Free Convoy by Dudley Pope Page B

almost a stranger in London as he headed for Admiralty Arch. Six weeks at Willesborough, with almost daily walks along the lanes skirting the rolling fields at the foot of the Downs, no acute pain to keep him awake at night, and Clare within a few yards every day, had pushed the war into the far distance; a memory no stronger than a film seen last year. Ironic, come to think of it, because but for the war Clare would never have been at Willesborough and he would never have met her; nor, for that matter, would his left forearm and hand look like a pink walnut. This damned cold and damp weather brought a sharp-yet-dull pain to the muscles and was as good as a barometer; no wonder old folk can forecast the weather by sciatic twinges.
    The last time he had walked across the top of Whitehall and under Admiralty Arch into the Mall – the other way, rather, because they were all going to Charing Cross Station to catch the Dover train – had been with Clifton and Jeffries, and both of them had been killed within a few weeks. Clifton was lost in a corvette; Jeffries had been commanding his own flotilla of MTBs out of Felixstowe but was late back from one night patrol when several German fighters caught him after dawn somewhere off Smith’s Knoll. Although his riddled boat managed to get back without her petrol tanks exploding, she was, they said, like a seagoing hearse.
    Salute, salute, salute…rarely ten paces without a salute. The Poles seemed most frequent and were a smart crowd; even the privates had taken their battledress jackets to decent tailors for a good fit. All the American soldiers looked like officers and even the lowliest private, obviously freshly arrived in Britain, the hayseed still in his crew-cut hair, seemed to have two or three medal ribbons, although from what he had heard they received medals where the British would have been lucky to get an arm badge – marksman, and so on; even a medal for being in Britain, which they considered a war zone. Judging from the sandbagged doorways, signs pointing towards air-raid shelters, boarded-up windows and bombed buildings, perhaps they were right.
    Even the pigeons had a military gait, perhaps more Nazi than Allied; strutting, almost goose-stepping, and always beady-eyed, like Guards drill sergeants or Navy gunnery instructors. All that each one lacked was a respirator slung over the shoulder; a standard Service-issue one but with stiff cardboard or plywood inside, front and back, to make the bag square, in the best Guards style. Guards? Put a telescope under a wing and each pigeon was a strutting midshipman or flag lieutenant on the quarterdeck as the admiral loomed in sight. They were blasé about bangs, too; a taxi backfiring a few yards from one group of a dozen put up only a single bird which fluttered a yard or so and then, Yorke was sure, looked ashamed as it strutted back.
    Under Admiralty Arch, with the ammonia whiff of the pigeons who lived up there, and then he could see Buckingham Palace sitting at the far end of the Mall, four-square and reassuring, the double row of trees stark now, stripped of leaves for the winter. The Palace was in fact the symbol of yet another family who weren’t moving out because of the Ted bombers. And there, just inside the Arch and beyond the bronze statue of Captain Cook, was the ‘Gingerbread’, officially the Citadel, the huge brown concrete box, nearly new and housing, many feet below ground, the operational heart of the Royal Navy. Down there officers juggled with markers and charts and sent fleets to sea or tracked Ted U-boats as they converged on some convoy unlucky enough to have been spotted by Focke-Wulf Condors, or seen by a single U-boat which raised the alarm…
    Yorke walked into the entrance and explained his business to the ancient messenger sitting in the booth just inside the door.
    ‘ASIU, sir? Any particular person? Captain Watts? If you’ll just wait a moment, sir, and fill in this form?’
    While Yorke