A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby by Eric Newby Page B

in front of it.
    We surfaced at nine o’clock and the four folboats were brought up on to the casing through the torpedo hatch without their midship frames in position, the only way we could get them through it, and we then carried out the final assembly.
    It was not a very dark night, but after thirty-six hours in artificial light underwater it seemed terribly black until we became accustomed to it, when it seemed altogether too bright. To the north we could see the lights of Catania and to the west the landing lights of the airfield. Planes were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet above our heads, and when they were directly above us the noise was deafening. The wind was on-shore and there was a nasty swell running which made the launching of the canoes over the bulges difficult with the tanks blown, and the loading of them once they were in the water even more so. One canoe was so badly damaged getting it into the water that it had to be left behind, together with the marine who was going to travel in it. He was very disappointed at the time. How fortunate he was.
    ‘Rather you than me, mate, but good luck anyway,’ were the last words addressed to me by a rating as he threw me the stern line; then we set off in arrowhead formation towards the shore, if three canoes can be said to constitute an arrowhead.
    The water was extraordinarily phosphorescent. We might have been in a tropical sea and as we dipped the blades of the paddles it exploded into brilliant green and blue fire and as we lifted them out of it they shed what looked like drops of molten metal which vanished when they fell back into the water. At any other time these effects would have seemed beautiful; now they seemed an additional hazard. Surely to the sentries patrolling the beach it must look as if there was a fire out at sea, and surely the crews of the bombers which were still coming in to land over our heads from dead astern must see it, just as surely as they must have already seen the submarine. Together with Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment, my companion at bow who was no doubt sharing these gloomy thoughts, I paddled towards the shore, trying to hearten myself with the prospect of the bacon and eggs which we had been promised if and when we returned on board.
    After a few minutes we heard the boom of surf and soon we were on the outer edge of it. It was not very heavy, but we got out of the canoes as we knew how to without capsizing them, and swam in with them until our feet touched bottom and we could stand. It is better to arrive sopping wet on two feet on a hostile shore than to be capsized or thrown up on it dry but immobile in a sitting position, unless you are a secret agent who must immediately enter the market place and mingle with the crowds.
    The beach, with the wind blowing over it and the surf beating on it, seemed the loneliest place in the world. The wire began about fifty feet from the water’s edge. We carried the canoes up over the sand and put them down close to the entanglements without being blown to pieces. At least this part of the beach did not seem to be mined with anything that a man’s weight would set off, or perhaps we were lucky, there was no way of knowing.
    Now we attached the time pencils to the bombs, which were a mixture of plastic and thermite. (With the white cordtex fuses they looked like big black conkers on strings.) This was something that could not safely be done on board a submarine costing a mint of money, because time pencils were rather erratic, and I always hoped that the workers in the factory in which they had been made had not got all mixed up and substituted a thin, thirty-second delay wire for a thicker, thirty-minute one, or simply painted the outside casing with the wrong colour paint, which was one of the methods of identifying them, mistakes that could quite easily happen after a pre-Christmas factory beano.
    When the bombs were ready we buried the canoes upside down in