A Dawn Like Thunder Read Free Page A

quietly with him before he had slipped again into a drugged sleep. The boy had asked, ‘What’s he like, Tommy?’ Even that had made him smile. So young, and yet already trying to play the Old Jack. If you were a Tucker in this regiment, you were always a Tommy, no matter what your paybook said.
    He thought of the lieutenant again. Grey eyes that assessed, calculated, took nothing for granted. He could remember exactly when he had been told he was to be paired off with Ross after his previous partner had been put ashore sick. Bomb-happy, more likely. The captain had said cheerfully, ‘You’ll get along like a house on fire, Tucker. He’s bloody good.’
    Tucker had already known that: Ross would not have lasted otherwise. When the kid had asked him, he had heard himself reply, quite simply, ‘He’s a hero.’ But he had already dropped off to sleep.
    And then there had been that terrible raid in the Norwegian fjord. Two chariots had been involved, the other one commanded by Ross’s best friend, some said his only friend.
    The floating dock had been the target, but at the last moment the unexpected had changed everything. A German cruiser, damaged by a mine in the North Sea, had entered the fjord and without delay prepared to use thedock, offering them a double target which they could not ignore.
    They could not delay either, for as the dock was flooded to receive the damaged cruiser, the narrowing space between the dock’s bottom and the bed of the fjord made the attack even more hazardous. Both chariots had been half surfaced between some Norwegian fishing boats. Tucker had seen Ross gripping his friend’s wrist, forcing home a point, and the other officer’s apparent reluctance. Time was short: as an instructor had once said wryly, ‘With six hundred pounds of high explosive between your legs, you could do yourself a real injury!’
    The attack had gone like a drill. After dodging past a small launch they had dived to some thirty-five feet below the dock and fastened their charges to it without difficulty.
    Right on time, while they had hidden amongst the fishing boats, both charges had exploded in one deafening thunderclap. The dock had seemed to fold like cardboard, while the damaged cruiser had rolled over, scattering trestles and wires alike, until both hulls were half submerged. Neither Ross’s friend nor his rating were ever seen again. They were probably caught in the mud beneath the dock, and had gone up when the fuse ran out.
    For that, Ross had been awarded the Victoria Cross. Tucker was still not sure how he felt about it.
    He heard men gathering beneath the forward hatch. This was a submarine’s most perilous moment: on the surface with the hatch open. It was time.
    He felt very calm, and turned to leave. But before he was sealed completely in his suit he pulled out his wallet in its oilskin pouch and, after the smallest hesitation, opened it and looked hard at her photograph.
Do you still miss her?
his mother had asked.
    He held the picture in the dimmed lights. Eve.
Evie.
Sopert and pretty in her bus conductorette’s uniform, the huge double-decker towering behind her.
    It had begun in the middle of an air-raid, just as the bus returned to the Lambeth garage for the night.
    â€˜I’ll see you home, love . . .’
    And the quick, searching glance he had come to know and love.
    She had answered, ‘All right, sailor, no tricks now!’ They had both laughed: her family lived just around the corner in Livingstone Road. He had seen her give as good as she got from boozy passengers when the pubs turned out, or amorous Yanks who thought that every English girl was fair game.
    It had ended, too, in an air-raid, although he had been at sea and had not been told about it until much later. They said it had been the worst bombing in London’s dockland since the outbreak of war: fifty-seven consecutive nights, until the warehouses,