Arctic Sea, 22nd March 1942
The first person Billy noticed on his third morning was Jack.
Jack was the loader of a Bofors gun near the ship’s bow, one the best— they said
that he could replace a magazine in under two seconds. However, everyone knew
that was he was known for something else.
The crew of the Trinidad was fresh— as one of the newest cruisers of the Fiji-class,
convoy escort was the very first true assignment that the crew would undertake. The
men sprinting about the deck with magazines hoisted under their arm, the men that
would curse at the gun hoists, the men on the bridge that monitored the
hydrophones in desperate anticipation— they had never before been beyond their
homes, let alone braved the Arctic Sea.
Not Jack.
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His eyes told others that he had been places and seen things. Things that made him
older than his twenty-four years.
The word was that he had come to and back from Arkhangelsk, PQ and QP.
Twice.
He never said anything about those journeys. There were rumours that he had
nearly died, the destroyer he was serving on split in half by the indiscriminate
torpedo of a U-Boat, cracked as if it was merely an egg; men jumping from a listing
deck like spilt yolk.
He was just Jack, the best Bofors loader on the Trinidad.
When the news of the German bombers first came over the radio, there had been a
strange, muted sort of panic painted on the bridge officers’ faces. First the crew
operating the ship’s rangefinders were clutched by a nervous silence, saying nothing
but collectively glancing skyward. Afterwards the anti-air crews had come above
decks, the news spreading amidst a warship that suddenly seemed infinitely small.
An agonisingly shrill alarm sounded. What seemed like the entire crew ran above
deck, the ship’s main guns screeching as they scraped off accumulated ice with
each degree of rotation.
In the midst of the chaos, Jack calmly slammed the rim of a forty-millimetre shell into
the gun breech.
