25

A fortnight after the bombing returned to London in early 1944, Julia was posted to a Heavy Anti-Aircraft (HAA) battery at Mudchute on the Isle of Dogs. When the signal came through she had just come to the end of another training course at Oswestry, all part of the army’s ceaseless attempts to mould machinery from human clay. She had been expecting to return to Filey, but one of the many things she had learned over the last eighteen months was not to second-guess the army.

It was bitterly cold and a thick layer of grey cloud pressed down like a dull headache. Julia made her way to the gun site half shouldering, half lugging her kit bags, respirator and water bottle round her neck, comb, cigarettes and travel warrant stuffed in the pockets of her battledress top and trouser pockets. At first she thought there had been a mistake and the transport had dropped her in the wrong place. It was true she had never been to the East End, had never shaken off her childhood dread of it. It was also true that she’d seen enough newsreels to expect damage. But the scale of the devastation her boots were crunching through was beyond her imagination – and well beyond what any censor would have allowed to be shown. She was reminded of the destruction of the City she had witnessed that first winter of the Blitz. Somehow this was worse, not least for the sense of abandonment, the absence of bomb tourists mourning architecture. It was as if an entire civilization had gone into rubble and been forgotten about.

She came past railway arches kitted out as makeshift shelters, isolated terraced streets and truncated sections of terraces, roofless, windowless houses, scorched brick walls, broken heaps of rained-upon furniture and unusable, unidentifiable furnishings. Pubs, churches and shops had not escaped and much of the debris was left where it had fallen. She saw few people. One or two cats slinking, darting about the edges of craters, lots of rats. A bleak haunted place. She later learned they called it the District of the Dead.

The battery comprised four positions arranged in the familiar semicircle on concrete platforms sunk into camouflaged pits, the barrels of the 3.7-inch guns directed skywards over the shipping traffic chugging on the river. It was mid-morning and there was a sentry at each position, field glasses slung round their necks.

The first one, who was furtively smoking, fag tucked into his palm lit end down, told her she would find the duty officer, Lieutenant Woodbury, ‘over there’, indicating a low sandbagged Nissen hut with a corrugated-iron roof next to a smaller hut with a stove-pipe exiting from one end that was probably the cookhouse. A little way off were other temporary-looking buildings that she supposed were barracks, their walls rippled a little with gun blast. She had seen better and she had certainly known worse. Last winter at an emplacement outside Brighton they’d called Vladivostok they had had to wash in snow and there had been an outbreak of dysentery.

Most of the women Julia had served with and the battery commanders she had served under had been younger than her, so it was no surprise to find the lieutenant was in his early twenties. From the doorway, where she dumped her bags, she had a moment to observe him, note the chin still bearing the livid dints of adolescent acne, the upper lip struggling to sprout a moustache, the square stubby hands shifting through paperwork beside a steaming tea mug. Then he looked up, and she saw his eyes were older than they should have been. There were times when the Face Game returned to her involuntarily and this was one of them. He was the young father, the emigrant in The Last of England, she thought, or perhaps a Holbein.

‘Sir.’

He returned her salute. ‘Corporal Sinclair, we’ve been expecting you.’

The accent was broad Yorkshire. The army did this: it juggled regions, classes, backgrounds. She had camped, trained and worked with women from Wales, Scotland, Liverpool, Newcastle, the Midlands, the West Country; with hairdressers, teachers, seamstresses, shop girls, farmers’ daughters and the occasional deb. She may be in London, but there was no reason to expect a London voice.

He flicked through her papers.

‘You’re a No. 1.’

‘Yes, sir. Since last October.’

‘Presumably that was when they gave you the stripes.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Kerrys or Sperrys?’

‘Both, sir.’

‘Mentioned in dispatches, too.’

She nodded.

‘Why was that?’

‘It wasn’t anything. We were strafed. I remembered to turn off the generator.’

He folded up the papers. ‘You’ll do.’

The walls were covered with posters: aircraft in silhouette, from the side, the rear, the front, from above. Dorniers, Heinkels, Junkers, Messerschmitts. Recognition was a key part of the training. Their aircraft and yours – you didn’t want to shoot down your own side, although on occasion that had been known to happen.

‘Corporal?’

‘Sir.’

‘Your previous postings have been on mixed batteries.’

Of course they had. She didn’t know what the lieutenant was driving at. On batteries you always had to have a man to fire the gun. Women weren’t allowed to fire guns. Women were only allowed to say when guns should be fired. You might say this was splitting hairs.

‘Yes, sir.’

Lieutenant Woodbury gave her a wry smile. ‘You’ll find we’re a little behind the times. Until last month we were male-only.’

These days, male-only batteries tended to be manned by those who were UFM. Unfit For Mixed. Dismay must have shown on her face, because the lieutenant was quick to reassure her that his men were civilized souls, on the whole, and their first draft of ATS girls had settled in well, all eight of them. Unfortunately, however, he went on to explain, the female barracks were not yet completed. Her billet would be with Mrs Hoffmann on Ada Street.

Ada Street? Down here, there were no streets to speak of.

Julia had completed her basic training at Aldermaston near Reading. Those six weeks had been punishing and mindless at a time when mindless punishment had been what she had needed. She had Mattie to thank for that.

The army had no cure for heartbreak. What it could supply was a steady stream of frustrations to take your mind off greater pain for a while. Inoculations and their bruised, feverish aftermath, blisters from route marches, pulled muscles from fatigues, petty humiliations of drilling on the parade ground under the sarcastic Warrant Officer, long, dull Friday nights after the FFI (Free From Infection) inspections, cleaning every item of kit, down to the studs on the soles of your boots and the buttons on your overcoat and uniform jacket. Your toothbrush had to line up in the right direction. Your bedding had to be folded just so. Label showing! Label showing! Your hair could not touch your collar.

She had asked Vera, who had been a hairdresser in Hull before she was called up, to cut hers off.

Vera said, ‘You don’t reckon the uniform is ugly enough?’

It was an ugly uniform, khaki, itchy. The girls tried their best with it, just as they pinned and rolled the hair that told them they were still female and would have laid down their life to save their lipstick. Julia didn’t see the point. She gave in to the uniform and its ugliness.

Nevertheless she felt a pang when feathers of dark hair started falling to the floor. What was she doing? Trying to turn herself into Ann Wightman? But Vera did too good a job for that. Looking in the mirror afterwards, the person she saw was Peter, aged and feminized.

They were endlessly tested, for physical fitness and for nerves under fire. Towards the end of the six weeks they were assessed for intelligence. She had joined up with the vague notion of becoming a driver. So too had many of the others: there were no vacancies for drivers. They found her maths better than most and she was sent to the School of Artillery at Manorbier on the Pembrokeshire coast for the first of many specialist courses.

They were being trained to operate a Kerrison predictor, a Kerry. The first time she saw one she was struck by how much it resembled a movie camera – this great green metal box with its telescopic eyepieces standing on a sprung tripod. It weighed half a ton and was powered by a generator, to which it was connected by a thick cable. Their instructor, a pot-bellied captain with a pencil moustache and a habit of idly probing for earwax, told them that its purpose was to determine the angles of deflection – both lateral and vertical – from a line of sight to a future line of sight so the shell found its target. Or rather shells, since the Kerry was designed to direct the fire of all four guns on a battery.

‘Any of you chaps here done any shooting?’

All the chaps here were women. One hand shot up.

‘Private?’

‘Morrison, sir. Clay pigeons.’

This appeared to amuse the instructor. ‘Tell us, Private Morrison, how you bag a clay pigeon. Do you aim straight at it?’

‘No, sir. You take a bead and you aim a little way in front of it. That is, a little way in front of where it’s going.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s moving, sir. It’s not stationary.’

‘Quite right,’ said the instructor. ‘Same principle.’ He pointed overhead with the stem of his pipe. ‘Say the enemy is fifteen thousand feet up. Your shell will take ten seconds to reach him. By which time Jerry is ten seconds closer to his target. If he’s flying at 200mph, that’s a mile further on. To down a plane, a shell needs to explode within thirty feet of it. You can’t judge that by eye.’ He slapped the top of the predictor. ‘Which is where the Kerry comes in. A few seconds of knob-twiddling gives you your quadrant elevation. All done by gears and gyros.’

He made it sound simple. It was – and it wasn’t.

Over subsequent days, sitting in the stuffy classroom, the befuddling summer sun streaming in, flies buzzing and dazing themselves against the windows, she felt like she was back in the school library, chewing her pen, trying and failing to solve a differential equation, or grappling with key signature calculations at college. Up on the chalkboard: azimuth angles, elevation angles, height and range, wind speeds, ballistics. She passed the written tests – just – by cramming the manual and making a couple of good guesses.

The theory was hard; the practice was better. When it was her turn to squint down the ’scopes, her pianist’s fingers found it easy to manipulate the dials to keep the target steady on the horizon line. She didn’t flinch when orders were barked. Neither did she complain when they were taught how to clean the generator and replenish its fuel supply (which was a dirty job) or how to sluice out gun barrels with boiling water, dry them and oil them (which was another). At this point she would have undergone any amount of training to shoot something.

One warm autumn day in 1942 when she was still at Manorbier, she and Pat Meadows, a friend she had made on the course, had planned a last sea bathe before the weather grew too cold. After work they made their way along the coast, stripped to their underwear and went in – straight in, that was ever their dare. Pat was a strong swimmer, who needed a destination; before long, she was halfway to the rock she used as a distance marker. Julia let the lapping water hold her in the shallows.

That morning she had received a letter from her solicitor enclosing her decree nisi. Thanks to Mr Gore-Finlay and a judge impressed by her army record, she had been awarded joint custody with Richard. The ruling was meaningless now: Peter refused to see either of them.

She and Pat dried themselves off, shivering. ‘That Alan What’s-his-face at the dance last night was dead keen on you.’ Pat hopped about, shaking sand from her feet. ‘I could tell.’

‘Was he.’

‘You’re free now, sweetie,’ Pat said. ‘Have a little fun.’

Julia wiped her face on her towel. Her lips tasted of salt.

Alan What’s-his-face proved to be a better lover than Dougie. That surprised her. He was dull. That didn’t.

Straight after Manorbier, she was sent to a training battery down on the south-west coast. This was when she first heard the guns at close quarters. At a distance of twenty yards, where the Kerry was sited, the noise was colossal. Shells jumped where they were stacked and so did the legs of your trousers. But you got used to it, blocked your ears with your fingers and bound your trouser legs with puttees.

They practised aiming at a drogue – a red weighted sail – towed behind a plane on a cable. You had to pity the pilots. Someone told her it was the ones on a charge who were given the job. She had been in the services long enough now to appreciate the elegant irony of that.

Other camps, more training, other batteries, had followed. Some of these postings were livelier than others – there was the occasion when they had been strafed, for example. Most of the work was dull and routine and here boredom was the real enemy.

What relieved the monotony was going to the cinema. This was how Julia came to see Song of Britain twenty-three times. All through the remainder of that year it always seemed to be on the programme whatever else was showing. The first occasion threatened to undo all the discipline the army had instilled in her. Pure torture, to see everything she and Dougie had discussed realized on the screen, along with herself, sitting in the National Gallery like the deluded fool she had been. But so much to admire, even love. That cut from Flanders and Allen to Mozart, bang on the beat. Basil’s doing, of course. He had a credit. She didn’t.

But by the fifth or sixth time she welcomed it. She was not alone in her appreciation. Embry had been wrong. It went down well in Cleethorpes; it went down well wherever it was shown, because people recognized their better selves in it and called it the truth.

Boredom was not a problem at Mudchute. They were too busy, too tired, too edgy for that. For the first time Julia found herself on the front line. Night after night, the bombers came. Night after night found her stationed at the predictor on the foreshore of the Thames, trembling with cold and anticipation.

The Isle of Dogs was not a true island. Bordered by the river to the east, south and west, a narrow strip of land connected it with the rest of the East End – Poplar, Stepney, Whitechapel, Bow – to the north. You might think, with three quarters of the houses destroyed and half the population shifted elsewhere or dead, there was little left to defend. But for German planes crossing the Channel and heading up the estuary, that distinctive loop in the river represented a gateway to the docks in the Pool of London and beyond, to the heart of the capital itself.

The canteen was crowded and smoky. They’d had the usual watery stew, washed down with tea that almost had more substance to it, and Beddoes, the gun layer in B team, was shouting at Julia from across the room.

‘What’s he after?’ said June. June – Private Colbert – was a brunette from Pontefract with large breasts and a complicated love life.

‘The usual, I expect,’ said Julia.

‘Well, he’s not getting it from me,’ said June.

The women at Mudchute, who were significantly outnumbered on the battery, dealt with this inequality in one of two ways. Some – June included – wore their femininity like a flag and relished the consequences, or appeared to. Julia adopted the opposite approach.

Nevertheless, she was not one of the boys. The men talked to her only in the abstract. She knew their politics, their world view, little else about them. Beddoes, for example, thought these raids were only to be expected, after the pounding they had given Hamburg and, lately, Dresden, which he regarded as criminal. Mason, who was a loader, spoke of the work of the peace, when they would organize collectively for the common good; Sergeant Wooler, too, endlessly. But it was the women who shared the inconsequential happenings of their lives and, in the end, these inconsequential happenings were what mattered. All lives were stories, or else they made no sense.

‘Sinclair!’ Beddoes was waving his arms, fag dangling from the corner of his mouth.

‘What?’ Julia cupped her hands behind her ears.

‘Give us a tune!’

Banging on the trestle tables.

‘Looks like you’re on,’ said June.

In Julia’s old battery it was accepted that piano-playing was her territory. (Wherever you went there was always a piano and the piano was always hired.) When she had arrived at Mudchute she hadn’t wanted to tread on anyone’s toes, so it was a while before they discovered that they had a better class of entertainer in their midst than Poole, who hadn’t much in his repertoire beyond ‘Chopsticks’.

For Julia no longer played for herself, she played for her messmates. She played what they wanted to hear. Generally this wasn’t Beethoven, although one of her battery commanders had been partial to a little Schubert now and then.

She took her tea mug over to the piano, sat down on the wobbly stool and asked: what should it be?

‘“Roll out the Barrel”!’

‘“Roll out the Barrel”!’

She laughed. ‘Can’t you lot think of anything more original?’

But they had already started to sing it – stone-cold sober, they sounded drunk – so she played along to their ragged boisterous voices.

It would be ‘Lili Marlene’ at some point later, ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Knees up, Mother Brown’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – and a new one for her, ‘Where Does Poor Pa Go in the Blackout?’ which was hugely popular, because scatological.

They rolled out the barrel.

‘Next?’ Julia rested her hands on the keys.

‘Your turn, Sinclair.’

‘You choose!’

‘You sing!’

Julia said, ‘All right. But I warn you I’m no Gracie.’ She rolled a few chords up and down then began to play what had been a favourite at her old battery.

I’m the girl that makes the thing

That drills the hole that holds the ring

That drives the rod that turns the knob

That works the thing-ummy-bob.

Silence. Didn’t they know it? Then it dawned on her that an overwhelmingly male audience might respond differently to the innuendo she and her friends had enjoyed. That she might be inviting attentions she had been at pains to avoid. Oh, bloody get on with it, she thought, and plunged into the second verse.

I’m the girl that makes the thing

That holds the oil that oils the ring

That takes the shank that moves the crank

That works the thing-ummy-bob.

It’s a ticklish sort of job

Making a thing for a thing-ummy-bob,

Especially when you don’t know what it’s for . . .

Laughter. Relief.

But it’s the girl that makes the thing

That drills the hole that holds the ring

That makes the thing-ummy-bob

That makes the engines roar.

And it’s the girl that makes the thing

That holds the oil that oils the ring

That makes the thing-ummy-bob

That’s going to win the war.

‘Going to win the war!’ A roar. ‘GOING TO WIN THE . . .’

Bang, bang, bang! A clanging on a mess tin announced the red warning, come through on the field telephone.

Everyone shot out of their seats, chairs and benches toppling this way and that. Julia rushed from the piano, clapped her steel hat on her head, tugged on her leather jerkin and, over that, her greatcoat.

They ran out into the cold night. The sirens began to wail.

‘Purple!’ came the shout. ‘Take post! Take post!’

They heard the bomber before they saw it. A guttural, throaty sound. Searchlights played the sky, caught the plane in their criss-crossing beams.

‘Target left!’

Julia squinted down the sight, grasped the clutch on the Kerry and swivelled it eastwards, downriver.

‘On!’ shouted No. 3.

‘On!’ shouted No. 5.

Julia released the clutch and the predictor followed the target.

‘Bearing 260! Angle 20!’ came from Arnott, manning the height-and-range finder.

She wound in the numbers on the red-lit dial.

‘Engage!’

Beddoes swung the gun around.

‘Fire!’ shouted Julia.

The guns cracked and flamed. Shells burst in the night.

There was a piece of the sky that belonged to you. You fired at it and, if you’d calculated the lead times right, the enemy would fly straight into the flak from your barrage. The shells were contact-fused to explode at altitude and fill a volume of air with lethal debris. A single splinter catching a wing, the cockpit or the underbelly of a fuselage would do it. Or not.

Speed was a weapon of war. Every instructor on every course had drummed this into her. The planes grew faster, the airspeeds were ever greater, which meant you had to be faster too. At the beginning of the Blitz, thirty thousand shells were fired for each downed plane. By the following year, it was more like four thousand. Today, the odds were better, the instruments were better, the training was better, but many planes got through.

As did the Heinkel, which jinked, got away. This was the human element.

Another plane came droning behind.

‘Target left!’

‘On!’ shouted No. 3.

Silence.

‘No. 5?’ shouted Julia.

No answer.

‘No. 5? No. 5?’

‘On!’ shouted No. 5.

‘Bearing 249! Angle 20!’

Julia dialled the figures.

‘Engage!’

Too late. This, too, was the human element. And another bomber flew on to dump its load.

A gang of feral children lived in the ruins. In the grey dawn, returning to Ada Street, bone-weary, ears ringing, Julia saw them scamper away from the standpipe with a clatter of cascading stones and broken bricks. There were a couple of older lads and a girl of the same sort of age, but most of the children were pitifully young. All were thin, dirty and bedraggled. One, who was barely walking, had to be scooped up and carried, her sodden nappy sagging down over a bare red arse. Julia had tried to approach them before, with no success, and she had not been able to discover where they were hiding. The first time she’d seen them she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her and these were ghosts come out to play on the unrecognizable streets where they had been born.

‘You get them down here,’ Mrs Hoffmann told her. ‘They come and go.’

Mrs Hoffmann was a busy, busy, tiny woman in late middle age who wore two spots of rouge high on her cheeks and, every day, the same scarf tied round her head, turban fashion – it was possible she slept in it. She reminded Julia of a wren, because you couldn’t imagine how such a big voice could come out of such a little body.

‘But who are they? Why isn’t anyone looking after them?’

‘Julie,’ said Mrs Hoffmann. (Julia was ‘Julie’ the entire time she was billeted with Mrs Hoffmann.) ‘You got to understand a thing or two. It didn’t take the war to do this, you know. It’s always been like this. I’ve known families on the Mudchute where the head of the household was ten, eleven, twelve years old. Mum dead, dad disappeared, God knows where. They brought themselves up then, they’re bringing themselves up now. What you expect them to do?’

Mrs Hoffmann reached into her apron pocket. ‘Letter for you.’

She put it down on the kitchen table, which had a chipped enamel top. There weren’t two steps between it and the sink. There weren’t two steps between the sink and the stove.

‘Can’t anything be done for them?’

Mrs Hoffmann smiled. Her pencilled eyebrows did not move. ‘Manny was the same. It was the filth some of them families lived in that used to upset him, blankets crawling with bugs, I’m talking thousands of them. But show Manny a brick wall and he was the sort to knock his head against it. He’d march them down to the school or the schul or wherever. Once, he wrote to the papers. Never got no joy out of it. Still, his heart was in the right place. Not what you might call faithful, but dead loyal all the same.’

‘There’s a difference?’ said Julia.

‘Lovey, you got a lot to learn.’

Manny’s photograph was in every corner and on every ledge of every room of the two-up, two-down terraced house. Dead of a heart attack three years ago. ‘There’s other ways of dying in a war, you know,’ Mrs Hoffmann said. ‘And natural causes is one of them.’ Her son Jacob was a prisoner of the Japs. There had been another boy, too, Benjamin, who’d been born wrong and hadn’t lived long. There were no photographs of him.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Oh, yes, thanks. I’ll make it.’

‘You’ll do no such thing.’ Mrs Hoffmann lit the gas ring. ‘You’re in luck. It’s been off all night.’

Like Mrs Tooley, Mrs Hoffmann had no faith in shelters; unlike Mrs Tooley, she had personal reasons for that. A year ago her niece, Lily, had been crushed to death at Bethnal Green Tube when a woman carrying a baby and bedding tripped on the stairs near the entrance and nearly two hundred people fell on top of her, Lily one of them. Julia had never heard of the incident.

‘They hushed it up,’ Mrs Hoffmann told her. ‘And they cleared it away dead quick, let me tell you. There was hundreds bedding down on the platform that night and when they come up the next morning there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. But we knew about it. We all knew someone caught up in it. She was bombed out four times was Lily. She thought she was safe down there.’

Mrs Hoffmann and her friends told her other things – contrary to appearances, there were others living down here in the ruins. They told her about hiding from the doctor’s collector, who would rap on the door first thing Monday morning wanting payment, about the old man who read the newspaper through the bottom of a bottle because he couldn’t afford spectacles, about the children who took it in turns to go to school because they had only one pair of boots between them. And they told her about the first day of the Blitz. When Julia had been watching a red glow in the sky from Primrose Hill, Mudchute had been surrounded by burning docks. ‘All round it was a ring of fire. The heat was that fierce you might have been in a cauldron. And we thought that was bad. We never knew it would get worse.’ The houses had smelled of burned cinnamon and cloves ever since. ‘It got in the walls and it’s never got out.’

Mrs Hoffmann set down the teapot. ‘You want to let it brew. Fresh leaves.’

The teapot was white bone china with violets on the sides and a green handle shaped like a stem. The cup and saucer matched.

Julia said, ‘Please, there’s no need to go to so much trouble. I’m fine with a mug.’

‘No trouble,’ Mrs Hoffmann said. ‘Second time Lily was bombed out she lost the lot. And she had some nice bits and pieces. That’s when I said to Manny I wasn’t going to keep my best things in a cupboard no longer. If the Krauts was going to smash them, I’d have the use of them first.’

She filled a hot-water bottle from the kettle and wrapped it in a tea cloth. ‘I’ll pop this under the covers. It’ll be nice and warm when you go up. How long they give you this time?’

‘I’ve got drill at half eleven.’

Mrs Hoffmann shook her head. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

The letter was from Netta. She was one of those people who wrote – and drew – how she spoke. Chorleywood jumped into life from her pages. It was an odd thing, but sometimes late at night or early in the morning, turning the handle of the predictor to train the guns at enemy bombers, Julia had the sense that it was Traddles she was protecting.

Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty.

When she lived there, she hadn’t appreciated it. She had been too bound up in a private life to understand that all lives were public at such times as these, or else they were not real lives, or lives being properly lived.

Julia drank her tea. Next door the small crowded sitting room was being cleaned to within an inch of its life. Through the wall came clinks and chinks of rearrangement, the groan of furniture shifted out of place and back again.

‘Sad news,’ she read, next to a marginal drawing of a cat with angel’s wings floating up to heaven. Underneath, a pictorial map showing the hawthorn under which they had buried George.

Mrs Hoffmann came through from the passage to shake her broom and duster out of the back door. ‘Something wrong?’

‘A cat I know has died.’

Mrs Hoffmann nodded. ‘It’s always the little things that get to you.’

Julia went upstairs to bed and buried her head in the flat damp pillow that smelled of burned cinnamon and cloves. No letter from Peter again. For months after she enlisted she had written into silence, a chip of hope sealed in each envelope. At the top of each letter, her army number and present whereabouts. Christmas, and a note came thanking her for the balsawood model-airplane kit she had sent him. A short note. She could hear her father standing over him to make him write it, as she could hear him standing over the ones that followed at infrequent intervals.

When she had leave a few months later, her father reluctantly agreed to her request for them to meet. They had tea near the hostel at King’s Cross where she was lodging. It was not a success.

‘Too soon,’ her father said.

Peter stood a way off. He’d recently had a haircut and the tendons on the back of his neck were prominent, bare and vulnerable.

‘Richard married that woman, did you know?’

She shook her head.

‘He wrote to invite Peter to the wedding. I must say, I think rather poorly of him for that.’

‘Did he go?’

‘Of course not. It was term time.’

Peter was no longer at Hurst. He was a weekly boarder at the school where most old Hurstians went. It was in St Albans.

On weekends, she gathered, the two of them filled their time by taking things apart and putting them together again. She remembered this about her father. Some men would sit in a draught and complain about it. Her father would apply himself to weather-stripping.

Spring came, even to Mudchute. The cratered ruins were covered with a fuzz of fresh green growth where weeds had seeded themselves in the cracks and the crevices. Here and there small hopeful flowers peeped out. A lone cherry tree blossomed. The wind blew the pink petals about in a strange shower of delight – the surrealism of it was somehow heroic.

‘Sir,’ said Julia, saluting. ‘You asked to see me.’ This came out as a croak. Her voice was going again.

Lieutenant Woodbury had set up an office in one of the bombed houses deemed unfit for human habitation. The house had no roof and not much remained of the upper storey. The staircase led nowhere. On the dank ground floor, semi-cleared, in what must have once been a parlour judging from the peeling remnants of wallpaper, was a steel desk, a field telephone and a battered filing cabinet.

‘At ease, Corporal.’ He spread his hands. ‘Your No. 5.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The telephone rang. Lieutenant Woodbury answered it, said, ‘Right you are,’ and placed the receiver back on its cradle. ‘The barrel’s on its way. Finally.’

‘That’s good,’ said Julia. They had been waiting weeks for it.

He fiddled with a pencil. ‘Poole.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘He used to be one of the best. It seems to me he’s been letting the side down lately. Would you agree?’

Julia said that Poole’s reaction times could be better.

The lieutenant was grey-faced. Acne had returned to his chin, but he’d given up on the moustache, which was an improvement. ‘We’re all knackered, overdue for rotation. Even so.’

Rotation was the way the artillery regiments maintained combat efficiency. You didn’t want the same personnel on a gun position for months on end. Yet Julia doubted whether rotation would help Poole. ‘Has anyone checked his hearing?’

Lieutenant Woodbury flushed.

‘It could be that,’ said Julia, whose own hearing was beginning to worry her.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it could.’

That night she was kipping in the command-post shelter when Arnott came in and tapped her on the arm. ‘Alert?’ she said, snapping awake.

‘No.’ Arnott had a sallow lined face and a wife and kiddie in Hartlepool. ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem with the generator.’

‘Again?’

‘Come on, Sinclair,’ said Arnott. ‘You know how to tickle it.’

The problem with the generator was easy to rectify. She could have done it with her eyes closed, which was just as well, as it was dark.

‘You’ve got to clean it out more often,’ Julia said, itching her nose and leaving an oily smear on her cheek that she would not discover until morning. ‘The trouble with you lot is you’re lazy sods.’ She checked her watch by torchlight. An hour had passed. ‘You owe me.’

‘We’ll pay you back,’ said Arnott.

‘With what?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Beddoes. ‘I’m spoken for.’

‘I want to man the gun,’ she said.

Arnott said, ‘We were wondering when you would get round to asking.’

‘Hop up, Sinclair,’ Beddoes said. ‘Your steed awaits you.’

Julia clambered up into the gun seat and felt a surge of pure agency.

‘Pity it’s so quiet,’ Arnott said.

What happened next had the quality of a dream. For the first time that night, the sirens wailed. ‘Purple!’ came the shout. Soldiers sped to their posts.

Searchlights combed the sky.

‘On!’

‘On!’

‘Bearing 235! Angle 15!’

‘Fire!’ shouted Arnott.

Her foot stamped on the pedal. Flames. A huge explosion in the dark sky.

Lieutenant Woodbury came out of his office as she was heading back to Ada Street. ‘I gather you christened the barrel last night, Sinclair. With a kill.’

‘A hit?’

‘Confirmed this morning. You know I could have you put on a charge.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So we’ll credit this one to Beddoes, shall we?’

‘How about Arnott, sir?’ She had a soft spot for Arnott.

‘Right you are, Corporal. Arnott it is. Enjoy your leave.’