´óÏó´«Ã½

MALTA CONVOY — CHAPTER FOUR

The raft

I slid down the rope, feeling nevertheless a bit foolish and unreal, and slipped into the water. It was silky and quite warm; there were no waves at all - a flat calm. Lankester guided me which way to swim by talking me towards the raft, which had already begun to move away from the ship's side. The other raft wasn't far away; we could hear the voices and splashing as they sought to use their hands as paddles. I grabbed a loop on one side of our raft and started scissoring with my legs to help the others take the raft further off, as fast as possible.
For what we now feared most, apart from an E-boat attack and the explosion that would pulp our internal organs, was being sucked under by the cruiser as she sank. Our immediate task was to put as much distance as possible between us and the 7,000 tons of metal and wood and equipment, before she slid below, creating powerful eddies that could draw us into the same grave. Without any need for words between us, we tugged and paddled the raft away from the Manchester, making a rough course out from her port bow. It was slow work: we couldn’t swim in time, so the jerks of one man tended to be cancelled out by the momentary inertia of others. Moreover the raft was blunt, having no natural bow or stern, and floated better than it moved.

In about fifteen minutes we had, it seemed to me, only managed to put two to three hundred yards between us and the ship, which was still visible. I realised dawn must soon be breaking, for the intense darkness of the night had ceded into a greyness in which nothing had colour, but shapes were defining themselves by the minute. As we pulled gradually away from the familiar shape of the cruiser, now listing to starboard at a quite unfamiliar angle, we noticed that no other floats or rafts were near us, and indeed scarcely anything on the port side of the ship at all. One carley float and a raft were several hundred yards ahead of the ship and pulling round towards the shore, which now began to reveal its hilly form. Those, I thought, must be the carley float and the raft that had left just before we did. They had obviously not made away from the cruiser broad on the port bow as we had, but made straight for the bows, or else described a tight arc around them, so as to be heading for the shore as soon as could be managed.

After exchanging a few words, we decided to do likewise, and pushed and pulled the raft in a wide curve so as to aim eventually at the shore line. As we looked ahead, trying to estimate how far off the coast lay, the hill tops were touched with a tawny yellow, and began to glow. soon after, turning our heads, we saw a red rim mark the horizon, broaden and ascend. The darker shades of grey on the water's surface lightened; shafts of gold streaked towards us from the rising disc of the sun. We looked about us again; it was daylight.
The Manchester was down by the stern, indeed almost submerged aft; the forepeak was high, almost clear of the water. Clankings could be heard as the anchor cable shifted its links, and deeper crashes sounded from within the hull when perhaps the strain on a bulkhead became too great and rivets started, causing a whole sheet of metal to bend or buckle.

As we slowly rounded the bows at a considerable distance, we could see the large number of rafts and floats making for the shore. Here and there I thought I caught the flash of oars; had they managed to hoist one of the whalers out? Everything was making for the shore, towards a dip in the hills where perhaps the coastline was less steep and it looked as if a shelving beach or little harbour beckoned us in. We tugged and shoved the blunt raft in the same general direction, but made extremely slow headway. An hour after setting out we were no more than 600 yards inshore from the cruiser, roughly abeam of her; that meant that currents were gradually taking us north, along the coastline. I wondered how strong they were; would we be swept away from the harbour faster than we could drag our stubborn craft towards it? We were tiring too; the kicking was weaker now, and each of us had to rest from time to time.

'She's going!' someone called out.
We turned to see the cruiser heeling swiftly from 45 degrees of list to 70 or 80. The deck now faced us: all the wooden planking we had scoured so painstakingly, and the metal fo’c’sle we had beaten at so assiduously with chipping hammers. From within the ship came a harsh noise of rending, of metal grinding on metal, of dull thumps as pieces loosened and tumbled to starboard. The bridge superstructure began to lean over crazily towards the water, bending and complaining as it went. The cruiser was settling even deeper by the stern: the quarterdeck had disappeared underwater. She must turn turtle, we thought; the weight of the turrets would take her over. The angle increased to 90 and beyond - surely she was bound to go at any moment.

Stubbornly, the cruiser refused to slip under the waves. At last one of the seamen at our raft understood what had happened.
'Her stern's on the bottom,' he declared. 'She can't turn over because the stern section is already resting, on its side, on the seabed.'
He must be right, I thought. The list was no longer increasing. But hollow, painful breaking-up noises continued to issue from within the hull, like the dying groans of a living creature.
'Poor old thing, she's taking a long time to go,' said a seaman.
'It's sad to see her break up like this.'
The water was now swirling up the lower edges of the flight deck. The vessel was settling gradually, on her side.
'She's been home to us for all these months ...'
A heavy rending came from inside the hull, and she began to disappear faster. The sides of the funnels were touching the blue surface of the sea; now they were taking in water. 'She's going, lads!'
From across the sea came the sound of voices in chorus. 'Let's give her a cheer, then. Right?'
'Yes, we'll do that. See her to bed proper and friendly.'
'Three cheers for the Manchester, then, lads, hip, hip -,
Our cheers rang out as the bridge was slipping under. From the bows one of the anchors slid out of its hawse-hole, as if to confirm the finality of the resting place. Last of all, the point of the bows slipped below.

Now there was nothing left to see of the cruiser; not even evidence of eddies or suction as she went deeper; only from time to time the bursting of great bubbles of air as some compartment collapsed under pressure and yielded up its last signs of having once been the home of seven hundred men. I felt unexpectedly abandoned, as if a parent had disappeared, or part of Britain. We were alone, making for a foreign shore, without any means of defending ourselves against attack. Only a few hours ago we had been powerful and swift, with a home to call our own. Now we had become destitute, owning nothing but the clothes we were swimming in.

As if to underline our vulnerability and give substance to our fears, we heard the sound of an aeroplane approaching. 'One of ours, do you think?'
'Not likely. We're still too far from Malta.'
'What do we do, then?'
'Wait and see.'
About a thousand yards off, the plane turned. She was three-engined, I seem to recall. The fuselage was light brown, and there were strange markings on the tail-fin.
There came a shout. 'She's an Eye-tie!'
As if in confirmation, the menacing rattle of machine-gun fire rasped on the morning air.
'She's firing! Scatter!'
I burst away at once from the raft, with a sudden access of newly-found energy. After thirty yards I paused to look up. The plane was circling; it had stopped firing. I determined to stay where I was and dive if I saw it heading my way.
As it came near us at a height of about two hundred feet, the windows of the cockpit cowling glinted in the sun, then cleared. I could see the heads of the pilot, and, to his rear, of the observer/gunner. I was sure by now that it wasn't a fighter: perhaps a reconnaissance aircraft, till I noticed two small bombs tucked in under the wings.
Once, twice it circled us. Then something fell from it. 'Look out!' someone shouted. 'Flat on your backs!'
'No panic,' shouted another. 'It's not a bomb!'
The shape was more like a bag or bundle. It fell with a heavy splash, and floated about a hundred and fifty yards from the nearest raft, seawards from it.
'Leave it alone, I say,' said one of the sailors clinging to our raft.

The aircraft had turned away, and was making north-east, no doubt to make its report. I wondered if the Italians would bring up fighters to machine-gun us in the water; such things were not unknown. No-one showed any interest in picking up what had been dropped, especially as it lay further offshore.
'Come on lads, let's get closer to that coastline!'
'Where is it, anyhow? ,
'Come on, Lofty,' said Lankester. 'You ought to know.' It was the first time he had spoken since rounding the bows of the cruiser. In spite of his note of expectation about my knowledge, I saw that he was anxious and strained. He didn't like being in the water, not at all.
'Well,' I began, 'the coast runs north and south here, I reckon.'
'That tallies.'
'So it's got to be Tunisia.'
'That somewhere near the narrow bit?' '
‘Beyond it.’
'Who owns this country we're headed for, then?'
'The French. Vichy French, I think.'
'Dirty lot they are, by all accounts. Don't trust 'em.'
'Are they in the war, then, or not?'
'I think they call themselves neutral.'
'But friends of old Adolf all the same...?'
'You might say that,' I replied guardedly.
'Well if they are neutral, let's get inside the three-mile limit just as sharp as we can.'
'What for?'
'Because once we're in there, there's less chance the Eyeties'll come and put some bullets in us.'
'Right. Or the Gerries.'
'Bugger them for a lark!'

So we kicked out again, and for a time seemed to make some progress towards the shore, now beginning to be enveloped in a haze that made it all the harder to tell how far off we still were. Nevertheless we were almost the farthest out of all the rafts and floats headed for North Africa. By now the sun had climbed higher into the sky and was warming our heads and shoulders; its light played dazzlingly on the surface. The strength of the glare and the increasing heat, combined with the weakness from an empty stomach, was making me feel fuzzy in the head. Silence settled over us as we continued to nudge our raft towards the land, in a daze so general that sometimes we lost direction and had to be pulled up and corrected by one or other amongst us who happened at that moment to be a little more awake than the rest. We were all weary, too, from lack of sleep, as well as from the strain under which we had been living for the past four or five days.

Around eight or nine in the morning, we heard the puffing of an old-fashioned ship's engine coming across the water from the shore. One of the seamen climbed with difficulty up on the raft, and knelt there while we endeavoured to hold it steady for him. Looking in the direction of the sound, he told us that what looked like a picket boat, maybe an old steam launch, was amongst the Manchester survivors nearer inshore and appeared to be helping them, probably picking them up.

The subsequent movements of the picket boat seemed to confirm this, for it turned shorewards, and half an hour later could once more be heard moving about among the rafts and floats. But it was still a long way from us, and many more sailors would have to be picked up and taken ashore before our turn came. I grew uneasy about the lack of headway we were making with our raft. Our swimming movements had by now almost ceased, so we were at the mercy of the current, which was clearly carrying us north along the coast. We might even be carried out to sea again, and left to our fate by the French as seamen of a belligerent nation beyond the three-mile limit and thus outside their jurisdiction.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.