The Stuka screamed towards them out of an immaculate blue sky, the shrill note of its engine rising higher and higher as it dived. At the first sound of its approach people on the crowded road had begun to scatter, now they were running pell-mell, scrambling into ditches, falling in panic, their faces distorted with fear, shouting orders, yelling and screaming, here a man pushing his children before him with both hands, there a woman with a baby clutched to her breast, old men stumbling bleary-eyed, dogs barking frantically, soldiers taking cover behind their carriers, families crouched together along the flanks of deserted cars, as the killer plane bore down upon them, its guns spitting fire.
Sid Owen had his rifle at the ready, like the rest of his platoon, but he had to concentrate to hold it steady because fear was making him shake. The plane was nearly overhead. They could see its blunt nose cone, the black crosses on those bent wings, the pilot grinning behind the glass cover of his cockpit, as his guns cut a red swathe through the mass of bodies on the road below him.
‘Fire!’ the sergeant yelled into the uproar. But the order was unnecessary. Most of his men were already blazing away, aiming in sheer fury at this huge obscene untouchable target.
Two bombs were falling, twisting in the air as if they were bouncing.
‘Take cover!’ the sergeant’s voice yelled. But there wasn’t any cover. Only the trailer and the dust of the road. Sid just had time to fling himself to the ground and cover his head with his hands before the first bomb exploded, lifting the earth under his chest and filling his mouth with dust. Then the second, further away, as grit and debris fell in a stinging shower, punching his shoulders, spattering the road, crunching against the roof of a nearby car.
‘Take cover!’ Sid said bitterly to the boy lying beside him.
The boy was weeping. ‘Fucking war!’ he said. ‘Fucking Stukas! Fucking Frenchies.’
‘You all right, Tommy?’
‘Fucking war,’ Tommy wept. But he didn’t seem to be bleeding.
Sid got to his feet, surprised by how stiff and tired he felt all of a sudden. The road was full of wreckage and bodies. And it was horribly quiet. Even the dogs weren’t barking.
He lit himself a fag and offered one to Tommy. ‘There y’are, Tommy,’ he said, “ave a drag.’
‘Ta, mate,’ Tommy said, taking the cigarette gratefully, his fingers trembling. He was doing his best to recover although his eyes were bloodshot and swimming with unshed tears. ‘Fucking ’ell, Sid! That was close. I thought I was a goner that time.’
People were moving again, crawling out of the ditches, running to the injured, weeping with grief and shock. There was blood everywhere, pumping out of wounds, seeping into dark pools under fallen bodies, even splashed along the side of their carrier. And the keening of grief was as terrible as the scream of the Stuka. A woman rocked the blood-red body of her baby in her arms, two small children sat beside the dead body of their father, huge-eyed and silent, too stunned to speak, an old man wandered aimlessly among the wreckage picking up shoes, dogs sniffed the corpses, one of the carriers was on fire belching black smoke, a soldier was being sick, leaning against the trunk of a pollarded tree, his face greeny-grey above blood-stained khaki.
‘Let’s be havin’ yer,’ the sergeant said, appearing from behind the carrier. ‘Render assistance, you two.’
‘Where d’yer want us ter start?’ Sid asked. How could you render assistance after a massacre?
There was an old woman struggling to right a cart that had been tossed onto its side in the middle of the road.
‘Start with her,’ the sergeant said. ‘We can’t none of us move till that cart’s out the way.’
There was a medical orderly attending to the soldier and some other people trying to staunch a woman’s head wounds with her shawl. Two lads were carrying the dead to the side of the road.
Tommy and Sid walked through the scattered bags and bundles to the cart. ‘Leave it to us, gran,’ Sid said to the woman. And she stood aside for them, meekly obedient.
‘You ask me,’ Tommy said as they heaved the cart onto its wheels, ‘the Dutch had the best idea. Give in. Let the buggers take what they want.’
‘They might want London,’ Sid said.
‘They could have it, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘You ain’t got kids, Sunshine,’ Sid said. ‘It’s different when you got kids.’
Ever since he’d arrived in France he’d known the truth of that, in a vague unspoken sort of way. Now, standing here in the bloody aftermath of this attack, the knowledge was certainty. Jerry was cruel and ruthless, and if there was anything he could do to stop them crossing the Channel and attacking Joan and his kids he’d do it. What a bloody good job he’d signed the kids up for evacuation. They were well out of it in the country. ‘It’s different when you got kids.’
‘Let’s get moving,’ the sergeant said.
‘What about them, Sarge,’ Tommy said, looking at the two dusty bodies by the side of the road.
‘Never mind them,’ the sergeant said. ‘Can’t do nothing for them, can yer? Right then. Let’s be ’aving yer.’
The section began to climb aboard the carrier, and while he waited his turn Sid fished in his pocket for another fag. As he withdrew the packet it dislodged the letter he’d been writing to Joan that morning. Was it really only that morning? It seemed a lifetime.
The crumpled paper drifted down into the dust. ‘BEF France.’ he’d written. ‘My dearest Joan. Quiet today. Lovely weather.’
That’s a laugh, he thought, reading the words as he lit his fag. No point in picking the letter up. It was out of date now. He’d write another when he got the time. If he ever got the time. As he climbed into the driver’s seat he could hear heavy gunfire to the south and the occasional rattle of machine-gun fire.
‘Fuckin’ war,’ young Tommy growled, climbing in behind him.
‘Shut yer face, Tommy,’ one of the other men said affably. ‘Look on the bright side. Least we ain’t bein’ bombed for the moment.’
‘Bright side!’ Tommy growled again. ‘Retreatin’?’
‘Only tem’pry, lad,’ the sergeant corrected. ‘Only tem’pry. Strategic retreat. You keep yer eyes skinned fer Stukas.’
Until that morning they’d been with the rest of 131 Brigade defending the line marked by the River Escaut, part of an army, entrenched behind field-guns with their mess-tents, supplies, petrol and ammunition close at hand, apprehensive because they knew they would soon be in a scrap but feeling vaguely confident that they would win it when it came. The arrival of the German panzers was such a shock they still hadn’t recovered from it, all those tanks rolling across the fields in such numbers and at such speed. They’d put up a fight, followed orders, fired endlessly, seemingly in every direction but the right one, but the tanks kept coming and everything was murderously confused. By the time they were given the order to retreat it seemed inevitable.
Since then they’d been travelling, and every single road they’d taken was more crowded than any thoroughfare they’d ever seen, choked with people and grinding with vehicles of every description, many of them in one another’s way, none moving in any kind of order, most drivers keeping a fearful watch on the sky above their heads. The muddle had been loud, frantic, chaotic and continual. There were refugees everywhere, streaming along every road, in tatty processions, carrying every kind of luggage, from sacks to attaché cases, whole towns on the move, women carrying their babies in shawls, men with small children on their backs, kids pushing prams, old women limping along in their dusty black with sticks to support them, families on overloaded carts hauled by straining farm horses, and once, trudging among them, heading in the opposite direction, several straggling columns of French infantrymen, humpbacked under their heavy kit.
The platoon was moving again. Sid began to inch the carrier forward, sounding his horn and shouting, but no one got out of his way, and after struggling for about a hundred yards they were stopped by a broken-down car which had skewed sideways, and together with the crowd that had gathered to get it started again, was completely blocking the road. There was a dispatch rider hurtling through the dust towards them on his motorcycle and he had to stop too. So the sergeant jumped out of the carrier and walked across to see if he knew what was going on.
He had orders for the armoured division at Arras.
‘What’s happening?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Search me, mate. There’s a rumour the Frenchies have folded up an’ gone home.’
‘What Frenchies?’
‘Ninth army.’
‘Bloody hell fire!’ the sergeant said. ‘On the Meuse?’
‘Yup.’
‘What all of ’em?’
‘So they say.’
‘Bloody hell fire!’ the sergeant said again.
The car began to move, swung round until it was facing the right direction, and juddered off leaving a stink of petrol behind it. The dispatch rider purred away at once, driving stylishly through the debris on the road.
‘Now what, Sarge?’ Sid asked.
‘Follow-me-leader,’ the sergeant suggested. ‘If we still got any leaders.’
‘We got old Churchill now, don’t forget,’ Sid said. Winston Churchill had taken over as Prime Minister on the day after the German invasion of the Low Countries. And a bloody good job too.
‘Where are we, Sarge?’ Tommy said.
‘How do I know?’ the sergeant joked bitterly. ‘Ask Hitler.’
‘I wish we knew where Daddy is,’ Yvonne said to her mother at breakfast-time. She’d examined his last letter carefully several times, because she could read the envelope now, although she’d given up trying to decipher the handwriting on the paper. ‘When do you think you’ll have another letter, Mum?’
‘He’s in France,’ Joan told her, ignoring the question about the letter because she couldn’t answer it. She hadn’t heard a word from him since he’d written on 10 May, which was the day the Germans invaded Holland and all this started, and ten days ago. He could be anywhere, fighting, injured, even killed. ‘He’s fighting the Germans,’ she said with more authority than she felt. ‘Hold still while I brush your hair. How d’you manage to get such tangles in it?’
‘When’s he coming home?’ Norman asked, looking up from his last slice of bread and jam. That was far more important than letters. Dad had said they wasn’t to be in London. He’d be ever so cross if he came home and found them here, and then what would happen?
‘Not yet awhile, I don’t suppose,’ Joan said, glancing at the anxious lines wrinkling the child’s forehead and feeling she could give him that much consolation at least. ‘They got a bit a’ fighting to do yet.’ But it was hard to imagine anyone fighting in this beautiful weather. The little patch of sky she could see through her kitchen window was a gorgeous blue and the sunlight was dappling the entire room with discs of pale bright colour, on the checks of the tablecloth, the plates on the dresser, Norman’s grey shirt, his dark hair, gilding his cheek bones and the line of his jaw, touching Yvonne’s hair with gold. Oh what a good job she’d got them back home. They were so much better at home. He hardly wet the bed at all now.
‘Tomorrow?’ Norman asked. ‘Will he come home tomorrow?’
‘No.’
‘Next week?’
‘Not for months and months,’ Joan said. ‘Not till the cold weather comes.’ From what the papers and wireless said it didn’t look as though the British army was doing very well. They’d retreated twice now, as far as she could make out, and the Germans always seemed to be advancing.
‘When’s that?’ Norman persisted.
‘Look at the state a’ your neck,’ Joan said. ‘I thought I told you to wash behind your ears. Now don’t forget Aunty Baby’s coming to collect you at four o’clock and take you back to Gran’s. Be good kids.’
‘Will Uncle Jim be there?’ Yvonne wanted to know. She liked Uncle Jim. He told them funny stories about the things that happened on his RAF camp, and all in his funny way of talking, about ‘kites being pranged’ and people being ‘clueless’ and ‘clots’. It was smashing.
‘No. You know he won’t,’ Joan said. ‘He went back ages ago. Where’s your coat? You’ll need that come this evening.’
Mum had been very good about having the kids after school and giving them tea and everything. It was a real gift when food was rationed and in short supply. And the best of it was that she didn’t seem to mind how long they stayed.
‘I like having them,’ she said that evening when Joan arrived in Paradise Row late and breathless and apologetic. ‘They can stay as long as they like. They’ve been helping me get the tea.’
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Joan said. ‘It’s been a rush job. ’Lo Peggy. Oh dear, I am being a nuisance. Perhaps I should stop going to work.’
‘You’re not being a nuisance,’ Flossie told her. ‘So you can just stop worrying about it. And if you take my advice you’ll go on earning as long as you can. Oh I know you can live on a soldier’s pay. I lived on a soldier’s pay for years and years. But you can’t live well on it.’
That was true, Joan thought. The pay at the factory was very good. Double what she’d been earning with that horrid old Miss Margeryson. In fact she was better off now than she’d ever been, and now that the kids were home she didn’t mind how horrid the work was. She’d bought new clothes for the kids this summer and new shoes and there was plenty of money for food and still some left over for a dress for herself.
‘Earn while you can,’ Peggy said. She was on night duty that week so she was in uniform ready to go out. ‘That’s one good thing coming out of this war, with so many men in the forces they’ve got to pay women a decent wage to do the work.’
‘I’d give it all up to have Sid home and safe,’ Joan said.
‘He’ll write soon,’ Peggy said giving her a hug. ‘You’ll see.’
But he didn’t and the news got worse by the day.
It was always the same and always bad. The Germans were advancing. They’d taken Amiens and Abbeville. They’d reached the English Channel. They were pressing on to Boulogne, surrounding Calais.
On 21 May the wireless reported optimistically that British armoured divisions had been gathered at a place called Arras, that a break through was being attempted and that fierce fighting was going on.
‘Arras again,’ John Cooper said. ‘Poor buggers.’
And it wasn’t long before they heard that the poor buggers had been defeated.
Now it was plain that a full-scale retreat was in operation. Rumours grew by the hour, all of them alarming. The British army was surrounded, cut off, defeated. A whole battalion had been massacred. The soldiers were burning their lorries and setting fire to petrol dumps. There was no hope for any of them. They were being captured in their thousands. The Fifth Column were at work all over France.
The days passed, prickly with apprehension, as people all over Britain waited for news, crowded about their wireless sets, living in abeyance from one bulletin to the next. It was as if their lives had no consequence beyond the outcome of this struggle. Joan grew gaunt with worry. It was seventeen days since the German invasion but it seemed like months. She’d had one letter from Sid in all that time, and that was a brief postcard to say that he was well, that he hadn’t been injured and that he sent his love to the kids.
‘He could be anywhere,’ she worried to Peggy, when her sister came visiting one evening late in May. ‘What are they doing? That’s what I want to know.’
The news of what they were doing broke the following morning.
Calais had surrendered, the Belgian army had capitulated to the Germans just before dawn and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force had begun. Troops were being taken from the beaches at a place called Dunkirk. Regular bulletins would be broadcast throughout the day.
They were broadcast during the next nine momentous days as ships great and small converged on those distant beaches, and the massive rescue operation continued. Horrific tales filtered through rumour to England. The German air force was bombing and strafing at will, there was only a handful of RAF fighters there but they were working miracles, the whole of Dunkirk was ablaze.
But then other stories began too. It wasn’t just the Royal Navy that was at Dunkirk. The army was being taken off the beaches by civilian ships too, a miscellaneous fleet of fishing boats and ferries, pleasure boats and steamers that had been gathered in secret at dead of night and crossed the Channel in a great armada to help with the rescue. Mrs Roderick was full of it when she came to call for Flossie for their weekly trip to the pictures.
‘The Thames has been denuded,’ she said. ‘There’s hardly a boat to be seen. Went through at midnight so Mrs Bertleman was telling me. The Royal Sovereign’s gone and the Royal Daffodil and the Gillyflower. It’s amazing!’
‘That’ll do it,’ Mrs Geary said. ‘Island race, you see. All sailors at heart we are. That’ll do it.’
‘Course, they’ll never get them all home,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘Not with the best will in the world. They got millions of men out there.’
‘If they get half of ’em out it’ll be a miracle,’ Flossie said. ‘Are they going to broadcast any more tonight d’you think?’
‘Bound to,’ Mrs Geary said. ‘Be on the nine o’clock news?’
‘Then I think we’ll give the pictures a miss,’ Flossie said to Mrs Roderick. ‘See what they say.’
‘Quite right,’ Mrs Roderick agreed. ‘We’ll have a game of cards. Baby’ll make up a four, won’t you, Baby?’
‘Where’s your Peggy?’ Mrs Roderick asked as she picked up her first hand.
‘Up the Post,’ Flossie said. ‘On duty.’
‘Jim’s not home then?’
‘No.’
‘Where is he posted these days?’
None of them knew where Jim was.
‘Didn’t Peggy say?’ Mrs Roderick asked.
‘She don’t say much these days,’ Mrs Geary said, arranging her cards.
‘Why should she?’ Baby said rather tartly. Mrs Roderick was a jolly sight too fond of gossip. ‘You don’t have to be talking all the time. Jim don’t say much either.’
‘Strong silent type,’ Mrs Roderick approved. ‘It’s being in the RAF I expect.’
They would all have been surprised to know that Jim Boxall had been talking non-stop since six o’clock that evening.
His squadron had been transferred that day from Catterick to Hornchurch to replace a squadron that had been in action over France during the retreat. There was a lot of repair work to do and they’d started on it as soon as they arrived.
He’d swung into his billet at the end of that first afternoon in the hangars, flung himself across his bed, lit a fag and closed his eyes with weariness when a familiar voice said, ‘Jim Boxall or I’m a Dutchman,’ right in his ear.
It was Froggy Ferguson. Still very recognizably Froggy Ferguson, wide of mouth, bolting-eyed, and grinning. ‘ ’Lo Frog,’ Jim said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. I thought I’d got shot of you back in Uxbridge.’
‘You don’t get shot of me so easy,’ Froggy grinned.
‘So what you doing here?’
‘I’m a sparks.’ And sure enough there were the sparks on his tunic sleeve. A qualified wireless operator and mechanic, no less. ‘Come for a beer.’
It was a cheerful reunion. They hadn’t seen one another since those first days in Uxbridge, nearly five years ago, so they had a lot of gossip and scandal to catch up on. Froggy seemed to know everything there was to know about their old oppos.
‘Remember old Tammy Shanter? Saw him in Debden last summer. He’s got a wife and two kiddies. And Jock? He’s training to be an air gunner.’
And he was also very knowledgeable about the airfield and the squadron that had just gone to Catterick.
‘They’ve been flying sorties over the beaches,’ he said. ‘Bloody shambles by all accounts. They’ve got the entire British army camped out on the sand apparently, standing in queues waiting to be taken off. All the roads into Dunkirk are jammed solid. So full of trucks they look like khaki rivers from the air, so one of our chaps was saying. Your lot are going over tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Jim said. ‘Will we get them all off?’
‘It’ll be a miracle if we do.’
But the miracle continued, as people all over Britain held their breath and said their prayers and tuned in to the BBC.
On 28 May 17,000 men were taken safely off the beaches, on 29 May it was over 47,000 and during the next two days more than 100,000 came home. Soon pictures of the returning army were filling the papers and wives were receiving letters and telegrams from the British ports.
But Joan heard nothing.
Yvey and Norman scanned the papers every day for the first sight of their father, convinced that they would see his picture sooner or later, walking up a gang-plank or waving cheerfully from the deck of a troopship, but they were always disappointed.
‘He can be as cross as he likes if he’ll only come home,’ Norman said.
‘Perhaps he’ll come tomorrow,’ Yvonne hoped.
But the days passed and it was 4 June and the papers were cheering that over 338,000 men were home and dry, that the last soldier had been lifted from the beachhead, the last little ship had limped to port.
And still there was no news of Sid Owen.
Joan was bleak with distress.
‘It’s the not knowing,’ she said to Peggy. ‘He could be dead somewhere out there. How would I know? People say they left dead bodies all over the place. Didn’t even stop to bury them.’
‘It’s early days yet,’ Peggy tried to comfort. ‘You think how many men they’ve brought back. It could take weeks to sort them all out. I’ll do Norman’s school shirt, shall I?’ She’d come to supper that evening, but being Peggy she was helping out with the ironing while Joan cooked their cauliflower cheese.
‘He could be wounded,’ Joan said, stirring the sauce.
Peggy thought it was safe to allow that and better than thinking he was dead. ‘Yes, he could,’ she said. ‘In a hospital somewhere waiting for someone to write a letter for him. Very likely.’
‘He wasn’t always the best husband alive,’ Joan said. ‘Had a right pair a’ fists on him sometimes, to tell the truth, but I wouldn’t wish this on him. Not for the world.’
‘Course not,’ Peggy said, removing Norman’s shirt from the ironing board and folding it neatly.
‘I don’t think I shall ever hear,’ Joan said. ‘I’m beginning to give up hope.’
‘You mustn’t give up hope,’ Peggy said. ‘None of us must give up hope. We’ve all got to keep going.’
It was Churchill’s message that evening too. As Peggy and Joan were washing their dirty plates, the House of Commons was listening soberly to the Prime Minister as he told them that the fight would continue.
‘We cannot flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills. We shall never surrender.’
Ten days later the German army entered Paris, and two days after that the French front collapsed and Maréchal Pétain became president of France. Now it was simply a matter of time before the country was handed over to Hitler.
And on the morning after the final fall of France Joan got the letter she’d been waiting for.
She saw it on the doormat as she was taking the children downstairs on their way to school. A small ominous-looking envelope with foreign markings on it. Oh God, not the offficial letter, she begged. Please God not that.
‘Just a minute,’ she said to the children, heart pounding. ‘I’ll just read this before we go.’
It was addressed in Sid’s clumsy handwriting and had been sent through the Red Cross from a prisoner of war camp, somewhere in Germany.
‘He’s all right,’ she said to the children, struggling to control herself because they were standing so still and looking so solemn and anxious. ‘He’s been wounded. Not much. A flesh wound he says. He’s a prisoner. He’s all right.’
And then they both tumbled into her arms to kiss her and hug her and they were all crying with relief.
‘We’ll have a ding-dong,’ Flossie said. ‘We’ve something to celebrate now. I’m so glad you’ve heard. What a relief.’
It was a curiously happy celebration. They should have been cast down by the serious state of the war or dismayed by the loss of their last ally but they weren’t.
‘If you ask me,’ Mrs Geary said finishing her gin, ‘we’re a jolly sight better off without allies. All they ever do is give in all the time. Lily-livered lot.’
‘Shameful,’ Mr Allnutt agreed. ‘At least now we all know where we are.’
‘It’ll be a long fight,’ Leslie warned.
‘Never you mind,’ Ernest said. ‘We’re all in it together. That’s what counts. Hitler needn’t think we’re finished because we’re not. We’ll show him.’
‘There’ll always be an England,’ Mr Brown declaimed, rosy with patriotism and four pints of beer.
So naturally John Cooper played the song and they all sang it.
‘There’ll always be an England, and England shall be free.
If England means as much to you as England means to me.
Red, white and blue, what does it mean to you?
Surely you’re proud, shout it aloud, Britons awake.
The Empire too, we can depend on you.
Freedom remains, these are the chains nothing can break.’
By the end of the evening they were in a mood of unquenchable optimism.
‘We’ll show the buggers,’ they said to one another as they kissed goodnight. ‘They needn’t think they’ve got the better of us.’
It was a mood they shared with more and more people as June blazed into an English magnificence of peaceful roses, honeysuckles and warm light evenings, a mood that spread by some curious national osmosis until there was hardly a man or woman the length and breadth of the country who wasn’t touched by it. The army was home. The rescue at Dunkirk had been a miracle. We would fight better on our own.
There was a cocky cheerfulness in the streets, lots of jokes and leg-pulling, jaunty whistling and easy laughter. It even affected the way people walked, heads up, shoulders back, with a strut and a swagger as if they were marching to stirring music.
There was no logical reason to any of it, but the defeats and anxieties of the last few weeks had taken most people beyond logic or reason. This was the stubborn, illogical, unwarranted optimism which is both the curse and the strength of the British in adversity. They might have their backs to the wall, they might be rationed, blacked-out, without allies, they might not have enough planes or ships or guns, beleaguered in their tight little island, but it never occurred to anyone to doubt that sooner or later right would triumph and they would win the war.
And over in America one of the leader writers of the New York Times put words to the mood.
‘So long as the English tongue survives,’ he wrote, ‘the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. In that harbour … at the end of the lost battle, the rags and blemishes that had hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, in shining splendour, she faced the enemy, this shining thing in the souls of free men which Hitler cannot command … It is the future. It is victory.’