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The engineer was just reporting to Smart. Number two boiler had just gone out and there were no electrics and no hydraulic power. The engine room had been only superficially damaged, however, and the engine room staff were struggling to shore up the bulkhead and pump out the boiler room.

‘How about casualties?’ Kelly asked.

‘So far four killed,’ Smart said. ‘But we think there may be a couple more. Seven injured two seriously. We’ll be towing her into St Jean de Luz. We’ve already radioed and Brazen’s answered. More than likely it was a German mine laid by an Italian ship. It’s as bad as being at war.’

Kelly turned. ‘As bad as?’ he snapped. ‘Dammit, we are at war! Here, it’s just started a little early.’

The late March dawn came wet, cold and grim, the waves changing gradually from night-time black to iron-blue and eventually to a cheerless green-grey.

The war had come exactly as Kelly had predicted. With disarmament and pacifism rampant in Britain, the will to withstand the bullying of the dictators had been sapped. Appeasement wasn’t just the will of the politicians, it was the will of the nation – something that had become obvious from the tumult of joy when Chamberlain had returned from Munich after knuckling his forelock to Hitler – and the Czechs, the Austrians and the Albanians had been sacrificed to the dictators in the hope of buying them off. Unfortunately the dictators had asked for more and, shamed at last into standing up for the Poles, a nation they couldn’t even reach, London and Paris had finally been edged – ‘shoved’ was perhaps a better word – into war. And Kelly, with the bonus of an extra stripe on his sleeve, had been snatched from the shore job at Portsmouth, where he’d found himself after a year on the staff of the C-in-C, Home Fleet, given the Flotilla leader, Feudal, and a group of ill-assorted escorts and thrust into convoy duties across the Atlantic. Like everybody else, he knew little about the job and was having to learn as he went along, but it was better, by a long chalk, than Portsmouth where the house he had occupied – wired like a battleship with naval-type switches and plugs and shades like plantpots – had been furnished by a predecessor with the imagination of a cockroach.

As the light increased, the first things visible were the white crests of the waves, then he picked out the veins that marked where the wind had clawed them down the lee side. The sky was filled from one horizon to the other with close banks of cloud that looked like old hard-packed snow, grey, dirty and ugly, and the rain fell in squally flurries in a steep, slanting drizzle that blew across the ship, blurring the horizon, so that the point where the watery sky met the sea was ill-defined, as if the two elements ran into each other and they were steaming into a sombre moving mass that curved down ahead of them and swept back below.

From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly stared back at the convoy he was leading. As the long steely waves from the south-west swept by in a never-ending succession, the ships bobbed their heads, bowing in obeisance to the gale before lifting them again and falling once more, to raise their sterns as they slid into the trough ready for the next act of obeisance. The smaller ships seemed to vanish entirely in the vast valleys of water until only their funnels and mastheads were visible and they seemed at times to be on their last long journey down to the immemorial ooze two miles below.

Behind Feudal, beyond the commodore ship, there was a forest of moving masts, funnels, samson posts and cargo booms, as freighters, tankers and passenger ships rolled and pitched and danced eastwards towards Britain. As the convoy executed its change of course, it was not at first noticeable, just that the ships appeared to be showing a different profile, and where Kelly had been looking at their bows now he was on the starboard beam as they swung to port. Every ship did the same thing, swinging slowly, adjusting position so that they simply changed lines and faced the stern of a different ship.

As the watery sun sent an unexpected ray down from the packed clouds, the light caught the curve of wet bows. The change of course put the wind in a different direction and instead of the spray swinging back on either side of the bridge, it now slashed directly across it, soaking the men who stood there so that they hitched at the towels they wore round their necks as scarves.

Though to other ships her decks seemed empty and she seemed to be devoid of crew, in fact Feudal was humming with activity. Throughout her length, auxiliary machinery, dynamos and ventilating fans filled the alleyways with background noise, and the cooking smells that pervaded the ship mingled with the smell of oil, vomit, and that curious acrid blend of steam and electricity which was always present where there was marine machinery.

Despite the curious passivity of the front in France – what the Americans with their gift for apt phrases were calling the Phoney War – nobody aboard was kidding himself that Britain had taken advantage of the lull. At home there were still plenty of holidays, and even with the war privilege had not vanished. Though the wealthy younger elements were rushing to the services, their parents were carefully establishing themselves in comfort in safe areas, determined to survive, and there had been little increase in war production. The Air Force was still short of aeroplanes, and the Army was still short of tanks, and there was a story, probably apocryphal, about a staff course at Camberley where an officer had been criticised for an overdeveloped sense of humour for mounting an imaginary anti-tank gun up a tree. He had defended himself briskly with the information that he had no idea what the weapon was like because he’d never seen one and, so it seemed, neither had anybody else.

The Navy was as short of ships. Though Britain had the largest and most professional navy in the world, it was desperately in need of reinforcements. Its strength on paper was misleading because half its ships had been designed for the earlier war, and though some had been refitted, many were obsolescent and some positively obsolete. Of those commissioned between the wars, some were magnificent but there were others, designed in a penny-pinching era, that were useless for fighting yet too slow to runaway.

Though the Navy still remained the darling of the British people, who considered it its bulwark against aggression, the men in it knew that out of fifteen capital ships only two were of post-1918 vintage, and Kelly had long suspected in any case that battleships’ bulk and low speed made them vulnerable to air and undersea attack, so that they could never be exposed without a fleet of smaller vessels as escort. Yet, because only a battleship could confront a battleship and since the Germans had built them too, blue-water admirals, who believed that ack-ack was better for ships than fighters, had been glad to build them in reply and they would have to be housed in secure anchorages until needed, absorbing thousands of men who might usefully have been employed on escort duties. It had not even been a battleship which had scored their only real success to date, the crippling of the pocket battleship, Graf Spee, in December, but three cruisers, every one of them outgunned.

It was a far grimmer war that was being fought by the lighter forces – and even they were far from perfect for their job. A destroyer was not an efficient escort vessel because her torpedoes were pointless for that duty, her low-angle guns valueless against aeroplanes, and her tremendous speed rarely needed. Her enormous engines occupied space that was needed for fuel and she required an unnecessarily large crew. The new escort sloops and corvettes that had been planned, though slower and smaller, were not only less cramped, but also less complex, and they could be built much more easily, while their armament laid stress chiefly on anti-aircraft weapons and depth charges.

From Feudal’s bridge, Kelly could see the ship’s company closed up at action stations. There were many newcomers among them, still going through the shocks of the changeover from peace to war. This war was a different one from the last, with different problems, though war itself remained the same and still brought out the same old human imperfections. The Hostilities-Only men were still struggling to become part of a crew. There still weren’t many of them, but to them everything was horrifyingly new – the sea, the ship, even seasickness – and, with the battle fleets taking all the best destroyers, only the old ones were left for escort duties, so that they were all desperately tired, desperately dirty and desperately overstretched.

His mind busy, even as he was alert to what was going on around him, Kelly glanced to starboard. The old W-class ship, Wrestler, now converted to escort vessel, was just heaving herself out of a trough. To port was the armed merchantman, Sappho, formerly a Lampert and Holt ship. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was another converted destroyer, Vandyke, together with the corvette, Sanderling. By the standards of the day the convoy was well-protected.

To Kelly and everybody else who had taken the anti-submarine course at Portland, it had always seemed that a defensive policy was the only one that could be applied to convoy work: make the U-boats come to the escort, rather than form escorts into hunting groups to search the vast ocean spaces for the enemy. Perhaps the desire to assume the offensive had been implicit in everything the Admiralty had done since the signal, ‘Winston is back,’ had been sent out in 1939, but at a time when the submariners were also still learning, not only were the hunting groups achieving negligible successes but they were certainly not using their new radar sets properly by thundering about the sea after stale scents and false periscopes sighted by aircrews, trawler skippers and old gentlemen fishing from the ends of piers. Judging by the reports that had to be investigated, the sea was teeming with German U-boats, and the radar operators – still nervously believing their sets made them impotent – were new enough to the game to be regularly sick over their dials.

Kelly’s own group had originally included the destroyers, Firebrand and Fortunate, the escort vessel, Wheeler, and the corvette, Dunlin, but these four had been snatched from him to oversee a convoy from Nova Scotia which was supposed to have joined them and never had. But, as everybody knew, when an escort group was named, the only thing that was certain was the leader, while the rest depended on what was available.

There had been a brush with a U-boat during the night. It had come to nothing, but Kelly was in no doubt that other submarines would have been called into the assault, because the Germans were beginning to realise that, against the new devices being used against them, it was necessary to contribute numbers. As full daylight came, he began to relax. It might be possible now to go below, change, and perhaps even snatch a little sleep. He had got over Teresa’s death more quickly than he could have imagined possible, and had wondered uncomfortably more than once if his feelings for her sprang merely from the fact that she looked like his long-lost Charley. It had become still easier when it had dawned on him that she’d never intended to leave Santander with him. She’d gone back again and again into danger because she’d had to, afraid to live and because of her faith unafraid to die. He’d been angry at her sacrifice and bitter at what he felt were her muddled beliefs, but the anger and the bitterness had finally died, and in New York, lonely as he watched his officers and men stream ashore to enjoy themselves with the bright lights and the girls, his thoughts had turned again to Charley Upfold.

Was it six years, or was it seven since she’d sailed in Mauritania for a job in New York? He’d looked her up in the telephone directory under her married name of Kimister and again under her maiden name of Upfold, but there had been nobody who could possibly have been her. The only person he knew who could still have been in contact with her to give her address was her sister, Mabel, but she was in England and married to a retired colonel of the Devons, who had somehow got himself back into the army and across the Channel to France.

‘I’m going below for a wash, Number One,’ he said to the first lieutenant. ‘But don’t for a minute imagine we’ve thrown him off because I dare bet our particulars have been passed to every U-boat in the area not wearing an ear trumpet.’

As he reached his cabin, Rumbelo was waiting for him. The same old Rumbelo recalled to service and happy to be back with Kelly. With a son serving in the destroyer, Grafton, it was hard on Rumbelo to have to return to sea, because he’d just got used to being settled at Thakeham. But he hadn’t grumbled, accepting it as normal, and grateful to be back with Kelly instead of in some unrewarding job ashore. The gap that had appeared between them when, to Rumbelo’s disgust, Kelly had married the wrong woman in 1927, had happily disappeared when the marriage had broken up, and Rumbelo and Biddy and their children had taken the place, with Hugh Withinshawe, of the family that Kelly had never had.

He was just reaching out to take Kelly’s cap when the buzzer went, and his hand changed its direction automatically to lift the instrument and pass it to Kelly.

‘Sir! Bridge! Wrestler has a contact!’

Snatching his cap back, Kelly hurried for the ladder. Below him, as he reached the bridge screen, was the four-inch gun and the forecastle streaming with water, the chain cables rising and falling as the bow drove into the sea.

‘Where’s Wrestler now?’ he demanded at once of the officer of the watch.

‘She’s moved astern, sir.’

‘Very well, we’ll join her. Bring her round to starboard.’

There was silence among the men alert at their action stations. Most of them were peacetime regulars with seven, twelve or twenty-two-year engagements, many of them enlisted in the years of the Depression to avoid unemployment. A lot of them had been awaiting their release when the war had broken out and among them were recalled men like Rumbelo, often middle-aged and in no condition for the spartan regime of a destroyer’s mess decks in the Atlantic. There were also a few Naval Reservists, trawlermen and merchant seamen, who, if not very good yet at their drill, were skilled seamen, and one or two Naval Volunteer Reservists, the Saturday afternoon sailors, mostly pure amateurs with more enthusiasm than expertise. But even they were learning fast, and they all of them – from the captain downwards – belonged to a small and closely-kept community, from which they could never escape. Aboard a destroyer, there was little time or room for pleasure and never freedom from noise or movement. Perhaps it was the one thing that held them together and made them a team.