Making Shore Read online

  ‘This is a brilliantly conceived story of endurance and romance, in which Sara Allerton’s mastery of detail and sympathy with her characters fully engage the reader. It held me enthralled until the last sentence.’

  LORD BUTLER OF BROCKWELL

  ‘Sara Allerton’s novel is a remarkable imaginative achievement – she takes you every inch of the way on this extraordinary journey across the Atlantic; it is a compelling story of both shame and heroism.’

  EDWARD STOURTON

  ‘This breathtaking debut novel deals with man’s harrowing struggle for survival in a hostile sea, but this book is so much more – a life-affirming account of love, camaraderie, anguish and coming of age, played out against a backdrop of the Atlantic swell. Making Shore is destined to become a true maritime classic.’

  ANGUS KONSTAM, AUTHOR OF Sovereigns of the Sea,

  Piracy AND Naval Miscellany

  ‘The profoundly moving story of a brotherly bond forged in unimaginable wartime suffering, of the bitterness of a terrible promise honoured, and, above all, of the hope-giving, life-sustaining selflessness of true love. Making Shore is a powerful and remarkable novel.’

  CLARE GIBSON, THE ARMY CHILDREN ARCHIVE

  ‘I don’t cry much over books, but this one brought a great lump to my throat. It is an extraordinary story – the grim face of war, chirpy unassuming courage, and running through, the need to keep faith whatever the cost. In the end, I did weep, but not from sorrow or despair.

  ANDREW WHEATCROFT, AUTHOR OF The Enemy at the Gate

  ‘This so very nearly made my final list [Costa First Novel Award shortlist of 4] - and perhaps it should have. It is based in part on a remarkable true story of survival at sea, and in that regard the writing is dignified yet compelling. Having survived the torpedoing of his boat during WWII, young wireless operator Cubby Clarke endures a terrible ordeal with other survivors from the boat, and even when they reach land, their ordeal is not over. But the reason for the power of this novel is its framing within a relationship between one of his shipmates and his fiancee, which packs an enormous emotional wallop and raises this far above a standard wartime survival story. The book deserves to reach a wide audience.’

  MARK THORNTON, COSTA AWARD JUDGE 2010

  SARA ALLERTON

  MAKING SHORE

  FOR Brian and Edith

  AND FOR Mum and Dad

  This novel was inspired by incidents that took place in 1942 following the torpedo strike on the SS Sithonia, but all the characters, including that of Brian Clarke’s namesake, are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The story and the actions and words of its characters are based on a blend of the author’s interpretations of Brian Clarke’s reminiscences and the author’s own imagination and invention of events that did not actually occur.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign of World War II, pitting German warships against Allied convoys from 1939 through to 1945, and was at its height from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943. Convoys of merchant ships between North America and the South Atlantic and Europe were protected by British and Canadian forces, aided from 1941 by US ships and aircraft.

  Some of the incidents described in this novel are based on one survivor’s recollections of serving on the British merchant ship SS Sithonia on such a crossing in July 1942, and of the ship’s sinking after a torpedo strike roughly at the site shown on the map above. The story of how some of her crew managed to reach safety is rooted in actual events, although all the characters and their interactions and dialogue (including Brian Clarke’s) are fictional.

  It was widely rumoured throughout the war that merchant seamen would be gunned down, or their lifeboats destroyed, in the event of their surviving a torpedo attack. The historical record has shown that on 14 May 1942, two months before the Sithonia was struck, Hitler ordered his submarine commander-in-chief, Admiral Karl Dönitz, to ‘reduce the number’ of survivors of strikes on merchant ships by whatever means.

  ‘Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.’

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1: THE MEETING

  CHAPTER 2: KNOWLEDGE

  CHAPTER 3: JOE, SNITHERS AND ME

  CHAPTER 4: HIT

  CHAPTER 5: KILL ME WITH KINDNESS

  CHAPTER 6: SMALL CANARIES

  CHAPTER 7: THE WATER MEN

  CHAPTER 8: PORTENT

  CHAPTER 9: JOE. OF ALL PEOPLE.

  CHAPTER 10: JOE’S LAND

  CHAPTER 11: ENLÈVEMENT

  CHAPTER 12: INTENT ON TRUTH

  CHAPTER 13: BETTER THERE THAN HERE

  CHAPTER 14: LAST PLACE ON EARTH

  CHAPTER 15: THE MEETING

  AFTERWORD BY BRIAN CLARKE: A LIFETIME OF LUCK

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MEETING

  I had imagined that she would already be there, waiting for me. She was not, and it unsettled me completely. Paralysed by the prospect of such a meeting – its most probable course, its outcome – my mind had clung to the only version of events it could afford to contemplate and that could go no further than finding her waiting there and blurting out what I would have to say. I had allowed myself to consider only what was necessary and it had not included any of the finer detail: not my reception, not her reaction and not her initial, if temporary, absence.

  I sat down heavily and felt the certainty of my resolve break up and seep away. Closing my eyes, I leant my elbows on the table and covered my face. The tips of my fingers sought the sunken sockets around my eyes and began to press their way along the grainy irregularities of bone beneath the fleshless skin.

  Perhaps it would not matter. Only I would ever know. I pressed my fingers hard against my eyeballs until they bulged, patterning with pain, and once again indulged the thought that I had fought so hard against, but which alone soothed and slowed the endless circular motion of my mind’s distress. Perhaps I would be forgiven for saying nothing. For seeking and admitting clemency. Had he had the chance, perhaps he would have granted that the spirit of such a promise given might be more important, after all, than the absolute adherence to the dictate of its letter.

  Either way, it had made a coward out of me. I had pushed it away, staved it off. It had been weeks since her letter had arrived, too many weeks, but still it was too soon. I was not ready. I had told myself that I needed time to muster strength, but what I meant was courage. I had dreaded it. After all the horror, even after all the horror, I dreaded it.

  I blamed Joe for having left me with this graceless legacy. I had been brave, everybody said so. And hadn’t I learned after everything that real courage is not, after all, the absence of fear so much as the refusal to give it rein? Complacently perhaps, I told myself that I had done with fear. I had run its gauntlet, parried its every thrust. I had feared the stealth of U-boats, stalking, far out to sea. Feared the maverick ocean. Her moods and whims. The unrelenting heat in the dawn and the black lapping of the night. Inexorable thirst. Slow starvation. I had feared for my sanity, for that of the others. For my life. And for Joe’s.

  It hadn’t killed me. I was still here, fiddling with the doily in this calm, cool café. There were normal people all about me here, and as I had gained weight and begun gingerly to bask in rudimentary relief, I saw that I might become one of them again. Fear could not touch me now. Except within my dreams.

 
And yet I sat in the café, waiting for her, fighting the leaden lurching of my guts every time the door swung open.

  I tried not to look up too jerkily, willing my eyes and fingers to keep steady on the stiff paper lace and fell to cursing Joe for making me swear, and to remembering.

  Remembering. How could I ever forget?

  I felt the quiet reproach of her presence not two feet from the table long before I could bring myself to look up at her. Sweat, unexpectedly cold, prickled along my hairline and, in bringing a trembling hand up quickly to dispense with it, I sought to cover, just for one moment longer, the shame in my disarray. I watched from beneath the slow, deliberate rhythm of my hand across my brow, the hem of her coat rising and falling almost imperceptibly at her knee.

  ‘Mr Clarke? Cubby Clarke?’ My own name, as she said it, with such eager, sharp-edged clarity, surprised me somehow and I flinched. I had not heard his name for me since I had got off the Barneveldt in Barrow. The fingers of my free hand clenched involuntarily around the remnants of the doily, and the fork at my elbow clanked obtrusively to the floor as I half rose, sweaty-palmed and stomachless, to greet her.

  ‘Maggie.’ I gestured towards the chair opposite mine and waited for her to sit. She edged her way onto a quarter of the seat and put her hands, which clutched and unclutched her gloves, on the table in front of her. I sat down again awkwardly and, unable still to look right at her, I watched her restless hands.

  ‘Why did you say…’

  ‘Tea?’ My voice, overloud, jutted out across hers.

  She nodded and waited quietly while I beckoned the waitress over. Clutching and unclutching. Having ordered, we sat, apparently with nothing to say. The tea came and I busied myself with the pouring and the fussing.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No. No, thank you.’

  Tea. What I wouldn’t have done for a cup of tea then. It was unimaginable.

  As I stirred and stirred with inordinate interest, I chanced a glance at her. She wasn’t at all what I had been expecting.

  The windswept desperation of the figure I had encountered so briefly on the dockside had pursued me ever since but I had taken in her mental anguish only and, crippled by my own, had been in no fit state to consider her physical presence much at all. Joe had talked to me of beauty, but then Joe had been in love.

  There was a quiet earnestness in her bearing, which would make it easy for her to go unnoticed. She was older than me, by four or five years or so; but then Joe was older still. She no longer had that glow of confidence that girls my age exuded; that innate self-assurance in the invincibility of their youth.

  She was dark-haired and olive-skinned. Her facial features, taken individually, could not have been described as pretty, or even sweet. Her brow was wide and her nose too flat while the large, oval shape of her face seemed overawed by the wayward waviness in her hair, strands of which refused doggedly to remain tucked behind her apparently tiny ears, wholly in adequate for the job. But these irregularities, far from undermining her personal appeal, seemed only to have added to it, for the overall impression she gave was one of a woman who, long used to viewing them as flaws, no longer saw them as important. This artless lack of vanity had imbued her with a physical ease, an ingenuousness that was mistaken, for her attributes taken as a whole made her unusually, if unobtrusively, engaging.

  ‘Thank you for coming to meet me… um, Cub?’ she tried it out, uncomfortable.

  ‘Brian. Brian’s fine,’ I said, too quickly. ‘Cub’ was too raw, too close, and given the apparent impossibility now of avoiding that which still I might have done almost anything to avoid, I had to keep her distant.

  But she had composed herself in the break for tea and her voice was now more even. I slid my eyes up to the middle distance beyond her, avoiding hers, and waited.

  ‘You look a lot better than you did.’

  ‘I am getting stronger… yes.’ I nodded stiffly. ‘It’ll take a long time.’

  My answer, only half-heard, faded with the smile of vague encouragement that had hovered briefly about her lips. She was already at her next question and those we both knew lay beyond it.

  ‘Why did you say that at the docks? That you couldn’t help me? When you knew?’

  There was nothing that I could say to her. I could not explain it. There was no language in the world that would adequately translate the reasons for my reticence.

  And so I did not answer, but like the coward I felt myself to be, I took refuge in a question, shrinking from the words I still did not actually know if, when it came to it, I would have the heart to say.

  ‘Why were you there? When you knew he wouldn’t be?’

  She paused for one moment, contemplating my prevarication, but I kept my eyes away and conceded nothing. Then she said quietly, ‘I just needed to see for myself. Just in case… you know.’ She tutted. ‘Silly, really. False hope.’ Shrugging, she forced a little smile which subsided almost as soon as it had begun.

  ‘False hope? I know a lot about that,’ I said grimly. She didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything. She stared instead abstractedly at her hands as if they were not her own. They continued to work at the gloves.

  ‘But how did you know? What ship we would be coming on?’ I asked. ‘It’s classified.’

  ‘My sister’s husband is at the War Office. He is a good man.’ I could feel her eyes upon me, intent, sizing me up.

  And again, silence. It’s curious, but people say that when two people are only interested in each other in a room, all other noise is soundless. Curious and true. The silence that fell between us was loud, weighty. I wasn’t aware of the other diners, their conversations and the general clattering of crockery. It must have been going on. I was aware only that she, unsuspecting, was anxiously awaiting misinformation that I was ashamed to give.

  ‘Billy Rawlins said you and Joe were close.’

  ‘You know Billy?’ I interrupted her, confused, but she shook her head.

  ‘I saw him when you docked. Somebody called his name. After you… after, I remembered it. I looked him up and went to talk to him. He couldn’t tell me much but he told me that I should speak to you.’

  Billy Rawlins. The name sounded like one I might have heard years ago but couldn’t quite place. An echo of someone. Yet not so very long ago I had been living in such close proximity with him that I could recall every single sinew on his skinny little carcass. I had come to know them all, maybe as intimately as their own mothers did. Their mothers perhaps could have forgiven them. I could not. And not least because we had been the ones who’d made it. We had survived.

  Billy Rawlins was sharp-eyed, flinty. We had seen each other as men do not wish to be seen or remembered. I never wanted to see him – or any one of them – again.

  ‘I wanted to know…’ She stopped abruptly and I waited.

  ‘You were with him when he died, weren’t you? You were with him.’ She repeated this last quietly, but not so quietly that I didn’t hear the heightening of her voice.

  It required an answer, and for the first time I looked right at her and saw in that moment all that Joe had loved.

  An almost unnatural, unnerving beauty lit her up from beneath the depths of her astonishingly large, dark eyes. I saw who she was. She had been speaking of him and there it was, shining out at me: the glittering radiance that was her passion. All that she had expected was there, all that she had hoped for and all that she had left to dream, a silent charter of hopeless hope played out in the ever-darkening shades of brown. Water that had gathered but did not fall added a brittle brilliance to the strident, luminous intensity flickering within.

  I could see with a clarity that physically shook me, how she had loved him. She would have loved him no matter how many days they had been afforded, she would have married him, borne his children and she would have loved him. She would have loved him into old age and she would have loved him until the day that she died. With an unflinching honesty that was
almost crude, her eyes betrayed her very core. She was beautiful and I understood.

  I am a terrible liar. I always have been. In fact, I am almost pathologically truthful and it got me into trouble a couple of times both on the lifeboat and in Sebikotane. Joe used to say don’t ask Cub, he’ll tell you. That’s what he used to call me. Cubby Clarke. Cub. Because of McGrath. Because I was the youngest. It seemed like centuries ago. I used to worry that if I ever did end up being a prisoner of war, would I be able to lie convincingly enough not to give away things I shouldn’t? Why then, oh why, Joe, did you leave me with this? I knew why. He knew that I would do it, that was why.

  I became uncomfortably aware as I gazed at her, that she was waiting for me to say something. I looked down at my untouched tea.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was with him.’ She breathed out softly and put her hands one on top of the other over her gloves.

  ‘Was he… in pain?’

  ‘Yes. It was painful, yes.’ Her eyes, which I could feel were scanning my downturned face for the slightest scrap that might afford some insight, forbade me from trying to dissemble in this. I would stick to the truth as long as I could.

  ‘Was he frightened?’

  ‘Not then, no.’ She drew herself up and tried to tuck some strands of thick, unruly hair away, swiftly, absently. They fell back into her face immediately. She rewrapped her coat around her, tight, and almost through gritted teeth she forced out what she had come for.

  ‘Did he say anything? You know, for me?’ The desperation in such a naked plea made me want to cry out to her.

  ‘Say anything?’ God, did I have to make her beg?

  ‘A message. For me. Something.’ Her voice was thin, alone. She too took refuge in staring at her unwanted tea, some hair still bobbing out in front of her eyes. I noticed that most of it had been mashed into a sort of makeshift bun at the back of her head, but there was far too much of it for her ever to have got it tidy. Having hurled the question into the air, I knew she was willing it with all her being to land the right side up.