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The American admiral greeted them warmly. His name was Charles J Allington and he insisted on Kelly addressing him as ‘Al.’ He was brisk and no-nonsense but was clearly glad to see Kelly. This was his first wartime operation and he was glad to know the reception was to be favourable because the convoy had been shadowed for some time by aircraft.

‘Intelligence says we’re believed to be just an extra large convoy for Malta and that the Krauts are massing their aircraft in Sardinia and Sicily,’ he said. ‘I sure hope they’re right.’

He was faintly awed to be surrounded by so much history. Certainly no waters in the world had seen so many maritime engagements. It was here that Drake had singed the King of Spain’s beard, here that Rodney and Jervis had won their victories, here that Nelson had commanded, here finally that Cunningham had held the waters.

All round them were troopships, landing craft, escort vessels and covering warships. There was absolute silence and a severely guarded black-out. As the ships passed through the Strait the sea was calmer and conditions were clearly favourable for a landing. Pilotage parties had reconnoitred the beaches ahead and boats with shaded lights lay stationed offshore to assist navigation. Throughout the voyage the troops had been practising going to their landing craft stations, at first in daylight and then after dark, and everybody had an American-prepared booklet on North Africa which contained a great deal of value, chief among which was the sentence ‘Do not monkey about with Mohammedan women.’

A cluster of lights appeared on the port bow, sharp against the shadow of the land, which they identified as Talebala.

‘There’ll be a black-out at Hellilah,’ Kelly said.

‘Fine. What’s our position, Navigator?’

‘Seven miles offshore, sir.’

Allington pulled a face and turned to Kelly. ‘How’s about moving in closer? My orders say seven miles and the US Navy’s strict about following orders, but I guess I wouldn’t like to travel seven miles in the darkness in one of those goddam landing craft. What do you say?’

Kelly smiled. ‘We have a saying in our Navy,’ he pointed out, ‘that a bit of Nelson’s blind eye never did anybody any harm.’

Helillah was a lucky landing. They could hear gunfire from further west near Algiers where landing craft and the destroyer, Broke, were sunk and the destroyer, Malcolm, was badly hit in the boiler room, but at Helillah there was only a solitary shot fired at them from the battery at Mersa-el-Fam. A salvo from Tyree into the country behind encouraged the battery commander in the belief that resistance wasn’t worthwhile, and soon after the troops went ashore a rocket soared up to indicate the landing was unopposed.

The French resistance stiffened the following morning, however, and batteries at Cape Matifu had to be bombarded before they fell into Allied hands and, with a freshening wind, the unloading of stores on to the captured beaches was delayed and landing craft were wrecked. By late afternoon, however, they heard the French were willing to negotiate and the whole coast fell.

Algiers, where headquarters was set up, was beautiful, row on row of white buildings climbing up the hills above the bay, with the white mosques of the Kasbah gleaming in the morning sunshine to make a wavering reflection in the dark-hued sea. The place was full of round-eyed young soldiers newly out from England and America, flamboyant Algerian cavalrymen, piled-up fruit barrows, black shoeshine boys, Arab women in coloured veils, and street vendors offering necklaces and fly whisks.

The French were polite, even if not friendly, but the political stew had been unwholesome for so long the suspicion in the air made the place uncomfortable. The French hated the Allies, particularly the British, and there were thousands of refugees, many of them rich from the profits they’d made supplying the Germans. However, Algiers was considered to be part of Metropolitan France and, with the Allies actually on French soil, they finally discovered they were happy about it and set about making them welcome.

Kelly’s share had not gone unnoticed and Boyle caught a glimpse of a letter from Cunningham to Ramsay, ‘…Ginger Maguire did very well and thoroughly justified his choice…’, but the smell of intrigue and bad feeling among the French was still strong and both Kelly and Boyle were glad when a signal arrived instructing them that their job was done and that they were to report back to the Admiralty.

Back in England, Kelly was given the choice of leave or going at once to Force T, which had been temporarily commanded by the captain of Chichester. He didn’t hesitate.

Paddy was at Thakeham as he stopped there to pick up his gear. She’d just received a signal telling her to report to HM Hospital Ship Anarapoora.

‘Where is she?’ she asked.

It took Kelly only a few minutes to find out. ‘Anchored off Lyness. It’s Scapa.’

He had expected her face to fall. Most people’s faces fell when they heard they were posted to Scapa. But her eyes were dancing.

‘Hugh’s due up there,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he pulled some strings.’

Kelly’s first job was to learn something about his ships and the captains serving under him. Chichester was one of the City-class ships, handsome with heavily raked funnels and quite capable of her designed speed of thirty-two knots. She had twelve six-inch guns in four turrets of three guns each, two forward and two aft, eight four-inch ack-ack guns, light weapons, and three torpedo tubes on each side. Her consort, Sarawak, was similar and slightly faster. Henry Pardoe, Kelly’s flag captain and senior staff officer, was a little older than Kelly, somewhat unimaginative but with a solid record and no fear. Cassell, of Sarawak, had been in Kelly’s term at Dartmouth, where he’d been noted for his intelligence and commonsense, and the destroyer captains were equally experienced.

As the group left harbour for working-up exercises, Kelly was determined that each of the individualists astern of him – and there wasn’t a naval officer born who wasn’t an individualist in some way – would quickly learn that the squadron was to be a solidly-welded unit. All day they carried out gunnery exercises and at night executed movements in the dark. By March they were as trained as time would allow and every captain knew not only what his brother captains would do, he also knew what his admiral expected of him.

They guessed they were due for Scapa when they’d finished, because Scapa was on the way to Russia and lay across the route of the German heavy ships in the Norwegian fjords, and when, soon afterwards, they were directed to Glasgow to ammunition and store ship, they knew they would soon be off to sea in earnest. As they arrived in the Clyde, Kelly saw Anarapoora lying off Greenock. Immediately, he sent a signal asking Paddy to have dinner with him in Glasgow, and her message came back, warm, enthusiastic and as impertinent as ever.

‘I’ll bet you’ve got a handsome flag lieutenant,’ she said. ‘I’d like to bring a friend.’

The flag lieutenant was a donnish young RNVR with a Cambridge degree, and the two girls were excited and obviously delighted to be seen in the company of an admiral. They were happy enough in Anarapoora, an old Henderson line ship, and, not a bit disturbed about the loneliness of Scapa, were chiefly concerned with the way the Goanese crew felt the cold.

‘They’re half-frozen most of the time up there,’ Paddy said. ‘So we spend all our spare time knitting woollen comforts for them. It’s a bit lonely, too, but there’s a depot ship, Dunluce Castle, and destroyers and patrol vessels come in from the North Atlantic for refuelling or a day or two ashore, so we see a bit of life.’

‘What about amenities?’

She gave him her familiar grin. ‘There aren’t any. Just thousands of sex-starved males. Actually, we get an occasional visit to Kirkwall for shopping or dinner at the Royal Hotel where the Fleet Air Arm pilots from Hatston try to pick us up. Or an occasional dance at the Church of Scotland hut. They send a signal and there’s a hair-raising journey in a drifter through the darkness. We’re not good dancers but we’re good listeners and the inevitable walletful of photographs is always brought out. It’s the homesickness of the men that touches you most.’

‘It was in the last war.’

‘I hear we’re going to Rosyth,’ she went on excitedly, and Hugh’s due there, too, in a shore job, so we’ll be able to behave like husband and wife at last. He might even manage to make me pregnant.’

Scapa didn’t change much. For anyone going on leave, it was still the longest railway ride in Britain and the train, Kelly noticed, was still called ‘The Jellicoe Express’ after the commander-in-chief in the First War who had initiated it. Though to those reservists who remembered the previous war, the place was bursting with welfare facilities and canteens, there was nothing to attract the townsmen now coming into the Navy, nothing to compensate for being set down in this inhospitable outpost, and the situation was not improved by the fact that many of them had only recently been dragged away from desks and factories. There were no pubs, no dance halls and, above all, no girls, and even the fact that the Women’s Royal Naval Service was there operating signals stations made little difference. Scapa was as popular in this war as it had been in the last, yet, when the weather was calm, the colour and cloud effects were as magical as ever; and, when the water was as smooth as glass and the ships were reflected mirror-like in the water, it was possible to believe that it was a nautical valhalla and that the story about the seagulls being the spirits of drowned sailors was true.

As the winter deepened, they made occasional sorties to sea and eventually were sent to Glasgow again to refuel. Anarapoora was there once more and once more Kelly invited Paddy out to dinner. She seemed full of spirit and quite undeterred by the isolation.

‘It’s always exciting,’ she said. ‘Once we were nearly run down by KG Five and every time we go ashore it’s a matter of life and death.’

He noticed she’d not mentioned Hugh and, guessing something was wrong, he probed gently. Her expression changed at once to one of distress and he knew that her brightness was only a brittle façade.

‘I thought he was going to get a shore job,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t that at all. He won’t accept one.’ It all came out in a breathless, agonised rush in her misery. ‘Do you think he’s trying to get himself killed? Just because all his friends have gone? He’s going back on carriers.’

‘Well, carriers are pretty big, Paddy,’ he reassured her. ‘And, since Ark Royal was lost, we’ve learned to take pretty good care of them. Which one?’

‘Parsifal. He says she’s a bit smaller than normal.’

Kelly was silent for a moment. Parsifal was a CAM-ship, carrying one Hurricane, which could be catapulted off but not flown back on. Trips from CAM-ships were only one way and all the pilot could do was ditch as near to the mother ship as possible. In good weather and good conditions there was a boat waiting to retrieve him but there could be bad weather, bad conditions and probably German ships or aeroplanes about which might cause the captain to sacrifice one man for the safety of the rest.

He saw Paddy looking at him. She was as well aware as Kelly of the risks that naval aircrew took. With a father and a brother constantly talking ships, she had no delusions about their chances of survival.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘A new kind. Bit smaller than Ark Royal, of course.’ He was telling no lies but he wasn’t telling the whole truth either.

He returned to Scapa in a thoughtful mood to find Verschoyle waiting for him with his destroyer group. He was not long back from Russia and he hadn’t enjoyed it. After the disaster when the convoy, PQI7, had been ordered by the Admiralty to scatter and been massacred, only one more convoy, PQl8, had been sent and only one had returned home. The presence of German heavy ships in the Norwegian fjords was forcing the old ‘fleet in being’ complex on the Navy, something nobody liked, and a new scheme was being tried.

‘Submarines are being maintained off the north Norwegian coast,’ Verschoyle said. ‘And we’re going to run convoys with a close escort of small ships and a forward escort of fleet destroyers. That’ll be me. There’s also to be a covering force of light cruisers at Kola Inlet where the Russians are as bloody-minded and uncooperative as possible.’ His smile widened. ‘That’ll be you. You’ll hate it.’

‘CHICHESTER,’ the signal said, ‘FLYING FLAG OF REAR ADMIRAL DESTROYERS WITH MARLOW METEOR AND MORRIS TO FORM FORCE T TO PROVIDE COVER FOR CONVOYS JW5OC, JW5OD AND RETURN CONVOYS RA5OC AND RA5OD. SHE WILL SAIL FOR LOCH EWE TO ENABLE REAR ADMIRAL DESTROYERS TO ATTEND CONVOY CONFERENCE.’

Latimer laid it in front of Kelly, and gave him time to absorb it.

‘London’s sailing for Hvalfjord with two American cruisers and an American ack-ack ship and her escort of destroyers,’ he said. ‘To be on hand if needed. Home Fleet’s expected shortly at Seidisfjord.’

‘Air support?’ Kelly asked.

‘Home Fleet’s got Victorious. Captain Verschoyle has Parsifal.’

‘And us?’

Latimer smiled. ‘None, sir.’

‘Watchmen and special sea-duty men close up! Secure all scuttles and watertight doors–!’

In the mess decks and passageways, men lashed hammocks. Communications were tested, and men pulled on seaboots, duffel coats and balaclava helmets. Stokers, telegraphists and artificers groped their way to their positions. Underfoot there was a faint trembling as the engines turned.

As they slipped the buoy just before nightfall and headed out through the Hoxa Gate, Kelly, huddled in his duffel coat, looked back at the long wake dropping behind them. He knew what his ships’ companies were thinking because he was thinking it himself. There lay Thurso and the road home. Then the Old Man of Hoy and the other islands fell astern and he turned to face forward. He’d been through it all before – the smell of the salt and its sting on the cheek, the runnels of spray moving along the grey paint, the quiver and throb of the ship as she tossed her head and flung the swell aside.

The merchant ships were waiting at Loch Ewe, the assembly base opposite Stornoway, travel-stained, slab-sided vessels marked with patches of rust and loaded beyond their marks with munitions. Like all convoys, they varied from straight stems and bluff bows to flat sheerlines, and their masters gave their speeds as varying between nine and fourteen knots, though Kelly guessed that their chief engineers, many of them canny Scots, would have a knot or two in hand. Some of them flew the red ensign, some the Stars and Stripes and two the pale blue of Panama, the bunting darkened by soot and rain.