The novelist Nicholas Monsarrat was a lookout on HMS Campanula, one of a handful of flower-class corvettes deployed as chaperones to the Aguila. One hundred and thirty-five of these chunky, hardy warships were made during the war, thirty-five of which were lost,13 and each was named after a different and equally delicate English garden flower (Bluebell, Zinnia, Hyacinth, Aubretia, Coreopsis). They were notoriously uncomfortable ships but doggedly seaworthy (their sailors were rarely lost overboard14) and, most usefully, presented only a small target to U-boats.
