HMS Bulwark Brings Britons to Safety

On the vast HMS Bulwark assault ship, the marine commandos' dining rooms and officers' living areas were crammed with families, elderly people and children colouring in Sudoku animal games or spooning corned-beef hash out of ration packs. When the Harry Potter videos on the plasma screens bellowed out a roar of sound effects, adults and children would involuntarily flinch and look around, before remembering they had left the bombings behind.

Britain had been accused this week of not acting quickly enough to get thousands of its distressed citizens out of Lebanon. But tonight it was performing the biggest single sea-rescue operation carried out by any country so far. Coach by coach at Beirut port, around 2,000 people were loaded from buses bearing union flags on to the 176-metre warship over eight hours yesterday.

Earlier, hundreds of others had departed on another battleship, HMS York. Many more, disabled or carrying babies, had been lifted out by RAF Chinook helicopters which had docked on the jetty after flying from Cyprus on Thursday morning.

The helicopters had negotiated an agreed five-mile corridor in Lebanese airspace watched by an Israeli battleship and planes. Now HMS Bulwark would slowly navigate through the Israeli sea blockade from 7pm, hoping to reach the Cyprus port of Limassol 12 hours later.

Many of the people who filled the corridors and rooms, tended by marines, navy and soldiers, had one thing in common, they called themselves the lucky ones. In Lebanon they had been fortunate enough to have intermittent internet access to check the website of the British embassy, or they had relatives outside Lebanon able to bombard the embassy with phone calls to arrange their passage out.

Most were leaving Lebanese family behind whose best hope of leaving is the dangerous drive to the Syrian border. Those on board felt relieved but ill when they thought of what they were leaving behind.

Shirley Nader, from Dublin, sat in the officers' wardroom with her two young daughters and her husband, a former soldier with the Lebanese army who now manages a restaurant in Battersea. They were trying to get back to London. They had arrived on their 10th annual Lebanese summer holiday five days before the trouble began.

"We were staying at a resort on the coast, swimming and sunbathing. All the hotels were booked up; you couldn't get a room in the whole country it had become such a popular destination," Ms Nader said. "Now everything is empty, everyone is running.

"From our hotel balcony we could hear the thump of bombs in the distance and see the flash of light before a bomb dropped. At first we were happy to stay, we weren't going get out.

"But relatives in Ireland and England were calling us to tell us what they'd seen on the international news bulletins. We realised we had to get out now rather than later for the children's sake."

They had heard rumours of drivers asking $1,000 (£540) for the trip to the Syrian border, but they had not wanted to go by road.

From 11am the ship had began to fill up with the sound of children crying, playing and shrieking. By 2pm when the first 800 people had boarded, at least 250 of them were children under five.

The ship had taken helicopter drops of nappies, babies' milk and sweets and lollipops. Some children stared into Game Boys in a trance, others skated in the corridors.

Many of the families and tourists on board were escaping apartment buildings or hotels in well-heeled Christian suburbs where they had initially intended to tough it out, thinking they would be safe.

John McKean, a lawyer from New Zealand who had organised a flight back to his home in Dubai, sat with his five-month-old daughter Zoe. He and his wife, Cynthia, who is half-Lebanese, half-Bulgarian had come to Beirut five months ago so Zoe could be born there. They felt safe, until Saturday night when they watched a bomb attack on Jounieh from their balcony.

"We had a view down the coast up to the harbour. We saw a thud and smoke rising. That's when we felt in danger. We stayed inside most of the time, but things started to worry us. The baby got sick, we had to get her to a doctor and pharmacy and realised there were restrictions on medicine. We noticed small shortages in the shops and started to worry there wouldn't be enough food."

They called the New Zealand embassy in Turkey and eventually made contact with the British in Beirut. But they had left behind Cynthia's Lebanese parents, who would try to get out by car over the Syrian border.

In the junior dining room, Fatima Kemp, who had lived in London for 30 years with her late English husband, sat in tears among the crowds.

Her flat was in a badly bombed area of southern Lebanon. She had not left it for a week and most nights had not slept until dawn, fearful of the sound of bombing and circling planes. Her brother had brought his family over to her for a couple of nights and they were watching a news bulletin when they saw his nearby apartment block brought down by a bomb.

Mrs Kemp's daughter, a lawyer, was waiting in Manchester where, just as the ship sailed, she was undergoing surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from her breast. "She kept delaying her operation so that she could keep calling the embassy and get me out. She drank a cup of tea to deliberately break her fast before the operation so she could delay it. I kept saying to her on the phone, 'No, no, you must go into surgery,' but she said, 'I just want you near me.'"

Meanwhile, the marine commandos, navy and Royal Irish regiment on board wandered around, keeping tabs on the numbered stickers each person had been given to wear and offering drinks, food, phone calls home and other support.

The crew, after a six-month tour that has taken them to Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, were supposed to arrive home in Britain on Friday before being diverted.

In the dining room, Amal Ghoul, a Lebanese woman who worked as an Arabic interpreter in London, was waiting for a chance to be taken above deck for a quick cigarette. As a teenager she saw corpses in the streets during previous conflict in Lebanon and said she now felt "sad, very sad".

She had not wanted to leave and was leaving her sister behind, but her family in London insisted on it. She had gone to Lebanon for alternative therapy for her arthritis and rheumatism.

"Even when I sit down, I'm in pain. I can survive without food and drink, but at this stage I can't survive without a cigarette. It's my medicine," she said.