This time I hadn’t put a sixpence in the ceiling – or even my secret penny. I didn’t let myself think about it. I was not a fool-fool country gal.
The engines roared and the Blenheim bumped over the airfield. I couldn’t see the take-off, but I knew when we left the ground because the jouncing stopped. I wrestled myself up into the clear Perspex gunner’s turret. There wasn’t any point worrying about anything for the next few hours, and the beauty of the sea and sky in silver moonlight and blue clouds was like a fairy world, a dream world. I was amazed by the cold night sky, the clouds filled with luminous light and shadow as we rose through them, the full moon dipping in and out of view, stars frozen still overhead. I wasn’t afraid of anything.
Jamie’s laughing voice came over the intercom.
‘Rear gunner, you’re making a lot of noise. Keep it down.’
I was humming Rhapsody in Blue. Just the way Mummy used to hum without thinking about it! The sky was wonderful.
And the cold – the cold! It was unreal. Even after three years in England, I was not ready for this kind of cold. After ten minutes I had to grip the sides of the turret to stop my body from shuddering. My toes and fingers began to ache. Frost began to fur the inside of the plane – all the struts and rivets and wires grew velvety white coats. When I breathed, the inside of my mask was slick with a thin layer of ice. The Perspex near my head became foggy, froze, and fogged again.
I kicked my feet and clapped my gauntleted hands to warm them up. Jamie and Silver had both given me their extra socks. I was bundled up with heated Ever-Hot bags. What could anyone do if I complained? I couldn’t complain. We were in the sky over the North Sea.
Now and then Silver gave Jamie a heading or a height. Through the crackle and fuzz of the headset I could hear people talking in the other B-Flight planes. Nobody was singing in German or sending coded messages. The cold, beautiful sky was quiet in its garment of clouds and moonlight.
I don’t know how long we’d been flying, but after a bit I wasn’t getting moments of moonlight any more, and I could only see a star if I looked straight up. Then there were no stars, either. Clouds rose all around, blue and black and mysterious, more shadow than light.
Then there wasn’t any light. It was all the close darkness of fog.
‘All B-Flight aircraft, this is Pimms Leader,’ Jamie called. ‘Better turn back, lads. I don’t like this cloud.’
I heard protests from the other airmen. Ignacy’s Polish accent stood out. ‘A good cloud is the Blenheim bomber’s best friend!’
‘You’re not hedge-hopping over the Netherlands any more, and it isn’t summer. Remember A-Flight in the fog in Shetland? We’ve got too many sprogs flying tonight – no offence, Stedman, but most of your lads are just as fresh as mine. North Sea ice and fog are no conditions for new pilots.’
‘Righto, Pimms Leader,’ called Adam Stedman, Madeira’s leader, in agreement. ‘But I’m not a sprog. I’m on instruments.’
‘So am I. You and I can complete the op ourselves,’ said Jamie. ‘The rest of you head back now. Get beneath the cloud if you can; watch out for engine and airframe ice. And spread out. Don’t try to stay together. I don’t want any collisions.’
I couldn’t see any horizon – it was all murk.
Jamie had said to let him know if anything bothered me, and something did.
‘If you can fly on instruments, can’t the Luftwaffe also?’ I asked.
‘Someone in a crate like ours could, yes,’ he answered lightly. ‘A bomber could. But they’re unlikely to send any Messers out into this soup. Fighters have to see you to shoot at you. Don’t worry.’
I tried not to worry. It was smooth flying. But if a mountain or another plane suddenly loomed in front of us, we’d never see it.
‘Just checking we’re on parallel headings,’ Adam Stedman came in over the static. ‘And that you’re above me. I can’t see you.’
‘Affirm to both. And I can’t see you either.’
‘Give that de-icer another pump, would you?’ Silver said. ‘Those engines sound rough.’
‘Aye. Wish we could get out of this muck.’
‘Shall we try a different heading?’
‘I don’t want to run into Stedman,’ I said. ‘I’ll go higher and see if we can clear the cloud. We’ll give it fifteen minutes and reassess. I can’t believe any Jerry pilot’s out here in this frozen cotton wool trying to bomb a fishing boat. They can’t see what’s down there any more than we can.’
Ugh, Louisa could hear everything we said. She wasn’t a worrier, but I was pretty sure she was worried.
‘You all right back there, rear gunner?’ I said over the intercom.
‘A bit cold,’ she admitted.
‘Can you feel your toes?’
‘Yes, and I wish I couldn’t!’
Brave lass! ‘No you don’t. If they hurt they’ll be all right.’ I felt I owed her more of an apology. ‘I’m sorry about the clouds. I wouldn’t have invited you if I’d known you wouldn’t see anything.’
‘It was lovely before,’ she said staunchly.
We flew on. The seconds crept by. It felt like an hour by the time fifteen minutes had ticked off. Well, we’d given it our best shot; we’d never find anything out here tonight, and neither would anyone else.
‘That’s it, Stedman, let’s go,’ I said. ‘This is a washout. Hold your height. And take care.’
‘See you back in Scotland,’ crackled Stedman’s voice.
‘Heading two-zero-five,’ said Silver.
I began to turn, eyes glued to the instrument panel. Poor Louisa probably couldn’t tell which way was up. Outside was nothing but suffocating cloud and the faint, pale glow of the frosted airframe.
The flight home seemed longer than it should have been. It wasn’t; I could tell by the clock. But I began to feel I was flying in circles, even though I knew I was holding a steady course.
‘Aren’t we there yet?’ I asked Silver.
‘Give it another minute on this heading,’ he answered, and there was strain in his voice, too.
Time crawled on. The luminous clock dial told me so.
Louisa dared to ask, ‘Are we lost?’
‘No, we’re not lost,’ I assured her. ‘But it’s not fun to fly in.’
‘Oh,’ Louisa said. She didn’t sound reassured.
‘Heading one-nine-zero,’ said Silver.
Louisa didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything she could do to help.
‘Can’t you give me a direct course?’ I asked.
‘No, in case we overshoot and fly into a mountain,’ Silver answered. ‘We don’t want to descend below safety height. Not in cloud like this – one-nine-zero—’
I banked slowly to port.
Louisa’s voice yelled in my ears.
‘Kingsleap Light!’
I saw it too, far below, a brilliant green ray piercing the clouds for one second. I spiralled down over the lighthouse, knowing I wouldn’t hit anything out at sea. The cloud was so low it sent fingers wreathing around the lighthouse tower. But we could see white foam against the black waves below, crashing on the Kingsleap Rocks.
Louisa’s voice came urgently in my headset.
‘“Hold green light await fog!”’
‘What?’ I asked automatically. ‘“Hold green light”?’
A second later I realized why the words were familiar.
HOLD GREEN LIGHT AWAIT FOG
‘“Await fog”! It’s an instruction!’ Louisa cried. ‘They always say “green light” when they mean Kingsleap – it means wait for a fog and then have another go at Windyedge!’
She’d cracked it.
‘What the—?’ Silver asked.
We were so close to Windyedge we ought to have seen the flashing beacon at the end of the runway. It wasn’t on, because I hadn’t called in yet. Presumably it was on earlier, when the rest of B-Flight came back. I couldn’t see the sea cliffs. If I left the lighthouse I would have to climb into fog to be sure I didn’t hit them.
But an enemy bomber wouldn’t have to worry about hitting the cliffs if he oriented himself by the lighthouse and stayed high as he came in over the airfield.
‘There may be a Luftwaffe bandit heading this way,’ I said to Silver. ‘We’d better do a bit of a patrol. There’s plenty of fuel left. If anyone asks, we’ll give credit to our ace wireless operator overhearing enemy transmissions.’
I called Adam Stedman to join me, and I called to the radio room on the ground and told them not to light up, and to man the anti-aircraft guns. Finally, for Louisa’s benefit, I said, ‘Hold on back there. Could be a false alarm …’
Adam came rumbling out of the clouds and flew right round the base of the lighthouse, making sure we could see each other. Then we both flew in long ellipses, one of us on each end of the curve, out to sea and back, peering into nothing.
It felt as though time had stopped still. Maybe we were already dead and this was purgatory, circling in the frozen dark forever, adjusting the angle of bank on the long turns, looking for an enemy that might not exist.
‘There!’
Silver and Louisa yelled together.
It was a Junkers 88 Luftwaffe bomber, a hulking black shape caught in the green loom of the lighthouse beam.
‘Get out of that turret!’ I yelled at Louisa.
But I didn’t – if I was going to die in an air battle I wanted to see it.
The Luftwaffe plane came out of the fog below us, a black shadow bathed in green light. I couldn’t hear the German engines’ tell-tale throb because of my headset and our own engines.
‘I’m going in,’ called Adam Stedman, and I saw sizzling red tracks through the air made by his firing guns.
The lighthouse beam turned. I couldn’t see Adam’s Blenheim or the German plane.
‘Are you out?’ Jamie called.
‘Yes, on you go—’
We dived. I couldn’t tell where the target was, but Silver barked directions to Jamie as if he could see in the dark.
The Blenheims took turns heckling the Luftwaffe bomber. When Jamie swooped down, all I could see was the frosted Perspex of the turret, glowing red as the inside of a pomegranate. I felt the dive and heard the guns in my stomach.
We swooped back up, avoiding the swinging lighthouse beam. Below us, red and blue light flickered as the Madeira Blenheim and the Ju-88 fired at each other. I saw a burst of orange flame, but it instantly went dark again.
‘He’s away!’ came Adam Stedman’s triumphant yell. ‘I think I got an engine. He wasn’t expecting an attack, was he!’
‘Think he’ll risk climbing into the cloud and bombing Windyedge on one engine?’ Jamie asked sharply.
‘Don’t know – hope not – well, I bloody well wouldn’t if it was me. It’s a long way back to Norway on one iced-up engine.’
Over the sea cliffs I saw a warm yellow glow like a great big firefly in the dark. It was a window in the Limehouse whose blackout curtains were pulled back. The light blazed boldly into the war-torn night at two o’clock in the morning.
‘Bloody hell,’ cursed Adam Stedman. ‘That’ll tell them where to aim, if they’re still flying.’
‘Someone’s scared of the dark,’ Jamie muttered. ‘I bet I know who.’
He radioed Windyedge and told them to ring the Limehouse and get Mrs Campbell to ‘close her bloody curtains’.
Only the double bedrooms faced south-east. Mrs Campbell would be the first to get in trouble, but it wasn’t her bedroom showing light. Miss Lind’s room had the big bay window.
Stedman and I patrolled for another twenty minutes before we landed. But the bomber didn’t come back, and finally I got Windyedge to light the beacon for us. There wasn’t much gap between cloud and land, but we could see the flashing red light at the end of the runway.
It wasn’t my best landing. But we’d done a hell of a night’s work.
‘I hope you haven’t turned into a block of ice,’ I called to Louisa as we bounced over the frozen field.
‘I’m warm as toast!’ she lied through chattering teeth.
Wonderful Louisa!
HOLD GREEN LIGHT AWAIT FOG
What if she hadn’t been along, putting the puzzle pieces together?
We’d have landed, and the Ju-88 would have seen the beacon and followed us in.
All the B-Flight Blenheims would have been lined up on the ground beneath the bombs.
I spent most of the night worrying that Texas Sunshine would freeze to death in the back of the Tilly, so I sat freezing with him to make sure he didn’t.
It was fearsome to watch the haar sea mist roll in and the moonlight disappear, and after the first planes came back, to spend a terrible hour waiting for the section leaders – and, God pity her, for Louisa. I heard the engines, Adam and Jamie flying round and round above us out at sea, as if it were too foggy for them to land. They circled most of another hour. No one outside the radio room knew what was happening. The beacon stayed dark, and Adam and Jamie stayed in the air.
Then came the battle over the lighthouse. You couldn’t see anything but flashes in the cloud, like distant lightning.
And then, hurrah, hurrah, the beacon winking on, and the planes roaring in with their landing lights shining, safe as houses.
I fired up the Tilly and raced to meet Jamie’s Blenheim trundling over the frozen grass. I got there before any other body and was halfway up the wing myself when the crew tumbled out. I hugged that rear gunner as tight as I could hug, and felt wee arms in deep padding hugging me back. God be thanked.
‘All right, lads?’ I asked, when we all had our feet on the ground.
‘Not dead yet,’ Jamie answered cheerfully. ‘Give us a smoke, lass.’
‘Got the shakes again?’
‘Don’t be silly. Takes more than a mite of cloud and a few squirts of machine-gun fire to make me lose my nerve.’
I lit him a cigarette anyway, and he gave it to Louisa, who I’m guessing had never smoked in her life. Clever lass passed it to Silver straightaway – she knew she’d blow her cover if she started choking and spluttering over her first cigarette. Silver took a drag, handed it back to Jamie, and went to open the van.
‘We’d better get this gunner to bed, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘His toes might be a bit cold, and he’s in no state for debriefing.’
‘Right you are!’ said Jamie.
Chip was still snoring as Jamie and Silver carried him into their barracks. Louisa stayed out of the way and rode home with me on the back of my bike as Jamie and Silver headed to ops to be grilled about their flight.
‘Give that Swiss milkmaid a bollocking for leaving her light on,’ was the last thing Jamie told us.
Scolding Elisabeth Lind for her blackout violation wasn’t the first thing on my mind as I limped up through the inky stairwell in the Limehouse. My feet had never been so cold in my entire life.
I stayed in the bathroom for nearly two hours, sitting on the chilly linoleum in the dark, rubbing my feet with a towel and crying as quietly as I could. The bathroom was safe; no one would come in during the night. The hot water was off till 7 a.m., and the loo was in its own closet next door. If I made no noise, no one would notice me.
I kept an ear out for Jane in case she got up, but by four o’clock in the morning I was so tired I thought I might be able to go to bed and sleep off the rest of the pain. I dragged myself out of the bathroom and started down the passage to Room Number Five.
As I crossed the landing at the top of the stairwell, I heard a noise in the hall below me like a trapdoor closing.
I panicked.
How had that woman got herself downstairs without me noticing? Not again!
The rest of the house was silent, still and dark. I knew for a fact Nancy Campbell finished counting in the landing Blenheims over three hours ago.
I put one burning foot down on the top step, then hesitated as I realised what the sound downstairs had been. There was a big medieval wooden bench in the hall with storage under the seat. The sound I’d heard was the lid closing. I didn’t think Jane could stand and lift that lid herself.
Then I heard the door of the telephone cupboard open, and I could tell that someone was sweeping the beam of an electric torch about inside it. I waited, listening. The torch went dark; I couldn’t hear footsteps, but a minute later the door of Mrs Campbell’s office snicked open.
Whoever was down there was moving so furtively that I wondered if we were being burgled.
But the creeper seemed too familiar with the place to be a sneak thief – perhaps it was Nan checking windows after the blackout violation. The office door closed again. There wasn’t any more light. The person was being very cautious.
Footsteps came treading deliberately up the staircase.
I took another step down and grabbed the rail, gasping with the shock of the sudden weight on my feet.
Whoever it was must have known now that I was there. If I tried to run back to the bathroom or my room, it would just look suspicious. Even ridiculous. So I sat down at the top of the stairs and waited.
Three-quarters of the way up, the stalker stopped and lit a match.
‘Oh,’ said Miss Lind when she saw me.
For a moment our eyes were level.
Hers were clear amber, like dark honey, in the matchlight. She shook the match to put it out before it burned her fingers.
‘Hello,’ Miss Lind said softly.
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.
‘What are you doing up?’ she fired back.
Her pretty vixen’s face lit again as she struck another match and touched the flame to a cigarette. She vanished into the dark once more as the match went out. She took a quiet drag on her cigarette; the red glow of its burning tip wasn’t enough to light her face.
‘I was in the bathroom, not sneaking around in the dark!’ I objected. ‘And you had your light on before, which anyone could see from ten miles away,’ I added in accusation. ‘There was a Luftwaffe bomber out there!’
She made an alarmed noise like a cat’s hiss.
‘I heard the engines,’ she whispered. ‘I thought it was our own planes coming back! I knew the Blenheims were circling, and I thought they couldn’t land because of the fog! I put on the light for them, not for the Luftwaffe – it’s terrible, waiting on the ground and not being able to help!’
‘It was jolly careless of you if you’re working for Intelligence!’
‘I know it. Cromwell chewed me out on the telephone and said he’d report me.’ I heard her give a sharp, snorting sigh through her nose. ‘I’m sorry. But I thought if they could see my light, they’d know which way to come in. I had to do it.’
‘I know,’ I said. I understood why. ‘You’re Jamie’s sister.’
She was silent for a moment.
I added quickly, ‘Don’t tell me your real name. I don’t want to use it by accident.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ She drew on her cigarette. It glowed red and faded again before she asked, ‘What gave me away?’
‘Ellen told me.’
‘Thank heavens you didn’t work it out yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s hell not being able to speak to Jamie in case someone notices the family resemblance. It’s such a stupid charade, trying to keep the Germans happy, when they won’t tell me anything anyway. Although I suppose it is good practice.’
Miss Lind lit another match. She cupped it in her hands, holding the cigarette between her fingers, and came the rest of the way up the stairs. She sat down beside me on the top step before the match went out. I felt her shuffling about in the dark as she reached into the pocket of her silk dressing gown. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘What were you hunting for downstairs?’
She returned fire just the way she did earlier. ‘How do you know my light was on?’
Oh, bother. If I’d been in bed when I was supposed to, with our own blackout curtains properly drawn, I shouldn’t have been able to see her window.
‘I’ll tell you if you tell me,’ I offered.
‘You first, then,’ she said.
‘I went flying with Jamie.’
She took a deep breath.
‘All right.’
She spoke practically in a whisper. I could feel her close beside me, a warm bundle of rustling inky silk in the inky dark.
‘I told you Felix Baer doesn’t trust me. I know you haven’t been able to do anything about it – how could you, really? But I can’t just come clean with Cromwell, either. I also have to answer to my department in Intelligence, and the German navigator – Dietrich Althammer – told me the most extraordinary thing today. He accused Cromwell of using a coding machine that Baer brought here in November. He says Baer had no authorisation to give it to Cromwell, and Althammer and Moritz want to convince Cromwell to turn it over to the correct authorities. My department. Except …’
She paused. I didn’t say anything.
‘Except Cromwell hasn’t got it. Cromwell doesn’t know anything about it. Yet the Germans think someone’s using it.’
I kept my lips pressed together.
‘The thing is, my department has been expecting this particular machine. The German Navy and Luftwaffe have used these things since the beginning of the war, since before the war, to generate code for the messages they send each other about their attack plans. Intelligence has an entire operation trying to crack the codes these machines generate, and they can’t do it. Coastal Defence hears German wireless communications flying about all the time, but no one can decode any of it. We already know how their machines work. But if we could capture one and get the settings to go along with it, we’d have a chance of cracking their code. Not just in the North Sea. All over the Atlantic. One machine, and a few pages of paper.
‘And Odysseus was supposed to bring us both,’ she finished. ‘But the paperwork was destroyed when the airfield here was bombed, and the machine never turned up.’
The paperwork was destroyed when Windyedge was bombed!
‘Oh, crumbs,’ I breathed. ‘I didn’t know – none of us knew.’
‘Didn’t know what?’ Miss Lind asked carefully.
‘That it was the only one!’
None of us realised how special it was. Not really.
‘Does that mean—’ She caught her breath.
‘Cromwell doesn’t have it,’ she said. ‘You have it. You have it!’
Her excited voice didn’t get louder – it dwindled to a sharp, hissed whisper. ‘Who’s “us”, anyway?’
‘Jamie and Ellen. And Jane.’ I rushed to get the confession over with. ‘Jamie picks up the code and Ellen drops it off here. I decode it with the settings Felix Baer left. Jane translates the German. Then we know where the U-boats will be.’
‘Settings!’ She laughed wildly. ‘You have the settings!’
‘We copied the leaflets,’ I whispered. ‘I made copies before Jamie turned them in.’
‘Proper little secret society!’ she gasped. ‘My God! Do you know how many scores of codebreakers are frantically trying to crack this technology?’
‘No,’ I answered, still whispering. ‘How could we?’
Elisabeth Lind drew a shaky breath on her cigarette, tapped off the ash, and brushed it beneath the coconut matting on the stairs.
‘Ellen said to give you the machine,’ I admitted. ‘It’s – it’s contaminated. We’ve run out of settings, and the Germans know we have it and they’re laying a trap for our planes.’
‘How in blazes do you know that?’ she exclaimed.
‘Felix Baer told me.’
‘Of course he did.’ She was breathless with excitement. ‘I am most impressed.’
‘I wanted to help,’ I said, feeling idiotic.
‘You did. You have.’ She laughed again. ‘You have. You are. How were you to know there wasn’t a stolen Enigma machine in every RAF base in Britain? Jamie might have guessed, but you weren’t to know. At any rate—’ Her cigarette glowed. ‘At any rate, now we have one!’
‘Shall I fetch it for you?’ I asked. ‘It’s in Jane’s wardrobe.’
‘Ah—!’ She hesitated. Then she said reluctantly, ‘No. No, not just now, not at four in the morning. It’s as safe there as anyplace, for the moment. It will take a bit of work to ship it to the proper Intelligence boffins. It would be jolly bad luck if another bomb dropped on it.’ Her voice fell to a whisper again. ‘But I would love to see it.’
‘Come visit us tomorrow,’ I invited.
Never had I been so glad to climb in over the foot of the bed in Room Number Five and curl up next to the old woman I was here to look after. Jane’s soft, purring snore seemed like the quietest sound I’d ever heard. I was still cold and my feet still hurt, and my confession to Sergeant Elisabeth Lind hadn’t untangled the knots in my stomach. I didn’t know what Falle Enigma was going to be; the German prisoners were still locked in the limekilns; the Luftwaffe bombers would come back.
But as I lay in the dark next to Jane I still felt sure I was in the safest place in the house.
I slept nearly till permitted hours the next day, and woke to find Jane pottering about in one of her fur coats. I sat up in bed. It was just gone eleven o’clock in the morning; the gas fire glowed warmly, and the windows gleamed with a dull, pale light I’d never seen before.
‘It’s snowing,’ Jane said. ‘It has been coming down all morning. Nancy lit our fire early, entirely for your benefit, I believe, and she has even brought up a pot of tea. She says the snow is halfway to her knees already! When did you come in?’
‘Snowing!’ I exclaimed, scrambling for the window. ‘Snowing!’
I’d never seen proper snow. In London we got sleet or sometimes sooty slush. The high moors around Windyedge had been white all winter, but this was the first picture-postcard snow I’d ever seen up close. I threw the window open and leaned into the sill over the books.
‘It smells different!’
I scooped snow off the sill and licked it. A flurry of wet flakes gusted into my face and the Scotch pines sighed.
‘It sounds different!’
Jane laughed at me. ‘Shut the window,’ she said. ‘The fire is on.’
‘Can the Blenheims fly in snow?’ I exclaimed.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Jane.
‘I told Miss Lind about the Enigma machine,’ I confessed.
Elisabeth Lind came in for five minutes, carefully avoiding Nancy Campbell. She was so excited it made her weep. She gave a little sob as she opened the shining wooden lid of the cipher machine, and another as she pressed a key and a lamp came on.
‘I’ve never touched one,’ she whispered. ‘Show me how the code works.’
I opened my exercise book to the first message I’d decoded, and showed her.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t call it contaminated just because they want to trick you. It’s the purest piece of machinery I’ve ever seen. It has to do what it’s told.’
I know it sounds mad, but I knew what she meant.
‘When the snow is gone I shall have to send it away,’ she said wistfully. ‘I’m a bit envious of you getting to really use it.’
The 648 Squadron airmen spent the day digging out Blenheims and clearing the runway, and the ground crew paraded up the lane to clear it as far as the main road. Ellen was busy hauling spades and soldiers; the Tilly rattled on tyres wound up in chains. I kept running to the window to try to see what was going on, and just before it got dark Jane insisted I run outside. She sat in the bar where Mrs Campbell could keep an eye on her, while I borrowed Mrs Campbell’s boots again and went down to the harbour to look at the snow falling on the cliffs and in the sea. My feet seemed back to normal, thank goodness.
Low gold winter sunlight streamed through the south-east windows when I woke up the next morning, lighting corners of the room and casting shadows behind the furniture. The radio played while Jane poked about in the top dresser drawers, hunting for something. I jumped up to help.
‘Oh, just a clean handkerchief!’ she told me. ‘I can’t find a single one.’
‘I washed them all yesterday. They’re on the drying rack by the bathtub. I’ll fetch one – but it won’t be ironed yet, you know! Do sit down – I don’t like to leave you on your feet.’
‘I can manage being on my feet in this room by myself perfectly well, as you know.’
‘All the same!’
I made her sit. I darted down the passage, stepped into the bathroom, and switched on the light.
The whole world seemed to explode.
It was a roar louder than being inside a Blenheim in the air, louder than standing next to a Messerschmitt 109 starting its engines. It was an explosion of thunder so suffocating I couldn’t hear my own shriek. The light overhead flickered out. The house shook. The floor beneath my feet shook. All I could think was that it was an earthquake, as once happened when Mummy and I were hanging out washing in our Kingston garden and we were both knocked off our feet – nothing else I ever felt could make a house tremble. I pressed my back against the bathroom wall, waiting for the earth to stop moving.
When the world set itself aright, I tore back to Room Five where I’d left Jane sitting in her nightgown listening to Music While You Work on the wireless.
The radio was dead and she was lying on the floor.
She had jumped up when the thundering started. The shaking hadn’t knocked her over – it just startled her so much she lost her balance.
She was doubled over between the armchair and the bed, whimpering. She had taken all her weight on her right hand as she threw it out ahead of her to break her fall.
It was as if she’d stepped into a time machine and come out twenty years older.
She cried and sobbed. She didn’t cooperate when I tried to help her sit up. I coaxed and pleaded and finally scolded. That made her whimper in a new and different way, whiny and snivelling, which shocked me. Finally I managed to make her roll on to her side – and gaped in horror when I saw that the last three fingers of her right hand were bent sideways.
But it was her wrist, not her fingers, that she grabbed at with her other hand. She cradled the hurt hand against her chest, moaning. I thought she’d broken her arm.
I was either going to have to leave her to get help, or yell my lungs out to make someone hear me.
‘Help! Help! Ellen! Phyllis! Nan!’
I’d left our door open, and Elisabeth Lind came flying into the dusty sunlight of our room wearing nothing but a fancy French silk bra and knickers, and one very ordinary darned wool stocking that was part of her WAAF uniform. She’d been getting dressed. She was not the least bit embarrassed. She knew what to do.
‘Stop moving her about,’ she told me sharply. ‘Mrs Warner, can you hear me? Did you hit your head? No? Ah, thank goodness—’
‘My wrist – mein Ärm ist gebrochen – ah—’
‘Shh – no German.’
With Miss Lind on one side and me on the other, we helped Jane to sit. She moaned again as Miss Lind examined her hand. Her twisted fingers were horrible.
‘I don’t think these are broken,’ Miss Lind said cheerfully. ‘The same thing happened to one of my brothers, well very nearly, and when we rushed him to the doctor’s it turned out they were only dislocated. May I?’
I could not look. I held Jane tightly, and Sergeant Elisabeth Lind straightened those fingers out all by herself.
‘Can you bend them?’ she asked kindly, and Jane could, a little. ‘Good. And the wrist – can you move it?’
Miss Lind held her own hand palm to palm against Jane’s, their fingers interlocked. She rocked Jane’s hand gently back and forth and side to side.
‘I don’t think you’ve broken a thing, Mrs Warner,’ said Miss Lind. ‘I think the wrist is just a sprain. But it will all hurt a good deal while everything mends. We ought to bind these fingers together and wrap up your wrist.’
‘But I won’t be able—’ Jane sobbed.
And I thought of a hundred things she would not be able to do, just without those three fingers, never mind her wrist. Playing piano duets was the least of it. She wouldn’t be able to dress herself; go to the toilet; put on shoes; use her sticks. She wouldn’t be able to walk independently, or sit down on her own, or stand up again.
‘How shall we get you off the floor?’ Miss Lind mused. ‘I don’t think we can lift you.’
‘If I put this arm around Louisa’s shoulder and you help on the other side, I think we can manage,’ Jane whispered.
I was so relieved to hear her speaking sensible English without tears that I kissed her. She was still in pain, unsteady, but no longer a defeated, whimpering old woman.
‘What happened?’ I asked Miss Lind. ‘I thought it was an earthquake!’
‘It was a bomb,’ said Elisabeth Lind in a low voice. ‘They very nearly got us that time.’
‘Yes they did,’ I answered accusingly. ‘They know just where we are. Maybe they will stop if they think it was a direct hit.’
She flushed and changed the subject. ‘Last time I was caught in an air raid I had my clothes on! This is most embarrassing.’ She snapped the top of her one stocking against her thigh.
‘On the contrary,’ whispered Jane. ‘You always look lovely.’
It was true, Miss Lind was annoyingly lovely, even wearing nothing but underthings and one darned stocking, her hair flying out of its plait like an untidy cloud of corn-coloured candy floss. Her make-up never seemed to smear – I wondered if she slept in it. She didn’t even look cold. She jumped up and began scavenging for something to wrap up Jane’s fingers and wrist.
I kissed Jane’s silver-white hair again. She was recovered enough to be herself – I could tell. Fighting. Thinking.
But my job had just become a hundred times more difficult.
I was downstairs in uniform and eating porridge when the bomb hit. The glasses rattled. My bowl slid and smashed on the flagstones. Nancy gave a wail and disappeared for a moment below the counter on the other side of the bar.
By the time the roaring stopped and I’d dived behind the bar to haul Nan to her feet and try to shut her skriking, Nobby Fergusson was pounding on the door – he’d seen the bomb fall and thought it hit the Limehouse. I left him with Nan and ran upstairs to Jane and Louisa.
There stood Sergeant Lind in her naughty French underthings and one stocking. I let out a howl of laughter and choked on it one second later when I spied Louisa on the floor with Jane.
‘That was a Luftwaffe Junkers 88 with a fighter escort of Me-110s,’ I told them, passing on what Nobby told me. ‘They came straight here and scarpered off again, whilst our lot are stuck on the ground clearing snow, and one of our lads, not saying who, never made it out of bed yesterday. And Deeside is snowed in too. Not a single RAF plane in the sky to chase off the Jerries, and they still missed the airfield!’
‘They might be aiming for something else,’ Louisa said quietly.
‘Mrs Warner needs a bandage,’ Sergeant Lind said. ‘She’s twisted her wrist and dislocated her fingers.’
‘I’ll fetch Nan’s first-aid kit. Are you hurt, Louisa?’
Louisa shook her head.
‘They got the hill above the limekilns,’ I went on. ‘If they’d waited a tenth of a second longer it would have hit this house.’
Elisabeth Lind went to get dressed, but Louisa didn’t want to leave Jane. We bound up the old woman’s wrist and fingers, and pulled her off the floor and pushed her into the big stuffed armchair. But we couldn’t put clothes on her and there was no way to get her downstairs unless someone carried her.
The bomb that missed the Limehouse did not fall harmlessly. You could tell that by leaning from Louisa’s window. There were sirens and shouts, and a scraping and pounding noise of men using spades and pickaxes against rock. The trees on the hill were aflame, and there came a delicious smell of burning pine, even through the window glass.
‘Louisa, you must go find out what’s happening!’ Jane told her.
‘But you can’t get up! Supposing the house is on fire!’
Jane snapped at her, ‘Goodness, girl, you’d better find out if it is, hadn’t you!’
Louisa and I both jumped. We’d neither one of us ever heard her speak so sharply.
‘You can get about and I can’t,’ Jane scolded. ‘Stop dithering and earn your keep.’
Louisa looked as if she’d laugh and cry all at once.
‘Bring me some coffee if the house isn’t on fire,’ Jane added in a gentler voice. ‘I will hold the fort, as they say.’
In the public bar, soldiers and firemen and the village Home Guard were running in and out and shouting to one another. The house did not look as if it were on the brink of falling down or burning up, but it was dark as a well because of the electricity being out. Nan rushed about boiling kettles and supplying folk with towels and blankets through the back door.
‘What’s happened?’ I exclaimed.
‘The limekilns have collapsed,’ Nan answered grimly. ‘Those Jerry prisoners are trapped. Maybe worse.’
‘Oh no!’ Louisa cried.
Nan gave her a strange look.
‘RAF Windyedge sent their fire crew across. They’ll dig ’em out,’ Nan said. ‘The snow’s melting fast, and if they clear the runway I think the lads will be flying tonight.’
‘I ken, I’ve got to hike back to the airfield in case they need me in the Tilly,’ I said. ‘Phyllis went before the bomb fell. Where’s Sergeant Lind?’
Nan shrugged. ‘Wing Commander Cromwell popped in and nabbed her so she can translate when they dig out the Jerries. There’s that much going on, I’m as glad not to have the house full of guests the day. Louisa, could you take this can of porridge out—’
‘I’ll do it, Mrs Campbell,’ I interrupted. ‘Louisa has to stay with Mrs Warner. She tumbled over when the bomb hit and she’s hurt her arm. She can’t use her sticks.’
Nan pushed her wispy black hair away from her face and rubbed her eyes.
‘Whisht, I never believed I’d see this day,’ she muttered, and slammed a full kettle on the hob. The blue flame of the gas burner gave a merry glow – God be thanked, the gas mains weren’t damaged. ‘Is she all right?’ Nan asked. ‘Does she need the doctor?’
As a Traveller I don’t believe I ever wanted a doctor in all my years, but after I’d seen one or two airmen fly in with punctured lungs after an op, I respected medical folk more than I did as a wee lassie. Aye, Jane ought to see a doctor – but it could probably wait until the blaze in the nearby trees had been put out, and the trapped men rescued.
Louisa thought the same. ‘She’ll do for the moment,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after her just now.’
Jane said she wanted coffee.
I tiptoed around the kitchen, trying not to get in Mrs Campbell’s way as I put together a tray. I couldn’t bear to think of what was happening in the limekilns; it took every bit of sense I had in me not to pull on Mrs Campbell’s wellie boots again and rush outside. I carried Jane’s tray upstairs. We couldn’t listen to the radio, but we heard the men digging.
Early in the afternoon, the emergency workers uncovered Eberhard Moritz, and he was all right. They moved him to the aerodrome and kept digging. At the same time, men were also mending the underground electric cables that powered the Limehouse. I found this out from Morag Torrie, who brought us tea and sandwiches and some arnica tincture to rub on Jane’s hurt hand.
‘Mrs Campbell’s popped down to the village,’ Morag said. ‘There were so many folk in this morning, with the rescue, that she’s out of milk and tea and cheese. I don’t think she’ll get any at the shop – she’s not got the extra ration tickets and is cross about it. You’ve got the last of the bread. I’m off work now so I’ll lock up, as the other girls are at the air base and you’re alone here. Is Mrs Warner warm enough? Oh, the fire’s on and it’s not three o’clock yet. Does Mrs Campbell know?’
We both looked at the fire. I noticed that the meter had about an hour to go before it would need another shilling.
‘She said to put it on for Mrs Warner, as she’s hurt and can’t come downstairs,’ I said.
‘Mrs Campbell is a very generous woman underneath,’ said Morag stoutly. ‘She’ll let herself in, but don’t open up to that emergency crew, because there isn’t anything else to feed them!’
‘You can count on us to hold the fort,’ Jane repeated, as if it hadn’t taken her twenty minutes to get to the toilet and back, hobbling with me for support and hanging on me with her bad arm over my shoulder while she wiped with her good one.
So Morag went and we held the fort.
Holding the fort meant trying to read aloud to Jane and stopping every ten minutes to stick my head out the window and try to work out if anything new had happened. We were both wildly restless. After an hour Jane exclaimed, ‘This will never do! Louisa, why don’t you bring up the gramophone? We can have a concert.’
So I went to get it.
Downstairs was dark. Even in daytime the unlit hall was gloomy, because it faced north-west and had only the one tall, narrow window letting in light opposite the landing at the top of the stairs. The public bar was gloomy too just now, without the fire burning or the lamp lit. I felt like an intruder. I hadn’t ever been there during the day without people about.
I chose a stack of five record albums and laid them on an empty table to come back for. I took the gramophone up to Jane, set it on the floor between her and the bed where she could reach it, and came back down for the records.
As I returned to the shadowy front hall with my arms full, I heard footsteps above me shuffling along the passage from the back of the house.
My heart did its too-familiar somersault of guilt and fear. Had Jane managed to get to her feet and tried to reach the loo without my help? If she was using just one stick and fell again, wouldn’t she likely try to catch herself with her empty hand – the hurt one?
I’d only been gone a minute!
I put down the records to free my arms so I could hold up Jane if she needed it.
Just as I started to climb the stairs, a young man in a flight suit crossed the landing above me and vanished down the dim passage.
I didn’t see who it was, though I didn’t think it was Jamie; it looked like a bigger man. But I wasn’t afraid – there were airmen all over Windyedge. How had he got in, whoever he was? Morag had locked the door behind her. Had he been here all afternoon, since before Nan Campbell left the house?
I went up the stairs after him.
By the time I got to the landing, he’d reached Room Five. I’d left the door open, to make the return trip easier, expecting my arms to be full of records. I heard the airman gently close the door behind him.
I followed him down the passage and stood outside my own shut door, listening.
Jane was speaking calm, matter-of-fact German.
She didn’t sound frightened. She sounded perfectly at ease – interested. Pleasant. Amused.
The man answered her in German.
His voice was hoarse and ragged, a person at the end of his strength and patience. The polite way he spoke to Jane was familiar, and I remembered how the navigator Dietrich Althammer had bent towards her so she could hear him, as if she were his own granny.
Althammer was the one Felix Baer didn’t trust, the one he’d tried to kill, just as they were coming in to land, when Althammer had least expected it.
I heard him say a word I understood, and Jane repeated it.
Enigma.
He was looking for the coding machine.
I didn’t know what to do. If I went in, wouldn’t Jane and I both be trapped? One smallish fifteen-year-old girl and one tottering eighty-two-year-old woman with a sprained wrist were not going to overpower a strong young airman, even if he had been locked up underground for a week.
His footsteps crossed the room as he made for the door.
I fled down the passage and through the first doorway I came to that was standing open – the loo.
I darted behind the open door. Better not to try to close it … Was I breathing too loudly, and why was he taking so long?
I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. He might hear me if I panted, and I wouldn’t be able to hear him. I listened, trying to think of a sensible thing to do—
And I heard one of Jane’s sticks tapping.
The German airman was escorting her down the passage. She must have asked for help to reach the toilet. And, since she seemed to be a friendly, cooperative, ancient German native, he offered his strong arm for support. He coaxed her in German, and I heard her grateful response. She struggled through the doorway into the loo on her own.
Jane closed the door and saw me standing in the dim light cast through the arrow-slit window below the high-up water tank. She raised her bandaged hand to her lips to warn me to be quiet.
We heard the airman go downstairs. I slipped my arm around Jane’s waist so she didn’t have to put all her weight on one stick.
‘How did he get in?’ Jane whispered.
‘It must have been the kitchen door!’ Morag said she would lock up, but she might have only done the front. He could have come in any time that day. No one would have questioned anybody in a flight suit, even if they’d noticed him. ‘He must have used the service stairs at the back. Is it Althammer – the navigator? What does he want?’
‘He’s looking for the coding machine. I played dumb, but he’ll try to find it now.’
‘Perhaps that’s what Baer meant by a trap,’ I gasped. ‘A trap for the machine itself! If the Luftwaffe bombers can’t destroy it from the air, perhaps they sent Althammer to try to destroy it on the ground!’
My voice had risen.
‘Shhh,’ Jane hushed. ‘I thought of that.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Wait,’ said Jane. ‘Just wait. Let him hunt. He might not find it. He’s bound to start with our room when he returns upstairs, but he’ll rush, because he knows I’m going back there.’ She paused, tilting her head to favour her left ear, listening. ‘I pushed the gramophone under the bed. He’s likely to look there first, and as it’s in its case, he might think it’s the cipher machine and just grab it and run.’
The house was silent around us. The only noise came from outside.
‘Hush,’ Jane repeated. ‘All we need do is wait.’
Once more, I had that false and foolish feeling that with her I was in the safest place in the house.
Suddenly, and irrelevantly, I remembered that the meter had run out and our gas fire must have cut off by now.
*
We heard the German airman come upstairs, and Jane was right – he went straight back to Room Number Five. We heard him close the door. But there was still so much muffled banging and shouting outside that we couldn’t tell what he was doing.
Jane whispered urgently, ‘I must sit. I suppose there’s only the throne. Help me—’ It was easier lowering her than before, and we didn’t have to fuss with her clothes. ‘Do you think you could open the window, Louisa?’
The narrow glass in the arrow slit was solid – there wasn’t any latch. ‘It doesn’t open,’ I said.
‘You’d better break it, then.’
I stared at her.
‘Why?’
‘I think we should have some fresh air.’
‘But!’
‘Use my stick,’ she told me.
‘Whatever will Mrs Campbell say!’
‘We need fresh air,’ Jane insisted, and then confessed softly, ‘I forgot to turn off the gas tap when the fire went out.’
‘The gas doesn’t come back on until you put in another shilling,’ I told her.
‘But I did,’ she admitted. ‘I put in a shilling just before I asked that young man to help me out here.’
‘Did you light the fire again?’
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t reach. I didn’t want to ask him to do it …’
‘But that means he’s been in there with the gas leaking full on for half an hour!’
We stared at each other.
‘Break the window,’ Jane told me.
And I did.
I took long breaths of fresh air before I set out to do the awful things that only I could do.
You have to breathe quite a bit of coal gas before it kills you. It makes you sleepy – people who die of it usually die in their sleep. I didn’t feel like I was going to fall over in a dead faint, but I didn’t know how much gas was in the passage, or how much I’d already breathed, or how much more I might have to breathe before I managed to open the window in our room, turn off the gas tap, and get out again. Or what I would do if Dietrich Althammer was perfectly all right and ready for a battle.
The only thing I was sure of was that I had to stop any more gas leaking into the Limehouse.
I crept to the closed door of Room Number Five and listened to the terrible stillness on the other side. I thought of my gas mask, chucked under the bed out of the way after the journey from Liverpool. It couldn’t help me now, and the German navigator would not have known it was there.
I went in.
He’d worked hard before the fumes overcame him. He’d tipped the mattress off the bed and up against the wall, and threw aside Jane’s chair and the lamp and table to get to the gramophone in its shining wooden case.
He didn’t even open it. He used my flute case to pound the gramophone into a mangled wreck of beaten metal and splintered wood. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it out of fury, just because it wasn’t what he was looking for, or if Dietrich Althammer really thought, at least before he started, that its polished lid hid the stolen Enigma machine.
Dietrich Althammer also lay in a crumpled heap next to the hearth, his mouth open and his eyelids half shut. I didn’t think he was breathing, but I didn’t want to get close enough to make sure.
I had to step over his body to reach the gas tap.
Biting back sobs, I climbed over the fallen standard lamp to throw open a window. The radio sprang suddenly into life, right in the middle of a tune, as the electricity came back on.
It was ‘The Spitfire Song’ again.
I wrenched open the wardrobe. The other glowing box sat there nestled safe and sound among the furs and tropical silks. I grabbed the rotors and snatched up the wooden case in both arms as if I were rescuing a baby from a burning building, and fled from the room.
Elisabeth Lind volunteered to move into a smaller room and give Mrs Campbell’s best double to me and Jane, so we didn’t have to sleep in Room Five that night.
This makes no sense at all, but after I crawled into bed next to Jane as usual, I no longer felt safe.
She was an eighty-two-year-old woman with a sprained wrist and knees that did not bend, and she had, in cold blood and full awareness, killed a young man ten hours earlier.
I know she did it to protect me. I think she did it to protect me. I don’t know if she could have done anything else. Dietrich Althammer was an enemy soldier. He was violent and frightening and dangerous – there wasn’t any question about that now. But no matter how I danced around the facts and made excuses for her, a man who was alive that morning was dead that night, and Jane had done it.
I wondered if she had done it before.
I lay awake beside this familiar stranger, wondering, and counted the Blenheim bombers as they roared out to sea under the waning moon, all six of B-Flight’s aircraft, one after another.
It was just after midnight on Valentine’s Day. XIV II.
I must have fallen asleep at last, because I didn’t hear any of them come back.
The joke was, as the Valentine’s Day moon came round, that of course we weren’t sent to Utsira. No one was sent there – no one but me had seen that baited message about mythical U-boats.
‘This’ll remind you of last year’s Norwegian Campaign, if any of you were around for that,’ Cromwell told us. All of us except Bill Yorke shook our heads; none of the rest of us had been operational a year ago. Ignacy and Derfel and Silver and I had fought in the Battle of Britain last summer, but we’d only been flying in combat for seven months. Wing Commander Cromwell sighed and cleared his throat.
‘You’re being sent on another retribution mission. You’ll be targeting Stavanger, the Norwegian aerodrome they’re using to get at Windyedge, and Coastal Command would like you to take flash-bomb photographs of the new field at Lista while you’re at it. A-Flight will attack Stavanger, and B-Flight will move on Lista again. We want to do damage on the ground – exactly what they’re doing here. Get in and out quick as you can and keep away from the anti-aircraft artillery.’
It was a routine op. It wouldn’t be safe. But it wasn’t unreasonable.
Cromwell hadn’t asked us to do anything unreasonable since – since mid-December? Since he confined me to barracks for getting the planes out of Windyedge when it first got bombed. And he’d complimented me at the same time for doing a good job. He sighed and barked and grumbled at me, and I argued with him. But now he listened.
For a few seconds I was light-headed with relief that I wasn’t leading anyone to Utsira – and a moment later my stomach was in knots with a new anxiety.
I couldn’t let A-Flight take the op to Stavanger. That part of Norway is all peninsulas and islands and inlets, and Stavanger to Utsira is less than forty miles in a straight line, about ten minutes in a Blenheim flying at cruise speed.
‘Permission to speak, sir?’
Cromwell sighed again.
‘What is it this time, Beaufort-Stuart?’
‘They’ll expect a raid, after so many attacks here, won’t they? Stavanger’s a huge operation,’ I pointed out. ‘They’ll be ready. But Lista will be a piece of cake – it’s still under construction. And who has more combat experience, A-Flight or B-Flight?’
I knew that just by our U-boat score, B-Flight would win that contest hands down. For all our scrapping on the ground, we flew together confidently now.
‘Let me guess what you’re trying to say, Beaufort-Stuart,’ Cromwell rumbled. ‘You’re suggesting that B-Flight make the Stavanger run, while A-Flight takes on Lista?’
Then my lads astounded me.
They backed me up.
‘I’m in,’ said Adam Stedman. ‘Madeira Section is ready for a fight. Stavanger will be a tougher op than Lista, but Beaufort-Stuart’s always one step ahead of the Jerries.’
‘Yes, he has a nose for them,’ Derfel Cledwyn said.
‘Scotty is careful, too,’ put in Ignacy Mazur. ‘Though we do not always agree!’
‘He’s usually right, though,’ said Chip.
Bill Yorke snorted. But he said, ‘I’m in.’
‘I didn’t think I’d last a week when I joined 648 Squadron,’ said Harry Morrow. ‘At least now I know what we’re up against. Scotty’s a jolly good flight leader. I’m in.’
Up and down the operations room, Pimms and Madeira claimed the Stavanger assignment for B-Flight.
I was a bit stunned.
Silver nudged me in the ribs. ‘You’re a jolly good flight leader.’
‘Stow it, mate,’ I muttered. ‘Behind every good flight leader …’
He held up his hands: still in one piece.
We knew that every single op might end in nothing but death. But this time I felt sure no one was going into it blindly. We were doing it together.
‘No heroics with Messerschmitts,’ I reminded them.
‘Keep us well south of Utsira,’ I told Silver.
We flew north along the Scottish coast, past Aberdeen and RAF Deeside, on past Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Out to port, looking over my gauntleted left hand on the control yoke, I could see moorland blanketed with snow, gleaming like icing sugar beneath the rising moon. Scotland lay quiet and still and dangerously cold. I wished Louisa could see it, and then I was glad she couldn’t, was glad she wasn’t there.
Off Fraserburgh we headed north-east out to sea. We flew at fifteen thousand feet to make the most of our speed, then came down to low level to avoid being tracked. Somewhere in the sky, A-Flight’s leader, Rob Lucknow, called over the radio on his way to Lista. ‘Hullo, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart!’
‘It’s a beautiful night for flying!’ I told him, as if we were larking about.
‘Enjoy it while you have the chance!’
We were over Norway in a little more than an hour.
Norway was as bright with snow and moonlight as Scotland, the rocky islets spread out in black and silver. It felt strangely still, nothing moving anywhere, no anti-aircraft guns firing. We passed low over the aerodrome at Stavanger and dumped our bombs on their runway and hangars. No one fired a single shot at us. There was nothing to hear but the hum of our own engines, and the explosions beneath us in the dark.
‘Circle over the docks and dump whatever’s left, and let’s get out of here,’ I said.
‘Too right,’ called Adam Stedman. ‘This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies.’
We knew there was only one reason they weren’t firing.
There must be Luftwaffe night fighters patrolling – probably not more than ten minutes away, waiting for us to turn up at Utsira hoping to bag another submarine. The gunners on the ground didn’t want to hit their own planes, so they couldn’t fire at us, either.
We detonated another load over the shipyard.
I climbed away, scanning the moonlit sky for dark wings, holding my breath. We were high now – we’d just about got away with it.
‘Cup of tea, Jamie?’ said Silver, handing me the steaming cap of the thermos flask. I took it and raised it to my mouth.
I’d been expecting an attack for the last half an hour; we all expected it, but none of us saw it coming. The first I knew there were Me-110s in the sky with us was when I saw one of Adam Stedman’s engines explode into flame beyond our starboard wingtip.
I banked automatically away and got a faceful of hot tea at the same time. Silver caught the cup as I dropped it, spluttering and cursing, and a bloody good thing he did, or it would have been rolling around jamming the rudder pedals. I saw Stedman’s Blenheim screaming downhill as he dived in a desperate attempt to put the fire out, and I saw the black shape of the Messerschmitt 110 dive after him, then nothing but flames below.
The sky was suddenly full of the black wings of night fighters. Someone must have called them home. And of course they hadn’t had far to go.
When you’re there, fighting, it’s hard to keep track of anyone but your own crew. People hare off out to sea to get away, or inland to make a crash landing, or down to treetop level to try to hide, or up to the heavens to get a better shot. And when a plane is in a spiral dive engulfed in flames, you often can’t tell if it’s one of your own or the enemy’s. So a lot of my impression of that battle is based on what my crew was yelling into my earphones at the time. Silver had his head in the freezing gale out the open starboard window panel, barking instructions about which way I should turn; Chip gave us an irrepressible non-stop narrative from the gunner’s turret like an auctioneer or a horse-race announcer.
‘There goes another Messer, hot damn! Doesn’t that make us official aces? I don’t know who got that one – we’re definitely down two Blenheims but I can’t tell who’s still flying. Pull her up five degrees, would you, cap’n, I don’t want to shoot our tail off! Thank you – just a mo—’ That was followed by the rattle of his gun. ‘Aw, missed. Turn right, turn right—’
‘STARBOARD!’ roared Silver, and I threw the Blenheim into such a steep turn that the whole machine shuddered, and I dived to avoid tumbling into a stall. Another plane screamed past my left ear and soared away before I’d straightened the wings.
‘Gonna try again,’ Chip blethered on. ‘Here he comes, a little higher—’ Another rattle of gunfire and a whoop of triumph. He yelled, ‘GOT YOU, TAKE THAT, YOU SON OF A—’
Something hit the turret so hard it knocked my head forward into the controls. I swam in sparkling blackness for a moment and when I came to, Silver was on his feet leaning over my shoulder desperately hanging on to the control yoke. An icy wind howled through the broken turret.
‘I’ve got her,’ I gasped.
‘You’re getting bloody low,’ Silver gasped back. ‘Never thought I’d try to fly a plane again—’
‘Nice work, mate,’ I croaked, levelling out.
‘Cheers.’
We didn’t say anything about Chip. There wasn’t anything to say.
Silver pointed ahead of us, northward.
A flotilla of German battleships were cruising full tilt along the craggy coast, black against the silver sea. They wouldn’t reach us for another ten minutes, but they were trying their damnedest not to miss out on the action.
That’s what we would have found waiting for us if we’d gone to Utsira – a squadron of Messerschmitts above and a load of anti-aircraft fire below.
In the end, it was swings and roundabouts, really.
Suddenly Ignacy’s voice crackled into life through my headset.
‘I’m on one engine and Taff is bleeding all over the cockpit. Cover me, Pimms Leader, I’m going to get those German bastards if it kills me. Keep the Messers off my tail. I’m going to sink a couple of those ships.’
‘There he is,’ Silver said, pointing. ‘Two o’clock high. Get behind him so nobody can sneak up on him, and I’ll climb back and see if the rear gun will still fire in case someone comes after us.’
Everything else still worked. I had both my engines and all my control surfaces – only the rear turret dome had been shattered. I tore my mind away from Silver in the back, and what he’d have to deal with before he could climb into the rear gunner’s seat. I focused on Ignacy and Derfel and Bill Yorke in the plane ahead of me.
We sped to meet the battleships. Silver and I had dropped our bombs over Stavanger a lifetime ago. I wondered, briefly and uneasily, why Ignacy hadn’t already got rid of his. Or if he had, how he was planning to get through the flak and sink a battleship with the slow-firing guns in the nose of the Blenheim.
‘Pimms and Madeira aircraft,’ I called. ‘Anyone about?’
Silence.
I hadn’t even noticed the Australian schoolboys going down.
‘Just us,’ Ignacy answered. ‘Thank you for the cover, Scotty, I am going in now – sorry, Yorkie, but I must take you with us.’
Then he said something in Welsh to Derfel in a low voice.
That’s when I realised what he meant to do.
‘We’re aces now, Mazur,’ I yelled at him. ‘Taff, Yorkie! We’re all aces!’
He chose the two ships that were closest together. He calculated the dive so he hit them both, the Blenheim cartwheeling across the deck of one and slamming into the other.
I climbed away through a trail of flame and shrapnel and a hailstorm of anti-aircraft fire. No one came after us.
Silver tossed the bundled-up dinghy over the back of his seat and climbed into the front cockpit after it. He sat down next to me again.
‘Tex won’t mind if we ditch him. Thought you and I might need this, though,’ he said.
‘You are showing lack of moral fibre,’ I answered hollowly.
We limped a hundred miles back west across the open water, leaking fuel through the bullet holes, and when the fuel ran out I made a Mayday call over the radio, because that’s what I’d been trained to do. If there was anyone out there to hear it, the chances of them being friendly were remote; we were still closer to Norway than to Scotland. Silver opened the hatch above us before I levelled the Blenheim to plough on its belly into the black-and-silver swell of the North Sea.
‘My hands are both still in one piece,’ Silver said.
Then the Perspex in the nose gave way, letting in a waterfall of icy black salt water.
Silver grabbed the strap of the dinghy out of the deluge and shoved the whole bundle up through the hatch ahead of him. We were both in water to our waists in the dark and it was impossible to get a firm foothold. I managed to push Silver out after the dinghy, one of his feet in the palm of my hand and the other on my shoulder – I don’t think he even realised he was standing on me. The Blenheim’s wings kept her from going straight to the bottom of the sea, but they were full of holes like the rest of her and filling up fast.
Somehow I hauled myself through the hatch after Silver, and we knelt clinging to each other on the starboard wing, slippery with seawater as the swell washed gently over it and back. Silver got the cover off the dinghy, but he couldn’t get the inflating valve unscrewed, which we’d only ever seen demoed once, and the distance between pretending you’re doing something in a drill and actually doing it in the dark in the middle of the North Sea is like the distance between yourself and the shores of Scotland while you’re floating there on your sinking plane.
‘Let me do it,’ I said, thinking of his chilblained fiddler’s fingers. ‘Keep your gloves on.’
I had to take off my gauntlets to release the valve. They were both instantly lost. Seconds before the Blenheim submerged beneath us, I finally got the dinghy to inflate. We didn’t have time to climb into it. All we could do was to hang on as the plane went down.
Our flight suits were full of icy water now, and it was like wearing armour made of lead. Neither one of us had the superhuman strength it would take to lift ourselves up over the side of the dinghy and into it. In five minutes I couldn’t feel my hands at all.
So that was us, hanging on to a life raft we couldn’t get into, up to our necks in water so cold it made every breath painful, under the most spectacular moon and starry sky I have ever seen.
‘Sod this,’ said Silver through chattering teeth.
‘Aye.’ It was too hard to breathe to try to talk.
‘No, I mean sod this. Sod moral fibre. I can’t do it. I’m d-d-d – I’m done. Thanks for b-being my pilot, Jamie. And my f-f-friend. If you make it b-b-back to Nancy’s, take my tanner out of the ceiling and b-b-buy yourself a drink on me.’
And then the bastard just let go.
When Louisa came down for Jane’s breakfast tray on Friday morning, there was me standing at the bar picking at a bowl of porridge I would never eat if it were the last bowl of porridge on this earth. There was Nancy, banging cups about as usual, but not so usual was that she hadn’t combed her hair – the hairgrips she fixed in it yesterday were sliding out and she’d not noticed. Elisabeth Lind sat at the table by the fire with her neb in a newspaper, studying the personal notices as if she were swotting for an examination. She turned the page and it covered her own untouched porridge, the paper making a wee camp tent over the spoon stuck out of the bowl. When Louisa came in, Sergeant Lind looked to see who it was and then looked straight back at her newspaper as if she were clockwork instead of flesh and blood.
I knew she must be dying inside. But we couldn’t weep in each other’s arms as we’d have done in peacetime. We had to play her stupid game of pretend.
‘What’s going on?’ Louisa asked.
‘Policemen, firemen, Germans, whatnot, I don’t know,’ said Nan, sounding angrier than usual.
That was yesterday’s news and we all knew it. Dietrich Althammer had been carried away last night, but the room he’d died in was still a dog’s breakfast. They’d found how he escaped: when the rescue crew broke into his prison from the front, the old chimney was open to the sky above a heap of earth and broken stone and bricks and snow. The bomb debris had not hurt him, nor trapped him, and he’d scarpered up the chimney and lain hidden among the ruined pine trees on the ridge before creeping into the Limehouse.
Nancy didn’t answer Louisa, and I couldn’t speak, so that left Elisabeth Lind to tell her.
‘The young men from 648 Squadron ran into trouble last night,’ Sergeant Lind said carefully, not looking up, turning another page. ‘Two planes confirmed down in B-Flight, and the rest are missing. “Failed to return” is how they report it.’
Louisa met my eyes. I shook my head.
She put her face in her hands. I saw her swallow, but she couldn’t speak. I knew what she wanted to ask.
‘Jamie made a radio call to Rob Lucknow in A-Flight while the party was going on,’ I told her, though I felt like my own voice would choke me. ‘He told Rob that Madeira was two down and that A-Flight should clear off before the Messers got wind there were more Blenheims about. A-Flight got back all right, but that was the last we heard from any of the others.’
‘What do you mean, any of the others?’ Louisa croaked. ‘Pimms and Madeira both? But it’s broad daylight!’
Nan turned her back, not even able to take a keek at us while we talked.
‘Phyllis said she’d ring if she gets news,’ I said. ‘They might have landed away like they did the first time Windyedge got bombed. Sometimes if they’re shot up they’ll land at the nearest base, any old base, instead of coming home.’
‘Oh.’
Poor disguised Elisabeth Lind stared at her newspaper. Anybody could tell she wasn’t reading it.
One of the firemen came in through the front door. We spun around.
‘We’ve just got the last Jerry out,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if we bring him in to warm him up? Not sure where Old Cromwell wants him, but he’s had a pretty rough time and he’s not in any shape to march to the aerodrome – he’s been fair buried alive for a solid day.’
Nancy faced the fireman with empty eyes and shrugged. ‘Do what you like,’ she said.
And they brought in our old friend, that Jerry pilot Felix Baer.
He was all over dust. His hair and face were all one colour, grey as grey. His eyes were black pools in the grey dust.
Elisabeth Lind jumped to her feet, but Louisa was there first. She leaped forward and snatched at his hand.
The grey dust cracked around his lips as he smiled at her faintly.
He took my other hand too. I thought of piano keys beneath those bony, nimble fingers; I could feel his ring with the engraved bear cool against my palm. They were things that made him whole before the war and were still part of him.
He leaned down quickly and I stood on my toes and we kissed each other’s faces.
I felt the grey dust come off on my cheek. He let go of one hand to brush it off me; he didn’t let go of the other.
I pointed to Elisabeth Lind. ‘That is Calypso. Not me.’
She nodded in agreement, looking as if she were about to cry. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I am Calypso.’
I didn’t dare say anything else; the room was full of guards and firemen.
Miss Lind pulled Jane’s comfortable chair close to the fire. The men from the aerodrome covered it with a blanket to protect it, and they let Felix Baer sit and lean forward with his hands close to the flames.
He spoke haltingly, trying to explain himself.
‘He wishes he had stayed here in November,’ Miss Lind translated softly. ‘But he didn’t want to break the link in his resistance network. After his first trip they began to watch him. They must have known what he’d done – what he left here. They sent him to bomb Windyedge himself – on Christmas Day, can you believe? But he didn’t. Althammer was his navigator on that flight, and when Althammer didn’t report his failure, Baer and Moritz disagreed about why. Moritz thought it was because he was sympathetic. But Baer suspected it was because he wanted to string them along and trap them both later.’
Miss Lind continued, listening to what Baer said and then going on again. ‘Baer turned out to be right, but Moritz was in charge, so when they were forced into a corner and cooked up the idea of defecting, Moritz brought Althammer along. And that’s exactly what Althammer wanted: a chance to destroy their secret on the ground.’
She and Felix Baer spoke together in quick, fluent German, nodding in agreement, comparing notes. She reached into her uniform pocket, fished out a handkerchief, and gave it to him so he could wipe his face.
I didn’t know what the German meant, but I knew what she was telling him.
Althammer failed. He’s dead. Your boss, Eberhard Moritz, isn’t hurt. My commanding officer is on his way back from Africa. Felix Baer straightened up a little. I have the Enigma machine, and copies of the documents you brought, and they are safe. Beneath the bruising and the grime, his face was alight with hope. He glanced at me.
‘I’m sorry it took me so long to understand,’ I said. I meant it for both of them.
He said something else. Elisabeth Lind’s mouth twisted into a crooked little smile as she translated. ‘He asks if you would play some music.’
The gramophone was gone. If I started at the piano – Jane was upstairs waiting for breakfast, and she wouldn’t stay put if she caught wind of music down here without her. To be honest, why should she? I knew how she hated to miss anything. But she couldn’t come down the stairs.
‘I want Jane to be able to hear,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my flute and play it in the hall.’
The tea on Jane’s breakfast tray had cooled. I knew she wouldn’t care, and took it up with me.
She sat gazing out the big bay window in Room Number Four, staring far away over the rooftops of the village and the wide sea beyond.
But she turned her head as I came in and gave me a small half-smile.
‘I was wondering where you’d got to!’ she said.
‘Felix Baer is here,’ I told her. ‘He asked for music.’ I screwed the pieces of the flute together. The case was cracked and battered, but my flute was all right. Like me: jarred but undamaged. I stood up, took a deep breath, and played an F-scale. Still warming up, I started ‘Jane and Louisa’.
Jane hadn’t forgotten the words. She sang in harmony with the flute, a third below the melody. ‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home …’
She broke off.
‘Are they going to arrest me again?’ she asked.
A chatty police inspector had come round in the afternoon yesterday, and he hadn’t said anything about arresting her. But he hadn’t let her off, either. Sorry about your fall, I expect you are quite dazed – you must have a doctor in to look at your arm! Don’t be careless with the gas fire.
I wondered if she was hoping that they would arrest her.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
I stood halfway down the stairs, exactly between Felix Baer in the public bar and Jane Warner in the best double room. What can I play for them both? I wondered, feeling self-conscious and awkward.
Put your shoulders back, Lula, I imagined Mummy saying. Make your Daddy proud.
Mendelssohn.
But I couldn’t remember the intricacies of the middle part of the Hebrides Overture. Rhapsody in Blue? I wouldn’t make it the whole way through that, either; not without reading music.
And then I remembered the Bach ‘Ave Maria’, whose glorious long slow tones were easier to pick out and linger over: Johanna von Arnim’s first record.
And as I played, I wondered if there had been music on Daddy’s sinking ship, a bugle playing ‘Reveille’ or ‘The Last Post’. Or had he sung hymns in his deep, rolling voice, the way we’d sung in the storm-tossed rowboat at Lime Cay? I wondered if Mummy had been humming to herself when the bomb fell, one of her students’ exam pieces, or a hymn for someone’s wedding. Music, right till the end.
I’d never know. I hadn’t been with them.
I thought of Jamie in the moonlight over the North Sea last night, with Silver next to him and Chip Wingate alone in the back.
I didn’t finish the Bach. In the hall below me, the telephone rang, and Ellen ran to answer it.
‘The Limehouse, Volunteer McEwen speaking,’ I croaked into the receiver.
‘Hello, Ellen, pet, it’s Phyllis.’ She was hoarse too. ‘I thought Mrs C. should know the latest.’
Dread clung like a strangling rope around my throat and I didn’t ask her to go on. But she did anyway.
‘Harry Morrow landed at Deeside five hours ago. Textbook landing. He didn’t taxi, though, just shut down the engines on the runway, so the ground crew ran out to see what was going on. And when they opened up the hatch they found all three of those Australian boys were already dead.’
‘All three of them!’ I gasped.
She’d told it without a sob, but now she began to weep.
‘However did they get home if they were already dead?’ I cried.
‘Dougie and Gavin had been dead for hours. But Harry, that lovely boy, I was dancing with him only last week—’ She sobbed. ‘He hung on and hung on until he made it home. One lung and his stomach full of holes and somehow he just kept flying until he was home, and he even managed to land safely, and – what was he thinking all that time that he managed to hang on so long? How he tried to kiss me in the porch of the Limehouse that warm night last December? Or just staring desperately at that stupid picture of his dogs taped to his instrument panel and longing to see them again? And then—’
I sat bent over myself on the stool in the telephone cupboard under the stairs, listening to her keening, and I felt as if those bullets were in my own lungs and stomach.
‘The rest of Pimms?’ I choked.
‘Failed to return.’ Phyllis took a breath. ‘They might have got away, though. You know what Scotty and Ignacy are like, flying foxes. They’ll hide in cloud, hedge-hop at sea level, whatever it takes. If they had to ditch in the water or make a crash landing in the middle of the Highlands, it might be days before we hear from them …’
Phyllis’s blethering trailed off. If they ditched in the North Sea or crashed on some mountaintop they’d likely just drown or freeze to death.
‘I’m glad Rob’s lads in A-Flight made it,’ I breathed. ‘Give him our best.’
‘I will,’ said Phyllis.
‘And ring us again when you hear anything else.’
My throat closed up, thinking about those three young lads bringing themselves home on luck and hope, dead men even before they landed.
‘I will,’ Phyllis repeated. ‘Tell Mrs Campbell.’
I couldn’t believe they were all gone.
I just couldn’t believe it.
But the day crawled by, and Phyllis didn’t ring back. Next morning Elisabeth Lind went with Felix Baer and Eberhard Moritz in a transport plane to deliver the Enigma machine to Intelligence. She caught hold of me before she left, smart and official in her uniform with her peaked cap fixed neatly over her braided hair. But she was pale and pink-eyed beneath the perfect make-up, as if she’d spent the night crying.
‘Louisa, can I borrow you downstairs?’ she said. ‘I’ve only ever flown once before, so—’
She held up a sixpence.
‘I wish you’d tell me which wishing coins are Pimms’s ones. I want to put mine with them.’
‘They don’t do a thing,’ I said hollowly. ‘They’re superstitious nonsense. They—’
My voice rose to a sob. Couldn’t I have done anything else – convinced Jamie not to fly that way, that night? What if I’d got Felix Baer and Elisabeth Lind together earlier? What if I’d gone straight to Wing Commander Cromwell?
None of it seemed possible, but the what-ifs kept spinning in my head like a gramophone turntable that wouldn’t stop.
Miss Lind reached up and caressed my cheek with soft fingertips.
‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘I know.’
I couldn’t imagine what it was like having to pretend your brother hadn’t just been lost at sea. Or wherever he was lost.
‘I want my sixpence to be there too,’ she said. ‘And I’m never coming back for it. I want it to be up there forever with the rest of them.’
I swallowed and nodded. ‘I’ll show you which is Jamie’s,’ I told her softly.
*
The moon was waning and the freezing fog returned and Windyedge was quiet.
Phyllis wrote her horrid reports by the fire in the Limehouse. The ground crew helped with the heavy work as we tidied up Room Five. I did not believe anyone could ever sleep in it again, but we put it back to being Mrs Campbell’s second-best double room. Everything in it still worked.
The policemen didn’t come back straightaway, but a doctor looked at Jane’s wrist, and said it would be fine and gave her strengthening exercises. After a few days, Ellen helped me bring her downstairs. Nobody fooled about on the piano. We couldn’t play records, though we read some of the album notes out loud. We swapped newspapers, doing the crosswords and fine-combing the casualty lists. The telephone never rang, and there were no planes to count in.
Exactly one week after the limekilns were bombed, as permitted hours began at half past five, I unlocked the front door for Mrs Campbell. Standing in the vestibule, I heard tyre chains and an unfamiliar engine labouring up the lane. I opened the door to look, just as a low-slung red motor car coughed to a stalled halt in front of the Limehouse.
Flight Lieutenant James Gordon Erskine Murray Beaufort-Stuart climbed out.
He didn’t bother to open the car door. He crouched on the seat and swung his legs over the edge of the open top as if it were a hatch on a Blenheim bomber.
For a moment I thought he was a ghost.
Never mind all my modern education and not being a fool-fool country gal. I actually thought he must be a dead man walking. I thought it must be a ghost-car driven by a ghost.
He was wearing the same flight suit and sheepskin-lined leather jacket he’d taken off in a week ago. They were stiff with water damage and crusted with salt. The thin, fair beginnings of a beard stubbled his filthy face. His eyes were unchanged, clear, bright hazel with a touch of madness in them.
‘Hello, Louisa,’ he rasped, and I held the front door open for him.
I was too shocked to touch him. I didn’t dare. I didn’t – he’d suffered something I didn’t understand, and it scared me like nothing had ever scared me before. What if it was my fault? Had I helped send him into that hell?
I couldn’t do anything but follow him into the house.
He limped to the bar.
Nancy Campbell looked up and dropped a glass. It smashed into a thousand pieces on the cold stone floor.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she sobbed.
‘Jamie Stuart,’ Ellen whispered. ‘God be thanked.’
He didn’t look at any of us. He raised his head and scanned the oak beam above the bar, all shiny with shillings and sixpences and threepenny bits. He reached up and twitched out one coin.
‘Silver promised to buy me a pint,’ he said hoarsely. His voice grated as if he hadn’t used it since the last time we saw him.
The thin sixpence clinked on the brass top of the bar as Jamie slapped it down. For a few seconds he held his hand spread out there over the coin, staring at his fingers in fascination and disgust. Ellen and Phyllis and Jane were all sitting and couldn’t see his hand. But Mrs Campbell could see it from where she faced him over the bar, and I was standing just one step behind him and I saw it too.
His little finger and ring finger were black as tar, black as bitumen, as if he had dipped them in ink to the second knuckles. The skin faded through grey and blue and green and purple back to where his fingers joined his hand. The rest of the hand was pale and filthy and covered with angry red blisters. But it was alive. The black fingers were dead.
Mrs Campbell let out another sob. ‘What—?’
Jamie shook his head. ‘The others are the same,’ he said. He laid his left hand on the bar lined up with his right hand, all ten fingers spread flat. The last two fingers of his left hand were mostly as blackened and dead as the ones on the right.
‘Frostbite,’ he said. ‘It happened on the boat that picked me up. I was all right in the water – it was warmer than the air.’ He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. ‘I got lucky. It was a fishing boat working with the Norwegian resistance – they had machine guns hidden in oil barrels. They heard my Mayday on their radio and came looking for us. But it took two more days to make landfall in Shetland, and it was bloody cold sitting on the deck.’
‘Us?’ whispered Mrs Campbell.
‘Give us a drink and I’ll tell you what happened,’ Jamie said, rapping the sixpence on the countertop. ‘I’m parched.’
He told his dreadful tale in a dull voice. We listened without daring to speak, though Nancy sobbed quietly all through the last bit. When he’d finished he wrapped both hands around his heavy ale as if it could warm them, and raised his glass.
‘Flying Officer David Silvermont,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Absent friends. Madeira and Pimms. Now we’re official aces.’
He drank slowly, and that’s when I saw his blackened fingers.
‘Och, Jamie-lad!’ I exclaimed in alarm. ‘Why aren’t you in hospital?’
‘I had to come here. Silver told me to buy myself a drink with his tanner at Nancy’s, and I’m doing it.’
I wanted to shake him. Here he was alive, his two hands ripe with gangrene, and he’d nothing better to do than toss back a pint in the pub?
‘You know my own twin brother nearly lost a leg with blood poisoning after Dunkirk last spring!’ I said furiously. ‘If you don’t get those fingers off they will kill you.’
He shrugged. ‘Can’t feel ’em. Stopped worrying about ’em when they stopped hurting. Can’t feel my toes, either, but I haven’t looked. I can drive. I bet I can fly, too.’
He sighed, and put his head down on his arms on the bar.
‘I went home first,’ Jamie mumbled, his head sticking out of the wool collar of his leather jacket like a tortoise. ‘One boat to Orkney and another to the mainland, and then I got a ride with a forestry crew. But I should have come straight here. The moment I got down from the lorry I wanted to be here. So I took the car and drove myself. It’s not far.’
‘Did you come in your mother’s car? Does she know you took it? Where did you get the petrol? Is there enough left to get to Aberdeen?’
‘Yes, no, don’t know,’ he answered wearily. ‘Probably.’
‘Hospital,’ I ordered. ‘Now. I’ll drive.’
We heard the car motor start, stop, start again. Then it roared away down the hill with its tyre chains clattering.
Jane bent at the waist, leaned over, and toppled a stack of peat bricks with one hand. She shoved them into the fire with her foot.
‘Louisa is shivering,’ she said. ‘Louisa is always cold.’
‘Well goodness, let’s build the fire up at once,’ Phyllis exclaimed. ‘This place is never properly warm. What did Sergeant Lind say – the ghosts will leave if they get warm enough!’
Practical, well-behaved Phyllis suddenly leaped to her feet and slammed peat bricks into the fire. She grabbed the bellows and fanned the flames. Jane tried to reach around her with the poker and banged it on the hearth, not doing much but making a great noise. Phyllis shoved more peats on. Flames licked around the corners of the blocks and grew taller.
It was wonderful.
In a minute it became the biggest, brightest blaze we ever had in that house. It filled the room with rosy light and threw streamers of gold up the chimney. As it burned higher, light caught on the rows of copper and silver pressed into the wood, dull and burnished and shining.
‘Build it up—’
I couldn’t in a million years work out who to blame for what happened next.
It was Jane urging us on. She is the one who kept saying, ‘More fuel! Another log!’ But it was me who took the poker from Jane’s frail grasp and stirred up the embers and turned over the flaming blocks of peat. Phyllis is the one who kept putting more of them in the fire. And Nan Campbell didn’t ever tell us to stop.
In the blazing heat, something fell gleaming like a raindrop full of sunlight and hit the stone hearth with a clink.
Then there was another. Clink. Clink – another. Then half a dozen all at once, clinkclinkclinketyclinketyclink – as if someone had thrown a handful of coins into the fireplace.
We all fell still, listening and staring.
The heat of our inferno was sucking moisture out of the mantel, shrinking it as it dried, and the old wood was letting go of its wishing coins.
One by one they popped out of the black oak beam and plinked on the hearth, pennies and tuppences and silver threepenny bits put there by generations of fishermen and crofters, and by the young men who died in the first Great War.
Alan Anderson. Ben Knox. Cammy McBride.
The fire was warming them up, and the coins and the ghosts were leaping from the thick walls.
Duncan Campbell.
With a great sob, Mrs Campbell grabbed her heather broom and tried to sweep the coins from the hearth into the fire. But they fell out of the mantel faster than she could sweep.
Clinkclinkclinkety clink-clink-clink
It was like Morse code spelling the names of dead men.
In a frenzy, Nan accidentally swept the bundle of dried heather into the fire too. The broom flared up in her hands like an incendiary bomb.
She yelped and dropped it. Her apron was on fire as well. She ripped it off, threw it into the blaze, and leaped away from the hearth.
Then the mantel caught fire.
It went up all at once – the old wood just reached its flash point, and a curtain of flame stretched across the whole length of the hearth and up to the ceiling. For a few seconds, every one of us was too stunned to do anything – we just stared.
Then Mrs Campbell screamed, ‘The ceiling! Phyllis! There’s a bucket behind the bar – fill it and help me!’
She became suddenly modern and efficient, wielding a proper soda-acid fire extinguisher in both hands, fearlessly aiming it overhead and sending a jet into the flames licking at the oak beam over the bar. ‘Louisa, get Aunt Jane outside! Then come back and try to ring for the firemen at Windyedge! Get Jane a chair if you can—’
Phyllis ran to fill the bucket. I hauled Jane over my shoulder by her good arm.
I left her shivering against the stone wall out front, between the scorched pines on the ridge and the dancing orange light behind the deep windows of the Limehouse. I had time to dash in to make the Mayday call. But I didn’t have time to get a chair. Nan and Phyllis turned me out as I tried to step into the bar.
Jane wasn’t where I’d left her.
She lay on the gravel in front of the Limehouse. She’d tried to come back in by herself. What for? The records, her wonderful jazz collection and the Johanna von Arnim recordings – her faked British passport?
I think she came back for me.
It was much worse than her first fall. It was hard to tell what was wrong.
‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,’ she moaned quietly, over and over.
‘Louisa, run down to the Torries’ and get a blanket and some brandy,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘We can’t move her without help.’
‘Oh no!’ I cried. ‘I left her alone a minute ago and look! I’m not going now—’
‘I’ll go,’ said Phyllis.
I knelt beside that wonderful old woman on the icy gravel with my arms around her, trying to keep her warm with my own warmth. The stones drove through my stockings into my knees like shards of frozen glass.
Couldn’t I have stopped this, this one thing?
But I’d had to ring for the firemen!
‘They won’t arrest me now,’ Jane whispered.
‘Nobody’s going to arrest you! Ever!’
She clutched my sweater. ‘Louisa? Don’t go, my lovely Louisa.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.
Oh no, sang a panicked fugue in the back of my head, don’t do this to me, Jane Warner! Don’t leave me alone again, I like it here, I like it with you, this hasn’t been long enough, who will play duets with me? We haven’t finished the last lot of library books, we need to buy you a new gramophone, there’s no one else! Oh God, did Jamie feel like this, like this, when his best friend let go and sank in the icy black water? How did he bear it, how did he not let go himself?
But he was there. He was there for Silver. And I was here for Jane.
I didn’t let her know how I was panicking.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I repeated. ‘You’re not alone.’
I held her, while we waited for what would happen next, and I sang softly.
‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home,
They will soon come home,
They will soon come home;
Jane and Louisa will soon come home,
Into this beautiful garden.’
Music. Right till the end.
So proud of my girl, said my daddy’s voice in my head. A real voyager.
‘Are you all right, Louisa?’ I whispered.
We lay together one night later inside the dark-as-dark of an old-fashioned box bed, a thing like a huge cupboard in the big room of Morag Torrie’s cottage. It had a heather mattress such as I slept on all my life until I joined up, piled with quilts and blankets. Another box bed beside ours held Morag and her parents – Phyllis and Nan were in a different cottage.
‘I think I’m all right,’ she whispered back. ‘What about you?’
‘Och, no bother.’
We lay among the lumps of dry heather staring into blackness.
‘You always say that. Really, “no bother”?’ Louisa asked.
‘Well, a mite done in.’
I came back to Windyedge the day after the fire. I sat in the hospital in Aberdeen all night while Jamie had his fingers and toes chopped off, and then I stayed to comfort his mam the next morning while he slept off the sedatives and the morphine before the doctors let anybody see him.
‘I’m awfully glad you’re here,’ Louisa said. ‘I was by myself last night, and it was dreadful. Nan didn’t want to share with me and I was so worn out and miserable after the firemen left, I just gave in for once and let Phyllis sort things. But I hated being alone.’
Morag’s parents hadn’t wanted me under their roof, either, after she told them I was a Traveller. But Phyllis sorted that, too. Of course you must put Ellen up, she is a servicewoman! Louisa won’t mind sharing. Aye, throw the two outcasts together.
Neither of us minded sharing, but it is not nice to feel unwelcome.
‘Morag said you walked the last ten miles to Windyedge from the rail station!’ Louisa said.
‘I like walking.’ It seemed a long time since I’d walked anywhere, really walked. ‘I like walking more than driving. It gives you time to think. My family walked all over Scotland when I was wee, following the work. It’s hard with the war on. The young people have all gone for soldiers or are in factories, and most of us hate it – so many flipping rules and regulations, and the same routines day after day, and having to kill. My brother hates it. I’m lucky at Windyedge … except when the planes go down. It’s like raising pet lambs, you give them daft names and watch them grow, and then when you send them to the butcher, you wish you hadn’t bothered.’
Louisa sighed. ‘Yes, it’s awful. It’s awful.’
‘At the Limehouse I’ve been under one roof, the same roof, for longer than I’ve ever stayed in one place ever,’ I confessed. ‘Ten times as long. Fifty. I don’t know.’
Louisa was quiet for a moment, and then launched one of her familiar well-aimed torpedoes at me. ‘That old man was quite rude to you when you were having your sandwich in the pub the other day, I thought.’
‘They’re always like that to Traveller folk, unless we’re digging their garden or mending their pots,’ I told her. ‘And of course Morag blethered about me to the whole village, so now everybody knows.’
‘But her parents weren’t so rude,’ Louisa said. ‘They were just … a bit like Nancy. They expected one thing, but they also knew you were the driver for RAF Windyedge and Phyllis’s friend, and they had to – open up their heads a bit to take it in. I suppose I do, too.’
I was surprised to realise I knew just what she meant.
‘That is how I feel thinking about Jamaica!’ I exclaimed. ‘It seems a fairytale, not a place where ordinary people live and buy stamps and make whooping-cough mixture and burn the cooking when they’re weary. I wish I could see it.’
‘Well, you say you are a Traveller – it’s a good long journey!’
She made me laugh.
‘You are so brave to have told everyone about yourself,’ Louisa murmured. ‘You knew the trouble it would make you.’
‘I couldn’t hide forever,’ I said. ‘But you can’t ever hide.’
‘No, but in Scotland I’m just one. People are often more curious than horrid if there’s just one of you. The villagers stare at me, but they’re not nasty.’
I laughed again, more bitterly. ‘Would you listen to the pair of us – as if it’s easier or harder for one or the other! It’s different, but mostly it’s just hard.’
‘Jane said I had to fight,’ Louisa said. ‘She said the world was poisoning itself, and I was young, so it was up to me to make it better.’
I heard her sniff. She loved that old woman.
After a bit I asked her quietly, ‘What will you do now?’
She sighed. ‘Mrs Campbell asked me to stay and help her put the Limehouse right, and work for her when the damage is mended, at the same wages I had for looking after Jane. So I will be all right for a bit.’
‘Can the Limehouse be mended?’
It looked like a great old smoking ruin when I saw it earlier the day.
‘There was a fire inspector round this morning. He says the building’s sound. The damage was mostly to the bar, and only Room One had smoke in it. They let us in to collect clothes and things! My flute and my passport and wages, and Mummy’s album of Jamaica photographs – all fine. Mrs Campbell is Jane’s next of kin, so she’ll have a little extra to pay for the repairs.’
‘I wish I’d seen the blaze,’ I said. ‘Poor old Nan. Poor old Jane.’
‘It wasn’t sad,’ Louisa said. ‘Or – I was sad, but Jane – she seemed ready. She was ready. And I was – I was so lucky to be there. I wasn’t there for either of my parents. I was—’ She grasped for the right word. ‘It was a blessing to be there with her. I was blessed.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, and twined my fingers through hers to squeeze them tight.
‘How is Jamie?’ Louisa whispered.
My turn to grasp at words, though I’d known she’d get round to asking when she was good and ready.
Truthfully, I didn’t know how he was. I’d seen him for five minutes when his mam went in, and he was barely awake, dazed and mazy. I’d felt like an intruder on his mammy’s grief, so I’d left them to it.
‘Not very well,’ I said at last. ‘In pain. Missing half his fingers and all his toes. Out of work. And blaming himself for seventeen young men dead. Which isn’t his fault at all, at all.’
In the black quiet of the box bed, Louisa cried so silently I didn’t hear until she gasped for air.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God, I think it’s my fault.’
‘Your fault?’ The words burst out of me as a sob. ‘It’s not your flipping fault, Louisa! What about those Messerschmitt 110 night fighters?’
‘I translated all that code.’
‘He gave you all that code to translate! Nor did I have to pass it on, which I did willingly! We did it together.’
‘But if he hadn’t flown to Norway—’
‘Och, you’re just as bad as he is!’ I exclaimed. ‘He had to fly to Norway. That’s what they do. It’s their war work. Sometimes they don’t make it back.’
I tossed off the covers and scrambled to my knees in the inky black. ‘All right, I can prove to both you gumpuses it was an op just like any other.’
Ellen threw open the door at the end of the bed. The room beyond held a faint memory of light, red in the hearth, paler black around the curtained windows. Ellen climbed out of the box bed, felt her way to the door where her satchel hung on a peg, and brought the bag back.
Back inside the closed box bed, she lit an electric torch. She gave me a square blue notebook, like a clothbound exercise jotter. She held her torch so I could look at the cover.
Printed on the blue cloth in black ink it said Royal Air Force: Pilot’s Flying Logbook.
Beneath that was a space for the owner’s name. In looping script like a schoolboy’s was written James G. Beaufort-Stuart.
‘He asked me to fetch it,’ Ellen said.
I let the notebook fall open. It was a list of all the flights Jamie ever made with the Royal Air Force, right back to his first training flight, not much more than a year ago. I turned the pages carefully. His early operational entries, last summer as the Battle of Britain began, were like the casualty lists. He was supposed to log how long each flight took and where he’d gone, but he also noted every time anyone in 648 Squadron was shot down. Then there wasn’t room for that. So sometime in September he limited it to just his mates in Pimms Section.
Then there was the entry for 7 November 1940.
That night, men had died in A-Flight as well as B-Flight. Jamie had listed the names of six men in Pimms and added a note that said, ‘Also five lost in Madeira and thirteen in A-Flight.’ His pen nib had torn the page where he’d drawn a line under also for emphasis.
Twenty-four men died that night – two-thirds of 648 Squadron, more even than last week.
They’d died on a routine mission.
And I knew then that Ellen was right. The Valentine’s mission had also been routine. The deaths that night didn’t have anything to do with me.
But I also knew that I’d feel like they were my responsibility forever, all of us would feel responsible forever, even if there wasn’t anything Jamie or I or Ellen or Felix Baer or anyone could have ever done to prevent those deaths.
I closed the book with a sob.
Ellen dropped the torch. She rocked me like a baby, dropping little kisses on my head and crooning in a language I didn’t understand. She was crying too.
I fought my way up from the bottom of an endless cold black sea where the whole of me was frozen except my hands and feet, and they were on fire.
After a bit I remembered where I was, and how I’d got here, and I opened my eyes.
I didn’t recognise the room. I remembered vaguely that Mother had been there, though, and it was pretty obvious she had, because I was surrounded by snowdrops and daffodils. There was a colony of jam jars full of dainty white drooping blossoms on the stand beside my bed, and a forest of white and yellow flowers in jugs and medical beakers on a wheeled steel trolley at my feet, and tall spears of unopened green buds were stood in buckets on the floor all around the walls. There must have been a thousand of them.
And my wee German-speaking sister was there, at work filling the window sill with more daffodil-stuffed jam jars, wearing her blue WAAF uniform and looking like herself again. She’d got rid of the operatic plaited crown of hair and the ridiculous fake eyelashes. Bit of lipstick, hair done up in that French-style twist our grandmother liked, still elegant. But more ordinary. Without the mask.
‘Oi, Sergeant Lind,’ I croaked. ‘People will recognise you.’
She let go a handful of two dozen half-opened daffs, scattering bright yellow flowers all over the floor around her feet, and raised her head. She looked as if she’d been awake all night crying.
‘Jamie-lad,’ she breathed. ‘How are you?’
‘Och, no bother.’
‘Liar.’
She dragged the one chair over by me and rested her chin on her folded hands on the bed next to my head. My own hands lay swaddled in bandages so that nobody including me could see what had happened to them, and my feet were under a little tent to keep the bedclothes off them. She was careful not to touch me.
‘Who’s the bloody liar?’ I accused. ‘“Sergeant Elisabeth Lind!”’
‘Lind is part of my name. And I borrowed Elisabeth from the Queen. Lots of people call me Queenie.’
‘Only Ellen does that,’ I disagreed hoarsely. ‘Why did you have to get assigned to Windyedge, of all places?’
‘I was supposed to collect a German coding machine for Intelligence,’ she hissed in my ear, ‘only some bugger from the RAF had stolen it and set up his own private special operations ring so he could go on submarine hunts.’
God, my hands and feet hurt – that wasn’t a dream. I didn’t dare to move, and I didn’t want to think back to that last flight.
‘I thought you’d help me,’ she added petulantly.
‘We damn well did help you. It wasn’t easy, though, with you being in disguise as a Swiss milkmaid. Ellen and I had a job not to fall about laughing and blow your cover.’
‘I had to. I was told. That was for the Germans. So they’d take me seriously.’
‘They took Louisa jolly seriously, and she just goes about as her proud wee self.’
‘They’re coming to see you,’ said my sister. ‘Louisa and Ellen, I mean, not the Germans. They said they’d wait until you were more likely to be awake.’ She raised her head to plant a quick kiss on my cheek. ‘I couldn’t wait, though.’
It was nice to be able to talk to her properly, like coming up for air after thinking you were going to drown. A better painkiller than the morphine.
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said.
Jamie was sitting up when Ellen and I got there in the afternoon. His pale skin was covered with scabs beneath the scraggly week-old beard, and his bandaged hands lay in his lap. The clear hazel eyes, unfocused in his narrow fox’s face, went bright and excited when he saw us.
His sister was perched on the edge of his bed, and she also looked up as we came in. Without her painted face and plaited crown of hair, sitting next to Jamie and wearing the same expression of welcome and relief, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen right away how alike they were.
I had to admire her for pulling it off.
Ellen strode across the hospital room full of spring flowers, leaned down, and kissed Jamie on the mouth.
‘There you are, Jamie Stuart. You owe me that one from before.’
Then she turned to the girl who wasn’t Miss Lind and they held each other so close and tight that the copper and gold hair tangled together at the sides of their heads.
At last they all stopped cuddling. I felt like a bit of a gooseberry. I wouldn’t have dared to kiss Jamie, even on the cheek; I was still a bit in awe of him.
Ellen saw, and reached one hand to pull me closer.
‘Show him the box of chocolates Nan sent,’ she said. ‘That’s good for a laugh.’
I got them out of my school bag. ‘She’s been saving them since last year, and they’ve already survived a German bombing and a house fire, so watch out.’
‘Ta, Louisa,’ Jamie rasped. ‘Put them in the drawer as there are no surfaces left. Ruddy female relatives and their ruddy floral tributes.’
‘Here’s your logbook,’ said Ellen. ‘Which bit did you want to torture yourself with?’
She sat in the chair beside him, holding it where he could see it, like a young mum reading a storybook to a small child.
‘I just want to make sure the Stavanger op gets filled in properly,’ he said. ‘Get Louisa to do it – her writing’s always tidy. See how I’ve done the other Enigma ops, look – I put a Morse E at the start, just a dot, to remind me which flights were connected with the coding machine. Don’t want it to be too obvious.’
I knelt beside Ellen with the book against the bed as I wrote out the details, at his instruction, determined I wasn’t going to weep. Miss Lind watched over my shoulder. When I’d done, and blown on the ink to dry it off, I shut the book.
It felt very final. We all knew he wouldn’t write in it again.
For a moment we were quiet about that.
Then Elisabeth Lind, looking down, smiled her crooked little half-smile at me kneeling by the side of the bed.
‘I’m Julie,’ she said.
‘Ellen told me. After you left Windyedge.’ I simply couldn’t think of her as anything other than Miss Lind.
‘Ellen told me that you seem to think you’re responsible for Pimms Section’s flight leader being a headstrong Scots lunatic.’
‘I wanted so badly to help!’ I wailed. ‘I wanted to do something!’
‘Buckets of blood!’ She sounded exactly like her brother. ‘You did do something, Louisa Adair! You gave us our only captured Enigma machine!’
‘I could have given it to you as soon as I found it. We could have contacted your commanding officer somehow. And then maybe everything would have worked out differently, and—’ I glanced at Jamie. I wasn’t going to be the first to mention again that not a single crew in Pimms or Madeira had survived their last mission.
Miss Lind looked thoughtful. ‘But you know, if you hadn’t used it, perhaps it would have been destroyed in one of those early bombing raids, just as the papers were. Or, if you hadn’t ever found it, it would have still been in the Limehouse, but you wouldn’t have guessed when the Luftwaffe was coming. And instead, you were always one step ahead of them. Remember the bomber you turned away in the air, that awful night of freezing fog? Maybe that bomber would have killed all of us and destroyed the machine at the same time, if the coded message hadn’t warned you. And B-Flight would have still gone down in flames. Maybe if you hadn’t done anything it would have turned out worse.’
‘If you hadn’t recognised Felix Baer whistling his SOS, we might have shot down his plane on Christmas day,’ Jamie put in hoarsely. ‘If he hadn’t thought you were Calypso, and even if they hadn’t bombed Windyedge, perhaps no one would have ever discovered where he hid the machine.’
I opened my mouth to protest, and realised they were right.
Not so much in that other, different, terrible things might have happened without my interference, but in that we just wouldn’t ever know the millions upon millions of combinations that fate’s rotor dials could have lined up.
Jamie’s sister gave me that crooked smile again. I liked her much more without the disguise.
‘Anyway this is how it’s turned out,’ she said. ‘And I shall make sure the full story doesn’t go beyond my commanding officer. The official version is that the machine was hidden behind the gas fire in Mrs Campbell’s best double room until I found it there just before B-Flight went to Stavanger.’ She paused, and made a point of looking at us one by one until we each met her eyes. She did Jamie last, as if she thought he needed an extra dose of telling-off. ‘You’re all accountable for treason against the British Crown under the Official Secrets Act if you reveal a word about any of it for the next fifty years.’
‘I’m not a child,’ muttered Jamie. ‘Nor are Ellen and Louisa. You needn’t keep up your Intelligence officer act now that you’ve taken off your false eyelashes.’
‘Well, I have to warn you about the Official Secrets Act, I’ve been told to, and I’m doing it now as I’ve got all three of you in one place and there’s no one else listening,’ she said crossly. ‘And there’s a difference between being held accountable for treason and actually being guilty of it. Accountable means you have to be able to justify your actions. I don’t know how you’d justify revealing any of what you’ve been doing for the past three months, but you could probably justify doing it.’
‘I bloody well could justify doing it,’ said Jamie. ‘I’d do it again.’
‘Someone will do it again,’ I said. ‘Now that we’ve shared it.’
Louisa was going to be wasted staying at Nan’s, with her head full of Morse code and her backbone of steel and her hunger for action.
I shifted my legs. It was practically impossible to sit up straighter without putting pressure on my hands. I tried not to flail; they’d all go soft on me if they thought I was in pain.
‘What are you going to do next to help win the war, Louisa?’ I said. ‘You should join the WAAF.’
Louisa shook her head and gave a terrifically prim response, sounding like Phyllis.
‘I’m fifteen. They’d never let me in.’
I couldn’t believe she’d let a little thing like that stop her.
‘When’s your birthday?’ I persisted. ‘You’ll have to get an adult National Registration card when you turn sixteen. Sergeant Lind here fibbed about her age when she took her driving test, and if you need anybody to pull strings for you at the recruitment office, I’d say she owes you a big favour anyway.’
I couldn’t understand why Louisa looked so angry.
And then I realised she thought I’d pushed her into a corner. She wasn’t ‘of pure European descent’. She thought the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force would turn her away, the way the navy turned away her father.
‘The air force lifted the colour bar in 1939,’ I said. ‘I guess it wasn’t done with a big welcome or a lot of fanfare, but there are a few West Indians in the RAF. I met one myself last autumn, George Archer, gunner in a Wellington bomber. Family man, lovely chap. I think the WAAF would take you.’
As I watched the familiar excitement creep back into her heart-shaped face, I secretly thought that giving Louisa the tip-off that would get her into the services was perhaps my finest hour: the best thing I’d done for Britain since the war started. A bomber pilot sent night after night on missions of destruction doesn’t get much opportunity to be creative.
Buckets of blood – what was I going to do next?
Weren’t there a couple of one-armed ferry pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary? I knew my wee sister had a friend who flew for them. Maybe she could introduce me.
It would be a while yet before the damaged bits of me healed, but the war wasn’t over.
Louisa as a WAAF! I tried to imagine her in air-force blue and a peaked cap. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see her as an officer, bossing folk about.
I needed to shift gears, too. Under Nan Campbell’s roof for fifty times as long as any other? Shaness – much too long.
I thought I’d apply for a bit of training. Gunnery – or those teams that raised the barrage balloons, protecting cities from enemy aircraft. Maybe even become an officer myself. I’d learned a lot watching Jamie.
The next few months wouldn’t be easy, living with the Torries in Windyedge and waiting for a transfer.
But Louisa and I would have each other while we waited.
I remembered what Jane Warner had said about a razor and ink being all it took to fix her passport.
Rules are made to be broken, Lula.
When my sixteenth birthday comes around in the spring, I thought, and I get my new National Registration card, I have only to get rid of one stroke off the 6 and add another loop to make it an 8.
You, Jane said to me, with warmth in her wonderful rich voice, you might be able to change things.
I’d have to fight. I knew I’d have to fight.
But I was ready for that.
A real voyager.
We’d all have to fight. I wouldn’t be alone.