The war had come to life with a vengeance.
The Navy had been at battle stations from two days before the declaration of hostilities and the areas of sea they had covered were vast. The advantage had always been with the enemy, however, and naval intelligence had often been incomplete, but, at least, unlike the army, the Navy was still virtually a force of regulars, trained to the last degree in the use of its weapons and the handling of its ships. Judging by some of the soldiers Kelly had seen heading for Norway, the army could not boast the same.
Intervention in Scandinavia had proved a disaster. The country was not only unprepared for war but it didn’t even know how to fight it. Troops had been landed without their equipment and requests for information had only brought more questions so that, with everybody asking what in God’s name was going on, orders had invariably proved to be out of date. Nevertheless, the Navy had not let the country down and the German seagoing forces had limped home battered, with the cruisers, Blücher and Karlsruhe, sunk; and the pocket battleship, Lutzow, the heavy cruiser, Hipper, the battle cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the cruisers, Köln and Bremse, all damaged, to say nothing of a whole fleet of destroyers sunk or damaged at Narvik.
Perhaps it was as well, because after eight months of silence in France, with most of the casualties coming from road accidents, and most of the country feeling that the war, like an old soldier, would simply fade away, Hitler had launched across Holland, Belgium and Northern France the blitzkrieg that had devastated Poland the previous year. With the Allies still – despite Poland, despite Norway! – painstakingly building up the traditional forces of 1918, by May 20th they had reached the sea and split the allied armies in two.
At Thakeham, it was hard to believe that men were dying and that the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force were penned with units of the Belgian and French armies, into a tongue of land no more than forty miles deep and the same distance wide. People were still taking long week-ends and half-days off work, still planning their summer holidays, still playing cricket and working out whether they could hunt when the winter came. As the facts became known, they produced only a numbed disbelief and the country still sat back, content that the British Empire could come to no harm. It was not surprising. The newspapers had perpetuated the legend that the Luftwaffe was out of date and even the Prime Minister had said that Hitler had missed the bus, so that wishful thinking and self-deception had continued to hang over the country like a miasma.
The only good thing that had come out of the disasters was that England had at last got a new leader. Churchill, who had conducted the affairs of the Admiralty since the previous year with his usual aggressive élan, had become Prime Minister and was offering only blood, toil, tears, and sweat, a daunting prospect that was at least realistic. In his impulsive way, Kelly thought, Winston would undoubtedly make mistakes as he always had, but at least he had a habit of doing something, while the recent government, fighting the war with committees, had only been able to display the certainty of good committee men trying to avoid positive action.
Seething with fury without a command and, still devoid of a hundred items of kit and uniform, which had disappeared with Feudal, he stamped about the house in a frustrated fury. Though it had been the family home since his mother had moved from Ireland to be near her husband and sons at the beginning of the 1914–18 war, he realised he hardly knew it. He had spent so much of his life abroad, he’d rarely lived there, not even after his mother had let him have it for his home after he’d married. It had been transformed by his wife’s money, modernised and filled with the treasures she’d acquired, but it had still meant little to him because she’d always preferred London and, as Biddy’s children had grown, Kelly, enjoying their noise and their laughter with the pleasure of a childless man, had managed to bring life to the place only by encouraging them to use it for parties.
As he brooded about the garden he was watched anxiously by Biddy. Rumbelo had disappeared mysteriously to Dover on some job but the Navy seemed to have forgotten Kelly. When he’d been sunk in Cressy, in 1914, it had been the cause of great indignation to him then that he’d been snatched back to sea before he’d had his survivor’s leave; this time, survivor’s leave left him cold. The Britain of 1940 wasn’t the Britain of 1914 and he needed to be where things were happening.
Unexpectedly, his father arrived from London where he’d lived ever since Kelly’s marriage. He was looking his age at last, because he’d done his stint in the Navy as long ago as the heyday of Queen Victoria. In the whole of his active career he’d never heard a shot fired in anger and to Kelly, who’d heard too many, he belonged to the big-ship-polo-playing navy, that had died before 1918 but had steadfastly refused to lie down.
“Made a bloody mess of Norway, didn’t you?” was his first greeting.
He seemed to be dropping hints about needing money but Kelly firmly set his face against them because his father had always been selfish and spendthrift, and he couldn’t remember his ever helping him in the days when he’d needed help. Everything he’d ever possessed as a child had come from his mother while his father had indulged himself with fast women and slow horses in and around London.
Realising he was getting nothing, the old man, frail, demanding and selfish as ever, stayed for only two days before returning to London, and it was only when he’d gone that Kelly realised he’d taken a suitcase full of treasures belonging to his mother or Christina which he clearly intended selling. He was glad to see the back of him, and there were no farewell waves from either of them.
Buying a paper in the village, Kelly sat in the garden to read it. It was full enough of disaster to be depressing. Young British airmen in outdated machines that had been wished on them by men like his father were committing suicide bombing bridges to stop the Germans, and the whole Channel coast of France was ablaze. In London, it seemed, instead of being concerned with victory, thoughts were suddenly dwelling on the possibility of defeat.
The day was hot and there was a scent of crushed grass in the air from the fields at the back of the house, and somewhere, faintly, from one of the nearby houses, the strains of ‘Deep Purple’ came through an open window. The German Army was trying to force its way into Boulogne and Calais and, from what it was possible to make out, the French Army was in ruins.
It was clear that the BEF was about to be pinned into a narrow strip of land round La Panne, Nieuport and Dunkirk. Nobody was talking about evacuation yet, of course, but among the vague references to ‘interior lines’, ‘pincer movements’ and ‘pouring in reserves’ that he’d been hearing on the wireless, Kelly had not failed to notice one item the previous week which even then had appeared to be of great significance.
‘The Admiralty has made an order requesting all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between thirty and a hundred feet in length, to send all particulars…within fourteen days…if they have not already been offered or requisitioned.’
The request had gone largely unnoticed in the plethora of gloom coming from France and Kelly had recognised it only as a move by the Small Vessels Pool to acquire harbour craft, but it had soon become clear to him that the Small Vessels Pool was now taking advantage of it as a precautionary measure for the evacuation of the Army.
He was still glowering at the paper and had just decided to head for London the following morning to bully someone into giving him a ship when Hugh arrived. He’d finished his training and was waiting to be posted to an aircraft carrier. He looked staggeringly handsome in uniform with his pale face, sensitive features and fair hair, and unbelievably like his mother.
His arrival provided a touch of light on a gloomy horizon, and Kelly smiled, delighted to see him.
‘Naval uniform suits you,’ he said. ‘Should fetch the girls.’
Hugh blushed a little. ‘Only one girl I want to fetch, sir,’ he said. ‘She’s outside.’
By the grace of God, Rumbelo’s daughter resembled not Rumbelo but Biddy, and she was blue-eyed, dark-haired and dainty in a way Kelly remembered her mother in 1914 when Rumbelo had fallen for her. She came in with Hugh and they had about them that indefinable rapport, that unity that sets a man and woman in love apart from the rest of humanity. Paddy looked so heartbreakingly young and so much like Charley at the time of the last war, Kelly felt as old as God, because it only seemed like yesterday when he’d been bowling leg-breaks to her on the back lawn and watching her wallop them into the next field.
She gave him a grin that was a mixture of friendliness and shyness. He’d known her since Biddy had first presented her to him within a few days of her arriving in the world and he’d grown to accept her as much a part of his proxy family as Hugh was. Without his godson, now at sea somewhere in the destroyer, Grafton, and this slip of a thing, he’d often felt he’d have grown middle-aged too quickly. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform and he eyed her up and down as she stood in the doorway with Hugh.
‘She’ll do,’ he said. ‘Wheel her in. What’s on your minds?’
They glanced at each other and he knew exactly what their reply would be. ‘We want to get engaged.’
Kelly’s smile died. ‘Seen your mother about it, Hugh?’ he asked. ‘After all, I’m not your father and it’s really nothing to do with me.’
Hugh frowned. ‘I saw her,’ he said. ‘She had no objection.’
‘It seems to me she’s getting a jolly pretty daughter-in-law. What do you want for a wedding present when it comes off? I’m not very wealthy, but I could probably run to a small cottage somewhere.’
‘That’s generous, sir,’ Hugh said. ‘But we were wondering–’
Paddy tugged at his hand and as he became silent she spoke. She had inherited a touch of the Irish accent that had never left Biddy and there was a great deal of her mother in her forthright manner.
‘We were wondering,’ she said, ‘if, while the war’s on at least, we could convert the stables into somewhere to live. They have two or three rooms above that used to be used by the grooms.’
‘And it’s handy for Portsmouth, Chatham and Devonport,’ Kelly smiled. ‘To say nothing of London.’
‘I’ll still be working at the hospital, so I’ll be able to get home and I can be here whenever Hugh comes on leave.’ She paused.
‘We’d pay properly, of course, because neither of us has any call on you.’
‘Don’t make a scrap of difference,’ Kelly said. ‘You’d better start getting on with it at once. In the meantime, I think we ought to celebrate, don’t you? And, with your brother at sea and your father doing mysterious things in Dover, I think we’d better have your mother in to join us.’
The following morning Kelly took the train to London. Somehow the Admiralty had come to life. It had always hummed under Winston but until Norway it had always had the dead hand of the Chamberlain administration over it. Now, there was a new confidence because at last someone had recognised that the British people had sufficient intelligence and courage to face facts, and the battle in France was finally being spoken of as the major disaster it surely was. It was suggested immediately that there was work for him if he wanted it, and he was told to report to Dover Command.
Because it was Sunday, the trains were running at their usual peacetime half-strength, and he had to wait what seemed ages. Young servicemen with their girl friends and wives filled the station, and he felt old and lonely. Thinking of Charley, he wondered what it must be like to be in America when your country was at war, and if it would be possible next time he was in New York to get in touch with her through one of the welfare organisations who sent comforts to British troops.
He was still waiting at the gate when the Dover train came in and almost the first person he saw coming towards him was Mabel, Charley’s sister. She seemed to have shed a lot of the artificiality, which had been part of her personality, and there was a solidity about her he’d never seen before.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ she said. ‘Where did you spring from?’
He told her what he’d been doing and her face changed. ‘It looks bad, Kelly doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘George’s in France. I hope to God he’s all right.’
He tried to pump her on the subject of Charley’s whereabouts, but she was giving nothing away. ‘I can’t tell you, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if she’d wish me to.’
He accepted the rebuke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘just give her my love when you’re next in touch with her.’
She gave him a curious look, but said nothing, and he was aware of her watching him as he turned away and headed for the platform.
As the train left London, Sunday cricket was still being played, and every road was full of small cars heading for the countryside. It seemed unbelievable that there was a war on, let alone a British army fighting for its life only a few miles away, and it reminded him of the indifference he’d seen in Santander. Would people still be so indifferent when the ‘last trump’ came?
It was evening when he arrived in Dover and he was aware at once of the war intruding. The place was packed with people, and they all seemed bent on some urgent task. There were policemen and uniformed women welfare workers everywhere and it was obvious they’d arrived from other towns and cities in response to an appeal for help. The town seemed totally inadequate for what was going on, and it was clear the minute he stepped from the train that the place was being geared up for the evacuation of the Army from France. The station was full of lines of communications troops, footsore men with harrowing tales of being bombed and shot at all the way from Brussels to the coast, and the station entrance and forecourt were filled with more of them, standing in lost groups waiting to be told what to do.
Every taxi in the place seemed already spoken for and he set off on foot for naval headquarters. Oddly enough, the first person he met was Rumbelo, plodding out of the gates with an envelope in his hand.
‘What the hell are they using you for, Rumbelo?’ he asked. ‘Messenger boy?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Rumbelo’s face was sullen. ‘As if I was a newly-joined boy seaman or a bloody old barrack stanchion having to lean on his broom to stop himself falling down. Taking messages. That’s what I’m doing. How about getting me out of it, sir?’
Kelly grinned, and told him of the celebration they’d had the night before. Rumbelo’s potato face lifted.
‘Honest, sir, I’m that pleased. How about you? Don’t you mind?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me, Albert, old son. He’s not my boy, and even if he were, it still wouldn’t be any of my business.’
‘I mean, me being only–’
‘Dry up, you old fool,’ Kelly said. ‘We’ve known each other too bloody long to worry about what we are. Biddy’s looked after my mother and then me, and you and I have been getting each other out of trouble ever since 1911. I can’t think of anybody better to be related to.’
Rumbelo’s face went pink with pleasure. ‘I reckon you’d better see Admiral Corbett, sir,’ he suggested conspiratorially. ‘He’s here and, if anyone can, he ought to be able to do something for us – both of us.’ He was just on the point of moving away when he stopped again. ‘By the way, sir, Mr Boyle’s on his staff, and he looks down in the mouth, too.’
Boyle was talking urgently into the telephone when Kelly pushed into his office. They’d served together in the destroyer, Mordant, and again in the battleship, Rebuke, after Boyle had switched to the paymaster branch. His wife was French; her family had bought a house at Dunkirk when her father had retired from the Consular Service and he was trying to find out what had happened to them.
Corbett was deep in conversation with three other senior officers when Kelly was shown in, but he broke off at once. ‘Just the man I’m looking for,’ he said.
He looked tired and admitted he hadn’t slept for three nights. ‘It’s just beginning to be difficult,’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve just heard Boulogne and Calais have gone, but Gort’s had the guts to decide to bring out the Army. And thank God, too, because if he doesn’t the war’s as good as lost. We haven’t another. Let’s go along and see Ramsay.’
Admiral Ramsay, the C-in-C., Dover, who was organising the evacuation, was a man of medium size, quiet, and so unemotional he’d always been considered rather a cold fish. Before the war, he’d even been regarded as a failure because he’d disagreed with his chief and, throwing up his appointment, had been on the retired list when the demands of the war and his unquestioned ability had brought him back. His headquarters were in the galleries hewn by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars in the cliffs below Dover Castle, and as Kelly was ushered in, the adjoining rooms were full of grim-faced men trying to bring order out of chaos. With the rumble of gunfire clearly audible, they were planning for emergencies.
As they waited, Ramsay was sitting on the edge of a desk talking to his chief of staff. ‘We can no longer expect an orderly evacuation,’ he was saying. ‘What ships are available?’
‘Keith and Vimy both hit at Boulogne, sir.’ The chief of staff looked at a list in his hand. ‘Both captains killed. Venetia also hit. Vimiera brought out one thousand four hundred men. The French lost Orage, Frondeur and Chacal.’
Ramsay’s face was expressionless. ‘What about Calais?’
‘We lost Wessex, with Vimiera and Burza damaged.’
Ramsay nodded. ‘Better get me a list of all available personnel ships, and we might even have to consider the all-out use of destroyers as lifting vessels.’
As the chief of staff turned away, Corbett introduced Kelly. Ramsay stared at him in his expressionless way.
‘Maguire,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of you. You were at Bilbao and Santander in 1937.’
‘He was also at Chinkiang in 1927,’ Corbett pointed out. ‘And Odessa in 1920 and Domlupinu before that. He knows a bit about evacuations. In 1914 he brought a couple of hundred Marines out of Antwerp after the Germans arrived.’
Kelly began to see the direction the conversation was heading. ‘Nearer a hundred,’ he said quickly.
‘You seem to have spent a remarkable amount of your naval career rescuing people from on shore,’ Ramsay commented. ‘Understand you speak good French.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, Winston’s a bit worried that the French are hanging back and he wants them bringing out in equal numbers. Unfortunately, they’re not very organised and we need to know why.’
‘Probably,’ Corbett said, ‘because there’s nobody over there who can speak their language. We’re not noted as linguists.’
Ramsay looked at Kelly. ‘I’d like you to go and sort it out,’ he said.
‘I’d hoped for a ship, sir.’
‘It’s everybody’s wish to distinguish himself at sea,’ Ramsay said dryly. ‘Unfortunately we’re more in need at the moment of people who can distinguish themselves on land. Tennant’s going across tomorrow as senior naval officer ashore. We need another.’
Kelly bowed to the inevitable. ‘I’ll go, of course, sir, if that’s where I’m needed.’
‘Good. You’ll need some staff. Any ideas?’
‘There’s a petty officer here, sir. He was with me in Antwerp and Domlupinu and Odessa. I know him well.’
‘He’s yours.’
‘Anybody else?’
‘Lieutenant-Commander Boyle, sir.’
‘He’s my secretary!’ Corbett protested.
‘He was at Odessa and Domlupinu, too, sir. Moreover, he speaks excellent French because he has a French wife and he knows Dunkirk.’
Ramsay rubbed his nose and gave Corbett a cold little smile. ‘It looks as if you’ve lost him, Cuthbert,’ he observed. ‘Very well, fix yourself up with transport across the Channel. Your job will be to contact the French Army and direct their men to the ships. You’ll find a bit of resentment all round because our people think the French have let ’em down by giving way and the French think we’re letting them down by pulling out. It’s up to you to sort it out.’
The harbour was packed with shipping. It had been designed originally as an anchorage for the old Channel Fleet, yet at the berths at the Admiralty Pier Kelly could see as many as eighteen or twenty ships moored in trots two and three deep. A hospital ship was unloading into a row of ambulances, and exhausted khaki-clad figures were stumbling ashore across her from other vessels. As he watched, a tug began to butt at a ship whose yellow bridge paint work was scorched by a great black scar where the steelwork was wrenched back like the lid of a sardine tin.
The office of the Director of Shipping was crowded and the naval commander behind the desk seemed to be at his wits’ end. When Kelly appeared, he simply waved him to the inner office where a naval captain was standing in front of a map, sticking flags into it, with a list in his left hand. Alongside him was a remarkably pretty girl in the uniform of a Wren.
‘Captain Verschoyle’s busy,’ she said immediately.
‘Not too busy to see me,’ Kelly retorted.
Verschoyle turned, stared at Kelly and began to smile.
‘Ginger Maguire, as I live and breathe,’ he said. ‘I heard they’d sunk you at Narvik.’ He gestured at the girl. ‘Beat it, Maisie. I’ll let you know when to come back.’
As the door closed, Kelly grinned. ‘I see you still know how to pick ’em.’
Verschoyle gave his superior smile and stuck another flag into the map. ‘I’d be a bloody fool if I let them fob me off with one with buck teeth and breasts like clockweights,’ he said. ‘Maisie used to be an actress, but patriotism or lack of plays drove her into uniform and she picked the Navy because her father was a chief petty officer in Nelson. She glosses over her background and she’s mastered her accent but I’ve noticed when we go aboard a ship she still tends to turn forward rather than aft at the top of the gangway.’
He saw Kelly looking round the office and gestured. ‘Don’t let this fool you,’ he said. ‘It’s only until this little bunfight settles down. After that, I suspect they’ll be needing everybody at sea who can handle even a pram dinghy because somebody seems to have made a proper balls-up of things, and we’ve finished up with the final socialist dream of plenty of money for social welfare but no fighting services.’ He jabbed another flag into the map, this time as if it were into a politician’s backside. ‘Si vis pacem para bellum. Well, now we’re up to the necks in the bellum we haven’t para’d for. What are you doing here?’
‘Just been landed with the job of naval liaison officer to the French Army.’
‘I hope you can run fast.’
‘I want a lift across with my staff, Cruiser.’
Verschoyle smiled. ‘You have an incredible gift for diving in at the deep end. How many have you got?’
‘So far, two. Seamus Boyle and Rumbelo.’
Verschoyle grinned. ‘I saw Boyle yesterday and Rumbelo a couple of days ago, so I had a feeling in my bones you’d turn up before long.’ He glanced at the list in his hand. ‘You’d better go across in Wolfhound. She’ll be leaving tomorrow. Tennant’s already booked a passage aboard her. You under him?’
‘No,’ Kelly said briskly. ‘I’m under me.’