Emancipation Day Read Free Page A

dark anymore. Jack could see across the Assiniboine ’s foredeck to the harbour, where a dozen other ships lay at anchor. Two huge grey hulks crawling with ants: troopships. Some of the names on the warships he could make out through the rain. HMCS Shawinigan , corvette. HMCS Esquimalt , HMCS Clayoquot , minesweepers. Half a dozen merchant vessels: M/V Bay D’Espoir . M/V Connaught . Fucking escort duty, then. Maybe they’d be escorting the merchantmen to Halifax, two days each way, or possibly to New York, a week.They’d lost three ships to U-boats on that run last month. You didn’t notice the empty bunks in the barracks anymore, except you did. Above the ships’ radar antennas the black headland of Cape Spear, a thin line of white froth barely swelling at its base, shielded them from the open sea. Beyond that was nothing, water, black and cold and unimaginably deep, with lots of corpses in uniform at the bottom of it.
    When the ship cleared the harbour gates the Chief dismissed them and the boson piped them below to the mess deck. Their kitbags were already there, neatly stowed beside their instrument cases and a pile of curious-looking cloth batons that turned out to be rolled-up hammocks. Twelve men to a mess, one mess for each of the trades: signalmen, firemen, gunnery mates, stokers. Jack, Frank and some of the other bandsmen fell in with the gunnery mates. They slung their micks over steam pipes, vent housings, odd hooks, wherever they could find a billet. Below them, metal tables and lockers were bolted to the decks and the bulkheads. Nothing was made of wood. When a torpedo struck, one of the gunnery mates told them, wood splintered and flew through the air, killing more ratings than compression or drowning. Metal just buckled and melted. “Fucking slave ship,” Frank muttered. Jack laughed, but his hands were shaking and they’d barely left port. He looked for a porthole but there wasn’t one, they must be below the waterline, a half inch of steel between them and oblivion. Knowing he was underwater made him feel as though he were drowning. Over the intercom they were ordered to bring theirinstruments to the forward hold, D Deck, to be stowed under rope netting until needed. Soft, red light in the passageways, couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. “Blacker than Toby’s arse down here,” Jack said. You had to claw your way back up the gangway to C Deck for chow. By then, the ship was well underway. The tremor he’d felt earlier became a full-fledged shudder as they listed slightly into the open sea, the engines rising to maybe F-sharp. Standing in line for chow he could see the flat, grey, foam-flecked ocean and smell fresh air through an open scuttle. He took in huge draughts of it, as though he’d been holding his breath against a smell. A dozen merchant ships through one scuttle, another dozen through the next. A huge convoy.
    Frank came back from a reconnaissance mission among the regular sailors ahead of them in line.
    “We’re not going to Halifax,” he said. “We’re on the Derry Run, escort duty across the North Atlantic. Fifty ships. We hand the merchantmen over to the British at the MOMP, the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, somewhere off Iceland. Then it’s R and R,” he said, grinning.
    “Oh good, rest and relaxation.”
    “No, refuel and return. Three fucking weeks at sea. Maybe longer.”
    Jack’s stomach tightened and his ears buzzed. “Why us? We’re not combat, we’re bandsmen.”
    “They send us to sea every six months to dry us out.”
    “What, no rum on board?”
    “I didn’t pack any, did you?”
    “Fucking hell.”
    The crew worked four-hour watches: the first from oh eight hundred to twelve hundred hours; the middle watch, twelve to sixteen hundred; and the morning watch, sixteen to twenty hundred, then the first again. A day was four hours on, eight hours off, then four on and eight off. Everything done by bells. Goddamned bells rang every half-hour: one