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For local boats, the trip across to Nanao was the easiest of sailings. It was little more than half a mile away, after all. But the night was black and the bay was shallow and rocky, so the village headman volunteered two of the island’s fishermen as pilots. One of them came on board Gandy’s boat and took up position next to him on the bridge. He evidently stood too close for the naval commander’s liking, for Gandy later wrote bluntly in his notebook: ‘He smelt.’ About ten of the local youths on the island took the chance to go along too, having offered to serve as guards. The five boats moved off slowly, keeping close together. As they approached the bay it suddenly seemed they might need all the guards they could get. Looming up out of the misty darkness ahead of them was a strange-looking craft with a squat, yellow funnel. Of one thing they were sure, it was no ordinary Chinese fishing boat. ‘Train the Lewis guns’ was the instant reaction. They cut the engines and fingers closed over triggers. Could the Japanese already be out looking for them? Then over the calm water boomed a distinctly un-Japanese voice: ‘A-hoy there!’ Having attracted their attention, the speaker reverted to muttering a stream of very English oaths—with traces of a New Zealand accent. It was Commander Montague RN, lately senior naval officer in Aberdeen and now most senior naval officer still afloat. Sadly, however, his ship didn’t do justice to his rank, and he was barely still afloat at all. His vessel—none other than the C410, the little diesel tug from the dockyard that had been used for carrying stores—had arrived about half an hour previously and had run onto the rocks at the entrance to the bay. It transpired that the Commander had fallen asleep at the wheel. He was now busy describing this in doleful but colourful terms as the worst sin he had committed in his long naval career. They soon recognized another familiar accent—this one hailing from Cornwall. 18 Guerrillas 26 December, 2 a.m. 136 Escape from Hong Kong Lieutenant Pethick—hair white as ever, but now minus false teeth— had been sent below to get some rest when the mishap occurred. He now realized that as a merchant seaman he should never have left the boat in the hands of the Royal Navy. As anyone who had taken a coastal steamer from Canton to Amoy knew full well, Mirs Bay and Bias Bay had the worst reputation for piracy in the whole China Sea. This was no place to run aground. Pethick was thoroughly fed up with the whole affair. But he was determined that the Japanese would never catch him, so he was only too happy, like those with him, to join the already sizeable escape party. The five other members of Montague’s crew were also volunteers from the dockyard, and four of them, like Pethick, were former merchant marine officers. Charles Skinner was a forty-one-year-old from Sunderland who had worked the China Coast for many years and had a taste for both Chinese women and Chinese liquor. Gandy later considered asking the police in China to arrest this ‘most plausible individual’ owing to the nuisance caused by his overindulgence in rice wine. Eric Cox-Walker’s drink of choice was gin. In a few hours time he and MTB 10’s coxswain, Bill Dyer, would be reprimanded for being ‘drunk while scuttling’, having finished off the bottle left out in the forecastle for the swimming party. Edmund Brazel, a bespectacled Jardines engineer, had served on the Cornflower as a member of the HKRNVR. And Alan Marchant—another Volunteer, this time HKVDC—was a former 2nd officer in the merchant navy, from Canada. But if it hadn’t been for an ex-member of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service called Arthur Pittendrigh, the C410 party wouldn’t have been there at all. Like Pethick, Pittendrigh was a wartime lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve. As a supervisor at the dockyard, he had won praise for his resolution and coolness at the height of the bombing raids on Aberdeen. Soon after 5 p.m. on Christmas Day, he and his dockyard assistants had further impressed Commander Montague by managing to get the stranded C410 off the rocks near Staunton’s Creek, despite coming under heavy fire from...

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