The Redeemed Read online

  For Hania

  ALSO BY TIM PEARS

  In the Place of Fallen Leaves

  In a Land of Plenty

  A Revolution of the Sun

  Wake Up

  Blenheim Orchard

  Landed

  Disputed Land

  In the Light of Morning

  THE WEST COUNTRY TRILOGY

  The Horseman

  The Wanderers

  CONTENTS

  Also by Tim Pears

  Principal Characters

  Part One The Battle 1916

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Two The Vet 1916–1917

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part Three The Scuttle 1916–1919

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Four Mother and Child 1919

  One

  Part Five Salvage 1919–1927

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Six The Grey Thoroughbred 1923–1926

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part Seven The Return 1927–1929

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Tim Pears

  ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

  I have called you by name, you are mine.

  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

  and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

  when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,

  and the flame shall not consume you’

  Isaiah, 43: 1–2

  Principal Characters

  Leopold (Leo) Sercombe

  Charlotte (Lottie) Prideaux

  The Battle:

  Willy Burd, stoker

  Jimmy White, boy seaman

  Lieutenant Pyne, ‘Y’ Turret officer

  Petty Officer Jeffers

  Sergeant Nutley

  The Vet:

  Patrick Jago, veterinary surgeon

  Herb Shattock, Lord Prideaux’s head groom

  Arthur, Lord Prideaux, Lottie’s father, owner of the estate

  Alice, Lady Prideaux, Arthur’s second wife

  Duncan, Lord Grenvil, Arthur Prideaux’s friend, Alice’s father

  Maud, Lady Grenvil, Duncan’s wife

  The Scuttle:

  Able Seaman Victor Harris

  Jamie Watt, Orcadian boy horseman

  The Salvage:

  Ernest Cox, entrepreneur

  Tom McKenzie, Bill Peterson, Sinclair MacKenzie, divers

  The Grey Thoroughbred:

  Muriel Furst, Lottie’s fellow student

  The Return:

  Wally Luscombe, farmer

  Agnes, Ethel and Myrtle, his daughters

  William Carew, ex-estate manager, war veteran

  Helena Carew, William’s sister

  Gladys Whittle, née Sercombe, cousin of Leo, housekeeper at the big house

  Sidney Sercombe, Leo’s brother, head keeper on the estate

  Gracie, Sid’s wife, and their children Stanley and Elsie

  Levi Hicks, gypsy horse dealer

  Part One

  THE BATTLE 1916

  1

  6 a.m., Monday 29 May 1916

  His Majesty’s Ship Queen Mary was a coal-firing battlecruiser. When, every few months, she ran low on coal, she required a delivery of three thousand tons. Today was such a day. The crew were woken early. Leo Sercombe and the other boys smeared their eyelids and eyelashes with margarine or Vaseline, and poked it up their nostrils.

  When Leo was a child he thought his father a hard taskmaster. Albert Sercombe ruled the stables with a rod of iron and the men who worked the horses bent to his will. But there were only four of them. On this battlecruiser well over a thousand men and boys were crowded. There were endless rules, discipline was rigid and strictly enforced. It was unbearably oppressive until you accepted it.

  Yet coaling days were different. It was like no other drill or job. All hands were piped ‘clean into coaling rig’ and could wear what they liked. Men attired themselves in overalls, dinner jackets, plus fours. One officer was kitted out in his red hunting jacket, jodhpurs and riding boots. What had ever made him consider these worth bringing on board, Leo could not fathom. Perhaps he wanted to be reminded of horses. One old seaman wore a dress. On their heads perched equally odd coverings: a topper, a turban, berets, bandanas, three-cornered tricornes. Everyone on board took part, excepting only the captain, the medics and the paymaster. Even the schoolies and the chaplain had to join in. It was like a party. Except the participants did not dance. They worked.

  The collier ship was made secure alongside. Four gangs from HMS Queen Mary were allocated to each hold. A gang was made up of four men and one boy, one gang to each corner. They scrambled down onto the collier. As a boy seaman, Leo did not shovel coal. He was not yet strong enough. Instead he held a bag for the men, who in their haste to fill it thwacked his knuckles. Each bag when full weighed two hundredweight. Ten bags thus made up a one-ton hoist. The hoists were swung to the decks of the Queen Mary by derricks.

  On the decks of the ship each bag was transferred from the hoist to a barrow, wheeled to a chute and emptied. At the bottom of the chute Willy Burd and the other stokers loaded coal into the bunkers.

  As the derrick came back round to the hold of the collier, if the next ten bags were not ready for the hoist the other gangs let that corner have it.

  It was back-breaking work with barely a pause, for the gangs were in competition with each other. A fanny or jug of lime juice was passed around. Leo blew the coal-dust scum away from the surface and drank. There was a thirty-minute break for lunch: two slabs of bread with bacon or cheese washed down with a basin of tea. Then the men lay down on the decks, eyes closed, till they were piped back to work.

  Every hour, signal flags were hoisted at the yard arms, indicating how many tons of coal had been stowed during the previous hour. Today, the whole squadron was coaling together, across the Firth of Forth, so that competition was all the more intense, between as well as within ships. Vast clouds of filthy black powder rose from the holds and from the ship’s bunkers, settling everywhere. The Royal Marine Band, perched precariously on top of the centre gun turret, played ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’, ‘Drunken Sailor’ and other sea shanties, with soot rising around them and their instruments, until they all resembled coloured minstrels from the music halls.

  The air was thick with suffocating dust. Leo could not imagine what it was like for Willy down in the bunkers. By six o’clock in the evening these were filled. All hands now turned to washing down the ship from truck to keel. A tug steamed slowly around the vessel, washing down the upper works with high-pressure hoses.

  When the Queen Mary was clean the hands could go below to wash themselves and their clothes. There were no showers. Boys were given one bucket of cold water between four of them. Afterwards coal dust stuck for days to those who’d smeared their eyebrows and eyelashes with Vaseline, and they looked to Leo
like some odd species of owl.

  2

  9 a.m., Tuesday 30 May

  The ship lay at anchor in the Firth of Forth. On the day following the coaling, after morning division, HMS Queen Mary was prepared for gymnastics. Older men, those over thirty-five, were excused, and instead kept busy rigging different sets of apparatus across the upper deck of the battlecruiser for their younger colleagues. All the other hands fell out and made their way, by divisions, to different exercise stations. The bugler played a G note, and gymnastics began. Leo Sercombe’s division climbed onto the roof of the casemate for the four-inch guns, on the forecastle deck. On its port side a horizontal climbing rope had been erected, from hooks screwed into metal stanchions. The boys took turns wriggling along it.

  The night had been cool but the sun was rising bright and burned off the last of the mist that clung to the water. Battlecruisers and other ships lay at anchor all up and down the Firth, placid as rocky outcrops in the unruffled tide. When the bugler played a G note again the boys’ division climbed down to the deck and, one after another, jumped over the horse. Then they moved round the bows to the tug-of-war, and on to the trapeze, to parallel bars, to Swedish drill, shifting around the ship each time the bugler played the note.

  Leo spent the afternoon on a wooden platform slung by ropes over the side, painting the upper hull. Seawater corrosion meant that hands were continually redecorating their ship. Chipping away flaking grey paint, sanding the surface, applying a fresh coat. One part or another always stank of fresh linseed and turpentine.

  Now and again Leo glanced behind him at the leisurely pace of activity across the estuary. A collier cast off from a destroyer depot-ship. Picket boats traced overlapping lines between cruisers and shore as if weaving some intricate watery thread. A tug chugged upstream towing a line of barges, only the smoke belching from its squat funnel indicating the strain it was under. An oiler berthed beside one of the new battleships that had oil-fired engines. Long tubes connected the two vessels. Pumps began to inject the fuel into the great ship as if with a fresh infusion of blood.

  It was almost 6 p.m. Some of the officers were yet to return from an afternoon ashore, in Rosyth or Edinburgh. Leo cleaned his paintbrushes in white spirit. Jimmy White was polishing brasses. His hands were black and his face too for he was forever scratching a tickle or wiping off sweat. Leo gazed periodically out over the starboard side, to Queensferry, and beyond, where the vague bluish shapes of the Pentland Hills rose in the far distance. Jimmy must have noticed for he said, ‘Ain’t you never goin to get used to bein a seaman? You looks like a maid peekin at the land like ’er lover boy’s over there.’

  Leo smiled and turned back to his brushes. ‘I like the lie of it,’ he said. ‘Can you not imagine ridin up into they hills?’

  Jimmy did not reply to this but said instead, ‘Aye, aye. Here we go.’ The boy turned and looked up and watched as a long string of flags was hoisted from the masthead of the Lion. Activity around him on the lower deck ceased as others noticed too. When the string settled, Jimmy said, ‘Raise steam for twenty-two knots. Bank fires at half an hour’s notice. Looks like we’re off on another bloody exercise, mate.’

  A bugle call augmented the flags. It was played aboard the Queen Mary. With ships anchored beyond Rosyth up as far as Charlestown, Leo now heard the faint echoing notes of their bugles, like Canada geese calling to each other across the estuary.

  Leo and the other painters stowed their equipment. The crew formed in divisions on deck. Leo’s job while raising steam was in the team weighing anchor. Other seamen in his division hoisted a boat inboard. There was no frantic commotion. Each officer and hand knew his role, having performed it many times. Watertight compartments were closed, gangways raised. Men uncovered the guns and the searchlights. Jimmy’s job was passing slip-wires at the buoys.

  Down below, the stokers got busy at the boilers. Smoke rose from the funnels. Leo’s pal Willy Burd was a stoker. He was two years older than Leo, four inches shorter but twice as strong, all muscle. One of five hundred stokers to power the battlecruiser’s coal-fired engines, Willy had trained in the Portsmouth Naval Barracks, shovelling stones instead of coal into disused boilers. Leo himself had undergone basic drills in the bunkers and stokehold, as every boy had to do, and he had no intention of going down there when he was fully grown.

  Yet his friend, inexplicably, loved the arduous labour. There were two classes of stoker. Willy was second class and a trimmer, or lumper, running the coal in a wheelbarrow from the bunkers to the boiler rooms. The first-class stokers were firemen, who either hurled coal into the furnace or, wielding nine-foot-long pokers, shook and broke up the mass of clinker while a colleague held a shovel in front of the furnace door to protect the fireman’s face from the heat. The temperature in the boiler room, furnaces roaring, reached a hundred and fifty degrees. The firemen sprayed fuel oil on the coal to increase its burn rate. The fire bed flamed to a white heat. They wore blue-tinted glasses, and were scalded frequently.

  The ship had forty-two boilers, arranged in seven boiler rooms, to drive her huge steam turbines. Willy was proud of these engines and informed Leo that they were capable of seventy-five thousand horsepower, to overcome the vast inertia of their massive battlecruiser and then to drive her through the water. ‘That means the strength of seventy-five thousand horses. Not little ponies either,’ he’d told Leo. ‘Your gurt big carthorses, boy.’

  Leo was in the starboard anchor team. Each huge anchor weighed ten tons, and was winched into the anchor bay by a capstan engine, the great chain links clinking together and crunching tight.

  Three hours after the flags had been hoisted, the fleet moved through the Firth of Forth at dusk: six battlecruisers and four of the mighty dreadnoughts. Leo had never been aboard one but Jimmy White told him they carried crews of three thousand men. It was hard to imagine.

  There was one seaplane carrier, and all the light cruisers and destroyers. Four thousand yards’ distance was kept between the rear ship of one squadron and the leading ship of the next. They sailed under the bridge and past Edinburgh and Leith on their starboard beam. Though the engines hummed and throbbed, Leo had grown so used to the sound that it was as if the fleets sailed silently out onto the ocean with the only noise the swish of the waves. He could feel the churning of the screws, a vibration all through the ship’s thirty thousand tons as she gathered way. Ahead of them the minesweepers cleared a safe passage, as they set off on this the latest of their customary sweeps of the North Sea.

  Willy would be sweating down below but Leo was still in the anchor bay shivering with cold, for in case of emergency the anchors had to be kept ready for letting go until the ship was clear of harbour. Finally, the order was given and they cranked the anchor home into its hawse-pipe. The chain was hove taut and secured, and Leo and the rest of his crew climbed up from the bay.

  3

  1 a.m., Wednesday 31 May

  The mess-decks never lost the odour of unappetising food slowly cooking. The ventilation system, from whose fan motors came a faint perpetual hum, issued forth stale air. On winter nights coal stoves were lit and the crew slung their hammocks, hung snugly together. Men learned to sleep on their backs. The atmosphere became dense and suffocating, thick with condensation, which sweated on the casings and dripped onto the bodies of the snoring men.

  Summer was now upon them. Leo was one of the first to request to sleep outside, in the open air. Hooks had been inserted all over the casings for this purpose. There were two cats on board the ship. The older one, a big black beast they called Billy Bones, ignored Leo, but the younger one, Jane Hawkins, sought him out. She sprang into his hammock and curled up on his belly. Leo scratched her behind the ears, and she purred her approval.

  Leo had kept a space beside him, and when Willy’s night shift was done his friend climbed up from below and came outside.

  ‘Still awake?’ he whispered.

  ‘Aye,’ Leo said. The cat raised itself up, annoye
d at this intrusion, and jumped down from the hammock.

  ‘Off to catch herself a rat,’ Leo said. He asked Willy whether he had noticed anything different down below.

  ‘Coal’s the same colour as it usually is, if that’s what you’re askin,’ Willy said.

  Leo said he thought he’d detected a certain nervousness in one or two officers. Like they had been told something the men had not, and were trying to hide it. Willy said this was wishful thinking. Leo was an optimist and a dreamer. This voyage was just another flap. Another stunt. Down in the lower holds where the likes of Leo never went it felt the same as ever. Leo should not get his hopes up.

  ‘I don’t hope for nothin.’

  ‘Don’t you want action? All you gunners do. Everyone up above does.’

  ‘I ain’t everyone.’

  They lay in their hammocks. There were a few others sleeping out, scattered across the deck, some snoring. After a while Willy, speaking quietly so as not to disturb them, asked Leo what his friend did want.

  ‘I’ve got a mind to apply to be a diver,’ Leo said. ‘I liked goin underwater when I was a boy, and I reckon I could work down there.’

  Willy did not reply at first. Perhaps he was trying to imagine what it was like beneath the surface of the ocean. Then he said, ‘Not for me, mate. Down in the bunkers we’re already workin below the waterline. A single torpedo in the wrong spot’ll do for us. We’re close enough to water where we are. I don’t want to get no closer.’

  They lay in their hammocks, the sky open above them, black and sparkling with pinpricks of light.

  ‘I was speculatin,’ Leo said. ‘There’s lads in the trenches a northern France lookin up at these same stars tonight. My brother Sid, a gamekeeper on the estate I grew up on … if he ain’t been called up he might be out trampin the woods, and pausin to contemplate ’em too.’ He studied the stars himself. ‘There’s a girl back there who could be standin on the roof of her house right now, gazin on the same sky.’

  Willy said his mother’s latest letter informed him that two more lads from their street in Bristol had gone missing in action in Flanders, presumed dead. She wrote of how glad she was that he’d joined the Royal Navy.