Northern Dream

Dreams are necessary, they say. There are many kinds of dreams: good and bad. Some say we need the nightmares to balance what the Spanish call ‘ilusiones’. Some nightmares are too horrible to be balanced with anything. We of the North might call these ‘ilusiones’ ambitions - or even pipe-dreams. The quartermaster told me that. He speaks Spanish, so we got some extra rations from the Peruvian Navy on the way out of Callao. I remember looking back at the Captain of the ‘Guardian Rios’ as he cast us off. He was shaking his head.

The Leader dreamt; he dreamt the past. He dreamt the past after the last great nightmare. I had felt sick when I read about the ovens. Thank God they never got the heavy water. Gunnarside made me proud. Perhaps the balsa wood raft will make us proud too.

Vision: maybe that is another word for ‘ilusion’. I’m not sure if we all shared The Leader’s.

We picked up the Humboldt immediately:

‘CQ, CQ From Lima 12 Bravo:

Riding the Humboldt Current: Relay to Lima Alpha Embassy, Out.’

There were answers. Sometimes I took the mike, sometimes Torvald did. The hand cranks were tiring and the batteries did not last long.

I began having the dream on the seventh night out. For the first week I took the dog watches, so my sleep remained undisturbed in my down hours. The second week The Leader himself took them and I was not so lucky for the remainder of the voyage . The voices in my dreams were basso-profundo. The songs they sang had no words. I had always heard music in dreamland, but not like this.

As we sailed west the crew spoke less. The Leader issued no orders beyond the obvious. The Humboldt bore us towards our destination, perhaps there was no need. The parrot was most diverting, for two weeks. I toyed with the idea of teaching it to sing ‘Oleanna’ but the parrot preferred to curse in Aymara or Spanish. We crew were not told where The Leader had come by the bird. I suspect the Captain of the Guardian Rios had given it to him as a prank...

The voices in my dream came from the earth: the hills, the mountains, the valleys, the plains, the ground, the soil. The land sang to me as we crossed the sea. When there was nothing to see but the horizon wherever we turned, I fancied I heard the voices whilst awake. They seemed fainter, but perhaps they were not there at all. When the quartermaster had to repeat things to me, I made no mention of it.

Everyone had brought a diary and at least one book to read, save Winzinger. He brought several notebooks and nothing at all to read. He spent his waking hours in observation and annotation. What he found to scribble about beyond sea-birds and the effects of salt, sun and wind on human skin, I could not imagine. My own book was a collection of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

There was a fight between Winzinger and the Quartermaster at one point. Winzinger was using a portion of his rations in the hope of luring the Albatross. The vast bird had been following us for a few days. We were bombarded by petrels for two days before Winzinger was persuaded to the Quartermaster’s view. The Leader said nothing, just stared out at the featureless Ocean.

‘How did the petrels find us?’ I asked Winzinger.

‘Their sense of smell.’

‘They can smell corned-beef from such a distance?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘They can smell us.’

The Albatross continued to fly overhead, all the way to the other side of the horizon. Perhaps Winzinger noted in his book that the Albatross did not care for corned beef.

One night, when the unfamiliar stars were out and the moon was full of water, we talked about the war. Daggesson, the Swede, did not say much. The Leader said resistance was a cold business in Finnmark. Torvald was so proud of the Tirpitz operation. I looked out of the water and thought of the 1000 sailors drowned off Håkøya Island. My fellow radio-operator told us a story.

‘It was not much more than a hut. The officer billeted in the main house was a Colonel. Alta did not boast many suitable residences and so he complained less than might be expected. Like most of the Germans, he liked to know his position. Thankfully, Mrs Hendersson kept him happy. The aerial for his HF equipment stood like a flagpole in the garden to the rear. I buried the cable between it and my suitcase radio two feet under the hard earth. The SOE thought they knew everything: I hid the suitcase under a mound of sacks behind the hoes, rakes and shovels. At least I was Mrs Hendersson’s gardener and I had reason to be in the shed – although not at 3 a.m.

‘One quiet night, I was keying a message, an NTR. I heard a CQ: I tapped out the encrypted R, the code book was open at the page, although I did not need it by that time. The message was in clear. I wrote the letters on the pad.

‘B-E-L-S-E-N’

‘A-U-S-C-H-W-I-T-Z’

‘D-A-C-H-A-U’

There were a dozen words on the pad. The thirteenth began ‘T-R-E..’ before the transmission broke off.

I listened for the rest of the night, but there was no more. Nor did I hear anything like it again.’

The six of us looked out over the water.

‘We know these names now,’ Torvald said.

The others nodded. The Leader cleared his throat. ‘Resistance is a difficult business.’

Those off-watch turned to, I stayed awake with The Leader and resigned myself to my own company. At 2 in the morning, about an hour before we were to be relieved by the Quartermaster and Winzinger, The Leader offered me his flask.. It was aquavit, sharp and strong.

‘Do you hear them?’ He asked.

‘Who?’

‘You know,’ he took a sip from the flask himself.

I looked down at my flashlight, clicked the button two or three times. The beam bounced off the wet tarpaulin.

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ I shone the torchbeam over the water. Maybe a fish leapt through it.

‘Well I hear them too,’ he said and he looked to the stern. ‘I’ll check the compass.’

A few days later we spotted land. According to Winzinger it was the Puka Puka atoll. It could have been Serendib or the land of Prester John for all most of us knew. The leader looked perturbed, but said nothing.

We ran aground after 101 days and my dreams stopped.

The Leader mentioned them a final time as we waited on the reef for rescue.

‘It was the Mo’ai,’ he said, and perhaps that was true.