The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories

They Sweep the Seas

It was still night when we cast off and nosed our way through the outer harbour, crammed with vessels of all sizes and nationalities, riding peacefully at anchor. Cold, grey rain was sluicing down mercilessly, spattering off our deck and churning the murky water to a light foam, and from the bridge, visibility scarcely extended beyond the trawler's bows. We felt, rather than saw, our way out to the open sea, barely making headway. We brushed along the side of a sister trawler, and farther on felt our hull scraping over an anchor cable, the black hulk of the ship's bows looming perilously near. Approaching the entrance, and feeling reasonably safe, we increased speed, and all but collided with a big Finnish freighter, which had worked with the tide across the harbour mouth; it was the word 'SUOMI', painted in six-foot high letters, gleaming whitely through the darkness, that gave us warning. Our skipper cursed fluently, spun the wheel to starboard, and we passed on. But we reached the sea without mishap.

In the harbour, it had been comparatively warm and sheltered, but a very different state of affairs existed beyond the headland. The trawler pitched wickedly in the long, heavy rollers coming in from the Atlantic, drenching itself in spray. Sometimes an exceptionally heavy sea foamed along fo'c'sle high, poured into the well, slid over the deck, and went gurgling through the scuppers; but this did not happen often. The wind was not strong, but possessed that biting quality which makes one raise one's coat collar and withdraw, hurriedly to the lee-side of the upper deck. There are few bleaker and more cheerless places than the west coast of Scotland in the early morning of a January day.

As the trawler went butting through the seas, in the chill grey of the breaking dawn, to its appointed station, the two officers on the bridge discussed the prospects of the coming sweep. Both agreed that it would be a trying day, that it would be as boring as ever, and that they would, as usual, encounter no mines. They disagreed, however, concerning the weather: the Lieutenant thought there was little chance of the wind dying down or the weather moderating; but the skipper was of the opinion that both would come to pass, although, probably, later in the day.

Neither the Lieutenant nor the skipper was a young man. The Lieutenant (RNR) wore three rows of ribbon, had been in the Dardanelles in the last war, and walked with a pronounced limp — a memento of Zeebrugge. He had retired ten years ago, but at the outbreak of war had left his comfortable, even luxurious, existence for the unknown perils and hardships of a minesweeper's existence. He did not do this as a favour to his country: he did it as his duty.

The Lieutenant, as has been said, was not a young man, but the skipper was at least ten years older. Half a century had passed since he first went down to the sea. He had swept mines in the war of 1914-18, but had considered himself, not unnaturally, too old for such an arduous task in this. Then one day, while trawling in the North Sea, he had been bombed and machine-gunned by a Heinkel. The bombs had missed, but the bullets had literally riddled one of his crew. That man was his son. And so he had changed his mind about being too old.

An hour after clearing the harbour mouth, we reached the beginning of our beat and cut the engines until the trawler had barely enough way to keep head on to the seas. We were awaiting the arrival of our companion sweeper, who made her appearance some ten minutes later, pitching heavily up on our starboard quarter, a vague shape in the dim half-light.

We drifted a light line astern and she altered her course to port, to pick it up. A wire was attached to this; we hauled it aboard our own trawler, attached the sweep wire to it, and paid it out astern again. At regular intervals, peculiarly shaped objects, professionally known as 'kites', were shackled to the hawser by two seamen, whose stoic features betrayed no signs of the extreme discomfort they must have been experiencing from their raw hands and stiff, cold-benumbed fingers. These 'kites' acted as weights upon the sweep wire, keeping it at the requisite distance beneath the surface of the water.

No landlubber or 'freshwater' man could have performed this task of paying out the sweep wire; it was an operation that demanded the very highest standards of seamanship. The co-ordination and sense of timing of the man at the wheel, the two 'shacklers', and, above all, the winch-driver, were marvellous to a degree. They worked as smoothly and as swiftly as the well-oiled, correlated cogs of an intricate machine.

Everything adjusted to his satisfaction, our Lieutenant signalled, by siren, to the other trawler that he was ready to commence his sweep. She acknowledged his signal, swept round to our starboard beam, and off we went, beating southwards. It was becoming rougher, and the Lieutenant, studiously avoiding the skipper's eye, was smiting with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was not often that the skipper's weather forecasts proved false, but this time, for once, he seemed to have slipped up.

We were broadside on to the seas now, one moment lifting over a sullen, spume-capped crest, the next sliding along a shallow trough, clouds of icy spray cascading inboard. The pitching had given place to a rather unpleasant rolling motion, the latter being a decided change for the worse. It was now that the genius — and genius it was — of the winch-driver asserted itself. His job it was to see that the sweep wire did not become too slack, which would have been bad enough, or become too taut, which might have resulted in tragedy. Sailors have, with good reason, a holy dread of overstrained hawsers. A snapped wire is a lethal weapon, and its power of destruction is rather terrifying; such a wire can slice off a man's head far more efficiently than the sharpest axe. But, judging from our winch-driver's nonchalance and the deceptively careless ease with which he manipulated the levers, one would have thought that no such unpleasant possibility had ever occurred to him.

On the bridge, the Lieutenant was poring over a minutely detailed Admiralty chart spread open before him. Also consulting it, but with a much lesser degree of concentration, was the skipper, who only did it that he might not hurt the feelings of the Lieutenant, for whom he entertained a very high regard. Privately, however, he held Admiralty charts and all such inessentials in a mighty contempt, and considered them unworthy of a real sailor. He had never needed a chart; a torn, finger-stained school atlas had served his purpose equally well.

When the Lieutenant judged we had reached the end of our beat, he pulled on the siren lanyard, and the other trawler cut her speed down to a mere crawl; whereas we continued at full speed and came sweeping round in a full half-circle, a manoeuvre which, though apparently simple, like all else in minesweeping, was, in actuality, a brilliantly executed bit of seamanship. One might have been excused for thinking that we had been hauled round by centripetal force, our companion trawler acting as the pivot and the sweep wire as the connecting link, so high a state of perfection had the co-ordination existing between the two trawlers reached.

All morning we continued in this fashion, beating up and down and gradually working our way westward. The wind, in the meantime, had veered from the west to north-by-west, and, though not becoming any stronger, had become exceedingly cold. At this juncture, we began to feel truly sorry for the winchman, exposed, as he was, to the full force of the elements, but consoled ourselves with the thought that he was specially adapted for resisting the cold, owing to his enormous girth. We were surprised to learn, however, that he was of normal proportions but wore no fewer than five overcoats under his oilskins and life jacket. But this may merely have been malicious rumour and we never received any confirmation as to its truth. Suffice is it to say that his attitude, regarding the weather, of the completest unconcern was Spartan to a degree.

If he was, undeniably, the most important member of the crew, the second most, equally without doubt, was the cook. Balancing himself with a marvellous agility, born of long and arduous practice, he made his appearance at regular intervals — never exceeding three-quarters of an hour — bearing, in the one hand, a large and much-battered iron kettle, and in the other, a motley assortment of tin mugs, joined together by a strand of wire passed through their handles. The kettle was filled, alternately, with strong, sweet tea and cocoa, and the contents surpassed, we were of the opinion, anything we had ever experienced in the finest of city restaurants. Apparently coffee does not find favour in the eyes of the crews of minesweepers.

Minesweeping is a dreadfully monotonous business, but we managed to pass the time tolerably well by smoking, spinning yarns, and drinking the cook's concoctions. In the early morning, a huge, four-engined flying boat of the Coastal Command passed directly overhead, acknowledging our humble presence by dipping graciously in salute, at which we felt highly flattered. About noon, a small convoy appeared on the southern horizon, but was gone within half an hour. Occasionally, gulls or wild duck flew overhead, and twice we saw the round, black, glistening head of a particularly venturesome seal emerge from a nearby wave, stare at us coldly and dispassionately, after the manner of its kind, then sink beneath the waves with an expression of disgust on its face. But noteworthy incidents were non-existent, and we gradually settled down into a state of wakeful boredom.

About two o'clock in the afternoon, when conversation had languished and died, and we were conjuring up fanciful visions of what we should have for our evening meal, our dreams were abruptly shattered by a loud, incoherent, but unmistakably triumphant cry from our indefatigable winch-driver. We dashed to the starboard side of our vessel and scanned the stretch of water under which the sweep wire was passing, eagerly awaiting the first appearance of the mine — as mine it must be. We could see nothing: neither had our winch-driver seen anything, but he had FELT some foreign body making contact with the sweep wire — and he was far too experienced a man to make a mistake.

It was a tense moment, holding, as it did, two distinct possibilities regarding the immediate future of the mine — one unpleasant, the other not so. (Parenthetically, it speaks well for our faith in our winch-driver that we never doubted the existence of the mine.) In the first case, our sweep wire might foul the detonating mechanism of the mine, which would forthwith blow up, in which event our sweep wire would be almost inevitably destroyed. Moreover, we had no means of knowing how close the mine was to one or other of our trawlers, and it was far from improbable that the explosion of the mine would entail our own or our companion sweeper's destruction. Such things had happened before. The other, and infinitely more pleasing possibility was that the mine would be drawn on to one of the cutters, be severed from its anchorage, and float harmlessly to the surface. To our immense relief, it was the latter that came to pass.

At a spot that was almost mathematically equidistant between the two trawlers, the mine rose slowly to the surface and remained there, rising and falling sluggishly with the seas, an evil-looking, murderous spheroid of black steel, about three feet in diameter, liberally covered with knobs. These knobs, when broken, set the detonating mechanism in action and explode the mine. We steamed on for some distance farther, in order to carry the sweep well out of the mine's reach, and, almost before we had stopped, two of the crew had their rifles out and were firing at the mine, patently bent on its early despatch and eager to witness the explosion and its spectacular after-effects. In their laudible efforts they were nobly supported by the crew of the other trawler.

After about a score of ineffectual shots had been fired by each trawler, it became evident that the disposal of the mine was going to be a by no means simple matter. The heaving decks of the trawlers, combined with the fact that the target was not static, made for very inaccurate shooting. Still, persistency had its own due, if not very satisfying, reward, for, after another ten minutes, the mine sank to the floor of the sea, riddled with bullets, none of which had the luck to impinge on any of the detonators. Although our object had been accomplished and the mine rendered harmless to shipping, one and all were grievously disappointed at the mine's inglorious end, having been pardonably desirous of witnessing a more dramatic finale. With a glow of inward satisfaction, not unmixed with a slight feeling of frustration, we returned to our posts and resumed operations.

Contrary to popular conception, minesweepers do not sweep up and explode dozens of mines every day. Long weeks may pass without so much as the sight of a mine; this was, accordingly, a red-letter day for the crew of our trawler. We had already nine white-painted chevrons adorning our long black funnel, signifying that we had destroyed that number of mines; already the ship's artist was ferreting out his paint and brush, preparatory to painting our tenth chevron when we should reach port or the weather moderate sufficiently to permit of it.

Towards evening the skies began to clear, the wind backed round to the westward again, and the rough, wind-swept seas gradually calmed down to a gentle swell. If the Lieutenant felt chagrined at his interrupted success as a weather prophet, he concealed his feelings remarkably well; probably, however, the excitement and success of the early afternoon had driven all thought of it from his mind. Some time later the cloudbanks to the west lifted, and, for the first time that day, we saw the sun, an enormous ball of dull red, its circumference very clearly etched through the lowlying winter haze.

Half an hour later, the sun dipped slowly below the south-western horizon, laying a broken path of crimson over the sea of our ship. Soon after, as the light was failing and we had the better part of twenty miles to go before we reached our home port, the Lieutenant signalled to our companion trawler to cease operations and disconnect the sweep wire. We hauled it aboard, unshackled the 'kites' and stowed them carefully away; we then turned the trawler's bows towards the east, for the first time that day, and set a course for home through the swiftly gathering darkness.

The day's work was done. The skipper, his hands gently caressing the wheel, was talking quietly to the Lieutenant, relaxed on a disreputable camp stool, his back against the bulkhead, his hands behind his head. Down below, the cook, his labours over, was lying on his bunk, reading a detective novelette. The winch-driver, impervious, as ever, to the icy wind which still blew, had not stirred from his post, but was dreamily regarding our slightly phosphorescent wake, watching it recede gradually into the darkness. A couple of men were sheltering from the following wind in the well-deck before the bridge, quietly smoking. Yet another two men were on the bridge-deck, steadying a ladder, on the top of which was perched a man for whom the slight pitching of the ship, the insufficient light, and the chilly night wind were proving no deterrent in the execution of his task. To him, art was all. He was painting our tenth chevron on the funnel…

Words cannot adequately express what we owe to these men — fishermen all, from the Hebrides and Mallaig, Wick and Peterhead, Aberdeen and Grimsby, Lowestoft and Yarmouth: call them heroes, and they would jeer at you: yet they are nothing else. Theirs is, at once, the most lonely, monotonous, and dangerous of all our Empire Forces' tasks, and one indispensable for the maintenance of danger-free sea-lanes for the Merchant Service, our lifeline with the world beyond. They put to sea in the morning, gay or grave according to their wont… and some do not return. But they close their ranks, and carry on.