I must have slept, for the next thing I knew was the shrill note of the bo’s’n’s pipe echoing over the main broadcast followed by a metallic voice declaring the start of another day: ‘Call the hands, call the hands, call the hands.’ It was 06.30 and since the movement had become a jerky roll and an occasional shivering crash for’ard, I guessed we had now cleared the western tip of Sicily with the full fetch of the Tyrrhenian Sea on our starb’d beam. The cabin door lurched back and Petty Officer Jarvis entered balancing a cup with a saucer on top of it. ‘Captain’s compliments, sir, and would you join him for breakfast as soon as you’re ready.’
The tea was dark, strong and very sweet. I drank it quickly, then staggered along the passageway to the heads. It took me some time to shave and dress because of the unpredictability of the ship’s movement, so that by the time I reached the Captain’s day cabin he had finished his meal and was seated at the desk reading through a clipboard of signals with the Yeoman standing by. ‘Sleep well?’ It was a perfunctory query, his mind concentrated on the sheets in his hand, his face drawn and tense, dark shadows under his eyes. After a while he said, ‘Very good, Yeo. Better send it now. They’ll need to have all the details.’ And then he turned to me. ‘The BBC had it on the six o’clock news and it was also referred to in the round-up of the day’s papers.
I had finished breakfast and was having a final cup of coffee when he suddenly stood up and reached for his cap. ‘Care to come round the ship with me?’
I followed him out into the passageway and down the ladder. For that moment we were alone, the first opportunity I had to ask him if he knew why he’d been despatched to Mahon in such haste.
He looked at me, tight-lipped, ‘I seem to remember I told you, last night. I shouldn’t have done, but I did.’ And he added, ‘I wasn’t quite myself, a bit tensed-up.’
‘You told me you’d had orders to leave, and you mentioned 10 Downing Street. But nothing else.’
‘That’s it — orders.’
‘But why?’
He stopped then. ‘This is the Navy, Mike. Politicians make the decisions, we carry out the orders.’
‘But you must have some idea of the reasons for those orders.’
‘Some idea, yes.’ He said it slowly, hesitantly. ‘The rest I’m having to guess at.’ He started down the next ladder to the deck below. It was then that I passed on to him what Jarvis had said about the mood on the mess decks. He turned on me. ‘I know about that. It can’t be helped.’ And when I persisted, suggesting that some hint of the reason for the orders he had received would make his men, and myself, a good deal happier, he gripped hold of my arm and said angrily, ‘Leave it at that, will you. I’m pleased to have you on board, but don’t ask questions.’
He went on ahead then, down a long passageway to the sick bay, where we found Kent pale but cheerful, sitting up bare-chested and heavily bandaged. ‘Pity we’ve no helicopter,’ Gareth told him. ‘But another twenty-four hours and we’ll either have a Spanish surgeon here on board to get that bullet out or we’ll fly you home.’
‘I’d rather have it out on board, sir.’ But as we left him there were beads of perspiration forming on his forehead, his skin very white. Gareth said to me quietly, ‘Good man, that. He’ll leave a gap I’ll have great difficulty in filling.’ And he added, ‘If we’d had a helicopter, we could have flown him ashore from here.’
The tour of inspection took in three decks and lasted just over half an hour, and all the time Gareth was making an effort to imprint his personality on the officers and men he talked to and play down what had happened at the wharf in Malta. Finally we reached the flight deck, going through the hangar to look down on to the quarterdeck below where the white of our seething wake and the roar of water boiling up from the twin screws made it almost impossible to talk. ‘What’s wrong with the helicopter — out of service?’ I shouted to him.
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been allocated one.’
‘So what do you keep in the hangar?’ I was curious because the shut steel doors had seals on the locks.
He didn’t answer that, looking at me sharply, then turning away. Later, talking to the Pilot on the bridge, I learned that those seals were inspected by the Captain or WEO personally mornings and evenings, that they each held a key to the doors and it required both of them present in person to unlock them.
