Able Seacat Simon: The Wartime Hero of the High Seas

Chapter 9

Yangtse River, near the village of San-Chiang-ying 08:00 hours, 20 April 1949

Animals have a way of sensing things, often long before humans. All animals can do this, because we have to rely so much on instinct – even creatures as apparently without wits as Peggy. Who knew why my own instinct was so strong that morning? But it was. I just had that feeling that something was going to happen. That all the mutterings I’d heard might have some substance after all.

But what might happen to us if they did? I didn’t know. Just as I’d never known war, I had never witnessed the extremes of violence that I’d often heard about during my time aboard the Amethyst. Not that I hadn’t seen violence happen. The death of my mother had definitely been an act of extreme violence, even though it had been an accident. I’d also known the kind of violence that was an everyday part of nature; the necessary skirmishes I’d seen animals engage in to protect their territory. But not killing. Never killing. Not the kind of slaughter I’d heard the crew talking about down in the mess. Not killing when you didn’t need to eat.

But I knew such violence and intent to kill existed. How could I miss it when the evidence was all around me? After all, the Amethyst had been originally built as a warship, as the captain had often reminded me. And with all her guns, it would be difficult to see her as anything else. But, for all the battle drills and the regular rounds of maintenance and inspection of her armaments, I had never known her as anything other than a home. So on the morning we set off from Shanghai, bound for the city of Nanking again, the only war I’d known was the one it was my personal duty to wage – the one against the rats that were still my mortal enemy.

My only enemy, in fact. Until now.

We’d weighed anchor at 05:15 hours, under a yellowish dawn sky, only to be forced by fog to drop the anchor again. I remembered the fog that could lie on the Yangtse from the last time we’d travelled up there – a dense, opaque whiteness that would roll out across the river like a blanket. But this fog was different. You didn’t so much see it as have it envelop you, damp and cool and pungent. As the Yangtse was notoriously dangerous to navigate in poor visibility, the captain had decided to stop and wait it out.

Ever mindful of both my mother and Jack’s words (on one thing they were agreed – never pass up the opportunity to take a nap) I’d then taken myself off for a sleep down in the galley, which was always a good choice when the dawn was breaking, both for the warmth of the ovens (always nice after a rat hunt) and the cook, who’d be busy preparing the crew’s breakfast, which inevitably meant there was a good chance of being given a scrap of bacon. I’d been fast asleep, too, it having been a long night and a busy one, what with all the strange comings and goings in the officers’ wardroom and the many signals Jack was sending back and forth to Shanghai.

Most telling was that Captain Skinner seemed to be taking the threat seriously. No, this wasn’t our war – I’d heard that said enough times that I could be in no doubt of it – but as we were going to be in what was agreed to be a potential war zone, he had already taken precautions. As soon as we’d slipped our mooring at Shanghai, headed towards Woosung and the Yangtse, he’d ordered a detail of ordinary seamen to stitch together several tarpaulins, in order to make two enormous flags. These they then painted in a precise pattern of red, white and blue, to match the Union Jack that had already been painted on the quarterdeck.

The new flags, not quite dry, were then rolled up over oars taken from the whalers, and fixed from the guardrails with sailmaker’s twine – both ready to be unfurled again at a moment’s notice, so that no one could be in any doubt that the Amethyst was a British ship, going about its lawful business for the Royal Navy.

My first real taste of war came without warning. And I must have slept deeply, because I was not so much nudged into wakefulness as pitched headlong into it, by the sound of instructions echoing round and round the voice pipes – by orders being relayed with an urgency I’d never heard before; by the furious ringing of the bell that had only one meaning: that the crew were being mustered to their action stations.

Wide awake now, I lifted my nose to see what I could get wind of on the air, but it was the captain’s tone of voice that told me most. Something had happened. Or was about to. Something bad. I could sense it. I stretched long and hard and jumped down from the stove side. While the cook ran off to where he was supposed to be manning a fire hose, I hurried back up to the bridge to see what was going on.

The passageways were busy, everyone rushing to be somewhere, looking preoccupied and tense, and I could almost taste the fear that seemed to travel with them. Keeping close to the bulkheads, and out of the way of running feet, I padded quickly along my usual, now long-familiar route, feeling the same peculiar mixture of excitement and anxiety that had accompanied me on that other journey, almost a full year ago now, when I’d been tucked safely out of sight inside George’s tunic. That sometimes felt as if it was a lifetime ago.

In some ways, it really was a lifetime ago, as I’d now been on the Amethyst for longer than I’d lived in Hong Kong, and, apart from when my mother visited me in snatches of strange, wistful dreams, the memories of that time were fast fading. I’d finally got my ‘sea legs’, just as George had always told me I would, and was now, nose to tail-tip, a sailor. Which no doubt meant I now had something of a sailor’s intuition to go with my animal instinct, because there was definitely a quiver in my whiskers; a sense that testing times might well lie ahead.

Though the fog had now cleared, the morning sky still looked bruised when I emerged out onto the deck, and I wondered if more might be on the way. But not as much as I wondered what other dangers lay in front of us – ones not of nature’s, but of human design.

I padded across the quarterdeck, feeling the dewy dampness on the freshly painted corticene beneath my paws, and thought the time might have come to deploy the Union Jack flags. And no sooner had I taken up my usual post on the electrical box at the rear of the bridge than all the reassurance we’d hung on to of being a neutral party was blown out of the water at a stroke.

Though I’d not experienced war, I had known the sort of terror that grips you when you know someone or something means you harm. Someone meant to harm us now. I just sensed it.

The attack, when it came, though, seemed completely out of the blue. One minute the captain was relaying directions to the wheelhouse via the voice pipe, the next, there was a flash of flame on the shore, followed by a terrible screeching wail, and it was as if the river we’d been previously gliding along was boiling, exploding, rising – up, up, up, up! – before my eyes, in great fountains of hissing, rushing water.

Both the captain and the first lieutenant grabbed their binoculars and raised them, scanning the place from which the eruption of water might have come. ‘Watch for the flashes on the bank!’ barked the captain.

Though the fog had gone, the shore was still distant and murky – a hazy and indistinct bluey grey. And as I watched, another flash came, and another wall of white water exploded, this time so close it almost showered us all. I felt my claws scrabbling for purchase and my heart starting to pound, and wondered if I was about to use up every one of my lives all at once – wondering if we all were; feeling terrified, terrified, for my friends. I hadn’t felt such fear since the day I had watched my mother die, and had never expected to again. I had never experienced shell fire, or anything remotely like it, and the sight and sound – the terrifying nearness of the explosions – came as such a shock that all my fur stood on end. And it seemed they weren’t done with us yet. As I struggled to keep my balance, further licks of flame bloomed on the north bank, and more fountains of water streaked skyward.

Captain Skinner lowered his binoculars, his face set and watchful. Then he leaned into the voice pipe that snaked down below. ‘Bridge to wheelhouse,’ he barked. ‘Increase speed to 15 knots!’ I could hear men all over the ship still hurrying to their various action stations. ‘Number One,’ he said to Weston. ‘See if you can get that bearing.’

Thankfully, the firing ceased almost as soon as it started, and the whole thing was over in a matter of moments. And as I quivered behind Captain Skinner, wondering quite what had just happened, I was reassured to hear his voice take on a less anxious tone.

‘Looks like we’ve just been caught in the crossfire,’ he said to Weston. ‘That salvo clearly wasn’t meant for us, or they would have hit us, wouldn’t they? Perhaps it was just a show of strength.’

‘Or they didn’t see the ensign,’ Weston suggested.

‘Maybe so.’ He paused and peered across at the north bank, which clearly told him little. ‘Well, unless we’ve an errant communist shore battery on our hands. Order the X gun crew to unfurl the Union Jacks just to be on the safe side.’ The first lieutenant did so. ‘In any event,’ he mused, scanning the north shore once again through his binoculars, ‘we’re sitting ducks and need to be clear of this as soon as possible.’ He leaned again to the voice pipe. ‘Bridge to wheelhouse. Let’s have 19 knots now. Full ahead.’

He turned to me then. ‘You still here, Simon? Looks like you’re finally seeing a bit of action, eh?’ He stroked me absently. ‘Let’s hope we don’t see any more, eh?’

It was a wish that was not to be granted.

We continued up the river for several minutes, everyone on the bridge tense and watchful. Despite Captain Skinner’s apparent confidence that the shells hadn’t been meant for us, there was still a sense of nervous anticipation in the air. He’d been right. Whoever they’d been meant for – the nationalists on the south bank, presumably – we were right in the path of any further fire directed their way.

The minutes continued to pass, though, and with every mile we put between ourselves and whoever had fired on us, I began to feel a little less frightened. We’d soon be clear of the wayward battery and could relax, if only a little. Even so, my hackles kept rising and I refused to be reassured, and, ever conscious that the captain might need to take decisive action, I decided to go below again and get out of his way.

I jumped down from my box, and made my way down the ladder to the foredeck, passing Frank, who was hurrying up it past me, his eyes focused up and forward. He almost vaulted me, seemingly oblivious to my being there.

Other than that, I saw no one. The whole crew were on alert still, everyone manning their various stations. From the passageway that led to the captain’s cabin, which seemed as sensible a place to go as any, the thing I could feel, over and above everything else, was the vibration under my paws as the huge turbines toiled beneath me; powering the Amethyst at a speed I had yet to feel her go, and churning the water into an angry, boiling soup.

But it seemed there was more than one shore battery keeping watch on our progress, because no sooner had I hopped up onto the captain’s desk, in order to see out of the scuttle, than the Amethyst lurched violently to starboard, knocking me off my feet. I scrabbled back up, but no sooner had I got my balance once again than another blast – another shell! – made the water foam in front of me. Just as I recognised that I should immediately take cover, I was ripped from my feet again, the air torn from my lungs, and the world swam away from me and disappeared.

Chapter 10

When I woke I could hear nothing but the drone of a mosquito. For a time I simply focused on the low, monotone buzzing sound, and tried to work out where I was. I was lying on a bunk, so my first thought was that I was still in Captain Skinner’s cabin, but something felt wrong. I struggled to clear my head enough to work out what it was. I was definitely in a cabin, but which? Not the captain’s. I couldn’t be in the captain’s, because… because… because what? Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to focus. I looked around me, sideways on, only one eye fully open, and at last my gaze came to rest on something that looked familiar – the collection of photographs pinned on the bulkhead opposite, which I recognised as belonging to Petty Officer Griffiths. I saw his locker then, as well. The place where he often parked his cap. But there was no cap. It was now open, the lid upright and some of the clothing spewing out of it, as if caught in the act of escaping.

I strained to listen; to pick up something other than the mosquito’s incessant whining, and realised that it wasn’t even a mosquito – the noise was a constant ringing inside my ears. But there was nothing to help me make sense of what had happened. I hadn’t the slightest idea of how I came to be here.

I tried to ferret in my mind for the last thing I could remember, but hard as I tried, I found I could not. There had been shouting, the clang of the ship’s bell – which resulted in more shouting – and yet more of those terrifying noises. Explosions and wheee sounds and deafening crumps that sounded like the ship was being ripped and gored and beaten, the licks of flame, the sting of smoke thick and acrid on the air.

And then… what? What had happened? How had I come to be here? How long had I been here? I knew it was light – well, more a dove grey, from what little that I could see through the scuttle – but I realised I had no idea of time, of what day it was; no idea how long I might have slept. I felt sluggish, stiff and listless, as if I’d been asleep for a long time – a deep, dreamless sleep – having lain in an awkward position.

I lifted my nose to sniff the air again and immediately regretted it. For some reason it hurt to move my head. It hurt a lot, in fact; a tentative stretch of my neck immediately confirmed it, pain streaking through my hind legs with such heat and intensity that I knew I must be very badly hurt.

I stayed still, concentrating as hard as I could on not moving; despite the constant urge to shake the noise out of my ears. It helped that I was too scared to even try to see my injuries, so I lay rigid but inert, waiting for both my heart and my head to stop pounding, and for the pain to subside to something I could deal with.

And I would have dealt with it, had my slow slide back into painless oblivion not been arrested by the sound of a single, anguished moan, which seemed to be coming from somewhere close by. I thought I recognised the voice, too. Was it Lieutenant Weston’s? Fear flooded in. Was he hurt? Had he been injured as well?

It all came back to me then, quickly, intensely and chillingly: the communists. The shells. The orders barked down the voice pipes. Bridge to wheelhouse. Full speed ahead! The Amethyst powering upriver, away from the first shore batteries, the captain not quite believing that what was happening could be happening; that we’d been anything other than simply caught in the crossfire between the communists and nationalists occupying the opposite shores.

And then the reality, quickly following the assumption that we’d passed the trouble: that, as we’d by now unfurled the Union Jacks the crew had made, there could be no question that they were firing on a British frigate. My padding down to the captain’s cabin, half believing we might be clear of it, then the terrible, terrible sound from just above me – the cabin door slamming shut, and then almost immediately bursting open – the mushroom cloud of choking black smoke surging in. The realisation that they had meant to fire on us – that they were firing on us now; that they meant us grievous harm. The shock of it. The terror. The sense of disbelief and outrage. Of hearing the captain – no, that was wrong – it had been the first lieutenant, hadn’t it? Of the first lieutenant, shouting… Return fire! Return fire! Bridge to wheelhouse! Return fire! Feet, thundering past me. Screams – so much screaming! Of the shouts and the cries – the desperate, keening cries – then the massive whump! close at hand, and the feeling that I was flying – of being lifted high, high, and higher, way up into the air, that same air then being violently snatched from my lungs…

The explosion! I juddered involuntarily, causing a second wave of agony to streak through my body, and the darkness sucked me down once again.

When I woke the second time, in stifling heat now, feeling thirsty and dizzy, it was to a second, even scarier revelation. It was one that I sensed, rather than saw, sniffing a sharp note of charring in the still air of the cabin and having it suddenly hit me what the source of the smell might be.

My whiskers! Where were my whiskers? Had they been burned off completely? I felt sick. I wanted to be sick, and even felt myself retching. For, despite my prone position, and my having no immediate need of them, the realisation of their absence felt like a violent wound itself. It terrified me anew. Would they ever grow back again? And what other grievous injuries might I have sustained?

I tried to lift my paw, very gingerly, the better to establish what I’d been left with, but again, the slightest movement – of any part of me, it seemed – caused me intense pain, and sent waves of nausea coursing through me. And as I could see almost nothing, I had no choice but to try to lie as still as I could again. To try to find refuge in further sleep.

But it was hard to sleep. The sound in my ears was like a burrowing animal worming away at me, and with so many questions swirling round my head, my brain was equally buzzing. What was going on? Where was everyone? What had become of Lieutenant Weston? What was happening to the Amethyst? Was she even moving?

My senses told me no, but they were muddled. Eventually I did sleep, though it was fitful enough and shallow enough to allow the noises around me to filter through. And the noises were, by now, at least a little less frightening, the screams and whumps of shells being replaced by very different sounds, a few of them even familiar and reassuring.

I thought I could hear the coxswain. Was that his low, phlegmy rasp? And Peggy? Was that Peggy barking? Oh, I hoped so. After a time, even more reassuringly, I could smell food being cooked, too, immediately conjuring the comforting image of one of my favourite spots in the galley, where I’d sit patiently while Slushy, the cook, trimmed what looked like whole sides of cows so they would fit into the oven, often treating me to a titbit of raw meat.

But such appearance of normality was soon unmasked as an imposter, and even in my weakened state, and with my mind bent so far out of shape by the constant noise in my head and the pain in my hindquarters, I recognised that despite the welcome clangs, thumps and whistles, things aboard the Amethyst were very far from normal. Was the terrible thing that had happened to us still going on in some way?

I strained to make sense of some of the sounds that were reaching me; of men below and along the passageway making strange, mournful noises; of angry shouts; of muffled sobs; of a single, anguished scream from somewhere above. They must have eventually triggered something because more memories started rushing back towards me like a tidal wave surging over a beach. Of seeing things happening to my friends that seemed to defy belief and comprehension.

Of men flailing and shouting, men falling and screaming. Of the acrid taste of smoke and cordite in the air. Of mangled lumps of metal strewn all over the Amethyst, as if flung there, like so much jagged jetsam.

But I mostly saw blood. Viscous, oily pools of it, steam rising from it, almost the colour of Cotton Tree blossom. I remembered lying on the quarterdeck, not understanding how I got there, and seeing blood, instead of water, flowing thickly across the deck and into the scuppers.

I closed my eyes again, hoping to make it all go away. But it wouldn’t disappear. It seemed burned onto my brain.

‘Well, now, look at this one. He really has been in the wars, hasn’t he?’

I woke again with a start, feeling immediately anxious, because I was sure I could sense a stranger standing over me. It was the odour – strong and musky, laced with some fuel-type tang I didn’t recognise. It was alien enough to snap me into consciousness in a moment.

He spoke gently, however, and with a strange twang to his voice. It was a form of human speech that I hadn’t heard before. Disorientated and confused, I tried to open my eyes so that I could see him, but found I couldn’t. My eyelids seemed to be gummed shut. After a couple of painful attempts to part them, I gave up trying. Perhaps I should leave well alone.

‘Something of a miracle he’s still with us, I’d say, Doc, wouldn’t you?’

My heart leaped. I knew that voice. It was Frank! It was Frank! I couldn’t see him, but I was immeasurably glad to hear him.

I also registered that word ‘Doc’. Was the man a doctor? ‘Sid Horton, one of the ratings, found him lying out on the deck this morning,’ Frank was explaining. ‘We suspect he was in the captain’s cabin when it happened. Took a direct hit. He must have. You saw it, didn’t you? When you came aboard? Beggars belief, it does.’ There was a pause. I tried to imagine their expressions. ‘Well, you could hardly miss it, could you?’ Frank added at last. ‘Poor little blighter must have been blown feet in the air.’

‘So he’s probably lost his hearing,’ the other man said, his odour mushrooming up around my face now, followed by the shock of feeling his fingers brushing against my fur. I tried to calm myself. He was a doctor. He was obviously taking a look at me.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, sir,’ Frank said. ‘I reckon he can hear us well enough, can’t you, Simon?’ To which I managed to respond with all I could manage – a feeble tail flick. It wasn’t much – barely anything – but it seemed it was sufficient. ‘See, Doc!’ said Frank. I could hear the pleasure in his voice.

‘So he can hear,’ said the other man. ‘Well, well, well. And there’s no blood in his ears, so that’s good. Though that’s a nasty burn on his left one, poor thing. But you’ve patched him up, I see.’ He touched me a second time. This time on my shoulder. ‘And that’ll heal quick enough.’ There was another pause. ‘Anyway,’ he said finally. ‘As you say, something of a miracle.’

‘Did what we could,’ Frank said. ‘And if he’s stayed with us this long, I reckon he’ll be okay, don’t you? Ship’s cat, isn’t he? Survivors. What’s to say?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Anyways, leave your things over there, and we’d best be getting you to the sick bay. The worst are gone, as you know, but we’re far from doing well. Though there’s a fair few in the after-mess as well.’ Yet another pause. He cleared his throat again. ‘We’ve run right out of room.’

They left me then, and I could hear their steps echoing down the passageway. And they left me thinking. Yes, perhaps it had been a miracle.

Well, either that or I’d used up one of my nine lives.

Chapter 11

Yangtse River, near Tan Ta Chen, Friday 22 April, 1949

Following my visit from Frank and the man he’d called ‘Doc’ the previous day (who turned out to be in the Air Force and was called Flight Lieutenant Fearnley), I had finally found the wherewithal to try to move. I had puzzled long and hard over why – and how – this doctor had come on board the Amethyst. How did he get to us? Or had the ship made it to Nanking without my realising? And where was our own doctor? Had he been injured as well? I didn’t allow myself to consider the other possibility.

I hadn’t moved much, not the first time, because it was still excruciatingly painful. Only sufficient to confirm what I already knew instinctively; that I’d been badly burned, and that my hips and back legs had been lacerated by pieces of shrapnel. Beyond that, I didn’t know, and decided I didn’t want to.

But I was alive, and could hear still – despite the persistent ringing – and my survival had been declared to be a miracle. I wondered if the rest of crew felt the same about it, and doubted it. As Frank had said, I was a ship’s cat, and sailors were superstitious, believing not only in feline powers of survival that went far beyond the credible, but in our ability to keep the crew from harm, too.

I wished I’d never learned that, because the weight of it felt heavy on my shoulders, suffusing me with difficult, distressing feelings. What if I’d stayed up on the bridge? Would I still be here to ponder it? And what of the protection I was assumed to have conferred on the Amethyst? Where had that gone?

‘You’ll bring us luck, little feller!’ I could hear dear George saying it. And that made me feel desperately sad.

I tried to console myself. George was safe somewhere else. Well, I hoped he was, anyway. I wondered where he was and what he might be doing now. And who knew? Had that luck – however scant, however tenuous – not been with us, perhaps even more would have perished. In any event, I felt humbled and all too aware of my own luck, and for those reasons knew I must bear my pain stoically. For in the time that had now passed since the explosion that had changed everything, I had learned of fates so much worse, so much more final, than mine.

Captain Skinner – brave Captain Skinner – was dead. I had already heard Petty Officer Griffiths discussing that with Lieutenant Weston in the adjacent wardroom; he’d died ashore, on the way to hospital. I’d also deduced – both from what they’d been saying and the way they’d been saying it – that Lieutenant Weston must be quite badly injured too.

Worse still, at least twelve of the crew were apparently dead also. Some had died instantly, some had been shot down in the water, one had died of his injuries on the way to the field hospital with Captain Skinner; others were still there now, badly wounded and shaken – some of them still at risk of dying too.

It was all such shocking news that I had not fully taken it in. Indeed, during the period when I was drifting in and out of consciousness in the cabin, I had hoped that the pictures that kept coming back to torture me were just the product of a fevered imagination. But they were not. They had happened.

I had managed to piece together some more of what had happened to the Amethyst simply by watching and listening. But it wasn’t enough, and I felt useless and desperate for information, so much so that the previous night, in the eerily silent small hours, the Amethyst still motionless, I had finally dared test the limits of my strength and resolve again, and tried to leave the cabin to find out more.

I had made it further that time, but still not very far. In fact, dragging my stiffened limbs proved to be a little beyond that limit. By the time I had managed to make it out of Griffiths’ cabin and into the passageway, such plans as I’d had, which were admittedly unformed to start with, became buried under fresh waves of pain.

Another thought had hit me then. I’d heard nothing of Petty Officer Griffiths since the previous day. Where might he be sleeping? Was he even sleeping? Was he safe? Something jerked inside me then – some primeval tug I had no control over. And I realised that whatever I had expected to achieve it was all cast aside. Instinct took over. A sudden, powerful, overwhelming instinct, as well: to hide away somewhere where nothing and no one could get to me, to find a place where I could retreat – where I could hide away, and curl up and retreat into myself; somewhere I could go and lick my wounds.

The ship had remained still. Still in the water, clearly anchored. I knew that she must have been still for some time, as well. It had been more than a day, in fact, since I’d last heard the throb of the engines, and, from the spot I’d found – behind a tangle of ropes in the corner of one of the forward gun decks – all I could hear above the whirr of bats and flying insects was the sound of the river lapping gently against the hull.

Here, gasping but finally on my side again, I was at least cooled a little by the corticene beneath me. Being able to see something other than a blank cabin wall was at least a distraction from the pain.

And what a distraction it turned out to be. Because the state of the Amethyst stunned me.

There was evidence of the shelling and machine-gunning everywhere – even the ensign flying at the stern hadn’t escaped it. It flew limply, forlornly, stirred by only the smallest of breezes, half torn off and riddled with bullet holes.

But it was the Amethyst’s hull which horrified me the most. Always ghostly in the moonlight, she was now all sooty smudges – smudges that resolved themselves into evidence of major damage: scores of ragged scrapes and rents and gaping holes. One – the biggest I could see from my vantage point – gaped high above me, just below the bridge, like a monstrous jaw. A blackened fissure, deep and shocking in the middle of the pristine whiteness, it was half-stuffed with what looked like piles of hammocks. It took a few moments for the realisation to sink. I realised with a gulp that I was looking at the captain’s cabin.

I stayed laid up for the rest of that night and all the next morning, even when, at some time when the moon was high in the sky, wreathed in a yellowy mist, I felt the engines come to life again and the ship begin to move upriver. It wasn’t for long, however, as very soon we were the target of yet more firing from the north bank – though as I lay there, it was without the least inclination to try to move, but simply to await whatever fate was now to befall me. I was done in. And now I was out here, there was nowhere to run to, even if I could. I’d stay put, I decided, and take my chances.

The gunshots, which had been sporadic, soon stopped altogether. I must have dozed then, despite everything (perhaps the vibration of the engines soothed me) and then slept more deeply, because when I woke up it was to a gradually lightening sky, and the boat was once again soundless and still.

The next thing I became aware of – again, some hours later – was the sound of an aircraft approaching. I had no idea at that point if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I quickly had my answer. No sooner had it flown past us than I could hear firing from the shore again, and, after another burst of orders, shouts and clattering urgent footfalls, it was gone almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Fully awake again, I tried to take stock of things more clearly. To try to tease out the facts from the clues. We were motionless, but not docked, so we were obviously just anchored, presumably at some point further up the river. Though there was activity – hostile activity – from the north shore of the river, I could see or hear no other ships or sampans, so we seemed to be alone. And as it seemed that no other boat (or aircraft) was able to get close to us, I could only assume it was either because the Amethyst was physically unable to slip her mooring, or was being prevented from doing so in some other way.

I didn’t have to think much to reach a single, obvious question. Were we stuck here because we were prisoners?

The day grew warm by increments, and very soon it was too hot to stay where I was. With the sun rising high in the sky, albeit partly masked by clouds, I knew the heat would shortly become intolerable. But I had another, much greater motivation to try to move. With so much going on that I was unable to see or hear properly, it was curiosity, as well as anxiety, which eventually dragged me from behind the rope coils – not least concerning the identity of a new arrival on the Amethyst an hour or so later. I’d heard a craft come alongside (probably a landing craft, I decided, due to the soft, purring engine) and, as I couldn’t see it, I was anxious to know who or what it contained.

I made my way haltingly around the snakes of rope – stiff again from the long period of immobility – and tried to forget about my missing whiskers. But all my small trek achieved was to place me a little further along the gun deck, where I flopped down close to the guard rail, my back legs unable to carry me further, where I could at least pick up a little of what was happening.

It seemed as though an officer was coming aboard – I couldn’t see him, but could tell from the tone of his voice, and the tone of voice of the man who was receiving him – another that I couldn’t quite place. And as they headed inside – perhaps to the wireless room or the wardroom? – all I could pick up was that there was some sort of dispute going on. I heard the name Weston, and a while later, heard Lieutenant Weston himself, sounding strange and as if he was struggling to get his words out. ‘We’ve destroyed everything,’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘All the papers and the charts…’ ‘I know, man. Calm yourself,’ the stranger reassured him. ‘I am calm,’ Weston kept saying. He was anything but.

Whoever had arrived hadn’t been inside long, for in no time there were men back on the deck below me, their hushed exchanges floating up to me only in part. But then they moved, and I heard someone say very clearly, ‘There’s no choice, man. If you don’t get that shrapnel removed, you’ll die!’

I lay back again then, trying to makes sense of it. Was that the ‘doc’ I had heard talking? Hard to say, but it was another voice I couldn’t seem to place, and soon after, it was joined by the throb of the landing craft engine, which was presumably leaving us again. It was only when it had travelled some distance that I was able to catch sight of it. Though I couldn’t be sure, I had enough of a glimpse to think it true – the landing craft was taking away Lieutenant Weston.

My first proper sighting of our new captain, a tall man called Lieutenant Commander Kerans, was when I limped onto one of the gun decks a few hours later, feeling compelled to find my friends again. And I found the ship’s company (such as it was, for by now I knew many of my friends were probably missing, or injured and down in the sick berth) had been mustered to attend what was clearly a very sombre gathering. Judging from the light – a murky charcoal, which the sun struggled to penetrate – it was now late in the afternoon. It was the first time I’d seen most of them in three days.

It had been a long walk to rejoin my company, every step sending knives of pain shooting through my hindquarters, and I’d had to sink down and catch my breath often. My skin stung – it was now clear that I’d lost quite a lot of fur – and I was so parched that I’d been driven to cast around the deck and try to lick up any beads of moisture I could find. But the sound of voices drove me on, and after I had no idea how long, I was rewarded by the first glimpse of my friends.

I would make it to the end guardrail above the gun deck, I decided. I kept my eyes on it, as if it were some kind of prize, limping slowly along the hull, keeping close to the bulkhead, feeling my back legs at every step quivering and protesting beneath me, and eventually found myself looking down at a dizzying blur of white.

I blinked painfully, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with what had happened. To square what I’d heard and learned with what I gazed down upon now. The remaining crew – much reduced – were all decked out in their white uniforms. They looked crisp and impossibly shipshape in their finery, and, to a man, they stood rigid and unsmiling.

It was impossible not to contrast them with the post-attack Amethyst: wounded, broken, lying up – licking its own wounds. Yet here were so many of my dear friends, gathered upon her battered deck, almost like a flock of beautiful white birds. Yes, they were bent and broken too, but they were also standing tall, managing to find strength and dignity from somewhere.

All thoughts of my own pain were spirited away then, because it was only now that I realised what I was witnessing. For in his hands, our new captain held what I knew to be the ship’s Bible.

Seeing that particular book lying open in his hands, I couldn’t help but find my eyes drawn behind him, where a line of low, sheet-covered mounds stretched along the gun deck. My friends’ bodies.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them, not for a long time, struck by the precision with which they had been arranged, by their shape, by their stillness. Which were they? Who was missing from the assembly?

There were so many men missing – many more than this number, surely? – that, apart from those I knew about, it would be impossible to work out who had died these past three days. I would find out; that wretched information would all too soon be known to me. In the meantime, I must do the same as my friends below me. Pay my respects and wish them peace where they were going.

Heads were lowering now, and a new solemnity fell upon the gathering. As I watched and listened, the captain speaking in tones mostly too low for me to catch them, the first body was committed to the river by a burial party of four ashen-faced men. Familiar faces, one I recognised as one of the ordnance men, Leighton, whose job today was to lash one of his shells to each sailor, to weigh them down – a bitter irony indeed. By the time they were done, the sun had dipped below the horizon.

And the sailors laid to rest at the bottom of the Yangtse River had numbered seventeen.

Chapter 12

Though it seemed unimaginable for such a thing to happen, in the grim days that followed that terrible funeral service, I found myself grateful for the rats. For it was undoubtedly the rats – now my mortal enemy and my naval duty – that gave me the will to recover. I knew I must recover, at least enough to find the strength to hunt them down and, hopefully, kill enough of them to make it clear to the rest that they were not going to take over the Amethyst.

We were trapped on the Yangtse. That much had been easy to establish. Time and again, some effort was made to free the ship, and as sure as the sun rose every morning, hazy and ineffectual, we’d be fired on by the communists on the north bank. Even so, there was work to be done on deck – urgent work – so what was left of the crew (less than half the ship’s company, I estimated) were labouring at all hours, courageously, right in the enemy’s sights, doing what was needed to make the ship seaworthy again. They were stuffing sandbags into holes, piling flour sacks around the bridge and wheelhouse, clearing wreckage from the decks, pumping out water from the wardroom, and frantically jettisoning whatever could be jettisoned – including oil – to try to get the ship back on an even keel.

What it seemed we weren’t going to be able to do, though, was actually go anywhere. Which meant the Amethyst had, to all intents, been captured by Mao Tse-tung’s men, even if they hadn’t boarded us, and would remain where she was till they decreed it otherwise.

Much as I craved their company, I stayed hidden from my friends for several days. Unable to walk properly, and fearful of being touched – even in kindness – I knew the best thing would be to keep myself out of sight and out of the way until I was strong enough to resume my own duties. So in the days and nights that followed I tried to keep to the shadows and secret places – an observer until I was healed enough to be anything else.

Everyone still on board seemed in shock, just like I was. Bar Peggy, who, being a dog, skipped around with her usual abandon, there wasn’t a crew member on board who didn’t look traumatised and exhausted.

I’d not seen Jack at the funeral, and I feared for him. I could only hope that he was in the wireless room, as reason told me he would be, busy tap-tapping away, sending his signals to the admiral, relaying whatever messages our new captain required.

I feared for all my friends, be they injured or able-bodied, on board or otherwise. I felt their pain. Which, having been born a solitary creature, was a strange new sensation for me. And it struck me how particularly wretched it must be for the fifteen young boy sailors who’d joined us just a month back, who, when out on deck, thin as reeds and as pale as the moonlight, looked so wide-eyed and jittery and terrified.

It was perhaps three or four days after the attack when it hit me why. It was when I watched the usual detail – the mop and bucket men who usually took such pleasure in their good-natured teasing – come out onto the quarterdeck and start scrubbing away at the corticene, and in such a fury that at first I thought they must be on a charge over some transgression. Then I noticed something not previously evident from where I was sitting: that what they were scrubbing away at, with their buckets of steaming, frothing water, was not the usual sooty deck grime, but blood.

If I hadn’t seen that red water run in streams into the scuppers, I imagine I would very soon have worked it out anyway. What I’d misread as fury was actually pain; pain not only evident from the grisly task they were detailed to perform, but from the tears streaming down the young ratings’ cheeks.

There was nothing in the world short of physical impossibility that would prevent me from doing what I could to help, though I soon realised that I would have my work cut out.

First of all, I was missing half my whiskers. I was missing half my eyebrows, and a great deal of fur from my hindquarters, too, but it was the damage to my whiskers, which had all but been burned off in the explosion, that distressed me the most.

I had known this from the outset, of course, because it would be impossible not to, but now their loss anguished me anew. It was one thing to move around all the familiar lighted places, but now I was keen to hunt again, I was doubly bereft to be without them as, when night fell – and particularly in the dark places below – I found it so much harder to see.

But see I must – and as a matter of urgency, too – because the rats, who must have rubbed their nasty little claws together in spiteful glee, had become bolder than at any time since I’d joined the crew of the Amethyst. As I lay up, cleaning my wounds, trying to will myself stronger, I could hear them moving about the ship, creeping and scuttling and defecating along their rat runs – an advancing horde (much like Mao Tse-tung’s communists, I thought grimly) with just one thing on their minds. The spoiling and purloining of our now doubly precious stores.

I made my first rat-catching foray in the small hours of the night. The ship, always sleepy at this hour, was preternaturally still, with just the slap of river water sploshing weakly against the hull and the ever-present drone of the night insects.

I took a route I knew well: past the wardroom, down to the galley, through the tight space between the ovens, then down to the very back of the stores, where everything ahead of me was solid black. And oh, how I felt crippled without my whiskers to help guide me, constantly having to stop and nudge my nose up to make up for the unsettling loss of vision.

I hobbled. Doubly lame. Like a blind animal in a blind alley. And because no one had ever told me, I had no idea when, or even if, new whiskers might start growing. I could only trust in logic, albeit without a great deal of confidence, and hope that they would grow again, and soon.

I padded on doggedly, and at last I caught a strong rodent scent – strong enough to have me quivering with anticipation, and pausing to take both stock and soundings. And almost immediately after that came the all-too-familiar scufflings and scratchings of a rat dining on food that didn’t belong to it.

I slunk round a pipe then, cold against me, and at last spied my prize. And when I fixed it in my vision (albeit hazily, without the reassuring confirmation from my whiskers) I sank down again slowly, trying to focus; trying to ignore the scream of protest in my hips. Whatever I currently lacked, I reminded myself firmly, one advantage I did have was my silence – my ability to stalk prey without creating so much as a whisper of unsettled air.

But there was no point in lingering. I would only stiffen up. I tensed myself and sprang.

And, to my horror, I missed. My claws found nothing more substantial than a scrape of scaly tail, and even that, as if to taunt me, caught my ear like a whiplash, as the filthy animal made good its escape.

There was no getting away from it. I felt desperately sorry for myself. My body ached, my ear hurt – the rat must have caught the spot that had been burned already – and it took some minutes before I was able to properly catch my breath.

Worse still, though, were the thoughts swirling in my head, which, like the rat, seemed to mock me for my arrogance. What had possessed me? I was in no fit state to hunt – even a cockroach could now evade me – and I had no idea when or if I would be. I had gone, at a stroke, from being a valued crew member to a burden, a useless liability to my friends. And as I made my way forward, with no clear idea where next to lie, I felt the welling of shame stinging my eyes and my gait becoming sluggish – as if grinding to a halt, much like the Amethyst herself, a prisoner of my own feeble state.

Thank God for my ears, though. At least they hadn’t failed me, and for the noise that, though distant, was caught by them now. I turned my head a little. Listened hard. It was regular. Tinny. And I realised – daring to hope now, my failure all but forgotten – that it was coming from the wireless room. Was it Jack?

I limped off to find out, climbing awkwardly over the barriers beneath the doorways, which, it seemed to me, had almost doubled in size. But as I neared the noise, the deficiencies of my hind legs mattered less to me, with my only goal – my only need – being to know if Jack was alright.

I halted, however, just a few yards from the wireless room, confused by what looked like sacks of flour arranged around it. Had it suffered terrible damage? Was it flooded? No longer in use? But as I sat there, uncertain, I realised I could hear voices – ones that seemed to be coming from inside the room, talking urgently.

‘So, this to C in C.’ Was that Captain Kerans speaking? He reeled off a message about deadlocks and meetings. From his tone it was obvious he wasn’t very happy. ‘Quick as you can, Flags,’ he finished. I imagined Jack (let it be Jack!) scribbling furiously with his pencil, ready to turn the message the captain had given him into Morse code.

Then came Lieutenant Hett’s voice, as ever, deep, clear and strong. ‘I’ll have Lieutenant Fearnley give you something,’ he said. ‘Some more Benzedrine will help, lad. And what about some food, eh? When did you last eat?’

‘I’m not hungry, sir. I’m fine. Just the Benzedrine’ll be fine, sir.’

It was Jack’s voice! It was Jack! I was so excited I almost forgot myself, emerging from the shadows and only narrowly avoiding cannoning into the captain and lieutenant as they swept out of the room and hurried off back to the bridge.

The wireless room was warm and looked untouched by the shelling; still humming and cosy and exactly as it always was, a constant in a world that had been so changed.

Jack was alone, with his back to me, busy working on the message at his little fold-down desk. As I entered he straightened, pulled his Morse code machine towards him, and began tapping out the message in that curious staccato rhythm that ‘another Jack’, he’d explained to me, ‘will hear through his earphones, translate, and write down – and that’s it – job done. Bob’s your uncle!’

I sat back on my haunches, carefully, and waited for him to finish, only going to him once he peeled his headphones from his ears, and stuck the pencil back in place over the right one.

Then I mewled. He looked down. Then he blinked. Then his mouth gaped. ‘Blackie!’ he exclaimed, pushing his chair back and patting his knees. ‘Love a duck! Where’ve you been? We thought we’d lost you!’

I couldn’t jump. Didn’t try. Didn’t dare. He quickly realised. He bent down, and as he did so, he let out a heavy groaning sigh.

‘Aww, look at the state of you,’ he said, picking me up very gingerly by cupping his hands around my front legs. ‘You okay, boy? When d’you last eat? You’re skin and bone. Look at you…’ He gently turned me this way and that, so he could get a better look at me, and I forced myself to cope with the pain even this small movement gave me – it didn’t matter. I was just so grateful for the comfort of his touch.

I studied Jack too. He looked exhausted. His skin was the colour of paper. I wondered when he had last eaten, as well. ‘Those ruddy bast— ’scuse my French, Blackie, but look what those bastards have done to you! Here, sit yourself down. That’s the way. That’s the way. Lord, it’s good to see you. Been getting awful lonely sitting in here, hour after hour, all on my lonesome.’ He grimaced. ‘’S only me now, my friend. Ruddy commies got the others. Just me now. Been up round the clock for ruddy days now.’ He laid a hand on my head, taking care to mind my ear. ‘Oh, it’s so good to see you. We all thought you’d bought it. Taken yourself off and died somewhere, we thought – and here you are! You’re a sight for sore eyes, you know that?’ Then he suddenly leaned forward. ‘Eh oh. Here we go. Hang on, Blackie. Let’s get this down, eh?’ Then he pulled the chair up to the desk again, plonked his earphones on his head, and began transcribing the reply to the message the captain had sent, while I sat in his lap, feeling warm and safe and humbled.

Chapter 13

Sound asleep on Jack’s lap that night, I dreamed of my mother. She was on the Amethyst, alongside me, my protector and friend, and when a machine gun was fired at us from a battery on a shore – the bank flocked with the enemy, all shouting and raging – she sprang up and took the bullets for me, falling lifeless at my feet. A bloom of blood then grew beneath her, till the tug of gravity took it, and it rushed in a stream into the scuppers.

I woke with a start, to the sound of voices again, but this time they were low and conspiratorial. Trying to shake the horrible images from my head, I opened my eyes, to see Lieutenant Hett and the man Frank had called Doc standing over us, the latter with a plate of sandwiches in his hand.

Lieutenant Hett smiled and raised a finger. ‘Shh…’ he mouthed more than said to me. It was then that I realised that Jack was fast asleep. His head was resting on his arm, which was flat across his desk now, and had formed a cosy human tent for me to doze under. I realised the rhythm of his breathing; it was the same one that must have rocked me to sleep.

‘Good to see you again, little fella,’ the one called Doc whispered. Again I wondered. Was he here because Doctor Alderton was injured? And where was Thomas, the sick bay attendant? I’d not seen him either.

The doc turned to Hett and nodded, and they both moved further away. ‘I don’t mind staying in here for a bit,’ he said, keeping his mouth close to the lieutenant’s ear. ‘Let him sleep. He’s done in. He can take more Benzedrine later. I can wake him up soon enough if anything new comes in.’

Hett nodded. ‘Good man. I’ll send a cuppa down for you when it’s brewed then.’ Then he turned back to me. ‘How about you, Simon? Peckish, old son?’ He came back and crouched down so he was on my level. ‘My, boy, you look like you’ve been existing on thin air!’

I doubted anything would have woken Jack, but I took the utmost care in any case, slithering down from his lap as carefully and smoothly as I could. Then, with a wobble of my hindquarters, which I quickly corrected, padded across to say hello to my lieutenant friend. ‘Some sardines, eh?’ he whispered. He looked amused. Pleased to see me. ‘Least the rats can’t get their filthy teeth into the tins, eh? Well –’ he grimaced. ‘Not yet, anyway. Way they’re going, I wouldn’t put it past them.’

I pressed myself around his shin, purring, then wound a slow double figure of eight around the pair of them, to let them know just how pleased I was to see them as well. Then I padded off, over the threshold and back to the dark, infested places. I would love some sardines. My mouth watered at the prospect. It was the first time I’d thought of anything but pain and thirst in all these days.

I would love some sardines. A plate of herrings out, too. Or herrings in, even. The kind in the horrible sauce Jack favoured. That was how hungry I suddenly found myself. I held onto the thought.

Then I tilted my nose, sniffed the air, caught a scent and began to follow. No doubt about it. I would love some sardines. I really would. But not just yet. First I was going to earn them.

Hunger and fury are a potent combination. That and the power of friendship. I was not going to let my friends down.

I killed two rats that night. Though at some cost to myself, admittedly. The second, a big ugly brute of a male, made a swipe that tore open the wound in my ear – again – and made it bleed so much it dripped all down my face.

But such was my delight – and relief – at having dispatched the hated animals that it could have bled all the next day (and might well have, had Petty Officer Frank not managed to staunch it) and I wouldn’t have cared. As it was, I was exhausted, but it was a good kind of weariness. The weariness of a job done to the best of my abilities and more than that, proof that where there is a will, there is, almost always, a way. I had Jack’s devotion to his own duty to thank for that.

I delivered my trophies, one by one, as naval protocol dictated – the first, at dawn, to the captain’s bunk – he being apparently busy inspecting the boilers. I’d yet to properly meet him and was keen to assure him that I was anxious to do my bit. I hoped he’d be pleased, and spent time arranging the rat’s body just so, before padding back to resume my duties below. My second catch, just an hour later, I decided would be for Jack, to cheer him up while he toiled at his post in the wireless room. He was by now wide awake again, looking all the better for his sleep, and munching on one of his ‘herrings in’ sandwiches.

He looked almost bug-eyed, in fact – like one of the black beetles that used to cling to the banyan fronds at dusk – when I padded in with my kill, saying, ‘That is the best thing I’ve seen in days!’ He immediately leaned across to send a message up the voice pipe, shouting, ‘Wireless room to engine room! Guess what. Blackie’s killed a flippin’ monster!’, upon which a message came back, almost immediately. ‘Er, correction, Flags – he’s actually killed two!’

It was the captain’s voice. He’d obviously found it. I couldn’t have felt more proud. Or, indeed, more hungry. When I was presented with the promised plate of sardines shortly afterwards, I ate them so fast that Jack even whistled his admiration up the voice pipe. ‘Gone almost before you could say Jack Robinson, sir!’ he told the captain.

Whoever Jack Robinson was. I felt proud of that, as well.

But, in reality, there was little room for pride on board the Amethyst. Not as things stood. As I patrolled the ship over the next couple of days, full of emotion, full of respect, it was clear that, for all the camaraderie, the crew were not just physically exhausted, they were emotionally exhausted too, grieving for and mourning their dead friends. Most of all, again and again, it confirmed my first impression: that just as the memory of my mother’s brutal death would always haunt me, so the faces of the crew – particularly the youngest, most inexperienced seamen – wore the pain and revulsion of the things they had witnessed, their brows etched not just with lines made of oil and grease and soot, but by the business of remembering, and the distress it must cause them. I felt for them. Grieved with them. Wished I could better help them, but knew I could not.

It was Peggy – dear, silly, muddle-headed Peggy – who first showed me that I was quite wrong about that. Something that should have been as clear as the nose on my face: that I could do so much more than just deal with the rat colony for my friends. I could help them in other ways, too.

It was a few days later, and I was patrolling the rat runs, as focused as ever, as, with no sign of us being allowed to continue on our journey to Nanking, it seemed we could be stuck for some time.

And it hadn’t just been the two kills that had fired me with such ambition. It was the fact that the rats were becoming their own worst enemies. So emboldened had they become since the ship had been marooned that they were often to be seen scuttling along their rat runs in broad daylight, as if – or so they thought – they had nothing to fear!

One of their runs ran through the sick bay, and was becoming increasingly well travelled, doubtless providing some new and devious rodent short cut to the already diminishing stores. There was sufficient food as yet – plenty of preserved food, and a reasonable stock of dry goods – but without fresh food of any kind, bar what could be obtained from the nationalists, the dry goods were an increasingly precious commodity. They had become currency, and could be traded for potatoes, greens, and eggs.

But it was that same store of dry goods – flour and cereals and rice, and so on – that the rats were most intent on stealing from under us, and what they didn’t steal, they spoiled, rendering it useless. Because there was also the health risk, which was not something I knew much about, admittedly, but the new doctor was clear on the dire threat they posed.

Rats spread disease and the rat population was growing. I had never been more needed and my injuries seemed as nothing in the face of it.

Peggy was in the sick bay, on a bunk, sitting squarely on someone’s chest. Which was an arresting enough sight in itself. She barked when she saw me (being entirely without any sort of hunting instinct, she could scatter prey in an instant) and the sailor turned around and grinned at me.

I didn’t know him well – he was one of the young lads that had only joined the Amethyst recently – but the smoothness of his skin under the sweat and grime was telling.

There was a bucket beside the bunk and as he had no visible injuries, I suspected he must have gone down with an infection of some kind – one of those ‘health risks’ our new doctor kept muttering about to the captain, while exhorting the men to wash and clean and scrub.

‘It’s the hero of the hour!’ he said. His face was greyish. Gaunt and angular. ‘Come here, little man,’ he coaxed, ‘come and have a cuddle with me and Peg, eh?’ He hung an arm down at the side of the bunk to coax me, while Peggy licked his face.

I duly trotted across, noticing as I did so how strange the sick bay smelled now. It was a new smell; sharply acid, and oddly sweet, too, and as I inhaled it I remembered something I’d previously forgotten – the frantic panic, the screaming, the desperate cries of ‘Get him in! Get him in!’. It was only a wisp of memory, a snatch of something I’d prefer to bury, but the scene, even though I couldn’t quite see it, became clearer. This same sick bay, not so long ago, would have been full of horribly wounded sailors, with our doctor – I’d now learned he’d been slain, along with his assistant, Thomas – dashing around desperately, trying to do what he could for his men, slipping and sliding on the pools of spilled blood…

Wash, clean and scrub, I thought. Wash, clean and scrub. Once the surviving wounded were taken away and driven to hospital, the sick bay – scene of so much carnage – must have been one of the first priorities. No such care and attention for my mother, whose body had no choice but to stay where it had been flung. I’d had to find a new route across the island from that day.

Today, the sick bay was clean, neat and bright, and almost empty. Bar this one young sailor, and a rating in bed in the far corner, who was snoring, the only other patients were ghosts.

I nudged my head into the sailor’s hand, feeling sadness pressing down on me, and though I braced for the pain as he brushed my still scabby ear, none came. His touch was as light as a cloud.

I managed to jump up onto the bunk, which was happily low, feeling extremely thankful for the growing strength in my back legs. And as I padded up the blanket, Peggy woofed, just a low, gentle snicker. And then stuck her great black wet nose into my face.

‘Look at you two,’ the young sailor said, in his high but rasping voice. ‘Who’d have thought a cat and dog would ever get on like you do?’ Who indeed? I thought, as Peggy hopped down and trotted off to make room for me. ‘Here you go, then,’ said the sailor. ‘Have the warm spot, why don’t you?’

I settled down in the space Peggy had just vacated, and kneaded my claws into the rough grey of the blanket. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one?’ the sailor said, a smile stretching his tired features. ‘I could get used to this, I could. I well could…’ And within what seemed like mere moments, his eyes had fluttered closed, and his breathing had become slow and regular. Every once in a while, the corners of his mouth would twitch a little. Happy dreams? I hoped so. To chase away the nightmares.

Chapter 14

It was several days before I was to gain any real understanding of why we were still trapped halfway up the Yangtse. After the usual Sunday morning church service, the crew were told to gather on the lower mess deck, and once Captain Kerans had all the men assembled together, he explained that we were in the middle of what he called a ‘diplomatic deadlock’. The local garrison commander, who had authority over the shore batteries that had fired on us, was not prepared to let us go.

Peggy and I sat together on one of the gun decks, the watery sun like a blanket on our backs, watching the antics of a small group of plump brown and white birds, who were bobbing on the water a few yards from the Amethyst, poking through the surface with their pencil-like beaks.

I couldn’t help but contrast the scene with the starkness of the captain’s words. ‘If we attempt to move, we will be fired upon,’ he explained grimly. ‘Until such time as we are prepared to admit that the Amethyst fired first.’

There was a swell of angry protest at this outrage. He raised a hand to silence it. ‘Which I have, of course, emphatically denied. And shall continue to do so, as we are not in the business of colluding with such lies. Quite apart from anything else, it would be a gross betrayal of the men who have died here. But I’m afraid that leaves us in something of a bind, and I’m going to need you all to be strong. As of now, we are in reasonably good shape. Talks continue – agonisingly slowly, but they continue – and at the highest level, so I am at least hopeful that it won’t be too long before the communist leaders take heed of the truth – that there is a somewhat trigger-happy garrison commander at the root of this mess – and that we’ll be allowed to continue our journey to Nanking.

‘But, in truth, I cannot say how long things will take. So though we must hope for the best, we must also prepare for the worst. Keep occupied, do everything we can to make the Amethyst seaworthy, and be understanding about the difficulties and privations that may lie ahead. We are at least lucky that we have assistance from the nationalists and can get our hands on some fresh food, though with the communists taking control of both banks of the river now, in places, I don’t know how long that might continue. We must also preserve our oil, for obvious reasons, so frugality is going to be key. To that end, I’m going to review our use of it on a day-by-day basis. It may well be that at some point soon we’ll have to shut down the boilers at night. Which won’t be comfortable, especially with the temperatures rising as they are, but I know I can rely on you all to be stoical.’

The captain knew he could also rely on me doing my part. Since the first rat I’d given him, I’d caught another two, and though our paths hadn’t crossed much he’d spotted me the previous morning and to my delight had said, ‘Well, now – so this is our master rat-catcher! Very glad to make your acquaintance at last, young Simon. Keep up the good work!’ Then he’d smiled and strode off, hands clasped loosely behind his back, leaving me puffed up with pride.

He looked around at the crew now and, following his gaze, so did I. So many of the remaining crew were so young themselves, and it shook me. Not to mention Lieutenant Strain, the fleet’s electrical officer, who now looked every inch the weather-beaten sea dog, despite having only joined the Amethyst at Shanghai the night we’d sailed – a taxi ride to Nanking was all he’d been after. As it stood, he’d been lucky to survive.

‘As I say, men,’ Captain Kerans finished, ‘this is a difficult situation – and one not of any of our making. And all we can do is accept our place in it with fortitude, and trust that everything that can be done is being done to expedite our safe passage. In the meantime, I know Lieutenant Commander Skinner would have been extremely proud of you. As am I. You are a credit to His Majesty’s Navy.’

Captain Kerans had the men fall out then, and despite the morale-boosting words, it was clear that the reality of our capture was beginning to sink in, and the mood quickly dipped again. I could see it in the slump of shoulders as the crew dispersed, in the low mutterings of discontent that floated up to me and Peggy.

I could mostly sense the growing anger, which was wholly justified, that the Amethyst was being pinpointed as the aggressor. That to admit to an outright lie would be a condition of us being freed, just to save the face – and perhaps the bacon – of a communist soldier who’d done wrong. And that anger was good, I thought. Fortifying and good. It would give the men a much needed reason to stay strong.

But it seemed Captain Kerans had been right when he’d used the words ‘agonisingly slowly’. A week passed and then another, and a new routine became established; one of hard physical work to keep the Amethyst in peak condition, which meant maintenance and cleaning and drills for the men, and round-the-clock rat-hunting for me. And while we got on with the business of managing our silent, stranded ship, the officers would be back and forth across the Yangtse in a communist sampan, back and forth, back and forth, all done up in their whites – to meetings with the communists, which always promised much but in every case failed to deliver.

The weather was a constant irritant too. The temperature rose and kept rising, but more often that not, there was no pleasure to be had from it. ‘There’s just too damned much weather!’ Frank was moved to comment one day, as we were treated to lashings of rain and winds strong enough to blow a man right off his feet (let alone a cat) alongside the inevitable soaring temperatures, dense, swirling mists, and humidity so high it made everything wringing wet anyway. ‘Can’t we just have one ruddy type at a time?’

And then, perhaps inevitably, came the news from the captain that in order to preserve the precious stock of oil we still had, the boilers would be shut down at night. This left nothing but the emergency lighting to rely on, and also meant there was no ventilation.

The news was greeted with grim acceptance, as the anger still held sway. They would not beat us. However hard they conspired to make life difficult for us, the truth was the truth, and every man was going to stick by it. To collude with their lies would be to betray our dead friends, so they could do what they liked.

Naturally, the rats were thrilled to bits.

Chapter 15

By mid-June, the temperature on board was becoming unbearably hot. By day it was in the hundreds and by night, not much cooler, and with the oil situation critical and no guarantee of getting more, the boilers remained shut down and silent every night, making the Amethyst as quiet as the grave.

It was strange and unsettling. A ship was a living, breathing thing. Whether at sea or in port, it was never meant to be completely silent. I knew this from my days as a kitten in Hong Kong. I would be mesmerised at night, often, by the big ships in the harbour – always lights showing, bells and whistles, the low chug and throb of all the engines and boilers, sailors running around everywhere, blurs of navy, flashes of white – seeming to crawl over the infrastructure like ants. This silence was different. It was complete and unbroken, and it was only now I felt it that I realised how peculiar it was.

I suspected the silence was the last thing on my friends’ minds. Just the heat, and the humidity, and the inability to sleep; so much so that little by little, the sleeping arrangements changed. Forced to swelter and sweat through the long sticky nights, many would often give up their hammocks and sleep on camp beds out on deck.

Sleeping on deck became popular for other reasons too; the fact that the ship – now such a hothouse, due to the necessary lack of ventilation – was becoming infested with insects. Mosquitoes hid everywhere – they were extremely good at hiding – and stalked their prey with commando-like precision. I was lucky, as was Peggy – they had no interest in us – but the men were plagued constantly, many of them covered in angry-looking bites, and driven to distraction by the constant itching of them.

There was also a big increase in the cockroach population. Where toying with a cockroach had once been a happy diversion for me, there were now so many running around that I scarcely registered them, even when they twitched my finally sprouting whiskers. Where the rats had their runs, so the cockroaches did too, though where the rat runs followed routes behind pipes and under furniture, the cockroaches – nimble, quick, and entirely without limits – would scuttle along bedsteads and hammock ropes and pillowslips, and if a human got in the way they’d just scuttle straight over them, their antennae waving gaily as they passed.

It was an education in the curious sensibilities of humans; I knew cockroaches were high on the doc’s list of ‘health crises in the making’ because, like rats, they spread diseases. But it turned out the sailors didn’t care about that. No. In the main, they were just very, very frightened of them. There was no logic in this. Not that I could see, anyway. Yet the sight of a cockroach would have the biggest, burliest seaman shuddering – especially the younger ones – and I wasn’t sure they knew why themselves. But what was very clear was that they found it impossible to ignore them. If they weren’t jumping up and down on them – though never in bare feet – they’d be springing up, going ‘aagh!’ and ‘yuck!’ and ‘ruddy bleeders! Yarggg!’, shaking themselves down as if they were crawling with scores of them, rather than just one, and doing strange little dances on the spot.

There was an entirely different attitude towards the moths. Strangely, given that moths were far superior when it came to flying (and often sat for minutes at a time on the men’s faces, when they dozed off, if only they knew) they attracted nothing like the same frantic response. A moth was looked upon benignly, brushed away relatively calmly – though as the weeks passed and the heat grew their numbers began increasing, the cry of ‘Cover that ruddy light off – we’ll be swamped with the bloody things!’ became a common one.

But it was the rats – always the rats – who were posing the worst infestation, and by mid-June – six whole weeks since we’d been taken hostage by the communists – there was little choice but to stop using the aft part of the ship entirely, and let the rodents have the run of the place.

As a consequence, the men were even more crammed together in the heat and, when not working or on watch (Captain Kerans was becoming infamous for his ‘obsession’ with keeping everyone occupied) attempted to amuse themselves not only by reading, or playing cards (or, touchingly, writing long letters that couldn’t be posted) but by thinking up ways the evil scourge could be exterminated. Whenever the opportunity arose, boots were lobbed at any rat who was bold enough to run around in daylight.

These days, such boldness was common to most of them, and all I could do was my best. But it was fast becoming an unequal battle. I made kills every day now – rats were there for the taking – but for every one I finished off there seemed to be a dozen more.

‘Breeding like rabbits!’ Sid observed one evening, after the meal was cleared away. ‘We’ll soon be overrun with the wretched things!

Sid, the youngest rating, had recently become a particular friend. To add to the woes already heaped on us by the communists, he’d suffered an injury a few weeks back when trying to adjust a steel cable. When he’d been taken ashore by the doctor, it was discovered he’d broken his arm, so he’d been in need of a little extra help and comfort.

I was sharing his hammock in the mess now, curled on top of his feet to keep his toes warm and, despite the chatter of the men, it was impossible not to hear the rats’ constant scurryings and scrapings beneath and around us.

‘Wish they were rabbits,’ remarked the other boy sailor, Martin. ‘Least then we could put them in a pie and eat the blighters!’

Martin, too, had had a tougher time than most. He and Bannister, one of the stoker mechanics, had been among those put to shore. They’d spent time in captivity – the plan being to use them to help coerce the captain. But they hadn’t co-operated, and had not long been returned.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ said Sid. ‘Now you’re making me feel sick!’

Sid was particularly queasy about the rats, having woken up one morning to find one half dead and squealing, dangling a scant three inches above his head, after a kind soul had rigged up a snare with some fuse wire. ‘Well, how was I to know you planned to sleep there?’ the sailor had huffed.

As it was, my kills were mostly lobbed over the guardrail into the Yangtse. It became the ritual to wish them a safe journey to the north shore, where the ‘bloody commies’ could roast them for dinner. I worked hard to keep the supply up, knowing my contribution was vital, as no other method of killing them seemed to work. Which was not to say the men didn’t try – in a fit of furious determination upwards of fifty traps were laid in a single afternoon. The next day, not a single one was sprung.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the feeling became prevalent that the rats were more organised than we knew. They certainly seemed so – and so confident! They were increasingly bolder and braver. Poor Sid, who’d been dozing in the sick bay one afternoon, just after his accident, was roused from his slumbers by one calmly nibbling at his toes.

There was also talk of several sightings of a rat to beat the lot of them – a giant of an animal who they’d nicknamed Mao Tse-tung, on account of him seeming to be the ringleader. ‘Big as you, he is Blackie,’ Jack had helpfully told me. ‘I reckon you’d have a job on your hands, taking him on.’

‘Nah, he’s a sight bigger,’ Sid had even more helpfully corrected him. ‘Job on his hands? I reckon that rat could see him off if he wasn’t careful. You’d best keep away from him, Blackie.’

‘He’s the one, though,’ Martin agreed. ‘He’s the King Rat, no doubt about it. He’s the one that needs dispatching to the afterlife, the filthy bugger. Before he sires any more of the blasted things.’

I’d never thought about rats having an afterlife before. Did they too have their souls in the stars? I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I had to concede that the idea made some sense to me, even it didn’t inspire any finer feelings for the filthy vermin. I was a member of His Majesty’s Navy and I had no time for that. Not for animals that caused so much misery for my friends.

I did think quite a lot about this legendary Mao Tse-tung, though. That perhaps Jack and Sid were right. Perhaps he would be too much for me. I’d already dealt with a couple of sizeable males, and, even with my strength returning and my whiskers coming along nicely, I was not fully fit yet, and it had been no small matter to catch them and finish them off. It seemed the bolder they got, the more well fed they got – while the men faced the meat running out in a matter of days now, the rats, gorging on grain and rice, were growing ever plumper. The plumper they were, the heavier and bulkier they were, and though I was healing well – barely limping now, as Lieutenant Hett had noticed recently – I weighed no more than I ever did, nor, I thought, would I.

But for all my ever-present anxiety about facing down the fabled ‘King Rat’, when the day of reckoning came, I had no time to even think, much less be frightened. It was all just so sudden, so unexpected, so unlike any rat encounter before it.

I had simply turned a corner onto the quarterdeck one morning, and there he was – it had to be him – looking as bold as you like. He was waddling across the deck in my direction, staying close to the bulkhead, but seemingly oblivious of all the sailors milling about, getting on with their duties. At first I could only gawp. He had such a proprietorial air about him (or so he thought; a rat could never aspire to such a thing) it really was as if he was entirely without a care. King Rat. Afraid of nothing and no one.

I’d sunk down to my belly before I’d even consciously thought about it, my instinct kicking in before my eyes had even registered what I’d seen.

He stopped too, and stared at me, his dead eyes like fish eyes. The same dull, unblinking gaze of a sandfish on a slab. His whiskers, in contrast, were quivering and questing, causing the air between us, which carried the scent of him, to tickle my own. He was a brute and his stench made me nauseous.

Jack had been right, though. Sid even righter. He was a very big rat. Even face on he looked huge so, though I couldn’t properly see the length and spread of him, there was no question that he was almost as big as I was. Not as big, which I registered gratefully, even as I stared. But heavier. So much heavier. A fat rat indeed. An unwelcome glimpse of the tip of his tail soon confirmed it. It was a good foot beyond the end of his body.

I settled and I watched and I waited, as per usual, vaguely conscious of movement at the edges of my vision. The men on deck had now noticed him too.

‘Go on, Blackie,’ I heard someone say to me – in no more than a whisper, though my fear that it might give the rat cause to turn and flee was soon forgotten. Quite the opposite. He was actually edging towards me.

I stayed where I was, mindful of the things my mother had always warned me. With an animal this size, it would be foolhardy to ignore them. He rose up as he kept moving forward – though not in a straight line but using a strange angled walk. Then I realised. He was circling me. Trying to come around the side of me. The better to spring? Then I must get the advantage and spring first. I side-stepped, and now I could see the bulk of his body, but with my adrenaline pumping and my hackles fast rising, there was no question of not taking him on, giant though he was. I had my friends to think about. I could not, would not, walk away.

He slipped past me again, and I was treated to a flash of his rodent teeth. Huge pegs, they were. Perhaps the biggest I’d yet seen. Deep yellow, curving up to the roof of his mouth. I would have to spring and get my jaw locked high up on his neck. I spun around, sprang and pounced – no room for waiting, too dangerous – and in one move had my own teeth buried deep into the fur of his upper back.

He whirled then, unbalancing me, sending me over onto my flank, heavily, so I curled my paws round him to stop him gouging at my eyes. And he squealed and squealed and squealed – high, high, and higher, scrabbling and pulling me round with him, using all his strength, which was considerable, to free his front legs. My jaws were on fire from the extent I’d had to open them, my breath coming in rasps as I tried to keep them locked. I couldn’t stand up and, even if I could, I hardly dared to – I knew it would only take the tiniest amount of slackening and he’d be out, he’d be free, he’d be turning on me…

I willed myself to bite down even harder – to try to finish him off now, to try to get a better, stronger, purchase… But the action only made him squeal and scrabble at me all the louder and harder. There was nothing for it – I had to clamp him between my paws and change my bite… One, two, three… Do it now. Do it now! Break and clamp. Break and grab again… Fast as you can. Strong as you can. Do it!

So I did it, and he jerked as if he were a lizard struck by lightning. And with my jaw screaming in pain now, I came so close to losing him, so stunned and unbalanced was I by the strength he had left. But then I felt it – the soft crack of his neck, then the stillness. Even then, for the longest time, I stayed as I was, panting, still as night, still as death, not once daring to loosen my grip. It must have been a full minute before I judged it safe to release him, and let his body drop heavily between my paws.

‘He’s done it! He’s done it! He’s only gone and done it!’

Having little idea of how many had gathered to watch, I almost jumped a foot in the air. The deck felt alive beneath my paws, such was the outcry; feet were stamping, hands were clapping, men were cheering and whooping, buckets were being clanged, mops and brooms rapped against the bulkheads.

I looked up to see a beaming Lieutenant Hett approaching. He was all done up in his whites – he must have just returned from a shore trip – with his cap tucked under his arm so he could clap me as well.

Then he did something odd. He stopped right there in front of me, clicked his heels sharply and saluted me. ‘I officially promote you to the rank of able seaman,’ he told me, which caused a new round of cheers and applause to surge all around.

‘Don’t you mean able seacat?’ shouted someone. There was laughter.

Lieutenant Hett nodded. ‘Of course! I stand corrected. I hereby promote you to Able Seacat Simon. Ship’s ratter of the highest order! Good for you!’

Then, before I had a chance to stop him, he picked the rat up by the tail, which drew another tumultuous cheer. I felt my heart swell. I had done it. I’d really done it.

‘How about that, then?’ Lieutenant Hett said, lifting the rat high in the air, where it swung, turning a circle, grey-brown, amorphous and limp.

And very dead.

‘Farewell, Mao Tse-tung!’ he said, and launched it into the river.

I watched the rat disappear and heard the ‘plunk’ as it hit the water. A very satisfying ‘plunk’ it was too. Though I was still breathing hard and knew my jaw would ache for hours, I don’t think I could have felt happier if I’d tried.

But I didn’t spend a great deal of time on celebrations. I was too exhausted. I went back to the captain’s cabin, curled up on his bunk, and slept for some ten hours straight.

Chapter 16

The demise of the infamous and much hated rodent Mao Tse-tung brought about a marked lift in everyone’s spirits. As for me, I couldn’t have been more thrilled, particularly with my new name of Able Seacat Simon, which I delighted in hearing called out wherever I went. The next couple of weeks saw a general cheeriness even, reaching a particular high when the clever electricians managed to tune us into a programme on the radio which I was assured was a great favourite of everyone on board, being transmitted by something called the BBC.

I didn’t know who or what the BBC was, but I didn’t need to. It didn’t last long, but there was laughter and chat and lots of singing, and – this did seem a miracle, especially when they said, ‘This one’s for Flight Lieutenant Fearnley!’ – it seemed much of the programme was dedicated to the crew of the Amethyst; something to cheer us up and to let everyone on board know that they hadn’t been forgotten.

Which was precious. Because there was no doubt that, for all the peaks of jollity, the troughs of exhaustion and sadness and dejection were deep.

Most kept it hidden. Rather too well hidden, sometimes, I mused, so many of the sailors – particularly the ones who’d seen so much, suffered so much, had to tend to their dead and dying friends – feeling not quite able to articulate the shock and revulsion that I knew must regularly dance through their dreams. So I acted on what had now become a powerful instinct; I gave comfort where needed, in the shape of my physical presence and, increasingly, because sometimes the pain was buried deep, gave comfort where it wasn’t even known that it was needed.

It was the strangest thing – well, at first. I soon learned to understand it. I’d have a rating pick me up, seemingly at random, and then they’d pull me close to their face – their conscious mind assuming that they were petting me. And then that outbreath. That sigh. That realisation seeping into them. That, actually, it was the other way around.

If the communist garrison leader – a Colonel Kang – hoped to break the crew, and have the captain agree to his terms, he had underestimated the strength of everyone’s resolve. This was strengthened even further when, towards the end of June, three mail sacks got through to us, and better still came the news, following an otherwise fruitless meeting with Captain Kerans, that Kang was going to allow us to have delivered some of the reserves of fuel oil that were currently up in Nanking.

The captain, in a rare display of levity, almost clapped his hands together in glee. ‘Now that’s what I call a mistake!’ he told the officers. ‘I still can’t quite believe it, I really can’t.’

‘Perhaps there’s been an instruction from on high, sir,’ Hett suggested. ‘You know. Humanitarian grounds and that. It won’t look good if the men start dropping, will it?’

The captain scratched his head. I could see he was thinking about Kang. Though he’d not said it publicly, because he didn’t want to frighten the men, I knew he believed everything Kang did was threatening. That he would have no compunction, if we crossed him, about killing us all. ‘Hmm, perhaps there has,’ he said. Then his face fell. ‘Or perhaps he’s playing mind games again. I should have thought of that. We still have to get it.’

It would be a long wait, too, but knowing it was coming, and that it would make everyone’s lives so much more palatable in the increasing heat, raised everyone’s spirits right up again. Then, ten days later, we greeted the day – a rare fine one – with the sight of a tug boat towing a lighter, approaching from upriver.

It took a while to be sure, but as it drew nearer, a cheer went up all over the Amethyst, as it became obvious that what it carried was the promised supply of oil. At last we’d have the means to light and ventilate the ship properly – simple things perhaps, but, in our current straits, so important.

Everyone free to do so crowded the starboard guardrails. The happy expectation turned out to be short-lived, however. As the craft tried to approach our side, the tide had its own ideas about where the oil should be headed, thwarting every attempt to get alongside us, and pulling both tug and lighter away downstream.

There was no way it was going to get away without a fight, and, eventually, through the valiant efforts of the pilot (helped by Peggy, who barked encouragement throughout, possibly under the misapprehension that it held some dog food) the lighter was tied to us and the business of unloading it could begin. The only problem now – and it was a big one – was how that could be done. For all that the precious liquid was a godsend, every last drum of it, a little under three hundred drums would have to be hoisted on board and then drained into the oil fuel tank by hand.

But it was a challenge the men welcomed and they rolled their sleeves up willingly. They’d not had any decent exercise for some 82 days now, and everyone was feeling it. There was another wait first, because to do so at night would be too dangerous. With the dusk closing in, the captain decided ‘Operation Oil’ would have to wait until the morning.

No one seemed to mind the dawn reveille, and it was cheering to hear the determination and commitment in the crew’s voices as they began the mammoth task of transferring our welcome haul into the tank. It was a messy business; by lunch time there seemed to be oil everywhere. It was spilled on the decks, all over the crew and, less happily, up my nose – the smell of it being the nearest I decided I would like to get to it. It was hard enough to keep clean in the current conditions at the best of times, so I busied myself, as per usual, padding along all the still well-travelled rat runs, happy in the knowledge that the light and air and general lifting of spirits would help send the creatures back from where they came.

‘To C in C,’ the captain said to Jack, when, by around four in the afternoon, the last drop was safely sloshing where it belonged. ‘Fuel now on board. 54 tons. Operation commenced 05:00, finished at 16:00 hours, working nonstop throughout, 11 hours. They worked like TROJANS!’ he finished. ‘And make sure that’s in capitals, Flags. What an excellent day’s work.’

There was further good news when a message arrived by boat a short while later in the form of a letter asking the captain to attend a meeting in Ching Kiang, the Communist People’s Liberation Army’s HQ, the following day.

‘Might this be it, sir?’ Hett asked him, as they gathered in the wireless room. ‘Might we finally be given permission to get away, do you think?’

‘I hope so,’ said Captain Kerans. ‘Let’s hope for the best, eh?’

But his expression told me the rest of what he was thinking. That at the same time, we should prepare for the worst.

The worst happened. Captain Kerans returned from the meeting stony-faced and sweating. Far from an agreement, he’d returned with yet another disappointment.

We might have oil, but they were still demanding an admission from the British Navy that not only had we fired first but that we shouldn’t have even been there. That we had no right to be in Chinese waters in the first place, which was patently untrue. But as the communists were now controlling more and more territory around the Yangtse, their implacable stance held more and more sway.

There was even more; the captain had asked about replenishing our food stores, and was told in no uncertain terms that, as foreign merchant ships were no longer permitted to travel up the Yangtse, any ship – or plane – that attempted to go anywhere near the Amethyst would immediately be destroyed.

‘And, of course, he reiterated his usual threat,’ the captain said gloomily. ‘The Amethyst will also be destroyed if we attempt to move it. So that’s that. Another deadlock. I’m sorry to have to say so, but if we’re going to play Kang at his own game, there’s no choice. It’s going to have to be half-rations from tomorrow.’

The strain of our continued confinement was now making its presence felt right across the ship. Like the ensign that still flew above us, the crew – me included, because I was now on half-rations too – were getting droopy and ragged. Even Peggy was beginning to wilt – and she was usually immune to the extremes of temperature. I’d often catch her standing by a guardrail, looking wistfully at the sludge-coloured water below us. ‘She’ll be in the river – you mark my words,’ Petty Officer Griffiths kept muttering. ‘She’ll be in. For two pins, she’ll be in, for a swim.’

Still, Peggy, who managed to resist the temptation (just – I had no similar compunction) did what she could to cheer our friends up, as did I. But while we could curl up with our friends in the mess and watch them settle down to sleep, Captain Kerans increasingly seemed preoccupied and distant, mooching around on his own at all hours of the day and night.

It wasn’t unexpected. After all, he’d been commanding a ship and crew in the most difficult and dispiriting conditions, and as the summer wore on the weather got even hotter, so keeping morale up among his young sailors must have been difficult.

With the daily grind being just that – a relentless and tedious round of mostly domestic drudgery – it was easy to forget the other spectre which still hung over the Amethyst: the fresh memories, there to stumble upon every time any of us passed over the quarterdeck – of the blood that had been shed and the lives that had been lost – of the friends we would never see again.

In the meantime, the game of what the captain had called ‘cat and mouse’ with the garrison commander, Kang, was still showing no signs of being resolved. I didn’t know which was which – who was the cat and who was the rodent? I hoped we weren’t the latter – but it was obvious that the repeated to-ings and fro-ings, to attend yet more lengthy and up to now largely pointless-sounding meetings, were beginning to try the captain’s patience to the utmost.

Either that, or he was doing what Jack had predicted we all might do before long, if we were stuck here much longer, and already ‘losing his marbles’. I wasn’t sure quite what that meant – couldn’t even begin to guess at it – but, judging by Jack’s expression when he’d said it, I suspected it wouldn’t be a pretty sight.

Perhaps Captain Kerans had already lost them. Whenever it was warm and dry (an extremely rare and welcome combination) I had lately taken to returning to one of my old favourite high places – the glass-topped magnetic compass and gyro up on the bridge, which had miraculously survived the shelling unscathed. It was here, one afternoon a couple of days later, that I was to witness first hand evidence that Captain Kerans’ ‘marbles’ might have already deserted him.

‘I need a detail of men mustered to deal with the blackout,’ he was telling Frank.

It was mid-July now, unbelievably. We’d been stuck here a whole two and a half months.

‘The blackout?’ Frank answered. He looked confused.

‘Yes, it’s not nearly good enough. Lights showing everywhere. We never seem sufficiently darkened at night. Something needs to be done about it.’

Petty Officer Frank adjusted his face into a configuration I recognised. One that said, ‘Really, sir? You’re sure, sir?’ but without letting on.

‘The blackout, sir,’ he said. ‘Something needs to be done?’ Captain Kerans flapped a hand. ‘Yes, it does. We need more blackout tarpaulins made. Particularly aft. Stern to amidships. Have a group of men run some up. Lots of them.’

Frank’s expression must have registered with Captain Kerans as well. Even with the oil, the power was still off by dusk. The nights couldn’t be darker. He cleared his throat. ‘We need to keep the men busy, Frank. All this heat and lassitude is doing morale no good at all.’

‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Frank. ‘Excellent idea for the morale, sir.’ He bent his head to make a note of the instruction in his book.

‘And we need to reduce topweight. The ship’s very unstable. We need to strip down anything we can from the decks, particularly the upper decks – including removing some of the masts.’ He stopped then, perhaps noticing Frank’s look of increasing consternation. ‘They can be stored below,’ he added. ‘Again, it’s all work that will keep the men busy, Frank – stop them thinking quite so much about their empty stomachs.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Frank, once again scribbling furiously.

‘And another thing,’ said the captain. ‘The anchor.’

‘Sir? The anchor?’

‘The anchor, sir?’ echoed an equally bemused-looking Lieutenant Hett, who’d just joined them.

‘Yes, specifically the anchor chain,’ Captain Kerans repeated, looking like a man not to be messed with. ‘It needs a ruddy good greasing. Clangs about all the time – specially on these high tides. Makes one hell of a racket. Driving me mad, it is. And it’s only going to get worse if that typhoon comes along.’

He was talking about Typhoon Gloria, a storm that had been building, that Jack had already told me might be headed our way. I’d never seen a typhoon before but felt strangely unafraid of it. With so much on our plates already – not least so much to be afraid of – a typhoon, sent by Mother Nature, seemed quite a benign thing. At least it might help stir things up a bit.

‘The anchor chain, sir,’ Frank repeated, scribbling again. ‘Have it greased.’

‘Yes, a good quantity of grease and soft soap,’ the captain said. ‘That should do the job, I think. Oh, and while they’re at it, have them wrap it well in bedding. Decent amount of blankets. That should do it. Stop the ruddy thing clanking away and getting on my nerves.’

Lieutenant Hett said nothing this time, but I caught him raising his eyebrows while the captain wasn’t looking, his attention still on the errant anchor chain.

‘That’s all, sir?’ asked Frank.

‘For the moment,’ said the captain. ‘And as soon as possible,’ he added. ‘Okay, Frank? That’ll be all. As you were.’

Captain Kerans stood and watched Hett and Frank walk away and down the ladder to the quarterdeck. He was looking very thin, and I wondered if he was eating his rations. Since I’d got to know him, I’d come to realise the sort of man he was, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to have his own food distributed elsewhere.

And it was then that he looked up and saw me. ‘Ah, there you are, Able Seacat Simon!’ he said, grinning up at me. Then he tapped his nose. ‘Ah,’ he said, mysteriously. ‘Walls have ears, Simon, my lad. That’s the thing you must remember. Walls have ears.’

I stared back down at him, every bit as confused as his officers. Walls had ears? Perhaps Jack had been right about the marbles.

Chapter 17

The 30th July 1949, a day that would prove to be unlike any other, dawned hot and humid, as per usual. The only difference to be seen and felt was the effect of Typhoon Gloria. Though she’d not quite made a visit, she had come pretty close, the result of which was a high tide and fast-flowing current, and flooding on both banks of the river.

Gloria had certainly made herself felt over the previous week, and in our already difficult straits had added another set of problems. The top of the ship had to be stripped of anything that might be blown away – all the canvas the men had been busy assembling and hanging at the captain’s orders, plus the covers over the guns, and all the other awnings. Then it was simply a case of waiting and hoping. As the wind rose and rose, most of us huddled under some sort of cover – at least grateful for the marked dip in temperature – till the worst of it blew itself out.

Not that it had all been doom and gloom. And, as I’d suspected, it had certainly stirred things up a bit. Just after the worst of the wind passed, there was suddenly a great commotion – Peggy, who I’d thought had been dozing in Petty Officer Griffiths’ cabin, was out on deck, barking herself hoarse.

We all went out to find out what was going on, gathering at the guardrails, to see a haystack floating past the Amethyst, with a dog standing on top of it, barking back. Peggy was beside herself, understandably. Was this the first fellow canine she’d seen in a year? Probably. I wondered if we’d see a cat next.

‘Shall we try to lasso it for you, Pegs?’ Petty Officer Griffiths was saying to her, laughing.

‘I think it’s love at first sight,’ remarked Lieutenant Strain drily.

There was more to come. Soon another haystack appeared in the distance, this one topped off not by a cat, but by a chicken.

‘Ruddy hell, is this some evil communist torture?’ Frank said. ‘God, what I wouldn’t give to see that roasted on a plate.’

But if the chicken had roused the crew’s hunger, the next thing had them drooling – for it was not a haystack this time, but a pig!

‘Saints alive,’ somebody shouted from above me. ‘Someone fetch some rope or something! Anything! We can get that! A whole pig!’

There was a frantic scrabble while everyone flew in all directions, trying to find something to lasso the animal with before the tide pulled it out of our reach. And they made a good fist of it; more than once managing to get a rope round it before the current got the upper hand and the pig, looking up at its tormentors with terrified eyes, managed to slip the makeshift noose.

‘No fresh pork for dinner tonight, then,’ Frank observed, as it disappeared into the distance and whatever alternative fate awaited it. ‘Bully beef it is, then,’ he added, sighing, and as I looked at the men’s expressions, the brief excitement snatched from them – literally – I couldn’t help but wish they liked sardines as much as I did. For all the privations, we had more than enough of those.

‘Woof,’ said Peggy, dolefully. We all knew how she felt.

Though the effects of Typhoon Gloria were largely behind us now, we had much to be grateful to her for. We didn’t know it yet, but the high tide, the current and the flooding on the banks were all going to be our friends.

However, when I entered Captain Kerans’ cabin that afternoon, in the interests of giving him some moral support, I had no idea quite how much Gloria was going to mean to us, and how soon.

There was no getting away from it; conditions were deteriorating rapidly. I had come from the wireless room – no longer a warm cosy spot but a raging cauldron – so much so that poor Jack was barely able to think straight from heat exhaustion. Junior ratings were taking turns to sit with him and pump a pair of the ship’s bellows over him, but he was in such a bad way now that he sometimes struggled to write, let alone try to decode incoming messages – of which, over the last few days there seemed to have been many.

There were also mutterings all over the ship – mutterings the captain had been at pains to quell – about what was going to happen once this new oil ran out, which it soon would, even with the ship being powered down at night. And what about the food? We were almost out of flour, the sugar was spoiled now, the rats – growing fatter on it – were breeding unchecked.

The flooding hadn’t helped, either. Because of it, communication with the shore had been impossible, so such supplies as we’d been able to trade for were no longer available to us.

No, all in all, things were not looking good for the Amethyst, and as I caught the captain’s eye once inside his cabin, I could tell he was thinking about that too; about just how far the communists intended to push us. To the death? Then, with a thrill of excitement, I saw something else twinkling in his eyes. Did he know something no one else did?

I settled myself down in my usual spot, just beside the typewriter on which he bashed out his reports. But it seemed that he hadn’t been writing, but drawing. He picked up the result of his efforts – a pencil sketch of a ship – and hung it from his fingers in front of me.

‘Shall I tell you a secret, Simon?’ he said.

Galvanised and rapt now, I stood up and stretched, then resettled and made myself more comfortable. I was glad I had, because it turned out to be quite a big secret. And also an explanation for all the strange goings-on that almost the entire crew had been muttering and moaning about these past couple of weeks. The business of the greasing and blanketing of the anchor. The business of the Amethyst being shrouded in sheets. The business of taking down all that metal topweight and slinging it unceremoniously overboard or below. The business of still being so frugal with the oil.

He wasn’t losing his marbles. He had had all his wits about him. He was setting things in place to try to silence and disguise the Amethyst. He was preparing for us all to escape!

‘What we’re going to do,’ he confirmed, to my great excitement, ‘is make a dash for it. Tonight. Yes, I know it’s dangerous, but there’s no need to look at me like that, Simon. I promise you, I have thought all this through. For weeks, let me tell you. We’re going to make a break for it under cover of darkness later this evening. Look. See this here?’

He pointed to where he’d done some shading with his pencil. ‘I’m going to disguise the Amethyst – well, to the extent that I can do, at any rate – disguise her enough to at least give those communists pause for thought. To be uncertain that they are looking at what they think they are looking at. And then we are going to escape.’

There was no hesitation. No judicious use of the word ‘try’. We are going to escape. So the men had been wrong in their mutterings and chunterings. Captain Kerans had pulled the wool right over their eyes.

Having already told Williams, the chief engineer, earlier in the day, so he would have time to raise steam in the boilers, Captain Kerans gave Frank a list of names. He was to inform everyone on the list – all the chief petty officers and petty officers – to assemble in his cabin, plus a number of the senior ratings, all of them maintaining utmost security at all times.

It was early evening when they arrived, the sky outside turning a darkening peachy pink, and the temperature still as warm as it had been all day. So with some seventeen men crammed into the tiny airless space, it was something of a hot, uncomfortable squeeze. I didn’t mind, though. I was too excited about everything to want to be anywhere else, so I settled again, just by the voice pipe to the wheelhouse, keen to listen in on his briefing.

‘I have decided to make a break for it tonight,’ he told everyone. ‘Now, I know it’s not going to be easy without a pilot to guide us, but the darkness is going to help us – the moon sets just after 23:00. And it won’t be as good for another month after tonight. The river’s high because of the typhoon, too, which should give us some advantage, and we need to slip at 22:00.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘That’s crucial if we’re going to pass the big guns at Woosung before dawn. I don’t doubt that if they are on to us, that’s where we’re going to get it. So speed,’ he glanced over at Williams, ‘is going to be of the very essence.’

There was silence for a moment as the officers took this in, then the mood changed and they all began bombarding him with questions – every one of which he seemed to have an answer for. He really had been thinking about this for a long time, I realised. No wonder he’d seemed so preoccupied.

They soon dispersed – because now time was very much of the essence – and everyone had a precise role to play to make Captain Kerans’ dream of escape a reality. There was no room for doubt. This was our only chance of making a run for it, and there wasn’t a man there, I think, who didn’t want to take it.

Frank grinned at me, then, having saluted the captain, as if on an impulse, scooped me up and tucked me under his arm. I wondered if – perhaps given what had happened the last time – he intended to take me down to the wheelhouse to bring him luck.

‘You hear that?’ he said. ‘Finally, it’s happening! You know what we’re going to do, Blackie boy? No? Well, I’ll tell you. We’re going to give that ruddy Kang a right smack in the eye!’

After so long being trapped, I felt the same excitement everyone else did. I just hoped Kang wouldn’t slap us right back.

Chapter 18

Yangtse River, 22:09 hours, 30 July 1949

Despite knowing what was happening, and by now having every faith in Captain Kerans’ ability to make it happen, in that hour or so remaining before we were going to make the dash for it, I started feeling frightened again. I couldn’t seem to help it. It just crept up on me, like the mosquitoes would creep up on the sleeping sailors. It wasn’t too bad at first; just a feeling that I couldn’t quite articulate, nothing more tangible than a vague sense of unease. But when I walked across the deck, close to the X guns, and caught the distinctive whiff of their recent oiling on the damp evening air, that’s when it properly hit me.

A memory pounced on me then – a memory that wasn’t even quite a memory. I remembered so little of the actual attack. Remembered almost nothing of those minutes in any detail – but the sound and smell of the guns had never quite left me, any more than had the sight of all the bodies. Though I’d become long used to seeing all the shell holes and twisted metal around the ship – and that emblematic battered ensign – the thought of the guns being manned and fired again tonight was more than enough to have the sensations flooding back. All at once, I felt ambushed by a powerful, mortal fear, and it was an act of will to force it out of my mind.

I knew many of the crew must feel the same. Over the months of our captivity, no matter how much they tried to push the memories down, many of them had relived the events of that day constantly; had kept seeing again the things they wished they hadn’t had to see in the first place. And I wasn’t surprised, because so many of them were still young and inexperienced. Like gentle George, who’d found me, so few of them had seen the brutal reality of war before this – even fewer, I suspected, had ever seen death. So I understood how frightened they must now be feeling again. And they knew I would always keep their confidences, too; keep those memories of the private tears some had shed to myself.

‘There is no courage without fear.’ I remembered Captain Skinner saying that to me. And he was right. You didn’t need to be brave if you weren’t afraid. A part of me felt a welcome kernel of excitement growing inside me at the sheer courage – the audacity – of what we were about to try to do. As I took up my position close to Captain Kerans (which thankfully nobody seemed to object to, even if Peggy, Queen of Incessant Barking, had been shut up down in the sick berth, just to be on the safe side) I realised I felt ready for anything, despite the constant undercurrent of fear.

The final couple of hours had not been without incident. The captain had gone up to the bridge before eight, keen to get his eyes used to the dark well before the time came to raise the anchor. Despite the advantages of the high tide and flooding, the Yangtse was still a dangerous river, and as we were without either a pilot or any charts now, being able to see with the naked eye was crucial.

And what he’d seen had been a sampan in the distance, that was heading our way.

Having been unable to get to us for over a week, due to Gloria, the traders who sold us produce (by now at ridiculously inflated prices) had, tonight of all nights, decided to make the crossing. With everyone now ready to go, and the evidence clear all over the Amethyst, there was a moment of panic about what should be done.

The captain thought on his feet. ‘On no account let them board,’ he told Lieutenant Hett. ‘And have some camp beds set up on the quarterdeck. Have some men get in them, as if they’re turning in. We must make it look as if everything is normal. Get some goods. Check the invoice. Act completely normally.’

And everyone did. But there couldn’t have been a crew member on board who wasn’t holding his breath. If news got passed on to Kang of even the tiniest oddity, our imminent deaths were now staring us in the face.

‘Lord, it’s dark,’ the captain observed, peering out into the inky night through his binoculars, the traders having thankfully left again. Despite his eyes having ‘adjusted’, that was the thing with humans; they really couldn’t see much after nightfall, which I supposed was why they tended to go to sleep. But not tonight, and the captain’s determination to free us only increased my respect for him further. It was a truly courageous decision to do the thing he was about to do, and I knew I must take my lead from him.

I also couldn’t help but remember what Colonel Kang had told him every single time they’d spoken: that ‘if you move your ship, every attempt will be made to destroy it. If you do not, all will be well.’

All would be well. We were going anyway, despite him and his threats, and all would still be well. We were going to slip and turn the Amethyst as soon as the moon nudged behind a convenient cloud, so I wrapped my tail around my paws and peered downriver alongside the captain and Lieutenant Hett, wishing I could reassure them on that point. For, much as I believed it, that wasn’t the case, at least not as yet.

There really wasn’t much to see, even with my excellent vision. Just the oily, lapping blackness of the river, the silhouetted shores – raggy and lace-like against the moonlit night sky – and the odd moth and winged beetle, flying low over the water, and – hang on! I craned my neck further. Wait – I could see something!

And so, evidently, could the captain. ‘Good Lord!’ he said to Hett, who was also peering through his binoculars. ‘See that, Number One? It’s only another ship! What the devil?’

They both lowered their binoculars, then raised them again. ‘Seems we have our pilot after all, eh?’ said the captain. Then he leaned towards the voice pipe to his right. ‘Slow ahead port engines,’ he commanded, his voice taut with tension. ‘Wheel amidships. Black smoke.’ The Amethyst responded. We were finally underway.

Everyone seemed to hold their breath at that point, it seeming a miracle that we could ever be so lucky. Because the presence of this other vessel was good news indeed. The captain’s biggest concern – which he had voiced only an hour earlier – was whether a big frigate such as the Amethyst would be able to safely negotiate the deep water channel in the middle of the river without a pilot. One slip-up and we could so easily run aground on the bank again. So the arrival of this other ship – which was strung with lights, and soon identified as a merchant ship called the Kiang Ling Liberation – felt like the best omen possible.

‘Five degrees starboard,’ Captain Kerans ordered, his binoculars following the merchant ship. ‘We’ll drop astern of her and follow her through instead.’

This was it, I realised, my whole body tensed in anticipation. After all these long weeks in captivity, we were finally doing it! We were making our escape!

Or, at least, trying to. Every second seemed to pass agonisingly slowly as inch by inch the Amethyst moved through the dark water. With our smoke belching aft now, the night felt even darker, the river’s shores blacker mounds in the distance. No one on the bridge said a word, but I knew every last man on board was silently waiting for the same thing to happen; for the moment when the communists saw us and began blasting us out of the water. Destroying us, just as they’d promised they would.

But it seemed the blanketed anchor and greased chain had done the job the captain wanted, and as we began to slice along behind the Chinese merchant vessel, the blackout sheeting seemed to be doing its job too, evidently making the Amethyst all but invisible to the batteries, just as Captain Kerans had hoped it would.

No such luck for the Kiang Ling Liberation. No sooner had we slipped alongside her, hidden now from view, than the shore was suddenly alive with activity.

‘They’re firing!’ the captain shouted, above the roar of shell fire and machine guns. ‘They’re firing at her! What the devil?’

And it seemed they were. The big merchant ship, already lit by its gay strings of lightbulbs, was now even more ablaze – with orange licks of leaping, murderous flame.

‘What the devil?’ the captain said again, his binoculars at his face again. ‘You see that, Hett? What the devil’s going on over there?’

I stood transfixed; paralysed now, both with fear and consternation, hearing distant shouts and cries as the Kiang Ling’s crew ran for cover; as the shells pounded against her, above and around her. Yet still we moved, following the same line as the stricken, flaming vessel. A minute passed. Five minutes. Ten minutes. More. Until she slowed, fully ablaze now, and we began to nose ahead of her, away from the batteries, away from Kang, away from the shells and the bullets, incredibly, astoundingly, unbelievably unscathed.

‘Looks like we’ve got away with it so far,’ said Lieutenant Strain. He sounded as stunned as everyone felt.

Captain Kerans raised his binoculars again, peering back from where we’d come. The merchant ship seemed to have been run aground now, as well. ‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘it does indeed, doesn’t it?’ He lowered his binoculars, and his expression was at odds with the calm way he’d spoken. ‘Those gunners on the shore must have been asleep.’

But even as he said it, the words were true no longer. No sooner had he finished speaking than new explosions broke the stillness, and the sky above the Amethyst was alive with flares.

‘Hard astern!’ ordered the captain. ‘Perhaps we haven’t got away with it after all. It looks like there’s a patrol boat coming to meet us!’

But then something else inexplicable happened – it began firing not on us, but at the shore battery that had sent all the flares up – which made no sense at all. Had the darkness and disguise really confused them that much?

‘Well I never!’ exclaimed Hett, newly stunned. ‘What’s all that about?’

‘Not an earthly,’ the captain admitted, as the shore battery returned their fire. ‘B gun, open fire! Might as well add to the confusion, eh?’

By now it seemed nothing was making sense. I jumped down from my station on top of the electrical box, and prudently took up a lower one below it. Keen as I had been to see as much as I could of the action, the words ‘sitting duck’ were now again fresh in my mind, and as the fizzing balls of light winged their way over and around us, I felt glad of the protection and security of the bulkhead. As my paws hit the corticene, I realised I was shaking all over. Was the captain shaking too? Was Lieutenant Hett? Lieutenant Strain?

If they’d not been up before then, then they certainly were now. No sooner had we passed the smoking hulk of the Chinese merchant ship than an enormous explosion at the bow of the Amethyst almost knocked all three officers off their feet.

The captain grabbed the windscreen and regained his balance. ‘They’ve found us!’ he barked then, to the voice pipe, to Jack. ‘Message to C in C. I am under heavy fire and have been hit! ’ He then sent orders for our remaining four-inch gun to open fire, and moments later, I knew from the reassuring vibration beneath my belly, that we were now travelling down the Yangtse at full speed. More than full speed, in fact. A whopping 22 knots, according to the engine room – faster than the Amethyst was supposed to even be capable of. But like a cat with a dog on its tail, she gave her all. She really was running for her life – and for ours – after almost three and a half months of captivity.

Not that it was plain sailing from then on. We sailed downriver without incident till long after midnight (Captain Kerans even found time to pull me from my safe place and reassure me, presumably thinking I was a great deal more stressed than I was by this time). Then, on approaching the shore batteries at Kiang Yin at 01:00 hours, he realised another substantial obstacle lay in our way: the make-shift defensive boom the communists had stretched across this part of the river, made up, the captain explained to Lieutenant Hett, from sunken merchant ships from an earlier war. Almost impossible to make out in the darkness, bar a few broken masts, it only allowed safe passage though a narrow stretch midstream.

We approached the boom, the Amethyst a deeper dark within the dappled dark of moonlight. It soon became clear that the passage – which would normally be marked on either side by guide lights – would not be very safe to negotiate after all, as only one of the two lights was lit.

There was a tense silence as the officers strained to make out some detail in the blackness that might help guide the ship through the channel. ‘Port or starboard?’ asked the captain finally. ‘Which way do you think, Number One?’

Hett shook his head. ‘I really wouldn’t like to say, sir.’

It was soon clear that we also weren’t alone on the river. Not that we’d expected to be. The captain knew that the communists upriver almost certainly would have alerted their comrades by now that the Amethyst had eluded them and was on her way. And it seemed they had, because a patrol boat was already speeding out to meet us, opening fire with tracer shells as it ploughed through the dark water.

I don’t think there could have been a man or beast on board who wasn’t once again holding their breath as we neared the boom. I thought once again of my mother, and how she’d told me that, sometimes, all you have to fall back on is instinct; a voice inside which you must listen to very carefully.

I looked across at the captain, and I could see him doing exactly that; trying to conjure up the instinct that would tell him what to do to preserve the safety of his ship and the lives of his men.

‘Five degrees port!’ he said at last, his voice strong and decisive, and, as we watched and waited for the sickening crump of metal that would mean he’d made the wrong choice, it was as if time had slowed down to an agonising crawl.

But he hadn’t made the wrong choice. The single light slid silently by us and, though I doubt they really did, given the still precarious nature of our bid for freedom, I felt sure I could hear the men cheering below.

‘We’re not out of the woods yet, Simon,’ Captain Kerans was quick to warn me, as I leaped back up onto the electrical box in order to resume moral support. ‘Bridge to wheelhouse,’ he said, ‘Woosung – what time are we likely to get there?’

‘Around 03:00 hours, sir,’ came Frank’s voice up the voice pipe, ‘barring any more unforeseen incidents. Though I doubt we’ll get past without some sort of response from them, do you?’

The captain didn’t really need to answer.

There was one unforeseen incident, just before the fort at Woosung was reached. We were travelling fast – still as fast as the Amethyst could manage – the same full, and – barring gunfire – unstoppable 22 knots. The Chinese junk that suddenly loomed in front of our bows was no match for us, and left little room to take avoiding action. The smaller boat was sliced clean in half.

There was no time to wonder if the crew had leaped to safety, as almost as soon as we’d left the junk’s debris in our wake, the fort’s searchlights began dancing on the water.

‘Here we go…’ observed Lieutenant Strain, his profile grim as he raised his binoculars. ‘If they didn’t know then they must surely know now. If we’re for it, this is where we’re going to cop it.’

But then a curious thing happened. Though the searchlights repeatedly found us, not a single shore gun opened fire, not even when one of the lights caught us in its beam and rested on the ship for almost half a minute.

‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ said Hett, as the light slid away again.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ wondered Fearnley, who’d now joined us on the bridge.

‘Do you know what, men?’ Captain Kerans said, lowering his binoculars. ‘I think they’ve had enough. I think they’re actively letting us pass.’

‘Really, sir?’ asked Hett, voicing exactly my question. After the way they’d attacked before, it seemed hard to believe.

‘I do,’ he said, visibly beginning to relax now, as the lights of the fort began sliding back astern. ‘I wonder if perhaps they feel well rid of us, don’t you, Number One? Yes, I think that might be it. In fact, I’m sure I’m correct,’ he finished. ‘I suspect Mao Tse-tung is very glad to see the back of us.’

There was a sound from below. A familiar one, too. A distinct ‘woof!’. Peggy obviously agreed.