger. The older of my aunts were teenagers then too, and I started to imagine what it might be like to have your formative years defined by war.
While the characters in this novel – and their ships and squadrons – are entirely fictitious, the historical events are as accurate as possible, with the odd alteration that I will try to list below.
The first Arctic convoy, Operation Dervish, left from Liverpool in August 1941, but none of its ships stopped at Loch Ewe on the way home. Although nineteen of the seventy-eight Arctic convoys left from the loch, the infamous PQ17 – described by Winston Churchill as ‘one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war’ – did not, but I have taken the liberty of allowing Jack’s ship to refuel there on its way to assemble in Iceland.
The false alarm that sounded across London on 3 September 1939 came minutes after Neville Chamberlain’s radio broadcast. Here, I have imagined it a few hours later.
The German submarine U-39, which fired torpedoes at HMS Ark Royal on 14 September 1939, did so as the carrier launched her Blackburn Skuas in response to a distress call from the merchant ship SS Fanad Head. I have delayed the U-boat’s attack so that Charlie’s Fairey Swordfish can display one of the things it was best at – spotting U-boats – on his return. It is true that Swordfish went to assist the Fanad Head, and also true that U-39 was the first U-boat of the Second World War to be sunk, giving up the first German prisoners-of-war the same day.
There was no aircraft carrier at Scapa Flow the night that HMS Royal Oak was sunk – although aircraft carriers did anchor there. The Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Charles Forbes, had ordered many of the ships to disperse, as there were rumours of an attack, so the anchorage was relatively empty.
There is no record of an aircraft carrier coming into Loch Ewe in the summer of 1940, but Ark Royal was deployed from Scapa Flow, so she was in the area.
Charlie’s aircraft carrier is an amalgamation of carriers, and its various captains are not meant to represent any real people. There was no Squadron 858 of the FAA, and none that saw such service as Charlie’s, although Squadron 825 drew pretty close, having operated in the Norwegian campaign, the sinking of the Bismarck, the Channel Dash, and on Arctic convoys.
The Norwegian campaign in spring 1940 saw the first airborne torpedo attack of the Second World War, launched by Fairey Swordfish from HMS Furious, and those ancient bi-planes saw a lot of action at this time, on reconnaissance, attack and anti-submarine patrols, but there are no reports of a mistaken attack. Lieutenant Commander Bob Selley RNR (Retired) told me how he was once sent up to spot in appalling Arctic weather. When his engine cut out, Bob had to jettison his flares and depth charges (unarmed) to save weight, lighting up the convoy as he did so – because the weather was so bad he had been unable to pull away from the carrier. His captain gave him a dressing-down for giving away their position, but Bob was simply relieved to have landed safely (the wind had got the propeller going again before landing).
In May 1941, Fairey Swordfish did indeed make a crucial contribution to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck after a torpedo damaged the ship’s steering gear. Remarkably, no planes and no crew were injured, unlike Charlie.
There is no bothy down by the loch in the grounds of Inverewe house, where Taigh Mor is based, and nor did the owners of Inverewe have anything to do with intelligence, as far as I know. However, Pool House, just up the road in Poolewe, was requisitioned by the armed forces and used by the RN as a headquarters of Russian Arctic and North Atlantic convoys from Loch Ewe. It was also here that Lord Rowallan – CO of the Highland Fieldcraft Training Centre – was based. My grandmother’s older sisters stayed in the cottage that can still be seen today by the gates to the National Trust’s Inverewe Gardens. The two youngest girls stayed in little more than a gardener’s shed with two beds in it, behind that gate lodge.
The SOE did recruit ex-FANYs of the First World War for roles in intelligence, including communications, and there were training centres up in Scotland, although none at Loch Ewe. The SOE Norwegian Naval Independent Unit operated the Shetland Bus from Orkney and Shetland, running agents in and out of Norway and ferrying supplies, usually on boats crewed by local men with sound knowledge of the waters.
Winston Churchill visited HMS Ark Royal and other ships of the Home Fleet when they refuelled at Loch Ewe in mid-September. This was before the sinking of the HMS Royal Oak, but I have made it afterwards.
There are no recorded sightings of German aircraft over Loch Ewe until 1941 – here I have them earlier. The Germans clearly knew about the base, as they mined HMS Nelson in December 1939 at the mouth of the loch, so it is not inconceivable that they would have sent reconnaissance planes. An empty lifeboat was found in 1941. In 1944 a Junkers 88 crashed on the Scoraig peninsula. Three of the crew died at sea, but the Unteroffizier survived and made his way to the only house for miles. The story goes that none of the women at home spoke German, and the officer spoke no English, so they communicated in Latin. As far as I know, none of my aunts ever found an airman hiding in the stables.
