We watched the sun setting from the bridge of our Motor Torpedo Boat. Gently it disappeared, trailing crimson streamers in its wake till the only clue to its position was the golden tint on the top of a woolly cloud.

With the sun’s going the night closed in on us, so that I could hardly see my companion, not an arm’s length away from me. The white blur that was his face turned towards me, and I heard him say in a soft Irish accent: “I bet we go out tonight, Shorty.”

I knew what he was thinking then. “Out with the moon, back with the sun, question mark.”

Though we would have been described as “boyish looking” by the sob-sisters of the so called popular press, we had seen our friends come back as blood corpses, or moaning travesties of men, not once, but many times. There were those too who would never come back unless the sea gave up its dead.

The eldest man in the crew was twenty eight, the youngest nineteen, and though we “dripped” continuously we were known as a happy crew. We liked our skipper, a heavily built, rosy cheeked Sub-Lieutenant RNVR who was twenty four, the same age as I.

He had volunteered at the outbreak of hostilities, coming into the Navy as an ordinary seaman, and finally obtaining a commission. Now he was in command of an MTB costing fifty five thousand pounds according to the Warships Week posters.

As I am telling the story, perhaps you ought to know that I am the coxswain, and that I came into MTBs because I prefer the routine of the small ship to the pomp and circumstance of her bigger sister.

The last faint gleam of daylight had gone, and now we waited in an atmosphere electric with expectation. Over the breakwater the buoys winked familiarly at us, “lamp posts” on the road to death”, as a cynic in the crew described them.

All but Mickey my companion and I, were below, fully dressed and lying on their bunks, smoking and talking quietly. If someone were to shout now, it would seem like a sacrilege. We on deck are waiting for a noise, a little whirring noise on the loud speakers that heralds the call to action, and as we stood we heard rapid footsteps, someone running hard, and the sound seemed tremendous in the strained silence. The steps became muffled, then rang out again on the still night air: “He took a short cut across the grass from the road to the jetty. This is it all right. Better get everything on the topline.”