Read Online The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer - Free Book Online Page B

There’s no equivalent for this in our language. She was a plucky trusty ship with a happy crew, and made from top-mast to rudder of good solid steel. Her turbines, navigating equipment, weaponry, all of it was reliable and lethal – the six 12.5 cm dual-purpose cannons set in crafty double formation to welcome enemy planes, the Tommy guns and hydraulic torpedo launchers stuffed into every available corner to deal with attacks from the sea. She was a fighter all right, the Tjerk Hiddes . Your people the English knew what they were doing when they built her, Tom. They also knew what they were doing when, after Rotterdam, they transferred her and the Van Galen , the other two-tonner, to the Royal Dutch Navy, to give us the extra clout at sea we so desperately needed. Not for the Brits the building of so-called economy ships, second-rate cruisers like the Dutch disgrace the Sumatra . She was the ship that very nearly capsized on the Java Sea when she tried to fire her cannons from port and then starboard in rapid succession. Or the Dutch training cruiser Tromp  – ’
    â€˜The Tromp ? Didn’t you once go minesweeping on the Tromp ?’
    â€˜Once and once only, in the Gulf of Bengal,’ The father casts a searching look at Ko, ‘And never again. That day of minesweeping, a couple of Japaner fighter planes crossed the Tromp ’s path and she tried Emergency Full Ahead. Result, her so-called solid steel mast split in two. What a trough our once-great seafaring nation there faced. The Dutch marines were all good fellows, still are, but our ships this century ailed. Yet to this day the people’s representatives in The Hague’s Inner Court, restored to their offices, their forelock-tugging Nazi insignia neatly tidied away, do not smoke one cigar the less in consequence . . .’
    The father’s voice descends to a sour rumble at the base of his throat. Nobby, the one non-smoker, bats at the ceiling of cigarette smoke floating above their heads.
    â€˜So your Tjerk Hiddes was a happy ship , you say, Har,’ Nobby says, squinting, ‘but even with everything you’ve told us, I don’t quite see how. Excuse me for saying, but I’m a planner. After the German occupation she will have been the last ship of any size you Dutch were in a position to staff. Prisons must have been swept out to find those ratings you had. Pure criminals – ’
    The father clears his throat, knocks back his sherry, straightens up still higher. The sound of the words Tjerk Hiddes in an English-speaker’s mouth is enough to restore his humour. ‘See, Nobby, any prison sentence you might think of, any crime, theft, manslaughter, it’s no hindrance to waging war at sea, not for white men. Any scoundrel can be used in the marine service and turn into a good mate. We two hundred heads, our captain and his merry men, including forty fellows from the British Royal Navy, we all got on despite our motley make-up, maybe because of it. Within six months the excellent Captain Klaas Sluijter had transformed us into a beautiful unity simply by working us hard, all together. There’s a moral for us in that, right here in South Africa today.
    â€˜Take my friend, the ordinary seaman Schilperoort. He’d been a bouncer and petty thief back in Rotterdam, or so he often told us. He’d had a starring role in the drinks heist the crew once carried out in Fort Frederick, the time when the sub-captain received a DSO. But he was a firm friend. He remained my friend throughout. He taught me about loyalty. Humour, too. Resourcefulness. Whenever Theo Verwerda and I came down at midnight after our watch on the bridge, wet and tired, Schilperoort always had mugs of kaai ready for us, thick, bitter chocolate with a shot of rum. God, I can sometimes still long for that stuff. You could rely on Schilperoort. At full alarm I always forgot my helmet. “Without this pisspot on your