Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 10

The Sea

I have sometimes thought that I only made one real sacrifice in my life, which I suppose is not true, but if there were others, they all seem to have flowed from the decision to end a naval career before it really began. My yearning to go to sea was born the first time I sat in a boat of any kind, around age five. It was small sailboat on Germiston’s Victoria Lake hundreds of miles from the ocean, but from then on I never doubted what I wanted. Further, of all the dramas during World War Two, the grinding attrition of the Battle of the Atlantic had most captured my imagination. I was awed by the grey ships of the Royal Navy, the men who sailed in them, and the six long years they had fought a hidden human enemy as well as the fury of nature itself. Unsurprisingly, there had grown in me a single-minded, uncomplicated intention to become a naval officer and spend my life at sea.

I blame God entirely for the frustration of this ambition.

I signed up in the South African Navy fresh out of school in 1956. As I boarded the bus for the 120-mile journey to the training base at Saldanha Bay, I was joining others who would spend a year at the Naval Gymnasium, young men from whom the Navy would select its next batch of officers and personnel. There were no women in those days, and certainly no black South Africans, but this was to be my first experience up close with Afrikaners. My initial encounter was a telling one in terms of the changing power dynamics in the military. Seated beside me in the bus was a pleasant young Afrikaner who, discovering that I was fairly well informed on matters naval, plied me with questions about life in the service. I was surprised that someone could sign up with so little knowledge of what he was getting into, yet a couple of days later this same person was kitted out as a commissioned officer and I found myself obliged to salute him. I was going to compete with 350 others to earn the Queen’s Commission, but he and some other Afrikaners on the bus that day were the first of the blitzoffisiers – ‘lightning officers’ – created overnight by the Nationalist government to dilute the solidly English-speaking character of the Navy and to infiltrate political support for the new regime. Seasoned officers with WWII records understandably resented these untested political appointees.

At the time, however, such issues hardly touched my life. Given my memories of 1948, I was relieved to find myself relatively at ease with my Afrikaner compatriots. Politics was taboo in the mess-decks, the English and Afrikaans languages were used on alternate days and we simply had no time to reflect on our cultural divides. Life at SAS Saldanha was both brutal and stimulating. We were knocked into shape by some leathery old salts who had seen decades of service in the Royal Navy and carried the scars to prove it. They were jealous custodians of naval tradition going back to the days of Nelson, and they knew how to deal with uppity recruits. Most feared were the GIs – Gunnery Instructors – who thought nothing of drilling us until we dropped. Rock ’n roll was bursting onto the music scene at the time, and our first acquaintance with its beat was not on a dance-floor, but through the PA system while polishing floors on our knees before sunrise. Morning PT was followed by parade drill and classes, and in the afternoons we practised rope-work, knots and splices, rowing and small-boat work, sailing the Navy’s traditional whalers and cutters across the bright waters of the bay. A 70ft, WWII launch challenged our skills at pilotage, picking up mooring buoys and coming alongside. We ate well and played hard in inter-divisional sports competitions and boat-pulling regattas. Our prize for surviving the first three months was a bumpy truck-ride south to a weekend shore-leave in Cape Town. The wild alcohol-fuelled drive back on the Sunday evening might have been the riskiest part of being in the Navy.

We all wanted real sea-time and I was fortunate to get some earlier than most. In April 1956 the frigate SAS Transvaal had a mishap on a replenishment mission to the South African weather station on Marion Island, deep in the Southern Ocean. Her motor boat had capsized while offloading stores through the notorious surf around the island and a Petty Officer drowned in the incident. She also had a number of men ashore at the time and was obliged to steam back the 1 200 nautical miles to pick up another boat and some temporary crew. I was excited to be among the dozen chosen, issued with a hammock and cold weather gear, and flown in an Air Force Dakota to Cape Town. Our first sight of the ship was depressing: she had battled home in the teeth of a 117mph gale and had taken a severe battering. Most of the gear on the upper deck had been swept away. There was no time to waste, the ship was still loaded with most of the stores needed at Marion, and as soon as essential repairs had been completed, we steamed out of Simon’s Town, heading for the Southern Ocean.

My first assignment at sea in a warship was less than romantic: the Petty Officers’ bathroom below decks was a tiled space lined with stainless steel washbasins, urinals and toilets. I was told that the ‘brightwork’ needed polishing, and the deck swabbed. I was also told to ‘look lively’ about it. Swabbing the deck required flooding the space with some sea water, then mopping it toward a single drain-hole – or ‘scupper’ – in the corner. This would have been simple if the entire space was not rising, falling and rolling from port to starboard and back in a gut-wrenching, corkscrew motion. Looking through the closed scuttles, I could see the grey mountains near Cape Point one moment and the next, nothing but green ocean sluicing past the glass. No sooner had I swabbed the water toward the scupper than it ran back at me, gurgling contemptuously at my efforts. My head began to spin and my breakfast left me. It had taken me less than 30 minutes to succumb to the sailor’s nemesis and things were not looking good. One doesn’t vomit in the Petty Officers’ bathroom.

There are no words for the sheer misery of seasickness. Those immune to it are born lucky; the rest of us have to bear it for longer or shorter periods before the ‘sea-legs’ come. Forty-eight hours of wanting to die usually dealt with mine but a fellow cadet on that first voyage was so ill that we thought him lost overboard. He was found hidden behind some coils of rope in a dark storage space, grasping his stomach, dry-retching and semi-conscious. He never went to sea again. The navy, of course, refused to recognise the illness. Officers watched with cold eyes as you mumbled an excuse and ran from your post to deposit another meal over the side. As long as you chose the leeward side of the ship they pretended nothing had happened.

Marion Island is well into the ‘Roaring Forties’ in the treacherous Southern Ocean. Howling gales bludgeon it all year round, so delivering stores to the weather station required taking swift advantage of the limited windows of good weather between. Our passage south had been almost as rough as the vessel’s earlier ill-fated one, with the gale this time reaching 90 miles per hour. More or less over my seasickness, I exulted in lookout duty on the bridge-wing of the frigate as she smashed into the massive seas, burying her bows deep into solid water and then, with a shudder through her hull, heaving high into the night, tossing the spray back into our faces, readying for the next assault. I was in awe of the fact that nothing stood between me and the chaotic black depths but the thin hull of this vessel, creaking and groaning as she took on the worst the Southern Ocean could hurl at her. Ships are living things and the bond between them and the souls aboard is something only sailors understand. It was also very cold. The Loch Class frigates had open bridges and as we plunged further south, the icy wind could whip scalding cocoa or ‘chai’ out of the mug in your gloved hands, freeze it in mid-air and send the solid pellets clattering against the bridge house. Off watch below, life was sodden. These ships, built hurriedly for wartime convoy duty, had no luxuries. Amidst the violent motion, when I did sleep, it was in a canvas hammock slung over a large generator that hummed and buzzed on and off all the time.

The only landing stage at Marion was a platform suspended by cables from a cliff. Everything we carried had to be ferried from the anchored ship by motor launch and hoisted to the cliff top. Then a long slope up the soggy, lichen-covered surface led to the cluster of wooden huts that constituted the 1950s-era weather station. I came to know that slope. For 22 hours non-stop I hefted 4-gallon jerry-cans of diesel fuel, one in each hand, to the dump behind the huts. We needed to get the job done before the weather closed in. The ground was covered in wire netting to prevent us from sinking in, but it was very heavy going. Over our ordinary seaman’s clothing we wore kapok flying suits, duffle coats, thick gloves, sea-boots and balaclavas, but when we paused to rest, our drying sweat chilled us to the bone. We even brought a piano ashore, somewhat dismantled, but still ungainly enough to make for a very risky passage in the launch. Apart from our marooned shipmates we were the first outsiders the weather people had seen for six months, but you would not have thought it. They looked on while we sweated and seemed quite relieved when we were on our way again. Presumably a preference for isolation is why they chose the job.

There were other sea-going opportunities. Simon’s Town was still the headquarters of the British South Atlantic fleet in those days and in the dead of winter, when the Cape of Good Hope transformed into the Cape of Storms, the annual NATO Capex exercises had South African ships working in heavy seas with a Royal Naval squadron ‘hunting’ a British submarine. I had chosen the anti-submarine branch so spent time in the ‘asdic’14 hut abaft the bridge, juggling what looked like a little car steering wheel, directing the sonar pulses beaming out underwater. It was all WWII vintage weaponry and some of the officers and senior hands had vivid memories of the Battle of the Atlantic. They remembered when all of this was life and death, and however staged the exercises were, when the dreary, repetitive ‘pingggg’ suddenly became ‘pinggg-guh’ hearts stopped momentarily and the hunt was on. During these exercises there was a moment when things did threaten to get real. When Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, we were ordered into port to fully ammunition our ships because there was a chance we could be sucked in to a looming conflict. It was then that I saw the older hands on board become very serious, but the Suez crisis dragged on for months until the disastrous British, French and Israeli attacks on the Canal Zone. After the canal closure South Africa’s only task was coping with the massive increase in shipping rounding the Cape.

I was loving every minute of it and looked forward to the day when I would be gazetted as a midshipman. During the entire year there was only one moment of doubt: some of us had been sent to Salisbury Island, Durban to familiarise ourselves with Torpedo and Anti-Submarine (TAS) weaponry and I recall us crowding round a dismantled 21-inch torpedo while our instructor showed us how it functioned. I marvelled at the technology that drove this weapon through the water at 45 knots, and the guidance system that led it to its target. Yet I also remember the beginnings of a nagging question: all this clever science to blast human beings to smithereens? I know now that on that day the seeds of a different attitude to war and peace were planted in me – seeds that would germinate nearly a decade later.

I would love to claim that the decision at the end of 1956 to enter the Christian ministry was motivated by faith and vision, but it was more like being kidnapped.

The call – I can give it no other name – came at a most inconvenient time. During the year, some 20 of us had been selected as ‘Upper-Yardsmen’, a term from the days of sail that set us aside as potential officers. Some had already dropped by the wayside and the time had now arrived for final selection as Midshipmen. It was the moment we had worked for.

Enter the Reverend Arthur Attwell, childhood hero and at that time Methodist Chaplain in the SA Navy. Arthur had been a Royal Naval officer in WWII, in the ‘little ships’ in the Mediterranean and Adriatic, where a stealthy war was fought supplying Tito’s partisans from the sea or dropping commandos to support them. His war had been a desperately dangerous one and beneath his kind exterior, like so many veterans, he carried some deep emotional wounds. Meeting him as a child and being shown the tattered White Ensign from his last command sealed my determination even then to become a career naval officer. Arthur was now a deeply respected padre in the Navy and had been invited to SAS Saldanha to help in the officer selection process. Commander ‘Flam’ Johnson, later to become Chief of the Navy, but at that time CO of the training establishment, asked Attwell to have a chat with me to confirm my intentions.

Meanwhile, I had been thrown into confusion by what I can only call an ‘inner encounter’. That same day, alone on the cliffs above the small boat harbour, I experienced a clear and unexpected conviction that cut across everything I had wanted and worked for. Something spoke inside me, saying, “You will be a minister.” It was as simple as that and almost as matter of fact as if a passing officer had barked an order, yet it came with more authority than anyone in the Navy could muster. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to wring from it what they will; all I know is that it was as real an experience as any I have known and it shook me to my boots. This was not what I wanted. I admired my dad, whose preaching had always moved me, but while I wished I could emulate his fine character and moral example there was no conscious desire to follow his vocation. Furthermore, he had never once hinted that he would like to see me in the ministry. This was an ambush. Having listened since to scores of stories from young candidates for ordination, I know beyond doubt that God ‘calls’ people in every generation to serve in this way, but unlike most of them, I was anything but pleased and remain mystified about why it landed on me.

Later that day Padre Attwell invited me to sit down alongside the sports fields for a chat. I had no idea of his mission, but I needed very much to tell someone what had happened to me. Arthur enjoyed recounting what happened afterwards: in the wardroom that evening Commander Johnson enquired, “Well, Padre, do we have our man?” Attwell’s response was, “Yes, sir, in a manner of speaking we do, but not quite in the way you expected. He’s signing up in my outfit instead.”

In the end I was gazetted as a midshipman. I had passed out well, with my most prized award being one in practical seamanship. The Orator’s Cup also came my way, whether as a piquant nod to my new future, I don’t know. Our passing out parade was a proud one, but it was hard to ignore the new political realities: we received our awards from the hands of Defence Minister FC Erasmus, an ex-Nazi sympathiser who was steadily forcing his nationalist ideology onto the armed services. Perhaps such factors were only passing shadows for an ambitious young man preoccupied with a career crisis, but I like to believe that a wider providence was tipping me in a new direction. Someone seemed to be clear that it was time to go.

Untangling from the navy was a little complicated and I asked God to please understand if it took me a while. I was placed in the reserve with links to the SAN base at Port Elizabeth. My future seminary at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, was 80 miles inland from there but one of the schools in the college town had a naval cadet detachment and I was also attached there as an instructor. The deal was that I would report for sea duty during university vacations.

One of these stints was during the Christmas vacation of 1957/58. I was attached to the fast frigate SAS Vrystaat under one the SAN’s legendary captains, ‘Tackers’ Terry-Lloyd, when we received orders to proceed at speed to a surprising destination. Margate was the premier holiday resort on the Natal south coast and in a real-life precursor of the movie Jaws, the area had suffered nine shark attacks in quick succession, six of them fatal. There were no shark nets in those days and ‘Black December’, as it became known, caused panicked vacationers in their hundreds to pack up and trek back inland, emptying most hotels and holiday accommodation. Margate and the surrounding resorts faced a serious economic crisis. Whoever had the idea that the navy could do anything about this I wouldn’t know, but it led to us using our anti-submarine weapons in anger for the first time. On 6 January 1958 the citizens of Margate packed the headlands to watch the fearsome sight of SAS Vrystaat racing toward the beach with a fine bone in her teeth, then executing a tight turn to starboard to bring her parallel. Speeding across the bay to ensure that our stern was not blown off by the explosions, we depth-charged the sea-bottom, causing spectacular bangs and masses of water to plume into the air behind us. Then, with the rocks of the northern headland looming perilously close, another tight turn took us out into deep water. The genesis of all this spectacular action was some mad scientist’s theory that in addition to any sharks we might kill, if we could sufficiently distort the shape of the bottom of the bay, the predators would stay away. We therefore went about redesigning the bottom of Margate Bay with a will, repeating the exercise. I modestly recall that all of us showed courage and determination in the face of the foe, but some massive explosions later we had accounted for only eight enemy casualties while hundreds of dead fish unfortunately had to be classified as collateral damage. We made a final, much slower sweep with a squad of riflemen in the bows, despatching any enemy wounded while other crew members with scoop nets ensured a decent disposal of as many of the edible fish as could be handled in the ship’s galley. We had no hope of picking them all up and the mad scientist had apparently not anticipated the attraction that multiple dead fish might have for even more sharks than before. Perhaps that is why I’m still waiting for my Battle of Margate Bay campaign medal.

Ultimately – except for a six-month stint as chaplain that I tell of elsewhere – even this limited connection with the navy had to end. By the close of 1959 I was about to be appointed to my first church and had to hand in my papers. My longing to be at sea has never left me and I still feel more at home on the water than I ever did on land. One of my sons – Christopher – understands. He has the same gene and no speech is needed when we sail together.

There my spirit is always at peace.