Ronald Healiss - Arctic Rescue: A Memoir of the Tragic Sinking of HMS Glorious

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IT was just after dawn when Action Stations sounded, and it came like a kick in the navel. You see, I was in the middle of a lovely dream this same dream I never wanted to wake from, and which had warmed me in the private hours of the night all the way back from the Indian Ocean

Pegs sweet breath is on my lips, her fingers touching my cheeks, her eyes so very bright. With more force than I mean to use thats how it always is with me I pull her to me, clumsily shoving the little gunmetal ring into her hand as I grope for words to go with it words to last us maybe three years until we meet and touch and kiss again, and I am finished with the sweating seas and the stink of Aden and Alex.

Waking dreaming

Waking dreaming My heart is pounding, pounding until I wake to know it is keeping time with the syncopation of that bleating bugle, and it is not Pegs warm body but the heat of my own sweaty palms, nails clenched in, as the horn brays on: Action Stations . All hands to Action Stations

There are 115 men on our mess-deck, the ports are shut, the deadlights down, and it is fetid with the stink of night, a night now broken in a welter of swinging arms and legs, each of us rolling from our hammocks, gripping the cleats as we steady ourselves from sleep and gaze half fearfully one to the other in the dim yellow gleam of the deck lights.

Ginger McColl, the burly red-head, gunlayer on P.5, near me when he isnt flunking for Jimmie the One, thumps me but Im not asleep now.

Im still looking at that kid Thompson in the next hammock, the young Irisher with the features of a slim girl and eyes like green diamonds, who is muttering to himself:

Merciful Jaesus, Jaesus God

For Christs sake shut your prayers, yells Ginger, and get your bloody seaboots on. This is it. The wars started, sonny

Somewhere down there, among the flying mattresses and the bundles of clothes, lit with a crisscross pattern under the wire mesh of the deck lights, are my seaboot stockings, and I fight through the pile because Im not going out to that ruddy gun and catch my death of cold.

Jock Clark, the Padres flunk, catches my glance as he pushes his long, ape-like arms into his sweater, talking through the neck of it as he does so. Funny, isnt it, Tubby? Funny when it really starts, I mean.

Did you think Hitler was going to send us a postcard first?

No, but those Nazi perishers are grousing at having to start before breakfast, just like us. Me, Id feel better if I had a fannyful of kye.

For gods sake get that Mangaroo out, calls Bill Hutchings. Therell be hell if Sarge sees him; if Sarge is awake now

For one minute I, too, think the young Irisher is asleep in his hammock, but as I pull the blanket off the kid Thompson the one we call Mangaroo because of his angular, flaying legs like a young kangaroo he strikes out with a sullen: Leave me be. Im getting out.

And then I can see what he was doing tucking a crumpled photo in his belt. And I feel kind of ashamed.

Put a nick in it, kid, I say quietly. Weve got to get to that gun damn quick. If youre feeling like lumping projjies, that is.

Youve got a bigger belly for it, Tubby, he grins, with those wide diamond-green eyes, and I kick his rump to help him on his way off the mess-deck.

And then we all go stumbling and scuffling after him, Jerry Rotherby, the Surgeon-Commanders flunkey and my rammer-hand on the gun; Ginger Woollon; that big, gangling Taff Evanson; Mickie Bolan, the other Irisher in our gang, and all the other characters in this dim-lit, grey-steel posser world which has been the life of all the hundred-and-more Marines like me ever since Glorious was commissioned. And weve been half-way round the world with her; traipsing the Indian Ocean, Suez, the Red Sea, back around Greece and Crete, looking for the war that Dnitz bragged about but which doesnt exist, not out there anyway.

The echo of running feet dies away and our part of the henhouse is deserted, and quiet, too, save for the dull roar of the fans as they drive a shaft of air through the low-roofed vents, leaving the blackout blinds swaying like theatre curtains on a first night when the show is just going to start.

For one moment I halt in our mad skelter down the ladders, because I meant to stop at my locker, 83, and grab a couple of photos I keep in there; but suddenly it seems so damn silly, because the pictures will still be there when I get back I can hear the Marine Sergeant of Flunks cursing us, cursing the Hun, cursing the bosun still yelling Action Stations.

And then I remember. My belt. Oh, goddam, Ive forgotten my lifebelt. During Action Stations everyone is supposed to wear a belt. I always feel this is a silly sweat, and keep my belt half inflated in my locker. What the hells the good of a belt anyway? You couldnt float, with your tin helmet, seaboots and dufflecoat. Or maybe you can. Maybe Ill find out. Maybe Im fat enough to float anyway. Maybe the sergeants forgotten his own belt in the panic, and I begin figuring if hell have the guts to put me on a charge if he cant find his belt either.

By the time Ive figured this out, Ive reached the gun.

The gun.

Two and a half years of my life with the Glorious have been round that gun, when Im not flunking for the officers, and I love that gun like my own two arms. The Glorious , flat-topped old barmaid, is a carrier for aircraft, and theyre all right. Gladiators, and Skuas, and Swordfish, yes, theyre all right. But its guns that will win this war. Maybe our gun will win it.

Gun P.7. The gun who runs our gun-crew. There are Bofors in the quarterdeck gun-position P.8, but our gun is a four-point-seven like all the rest port and starboard. Marines man P.5, 6, 7 and 8. The rest are manned by matelots. There are gun positions S.1 to S.8 on the starboard side just the same, but Ive never wanted to man any other gun but P.7, and P.7 knows it. Shes part of our team, the same crew weve had all the commission. P.7s a grand old girl.

P.7 is in a bay in the carriers flank, like the others; then there are two blank bays for boats or ammo lockers; then another gun-bay; and thats how it is all the way along. All the bays are open to the sea, with only a rubber-covered girder as your upper horizon to fix the limits of shooting, or youd hit the flight-deck.

Our P.7 crew consists of the layer, trainer, rammer, sight-setter, first and second fuse-setters, and two ammo supplies to hump the projjies from the trollies to the post. The gun, like us, is only human. Shes a bitch who has to be coaxed and fed, and who blasts the living daylight out of you at the consummation of her fire.

No wonder I love that gun.

The chaps, hooded in their duffle llamis, are standing quiet and awkward, because this isnt just a practice shoot, like all the others for two years gone. Its the real thing at last, only none of us knows what the real thing is going to be like.

Glorious is shuddering with speed, flinging spray back over her nose, and because we feel a lot of bloody fools standing there just looking at each other, we turn and gaze out to sea, out over the sharp-cut wheel of the horizon where there ought to be a target. But if there is we cant see it, and with the war so new we dont know what target were looking for anyway.

Jerry Rotherby, eyes squinting, wonders if he can see better than the lookout, and voices the thoughts of all of us: Hes looking after his ruddy self. Felt lonely up there, maybe, and thought he saw a seagull

Ruddy fine time to be seeing seagulls. Must be just after dawn.

Were in northern waters, and it never really gets dark. You cant tell for certain what time it is. But it is just the hour when a lone reckie plane might be coming down from Vaagso or Maaloy Island way, the dim sea light making a good cover for just one aircraft taking advantage of the chain of cloud cover over the Indreled, that narrow passage which stretches along so much of the Norwegian coast. And after the lone spotter, perhaps a wave of trouble?