The Waiting Game

1 SHE WAS LONG AND BLACK, and, in the parts that showed above the water, slim; the casing widened a little where the for’ard hydroplane guards grew up and out like ears, then narrowed sharply to the pointed, preying bow. But below the waterline she was as round and as fat as a cow in calf, the saddle-tanks thick bulges on her sides; and like a drunken cow she rolled while she staggered up the long, steep slopes of the waves and hung momentarily on their crests before plunging down and burying the whole of her forepart, almost as far as the three-inch gun just below the front of her bridge, under the heavy, heaving sea. Down in that trough between the rollers she’d drag herself clear, and then the waves’ tops all round would be higher than the heads of the men in her bridge, grey-green walls flecked with foam, looming and overhanging; as the bow broke free, her stern would go down hard, the screws would bite and thrust and she’d drive, splitting the dark water in a great V of white, up the slope of the next roller as it flung itself, mountainous, against the line of her jolting, battering advance. The top of the wave, breaking, would rush aft along her casing and explode against the gun and against the front of her bridge, flinging up a ton of green water and dropping it on the heads of the watchkeepers, who for their own safety were lashed there with ropes’ ends bent around their waists and secured to solid fittings in the bridge. As she rolled, one side sliding down into the sea and the bridge leaning over until if a man stretched out a hand he could almost touch the water, the other side, rising, shone blackly, the great bulge of the saddle-tanks sleek and gleaming like the flank of some monstrous seal. It’s a long time ago to remember, but that’s how she behaved and how the waves treated her and looked to the men in her bridge. (Today she no longer exists, except perhaps in other forms; they took her apart, when the war was over, for the value of her steel and because she had served her purpose.) But she was a ship, then a submarine; and that’s how she looked and felt to the men in her bridge as she hammered in towards the grey, wind-lashed harbor of Lerwick, in the Shetlands, just about dawn on a morning nearly twenty years ago.