The Redeemed Read online

  Leo agreed they’d made a wise choice. The only worry he had was about once their service was over – how they’d adjust to life on dry land.

  ‘We’ll relish it,’ Willy said, yawning. ‘Don’t you worry about that, mate. We’ll relish it for the rest of our lives.’

  Leo pondered this welcome prospect. But another misgiving arose. ‘I fears I’ll have forgot which end of a horse is which,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the oddest mixture of a man I’ve come across,’ Willy told him. ‘Tomorrow you’re not bothered about, but you worry over what might come to pass in ten years’ time.’

  Leo smiled to himself. ‘And you, Willy,’ he said. ‘What’ll you be good for? A stoker on a train?’

  Leo waited for a reply, but when it came it was not in words but snores instead. He closed his eyes. Even soothed by the motion of the big ship, he found it difficult to get to sleep. He could not say why he was nervous. He was sixteen years old, and he was one of thirty-four boy seamen on HMS Queen Mary. The full crew of officers, men and boys numbered one thousand two hundred and eighty-six. Numbers placated his unsettled nerves. He ran the other ranks on board through his mind. There were thirteen midshipmen. Three surgeons. Thirty-three petty officers. One chaplain, the loneliest man on board. One sailmaker, a remnant, in this age of steam. Five signal boys. One plumber and two plumber’s mates. Leo’s anxiety eased. The numbers made him drowsy. One cooper. Two blacksmiths. But no horses. Two blacksmith’s mates. This ship was no place for horses. Only for cooks and stewards. And musicians. There were a dozen band members, plus the two buglers …

  The boy slept.

  4

  7 a.m., Wednesday 31 May

  On the huge vessel pounding across the sea the day dawned grey and cold. After Leo had lashed and stowed his hammock, the boy made his way to the upper deck, trousers turned up to the knees, bare-chested. Jostling with other boys, he washed at one of the large water butts, then presented himself for inspection. The petty officer passed him and Leo went down to the mess-deck and poured himself a basin of thick hot cocoa from the kettle and took a biscuit. He consumed these while standing.

  Back up, Leo joined a line of boys strung across a deck, armed with long-handled scrubbers. Water was hosed over the boards and the leading seaman yelled, ‘Scrub forward. Scrub aft,’ and so they worked in rhythm. Then they mopped up the water and dried the deck and finally went down to breakfast. Leo was hungry, as they all were, the more so now that they were at sea. The others wolfed their food, but Leo ate his porridge methodically, and drank sweet tea. As his fellow eaters rose from the table, others squeezed into their places on the bench. They smelled of damp serge and mothballs. Leo spread his cube of margarine on a half loaf, and ate it patiently.

  ‘Come on, bumpkin boy,’ someone said. ‘You goin to chew the cud all fuckin day?’

  Leo swallowed his last mouthful of tea. He rose and, with one hand on the shoulder of the boy to either side of him, levered himself up and swung his legs out behind the bench. There were clocks all over the ship, a recent innovation older hands insisted there was no need for. Leo changed into his duck suit, pulled a jersey over it, and at 8 a.m. fell in on deck. He was sent back to the mess with Jimmy White to scrub out and prepare breakfast for the next batch of seamen. At 9 a.m. he fell in at divisions on the upper deck amongst the men of his turret. They stood facing inward. Between funnels and casings Leo glimpsed divisions of stokers on the starboard side, and caught sight of Willy Burd amongst them.

  Lieutenant Pyne inspected Leo’s division for cleanliness in dress and person. The drum and fife band were on the far side of the turrets amidships, between the funnels. The brass band were on the near side and they struck up. All the men, the entire crew, turned to their left and began to trot around the ship. Leo skipped over hatches, slid down ladders. If you forgot how big your ship was, the exercise reminded you. It was like running around a one-and-a-half-acre field, strewn with obstacles. The band played with quickening tempo, and the runners increased their speed, leaping over obstacles ever faster until they were sprinting and knocking into each other and the music reached a crescendo. Then it ceased abruptly. All crew fell in, panting and sweating.

  Petty Officer Jeffers called his turret crew to attention, then ordered them to stand at ease, and they were able to get their breath back. The PO stood with his legs apart, shining boots planted on the deck, and in his deep booming voice detailed hands for instruction or for work. Rifle drill signals, rope-splicing practice. Messenger and call boy duties. Leo was the last named.

  ‘Sercombe, accompany me to inspect the turret.’

  Theirs was ‘Y’ Turret, towards the stern of the ship, and they made their way there. PO Jeffers strode straight-backed across the swaying deck as if marching on a solid, flat parade ground. Leo tried to match his regular stride and could not for with each step he had to compensate for the motion of the vessel. Yet on dry land Petty Officer Jeffers was one of those seamen who walked with a rolling gait. None of the boys imagined they would ever do likewise, but if they stayed in the Navy long enough most surely would.

  They inspected the turret from bottom to top. Down in the shell room they counted the ammunition stocks. They made sure the ready-racks had been refilled. Up in the gun room the PO studied the log to make sure the guns had been sponged out and greased. He enumerated each object he assessed, whether reminding himself or to educate the boy Leo was not sure. Perhaps both. Leo listened anyhow and nodded. ‘Spare lengths of flexible piping,’ the PO said, his basso voice resounding around the gun room. ‘Urinal buckets. First-aid dressings, plenty of ’em. Biscuits and corned beef … good. Drinking tank.’

  When they had finished, Leo requested permission to speak. He asked the PO if he thought this was just another exercise.

  Petty Officer Jeffers frowned. Planting his feet apart he said, ‘Who do you think I am, boy? The captain? They’ll tell us when they reckon we need to know.’

  The sun came out and shone across the wide, deep sea. Hands were given a make and mend. Leo went to the dry canteen and bought cigarettes for Willy Burd and climbed up and dossed down on the quarterdeck. There Willy found him, after he had been released from the stoking rota. Leo gave him the cigarettes. Willy handed over the money, and thanked Leo for saving him time, and lit one. Leo did not join him. He did not imagine the pleasure derived from smoking would merit the punishment should a boy not yet eighteen be caught. Cells for three days on low diet, bread and water.

  They looked out from the quarterdeck. The wind beat on the grey metal around them as the ship ploughed through the leaden-tinted ocean.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Leo asked. ‘Twenty knots?’

  ‘Nineteen,’ Willy said.

  They could see the Lion and the Princess Royal, other battlecruisers, ahead of them. Behind were the Tiger and New Zealand, and further back the four battleships.

  ‘You know, p’raps you was right,’ Willy said. ‘One a the lads below reckons he overheard an officer say the Grand Fleet itself is a few miles right behind us, steamin out a Scapa.’ He took a final drag of his cigarette and threw the dog-end in the spit-kid.

  The Queen Mary was as steady as a log in a placid stream as she forged on in Princess Royal’s broad, white wake. Willy said that it was a lovely old day, a fine day for a battle, perhaps today would be Der Tag after all. Jimmy White joined them at that moment, having just done the dog watch. He told Willy that there was no chance. This was just another sweep and they would find nothing, for the Huns were like rabbits in their warrens inside the port of Wilhelmshaven.

  ‘The only craft they’ve guts enough to send out’s them fuckin U-boats,’ he said. ‘Or they sneak out for a quick raid on our coast, chuck a few shells at Hartlepool or Scarborough, maim a poor civilian. The only thing they’re bold enough to meet us with is mines.’

  Leo watched the two battlecruisers ahead, and light cruisers and destroyers that steamed ahead and either side of them like eager guard dogs arou
nd a flock of regal sheep. You grew up in a crooked valley in the West Country, nestled between the moor and the Quantock Hills, and you could not imagine how vast the sea was. How bare. That you could look all around these broad vistas and see only an empty horizon. Yet a battlecruiser steamed across the ocean with over a thousand men on board, confined in a kind of floating hotel, indeed, as Rufus Devereaux, the hermit tramp who’d shared his woodland glade with Leo, had called it.

  Leo looked up. Occasionally, he saw gannets fly over, in one direction or another, no land in sight. And there were smaller birds, too, with black heads like plastered-down wigs, and red beaks. Arctic terns. Willy called them sea swallows and it was true they swooped through the air with great elegance. Their migration was a phenomenon. Not just their infallible compass, but their single-minded intention.

  A rumour was passed along that someone had spotted a Zeppelin, high up in the sky above them, but Leo and Willy and Jimmy all peered and could not see it.

  ‘I been on polishin all this week,’ Jimmy said. ‘You can ask Leo. I’ve polished portholes. Fire-hose nozzles. Brass dogs and bollards … and don’t even get me started on the fuckin ward rooms. Can you smell the ammonia on me? I can smell it. Can’t get it out a my nostrils.’

  Now that he mentioned it, Willy said, grimacing, he too could detect Jimmy’s perfume, and he shifted himself away.

  Leo smiled. He and Jimmy White had trained together at Devonport. Months learning how to heave the lead, steer a boat, knot ropes. Explosives, fire control, heavy gun drill. Most of their cohort were now scattered across the fleets. They were Boy Seamen Second Class.

  Jimmy said that last night’s stewed corned beef was coated with cinders. ‘Just my luck to be on one a the last coal-fired ships. I bet the oil-fired engines don’t coat every fuckin thing with cinders.’

  Willy asked Jimmy if he was trying to put him out of a job. Leo suspected that Willy had first attached himself to them because he found Jimmy’s endless grizzle of complaint amusing, before he became Leo’s best pal. ‘Just because the stokers beat your gunners at the miniature rifle shootin,’ Willy said. ‘I heard the captain’s considerin swappin us round. Get your lot down in the coal bunkers and us lot up in them lovely clean turrets, seein as we’re better bloody shots.’

  Jimmy scowled, lost for words for a moment. Then he said, ‘Somethin wrong with the bloody rifles, there was, everyone knows that. Anyways, at least a gunnery crew won the cricket.’

  Willy laughed out loud, so trivial was the boast.

  Not all the upper-deck recreations were competitive. Leo’s favourite was roller skating, up on the fore-deck. Neither Willy nor Jimmy could see the point in it. Some men liked to skate in pairs. Leo preferred skating alone. Places were also told off for boxing and wrestling. Two weeks earlier they’d had an inter-ship assault-at-arms with the Princess Royal. All of Queen Mary’s weight classes were represented by stokers.

  Willy Burd asked Jimmy White if he knew that Leo was of a mind to train as a diver. Jimmy said, ‘He’s got a screw loose, don’t he? Goin down in the drink when he don’t have to?’

  Willy admitted that in this case Jimmy had a point, he was obliged to agree.

  They lay in the sun and dozed. The bosun’s mate came out and called, ‘Hands to tea.’ The trio rose from the deck and joined the crowd making their way below. ‘You know, I thought I might see summat a the world if I joined the Navy,’ Jimmy said. ‘And all I’ve seen is the North fuckin Sea.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have joined just before a war,’ Willy said. He went further aft to find a less busy ladder.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ Leo called after him.

  ‘Not if I see you first, mate,’ Willy yelled back. He ducked through a hatch and disappeared.

  Jimmy said, ‘He’s been comin out with that line ever since we come aboard and he still thinks it’s funny.’

  Leo smiled. ‘It is.’

  ‘How do you figure that then?’

  ‘The more times he says it, the funnier it gets,’ Leo told him. ‘Don’t ask me how.’

  Jimmy White shook his head, with an expression upon his face meant perhaps to convey that it was his misfortune to have to indulge these immature lads, though he was one himself. Just then the bugles sounded off, with the call for ‘Action Stations’.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ve been lyin around all afternoon and they call an exercise action at teatime.’ He cast around him for a clock, and shook his head. ‘See? Bang on three-thirty.’

  Leo did not have time to tell Jimmy that a further note had sounded while he nattered. The extra note signified ‘At the Double’. Leo was already running. If Jimmy had not heard it himself he would realise soon enough that this was not an exercise. The ship was like an ants’ nest, suddenly, men dashing this way and that, some yanking jumpers on. They ran down to their shell rooms, or up to controls. Hands struck down mess stools and tables, and bedding in officers’ cabins, and other inflammable objects. Leo took the first hatchway back up from the mess-deck. Stokers were closing bulkheads and shutting watertight doors, and rigging hoses that could be left running on the upper deck to keep it wet. Above, extra white ensigns were hoisted at the mast and yards.

  Leo climbed a ladder to the fo’c’sle deck and came up the starboard side, and sprinted aft past the funnels, the lashed-down cutters and whalers and pinnaces, past the captain’s gig and the sixteen-foot dinghy below the torpedo control tower. There he shot down the ladder using his hands to slide.

  Hammocks were being put up. On some ships they were struck down as a fire precaution, but on HMS Queen Mary the captain preferred them slung, to check flying metal. Damage control and fire parties stood back out of the rush as they assembled at their meeting points, and were cursed whenever they got in someone’s way.

  Leo raced along the deck towards the stern, to ‘Y’ Turret. He swung himself up and inside through the hatch. Petty Officer Jeffers climbed in shortly behind him and shouted, ‘Turret’s crew, number!’

  Jeffers watched the men take their positions in the gun room. Gun layers, trainers and sight-setters stood at their stations by one or other of the two guns. Number ones stood at the loading-cage levers, facing the breeches. Number twos in line with their breeches, facing the muzzles. Number threes in front of number twos. Number fours at the sides, facing inwards to the breeches. The spare gun layer also had the job of recording the number of rounds fired.

  Boy Seaman Leo Sercombe was the only hand in the turret without a specific task. The boy was a general dogsbody. He would pass food or drink as required, bring the urinal bucket, empty it when necessary. He might be ordered to fetch something or, if the wireless packed up, run with a message. Now he stuck close to Petty Officer Jeffers.

  The second captain of turret and numbers five and six were beneath the gun room, in the working chamber. Further below were another petty officer and eighteen men in the magazine, and a similar number in the shell room right down at the bottom of the turret. The men there wore masks with goggles, respirators and anti-gas apparatus. The first time Leo had seen them, in the din of iron doors banging and machinery clanging, he was startled. They looked like demons. Fallen angels kept in chains under gloomy darkness.

  All were correct from top to bottom. PO Jeffers pulled the hatch shut and the crew was closed up. He went to the cabinet at the rear of the turret. Leo followed. It was sound-proofed so that the turret officer, Lieutenant Pyne, could hear as he spoke over his Navy phones to the control top and to the transmitting station below.

  Lieutenant Pyne had an air of simultaneous impatience and calm. He gave the impression that he resented being stuck in the cabinet and would much rather be in the gun room with his men. Leo saw that they liked him. He knew every one of their names and would ask a question out of the blue about their family, or say something that was peculiarly apt. The only words he had so far addressed directly to Leo were that what he missed most about being in the Navy was hunting. As if he knew of this b
oy seaman’s love of horses, the officer had described his favourite mount, a white hunter that he prayed had not been purloined for the French campaign but was still in its stable at home awaiting his return. Leo asked him what their countryside was like for riding and the lieutenant told him his home was in the Midlands, which was neither flat enough nor hilly enough. Which he supposed was also its saving grace.

  ‘Very good, PO,’ he said now. Behind Lieutenant Pyne stood his snotty, or midshipman, assistant. ‘Better get the hands to test the loading gear.’

  Once this was passed, men had a moment of peace in the gun room. Some had practices or superstitions of their own to be observed. The lieutenant unstrapped his watch and emptied his pockets. He reckoned that any unnecessary articles, that might complicate wounds, should be removed. One of the sight-setters placed his tobacco tin in the biscuit box. Sergeant Nutley wore a thin shirt whose arms he’d torn off at the shoulders, to allow him greater freedom of movement. He also had a hunting knife hanging by a lanyard from his neck, which he used for cutting the rope grommets that protected the driving bands on the projectiles.

  Leo could feel the increase in speed, the engines working harder far below them. Now and then the ship seemed to shiver or tremble. He did not imagine any of the others, busy with their tasks, noticed.

  Lieutenant Pyne stepped out of the cabinet and announced that he wished to say a word. The men in the gun room turned their attention towards him. The lieutenant said that they could expect to meet anything from a light cruiser to the biggest battleship of the High Seas Fleet, and that ‘Y’ Turret’s foremost duty was to get off the maximum number of rounds.

  ‘Let us hope that we shall imminently be permitted to do what we have trained to do, and hoped to do, for many months now,’ he said. His voice did not carry like the PO’s, so he shouted, that all the hands could hear him. ‘Every man on every battlecruiser in this fleet knows that the crack gunnery ship is this one. The Queen Mary. And the finest turret on the Queen Mary is this one. “Y”. I trust you will not miss a single salvo, gentlemen.’ He looked around the room, and smiled. ‘Not a single bloody one.’