The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Read online

  THE DEATH OF THE FRONSAC

  Neal Ascherson

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.apollo-classics.com

  About The Death of the Fronsac

  This is an unforgettable recreation of life in wartime, and of the tragic fate of Poland in the twentieth century: a novel about sabotage, betrayal and the terrible sadness of exile.

  In 1940, during the Phoney War, a French ship blows up in the Firth of Clyde. The disaster is witnessed by Jackie, a young girl who, for a time, thinks she caused the explosion by running away that day from school; by her mother Helen, a spirited woman married to a dreary young officer; and by a Polish soldier, whose country has just been erased from the map by Stalin and Hitler. Their lives, and the lives of many others, are changed by the death of the Fronsac.

  This is a story of divided loyalties, treachery and exile; about people in flight from the destinies that seemed to be theirs before the war disrupted the world they knew.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Death of the Fronsac

  Dedication

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  About Neal Ascherson

  More from Apollo

  About Apollo

  Copyright

  For George Rosie

  Preface

  This story begins in the town of Greenock, in western Scotland, in the first year of the Second World War.

  Greenock is an old seaport. It rises in tiers of stone tenements and terraced housing, up a steep hillside along the Clyde estuary. It looks down on the place where the river becomes enormous and turns south towards the ocean.

  At its upstream end, Greenock merges into Port Glasgow – ‘the Port’. Downstream, it finishes in the tilting town of Gourock – ‘all on one side, like Gourock’ – under its crown steeple.

  Once Greenock was Scotland’s door to Ireland and, later, the Atlantic. Then it became Scotland’s gateway for emigrants and the hardware of the industrial revolution, pouring out towards every continent. For over a century, the Greenock shipyards built many of the steam-driven navies and merchant fleets on the seas of the planet.

  When I was a wartime child in Greenock, the town still seemed to me the centre of the world. The battle fleets of the Allied nations rode at their moorings under our windows. The great anchorage called ‘the Tail of the Bank’ displayed the ships of the Atlantic convoys, arriving and departing, discharging tanks and trucks and soldiers. The streets and bars were bright with the uniforms and loud with the voices of Americans, Canadians, Norwegians, Frenchmen, Czechs and Poles.

  The Poles fascinated me. Who were they, with their swinging musketeer capes, their rattling language and their merry gallantry? (Scottish women soon discovered that ‘they could all dance like Fred Astaire’.)

  Less than a year before, in September 1939, their nation had been invaded simultaneously by Germany and Russia, who declared that Poland had been abolished for ever – ‘the bastard of Versailles’. Hitler and Stalin partitioned its territories between them. But these soldiers had escaped to France to fight again. When France fell, the survivors reached England, and Churchill sent them to Scotland to recover and retrain.

  The Poles had lost their country. Many of them, coming from eastern Polish provinces now annexed and renamed by the Soviet Union, had also lost their homes. But ‘home’ is an elusive concept in Polish culture. There is no precise translation for it; Joseph Conrad reflected that ojczyzna – literally, ‘fatherland’ – signifies at once less and much more than the English word. The young Polish officer at the centre of this story is exploring what sort of loyalty is denoted by ‘home’, for himself and for the Scots around him. (I should add that his opinions on politics and religion are his own, not necessarily mine.)

  The tale starts in April 1940, in the final days of the ‘phoney war’. Nobody – well, almost nobody – imagined that a sudden onrush was about to bring Hitler’s tanks to Paris in less than five weeks.

  In that last week of calm, a French warship – the heavy destroyer Maillé-Brézé – exploded off Greenock, killing most of its crew. Greenock is a mythopoeic town that has always bred novelists and poets, and this disaster touched off a second, imaginative explosion. Some accounts were grisly, some supernatural, some writhing with rumours of foreign spies and traitors. But these stories have haunted me since I first heard them as a boy. And this novel gathers some of them to suggest how the death of that ship, a single terrible but to this day not fully explained event, might have deflected and then stalked the lives of a group of men and women in the years ahead.

  As with many other events in this book, I have changed names and some details of the disaster. The oldest Greenockians will notice that. There are stories here that I witnessed, stories that I was told and ‘stories I stole’. In that last category is a scene about a Polish general’s visit to an East Neuk fishing town, which I have adapted from a wartime sketch by Ksawery Pruszyński. The chapter about wreck salvage took guidance from the expert professional account by Frank Lipscomb and John Davies in their book Up She Rises (first published in 1966). The murders at the camp for SS prisoners at ‘Abercultie’ resemble, not very closely, murders which did take place in the camp at Comrie (Cultybraggan). Margaret and Tadek’s love story is true, but their names were different. The French Commandant and his daughter were family friends of ours, and I have changed his name, too.

  My gratitude goes to the archivists of the Service Historique de la Défense at the Château de Vincennes, Paris; to the staff of the MacLean Museum in Greenock; to Alan and Mhairi Blair; to Mr Zbigniew Siemaszko, historian and wise veteran of the Polish armed forces in Scotland. And without the happy month spent as a writer-fellow at Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh, under the care of Hamish Robinson and as the guest of Mrs Drue Heinz, I would never have been able to finish this book.

  Once, centuries ago, thousands of Scots lived in Poland as traders, bankers and soldiers. Today, many thousands of young Poles have enriched Scotland by coming to live and work here. I dedicate this book to them, and to the fine, thrawn people of Greenock and Port Glasgow who are fighting their way out of hard times.

  ...Home. A sort of honour, not a building site,

  Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might

  Be somewhere else, but trust that we have chosen right.

  —FROM ‘IN WAR TIME’, BY W. H. AUDEN

  1

  One day, Jackie came home early from school and blew the world up.

  That story should belong to her. So why am I telling it, so many years after it happened? For a strange reason: because nobody can pronounce my name.

  I am called Maurycy Szczucki. Yes, Polish, although I have held a British passport for half a century now. When I renewed it in Glasgow last year, the young wo
man in the passport office was only the latest in the queue of well-meaning meddlers who have suggested that I change that name. ‘See, Mister, ehm, Sushi: you could make life easier being, like, Stuart or mebbe Shoesmith.’

  I refuse. It’s not patriotism. It’s not even that, frankly, they could easily pronounce it if they bothered to try. ‘Sh-choot–ski’: not so hard. No, it’s because my name is one of the only two things I have left to stand by, to keep me sure about who I am. The other, less reliable, is memory.

  After war and exile, I could have reconstructed what the British call a ‘normal’ life. But what happened on that day, the midday when Jackie came home early from school, led me off into fogs and mires. In the fog, other people came close to me but then were lost again. Whenever I set out on a paved road, the hard stone under my feet dissolved into marsh.

  So many things happened to me – happened senselessly, I used to reckon. But when that girl in Glasgow challenged me, I suddenly thought: my name is a flag. I am still grasping it, even as an old man. If I hold it up and march back through my life, I might make sense of those memories. Not only the tale of a disordered man but a life as a geological core – mud, gravel, then sandstone full of grimacing fossils, then dead granite drilled from earliest times.

  That is why I began to write this. For whom? Not for myself – I am finished with myself. Not for a namesake (I have no children) but for the sake of my name. So let us arrive in Scotland, in the year 1940, and start this story again.

  *

  One day, Jackie came home early from school and blew the world up.

  I remember the day. In some ways, I remember it more sharply than what happened on the day.

  It was late April, with May becoming imaginable. Pretty cold still, but handsome. From Greenock, you could see right across the big estuary. The warships and convoy ships anchored off the Tail of the Bank lay in sunlight; the Argyll mountains behind them were black in rain-mist. A northerly breeze kept jumping up and then falling away. It sent dark catspaws racing across the water from Gourock Pier to Princes Pier. The barrage balloon tethered to the Esplanade swayed and glinted.

  All this I could watch from my window in the French naval headquarters. This day began as a wartime day: plenty of confident, pointless activity. Two British destroyers were making a mess of coming alongside at Gourock, thrashing up cataracts of foam as they went astern, whooping their sirens. Then a procession of blue naval lorries became stuck in the road outside the torpedo factory at Fort Matilda. Shouting broke out, though I couldn’t hear the words. Gulls lined the roof-ridges, jostling and shrieking. A white flying boat passed low overhead, landed almost out of sight by the other shore of the Firth and then, restlessly, took off again.

  Everyone else was busy winning the war, but I was not. After all, I had just lost one. As a Polish officer freshly attached to the French navy, that experience gave me authority but also a certain unpopularity. I soon realised that I was losing a friend each time I said to some eager young enseigne de vaisseau from Brest or Toulon: ‘Your turn will come! Then you will see what they can do when they really mean it!’ So these days I sat at my table by the window, smoking Gold Flake and exchanging small talk with French colleagues about the eccentricity of the Scots. I had a telephone, the only one in the office, which was used by everyone else to make assignations with girls. I also took care to have papers spread out on the table, weighed down by the ashtray. These papers were my diary and some draft pages for a novel, but as nobody else could read Polish they gave a diligent impression. I read a lot, library fiction in brown-paper wrappers, to improve my English.

  That day, when I came in, Commandant le Gallois told me that I was to wait indoors for the arrival of some personage from Paris. A figure from the Ministry of War wished to inspect the base and meet the foreign liaison officers. Due to the uncertainty of the trains, he might turn up at any hour of the day or night. I was to remain in the building until further orders.

  This annoyed me, because there were other things I wanted to do. So, in spite of le Gallois, I did venture out twice. Why not? Who did he think he was? I should explain that all this was happening in the spring of 1940, when the French were free but not yet ‘Free French’, and nobody had heard of Charles de Gaulle.

  This phoney war had, in fact, only ten days to run before Hitler’s panzers sprang out of the woods and gave France heart failure. I did not realise that it would be so soon. But of course I knew that it would happen. I had watched it happen to me and to my brave artillerymen and to my country, only seven months before. Where had France been then, with all her promises of a counter-offensive on the Western Front? Where would France be tomorrow, when the Nazi-Soviet dragon had finished digesting my country and came looking for its next meal?

  I raised all this with Commandant le Gallois one evening, soon after my arrival in Scotland. He said that I was a pessimist; I said that I was a realist. A defeatist sort of realist, then? I reminded him that one of our great leaders had said that ‘to be defeated and not to give in is to be victorious’. We both sensed that it was better not to continue this conversation. Le Gallois smiled at me (he wasn’t a bad fellow), and, getting up, remarked: ‘After all, many of my colleagues think that we are fighting this war for Poland, for Danzig, but not really for France.’ I thought of saying: ‘Just wait and see!’ But then I decided to say nothing. I decided that I would continue to like le Gallois, who so calmly tolerated my waste of his time and space, but that I would no longer be in awe of him.

  So I went out twice. The first time was to walk down to the noisy lorry convoy jammed on the main road at Fort Matilda, and see what it was carrying. Probably the trucks were carrying torpedoes. If they were French ones, strange contraptions with a bad safety reputation, I could accept that they were none of my business. But if they were British torpedoes, then they might be destined for one of our Polish destroyers or submarines based here, and I could make their delay very much my business. I could justify my existence.

  While the drivers stared at my exotic uniform, I peered over the tailboards. No torpedoes. The lorries were carrying naval rations in crates. I went back to the office.

  The second time I went out was around midday. No, a few minutes after. I meant to cross the main road at the foot of the hill and make for the gate of the torpedo factory. A British naval friend there, a lieutenant commander, had asked me to drop into the officers’ mess for lunch and a game of billiards, and I was going to leave a note explaining why I couldn’t come.

  I do recall going down the headquarters steps and then stopping on the lowest one. Too much smoke in there, too many voices, and I needed to breathe for a moment. The Scottish air was cold, spiced with distant heather and bog-myrtle. Everything seemed to have gone quiet. The lorries had concluded their dispute and gone. The ships were silent; the argumentative gulls had slipped off the roofs and spun away across the water. The soldiers and children of the town behind me had stopped drilling and playing and had gone indoors for their dinner.

  Even the little wind had died down. The quiet – and I swear that this is how I remember it – seemed to bulge, to become expectant. As if the universe had exhaled and now, very slowly, was beginning to draw breath again. What word or sign was coming? I thought of our enemy, that double-headed monster with its crooked cross and red star, and imagined it heaving again to its feet, filling its lungs with fire as it prepared to wade across the sea towards us.

  I looked up at the sky. In my hand I was loosely holding a small brown envelope, my note to the lieutenant commander. Suddenly the envelope knocked my fingers apart and leaped to freedom. I stared after it, astonished. Then the sound came.

  2

  Jackie mounted the steps to the main door and took the key out of her coat pocket. But then she paused and looked around. She was doing a very, very bad thing, and she knew it. Running away home in the middle of the school day. Not asking Mrs Graham could she go, not telling anyone but just slipping out of the gate and off down
the steep Campbell Street brae while all the other girls were lining up in the yard to go in and get their dinner – it was just bad.

  Why did she go? It was because of her name and the big girls. Every day when they went out to the yard, Ina Ramsay pressed up against her and said: ‘O my, it’s Jacqueline! O my, and how is Lady Jackie Jackass the day?’ And her gang, with their big chests wobbling in their jerseys, would squeal with laughter. Today Jackie had hidden in the toilets for as long she dared. Mother and Uncle Mike, the Polish officer-lodger, always said: ‘Remember, you’re as good as they are. Just you tell them to get away and mind their manners, and they’ll back off.’ But being named Jacqueline, and wearing spectacles, and being clumsy and only nine years old, meant that she exactly wasn’t as good as they were. So today, when she came out into the yard and saw Ina and the gang over by the tree, and fancied them laughing when they made her say where she’d been, that was it suddenly. She took her gas mask case off its hook, because it must be carried at all times, and ran.

  She would get a row from Mother, a bigger row from Mrs Graham, something much bigger than a row, because running away from school was enormous, unforgivable. Even the joy of racing down Campbell Street, feet taking over so she thought she mightn’t be able to stop, made it worse. That joy would need paid for, too. Yes, she would get it. Nothing would be the same again.

  Union Street, when she got there, was different. At this time of day it had become a place Jackie scarcely knew; the normal shadows were wiped away, the granite setts shone emptily. The Dunrod Dairy was closed for dinner. Nobody was about. But as she approached the house, something pale moved. The huge dirty-white tom cat with red eyes, the cat which belonged to nobody but which was said to kill wee dogs, jumped off a wall and slouched past her. Jackie dreaded this creature. But today she felt a sordid recognition coming from it: another evil-doer.