Under Pressure: Life on a Submarine

That was close, way too close. The captain made the call – correctly, of course – that it was making far too much noise to have detected us. But even so, most of the crew on watch when it happened are now nervously fidgeting, thinking to themselves: How did we miss it? There’s a lot resting on our – mostly very young – shoulders. We can never be detected or compromised. Nor can we seek and destroy. We can only evade. Our job is to hide the bomber, this monster of the deep.

***

HMS Raleigh, Torpoint, Cornwall, nine months earlier.

I’d had a plan – a clear plan – since joining the Royal Navy that I wanted to serve with the elite. I wanted to be challenged, and if I was going to do it I needed to throw my heart and soul into it. I also needed the adrenaline fix. As a restless but determined soul who wanted to do something a tad different with my life I decided on the Submarine Service, the ‘Silent Service’. I wanted some of that, and although I had no idea what it would entail or what was required both mentally and physically, it appealed as a test. I’d been intrigued by submarines since childhood and had regularly seen them at the Plymouth naval base on our family’s annual summer break to the beautiful South Hams region of Devon. We’d spend at least one day visiting Plymouth Hoe for a game of crazy golf followed by fish and chips, gazing out to sea where, among others, Drake had sailed in 1588 to engage the Spanish Armada. Plymouth had been a vital centre during the Age of Empire, and all the sailor-scientists had set sail from here – Cook, Bligh and Darwin. Its naval history carried on and on through the two world wars, right up to the fleet of vessels I’d see on my boyhood holidays.

After lunch the family would take a guided trip round the warships on one of the boats that departed from the Mayflower Steps on the seafront, and we’d work our way past the might of the modern Navy. The moored-up, rusting warships seemed large, robust, even a tad soulless.

Meanwhile, the submarines tied up alongside looked anything but; sleek and powerful, with a large helping of intimidation to boot, they radiated a sense of mystery and glamour. I’d sit there looking at them, marvelling at what lethal pieces of machinery and wondrous feats of modern engineering they were. Enigmas to me in many ways: one minute powering forward on the surface like a ship, then in a flash simply vanishing under the water, wholly hidden from the world, completely self-sufficient, relying on no one, asking for nothing.

Unbeknown to me at the time, on these holiday boat trips I was witness to the changing nature of the Navy. It was no longer the surface boats that dominated the dockyards but the submarine. For where once it had been the battleship, aircraft carrier and frigate, now it was the age of underwater supremacy.

But even at that age I did sense that perhaps the ultimate mental examination was – as it still is – coping with life under the sea. A world without natural light, cooped up alongside more than 140 other men, eating the same food, breathing the same air, surviving together in some of the most forbidding conditions imaginable. Before I was to attempt this, however, at the age of 17 I tried to join the French Foreign Legion in Aubagne, near Marseilles. I’d ventured out there alone by ferry and train – having told my mum and dad I was off inter-railing with a couple of mates – and passed all the initial tests, both fitness and written, only to be told by a corporal of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment that I needed parental permission as I was not yet 18. This was never going to happen. Immaculately dressed in fatigues and green beret, the chiselled Englishman cheerfully advised me to reapply in a few months, seemingly implying it would be a mere formality and that a career in the Legion lay ahead. To this day my mother knows nothing about this episode in my life, nor does my father.

I’d been fortunate enough to win a scholarship to public school in the Midlands for some of my secondary education. I didn’t come from a wealthy family – my family had grafted all their lives – so boarding school had certainly been an eye-opener as to how the other half lived, but it was useful in developing coping measures and survival instincts, and enabled me to get along with pretty much everyone. It was here that I first read Simon Murray’s Legionnaire, his classic account of serving in the Foreign Legion and the very book that had inspired my ill-judged trip to Marseilles. But the book also taught me something else – that the traditional trip through further education and then college or university wasn’t for me. I’d had enough of textbooks, teachers and essays; it was time to do something against the grain for a few years and see where I ended up.

There didn’t seem much point hanging around in the real world, as Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government were wantonly destroying the West Midlands and most of northern Britain. The very recent miners’ strike was evidence of that, with the hitherto unseen spectacle of the British police having pitched battles with miners in desolate fields across South Yorkshire. It seemed that tradition and heritage no longer stood for anything. The miners, who could trace their family lineage back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, when the mining industry supplied power to steam engines, generated electricity and heated buildings, now found themselves on the sharp end of the politics of hate and the systematic destruction of the industrial heartlands. Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham were the major cities on the brink of economic collapse, and this had a knock-on effect on their satellite communities, my hometown of Wolverhampton being one.

Wolverhampton had gained its fortune on the back of the wool industry in the Middle Ages, when it flourished as a small market town. Its prosperity continued through Tudor Britain, and its first canal opened in the early 1770s, stimulating economic and industrial growth through the transportation of raw materials and goods. During the 19th century, at the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Wolverhampton boomed as a centre for steelmaking, coal mining and lock-making, and most of the country’s cables and anchors were made there at the height of the British Empire. It was also in the 19th century that the town and the surrounding area picked up its nickname of the ‘Black Country’, when the soil was turned black with soot deposited by all this burgeoning industry.

The railways reached Wolverhampton in 1837 and, coupled with the canal system, further increased the accessibility of the town; indeed, the Great Western Railway soon became a major employer in the area when it opened a locomotive repair factory in 1859, a large bicycle manufacturing industry further enhanced economic prosperity, and by the time a public park was opened, quickly followed by an art gallery, library and hospital, the town was thriving as it headed into the new age.

The early and middle part of the 20th century had been kind to the town, and its football team – along with Manchester United’s ‘Busby Babes’ – were the best in the land. Captained by legendary centre-half Billy Wright, Wolverhampton Wanderers won three league championships in the 1950s and an FA Cup at the end of the decade, making them the unofficial world club champions.

But the mid- to late-1960s saw a painful decline in both Wolverhampton’s – and the industrial western heartland’s – economic fortunes, and by the mid-1970s a third of the population lived in council housing, with unemployment rising and immigration causing deep divisions in the West Midlands.

Enoch Powell, author of the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was the local MP for Wolverhampton South West. I’ll never forget as a very young boy answering the door to him while he was on the stump in the first general election campaign of 1974. I remember opening the door to the palest-looking man I’d ever seen, his skin like alabaster, head slightly tilted forward. He stared at me intensely with fixed, unblinking eyes.

‘Mum and Dad are up the road at the neighbours,’ I told him bashfully.

I may have been very young but I knew immediately who he was – I’d seen him on the TV – but of course I didn’t know about the general furore he’d caused in the country as a whole. At this point my elder brother Chris joined me for moral support, so Powell doffed his trilby hat, wished us good luck and walked off at a gallop to Number 6.

Wolverhampton in the 1970s staggered along with rising unemployment and seemed to me to possess an underlying threat of violence. The place was suffering – economic death by a thousand cuts – and by the time the Tories came to power in 1979, hell-bent on changing the social and economic outlook of the once-great industrial heartlands of the Black Country, most of northern Britain was finished; the collapse of the industrial working class and the north–south divide of Thatcherism had well and truly begun.

As a six- and seven-year-old, I’d watch the news of factories shutting, car plants closing, the oil crisis and the first miners’ strikes. Even at that age I was aware that this wasn’t business as usual, but it didn’t give me sleepless nights. I was too busy with my newfound love of sport. Whether it was football, rugby or cricket, it all came fairly easy to me, and I guess that sport was also an enjoyable release from overly zealous, annoying teachers. Football was my obsession; morning, noon and evening I’d be out in our road, in the park, or driving my parents mad, hammering the ball against the garage door. Slightly introverted and on the shy side, I was wary of people until I got to know them, and was not much of a conversationalist. Instead, I lost myself in sport and my other passion – music.

Later on I captained the school football team and played for the area and district teams. Football was my life. Aged 14, I was lucky enough to have trials with my hometown club, Wolverhampton Wanderers. I’d been training in their youth set-up and had been on a couple of tours with them, including a memorable trip down to London where we played the borough of Hackney, coincidentally my home for the past 16 years. We had stones and bricks thrown at us from the touchline, and the match was suddenly called off after 30 minutes.

I didn’t make the grade for Wolves. I remember the coach coming round to my house, sitting me down in front of my mum to break the upsetting news. It hit me hard, the first time I’d failed at something.

But my childhood was happy for the most part, except for losing both my maternal grandparents at the end of the decade, my grandfather dying six months to the day after his wife; married at 18, they’d been together for over half a century before both bowing out at three score years and ten. I was particularly close to my cousin Stephen. Four years older than me, he was cool, played the guitar and was into New Romantic bands, particularly David Sylvian and his group Japan. I didn’t see him as much as I’d have liked, and by the time he reached 18 I’m sure he didn’t want to be seen hanging round with this spotty 14-year-old with braces.

It was the hot summer of 1982 and the World Cup on the telly when the phone rang. Dad answered. It was a friend of my Uncle Brian, telling him that Stephen had been found dead in his car. In shock, we assumed he’d been in a car crash, but in fact he’d had a massive heart attack and a friend had discovered him slumped over the steering wheel with the horn blaring. Dead, and not yet out of his teens. The post-mortem revealed he had an enlarged heart muscle. I was devastated by his death, but of course I had to be as strong as I could for my aunt and uncle. I didn’t know how to process my feelings or communicate my grief, so I just bottled it up and allowed it to fester. It wasn’t really an era for discussing feelings – that wasn’t how things worked – and my whole family suffered in silence.

My parents would let me out of the house for hours at a time. I’d disappear up the local park, playing football, climbing trees, annoying the neighbours, staying out till dark; fish and chips every Saturday lunchtime, going to Woolworths to buy The Jam’s Sound Affects, my first LP – not ‘vinyl’, it was never called that, a modern term used by people who were never there in the first place; playing ‘knock and run’ … slowly I was tapping into a new sense of adventure as my body and confidence grew.

As I became older, this love of adventure – plus Simon Murray’s book, which had provoked my failed attempt to join the Legion – pushed me towards a life away from formal education. When I returned from Marseilles, the Navy looked like the next best option for an unconventional life – and I’d also heard that the Submarine Service paid well. Serving Queen and country never entered into it for me, as I was neither nationalistic nor a particular fan of the monarchy. The only people who ever talked about fighting for Queen and country were – and still are – feckless politicians who’d never done, nor ever would do, any of the fighting. Queen and country? One was outdated as an institution, the other past it as an idea. No, I wanted to do it for me.

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