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She is a corvette, a new type of escort ship, an experiment designed to meet a desperate situation still over the horizon. She is brand new; the time is November 1939; her name is HMS Compass Rose.
No voyage can last for ever, save for ships that are sunk:
That was one of the best things about the Navy – in wartime at least: it taught you quickly, it taught you well, it taught you all the time: suddenly you woke up with a direct responsibility for a valuable ship and a section of a convoy and a lot of men, some of them your friends, and it seemed as if you were simply turning another page of a book you knew by heart already.
In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.
It was quite true that for thoughts there was gin.
‘The sea in their blood’ meant that you could pour Englishmen – any Englishmen – into a ship, and they made that ship work and fight as if they had been doing it all their lives, catching up, overtaking, and leaving behind the professionals of any other nation. It was the basic virtue of living on an island.
