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Impi finally secured alongside under her own searchlights and without any help from ashore, and within minutes, hundreds of men had appeared, standing in bunches waiting for embarkation. But time had to be wasted rigging clusters of lights and making preparations to marshal them into some semblance of order, things which should have been done long before their arrival. By the early hours of the following morning, the harvest of men totalled over eight thousand, but since they had to leave before daylight it was a saddening experience to know that thousands more had had to be left who would have been aboard if someone had only shown some initiative.

As the convoy assembled outside the harbour just before daylight, a New Zealand colonel appeared on Impi’s bridge to say there were two of his companies at a fishing village further along the coast, so, ordering the convoy to leave with Inca and Indian, Kelly took Impi close inshore and found the harbour just before daylight.

As they groped their way through the unlit and deceptive entrance, the quay appeared to be deserted. One of the Maltese stewards could speak Greek and Kelly sent him ashore in the whaler with Latimer and the New Zealand colonel. They returned half an hour later with only nine soldiers and the New Zealander on the verge of tears.

Apparently nobody had heard of the impending arrival of the rescue ships as the telegraph system had been put out of action and the army radios had failed to pick up any signals. It was growing daylight now and becoming dangerous to stay much longer.

‘Sound the siren,’ Kelly ordered and the high whooping cry began to echo among the hills. Almost immediately, men appeared about two miles away, popping up like jacks-in-the-box among the folds of ground.

‘Keep it going!’

The distant figures were joined by others and began to stream out of the rocky fissures until they clotted together into a black mass of men hurrying down the dirt road to the harbour. They arrived alongside, panting and sweating, and were driven like sheep up the gangways.

As they went astern, more men appeared and Kelly put the ship’s bows against the dockside, keeping her there with the engines running slowly ahead. Considering what a reputation he had for handling ships alongside, he thought, he was taking a hell of a chance. Ropes were dropped ashore and, as the men scrambled up them, the ship finally went astern in almost full daylight with two soldiers still clinging to a rope ladder dangling from the bows.

The air attacks started not long after sun-up. It was a clear bright day with a fresh wind, which whipped the sea into a short ugly swell. The dive-bombers immediately singled out Glenbyre, the largest ship, but Inca and Indian took station between the two transports to afford them protection while Impi moved ahead to throw up a barrage through which the Stukas would have to dive.

It didn’t seem to put the Stuka pilots off in the slightest, and within minutes Glenbyre was shaken by two direct hits, one engulfing the bridge in a sheet of flame. She swerved, almost colliding with Inca and swung helplessly head to wind so that the flames were fanned along the length of the ship, which was soon burning fiercely from end to end.

Kelly’s face was taut. He knew they daren’t stay and his eyes hardened as he turned to the yeoman of signals. ‘Make to Inca to remain and pick up survivors.’

As the rest of the convoy continued, the Stukas were still flying over the burning ship, spraying it with their machine guns and cannon and subjecting Inca to sporadic attacks. As the noise died and the aircraft disappeared, nobody was under any delusions that there wouldn’t be more.

The buzzer went. ‘Masthead to bridge. Four ships in sight dead ahead.’

They swung round, wondering what they were in for next. For a long time, with the sun still behind the distant ships, it was impossible to tell what they were, but then they turned slightly to starboard to come up on their port side and Latimer grinned.

‘Hunt-class ships, sir. Chatsworth in the lead. And there’s an I-class ship bringing up the rear. I think it’s Impatient.’

The four newcomers closed them at full speed, – and Verschoyle’s signal was a repetition of one he had sent to Kelly up the Yangtze in 1927.

‘Fancy meeting you.’

As the four ships crashed past them, Impatient’s roughly-patched wounds clearly visible, her light flashed.

‘Request permission to escort little sister Inca home.’

‘Make “Granted”.’

Almost immediately, more Stukas arrived and the holocaust of sound started again as the guns threw their barrage of steel into the sky. As they came in Kelly found himself cataloguing and analysing his thoughts. It wasn’t fear that filled his mind but grim fatalism. The muscles of his mouth were drawn taut and he felt that Impi was only a minute fragment in the catastrophe of events that were taking place.

They beat off the aeroplanes without damage but as they began to relax, the signals officer appeared alongside.

‘Distress call from Inca sir: “Being dive-bombed.”’

‘It’s started.’ Latimer’s mouth was grim. ‘It’s going to be murder.’

An hour later the signals officer appeared again. ‘Inca, sir. She requests fighter protection.’

‘There is none,’ Kelly snapped.

Junkers 87s were dive-bombing the ships in Suda Bay as they arrived, contributing to the growing chaos there with attacks which came with an intensity that stunned the senses. One of their bombs near-missed Eastern Prince and she came to a stop with steam coming from her engine-room ventilators.

Out in the harbour, ships were queuing up for the long journey to Alex while personnel ships were waiting to disembark at jetties where others were busy getting rid of their cargoes of men. Already, it was clear Impi would be going back to the mainland and the first lieutenant had got his men splicing slings for stretchers and lashing drums together to make rafts because the soldiers were going to have to come out on anything that would float. The doctor had roped off benches for operations and the cooks were baking double helpings of bread and preparing cauldrons of soup. The sailors seemed fatalistic.

‘What’s the good of cleaning it up?’ Kelly heard Siggis say. ‘The bloody pongoes’ll only come and mess it up again.’

As they put their ropes ashore, the signals officer appeared, his face grim.

‘They got Inca, sir,’ he announced. ‘Impatient reported picking up the survivors of both ships, but then the bloody Germans raked them with machine gun fire and killed the guns’ crews, and the bombers went in. Impatient went in about fifteen minutes, with most of her crew and the survivors from Inca and Glenbyre they had on board. Some have been picked up by Ashby, but not many, I’m afraid.’

‘How about the captains?’

‘Not among the survivors, sir.’

Kelly’s face was grim. Out of his flotilla, he now had two ships left, and ships were not merely steel and guns and turbines. They were living disciplined organisations with officers, seamen and stokers, and death by oil suffocation or entombment in the bowels of a ship was a squalid and terrifying end. And every one of them had a family – parents, wives or children who were still writing letters in the belief that they were alive. Even when the news arrived, ‘Missing, presumed killed’ it would still leave a tiny spark of hope. As he looked at his ship’s company sleeping off their exhaustion in the sun, he was staggered how young they looked despite the beards they grew, and a great surge of pride and affection for them filled his heart.

Mail had arrived from home and it seemed like a glimmer of sanity in the lunacy of death and destruction that prevailed. Kelly Rumbelo had got his commission and was now in Repulse, and Paddy had got her wish and been warned she was to go eventually to the hospital ship, Anarapoora, at Scapa, but she was disgusted because Hugh had left Macrihanish on appointment to Victorious, which was due for sea. The trivialities the letter contained seemed to make sense just then, after the deaths of Smart in Impatient and all the men in Inca and Glenbyre.

In defeat defiance, Churchill had said, but that was fine if you had the means, and defiance was always a bit more personal when you were the one who was doing the defying. At that moment, every day they awoke to find themselves alive was another day of grace and they were under no delusions as to the future.

Kelly had just put the letter aside when a signal arrived that he was to take over Verschoyle’s ships, refuel immediately and be ready for sea within four hours. Chatsworth was on the oiler when they arrived and Kelly appeared alongside her with a crash that demolished the whaler.

‘It’s getting to be a habit,’ he said.

Verschoyle looked tired and dark-eyed. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll have it put in the water and signal you when it’s safe to come.’

He was depressed by the disasters, because he’d already lost Rushden on the Malta convoy. She’d had to be beached at Marsa Xlokk after being damaged by a near miss and although he’d brought every one of the merchantmen home with his ships almost out of ammunition, Mons Star had been hit by a bomb eight miles from Grand Harbour. He’d managed to tow her in with Chatsworth and Hallamshire in a chaos of wires, ropes and cables, with most of her oil intact but Clan Mackay had been sunk by another bomb at her berth with the loss of most of her cargo.

Since then, he’d been operating with his remaining ships and Impatient off Volos and had no great opinion of the staff work that had sent him there.

He offered Kelly a drink and a cigarette and sprawled in his chair, his body limp with weariness. ‘This is only the beginning, too,’ he went on. ‘When they start on Crete, we’ll have to do it all over again. It’ll be like Dunkirk, only worse, because this time we’ve got to do it across a hell of a lot of sea without the RAF to watch out for the Luftwaffe.’

He smiled wearily and sank his drink. ‘It’s a bugger of a war, isn’t it?’ he said.

They had brought the army out, but the battle was far from over. Before long the Germans would attack Crete and the British had to hold it as much as the Germans had to capture it.

There was little light in the darkness and British fortunes were at their nadir. Tobruk was besieged now and the situation in the desert had grown worse. Two British generals had been captured – ‘It ought to ease the crowding among the staff a bit,’ Latimer commented – and most of the armour had been lost. Every gain from the winter campaign had gone.

In Alexandria the anxiety was obvious. With envy in his heart as he saw the delight with which Verschoyle and Third Officer Pentycross greeted each other, First Officer Jenner-Neate became a symbol of calm to Kelly. He found himself investing her simplest actions with something the other Wrens couldn’t even pretend to possess – confidence and efficiency when they seemed to be blessed with nothing but the enthusiasm of youth, grace when they seemed as awkward as colts, tranquillity when they seemed to shriek like a lot of disturbed parakeets. It was tragic that they’d met again at the most desperate period of the war. Nothing was normal: everything – associations between men and women, even love affairs – had to be conducted at a frantic pace. Britain was fighting for her life. Now that the invasion scare at home had died, the desperation was all in the Middle East, because if the Mediterranean were lost the whole of British strategy would collapse.

With the North African coast occupied by the enemy, there could now be no air cover for the biggest part of the Mediterranean, and Malta was once more in danger of starving. The respite the destroyer crews had hoped for after Greece – because there was hardly a single ship that was not in urgent need of a refit – never materialised. Tank and aircraft reinforcements had to be pushed through from Gib, because the army couldn’t wait for it to go round the Cape, so a convoy was assembled at Alex and, escorted by every available warship, run westwards to Malta where the tank and aircraft convoy was met and brought back to the Eastern Mediterranean. The Luftwaffe tried its hardest but the volume of gunfire was so tremendous it was beaten off without loss, but neither the tanks nor the aircraft, which had been brought at such effort from England, had been fitted with sand and dust filters and the work had to be done before they could go into action.

‘Why in God’s name couldn’t they fit the bloody things before they shipped them?’ Verschoyle snarled. ‘The whole goddamned lot could be destroyed before they’ve even fired a shot!’

Desperate for calm, Kelly looked up First Officer Jenner-Neate again, but she seemed wary of him and was so perpetually on duty she began to torment him with her inaccessibility. He could see her and talk to her at headquarters but never alone, and he wondered if she were avoiding him. He knew she had a highly responsible job that demanded dedication and long hours but, by this time, her dullest, most menial chores had become for him an expression of her personality. She was completely mistress of what she did and seemed to tackle her work with a serenity that elevated it beyond a mere chore, and he took to hanging about in the corridor near her office like a love-sick midshipman in the hope of meeting her. When she appeared, which was rarely, she was always in a hurry, however, and in his desperation he wondered if he were falling in love again. Surely not, he told himself. He was too bloody old for that and she was too sensible.

Finally, he grabbed her as she appeared with an armful of papers and was just about to ask – demand even – that she meet him for drinks when the fleet chaplain appeared. Frustrated, he swore bitterly and he saw the chaplain’s lips purse. Jenner-Neate’s mouth was as firm as ever but as she vanished – as suddenly as she’d appeared – her eyes were smiling.

In a fury, he wrote her a note asking her if he could take her out to dinner but it came back with a scrawl across the back – ‘Too busy. And so will you be soon.’

She was dead right again and the following morning he heard that the Germans had occupied the island of Milos eighty miles to the north of Crete as a base for the assembly of convoys and that they intended to mount a massive invasion of Crete by air. It needed no great intelligence to appreciate that the targets would be Canea, Retimo and Heraklion, and to counter any such attack naval forces were to be deployed to the west and north-west of the island, while the main fleet remained at Alexandria. Air reconnaissance or fighter cover was not expected to produce much.