‘I’m still here,’ I said. ‘I’m still here.’

It was all I could think to say but I knew it wasn’t enough to mollify them.

‘You too will go,’ a voice shouted from the back of the crowd.

Someone said that he would kill himself rather than fall into the hands of the Vietcong. Others shouted about the years of service they had given and that they were known to work for the Americans, that their names and their family names were known. There was nowhere for them to hide. They needed to be flown out.

I told them an inventory had been made, that the Embassy had promised to get them out and that all of them were on the official list of those endangered, but it did little to quell their fears. Greenberg’s desertion had helped destroy the credibility of such promises. And they gauged rightly that I wasn’t someone of enough standing to guarantee them anything. So, faced with someone they knew couldn’t give them the needed answers, gradually their anger spent itself and instead was replaced by an almost tangible sense of despair. If anything, this was even worse and, as I watched them slowly walk away and huddle once more in corners, I resolved again to do whatever I could to ensure their safety.

It would be the last time I visited the Embassy, its gates now locked and guarded by Marines, so I had to struggle to gain entry, while all the time beseeching hands pulled at my clothes and people tried to shove letters in front of me, supposedly evidence that they had worked for us in some capacity. Inside was a kind of organised chaos where the central preoccupation appeared to be cremating things. Burnt flakes of paper drifted like black snow from every rooftop incinerator that could be fired, while in every office shredders churned our dying empire of paper into confetti until the hysterical machines overheated.

I struggled to locate anyone willing to admit responsibility, but after being passed from person to person I eventually found someone, who found someone else in a half-abandoned office where the phones screamed constantly until staff lifted them off their hooks, and who told me that things were in hand. That I was to be assured things would be taken care of. I probably felt the same level of confidence in this assertion that my colleagues had when they listened to my faltering attempts at reassurance. But there was nothing more I could do, and although I also made enquiries about Donovan, no one seemed to know anything of his whereabouts or be willing to share their knowledge if they did. When I was leaving I passed an office where, through a partially open door, I saw a woman sitting at a typewriter and silently crying, her glasses pushed high on her head. I walked on and out again into the same drift of black snow.

It’s not possible to talk about that time without history attempting to take ownership of your story and what you want to recount risks being replaced by the images that it has imposed on it – the ant line on top of the apartment building climbing into the helicopter; the frantic crowds being repelled as they try to get into the Embassy; the South Vietnamese helicopters pushed off the aircraft carriers into the South China Sea to make room for the next arrivals. All of these clamour for precedence but I didn’t see these things, although their frequent repetition on-screen sometimes makes me think that I must have. However, there are other insistent memories I hold and which refuse to be permanently pushed aside.