Back to Battle (11 page)

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 Young British airmen in outdated machines that had been wished on them by men like his father were committing suicide bombing bridges to stop the Germans, and the whole Channel coast of France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.