By Charles Donachy

For years as young sea scouts they were doughty sailors in a skimpy flat-bottomed coble, even out in the choppy river estuary. But today they were alone in a stolen MOD midget submarine and not another soul knew. Marty Brown was beside himself with excitement as he and his friend Colin floated on the Forth and Clyde Canal just before it meets the river Clyde.
    It was Marty’s uncle Joe had introduced them to XE9, the highly secret midget submarines of the late Forties. Uncle Joe was a handsome muscular man with jet black eyebrows and an unruly mop of matching hair, but was sadly no longer quite right in the head. The grown-ups said he was shell-shocked but harmless and all agreed he loved his nephews and nieces, especially Marty. Marty and Colin believed him when he claimed he’d found the Royal Navy’s midget-sub XE9 in a forgotten shed in a mothballed Clydebank shipyard. He said he’d lost his job maintaining the old XE9 when the MOD discarded them after the war. They had all three worked really hard that first month to repair and renovate the vessel. But in the two months since, uncle Joe kept procrastinating by ‘finding’ things that still needed doing.
    “Colin, uncle Joe can’t make it today but says we can take Neptune for a full scale trial-run along the canal. Are you on?”
    “Aye sure. You betcha.
    They settled in; did all their checks and started mini-sub Neptune.
    “We’ll just dive about five feet to be safe, Colin.”
    “Aye righto, Marty.”
    Suddenly the small sub was tossing and turning as a massive big rope kept hitting the windscreen which the boys feared would break. Marty swerved back and forth to try and dislodge the thing and accidentally knocked the gear lever and instantly they were picking up speed at an alarming rate.
    “Colin, the joystick won’t respond.”
    “That’s nae rope on the windscreen, Marty. It’s a big flippin conger eel.”
    As he spoke the eel peeled away just in time for Marty to see the large keel of a ship straight ahead and swerve in the nick of time. Now the boys gasped: they were no longer in the mouth of the canal but in the river Clyde and pelting downriver and out to sea.
    “Surface, Marty! Surface!”
    “I can’t, the controls are jammed.”
    “Dive – the extra water pressure might help to free the controls.”
    “I’m not sure but here goes. Great! The joystick‘s responding.”
    “Easy. Easy! You’re diving too deep.”
    Marty straightened Neptune up, asking Colin to check how far it was to the Cloch Lighthouse. He knew his friend had forgotten his glasses and the task would keep him occupied for some time. Marty could now focus on the job at hand. They were near the Cloch lighthouse which still had a large wartime boom stretching across to Dunoon Harbour. Neptune could normally only cross this at high tide or after very heavy rain, which is why Marty had it racing along the bottom like a demersal eel so that at the exact moment he could race upwards and take a flying leap out of the water and over the boom. It worked beautifully, just like Jack Daniels with his metal swordfish in the Wizard.

Marty had been lying to everybody these two months and was feeling guilty about it. At first he felt all grown up and sure that he could handle the situation. But now that the time for action had come it was very strange. On the one hand he was pleased to be actually doing something concrete, but on the other hand he had this huge weight of responsibility bearing down on him. He had been lying to his own family and especially his mum who trusted him and depended on him. He’d deceived his best pal Colin. But the worst deception had been to uncle Joe himself. Joe, who had not given permission for this full scale trial at all and was deceived into thinking that today’s trip had been called off because Marty was unwell.
    Marty emerged from his reverie and noted they were racing past Port Glasgow and heading for Helensburgh and despite his angst he thrilled to the chase, for they were racing time itself to complete their mission before dark. He felt emboldened to finally tell Colin the whole truth.
    “Colin, mate, we’ve been pals for years and I’m sorry I’ve kept you in the dark these past two months. It all started when I went on that school trip to the Hunterian Museum…”
    Marty explained how the lecturer had mentioned demersal fish like conger eels and how they hug the bottom of deep water habitats, and how sea monsters like Nessie had probably avoided capture by doing the same in the very deep waters of places like Loch Ness.
“Then, Colin, I stiffened upright as the lecturer went on”...Towards the end of the war there were a series of interesting experiments carried out at Gareloch, beyond Helensburgh. They worked on a special school of dolphins, training them to carry torpedoes. But they also tried to teach the dolphins sign language and telepathy. The dolphins learned to lie still on the bottom of the sea alongside prototype XE9s and were bombarded with depth charges, grenades and high frequency sounds to see how their temperament and their brains could cope.
    “We tried to ask questions but the lecturer knew he had blabbed too much and went schtum. But things were starting to add up for me, Colin. Uncle Joe had never explained how he got shell-shocked but he had mentioned working with dolphins. I went to the Mitchell Library and explained about uncle Joe to a pretty young assistant with red hair. She said her dad had also been badly shell-shocked and sympathetically offered to help me. She found out that Uncle Joe was one of a select few Fleet Air Arm personnel to pilot the midget submarines. And do you know what, Colin?”
    “I wish I did, Brown, but since you’ve been keeping secrets of course I don’t.”
    “I’m sorry, Colin. I wish I could have explained it all to you before but nobody would have let me do what I’m trying to do, which is to help uncle Joe.”
    “And how does the mighty Brown intend to do that?”
    “Ach, you’re being unfair, Colin. Apparently they only discovered that one of the mini-subs was missing the year before last when they wanted it for the Festival of Britain Exhibition in the Kelvin Hall. Uncle Joe found it and hid it for sure. You must admit that explains all the mystery – why he never let anyone know what we’ve been doing these past few months.”
    “Aye, ’ave wondered about your uncle Joe’s talk of repairing this that and the other but then leaving them be. Why does he pretend like that?”
    “That’s my whole point, Colin. I’m sure he wants to take Neptune back to do his demersal thing and lie on the floor of the Gareloch and try to lay his ghosts and nightmares to rest.”
    “What nightmares?”
    “My librarian friend found an article by a psychiatrist guy who is also a dolphin boffin. He actually wrote about the MOD experiments in the Gareloch. He claims that individual dolphins do have some weak kind of telepathic power but it’s much much stronger when they combine their powers in a group like when they herd and corral fish for eating.”
    “Am no following you, Brown.”
    “His study suggests that the Gareloch type experiments left all the pilots suffering from shell-shock because the demersal dolphins found themselves under attack and telepathically persuaded each pilot, including uncle Joe, to remove his earmuff protectors so that they would suffer as well.”
    “So, why have we come here to the Gareloch?”
    “Because uncle Joe would love to come and face his demons but has a mental block about actually doing it. Now that we know the whole story and have been here I’m sure we can promise him enough moral support to get him through it.”
    “But what will he achieve?”
    “Atonement for the dolphins’ pain and an at-one-ment with all the surrounding Gaia.”
    “What the heck’s Gaia when it’s at home?”
    “Ach, you know uncle Joe’s into his idea of the big family of the birds and bees and the mountains and trees. Well, all that mother earth stuff is Gaia.”
    Colin was still looking puzzled and unconvinced when a lovely thing happened: two dolphins appeared from nowhere, nosed around the sub; looked in through the windscreen and then glided off.
    “Flippin heck, Brown, did you see them ruddy great dolphins peering in?”
    “I don’t know about you, Colin, but now I am totally convinced.” 

© Charles Donachy

Still Waters Run Deep was first published in The Journal, 22 October 2011