Free Convoy by Dudley Pope

of Naval Intelligence, DOD for Operations Division, and so on. This must be some new and crackpot department which allowed the Second Sea Lord (who dealt with appointments) to find quiet jobs for deserving wrecks like Lieutenant Edward Yorke, DSO, RN – providing he had two arms that functioned. If his left arm seized up then he would be invalided with a pension and one of the large silver lapel badges called ‘The King’s Badge for Loyal Service’ (presumably intended to stop old ladies giving you white feathers) and turned out to graze in civilian clothes with the assurance that the King and his various helpers could now beat Hitler without Lieutenant Yorke’s one-armed assistance.
    There was a great future for a one-armed man of twenty-five who had been trained only as a naval officer, especially one who had specialized in navigation, so that a dagger sign followed his name in the Navy List. The world was waiting with open arms for unemployed dagger navigators; they were needed to help old ladies drive their cars through the centre of London, making the best use of the petrol ration.
    The letter from his mother was, as usual, a calm note which ignored the existence of Hitler, the Luftwaffe, rationing or bombing, and which was a measure of her personality since she was living in the town house in Palace Street, only a few hundred yards from Victoria Station. She described how she had been able to find some ‘artificial boarding’ to cover up a few broken windows – no mention that the glass was shattered by the blast of bombs – and the loose tiles had been replaced. She was more concerned lest she had said the wrong thing to newspaper reporters who had called to find out details about him. ‘The fact was,’ she wrote, ‘that they seemed to know a great deal more of the interesting part of your life than I did; I was able to tell them only that over the years the men in the family had tended to go to sea. There was an amusing moment when we found out that one of the reporters, who was a bit tipsy, thought I said “tended to go to seed”, but a colleague of his, a nice young man who had lost a leg in the Western Desert (trod on a landmine, I think he said), seemed to watch out for that sort of thing.’
    Then, with her usual forthrightness, she commented on his reference to Clare. ‘I was interested to read about your beautiful young widow – you seem to prefer small women. But beware of widows in general. The advantage is that they have few illusions left about men; they have learned all the lessons and if they fall in love with you it is likely to be both genuine and without any illusions. The disadvantage is that if they loved their first husbands, then the new husband is competing with a ghost and will always lose. He might in fact be a much more satisfactory husband, but he will never be certain because he’ll never believe his wife’s assurances. If you love her,’ his mother wrote, ‘then trust her and dismiss from your mind that there was ever a predecessor. You wouldn’t be jealous of an earlier lover – in this modern age most young women have had one – and a brief marriage differs from a brief affair only in the legal aspect.’
    Yorke folded the letter and put it on his locker with the manilla envelope from the Admiralty. Clare, whether as Miss Exton or Mrs Brown, was welcome at Palace Street. He wished his father had still been alive to meet her; but on the other hand the last few months of the war would have broken his heart: with Winston Churchill he had tried in the House of Commons to warn the nation against Hitler and persuade it to rearm; but like Churchill he had been howled down. Peace had been the fashion, the Labour Party was against rearmament and the Conservatives against taxation, and the majority of the people had been prepared to pay any price as long as it cost nothing. Well, the bill was now being presented – not just their sons’ lives but, in the bombed cities, their