Storm Below. Hugh Garner
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during the Riverford’s violent combat manoeuvres, and literally shows the face of death to the crew, the result is a pervasive “mass psychological tension” (156) that almost provokes a mutiny. The “storm below” the surface created by the ship’s antisubmarine depth charges has been relocated within the Riverford itself, and it is Garner’s deft depiction of this transformation that makes the novel such a powerful portrait of what happens to men under the conditions of combat.
Hugh Garner would go on to become one of the most prominent Canadian writers of his time. Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, which included such much-anthologized favourites as “The Yellow Sweater,” “The Conversion of Willie Heaps,” and “One, Two, Three Little Indians,” won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1963, and when Cabbagetown was finally published unabridged in 1968, it was recognized as a major work of social realism. Although the ravages of alcoholism and poor health would significantly diminish the quality of his subsequent literary output, and thus lead to a substantial downgrading of his work by literary critics and historians after his death in 1979, for much of his career he was a powerful and evocative writer who spoke directly to many of his fellow Canadians. In my biography The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner, I concluded that his best writing “will be read and appreciated as long as there is an audience for honest and impassioned literature,” and rereading and reflecting upon Storm Below allows me to reaffirm that judgment.
By the time this photograph was taken in 1968, Garner had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was at the height of his powers as a writer.
Selected Reading
Fetherling, Doug. Hugh Garner. Toronto: Forum House, 1972. Garner, Hugh. One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.
Moss, John. “A Conversation with Hugh Garner.” Journal of Canadian Fiction, I, No. 2 (Spring 1972), 50–55.
Stuewe, Paul. Hugh Garner and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984.
____. The Storms Below:The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988.
BY HUGH GARNER
The Canadian corvette, HMCS Riverford, which serves as the setting of this book, is fictitious only to the extent that it is a composite of many. The members of the crew are also fictitious, but, I hope, recognizable as human beings behind the hyperbole and distortion which is the privilege of the fiction writer.
It takes all kinds to make a world, and it also takes all kinds to make a war — or fight one after some of the others make it.
This is not the story of a ship, but the story of a few Canadian sailors who formed the ship’s company of the Riverford, during six days at the tag end of an escort run in March 1943. There is nothing much about them to inspire poetry, or a patriotic shiver of pride in the reader; that is not the object of this book. They are not even “typical” sailors, if such exist. All I can say to justify them is that they are drawn in the image of hundreds who made up the Royal Canadian Navy. They do not need an apology — they were out there, and we won.
The dawn of March 9, 1943, rose above the spinning earth. For the many it was without significance, except to herald the coming day, but to the few it was epochal, and filled with meaning. It was the first dawn for those who were born the night before, and the last for those who had to die.
They were to die in many ways on that fateful, yet un-different day: In the gas chambers of Osweicim, on the spittle-caking roads of North Africa, in a birth bed in the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital in Sheffield, before a Ustachi firing squad outside Sarajevo, of prostatic cancer in a hotel for indigent men near the corner of the Bowery and Houston streets in New York City, at the wheel of a 1940 Buick at a level crossing near Buenos Aires, in the tail turret of a Halifax bomber over the German Ruhr, of pulmonary embolism in a sheepherder’s hut in Queensland, Australia….
The Canadian Flower class corvette HMCS Riverford was proceeding west-southwest at ten knots, part of the escort force of a merchant convoy, eleven days out of Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She was adhering to an admiralty-specified zigzag on the port, forward anti-submarine sweep, abreast of the leading file of fifty-six assorted merchantmen returning to North America in ballast. They had rendezvoused in the Clyde from such scattered points as Tilbury, Murmansk, Birkenhead, Loch Ewe, South Shields, Bristol, Oran, Queenstown, Lisbon, and Hull for the break across the North Atlantic. They ran the gamut of sea transportation from a twenty-two-thousand-ton Norwegian whaling factory through Liberty Ships, an Australian refrigerator ship, a Canadian lower laker, to a decrepit Greek coaster which trailed the others like a dirty-faced young brother on a hike. Also escorting them were a Canadian four-stacker destroyer, four more Canadian corvettes, and an English trawler on its way to the West Indies to take up minesweeping duties outside the port of Kingston, Jamaica.
The pre-dawn air was chill with the wind which swept off the blue-glass ice shelf of Greenland a few hundred miles to the northwest, and the cold black sea was raised into sullen, turgid ridges, its fringe of white petit point blown away with each gust of wind.
Ordinary Seaman Clark, nineteen years old, Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, stepped quickly through the sliding door of the wheelhouse, shutting it behind him, and stood in the darkness on the narrow platform staring out at the noisy, heaving sea. He looked up into the darkened sky, catching a glimpse now and again of a patch of star-studded heaven as it dipped and curtsied behind and between the wider ceiling of scudding clouds. The whole cosmos revolved around an axis formed by the jutting bow and fo’castlehead of the small ship, and the whistle of the wind through the struts and halyards accompanied the pirouette of the fading night.
As he stood still, fastening the top toggle of his woollen duffle coat against the wind, he became aware of the dark, dreadful loneliness of the sea. He was suddenly afraid, and he tuned his ears to the more familiar sounds of the ship and his fellows. From below him came the clatter of pans in the galley as the assistant cook, who had been baking his nightly batch of bread, cleaned up before his mate arrived to prepare breakfast. Up ahead the four-inch gun strained at its lashings with every rise and fall of the gun deck, and the shells clanked mournfully in their racks. There was the sound of feet being stamped on the boards above his head as the port lookout changed his position on the wing of the bridge. The noises from aft were swept away with the wind.
The sounds of the ship only accentuated the noisy quietude of the limitless expanse of the sea, so that the boy shivered, and his hands gripped the railing beside him. Suddenly he was afraid of losing his grip on this heaving thing which was his only connection with security, and he feared to be cast away into the sea which hissed and foamed as it reached with white-nailed fingers upon the freeboard below.
Standing there he realized that the sea cannot be loved; it is an enemy upon which men sail their puny craft — an alien thing armed with a multitude of claws ready to pull them beneath it with scarcely a ripple or a trace. It is too vast and too black and too uncomprehending to be loved. It gives neither succour nor hope nor life to those who must depend upon it. It is beautiful and terrifying, and gigantic and insatiable; a desert of water over which men travel through necessity.
He no longer thought of submarines and torpedoes, for now his fears were those which have followed men from the dawn of time; the primeval fears of the elements: of wind, of lightning, of the sea.
He strained his eyes aft to try to catch a glimpse of the lookout on the ack-ack platform; to find another human being with whom to share his terror; but the man could not be seen; he was alone. He fought with himself against the dread which rose through his fibres like a scream. With a desperate urgency he