Part One

Odysseus

 

 

Flight Lieutenant James G. Beaufort-Stuart:

The night of 6/7 November 1940 – how many of us dead in that raid?

I don’t know.

I know nine men in 648 Squadron’s A-Flight were killed that night just because of weather. Two planes collided in fog just before landing, and one came down heavy with ice. But I don’t know how many in A-Flight fell to enemy fire.

How many in B-Flight, then? My own lads … I ought to know that, at least.

But I don’t. Not offhand. I’d have to sit and count. I probably made a note in my logbook. That night wasn’t the first time we took a heavy loss, and it wasn’t the last time. Buckets of blood. It wasn’t as many as last time. Anyway it’s hard to remember all the losses, which for Bristol Blenheim bomber crews was just about every mission, and I get some of the dead men muddled when I try to count. The Royal Air Force isn’t going to win the war flying Bristol Blenheims.

I’d argued with Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell before we took off on that mission. That wasn’t the first time, either. I knew he didn’t like me, and I risked an official reprimand, or worse, a demotion, every time I challenged him. We didn’t see eye to eye on anything.

‘We’ll never find German warships if we’re flying at twenty thousand feet!’ I told my commanding officer. I didn’t even try to hide my anger. ‘There’s no hope in hell of a Blenheim hitting anything from that height anyway. The bomb doors don’t always open when you want them to, and up there you can’t tell whether a speck out the window is an enemy destroyer or a bit of runway mud stuck on the Perspex!’

‘Are you quite finished, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart?’ said Cromwell, lowering his eyebrows like barrier gates. ‘You’ll fly at twenty thousand feet, and so will all your men. Orders are orders. That’s where Coastal Command wants you to fly. I take my instructions from headquarters and you take yours from me.’

Cromwell and I had been at each other since the day we first came together about two weeks earlier.

He got transferred to us in October when we moved to Shetland as the Battle of Britain came to an end. Our squadron patrolled the North Sea for the Royal Air Force, the RAF, just as we’d done at other bases all through the summer of 1940. But Cromwell’s role with 648 Squadron was new. Before he got lumbered with us, he’d commanded a squadron of speedy new Spitfire fighters. In August and September, while we were flying Blenheims under cover of cloud on low-level bombing raids targeting German ships, he’d been sending fighter pilots into soaring dogfights in the sun.

None of our experiences matched up. He couldn’t manage twin engines and didn’t join us when we flew. And he didn’t like it that at nineteen years old I was half his age, shorter and slighter than most of the other lads and barely needing a shave, yet I talked back. He didn’t like that all of B-Flight were on my side because they were Blenheim airmen too; maybe I looked like a schoolboy, but they knew I wasn’t. I’d been their flight leader since August.

And sending us on a bombing raid with only a half-moon to light us, above cloud at twenty thousand feet? I was reckless with frustration.

‘It’s stupid, stupid – everyone knows it. The men are complaining. You know it’s stupid. Above the cloud? We won’t be able to see the sea, let alone ships in the dark! And the air’s too thin up there for a Blenheim to operate efficiently. It’s not like flying a Spitfire! We cruise best at fifteen thousand feet, and when we’re in combat we take it as low as we can, it helps camouflage us. And the Jerries – the German fighters all know they can go higher and faster, and they circle like vultures, waiting—’

‘None of my Spitfire pilots complained about danger,’ Cromwell said coldly. ‘I expect more of a young man of your calibre, Beaufort-Stuart. This sounds like lack of moral fibre.’

Lack of moral fibre – that wonderful euphemism for cowardice.

I couldn’t let him accuse me, or worse, my 648 Squadron airmen, of being cowards.

I said stiffly, ‘Sir. I’m leading B-Flight on a mission tonight. I want the best for them.’

‘When you go in at low level, you get shot up by enemy anti-aircraft guns,’ Cromwell told me, as if I didn’t know. ‘We need to change our tactics.’

It was true that most of our losses came from guns on the ground or at sea level. I couldn’t argue with that. But I felt sure that a raid at twenty thousand feet would end in the same tears for different reasons, or at best, be completely pointless because we wouldn’t hit anything. It wasn’t the first time Coastal Command had tried it.

However, with no winning counterargument, off we went, hoping a few of us would make it back safely in five hours or so. Following orders.

The Blenheims were like a herd of shadowy brontosauri waiting on the airfield in the dark beneath the high cloud.

‘Come on, Scotty, buck up,’ said David Silvermont, my navigator, as we lowered ourselves in our bulky flight suits through the forward hatch of that night’s plane. Being the only Scot in the squadron meant that I mostly hadn’t been called Jamie for the past year or so, except on leave. ‘We can’t have you in a funk, it brings everybody down. The lads take your moods very seriously.’

‘Wing Commander Cromwell bloody well doesn’t,’ I retorted. ‘I wish he’d have a go at you sometime instead of me.’

‘No chance, as you’re the officer in charge. Anyway I am much bigger and older than you, and better looking too and probably smarter, so he doesn’t dare.’

‘And you have a bigger head than me!’ I laughed.

Most of those things were true, as David Silvermont was two years my senior and had been halfway through a medical degree when the war started. But he was also my best friend. He was easy to like and smooth with girls, with the brooding dark looks of a film star, and was good at breaking up fights and at making me laugh. Silver read poetry before he went to bed; he played Mozart on the cracked fiddle he’d found in the officers’ lounge when we were off duty; but those highbrow occupations didn’t stop him plotting a course by dead reckoning, or spotting enemy convoys, or having a sense of humour.

He was a wizard navigator.

‘What’s up?’ called our air gunner and wireless operator, Colin Oldham, from his place in the back of the Blenheim.

‘Just the usual scrapping with Cromwell,’ I grumbled. ‘Accused me of “lack of moral fibre”.’

‘Rubbish! He’s not flying tonight, is he!’ Colin exclaimed.

‘I expect he doesn’t like your poncey double-barrelled surname,’ Silver teased me. ‘It reminds the old Roundhead that your dad’s the Earl of Craigie, and then he wants to start the Civil War over again. Can’t have teenage toffs telling him what to do.’

Colin howled. ‘“The Old Roundhead”! Suits him!’

‘I don’t tell him what to do,’ I protested, checking the instruments and controls while Silver and Colin belted their harnesses in place. ‘I make polite suggestions about what not to do. And being the youngest of five sons doesn’t mean a thing. They ran out of titles before they got to me.’

‘It’s your classical education he doesn’t like,’ put in Colin.

‘I’ll make a list, shall I? Perhaps if I were taller or bigger or grew a moustache—’

‘He doesn’t like me much, either,’ Silver said with sympathy.

‘You both make him feel inferior,’ said Colin. ‘All that heady talk in the officers’ lounge comparing hydraulics to blood pressure. He can’t keep up.’

‘Hydraulics and blood pressure are endlessly fascinating,’ said Silver. He spread his chart on his knees, holding his electric torch ready in his gauntleted hand. He declared with satisfaction, ‘From tonight I shall always think of him as the Old Roundhead.’

My B-Flight aircrews knew what we were doing that night – three planes in my own Pimms Section and three in Madeira Section, with three men in each plane. In a few minutes I’d be in the sky in the dark in charge of eighteen men, counting myself, and in a few hours half of them would be dead.

I didn’t know then what the full toll of that night would be, and I tried to lighten the tone as we set out. I called over the radio to Pimms and Madeira as we took off. ‘Setting course for target and climbing to twenty thousand feet, as per orders from the Old Roundhead.’

Over the intercom I heard Colin behind me laughing again.

‘The Old Roundhead might be keeping a listening watch,’ Silver warned me.

‘I don’t mind. I’ll get another damned reprimand. He already knows what I think of him.’

We flew obediently high, heading for a flotilla of German warships that was supposed to be cruising fifty miles off the Norwegian coast. After about an hour and a half, maybe we were over the ships we were supposed to hit and maybe we weren’t. The sky was clear and blue-black, but the half-moon lit the thin cloud below us like a sheet of milky Chinese silk. I could see the other B-Flight planes standing out in black silhouette like decals against that cloud.

So, too, could the German Messerschmitt 110 night fighters on patrol.

We didn’t have lights and neither did they, and we didn’t see them coming. They can fly a hundred miles an hour faster than we can. But Silver and I both saw the streaks of green flame as the tracers flew from the first rounds of their thundering guns. And we saw the explosion of golden fire as the bullets struck an engine on another Blenheim in our formation.

Silver opened the observer’s panel in the window next to his head and twisted around to stick his nose out so he could see behind us. ‘There’s one on our tail!’ he cried. ‘Dive, dive—’

‘Down, everybody get down!’ I called to my lads over the radio. ‘Use the cloud! Get into it or below it where they can’t see you! Drop your bombs if you have to, lose the weight—’

I pushed my own plane into a nosedive. Our only hope against an Me-110 was to get away from it. Hide in cloud, camouflage yourself against the earth’s surface. For a moment, behind me, I could hear Colin’s gun rattling back at our attackers.

In a Blenheim, the air gunner has to sit with his head up out of the plane in a bubble of Perspex like a goldfish bowl on a window sill. The gunner’s turret is often the first thing that goes when the Jerries are after you. And that’s exactly what happened that night, with a deafening bang that I felt more than heard. God. The wind in the cockpit, after our turret exploded, howling around us as we sped towards the black sea below. The mess of blood and bone that had been Colin, all over the inside of the plane and the back of Silver’s leather helmet.

That missed me, anyway – I was protected from Colin by the bulkhead between the pilot’s seat and the radio equipment.

The sky went small and grey. I was diving too fast – in another few seconds the increased gravity would knock us out.

I must have levelled up somehow.

I skimmed so low over the sea, when I reached it, that the poor Blenheim’s tail wheel snagged in a swell and snapped off.

In front of us, seawater erupted like a geyser as someone overhead got rid of their explosives, and I was too close to the surface to turn away from the pluming waterspout. I had to fly through it. We lost windowpanes in the front cockpit and Silver’s charts were soaked, but we were still flying on the other side.

We were being bombed by our own planes.

We saw two Blenheims go plummeting in flames into the water around us while we struggled away from the waves.

It was the morning of 7 November 1940, and I was so stunned and spent after I landed back at our base in Shetland that I couldn’t think. I shut down the engines, and Silver and I sat in silence. We didn’t even try to get out.

Then a couple of mechanics climbed on the wing to open the hatches, and Silver looked up. He put a hand on my shoulder and said softly, ‘Nice flying, Scotty, as per usual. Thanks for getting us home.’

He’d taken off his gloves to rescue the charts and to use the pencils and flight calculator on the way back. His hands must have been freezing. But he made the same cheesy joke every time we landed safely – he’d be able to play the violin again. He pulled the little box of rosin from his knee pocket, the lucky charm that went with him on every op, and held it between thumb and forefinger with both hands in front of his face.

‘Look, everything still in one piece.’

He couldn’t not say it. He couldn’t not take the rosin with him. I had a charm too, in the breast pocket of my uniform beneath my flight suit, a perfectly round quartz pebble from the Iron Age hill fort on my father’s grouse moor.

‘You’re welcome,’ I croaked.

Our clothes were soaked with seawater and Colin Oldham’s blood. It was all over the cockpit, and we had to climb through it to get out the hatch.

Half an hour later I sat down in front of Flight Officer Phyllis Pennyworth, our brisk, chirpy robin of a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force interrogator who was in charge of grilling us after a mission – and I got so choked up I couldn’t talk. I sat for a while with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and she just let me do that, didn’t say anything, knew what was coming – or guessed, anyway.

When I looked up, the pretty pink had faded a bit from her rosy cheeks. She loved us all very much. But in the debriefing room Pennyworth took care to be all business, and this time I was too broken and beat to do my job politely.

‘Too many German planes to count,’ I told her. ‘Bloody Jerries in their bloody Messerschmitt 110s. Those Luftwaffe night fighters. Like a swarm of hornets – they know where we’re coming from and what we’re after, and they’re a million miles an hour faster than us—’

‘Not a million, Scotty,’ Phyllis corrected me gently. Using my nickname instead of my rank title the way most of my lads did, so that I knew she cared, but reminding me to be precise so she could make an accurate report. She was a stickler for rules herself, and she was scared of the Old Roundhead.

‘Might as well be a million.’ It came out as a sort of sob. ‘These old Blenheims we fly, these airborne buckets of bolts we’re in, these crates don’t have a chance against a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter!’

And I gave a real sob then, because of Colin.

I didn’t tell Phyllis Pennyworth about the mess. She’d seen our busted-up plane – half the glass in the front cockpit punched out, a furrow ploughed in the airfield behind us by our tail because we’d lost the tail wheel, the gaping hole where the gunner’s turret used to be. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what had happened to Colin. She waited while I tried to pull myself together, and when I still didn’t say anything, she sighed and put down her pen and lit a cigarette for me.

I took it and my hands didn’t shake. I hadn’t lost my nerve – I was angry. Not just at the Germans, our enemy. I was angry at my commanding officer, at Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell, for being so blind to what we were up against, and at Coastal Command itself, whoever they were, making impossible rules in some comfortable headquarters in England while we bled our lives out in unforgiving sky and sea.

I tried to smoke. Phyllis passed me her ashtray. I was nearly angry at her, too, behaving herself and reporting to them. But she was good at her job, unlike Cromwell; she’d been with us since June and she knew us well.

‘When we fly that high the mission is absolutely pointless, but when we come in at a low level to bomb the German ships, we get shot up by their anti-aircraft guns,’ I said bitterly. ‘I just want an advantage, you know? I want to know where their submarines are, or if there are night fighters about, before they’re on top of us. Some wee thing. One thing that we can do better than the Germans. One surprising smack in their faces.’

‘We stopped the invasion,’ Phyllis said. ‘You helped too, two months ago when we were fighting the Battle of Britain. We made them back off. That was a smack in their faces.’

‘Now they’re bombing our cities to blazes – that’s not backing off!’

‘We all want revenge,’ Phyllis said softly.

That surprised me a little. I didn’t think of earnest, diligent Flight Officer Pennyworth as someone who had unwholesome emotions that might involve a thirst for blood. I glanced up at her, thinking she might be offering mechanical sympathy to another shot-down airman – or I suppose I should say shot up, not shot down, as I’d managed to bring the crate back and land it in one piece.

Her eyes were red and her mouth was set in a stubborn, steely pout. I guess Flight Officer Pennyworth got the job partly because she didn’t cry easily. Maybe she did want revenge.

‘We’ll win,’ Phyllis said firmly. ‘We’ll keep fighting, and someday we’ll win fair and square.’

I’d let my cigarette go out. I dumped it in the ashtray. What had Cromwell told me?

We need to change our tactics.

‘I don’t want to win fair and square any more,’ I said through my teeth. ‘I want to cheat.’

Louisa Adair:

Daddy said I lost my Jamaican accent in one year. One year at the rather posh London school where my mother taught music, and I had a polite accent I’d picked up from my schoolteachers. I didn’t even know it was happening. There wasn’t any other obvious way to blend in, with my light brown skin and springing dark brown hair, tamed into plaits by Mummy and then into tight rolls by me when I got older. ‘Me boonoonoonoos country gal is turning into a little English lady,’ Daddy teased. But it stopped the other girls from teasing.

In November 1940, my polite English accent came in useful.

I was fifteen years old and both my parents were killed in a single month by German explosives, Mummy in an air raid and Daddy in a sea battle, thousands of miles apart. My school closed because of the Blitz even before Mummy was killed, but I was old enough that I didn’t need to stay in school anyway. Now I was stuck by myself in Mummy’s rented attic room surrounded by falling bombs. Our elderly landladies looked in on me and made sure I didn’t starve, but all I did in the first shocked horrible weeks after Mummy’s death was bury my nose in books whose orphaned heroines got happy endings.

I reread A Little Princess, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables, but my literary friends began to feel disappointing. They didn’t have to cope with air raids. Nobody was rude to them for being foreign. Sara Crewe was born in India and spoke Hindustani, but she still looked English. When people shooed her away it wasn’t because she was brown.

I had a bit more money than Sara Crewe or Jane Eyre or Anne Shirley, that was true. There was twenty-five pounds in Mummy’s post office account. But it wouldn’t last forever. I had to have something to do when it ran out, or I would end up living in an air-raid shelter on an Underground platform. The only person I could go to was Granny Adair, Daddy’s mother in Jamaica, and how was I going to get back to Jamaica, past the U-boats and destroyers? The City of Benares, full of evacuated children, was torpedoed by a German submarine in September!

I knew I couldn’t go back. We’d moved to England when I was twelve, and I knew, because of the dustbin of rubbish true facts in the back of my head, that I could not live with Granny Adair. I’d have to earn my keep there by picking up stones in her tiny field of sugarcane, or herding her goats. At best, taking in washing, which in the Jamaica bush means scrubbing sheets in the river and walking six miles with a laundry basket on your head. Three years in London had ruined me for such a life. No, if I am honest, it was Mummy’s fault, with music lessons and library books and her pretty tailored suits. Even in our Jamaican bungalow we’d had a piano and a veranda and a little garden of English roses. And we left Kingston because Mummy was afraid of the workers’ strikes and the Caribbean riots. Daddy grew up in the bush, but he went to sea when he was fifteen.

At fifteen! My age in November 1940. You can do that if you’re a boy – even a West Indian boy can do that. The rules won’t let any kind of girl do that. And I was a West Indian girl.

What can a West Indian girl do at fifteen?

A girl whose parents are both killed by enemy action and who burns, burns to fight back? A schoolgirl with no skills who stands in the street watching the vapour trails of the fighter planes and wants to be up there with them so badly that it hurts?

Some of those children on the City of Benares were rescued from the sea. They were the ones who hung on, who fought to stay awake in the cold water and who wouldn’t let go of the wreckage that kept them afloat.

I am like those children. Not the ones who sank. The ones who fought.

Rules are made to be broken, Mummy always told me. She believed that you can get away with breaking rules if you are polite about it, and underneath her cultured British charm my mother was the boldest of rule-breakers, a white Englishwoman who married a black Jamaican. But she was carefully polite. That’s how she got around our landladies in London, with harp music and flute music and smart, stylish hats. Mummy had always been there to protect me from the rules. Now I was going to have to break them on my own.

I had to find work. At my age it wasn’t going to be war work, but I had to pay rent and buy food. Sensible positions such as ‘salesgirl in record shop’ and ‘music teacher’s assistant’ weren’t the answer because time and again people made it clear they didn’t want to hire someone with a tropical complexion, even a pale one – light brown, dark brown, it was all the same to the English. ‘The Caribbean sun makes people lazy,’ explained one well-meaning person as she turned me away.

And Mummy had trained me so carefully to be polite that I thanked her as I left.

Afterwards I sat on a bench by the Serpentine and cried.

But then I found Nancy Campbell’s notice in the newspaper. Her old aunt Jane needed someone to look after her; I had to ring a number in Scotland to ask about it. And that was perfect, because over the telephone I was able to get around the rules by invisibly using my most practical, useful skill – my polite English accent.

I was surprised at how quickly my plan worked. Nancy Campbell, whoever she was, seemed ready to snap me up straightaway.

‘You must be tidy, and able to make travel arrangements by yourself,’ she told me. ‘I’ll send the rail fare if you’re willing.’

It seemed too good to be true.

‘But haven’t you other people applying as well?’ I asked.

‘I’ll accept the first suitable candidate who wants the position. I’ve lost count how many lasses have rung me, then changed their minds – oh, twenty, at least. No one wants to be seen with Aunt Jane, and that’s the truth.’

‘Is she West Indian?’ I blurted, before I could stop myself.

‘No,’ said the Scotswoman. ‘She’s German.’

German!

‘She’s suspected of being a risk to national security,’ the woman on the phone continued grimly. ‘She has to be collected from an alien detainment camp on the Isle of Man.’

A risk to national security in an alien detainment camp!

Worrying I’d hang up on her, Mrs Campbell rushed to give me more information. ‘My aunt’s what they call “category C”, a low-risk prisoner. She broke her hip last summer, hillwalking at eighty-two, silly woman! She needs help getting about. Not heavy lifting, just minding … and keeping her out of my way, to be honest. I have the pub to manage, and I can’t look after an invalid. Aunt Jane is far too old to be locked up like a criminal anyway, though that’s her own fault for lying about her age – she told the policemen who arrested her that she was sixty! And how she pulled off such a devilish falsehood, I can’t tell you. I’ve a mind she wanted to be arrested – attention-seeking Jezebel! But the government’s releasing quite a few folk they detained earlier this year. Most of them are Jewish and not Nazis at all, and people aren’t happy about imprisoning folk the way the Germans do.’

Mrs Campbell paused for breath.

‘Why did they arrest her?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Besides her being German?’

‘She was a telegraphist. She worked five years in a wireless exchange in Berlin when she was a girl, sending Morse code, before she became an opera singer.’ Mrs Campbell added hastily, ‘But that was more than sixty years ago, in the 1870s. Before the telephone – plenty of young ladies did the same! It’s not as if she was Mata Hari, taking messages and spying in the Great War!’

A telegraphist and an opera singer! Morse code! I thought the old woman might turn out to be quite interesting. And I wasn’t scared of an old woman, even if she was German. I liked old women. I liked our landladies, who were kind to me when Mummy and Daddy were killed. I liked Granny Adair.

Mrs Campbell elaborated, ‘Aunt Jane’s no blood relation, you understand. She’s my father’s brother’s wife. They lived a wicked bohemian life, Uncle John and Aunt Jane, in the last century – Berlin, Vienna, Paris. She was famous the world over, to hear her tell it. Her real name is Johanna von Arnim, though she’s Jane Warner now.’

‘How is she? Can she walk?’ I tried to think of any information I needed before the money for the phone call ran out. ‘Did she live alone before she broke her hip?’

‘Yes, she had a flat in London,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘Uncle John had a long lease on it which expired ten years ago, and afterwards the landowner rented it to them year to year. But Uncle John’s dead now, and Aunt Jane’s let the flat go and has no place to live. At eighty-two! What am I to do with an eighty-two-year-old invalid who’s made her living in music halls – put her behind the bar? Oh – and you must be quiet about her being German. The pub is next to a Royal Air Force base, and the bomber lads often come here when they’re not in the air.’

‘Does your aunt speak English?’ I asked.

Nancy Campbell huffed at the other end of the telephone line. ‘Aye, did I not say? She married a Scotsman – they kept a London flat for fifty years! Of course she speaks English.’

I took the job over the telephone without the desperate Nancy Campbell seeing me. She was easily persuaded when I told her that Mummy had been a music teacher, and that I could play the flute and the piano. Mrs Campbell thought her operatic auntie would like to have a musical companion.

So I filled a pasteboard suitcase with books and sheet music, and a larger one with all the winter clothes I could cram into it. I said goodbye to the landladies at Number 88, Gibraltar Road, in Tooting. Then I started on my first journey all alone across the British Isles.

That journey passed in a swirl of November leaves and rain outside moving windows: train to Liverpool, overnight ferry to the Isle of Man, and another train to Rushen Camp, grey and wet, in a seaside town surrounded by barbed wire. I kept my nose in a book or pressed against the window the whole way, being polite to everyone, ignoring the stares, avoiding looking at anybody – just the way Mummy had always done when we went out together.

The prison guards were social workers, Society of Friends volunteers, they said. A young woman wearing a patched cardigan, with her hair tied back in a school ribbon, led me up the stairs in a Victorian guest house converted into barracks. ‘Are you from East Africa, perhaps? You do speak English very well. Was it difficult to pick up?’

She was as nice as possible, but annoyed me by asking the same old stupid questions, which I answered politely as usual.

‘I’m from Jamaica. My mother was English.’

‘Oh, Jamaica, even further! Don’t you mind the cold? Here we are.’

She didn’t give me a moment to answer about whether I minded the cold or not. She knocked and opened a door.

‘On you go.’ She waved me ahead of her.

I stepped into the room and came face to face with Johanna von Arnim.

The old woman sat swaddled in a mothy wool blanket. There were no curtains in her small room, which was filled entirely by the chair and bed and wardrobe. The window glass was slabbed with dark blue paint and tape because of the blackout, so that German bombers wouldn’t see a light on the ground at night. The window was open to let in daylight, and the air inside was as cold and damp as outside.

Johanna von Arnim stared at the Friends volunteer with cool, pale blue eyes. Then she turned those eyes on me, and they widened in surprise.

I held my breath, ridiculously expecting her to say something in German.

Instead, she sang an English singing game.

‘“Who shall we send to take her away?”’

Her voice was amazing. It was a rich, fruity mezzo-soprano, perhaps a little quavery with age, but not at all weak or thin. The song filled the room. When she stopped singing, the air seemed to hum with the memory of it.

I used to play ‘Nuts in May’ too, outside my primary school in Jamaica, holding hands with my friends in a circle beneath the Bombay mango tree. So I sang to her in reply.

‘“You’ll have Miss to take you away!”’

My own voice embarrassed me. It sounded like a tin whistle following a golden flute.

The old woman’s parchment skin crinkled around those pale blue eyes into a silent laugh.

‘Here I am,’ I said. I held out my hand for her to shake.

‘Which corner of the British Empire do you come from, my dusky maid?’ she asked, shaking hands politely.

‘Jamaica. I grew up in Kingston,’ I said. ‘My mother was English.’

I waited for her to compliment my English or ask me if I was cold, but she surprised me.

‘Is that a flute you’re carrying?’ she asked. ‘Do you play?’

I’d left my cases at the camp headquarters, but I had the flute on its strap over my shoulder. ‘A bit,’ I said cautiously.

Mummy would have told her I didn’t like to practise. I didn’t want to admit this right away to a professional opera singer. Or to the only person who’d started out by showing as much interest in my flute as in the colour of my skin.

‘Frau von Arnim, this is Louisa Adair.’ The woman from the camp office introduced us. ‘Louisa can help you pack.’

‘I don’t want help packing,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘My things are my own business. But I shall need assistance to get to the bank to collect my furs.’

‘Your furs are at the bank?’ I echoed.

‘Yes, of course, we’re not allowed locks. I don’t trust that damned Nazi Ella Fiesler across the passage, and there are three children downstairs who stain everything they touch. They’re not Nazis – they’re just children. I cannot keep their sticky paws off my gramophone. If that martinet of a commander would allow us to listen to the radio they might be less trouble, but as it stands, my gramophone is the only entertainment in the house. Open the wardrobe – you’ll see. Go on, girl, don’t stand there staring.’

Not only could she speak English, but her English was flawlessly proper. She sounded like a radio announcer. Like a duchess. Like the Queen.

She watched me as a cat watches a bird, hungrily. I opened the wardrobe.

There was the gramophone, and next to it was a stack of records higher than my knees. Gowns bloomed like hibiscus and oleander on the rail, pushed to the back so she could reach the gramophone.

‘Well, Louisa, now you’ve met Johanna von Arnim, help her to her feet,’ said the young woman from the camp headquarters. I thought she must be evaluating me.

I clasped Frau von Arnim by the forearms and braced my heels while she pulled herself up. She was a good deal heavier than she looked.

‘The coat, and then the sticks – ugh, dreadful things, I look like an old spider,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘And my bag beneath the pillow. The passbooks are behind the notes for one of the Django Reinhardts, I forget which.’

‘Pardon?’

‘In the record album,’ she explained impatiently. ‘At the bottom, beneath the frocks. That damned Nazi Ella Fiesler would never pick up a jazz record.’

Frau von Arnim got down the stairs by herself. I was relieved that she could manage stairs, but goodness, they seemed to take forever – she did them one at a time. The volunteer and I came down behind her. I carried her walking sticks, wondering if I should have gone first to break her fall if she went plummeting forward.

‘You must have very strong arms,’ I said.

‘I have, girl,’ she agreed.

And then a long plod to the bank, where we collected a mountain of furs. The Society of Friends woman came with us, watching how I got on. Frau von Arnim, frowning with hostility, examined each piece of fur and signed for it.

‘I shall be withdrawing my savings, as well,’ she announced with queenly pomp.

That was more complicated, and the bank manager took her into a private room to sort it out.

This left me alone with the detainment camp volunteer.

She grasped my arm and pulled me away from the bank manager’s office. She glanced about to be sure none of the clerks were listening, and then she spoke to me quickly, with her voice carefully lowered.

‘Thank you for coming for Frau von Arnim,’ she said. ‘She should have been released over a month ago, and frankly she ought never to have been sent here in the first place. It really is too bad! She’s well aware of why it’s taken so long for her niece to find someone to help her travel. There’s nothing worse than knowing nobody wants you.’

I nodded. I thought I understood that.

‘Do keep a careful eye on her, won’t you?’ said the social worker. ‘That fall she had on the cliffs was providential, if you ask me. We think she was planning to throw herself over the top when she made it to the edge.’

It took me a moment to realise she was serious.

Oh, heavens, did Nancy Campbell know that about her aunt? If she did, she’d been a bit secretive about it.

‘Frau von Arnim has always been very unhappy here,’ the camp volunteer explained, seeing my wary expression. ‘The Rushen Camp women are allowed to go about the town freely, to the shops and the cinema and such, but Frau von Arnim would keep doing things we had to put a stop to. Bathing in the sea naked – at her age! Playing records at three o’clock in the morning, purposefully hiding library books when they were due to be returned. Tossing out other people’s post! She’d say it was an accident, but she always picked out the ones belonging to people she didn’t like. And then there would have to be consequences, so she wasn’t allowed on the beach, or to the library, or to speak to the postman, and we had to move her three times in four months, and her gramophone got taken away for a bit … just constant scrapping with everybody. And it always ended in us having to treat her more and more like – like—’

I was sure she was going to say more like a prisoner, but she surprised me.

‘More and more like a very elderly woman indeed.’

The social worker paused. She had me by the arm, as if she expected me to try to escape. She searched my face, no doubt wondering if I understood her.

I thought of Frau von Arnim’s whacking great lie about her age. I put that together with what I’d seen of her in the past hour: stubborn, independent, regal and elegant, with a voice like a nightingale and a cupboard full of jazz records. She was still looking for adventure. Perhaps when she was arrested she imagined a few nights in prison before someone discovered how old she was – perhaps she imagined she would charm her guards with song, and then there might be outraged news headlines about her brave spirit and the injustice of her arrest, and people would remember her operatic past. Retired, perhaps, but not old.

A rule-breaker, just like Mummy.

Just like me.

‘And now that she can’t walk properly, of course she does have to be treated like an old woman,’ the social worker finished.

‘I expect she’ll cheer up once she’s off the island,’ I said.

‘I expect she’ll cheer up now she has you to order about,’ replied the social worker, at last letting go of my arm.

She smiled at me. Then she ruined it by adding ominously: ‘Do take care that Frau von Arnim isn’t allowed to hurt herself again.’

We had one last visit to the camp office. I was to be the Official Keeper of Documents, and there was a brief argument over my suitability for the job.

‘Miss Adair is perhaps rather, um, perhaps too young?’ said someone. ‘To be entrusted with such responsibility, I mean.’

‘I don’t believe the commander would approve,’ said another. ‘Not if she saw the girl herself.’

‘But she hasn’t seen the girl,’ protested Frau von Arnim, who was ready to leave.

What a stupid argument! I was sure it had nothing to do with my youth and everything to do with my skin colour.

I said, in my best English accent, ‘I should think it will be rather difficult for Frau von Arnim to manage her walking sticks and her papers at the same time.’

In the end I was put properly in charge, with sheepish excuses as the Society of Friends people avoided looking me in the eye. But they apologised by making a bit of a fuss over Frau von Arnim before she left, and me as well, feasting us with scones slathered in jam and butter. ‘There’s no rationing here!’ somebody told me. ‘People on the mainland are envious when they find out how well the detainees eat. But we can’t let it go to waste, can we? And we’re not allowed to send any foodstuffs off the island. You must guzzle as much as you can before you go!’

I studied the documents they’d given me so grudgingly. It said Johanna von Arnim on the old woman’s passport and her ration books and release papers. Hadn’t Nancy Campbell told me her aunt was called Jane Warner now? But everyone in Rushen Camp called her Frau von Arnim. I wasn’t sure how to keep her Germanness quiet, as Mrs Campbell said I should; or even what to call her.

*

The mainland ferry set sail for Liverpool, and I sighed with relief as I unwrapped the sandwiches I’d bought at a kiosk on the pier in Douglas. (Roast beef! I hadn’t tasted beef that wasn’t out of a tin since the war started.) Taxi, rail station, taxi, ferry, loading and unloading everything at each stop, helping Frau von Arnim in and out of vehicles and up and down from platforms – hauling all the travelling cases along with us again, hers full of record albums and mine full of books. There was the gramophone, too. We had to wear the furs; I felt like a trapper. Had Nancy Campbell suspected the fuss? She must have.

But at last I had a chance to breathe, with a long night at sea ahead. We weren’t in a cabin, but the ferry lounge was more comfortable than the train, and Frau von Arnim’s furs were incredibly warm and surprisingly light. I had never worn anything so soft. Johanna von Arnim sat straight and elegant in her own beaver coat and fox stole, with her back to the Isle of Man as we steamed away from it. Her thin powder-white hair peeped out beneath her fur hat, and her watery blue eyes gleamed as if they were wet.

‘Good riddance to that godforsaken place,’ she said abruptly. ‘Tell me, my dear, how does a Jamaican schoolgirl end up traipsing across Britain with a released German detainee?’

I swallowed. I hadn’t yet had to tell anyone about Mummy and Daddy being killed – my landladies were there when it happened, and it was nobody else’s business. Mrs Campbell hadn’t even asked.

‘I needed work,’ I said evasively.

‘No people of your own to go to?’

‘Not here,’ I said.

I bent over my cup of tea.

‘You’re dreadfully young not to have any people,’ said Johanna von Arnim.

I didn’t want to talk about it.

But I’d just make it worse for later if I was mysterious. It wouldn’t be the last time I’d have to tell someone, even if it was the first.

‘My parents were killed by bombs last month,’ I said. ‘In the same week. Not in the same place. My mother, she was called Carrie, Caroline Adair – she – she was riding in the front of a bus that fell into a crater when Balham tube station was bombed. You might have seen the pictures in the papers.’

‘No, we aren’t allowed newspapers,’ the old woman said gently. She cocked her head to favour her left ear, listening carefully over the ferry’s engines. ‘How terrible, and how unhappy you must be! Were you in the accident?’

I shook my head. This I couldn’t talk about – that I hadn’t been along. I hadn’t been there when it happened, I hadn’t been there when Mummy was taken away in the ambulance, I hadn’t been there when she died all alone in the hospital four days later. No one needed to know that. No one could fix that, and I didn’t want anyone to pretend to try.

‘My father, Lenford Adair, was a merchant seaman on a ship that was torpedoed three days after my mother died,’ I said carefully. ‘I didn’t find out until about two weeks later. Poor Daddy! I don’t know if he knew what happened to Mummy. I sent a telegram, but it might not have reached him. I can’t decide if I hope he did know, or if I hope he didn’t.’ I swallowed again. ‘Hundreds of men drowned. He hadn’t been let in the Royal Navy because he wasn’t born in Europe, but the German U-boats don’t seem to care whether it’s a navy or civilian ship they’re sinking—’

I choked on my words, my face and eyes burning.

‘I’m sorry!’ I gasped. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like anyone who’s German—’

‘It didn’t,’ she said. ‘And the U-boats don’t. Well done, Lenford Adair! Those merchant seamen are just as heroic as the military seamen, even if they’re not in battle. I’m sorry they wouldn’t let your father in the navy. There’s nothing more frustrating than having an open door slammed in your face.’

It reminded me of what the social worker said: There’s nothing worse than knowing nobody wants you.

‘And grief is a burden you can never put down,’ said the old woman. ‘Though it gets easier to hide. I’ve been alone for three years. It doesn’t feel very long.’ She suddenly sounded stubborn. ‘It isn’t very long. It never stops hurting. You learn to bear the pain.’

‘Do you?’ I asked longingly, caught off guard by her intimacy and kindness.

She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘It depends on where you are and what you’re doing.’

The social worker’s warning nagged in my head. Do keep a careful eye on her, won’t you? Do take care that Frau von Arnim isn’t allowed to hurt herself again.

We’d finished our sandwiches. The old woman drooped and was instantly asleep, snoring lightly against my shoulder.

I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t remember ever being so tired in my life. Johanna von Arnim’s sleek head pressed against me like a sandbag full of concrete. It hadn’t been easy, talking about Mummy and Daddy. I let the tears come quietly and didn’t make a noise. It was comforting to have the old woman’s head lolling heavy and trusting against my shoulder.

I thought it would be impossible for her to steal off and throw herself into the Irish Sea without waking me up, so I gave up trying to keep my own eyes open.

I recognised the drone of German planes even in my sleep. I dreamed I was standing in Balham High Road back in London, staring at the sky. It was blue and empty, and I wasn’t worried about being attacked. I was happy and excited, as if I were going to a party. I could hear the thudding engines all around and I held my breath, longing for the air battle to begin. I couldn’t wait to cheer on the Spitfires and Hurricanes as they cut up the sky with their vapour trails.

Then I remembered what the bombers would do to Mummy, and woke myself with a sob.

The engines were real. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, was bombing the Liverpool docks. The ferry lounge lights had been switched off, but the ship steamed onward, with a kind of grim determination that reminded me of Mrs Campbell on the phone.

I jumped up and peeked beneath the blackout curtains. We hadn’t far to go, but fire lit the low black land. The ship rocked, and I thought of U-boats and torpedoes. We were helpless. Had Daddy felt this way, waiting for his ship to sink? I couldn’t believe it. He must have had a job to do, right up to the instant he was killed.

I thought I would choke to death with wanting to fight back, to join in, to make a difference, to do something.

Johanna von Arnim slept peacefully, snoring gently.

Well, she was my responsibility. Looking after her was my wartime job right now, and it was too bad if it wasn’t very exciting or even very patriotic. I sat down beside her again and sighed. It wouldn’t matter anyway if our ship sank on the way to Liverpool.

But mercifully it didn’t, and by the time we docked the raid was over. I hauled the cases and gramophone on to land as the all-clear sirens hooted. My wartime job was going to keep me fit, whatever else happened.

We spent hours in the city police station getting her registered, and then in the railway station at Liverpool Lime Street queuing to buy our tickets.

‘Identity documents, miss?’ the ticket seller asked, eyeing me suspiciously, when I finally got to the front of the line. I felt conspicuous in the fur coat.

Be polite, Lula, warned Mummy’s calm, comforting voice in my head.

I gave a false, bright smile. ‘Oh – yes, sorry! I haven’t had to show ID to buy a rail ticket before.’ Of course I hadn’t. No one has to. But I dug in my school satchel for my National Registration card anyway.

‘Please step aside so you don’t hold up the queue,’ said the ticket seller coolly.

My heart plummeted as I bit back rising anger. It is hard to stand your ground and politely break rules at the same time. Why hadn’t I parked Frau von Arnim with the luggage instead of shuffling everything along in the queue with us? If we lost our place I’d have to shift it all again—

The old woman reached over me with an official-looking booklet open to a smiling photograph of her own face. The ticket seller nodded and pushed the passport back.

‘Apologies, madam, I didn’t realise you were together.’ He smiled at her over my shoulder.

‘Well, we are,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘Two singles for Stonehaven.’ She added in a friendly way, ‘We are visiting my niece in Scotland.’

My face burned as the horrid man thumped our tickets with the date stamp. I paid without saying anything.

‘Thank you,’ said the old woman as we turned away. But she might have been talking to me.

Afterwards we sat in the ladies’ waiting room, surrounded by our piles of luggage, until it was time for our train.

‘What did you show that man?’ I asked. I was supposed to help her with her papers, and here was something she’d kept to herself.

The old woman gave a slow, shy smile, as if she were the one who was a bit embarrassed this time. She handed over the booklet and let me look at it.

It was an ordinary British passport, more ordinary than mine, even, because mine says JAMAICA across the front below BRITISH PASSPORT. The smiling photograph pasted inside was definitely a recent picture of the person sitting next to me – at least, it wasn’t taken so long ago you couldn’t tell who it was. But the name read clearly, Jane Warner, British subject by birth.

It also said she was a musician. And it said she was born in Aberdeen, in Scotland, in 1868, ten years later than the date on Johanna von Arnim’s alien registration card.

‘You can call me Jane,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s what I call myself.’

I stared at the lying document, then looked up at the person who called herself Jane. The shy smile was gone. She watched me seriously, trusting me with a secret.

‘How did you get this?’ I demanded. It came out sounding very stern, and her thin shoulders cringed a little. Perhaps she was expecting me to take it away from her. That’s what they’d have done at Rushen Camp if they’d known about it.

‘It was my husband’s,’ she said defiantly. ‘I kept it when he died. It wasn’t until I was already locked up in that miserable place that I started fiddling with it. Of course they knew who I was, but I’ve called myself Jane Warner since the early thirties … And who doesn’t look forward to a better life ahead? I thought I should be ready if the chance arose. It was simple to fix – a razor and ink is all it took. Rubbing the raised stamp on to the photograph was the difficult bit.’

She was more of a rule-breaker than I’d realised.

‘You really ought not to use it,’ I scolded. ‘You could get into terrible trouble.’

She laughed. ‘What do you think they would do? Put me in prison? At my age? Imagine!’

‘It would be worse than the camp,’ I argued.

‘I was in prison for three weeks before I went to the camp, so I know what it would be like,’ she told me.

I gazed at the glamorous smiling face of the elderly, but younger, woman in the fake passport.

‘You don’t need to show identification papers to buy a rail ticket,’ said Jane Warner. ‘That man was a bully. He was bullying you.’

‘I know he was bullying me,’ I said. ‘People often do.’

I’d been saved by an old German woman! Suddenly I laughed too. ‘Stupid bossy official! Aren’t there enough rules already? I wish we could report him for making up extra ones.’

‘Never mind,’ said Jane. ‘There’s no danger to national security, and we have our rail tickets. If he goes on making up extra rules, the stupid bossy official may get himself in trouble without our assistance.’

I gave her back her husband’s doctored passport.

‘This is going to expire next year,’ I pointed out.

‘I’ll worry about that next year,’ said Jane.

I rang Mrs Campbell from the red telephone kiosk by the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. That was as far as we could get to the village of Windyedge without having to walk, and Mrs Campbell said she’d arranged for someone to come in a car to collect us.

It felt like the end of the earth. I remembered, in a flash, a time when I’d been very small, following a path in the bush behind Granny Adair’s tiny ramshackle house, and suddenly everything seemed strange. I was alone among the giant ferns and banana trees and huge Anansi spiderwebs, and I panicked. I wasn’t lost – I shouldn’t have been afraid. But I was terrified. I turned around and ran screeching back down the path to Granny Adair’s familiar shack and henhouses.

I felt a bit like that now. Only the bus shelter, the telephone kiosk, and a small postbox sunk in a stone wall showed it was the twentieth century. All around were brown winter fields dotted with sheep, a brown hillside wreathed in low clouds, and unhappy blackthorns stooped by sea wind. There weren’t even any signposts. They’d all been taken down to confuse the Germans if they invaded. Smoke rose from the invisible village down the lane, almost a smell of tobacco, because they were burning peat, not coal – just as they’d done for thousands of years. Beyond the smoke stretched the sea, the cold North Sea.

But Mrs Campbell had said there was an aerodrome nearby, for a Royal Air Force bomber squadron. The airmen came to her pub. Perhaps I’d see some of them there, young British men returning from combat over the North Sea.

The longing I felt when I watched an air battle swelled up in my throat again until it was drowning me. What in the world was I going to do here, or learn to do here, to help win the war? Looking after Jane Warner would keep me from starving, but it wasn’t going to lead to anything else, was it?

My chest grew tight with the same kind of panic I’d felt in the green strangeness of the Jamaica bush.

But I couldn’t turn around and run screeching home this time.

Neither one of us could.

Volunteer Ellen McEwen:

There’s always someone telling you to move on if you’re a Traveller. There’s always someone calling you dirty or sly, or slamming a door in your face. Filthy sleekit tinker. That’s what I live with, and not just me, but all my family too. Then the war came along and gave me a chance to be someone different.

It wasn’t that folk changed the way they felt about us, mind. It wasn’t some la-di-da virtuous ‘fighting a common enemy’ rubbish. It was just that once I was in uniform, folk couldn’t tell where I’d come from.

The war began when I was eighteen, and my twin brother and I joined up at the same time early in 1940. Euan went for a soldier and was sent to France, but a lass like me wasn’t going to have to shoot at people. I became a driver for the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. I was proud to do it, and I had steady wages I could share with my mam and dad if they told me a post office to send it to.

When I finished the training course and was assigned to be the driver for an RAF aerodrome, no one at my new RAF base had the least idea where I’d come from. Scotland, aye, that was clear, but the English erks and airmen didn’t know I was a Traveller. I became a gadgy dilly like the other girls, living under a roof and wearing a uniform, and no one but me kent I’d rather be sleeping in a camp tent.

And I kept quiet about it.

At first it wasn’t on purpose. But when I realised folk weren’t bothered about me, I was careful not to let them know. A fresh start. No need to stir up trouble, aye? There was no women’s barracks at RAF Windyedge so I was billeted at the Limehouse, Nancy Campbell’s pub in the village, and she didn’t bat an eyelash over me staying there. She was just the crabbit sort who wouldn’t take well to a fiery-haired, long-legged Scots Traveller lass staying under her roof, but she tolerated me well enough. It was grand being tolerated instead of shunned.

Better than that, at the airfield and in the pub, it was grand being liked by the RAF lads and trusted by their commanders. It’s true that Jamie Stuart knew who I was. We were both at RAF Windyedge late in the summer of 1940. But he was an old friend and didn’t give my game away. He had his own posh family that he tried to keep quiet about, being the laird’s son educated at Eton and all that. My mam and dad used to camp on his grandad’s land.

We were lucky to be close by, and I missed him when 648 Squadron went up to Shetland – I worried about him the way I worried about my own twin brother.

But apart from the worry, if I’m honest, the war so far made me grow a mite comfortable in ways I’d never expected. I didn’t think about the future – how did anyone? Should I go back to my own folk, would I marry, could I make a living? No one needed to decide any of that now, not when we might all be speaking German in another year! I might as well enjoy myself in my wartime job, enjoy being just the same as other folk.

And then in November 1940, it all turned over. After November 1940, I couldn’t be so comfortable.

It started with Nan Campbell asking me to do her a favour on my way back from delivering a load of engine parts to Deeside near Aberdeen. She had two guests arriving to stay at the Limehouse and needed help getting them there. One was Jane Warner, Nan Campbell’s ancient auntie, who had broken her hip and had to walk with two sticks. She’d just come out of hospital and had no other place in the world to go. The other was the girl Nan hired to help her auntie make the journey, and to look after her a time. Could I collect them in the Tilly from the nearest bus stop, Nan asked – the Tilly was the Hillman Minx van I had charge of, converted for carrying bags of stuff or a troop of men, with wooden benches in the back under a canvas top. Nan’s old auntie had brought piles of luggage and couldn’t possibly walk two miles to the Limehouse.

I said I didn’t mind, and when I got back from Deeside, there was the old woman waiting with her young assistant at the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. They did make me laugh, all among their furs and their cases, when I pulled up! They looked like a pair of imperial Russian princesses running away from the Red Revolution.

The hired lassie gave me a surprise, for her smooth skin was the pale brown of milky tea or the inside of a fiddle. I wondered if crabbit Nan Campbell knew she’d hired a black girl. It had all been done over the telephone and in the post, and if this lass was anything like me, she might not have said. It’s easiest not to say, if you’re trying to get work. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to be able to hide her secret for much longer.

She was a pretty young thing, neat and small, with a heart-shaped face that looked a mite fed up at the minute. She wore a sleek black mink coat that shone more glossy than her dark hair, and she had a flute case on a long strap carried over her shoulder. The poor old lady, also bundled in a pile of fur, had fallen fast asleep waiting for me to turn up. She sat perched on one of her cases, bent with her hands clasped together over her sticks, her forehead resting on her knuckles.

I parked the Tilly at the bus stop and got out to help with the luggage. The old lady jerked awake as I slammed my door shut behind me.

I’d only ever spoken to one other black person in my life, and it had been a most uncomfortable conversation. But I was going to have to live under the same roof with this one. I swallowed hard and reminded myself she was just hired help and I was an ATS volunteer. She wasn’t going to start by calling me a dirty tinker, and I’d better not start by making her feel like a British Colonies outcast.

‘I’m Volunteer Ellen McEwen,’ I said, taking great care with it. ‘I’m the ATS driver for RAF Windyedge. I also stay at the Limehouse.’

‘I’m Louisa Adair,’ said the lassie, sharply holding out her hand, like a challenge to fight.

I shook hands with her. Her grip was very firm for somebody so slight and so polite. I made an effort. ‘What a bonny coat!’ I told her.

‘The furs belong to Mrs Warner,’ Louisa said, waving the other hand towards the old woman. ‘The only way we could get them here was to wear them!’

‘How do you do, Mrs Warner?’ I said.

‘You may call me Jane,’ said the old woman, with a look at Louisa that made Louisa smile, as if they were leaving me out of a joke between them.

‘Jane it is, then,’ I said.

I took a breath and went round the back of the Tilly to drop the tailboard so I could load up the pile of cases. It could have gone worse. Ah well!

‘Och, a gramophone!’ I sang out when I found it.

Piled on top of the biggest leather valise, to keep it off the damp ground, was a portable wind-up record player – a very good one, too, with its own loudspeaker built into a beautiful wooden case. Louisa helped me to lift it into the Tilly.

‘That’ll liven things up at Mrs Campbell’s,’ I said. ‘You’ll be popular with the airmen when the next squadron gets here!’

I was most curious about Louisa’s dark skin, but I didn’t like to ask. I didn’t let people poke their nebs into my business, and I wasn’t going to poke into hers. What must it be like, I wondered, never to be able to hide?

I tossed all our gas masks, my one as well, and Louisa’s satchel and flute and her own two cardboard suitcases, on top of the luggage in the back, and slammed the door. God pity her, how had Louisa ever managed that lot on her own? She must have hidden pools of strength. I could guess where the fed-up look came from.

It was no easy task getting Jane into the Tilly, either. Her old arthritic knees didn’t do any bending, and the seat in the cab was high. She couldn’t manage to stand on the running board. Louisa and I had to lift her in feet first – with our arms full of fur, it was like lifting a bear.

At last we managed it, and Louisa climbed in on my side to ride in the middle, and I climbed in behind the steering wheel. Louisa sat right up on the edge of the seat like a tiny tot so she could see over the dashboard.

‘And now you are high enough to get a braw view of Windyedge as we come down the lane,’ I said to them as I started up the van.

Windyedge Aerodrome sits on top of the moor above the fishing village it is named for, just south of Aberdeen. It has sat there some time, built before the Great War, in the early days of flying. About it runs a proud stone wall, with its good looks all ruined by a high wire fence topped off with barbs. The road follows the wall for a mile and a half, past lookout towers and bunkers for anti-aircraft cannons. The other side of the road is all wind-bent hedge and fields and wild woodland.

I drove through this drearysome landscape as I’d done a hundred times before, one hand resting on the gear stick and the other lightly steering as we passed along the narrow lane. The road was dry, and the clouds seemed far away, high and rippling, a sky like a wide sheet of grey river pearls.

One black spot floated low over the North Sea like a fly on my windscreen.

I blinked.

Not a spot: an aeroplane. Such a totsy wee speck before it became frightening: before I knew how close it was going to get to me.

‘That’s a German plane,’ said Louisa.

‘Don’t be daft!’ I said. ‘It’s coming in to land.’

‘I don’t know what kind it is,’ she told me. ‘But I can tell them apart. I was in London all through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.’

The plane had wings like blunt butcher’s knives, not the tapered wings of our Hurricanes and Spitfires. It screamed in low over our heads.

‘That’s a German plane,’ the lass Louisa insisted. ‘It’s a German fighter.’

‘They’d be shooting at it if it was a German plane,’ I said uneasily. ‘See the watchtower? There are guards there, with machine guns. There’s an anti-aircraft battery just below them that you can’t see from here, and another at the edge of the cliffs.’

The old woman, Jane Warner, didn’t say anything. She and Louisa craned their necks away off their shoulders and swivelled their heads around, trying to see in back of them to watch as the plane landed. But I had to keep my eyes on the road.

We passed the aerodrome entrance and its guards’ shed. The lane gives a sharp turn there, heading downhill. Below us now, Windyedge village lowered itself cottage by cottage into its dark and narrow harbour. Down there was a post office playing at being a shop, a handful of cold-looking stone dwelling places whose thatched roofs were tied down with rope so they couldn’t blow away, and a Presbyterian chapel behind a shut door, all with small, deep-set windows to keep their inhabitants in a state of eternal darkness. Beyond the harbour lurked a little beach, but you couldn’t get to it through bales of barbed wire and concrete blocks that were supposed to keep German tanks and troops from unloading there. It felt like the most unwelcoming place on God’s earth in 1940.

You had to go into the village a ways and back up another narrow lane to get to Nancy Campbell’s pub. The pub was perched above a row of four stone arches built right into the hillside, like underground lairs. Heavy oak and iron doors fitted into the archways, and these were soundly locked and bolted to keep folk out.

‘Those are limekilns,’ I told Louisa. ‘Where they used to make lime, for concrete and plaster, back in the day. That’s why the pub is called the Limehouse. Then they got used as a prison, for deserters in the Great War, and—’

I shut up my blethering. She didn’t need to know that my two uncles had been locked up in those limekilns for a week after they got caught ‘trespassing’ on the airfield ten years ago, in peacetime – snaring rabbits. That’s my family connection to Windyedge. It doesn’t fash me – it made my mam split her sides laughing when I told her I was getting paid to work there now. But I wouldn’t want anyone to know.

The Tilly whinged and complained as it slowly climbed the steep lane past the old limekilns. Waiting for us at the top of the hill was the hotchpotch of granite walls and blue slate roofs of the Limehouse, like an old laird’s castle collapsed into the moor. A few tall Scotch pines tossed their limbs restlessly about above it in the wet wind.

The pub sign was a painting of the four limekiln arches. Louisa gave a shudder as we pulled up in front.

‘I expect you’ll find Scotland a great deal colder than where you come from,’ I said. ‘But you’ll be warm enough inside. There are gas fires in the bedrooms.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Louisa answered through tight lips. ‘I’ve only come from London just now.’

I helped to unload the old woman’s things, but I couldn’t stop to move them in. I was meant to be on my way back to the airfield, not wasting Air Ministry petrol running errands for Nancy Campbell. As I turned the Tilly to face about so I didn’t have to reverse down the lane, I saw Louisa holding the door open for the old woman. I wondered how the brown-skinned lass would cope with Nan when they met for the first time.

Not my lookout, I thought with relief, as I headed back to RAF Windyedge.

I didn’t have any idea who was in the plane that had just landed, but I didn’t take Louisa’s warning very seriously. It was likely some bigwig, or prisoner even, who needed to be shuttled someplace. The airfield staff would miss me right away if they needed me.

Sergeant Norbert Fergusson was standing outside his guard’s hut in front of the barrier to the aerodrome drive, watching the sky through field glasses.

I cranked down the window of the Tilly and leaned out. ‘What is it, Nobby?’

‘Bloody Jerry just landed on our airfield,’ he said through his teeth.

Shaness. The oath in Traveller cant hissed in my head, though I’d taught myself not to speak it aloud. Louisa had been right. It was a German plane.

‘Why didn’t we shoot him on his way in?’ I exclaimed.

‘The ack-ack lads on the north side gave him a burst, didn’t you hear? But then they stopped. He had his cockpit open, waving a big white sheet behind him, and his Luftwaffe markings are all covered up, too. Looks like he means to surrender, or something.’

‘Get the barrier up,’ I told him. ‘They might need me to drive somebody somewhere.’

‘Better you than me if there’s a bloody Jerry involved,’ said Nobby, and raised the barrier.

I went along the gravel drive as fast as I dared. I was in two minds as to whether I ought to hurry in case I got in trouble for not being about when I was supposed to, or to go slowly so I didn’t have to meet any German airmen. The Tilly’s tyres spat up pebbles behind me. I passed the concrete barracks and the aircraft hangar with its faded green paint, and pulled up in front of the operations building.

There was one plane on the airfield, a great grey ugly thing, wings like knife blades and high Perspex cockpit bulging on top like a giant one-eyed insect.

I could see what it was, up close on the ground. It was a Messerschmitt 109 fighter.

The Luftwaffe markings, German black cross and Nazi swastika, were covered up with white canvas sheets, bound tight and flat with strips of webbing. Two lads from Windyedge’s short-staffed ground crew were standing stiffly on guard in front of each wing, holding rifles. There wasn’t anyone else about – they’d all trooped into the radio room to talk to the wireless op.

I waved to the guards, but they were taking their job seriously and didn’t wave back.

So then I made a great howling mistake.

When I think on it, I don’t see how I could have known it was a mistake. I went into the operations building. It had been put up before the last lot, the Great War, one of the oldest ops buildings in the nation, and everywhere was a mite mazy and crumbly inside. I went looking for everybody.

The door to the radio room was open. I heard a low voice talking. When it stopped, I heard the high-pitched nagging bleep and click of a Morse code key.

Standing in the open doorway, where he could see who might be coming down the passage as well as all the folk gathered in the room, was the German pilot.

I foolishly didn’t take on who he was.

I thought he was a good-looking lad – tall and clean-shaven, with close-cut, mouse-blond hair. He wasn’t in uniform, maybe that’s why I didn’t guess. He wore a dark blue roll-necked sweater, like a sailor, and a knitted scarf, underneath a long leather coat. He didn’t have anything on his head. A leather bag, darker and more worn than his coat, hung on a strap over his shoulder. He stood with his booted feet parked on either side of a small wooden case, like a gramophone.

There wasn’t anything about him to tell me he was a pilot, still less an enemy one.

So I came bold as brass to poke my neb in at the door, and he just took hold of my arm – carefully, like a gentleman at a ball – and when I turned to look at his face in surprise, he raised his other hand.

He was holding a narrow black pistol.

He pulled me close against his squeaking leather coat and pressed the muzzle of the pistol firmly against the side of my head.

I could not have been more easily caught if I had been a rabbit in a poacher’s snare.

That was the moment when I learned hate.

Even more than I feared him, I hated him. I hated all Germans. I was blind with it. I couldn’t move nor think, not even to fight.

And I couldn’t fight, because now I was his hostage.

Jamie:

‘Hey, Cap’n, I’m getting another of those bastard Kraut messages in Morse code.’

Chip’s voice crackled through my headset over the roar of the Blenheim’s engines.

Silver and I had a new wireless op, Chester P. Wingate – Chip for short, or sometimes Tex because he was a full-blooded American from Texas. The USA wasn’t at war, but our Tex had come over as a sparks on a cargo liner just as the Atlantic grew dangerous: merchant vessels escorted by destroyers, civilians drowned alongside navy men, passenger lines cancelled. Chip was going home on a ship that was dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe off the South Foreland Light and it went down right under his feet. Chip was one of the lucky ones pulled out of the water, and when he’d dried off, he marched straight to the nearest RAF recruitment office.

He was fluent in Morse code from his radio days at sea, and he was happy to be given a gun, too, so they made him a wireless op/rear gunner. He and I came to 648 Squadron on the very same day in July 1940, but it wasn’t until November that we flew together. He’d lost the rest of his crew on that same terrible hop when Silver and I lost Colin. Chip’s damaged Blenheim had stalled and nosedived on landing back in Shetland, and his pilot and navigator were both killed instantly. Chip, in the back, had been lucky again.

In fact Chip and Silver and I were all that was left of last summer’s Pimms Section. We’d all been lucky before, so we reckoned we’d be lucky together. God knows we needed luck.

On 18 November we were flying reconnaissance. My other two Pimms Section crews were new to me and one of them was completely new to 648 Squadron, and though we were in freshly maintenanced Blenheims, we needed practice at formation flying. We’d been sent out over the North Sea in broad daylight, without a fighter escort. I wasn’t happy about that, and of course I’d said so and got told off by the Old Roundhead again for arguing with my superiors.

We had guns ready front and rear, but were generally loaded up with cameras instead of bombs. Now we were overhearing these German transmissions in Morse code from somewhere. The last thing I wanted for my new flight section was to run into German planes.

‘How many does that make?’ I asked Chip. Behind me in the cramped gloom of the aircraft’s body, perched in his bulky flight suit at the radio set, Chip had been reporting them for the last hour.

‘Fourteen. Got five of ’em all at once last time.’

‘In code?’

‘No, in Kraut. If it was in code I wouldn’t know it was Kraut, would I?’

‘Tex is physically incapable of saying the word German,’ Silver suggested. He crouched in the glassed-in nose of the plane where there was a ledge for him to lay out his charts.

‘I can say it. I just think it’s bad luck to say it in the air.’

‘Let me see,’ Silver said to Chip.

I’d told Chip to write everything down. Silver crawled out of the nose to sit beside me and reached behind the bulkhead to the radio set, and Chip passed him a sheet of paper. Silver frowned at Chip’s scrawled columns of letters.

‘What is this, are you trying your hand at nursery rhymes? Fun kistka putt, ichho ere nichts – funkist kaput, tich … ?’

‘And Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!’ I laughed. ‘That’s not German.’

‘He’s written it like code, in five-letter blocks,’ Silver said. ‘Maybe you can figure it out.’

With one hand on the flight controls and the other balancing the throttles, I glanced at the page and looked away again. I thought about it as I stared at the high grey cirrus cloud, five thousand feet above us even though we were flying at ten thousand feet. The sky looked like a sheet of silk spilt all over with grey river pearls, serene and beautiful. Even after five months of operational flying I still couldn’t marry the pure sky with the menacing enemy radio messages coming out of it from who knows where. It felt like evil magic.

‘Funk ist kaputt, maybe?’ I guessed. ‘I think that means radio is broken.’

‘You speak Kraut, Cap’n?’ Tex sounded more shocked than outraged.

‘I don’t speak it,’ I protested. ‘I understand a little. My wee sister went to finishing school in Switzerland, and she’s always wittering away in German. Reads German novels and all. O mein liebster Bruder! Thinks it’s cute. Does my head in.’

I couldn’t fly the plane, keep an eye on the new pilots just off my wingtips, and interpret German radio messages all at once. Silver helped me think. Chip was good at Morse, but not a brilliant detective.

‘“Radio is broken”,’ Silver mused. ‘It’s two planes communicating. Reconnaissance, maybe. The first message has the word Morse in it – I think one plane can’t give or receive radio calls, and he’s telling the other to transmit in code.’

The last flurry of messages Chip intercepted seemed to be someone in a second plane trying, more and more frantically, to contact the first.

There didn’t seem to be any reply.

‘What do you think these Germans are flying?’ I asked uneasily. ‘Clapped-out old Blenheims?’

‘Ha-ha,’ said Silver.

‘We don’t want to tangle with a Luftwaffe fighter. We’re close enough to Norway they could be Messerschmitt 109s.’

‘Let’s find the guy sending the messages and call a Spitfire from Deeside to put him out of his misery,’ said Chip.

There was no question of tackling him ourselves – that would be suicidal, and we knew it. Our guns only fired half the distance of a Messerschmitt’s.

But we could figure out where he was. With the Jerry’s wireless making so much noise, we might get lucky. It would be good practice for the new Pimms Section.

One of the crews in formation with me was completely wet behind the ears, a trio of fresh-faced Australian classmates who’d come straight here from some posh school in Sydney. They were even younger than me. In our third plane were two survivors of 7 November: Ignacy Mazur, the Polish pilot who’d walked across Eastern Europe so he could get to Britain, and Derfel Cledwyn, his Welsh navigator. They’d moved to Pimms from A-Flight. I wasn’t used to flying with Ignacy. He was hell-bent on shooting down Nazis and had a habit of tearing out ahead of everybody; I had to keep yelling at him to watch for the rest of us. After the shake-up, like me and Silver, Ignacy and Derfel had a new wireless op: Bill Yorke had transferred from another squadron, and we didn’t know how good he was.

So getting a position fix on a German plane would test our new wireless operators, Bill Yorke and the Australian lad, Dougie Kerr. And if it worked it would give Ignacy Mazur the satisfaction of sending someone to chase down a Nazi fighter without putting my youthful Aussie lads in too much danger – the perfect practice op. Although it was real enough, even if we were practising.

Funny how it’s easier to remember who was alive and flying with you on a hop than to count the ones who died in the air around you.

So we hatched a plan to snare this German plane.

Ignacy and Derfel raced off towards Norway to try to receive the transmission from a different place. I told Harry Morrow, the new pilot, to stay with me – the Australians had not a whiff of combat experience between them, and if it came to an air battle I meant to get them out alive or die trying. Our two planes circled beneath the pearly sky until we’d had three more German radio transmissions, stronger and stronger each time.

Bill Yorke, in Ignacy’s plane, heard it too. When his navigator, Derfel, told us where they were and where the noise was coming from, clever old David Silvermont plotted a web of lines and gave us coordinates for where he thought the Luftwaffe plane might be.

But bloody Ignacy wasn’t satisfied with calling up Spitfires from Aberdeen to finish off the German.

‘Pimms Leader, hello, I am going to meet him,’ said Ignacy’s voice over my headset.

‘You damn well won’t!’ I told him. ‘Get back here with the rest of us.’

‘He’ll be surprised,’ said Ignacy.

This was mutiny and suicide rolled into one, and of course I couldn’t let him go alone.

So with my wet-behind-the-ears Australian sprogs on my port wing, we set off after Ignacy.

I was sure he would get there before us. But I flew full throttles anyway. Chip was up in his gun turret now; no point in sitting in the belly of the plane at the radio where he couldn’t see anything, listening to dah-dit beeping in German, when he could be firing guns. The Luftwaffe plane wasn’t saying anything new anyway. Silver showed me the last sequence Chip had taken down:

WOBIS

TDUKA

NNSTD

UMICH

HOERE

N

Wobis, wobist? Wo bist … Wo bist du, like Old English, like Chaucer. Where beest thou?

Wo bist du, kannst du mich hoeren?

I gnawed at it as I flew, trying not to think about Ignacy and his underpowered guns.

Where are you … canst thou me hear?

Can you hear me?

Ich hoere nichts.

I hear nothing.

It sort of got me in the stomach. I wondered what had happened to the other plane. Poor lonely Jerry, losing his wingman. I knew how that felt.

We found the pilot who was transmitting, though. We even got there before Ignacy.

The Luftwaffe pilot was alone, as we’d guessed, flying a Messerschmitt 109 fighter dangerously low over the sea, skimming the whitecaps. He circled and climbed and descended again, which was why his messages faded in and out. He was looking for something, a wreck, or a trace of his companion’s crash, maybe.

It wasn’t even a fortnight since 7 November. And here in front of me, getting nearer, were iron-grey wings like knife blades, emblazoned with black Luftwaffe crosses, and with the ugly whirl of a black swastika on the tail.

He saw us and began to climb to meet us.

Silver and I both spotted him – but I was the one with the guns in front.

There wasn’t enough cloud to hide in. The only thing we could do was get down, but you can’t hedge-hop over waves and expect the sea to camouflage you the way valleys and woodland and riverbanks do.

Well, this was probably it, then …

I rammed the controls forward under full power, turning and diving. I’d out-turned a Messerschmitt 109 once before, even if I couldn’t outfly or outshoot them – the Jerry probably didn’t know that, and if he went after me he might leave the Australian lads alone …

The blasted Australians thought this was a game, their first dogfight. I could hear their pilot, tall Harry Morrow, whooping with excitement as they fired away at the German pilot. They didn’t hit him, though. He swooped up over us, made a wide turn, and came back in over the Australians from behind. I could see tracers flaming from the Luftwaffe cannons and from Dougie Kerr’s gun turret. I threw the Blenheim around and leaned into my own guns.

It sometimes doesn’t feel real when you’re there. You’re so focused on flying and firing. Afterwards, you feel choked up or frightened – especially if it’s gone badly, and you have miles of empty sea to cross in a broken plane, and your mates are dead. But in battle, there’s nothing else to think about.

Suddenly the Messer just stopped playing. He shot off east as if he couldn’t be bothered to waste time with us. I don’t think he was out of ammunition; he must have been low on fuel. He’d probably already been pushing his luck, with all that haring about after his missing wingman, and now he couldn’t risk the toll an air battle would take on whatever was left in his tanks.

Thank God – thank God. Thank God I hadn’t lost these kids on their first operational mission.

By the time Ignacy found us we were alone and heading home under the pearly grey sheet of sky.

‘You blooming great fool, Mazur, you’re on report,’ I snarled at Ignacy over the radio.

‘Save it, Scotty,’ said Silver gently through the intercom, which Ignacy couldn’t hear. ‘Wait till we’re on the ground.’

I was seething. I took a deep breath.

‘Get back in formation, Pimms Section.’

That was the only order they paid attention to all afternoon.

I wondered briefly if the lost Messerschmitt pilot had been disobeying orders too. But only briefly; that was someone else’s problem, and Pimms was mine.

Louisa:

Look at that lion kill. That’s what I thought Daddy said to me, pointing out the bus window along the road to Granny Adair’s, on the edge of St Andrew Parish back in Jamaica. I was only little, sitting on one of his knees and wedged against the window by his canvas duffel bag on the other. Around us were people with luggage and groceries and chickens, and the smell of sweat and tobacco. Daddy pointed to the limekiln every time we passed it and I always thought he said, That’s an old lion kill. I thought that abandoned stone-and-brick building, half-buried in ferns, was a place where brave and terrible people took lions to be slaughtered. Whenever we went to Granny Adair’s and passed that place it gave me a queer, nervous thrill of fear and mystery.

The limekilns at Windyedge village made it all come back. Just when Ellen said that – Those are limekilns. And again when she left us, as I looked up at the pub sign with its painted limekilns. The back of my neck prickled chilly, even beneath Jane Warner’s warm fur coat.

I wasn’t a fool-fool country gal and I knew they were just limekilns. But maybe it was the German plane that gave me the shivers.

The Limehouse had a small porch made of black-painted tree trunks framing the front door. Through that was a vestibule with a coat rack and two more doors leading into the hotel hall if you turned right, or into the public bar if you turned left. Nancy Campbell stood inside the left-hand door, waiting for us to arrive.

She was a thin woman in a drably flowered pinny apron over a brown dress; her grey-streaked black hair was pulled back with diamante clips, except for a few wisps escaping in frizzled curls around her face. When I opened the door for Jane, Mrs Campbell held out her arms stiffly and put them around her old auntie in a quick, awkward hug.

‘Aunt Jane!’

Jane planted frosty kisses on her niece’s cheeks, and Mrs Campbell looked as if she were trying to dodge them.

‘Welcome to Windyedge, Aunt Jane,’ Mrs Campbell said, with that same grim determination I’d heard on the phone. ‘And to the Limehouse. Was the journey all right? How is your hip? Can you manage stairs?’ The landlady frowned. ‘I’m not sure where to put you if you can’t manage stairs. There aren’t any ground-floor bedrooms. I suppose I could convert the dining room, as I haven’t served there since the war started …’

‘I can manage perfectly, Nancy. I just need someone to carry my things.’

I was doing that now, bringing in suitcases. I struggled through the vestibule and realised Mrs Campbell was staring with her mouth open. I felt the blood rise flaming in my cheeks. I wasn’t going to pretend it was all right for her to stare. I was used to being stared at, but she was going to be my employer.

I put down the cases with a thump, straightened, and held out my open hand to the landlady.

For another moment the thin woman’s face looked baffled. Then her mouth tightened as she realised who I was. ‘Oh!’

She took my hand, though. She gave it one light shake and let go. She looked me up and down with her thin lips pressed shut, assessing me. I was wearing one of Mummy’s neat tailored suits beneath Jane’s mink coat, my hair was rolled tight against my head, and I knew I looked all right.

‘Where have you come from?’ she asked me.

‘London,’ I answered again without thinking.

Her thin mouth tightened even more.

‘I mean – that’s where I’ve been living,’ I added hastily. It’s true I was annoyed about the staring, but I hadn’t meant to be cheeky. ‘I’ve been in London for three years. That’s where I saw your advertisement. I grew up in the West Indies.’

The prickly woman’s voice was cold. ‘You might have said. On the telephone.’

‘My father is from Jamaica,’ I confessed now, as if it weren’t ruddy obvious.

‘Ah, that explains it,’ said that miserable landlady. ‘I don’t like surprises.’

‘I can go, if you like,’ I told her. ‘Now that I’ve brought your aunt here.’

I did not want to be rude or have a fight. I did not want to go back to London and start looking for work all over again. But I was tired of the messing about. We might as well be clear.

‘You can find someone else to help you if I won’t do,’ I added.

Jane put a stop to this conversation.

‘Of course you will do.’ She laid her hand on my arm, as if she were hanging on to me for support. ‘Louisa and I understand each other. I shouldn’t want a new companion after we’ve had such a nice time travelling together.’

A nice time travelling together! I nearly smiled.

Mrs Campbell did laugh, a dry snort that told me she wasn’t fooled about what kind of a journey we’d had. But she didn’t ask me to leave.

So I brought in the rest of the luggage. Then I got to look at the inside of the Limehouse. I’d never set foot in a pub before. Even Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t have gone into a pub together, and certainly not with me tagging along.

The floor of the public bar was grey flagstones and the walls were whitewashed, with deep-set windows like the ones in the Windyedge village cottages. The bar had a brass countertop. Oak beams, black with age, held up the low ceiling above the bar. There was a scatter of tables, wooden benches and stools, and one or two proper chairs with armrests and cushions on the seats. On one side of the room, between two windows, was a battered upright piano; across from it, beside the bar, rose a chimney over a big fireplace. There was no fire burning in the grate.

The place wasn’t welcoming just now. But it wasn’t unfriendly. It was empty and waiting. It might be nice, if there were people drinking at the bar, and the fire were lit, and there were music.

I wondered where a girl like me would fit into that picture.

Mrs Campbell’s eyes widened again when she saw Jane’s luggage.

‘I thought you were only allowed one case at – at that place. There’s no surface for the gramophone in Room Number Five, and anyway I’ve put the wireless in there for you.’

‘Oh, surely the gramophone can stay down here?’ Jane suggested winningly. ‘And the records? I understand the lads from the aerodrome spend time here – perhaps they’d enjoy hearing some music.’

Jane put down her sticks and dropped herself quite suddenly on to a chair.

‘You said there were stairs,’ she said. ‘I’m just having a rest before I tackle them. Louisa, open that smaller case. I’ve brought a gift for Nancy.’

Inside it, wrapped in silk underwear like a pass-the-parcel, were five cheeses and six blocks of butter. Jane had smuggled dairy products off the Isle of Man in her knickers! I definitely did not see her packing them.

‘There wasn’t any rationing in That Place, darling, and I know you struggle because of the blockades, so I brought some contraband.’

Mrs Campbell let out another burst of dry laughter. ‘My word. All that butter! You haven’t changed a bit, Aunt Jane.’

She hadn’t exactly said thank you.

‘Nor have you, Nancy,’ said Jane gently, as if it couldn’t be helped.

Room Number Five was at the end of the upstairs passage. Mrs Campbell called it the ‘second-best double room’.

‘I’ve put my own wireless radio in there,’ she told us again grudgingly, ‘but you’ll both have to share the bathroom with the lasses. There’s only Volunteer Ellen McEwen just now, the driver for RAF Windyedge. When there’s a squadron based at the aerodrome there are sometimes others. You’ll have to take a torch or a candle when you use the stairs at night, as it’s impossible to fix blackout over that tall window in the hall. I’ve taken out the bulbs from the electric fittings to stop anyone switching on the lights by accident.’

It was all cold. The stair was covered with faded coconut matting. This brown dull stuff underfoot had been green and alive once, palm trees blowing in a tropical sky. Far from home like me. Except that nobody stared at coconut matting. It was ordinary.

But Room Number Five was all right. It had three of the deep-set windows, one small one like an arrow slit facing north-east towards the airfield, and two facing south-east. With great relief I set down the case of Jane’s that I was carrying. I didn’t think it would be too bad being here, even if it was cold and dark, because I liked Jane despite her being German, and there was a piano downstairs, and the gramophone. I leaned across one of the bigger window sills in the room, and I could see the North Sea like a strip of Christmas tinsel on the horizon. Far off in the distance, somewhere on the way to Norway, the sun was shining.

If the aerodrome gets busy, I thought, perhaps there will be other young people about.

There was already Ellen McEwen. She couldn’t be much older than me. But she seemed it, in her crisp khaki uniform and tie, driving the Royal Air Force van so casually. It made me quite envious, remembering. Also, she was a tall and rather striking beauty, with shining coppery hair coiled beneath her uniform cap. She could have been on a recruitment poster. She’d made me feel mousy and shy, which wasn’t helped by her being a bit stiff.

Or was she shy as well, and the uniform let her hide? She’d been perfectly welcoming. I’d have to make an effort to be friendly. I could ask what happened to the German plane after it landed. Perhaps she could take me to see the airfield sometime.

Mrs Campbell waved towards the armchair, and Jane sat with one of her thunderous backwards plunges, letting gravity drop her.

‘How cosy this shall be when the fire’s lit,’ Jane said.

The open hearth was plugged up and fitted with a gas fire exactly like the one Mummy and I had in the attic at Number 88, Gibraltar Road.

‘We’re lucky to have town gas and electricity,’ Mrs Campbell said. ‘They brought it to the village the same time as the aerodrome, five years ago, when they stepped up Royal Air Force training here. I don’t allow the rooms heated before three p.m. and there’s no hot water before six. You’ve got your own gas meter for the fire – it only takes shilling coins.’

‘We had one like it in London,’ I said.

‘Well, then you’ll know to treat it respectfully. If you don’t top up the money, the gas cuts off, and the fire will go out. Then if you forget to turn off the gas tap, next time you put a coin in, the room will fill with gas until you turn off the tap or light the fire again. I don’t want any explosions! It takes another shilling every two or three days if you’re careful. And don’t stuff it full of coins before the collection man comes to reset the meter – once the coin box is full you can’t get more gas until he empties it.’

‘Yes, that’s how ours at home worked,’ I said.

‘Well, be careful.’ She slipped a silver shilling into the meter. ‘Here’s a bob to start you off. Don’t turn it on until three o’clock. If you want a fire before then, you’ll have to sit in the bar.’

Oh, what a grouch.

But Jane caught my eye like a naughty child. I was sure she was trying to make me laugh. I looked away quickly.

I did like Jane.

How lucky I am to like her, I thought, as we unpacked. We each got a window sill to stack our books in; she had as many as I did.

‘I shall look forward to reading yours,’ she said. ‘I’m tired to death of my own.’

Room Number Five, the Limehouse, I realised, wasn’t a big change from her room in the alien detainment camp. Apart from the radio, of course. There was a bit more space, but now there were two of us. She’d had a bed to herself before. Now she had to share with me.

Would she mind? Would it be worse than the camp – would she feel she was being guarded all the time, with not even any privacy?

‘I could sleep in the chair,’ I said, hesitating to set Mummy’s Bakelite alarm clock next to the bed in case Jane didn’t want me to sleep with her.

‘Nonsense, what a ridiculous idea,’ said Jane. ‘The bed is large enough for a family of four. You will have to sleep by the window, as I often get up in the night.’

I hesitated. ‘Won’t you want me to help you?’ That would be the worst thing about always being watched.

‘I can manage the toilet perfectly well on my own, as you know,’ Jane answered.

In London I’d got used to sharing a bed with Mummy, except when Daddy was home, when I would gladly move to the settee for two nights or a fortnight or whatever it was. All through the last horrid weeks of 1940 I’d felt very alone in Mummy’s bed all by myself. I was glad Jane didn’t mind.

She wanted me to see to her gramophone downstairs.

After we unpacked we went down to the public bar, where Mrs Campbell said it would be warmer, and where I was hopeful of toast. Sure enough, the peat fire in the big hearth was alight, and there was a small table and a comfortable chair pulled close to it. Mrs Campbell didn’t say it was meant for her old aunt, but I thought it probably was. Jane hovered near my shoulder, leaning on her sticks as I found a place for the gramophone on top of the piano.

‘The loudspeaker needs to face the room,’ she directed.

Of course it did, silly me. I shifted the case around.

‘And the records over here …’ There was a low, narrow cupboard beside the piano with a mostly empty shelf holding a few glossy magazines.

Jane was particular about how she wanted the records arranged. I didn’t mind – it gave me a chance to look through them. There was a lot of jazz from the early 1930s, a bit of classical. A few pieces made my throat close up, thinking of Mummy playing them: Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto in C, Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’.

At last Jane settled into the chair by the fire. After I’d tucked her woolly blanket in around her legs and laid her sticks out of the way, I stood back and got my first good look at the old fireplace.

Thick black beams held up the mantel, and more thick beams braced the chimney where it went through the ceiling. The black wood was split and cracked, and in the cracks, thin pieces of metal were wedged like studs. Most were black with soot or green with age. But a few still gleamed silvery and coppery, and I could see they were coins: the ones in the front of the mantel looked like pennies and tuppences. Others were wedged so far into the wood and so discoloured that you couldn’t tell what they were, or how old.

It was a bit unsettling. It gave me the same chill as the limekilns, and I don’t know why.

The knobbly, uneven column holding up the low ceiling at the corner of the bar was another tree trunk, painted black, like the tree trunks holding up the porch outside. It was also studded with coins, though not as many. And there were more coins in the black beam that crossed above the bar. All those gleamed, as if someone buffed them regularly with vinegar and salt. They looked like modern sixpences and shillings.

I ran my fingertips over the pennies in the mantel. That’s what I was doing when Nancy Campbell came out through a door behind the bar.

‘That’s dead men’s money,’ she snapped. ‘Leave it.’

‘Of course no one’s altering your decorations, Nancy,’ said Jane tartly.

I took my hand away and, though I was probably more annoyed than Jane at the idea I might be mining for gold in the mantelpiece, I gritted my teeth and bit my tongue again, determined not to create a stir on my first day. Also, I was curious about the coins.

‘Dead men’s money?’ I repeated.

In fact Mrs Campbell was busting to talk about it. She was just so tight-lipped she didn’t know how to start a conversation politely.

‘The wood in here is all from a wishing tree. It’s older than the Limehouse,’ she said. ‘Folk made wishes on it for hundreds of years before it fell. There were pennies in the tree when this place was built, two hundred and fifty years ago. Then the airmen from the last war put their coppers in the mantel for safekeeping before they went on a mission.’

She gestured towards the pennies I’d touched.

‘Those lads would put in a tuppenny bit and after a flight they’d take it out and buy a pint. All these still in the wood are airmen who never came back. Dead men’s money,’ repeated Nancy Campbell. ‘Wishes that didn’t come true. My lads. Same age as me in the last lot.’

She pointed.

‘That one was Cammy McBride. Cheeky daredevil with green eyes. I pulled his last pint. It was a reconnaissance flight – he got caught in clouds. And that was Ben Knox. His engine failed on a training flight. Just up there—’

She pulled her hand back, but not before I saw her fingers trembling. ‘Alan Anderson. Cannon fire from a German warship. They think. At any rate he didn’t come back either.’

She pointed to the coin nearest the bar, by itself at the edge of the mantel. ‘Mr Campbell,’ she said softly. ‘My Duncan. His dad ran the place before I took over. I worked behind the bar for them.’

Jane gave a soft little sigh. ‘Oh, Nancy!’

Then an unearthly shriek tore that moment apart. The hair on my spine stood on end – but of course it was just the kettle coming to a boil.

‘Tea?’ Jane added. ‘You are kind!’

Mrs Campbell wiped her hands on her pinny and took the kettle off the hob. ‘I was going to have a cup anyway,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But I’ll make enough for three.’

She clattered about with a teapot and china behind the bar. As she left the tea to stew she turned to me and demanded, ‘Ration coupons.’

She made it feel as if she wouldn’t give us the tea without them, though I knew she just needed our tickets to get extra supplies for our meals when she did her shopping. I had to run upstairs to get them. Over the coconut matting, down the dark passage – strange to think this was my home now.

Back downstairs again, out of breath as I handed over our booklets, I looked up at the modern coins shining in the beam over the bar.

‘Those belong to the 648 Squadron lads,’ said Mrs Campbell, following my eyes. ‘From when they were based at Windyedge.’ Her hard face softened, as it had when she’d talked about the airmen from the last war. ‘They always prepaid their drinks. Their squadron is up in Shetland now.’

‘Will they come back?’ I asked.

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Nancy Campbell. ‘RAF Windyedge doesn’t feel right without a squadron at the aerodrome. Those lads at the anti-aircraft guns on the perimeter haven’t a thing to do other than smoke and play bridge and read the papers all day. Coastal Command is just asking for trouble, in my opinion.’

Ellen:

When he pressed the gun against my head, I moaned with fear, and everybody in the radio room clapped eyes on me. They all gasped together. How could one German pilot so handily get the better of a dozen Royal Air Force ground crewmen?

‘What’s he doing here?’ I cried out. He hadn’t told me to belt up. ‘Why did you let him land?’

The radio operator, whom we called Old Flash because he was about ten years older than everybody else, was the only one who seemed to ken what was going on.

‘We had to,’ he told me. ‘Orders. He has a code name on our list. He transmitted it correctly. Someone in Intelligence expected him.’

‘What are you all doing in here, then?’ I gasped.

‘He’s got some message he wants me to transmit to an Intel bigwig in England. Hard to understand him – nobody speaks his lingo, and he doesn’t have much English. Everybody kind of piled in to help – and to make sure he didn’t cause any bother …’

‘Aye, you did that well!’ I sobbed. ‘He’s no bother at all.’

The German pilot let his gun drop away so it wasn’t touching my face, and his fingers stopped digging into my arm. ‘Shh,’ he whispered soft at my ear.

I gulped air and stood tall. I didn’t think he was telling me I couldn’t speak – more hoping I would stop panicking.

‘Did you get an answer?’ I asked the radio operator. ‘From the bloke in England?’

‘We’re to refuel the plane and let him go! But we’re waiting—’

And then our Flash had to take down a message that was coming in. Everybody stood frozen, listening, no one but the radio operator being able to understand the string of bleeps and blips, even though we could all hear it and it wasn’t in code. Well, it was in Morse code. But in English.

When the transmission stopped, there was a long silence while we waited for more. I could hear the German pilot breathing.

Old Flash cleared his throat.

‘They’re saying Robert Ethan, that Intelligence chap from the War Office, is behind it. Remember him, all in tweed like Sherlock Holmes, with the thick specs that make his eyes look like billiard balls? He was snooping around the perimeter with binoculars last month. Maybe his tame Jerry’s giving him a lift to Norway. He left Intelligence a message in German for the pilot that they’re going to send.’

So we kept on waiting.

The German pilot never let me go. Every soul in that room believed he’d shoot me if we didn’t do as he wanted.

At last the German message arrived, and the pilot pushed me across to the communications desk so he could read it, nudging his wooden case along with his foot. He eyed the page, then sighed. Whatever it said, it wasn’t what he was hoping for.

For the first time since I turned up, he said something in English.

‘A room?’

He pointed to me, using his gun.

‘With the girls.’

Everybody gasped, and, oh, how fear swelled up in my chest! A room with girls? Who else was there but me, and what did he need with a room?

He added, ‘The Limehouse? A room is there.’

Old Flash said, ‘The Limehouse was mentioned in the German message. I think it said he should stay there tonight. Robert Ethan’s stuck in England on a stopped train. This is his alternate plan – he wants his man to wait for him.’

‘Oh!’ I gave a skrike of a laugh, fear and relief bundled together. ‘The Limehouse – with the girls. He means “Take a room in the hotel where the lassies stay”. Not that he wants – that he – not that.’

I couldn’t speak what we all thought he’d meant.

With his mate from Intelligence stranded, maybe the German pilot truly did just want a place to stop the night.

Everybody muttered. Then some cleversticks suggested, ‘Volunteer McEwen can drive him to Mrs Campbell’s for the night and bring him back tomorrow.’

‘You double-crossing bastards!’ I cried.

‘Don’t make a fuss, you’ll make it worse,’ said Old Flash. ‘We don’t want to scare him into pulling the ruddy trigger, do we? I’ll check with Intelligence before you go. If it’s orders it ought to be all right.’

Of course I was the driver for RAF Windyedge; this was my job. But – they were all so flipping helpless! ‘Some heroes you turn out to be,’ I sobbed. ‘You bloody bastards.’

I wriggled my arm up beneath the Jerry pilot’s and gingerly pushed his gun further away from my head. I sucked in a breath. I hated him like I’d never hated any man before in my life.

‘I’ll drive you there,’ I told him. My voice quaked. Then, because I knew he didn’t understand, I said very loudly, ‘A ROOM. THE LIMEHOUSE.’ I pointed to myself and mimed driving.

No one tried to keep us from leaving – they were still in a flap worrying he might shoot me.

We waited for the last message. Old Flash nodded as he listened to the beeping stream of dots and dashes. ‘He’s to give it till tomorrow morning. If Ethan doesn’t turn up, he’s to take off when it gets light, or he’ll be missed back at his own base.’

Flash took off his headset and turned to me. ‘Your Jerry’s got a code name,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to call him Odysseus. He’s here for a reason, whatever it is, and I don’t think he’s likely to wreck things for himself by hurting you.’ The radio operator gave me a grim wee smile, trying to be encouraging. ‘You’ll be all right, lass.’

‘I’ll take him straight over the cliff if I’m not,’ I said through my teeth.

Jamie:

‘Well done, still in one piece as always,’ Silver said, holding up his ratty box of rosin.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

We were back on the windblown Shetland aerodrome where we’d been based whilst fighting our losing battles for the past two months. My two other crews pulled up safely alongside our Blenheim, and Silver pushed open the hatch above us.

I climbed through the canopy and jumped off the wing. Silver followed, and Chip came behind, climbing out of his own hatch forward of the rear gun turret. He stood on the wing, gazing critically at the Australian lads getting out of their plane. Then he exclaimed in his Texan drawl, ‘Aw, fer cryin’ out loud.’

About an inch off the top of their tail fin was shot away.

‘They took a hit,’ Silver exclaimed. ‘We shouldn’t have chanced it with a Messerschmitt!’

‘We didn’t have a choice,’ I pointed out.

Chip laughed. ‘The Kraut pilot didn’t do that. I’ll bet that new Australian gunner did it himself. Rookie mistake. You can’t fire straight behind you without hitting yourself in the rear end!’

‘Look at the turret,’ said Silver grimly, pointing.

One of the Perspex sheets in the dome was missing. The panel was completely blown away.

‘Dougie Kerr didn’t do that himself. They took a hit,’ Silver repeated.

One of the other turret panels had a small jagged hole in it. It was no rookie mistake. A German bullet had gone through one side of the dome and come out the other.

I’d nearly lost another kid.

I squeezed my eyes shut and steadied myself with one hand against the cold hull of the plane. When I opened my eyes, breathing again, I could feel the blood burning in my legs.

‘Steady on, mate,’ Silver said, grabbing my elbow. ‘Not enough porridge this morning?’

But Dougie Kerr, the Australian wireless op and gunner with the gingery hair like a bottle brush, was alive and well on the ground, and so were his tall pilot, Harry Morrow, and his baby-faced navigator, Gavin Hamilton. All three were chattering like excited sparrows to the ground crew who came to take care of the planes.

‘They’re all right,’ Silver said to me quietly. ‘Stop acting like an old woman or everyone will notice.’

Chip leaped off the wing of our plane and scrambled on to the one next to us to get a look at the damage to the turret dome. He let out a long whistle.

‘Must have made a hell of a bang going through! That Aussie gunner had a close shave! You know what? I’ll bet he didn’t even notice. Probably too busy kicking himself for shooting up his own plane. If he knew he nearly had his crazy hair trimmed by a German bullet, the whole crew would be up here poking at the hole and patting him on the back!’

We pointed out the damage to maintenance, but they couldn’t sort it, and told me my new lads would have to fly with holes in the tail and turret – or a quick fix of cardboard and sticky tape – until the Air Transport Auxiliary could ferry another plane to us and take this one away to be mended properly.

Now I was hopping mad at the Jerries again, seeing red as I took off the bulky bits of my gear – Mae West, I mean life vest, and helmet – and fished cooled-down Ever-Hot bags out of my flight suit. I had to go be grilled by Flight Officer Pennyworth.

There wasn’t anything special about that interrogation. As the rest of Pimms Section filed out to get baths and sandwiches and cups of tea, Phyllis told me apologetically, ‘Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell wants you in his office.’

So I had to face the Old Roundhead by myself again.

He’d had a hell of a go at me after 7 November. This time I didn’t blame him for wanting to have a go at me, because I knew we shouldn’t have gone after a German fighter, and my new Australian flight crew had survived on blind luck, and Ignacy had essentially ignored everything I’d told him to do.

‘Going to have to put another reprimand stamp in your logbook, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart,’ he told me. ‘You’ll have to get a better grip on your crews than this or I’ll replace you as B-Flight’s commander. Adam Stedman in Madeira’s a capable chap.’

I stood in front of his desk as he defaced my logbook, clenching my teeth so hard I started to give myself jaw ache, watching his hands moving. His head was lowered, so I couldn’t see any part of his face but his frowning forehead and wiry eyebrows. Of course he wanted to replace me, and this was the perfect excuse. Stedman was an easy-going, capable fellow, transferred last week from another Blenheim squadron, but he didn’t have any more experience than I did, or know the new crews any better.

‘Sir, with respect—’ I made myself say it, polite words, without choking. ‘With respect, it’ll take a couple of flights for these new pilots to learn to fly together. Mazur is a bit of a daredevil, and Morrow’s just inexperienced.’

‘It’s not their flying that’s getting them in trouble,’ Cromwell said, deep-set eyes making his craggy face grimmer than it had any business being. ‘It’s their big mouths. “Careless talk costs lives” and all that. But you’re their commander, so you’ll have to be held responsible.’

Now I was confused.

‘“Careless talk costs lives”?’ I repeated.

‘Your young Australians were chattering like magpies about receiving Morse code in German! It’s all over the aerodrome – the whole squadron knows what Pimms Section did out there today. Half of ’em are jealous and want to go shooting at Messers themselves. The other half want to know what kind of secret ops you’re on. I can’t have such undisciplined behaviour, Beaufort-Stuart. There’s a delicate operation going on, and you may have thrown a wrench in it by chasing off that Jerry.’

Wing Commander Cromwell pushed my logbook across the table and leaned back. I gaped at him.

‘Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, chase off Jerries?’ I exclaimed.

Buckets of blood! What the hell was he talking about?

‘Too bad you of all men ran into this,’ Cromwell said. ‘You weren’t to know. This was the one German plane we weren’t supposed to shoot down. Intelligence was expecting him – hoping to collar him alive.’

‘Well, he’s still alive, sir,’ I said. ‘We didn’t shoot him down.’

But an idea hit me. If there was a rogue Messerschmitt pilot on the loose, maybe he’d used the broken radio as a smokescreen. Maybe our Luftwaffe fighter hadn’t been trying to contact a friend at all. Maybe he’d been hunting down a traitor who’d given him the slip.

In that case, Pimms Section hadn’t ruined some special operation – we’d helped by distracting the enemy.

I sucked in air, wondering whether Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell was capable of understanding this. It was guesswork, and he never took me seriously. As I hesitated, the radio operator tore in, out of breath and waving a sheet of notepaper.

He slammed the page down on Cromwell’s desk by my logbook and said explosively, ‘It’s all right, sir. We’ve got a message from Windyedge in Aberdeenshire: Odysseus in port.’

He stood panting.

I stepped forward and picked up my logbook.

‘Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart, you didn’t hear that,’ the Old Roundhead barked.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Tell your men to keep their mouths shut.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Dismissed. Close that door on your way out.’

I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall, trying to relax the muscles of my face before the jaw ache turned into a headache. It was like being in school, like failing a test on Latin verbs because I’d studied noun declensions all night. How could I possibly have guessed any of this? No one had briefed me about ‘Odysseus’ in a special Messerschmitt 109 – and how were my lads to guess that today’s op was a secret when yesterday’s wasn’t?

I was a hundred per cent on my men’s side, but I wasn’t sure how to get them on mine.

I steeled myself to give them a talking-to.

Louisa:

Jane and I sat by the peat fire in the public room of the Limehouse, just next to the mantel made out of the wishing tree, making the most of our first night there. I had a glass of Rose’s lime because it reminded me of Mummy and Daddy, who used to drink it with rum on the veranda of our bungalow in Kingston; Jane very slowly nursed a tumbler of whisky and water.

‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘This is almost what I missed the most in That Place.’ She closed her eyes with a blissful smile. ‘Except it is really the BBC Home Service on the radio I missed the most.’

I spent the evening on edge. Every old man who came into the Limehouse eyed me curiously, and I leaped to my feet every time the door opened, as if this would somehow show people that I was there on business and not as a paying customer. It made me feel doubly out of place that not a single woman came in that night. But perhaps that was because it wasn’t very busy. When the last two customers from the village said goodnight, it was only half past nine – half an hour before closing – but Mrs Campbell began to stack chairs on tables anyway. I suppose it didn’t seem likely anyone else would come in so late on a weekday.

‘Shall I lend a hand?’ I offered.

Mrs Campbell looked at me with suspicion again. I felt my face beginning to burn and braced myself. I hoped hard she too wasn’t going to make some nasty remark about the Caribbean sun making people lazy.

Instead she said, ‘What age are you?’

I hadn’t even thought about that. Was I old enough to be in the bar? I knew Scotland’s laws were different from England’s, but I didn’t know how that affected me.

Rules are made to be broken.

‘I am just about sixteen,’ I told her.

She sniffed and raised her eyebrows.

‘“Just about”! Well, you’re willing, I’ll give you that,’ she said in her grudging way. ‘Come on behind the bar then, you can do the washing-up. There’s a girl from the village who helps me, Morag Torrie, but she’s part-time since the squadron is away. I’m just going to sweep under these tables and then I’ll lock the door.’

‘What about Ellen?’ I asked her.

‘She has her own key,’ grunted Mrs Campbell.

Of course she has her own key, I thought jealously. Important.

‘They keep odd hours at RAF Windyedge,’ Mrs Campbell added. ‘The squadron that was here before mostly flew at night. Ellen’s got to be on hand if someone needs her.’

When the fire was low and the chairs were hung upside down, it didn’t feel as cosy. But Jane was still bright-eyed and wide awake – I don’t know how, after two nights and a day and a half of travelling. There weren’t many glasses to wash up, and when I finished my little job I hung about at Jane’s shoulder, staying on my feet to encourage her on to hers. Mrs Campbell went into the entryway to lock the outside door.

As she opened the inner door leading into the vestibule, we heard the harsh noise of a motor engine straining up the steep hill past the limekilns.

‘That’ll be Ellen now,’ said Mrs Campbell, and stepped back to wait for her to come in.

The engine stopped. There was a long pause. Then a van door slammed. Another slam followed a second later – like gunshots, the two slams cracking whiplash quick on top of each other. I knew it must be two people getting out at the same time, one on each side of the van. So Ellen had brought someone home.

She came in slowly, tall and graceful as a goddess in her khaki ATS trousers and tunic. Her hair was still coiled in its neat bun below her peaked cap, but I could see it gleaming like a copper whisky still as she turned to hold open the inner door for her guest. He walked in past her, and Ellen closed the door.

She’d brought home a young man! I wondered for a moment if she did it often, and what old Nancy Campbell had to say about that.

Then I saw that Ellen’s face was as pale as a dead fish’s belly. She hugged her ribs as if her body would fly into pieces if she let go, and suddenly I no longer envied her.

She was very, very scared.

The man who came in with her seemed perfectly ordinary. He wasn’t in uniform; he wore a scarf and sweater like a seaman. He carried a wooden case under one arm, with the other hand hidden deep in the pocket of his heavy coat.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Campbell,’ Ellen choked out. ‘He needs a room.’

‘A room,’ the man repeated, striding to the bar.

He was strongly built and much taller than me. He gazed up curiously at the coins in the oak beam over the bar for a few seconds. But he didn’t touch them.

‘A room,’ he repeated. ‘And –’ he hesitated – ‘drink.’ He put his wooden case on the brass counter and mimed drinking, with his cupped hand going to his mouth.

He didn’t speak much English. I held my breath, guessing what that must mean.

‘He’s flown from Norway,’ Ellen whispered.

‘Norwegian?’ asked Mrs Campbell, frowning. She seemed to distrust all foreigners, but Norwegians probably ought to be made welcome. They would be refugees, escaping the iron rule of the Nazis in their invaded country.

‘He’s not Norwegian,’ Ellen whispered. ‘I think he’s German.’

She raised her voice, and asked me, ‘You remember the plane we saw this afternoon? You said …’

She trailed off.

‘It was a German plane?’ I asked.

Ellen nodded.

I stared at the stranger in alarm. If this was a German pilot, this wasn’t someone who’d chosen to live in England for decades, like Jane. This was a military man, fighting for Hitler, like the German soldiers who killed my parents. This was the enemy, the real enemy, right here in the room with me.

My heart lurched in fear. When that passed, it lurched again, in fascination.

He was also a pilot. A real pilot.

The enemy pilot swept his curious glance around the room. He paused to look at Jane. Then he looked at me, standing beside her.

My cheeks began burning again. What did Nazis think of West Indians? Not much, I imagined. They wanted everybody to be just like them. They didn’t like Jews, or Gypsies, or jazz.

The stranger patted the brass bar and pointed to the glasses.

Jane spoke up.

‘Come now, the young man would like a drink,’ she said from her seat by the now-dead fire. ‘Perhaps he’s come to Scotland for the whisky.’

Ellen let out a nervous squeak of a laugh.

‘He’d be better off in America, then, where there’s no rationing,’ said Mrs Campbell, putting on a defiant brave face like a Londoner in the Blitz.

The German pilot pulled his left hand from his pocket, and the hand was closed around a sleek and sturdy black pistol.

He’d been holding it all the time, a nasty secret.

I didn’t dare to move.

Jane and Mrs Campbell froze too.

But Ellen’s expression didn’t change. She’d known all along. She drove him here from the aerodrome, knowing that if she didn’t do as he told her, he’d shoot her.

The pilot beckoned Ellen, using the pistol. She crossed the room like a whipped dog. He pointed to the beer with the gun.

‘I don’t ken how to draw the ale,’ Ellen whimpered. ‘Mrs Campbell, please get him a drink.’

Nancy Campbell shook herself to life and quietly let herself in behind the bar. She’d already covered the taps for the night, but she lifted the towel, screwed a nozzle back on, and picked up a clean glass. As she filled it, she made a fierce offer through clenched teeth: ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

The German pilot didn’t understand. He rested both elbows on the counter, making his hold on the gun seem terrifyingly casual.

‘What does he want?’ Mrs Campbell hissed. ‘I don’t mean the room. He can have the room. Ellen! What else does he want?’

Ellen shook her head. A wisp of fiery hair escaped her bun, like a flame flicking her cheek. She hissed back, ‘How do I know? His English isn’t very good, and I don’t speak Jerry myself!’

Mrs Campbell said helplessly, ‘Aunt Jane?’

The old woman stared at her niece with blank, pale blue eyes. She said stiffly, ‘I don’t speak Norwegian.’

‘You know he’s not Norwegian,’ Mrs Campbell said through still-gritted teeth.

She handed the full glass to the grim young man. He took it, held it up in a salute, and drank half the pint in one gulp.

‘Please, Aunt Jane,’ begged Mrs Campbell.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Ask him if he’d like a sandwich.’

Ellen exploded in fizzing nervous laughter.

The man drank off the rest of the pint. Ellen backed up and collapsed into my empty chair, at the table across from Jane. She told us, ‘He’s waiting for a toff from Intelligence to meet him here. If his contact doesn’t turn up, he has to fly off at the crack of dawn tomorrow, and we’re to let him. He’s a spy, or a double agent or some such. He has a code name, they said. “Odysseus”.’

I read a lot, I read all the time, and I knew who that was. I thought of the Trojan Horse.

So did Jane.

‘“Odysseus, man of many wiles,”’ she said. ‘From Homer’s Odyssey.’

He must have known we were talking about him, because ‘Odysseus’ sounds much the same in English and German and I expect Norwegian too. He pointed his gun at Ellen again.

‘You bloody Nazi bastard,’ she spat, her voice catching in a sob. ‘What can I do? You’re the one with the gun.’

He glared at her and handed his glass back to the landlady.

While Mrs Campbell refilled his glass with beer and resentment, the German pilot crossed the room to the piano.

He took his wooden case with him. The polished blond box looked like a small gramophone, much like Jane’s, but without the loudspeaker. The pilot placed his box on the piano next to Jane’s gramophone and laid his gun on top of the box. The two cases looked like a mother and child gramophone sitting side by side.

With his hands free, the German opened the piano lid. His left hand pulled out a hesitant arpeggio of low notes from the keyboard.

Almost as if he were surprised to find the piano in tune, he coaxed out a few more handfuls of sound, repetitive and dark and insistent. Then he added a high, sustained trill in the right hand. It was Mendelssohn – the Hebrides Overture.

His fingers moved like wind over the keys, and the music was heartbreaking, heart-stopping, filling the damp walls of the old house with beauty and longing and a crashing of waves.

It was not a piece I usually think of when I think of Mummy. It is an orchestral piece. But the last time I heard it, Mummy was playing it on the school piano.

I don’t remember crossing the room.

I stood next to him at the piano, tears streaming down my face, and watched his hands, long, bony, strong fingers and a plain gold ring with a bear engraved on it, flying over the keys.

The German pilot suddenly realised I was there beside him.

He broke off playing to snatch up his pistol so I couldn’t pick it up myself. The music stopped abruptly, and as he grabbed at the gun he knocked it against his wooden case.

The front of the box was a narrow, hinged flap held in place by a hasp on the flat lid, and when the gun hit the catch – it must have been loose – the front flap fell open to lay bare a panel full of holes and wires, each labelled with numbers and letters of the alphabet, like a telephone switchboard.

The inside of the wooden flap was stamped with a brand name: ENIGMA.

The German pilot flipped the front flap back up. He had to raise the lid on top of the case a little bit to fit the catch back into place, and beneath the lid I saw a keyboard of ordinary typewriter keys.

It looked like a portable electrical typewriter.

He used the gun to make me step back.

Jane spoke suddenly, sharp and scolding, in a language I didn’t understand.

But the pilot did.

He put the gun back into his coat pocket and stepped away from me, holding up his empty hands to show he wasn’t going to threaten me any more.

‘I do speak a little German,’ Jane admitted grudgingly.

‘I know you do,’ said Mrs Campbell.

Ellen:

That brave young lassie – I’d not spent an hour in her company, and knew not a thing about her but that she had brown skin and was in London during the Blitz. But seeing her in tears at the music, and him stopping to point his gun at her, made me hate him all over again.

Nan’s old auntie was calm as could be. She asked the young man a question in his own tongue. He bowed his head to Mrs Warner and I heard the name he gave her: Felix Baer.

What was he up to, sly devil? Trying to make friends, just because a body speaks your lingo? Expecting us to behave ourselves just because he was polite? I was fuming.

But the old girl, Jane Warner, just cracked on and gave him an English lesson.

When she finished, he faced Louisa standing there with her brown eyes full of tears. His voice when he spoke was gentle and polite as a lady’s maid. ‘I am sorry I frightened you.’

‘I told him about your parents,’ Jane said softly. ‘So he knows it was German bombs and torpedoes that killed them.’

Her parents were killed in the Blitz? She must have hated the Nazis even more than I did.

‘Oh.’ Louisa gave a great gulp of a swallow, and just about whispered, ‘Thank you.’

I could see she didn’t like to talk about it, and I was glad I hadn’t asked.

‘My mother played the piano,’ she added, getting control of herself. ‘You can tell him that, I suppose.’

‘Ask him if he wants a sandwich,’ Mrs Campbell insisted, and then I roundly lost my temper with her. Shaness, could she not see Louisa’s tears for herself, and all she could think of was food? I jumped up and barked, ‘Hold your whisht, Nan Campbell, and stop going on about sandwiches! Hitler himself could walk in here and if he was a young pilot you’d pull him a pint and stuff him full of grub! I’ll get the ruddy Jerry a ruddy sandwich for you.’

I barged past her into the kitchen at the back.

The kitchen was full of weapons. Everywhere I looked I saw things I could use to hurt the bastard with. Cast-iron pans! A butcher’s knife! Toasting forks! Blimey, I could break a milk bottle over his head if I were brave enough, couldn’t I!

I could hear Jane cracking away in quiet German with the pilot, and Mrs Campbell dithering behind the bar. ‘Tea, that’s what we need,’ she said, and I heard the skritch of a match as she lit the gas burner to boil the kettle.

Aye, cups of tea – that will stop the invasion!

Stupid woman, I thought, and bit my lip. I was too frighted of the strapping tall young man and his gun to get around Nan with a frying pan and try to hit him in the head. I’d never manage it fast enough or hard enough. And anyway, I’d been told to let him get on with his mission, not to knock him out.

So I yanked open the icebox and found a big slab of butter. Where did Nan Campbell get so much butter, I wondered, did she have friends in the black market? No matter, there was cheese and bread, and I slapped a sandwich together.

When I came out of the kitchen, the lass Louisa was sitting silent and small on the piano stool. She was watching the Jerry pilot with the faintest frown. Interested. Not frightened. Or, if she did fear him, not showing it.

He was back at the bar, with the wooden box that he never let out of his reach, answering Jane’s quiet questions.

I pushed the sandwich across the bar. The Jerry pilot wolfed it down so quickly I began to make him another without thinking.

‘Oi, leave off, that’s not for hotel guests!’ Mrs Campbell cried. ‘That’s Isle of Man butter!’

I froze and gave her the worst kind of cold and fearsome glare. ‘And it’s Scottish bread, aye? He doesn’t care.’ I went back to buttering.

Jane held up her empty tumbler. ‘How very exciting this is!’

The Jerry took her glass and gave it to Nan to fill again. I wondered who would have to pay for that wee dram; whisky wasn’t cheap. He passed the glass back to the old woman and they jawed some more. Then he took a silver cigarette case from inside his coat and held it out. She took a cigarette and leaned forward, and he struck a match.

Oh, the look on Nan’s face when the German pilot gave her old auntie a cigarette!

Jane called to the lass.

‘He says to tell you, Louisa, that he has great respect for the American Negro. He saw Jesse Owens run in the 1936 Olympics.’

‘I’m not American,’ Louisa said, her head high.

‘I told him you are a British subject.’ Jane smiled, her eyes wrinkling so you couldn’t see the colour in them. ‘From an island in the West Indies.’

The pilot took fresh interest in the lass, his brows knotted. He asked a question, and Jane translated in a soft voice. ‘Do you know the music he played, the piece that made you cry?’

Louisa nodded, and glanced again curiously at the German pilot. ‘The Hebrides Overture,’ she said. ‘Scottish music by a German composer. Mendelssohn is German, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he was born Jewish,’ Jane explained for the benefit of us musical ignoramuses, me and Nan. ‘Not a Nazi favourite. Mendelssohn’s work is banned in Germany. They pretend he’s not one of theirs.’

I wondered what the pilot would think of me, neither black nor Jewish, but a Traveller. What would he think of my people, who moved from place to place selling horses and willow baskets, collecting old clothes and mending pans, working in the tattie fields and at the berrying? Most British people don’t like us. Surely the Nazis are worse.

I cringed into my uniform, as if it were a costume that didn’t fit.

The outrageous Jerry asked another casual question.

‘He wants to know,’ said Jane to Louisa, ‘if you are familiar with the music called Calypso.’

The lass nodded. She threw back her shoulders and stood straighter. ‘But it’s from Trinidad. I’m from Jamaica.’

The Jerry pilot breathed a long, raggedy breath. Then he held a hand towards Louisa. She flinched at first, but at last she reached to shake his offered hand. He looked her straight in the eye, solemn and serious, and repeated, ‘Calypso.’

‘I’m Louisa,’ she said.

Nan Campbell spoke up, wiping her hands on her pinny. ‘He can have Room Number Four, the best double room, at the single-room rate. Ask him how he means to pay.’

Jane asked him.

His eyes flicked up to 648 Squadron’s wishing coins studding the beam above the bar. But he put his hand inside the breast of his leather coat and pulled out a wodge of limp English pound notes in a silver clip.

‘I’ll show him upstairs,’ said Nan. ‘Ellen, perhaps you’ll come along so I don’t have to go alone.’

The Jerry picked up his wooden box. He asked Jane another question.

‘What did he say?’ said Nan.

‘He wants to take my gramophone to his room.’

‘You let him,’ said Nan, shaking a finger at her old auntie to make her mind. ‘I’ve given him a bed, and I’ve given you another whisky, and Ellen has to drive him about. You let him choose some records.’

Everybody paraded up the pitchy stairs together as if we were about to have a party. Louisa carted the gramophone, and I brought the record albums and the torch. Jane, who couldn’t do stairs quickly, jigged about trying to catch hold of things, finally anxious about something – her precious music. Louisa jigged about trying to catch hold of Jane. Mrs Campbell jigged about anxiously as well, but she was worried about something else. She needed Jane to translate as she showed the Jerry how to work the gas fire in his bedroom.

He did not at all seem to understand about putting the money in the meter. In any case he hadn’t any small change. He turned the gas tap on and off about five times, which frighted me all over again, wondering if he might forget it was on and fill the house with gas.

He was only going to be here for one night, God pity us – couldn’t Nan Campbell just turn the fire on herself this one time without having to teach him all the fine points of the meter?

Louisa finally ran back to Room Number Five and donated a shilling of her own, which was a very dear donation. But it got the fire going without a gas leak, and it meant we could all go to bed.

As Louisa dropped her shilling into the meter like a wishing coin itself, I wished that the enemy airman staying under our roof would not shoot any of us before he left.

Louisa:

Felix Baer looked exhausted, but he didn’t go to sleep right away. I know, because I heard him playing records for half the night.

Beside me in Room Five’s mysteriously lumpy bed with its musty mattress – you could smell damp in it through the clean bedclothes – Jane was asleep, I think, the moment her head hit the pillow. Not me. It was the second-longest day of my life, after the day when the bomb dropped in Balham and Mummy was killed. I dozed off, in the unfamiliar bed next to this unfamiliar old woman, but I kept waking and hearing the music in Room Four. Record after record. I’d fall asleep listening to Mozart, and wake up and hear Ravel. Or Cole Porter. Or some German song I didn’t recognise.

Felix Baer couldn’t have slept at all, because he kept changing records and winding the gramophone. Perhaps he was keeping himself awake on purpose, waiting for his contact from Intelligence.

The music was only a lullaby lilt through the closed doors and the passage between us, but it must have been jolly loud in the room where he was playing it. By and by I noticed that most of what he played – most of Jane’s records, actually – were all forbidden in Germany now.

So he was treating himself to a feast of beautiful music from before the war, from before the Nazis, when people could listen to whatever they liked.

I wanted to hate him. But the music made my heart sore, and I remembered the warm touch of his palm against mine, and his bony fingers flying over the piano keys. What was it like to be a musician and not be able to play music you love? I thought of my flute and all it meant to me, lessons with Mummy, duets with Daddy, sitting on the roof of the flat in London trying to imitate the starlings at dusk when I should have been practising.

I drifted off once more, and this time when I woke I heard nothing but the wind in the Scotch pines on the knoll above the Limehouse, and Jane gently snoring beside me. Felix Baer was finished playing records.

I knew there wasn’t a thing Jane could do if that German decided to shoot us in our sleep. But I didn’t think he would, not after she let him share her music. Lying next to her, I felt like I was in the safest place in the house.

So finally I went to sleep properly.

Hours before it grew light, I opened my eyes and stared into a wholly unknown dark. I had absolutely no idea where I was. On a train? Or a boat? In an air-raid shelter? England, Jamaica, the Isle of Man? I wasn’t scared – I just had no idea where I was. I’d been going so hard for so long that I’d lost my place in the world.

But I knew the sleeping person beside me was not Mummy but Johanna von Arnim, otherwise known as Jane Warner. This reminded me I’d come to Scotland to look after her, and I was in the Limehouse, and down the passage was a music-loving German pilot.

My stomach lurched with fear and fascination. It was hopeless trying to go back to sleep. I lay stiffly.

Before long there came a tapping at the door, soft but insistent. Jane slept on as if she were completely deaf. What if I opened the door and it was Felix Baer, with his pianist’s hands and tired eyes? What would I say? We didn’t share any language but music.

I found myself whistling the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture under my breath.

‘Louisa!’ The voice was high-pitched and urgent and definitely didn’t belong to the German pilot. ‘Louisa, wake up!’

I crawled out of bed and clunked around in the dark, feeling my way. Jane and I had locked ourselves in; I’d shoved a chair under the door handle to brace it. It took me a moment to undo all this extra security.

‘Louisa!’

‘I’m coming!’

I got the door open. Ellen McEwen stood in the shadowy passage in her ATS uniform, less crisp than it was the day before, holding an electric torch.

‘I have to take the pilot back to RAF Windyedge,’ she said. ‘His contact isn’t here, but he wants to go. You can tell he’s a mess of nerves. Will you come with me? Please come with me.’

‘Oh—’ I protested. ‘But I’m supposed to help Jane – it’s her first day here!’

‘I asked Mrs Campbell, and she’ll take over till you’re back. Please, please, Louisa.’

Didn’t I want to do something to win the war? To be in the sky? To fly into combat against German pilots?

Well, here was a German pilot.

It wasn’t flying into combat, but it mattered. I could go with Ellen, and do a little thing for our side.

And I wanted to see him again.

‘Yes, all right.’ It came out like the croak of a tree frog. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Let me get dressed.’

‘Thank you, thank you. He’s downstairs having coffee. We can have some too.’

Mrs Campbell had also made a great pot of porridge. We all stood at the bar strengthening ourselves, Ellen and I at one end and Felix Baer at the other. The ‘coffee’ was made from chicory syrup, and it was terrible. I decided I would not drink coffee again until rationing ended or I went back to Jamaica, whichever came first. But that pilot-pianist drank it greedily.

When he’d finished he looked up at the sixpences and shillings left behind by 648 Squadron, gleaming silver in the yellow light of the lamp Mrs Campbell had switched on behind the bar.

He reached into a pocket and pulled out something that shone like a silver sixpence. I couldn’t tell what kind of coin it was between his thumb and forefinger. It wouldn’t have fit in the gas meter, but he reached up and pressed it firmly into a crack in the black oak beam over our heads.

‘You see, Louisa?’

I jumped. I didn’t expect him to call me by name.

‘How you say – ?’ He faltered. ‘For luck.’

‘Aye, right,’ said Mrs Campbell darkly. ‘Good luck, then.’

He pushed away his coffee cup and went through to the hall. His boots clattered as he took the stairs two at a time. I worried he’d break his neck in the unfamiliar dark. A minute later we heard him come back down.

He whisked through the vestibule with his wooden box, and there was a lot of slamming of doors as he loaded his things in the Tilly. He ran up to Room Number Four again, and this time came down carrying Jane’s gramophone in one arm and the armful of records in the other. He set these politely on the piano and the shelf in the cupboard beside it.

‘Danke – thank you,’ Felix Baer told us, smiling. He pointed upstairs, mimed sleep, and said, ‘Thank you, ladies.’

‘Aye, right,’ Nancy Campbell repeated bitterly.

‘Come,’ he commanded Ellen.

She flinched. Her pale face was fish-belly white again, as if she expected her head to be chopped off.

Now was my chance to help her.

I swallowed hard, linked my elbow with Ellen’s, and said to the airman, ‘I’m coming too.’

Ellen squeezed my arm and turned her head to give me the faintest hint of a grateful smile. We stood side by side as if we were the best of friends determined to do a job together, not two strangers who’d only just met for a few minutes the day before.

The German pilot seemed perplexed. Then he figured out what I meant. He shrugged and jerked his head towards the door, beckoning us both. ‘Come, two girls. It is good.’

He was going to let me go along without a fight.

I stepped away from Ellen so I could pull on my mother’s winter coat.

Then we followed the German pilot into the windy dark.

Ellen:

Gripping that black pistol, the Jerry pilot chivvied Louisa to get into the Tilly ahead of him.

‘You all right?’ she whispered as I climbed in on my side.

‘Aye, no bother,’ I muttered. ‘Better not chat.’

She sat squashed between me in my woollen overcoat and himself in his shiny leather one. ‘He thinks we’re friends,’ she said. ‘We should chat. We should act like we’re not scared. He’ll tell us to stop if he minds.’

I tried to get a keek at her face as I started the engine, but it was too dark. She seemed a quiet thing. But she was bolder than she looked, and clever with it.

The Jerry pilot kept his pistol pointed at me, his arm across the dashboard.

‘Don’t wave your hands or look as if you’re going to fight him,’ Louisa said sensibly. ‘Just chat about the road and how long it takes to get there and things like that.’

‘Well then,’ I said, and swallowed. ‘Um. Bit cold for the time of year, aye?’

‘Is it? This is my first time in Scotland. Everyone always asks me if I’m cold! I’m used to being cold. I lived in London for three years, but I grew up in Jamaica.’

I couldn’t remember if Jane had said it was in the East or West Indies, and I didn’t like to ask. Was this how folk felt when they found I was a Traveller, so full of ignorance they couldn’t talk sense?

Of course most folk don’t ask those questions whilst driving an RAF utility vehicle, havering from hedge to hedge because they are trying to keep an eye on the German’s gun on the dashboard and hoping it doesn’t go off by accident when you hit a bump in the lane.

The pilot didn’t tell us to hush, though, so Louisa kept going, like a terrier with a bone. ‘Could you drive before the war?’ she asked.

‘Only – only a wee bit,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I trained when I joined up.’

‘Do you like it?’

Had I ever thought whether I liked it or not? It was a fair question.

‘Aye,’ I whispered. ‘I do like it. Makes me feel powerful, managing a big machine like this.’

‘All that noise and speed!’ she said as we rattled up to the airfield barrier.

‘And the smell of petrol,’ I agreed. ‘Sharp and fumy. Exciting.’

I stopped to wait for the guards to come out.

Louisa said fiercely, ‘An important job to do.’

I thought she sounded envious.

Sergeants Nobby Fergusson and Jack Hinton came up to the van, and Jack pointed his rifle at us.

Louisa:

It was still dark. Ellen cranked down her window to talk to the guards.

‘All right there, Volunteer McEwen?’ one of them asked anxiously. He poked an electric torch through the window and swept it over us.

‘I am still alive,’ Ellen answered bitterly. ‘The Jerry’s heading home now. Get your light away, Nobby, you’re blinding me.’

‘Who’s the coloured girl?’

I tightened my hands on the dashboard. Why didn’t he ask me that question?

The light moved, and Ellen answered. ‘She’s called Louisa Adair. She’s new at the Limehouse. I asked her to come along with me.’

‘Has she got ID?’

‘Nobby Fergusson, I will give you ID at the end of my arm with my fist in your teeth. Or will you take over my job?’ Ellen snarled. ‘Because I have got a ruddy Jerry’s gun pointed at my face the day, as you can see—’

The torch’s beam fell still, lighting up Felix Baer’s hand on the dashboard holding the pistol. The curves of shining black metal gleamed softly in the dark.

Suddenly the barrel of the other guard’s rifle cut the light as he pushed it through the window past Ellen’s head, pointing it at Felix Baer. The end of the long gun was in front of my nose.

In a flash, as I flung up my hands to protect my face, a lot of terrifying things happened. Ellen cried, ‘You idiot, Jack, away wi’ you!’ Felix Baer pulled me against his chest, which meant that if the rifle went off in that closed space in the dark, I’d be the first to die. Baer raised his pistol, reached across Ellen, and with a sharp crack, fired a shot out her window that must have missed the guard’s head by a quarter of an inch.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot at him!’ Ellen screeched. ‘You cannae see! You’re too close, you’ll hit us!’

She grabbed the rifle. She couldn’t push it away, but she stopped the guard from aiming it. Everything went still. Felix Baer had his arm across my shoulders, not choking me, but gripping me firm against him.

‘Shh, shh,’ he said softly in my ear. ‘Louisa. Stille.’

I held still, cold against his stiff leather coat.

‘Lift the barrier, will you, Nobby?’ Ellen gasped. ‘So we can get him to his plane and get rid of him.’

‘We fly now,’ agreed Felix Baer with authority. He urged Ellen to start forward. ‘This girl. We fly.’

The defeated guards raised the barrier.

Ellen:

My hands on the steering wheel and the gear stick quaked like birch leaves in a wind. I couldn’t drive in such a state.

I whispered, ‘Crack on with your chat, will you, Louisa?’

She looked up over her shoulder at the Jerry pilot. ‘I need to help her,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’

He let go of her throat, but not the pistol.

Louisa pressed cold hands over mine and squeezed. ‘He won’t hurt us. He won’t. I think it would kill him. It’s all for show. We’ve only to get him to his plane, and he’ll go back to wherever he came from—’

‘He said I have to go along,’ I whispered. ‘This girl. We fly.’

‘He might have meant me,’ Louisa said. ‘But I think he meant only to the airfield, not – not to Germany.’

She rabbited on hopefully, and I realised her accent wasn’t just London – it was actually quite posh, too. Not proper posh, not like Jamie Stuart when he was putting it on, but like someone who reads a lot – like someone whose mum was a schoolteacher. Her calm voice worked on me like a granny coaxing a sobbing bairn with promises. At last I took a deep breath and shook off her hands. Die here, or fly to Germany? We had to move, at any rate.

I put the Hillman Minx in gear. It stalled as I moved forward. I took another breath and started the motor again carefully. I didn’t dare steal another keek at Nobby and his mate as we left them.

My passengers were quiet as we sped along the narrow drive. I wondered what the Jerry pilot was thinking about. What would happen at the airfield when he tried to get me, or Louisa, into his plane? Would the RAF Windyedge lads let him take off? What would happen to me, or to Louisa, if they didn’t?

God pity us.

Louisa:

It wasn’t as dark now. Felix Baer would have daylight to fly in.

I was crammed between him and Ellen and couldn’t possibly try to escape until one of them got out. I squinted into the gloom over the gun on the dashboard, trying to ignore it, and stared out at the aerodrome.

I am on a Royal Air Force aerodrome.

I thought I’d suffocate with fear and excitement. It was like having my own private Blitz in my head and my stomach.

I saw a cluster of sheds and barracks, concrete and boards and weathered brick. The drive was rutted gravel and the runway was grass. It all looked the same colour in the grey dawn. There was one plane parked on the grass.

It was the German pilot’s Luftwaffe fighter, like some giant stinging insect with broad blades for wings. Its markings were covered, but it was as sleek and dangerous as a sword, a battle weapon and armour rolled into one.

I thought of Ellen saying that driving made her feel powerful. What must it be like to fly?

It may have been nerves or petrol fumes going to my head, but for a moment I envied Felix Baer even more than I envied Ellen McEwen.

Ellen:

I pulled up by operations. But the Jerry wouldn’t walk across the airfield with folk such as Nobby and Jack chasing him. ‘Go, go.’ He pointed angrily to his plane, on the grass outside the hangar, and rapped his pistol against the windscreen for emphasis.

I didn’t ken how many shots he had in that pistol, and I didn’t want to find out. Never have I felt so sick with fright.

I drove as slowly as I dared, bumping over clats of turf, trying to give our lads a chance to come after us without giving the Jerry another fright.

I stopped alongside the plane and opened my door and climbed out. So did he. He wasn’t going to give us any chance to make a run for it.

Louisa:

I jumped out after both of them. In the gloom, I could see the shadows of men running, and it looked like every one of them held a rifle. It was like watching a cinema newsreel, all black and grey, soldiers rushing into battle.

Weren’t we supposed to let the German pilot go? Didn’t he have a code name in some secret Intelligence plan? The guards at the gate nearly killed us trying to take command of him. But there wasn’t supposed to be a battle.

I shouted, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’

A few of the men skipped to a stop, as if the film reel wasn’t spooling properly.

‘Is that Volunteer McEwen? Who’s with you?’

None of them knew who I was.

‘The lassie works for Mrs Campbell at the pub,’ Ellen cried. ‘God pity us, never mind just now – don’t fright the Jerry! Keep your guns down unless he tries to take us along!’

If they threatened him, he might panic and use his pistol again. I didn’t believe he’d hurt me or Ellen, but we weren’t armed men. Maybe he wouldn’t aim to miss this time.

Ellen:

He herded us like a pair of ewe lambs, pointing our way with his gun. He stood us on the other side of his Messerschmitt, where no one could keek any part of us but our feet beneath the carcass of the plane. Our heads were right next to where the machine guns stuck out of the wing.

‘What’s he doing?’ Louisa whispered. She only came up to my shoulder, and we both craned to spy on him.

‘Sorting his gear,’ I guessed. The nose of the plane pointed over my head and I couldn’t see anything, either.

She hooked her elbow through mine again.

‘If we both fight him …’ that brave lass whispered. But she didn’t finish her idea. He was out of our sight just now, but he still had that gun.

We heard the Jerry slam the doors of the Tilly. Then he got up on the wing we couldn’t see, and pulled back the cockpit canopy. He took out a parachute and life jacket and chucked them on the ground.

‘What’s he doing now?’ Louisa asked.

‘Making room for his precious box,’ I said.

Louisa:

I glimpsed the top of one narrow seat in the cockpit, with nothing behind it, and only the controls in front. He must have had to fly with the wooden case in his lap. Even his long coat must have been awkward in that cramped space. He couldn’t possibly have room to take a hostage, could he?

If he did, I would be a better fit than tall, long-legged Ellen.

Could he? Cram me in between his shoulder and the metal hull, and take off into the rising sun on those knife-blade wings?

For one thousandth of a second, just before it plummeted in fear, my heart flew.

Ellen:

He stood on the wing opposite. His left arm was straight out with the gun once again aimed at my head.

I spat to tell him how much I hated him.

He heaved a sigh. He kept his arm out with that ugly pistol cocked, and turned to shout towards the lads lined up on the edge of the airfield, pointing at him with their rifles.

‘Starter!’

Louisa, braver than me, ducked to keek underneath the Messerschmitt and see what was going on.

Louisa:

The pilot was ready to leave. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Being interested numbed my fear, like ice numbing a twisted ankle, the way reading numbed grief.

He untied the fabric covering the plane’s Luftwaffe markings so he wouldn’t look suspicious when he landed back in Norway or wherever he was going. He checked the engine and wheels, he checked hinges on the wings and tail, and he checked the propeller. I longed to know what he was looking for, where the fuel went, what the hinges on the wings did.

At last he strapped on his life jacket and parachute and pulled on a leather flying helmet.

He yelled again in English to the soldiers with the guns, repeating what he’d said before.

‘Starter!’

He waved a crankshaft at them, just like you’d use to start an old car, and mimed winding it.

Ellen:

‘He needs a mechanic to turn over the engine,’ I told Louisa in a whisper. ‘Perhaps when the other lad comes near we’ll be able to run …’

‘But he’ll need both hands to drive the plane,’ Louisa whispered back. ‘Like you do in the van, I’m sure of it. Wait till the engine starts. And then we’ll run.’

The Jerry had to wait along with us for the starter. He climbed in and sat there with his left arm slung out of the cockpit and his filthy old pistol still pointing at my head.

At least neither one of us was in the plane with him. A bonny green sprig of hope unfolded in my heart.

Louisa:

The mechanic stood on the other side of the plane to crank the engine, so we couldn’t see what he was doing. But we jolly well heard and felt when it started. The roar exploded around us like a tube train pulling into an Underground station. The German pilot pulled his arm back into the cockpit as the plane jumped forward an inch or two; the wing nearly knocked us over.

Before he slid the canopy shut over his head, Felix Baer leaned out and waved at us.

The gun was gone. I was right – he needed both hands for the plane. We were in his way now, and he was trying to shoo us off like chickens.

I waved back, to let him know I understood.

Ellen:

‘Go!’ Louisa cried.

She grabbed my arm and harled me along beside her. We raced away across the mowed strip of runway with the noise of the Messerschmitt howling around us. Then we were stumbling over longer, slippery grass. The Luftwaffe engine screamed like a pack of devils and if anyone was shooting at anyone, I couldn’t hear it.

All at once that strange lassie stopped running.

She turned about to watch him go.

Louisa:

The sky was dark blue and grey with clouds, but it was light enough that the sun must have been up somewhere, somewhere not so gloomy as northern Scotland in November. The German plane lifted off the runway into the east wind.

Felix Baer was black wings against the grey sky, and then he was a black dot over the North Sea, and then he was gone.

Jamie:

Overnight, Shetland came under a bombardment of howling wind and pouring rain, battering down from the north-east, and nobody could take off. A-Flight was in bed, exhausted after slogging through the storm, but B-Flight sat in the officers’ lounge consuming shortbread and watery tea when Cromwell came in and barked, ‘Pack up, you lot: 648 Squadron’s posted to the mainland. A-Flight’s joining the Spitfires at RAF Deeside, and B-Flight’s going to fly from RAF Windyedge for the rest of the winter. The Spits have their own commanding officer, so I’ll be at Windyedge with B-Flight, but as there’s only ten miles between bases I’ll keep tabs on all of 648 Squadron.’

This was the best news I’d had in a long time. Cromwell was going to have to commute, and I’d be back at RAF Windyedge where my friend Ellen McEwen was the ATS driver. And it was less than an hour on the train to get home if I ever had a day’s leave.

‘What’ll we be doing there?’ asked Pilot Officer Adam Stedman hopefully. He was the new leader of Madeira Section, the other half of B-Flight – the fellow Cromwell had threatened to replace me with. ‘Hunting U-boats?’

Up in Shetland, our assignment was to bomb German shipping. The anti-aircraft guns on their destroyers were our worst enemy. We longed to have a go at their submarines, which would be less able to fire back at us, but we never knew where to find them.

‘You’ll be on warship escort and reconnaissance. And protecting coastal fishing and supply fleets. RAF Windyedge needs a squadron stationed there until a spot of bother with Intelligence blows over. Get ready to leave.’

Cromwell stormed out again, slamming the door behind him, to go wake up A-Flight and rattle them with his urgent news to start packing. But none of B-Flight jumped up to get moving.

‘Bloody North Sea mist,’ somebody muttered. ‘We’re not flying anywhere in weather like this, are we?’

Silver nudged me with his elbow. He lit a cigarette and murmured, ‘Sounds like they’re sending us somewhere a bit less hot. I think the lads need rallying.’

I wondered if the move was punishment for Dougie and his crew not keeping their mouths shut, or for Ignacy’s overconfidence, or for my struggle to get B-Flight’s new aircrews to work together.

Then I remembered the radio operator with his urgent message from Windyedge.

‘Maybe it’s hotter than Cromwell’s letting on,’ I said. ‘Maybe the spot of bother with Intelligence and that Jerry we ran into were part of the same op. Maybe they’re sending us as a guard force.’

‘You sound very clued up.’

I stubbed out my own cigarette. ‘Something’s going on,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to play along without knowing what.’ I nodded towards Dougie Kerr, leaning his wiry ginger head forward to catch what I was muttering. ‘Careless talk costs lives,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps Dougie’s going a bit deaf from all that rear gunnery, and we should invest in an ear trumpet for him.’

Silver laughed. ‘I think a megaphone for you would be a better investment.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘Now’s your chance. Take the podium.’

He was right, as usual. I stood up, grabbed a spoon, and clinked my teacup for attention.

‘All right, lads!’

They looked at me like expectant puppies. They were like puppies – untrained, disobedient, but anxious for praise and action, and maybe, if I worked at it, I’d win their loyalty. I’d had it before, to the death. Starting over was hard on us all.

‘I’ll bet every one of you began the war thinking you’d be a fighter pilot in a Spitfire or a Hurricane,’ I said.

Every one of them nodded, grumbling in agreement. ‘Too bloody right!’ said the new Australian pilot, Harry Morrow.

‘Well, we’re not flying the most glamorous kites, but we’re just as important and just as dead when our luck runs out. I’m not going to quote poetry, but if you like, Flying Officer Silvermont, my navigator here, can recite John Donne’s “No man is an island”—’

Laughter and hoots of ‘No thank you very much!’

‘What about action?’ asked Dougie Kerr, the big-mouthed gingery Australian air gunner. ‘I want another go, and I won’t blow our own tail off this time.’

His pilot, tall Harry Morrow, and their navigator, baby-faced Gavin Hamilton, shared a laugh.

I glanced over at Ignacy, Pimms Section’s bloodthirsty Polish pilot.

‘We all want another go,’ I said. ‘Only next time we’ll coordinate the action, all right? No heroics with Messerschmitts. There’s only one Blenheim pilot who’s an official ace, Reginald Peacock over in 235 Squadron, and he’s dead now. You can’t dogfight in a Blenheim; it’s not built for single combat. If we want to count as aces, we have to do it as a team. German battleships and U-boats count for us as much as fighter planes. Let’s aim to get five while we’re at Windyedge, and we’ll all be aces.’

‘All right, I will drink to that,’ said Ignacy.

‘I’m in,’ said Adam Stedman from Madeira Section.

The Welsh navigator, Derfel Cledwyn, held up his teacup to Ignacy. They both knocked back their tea as if they were sharing a toast with whisky or vodka. The only one who didn’t crack a smile was their new gunner, Bill Yorke. But he was always a bit quiet. Tough job being thrown in with Ignacy and Derfel, who jawed away at each other in the air in Polish and Welsh as if they were playing at League of Nations.

‘You’ll all like being at Windyedge,’ I added. ‘It’s close enough to Stonehaven and Aberdeen that you can go to the cinema or a dance hall in bad weather, and there’s a jolly good village pub within walking distance—’

‘I remember that pub!’ Chip put in enthusiastically. ‘With the wishing coins and the piano. Nancy Campbell always had the fire burning for us. That’ll be fine.’

‘Something to look forward to,’ I agreed, deciding not to tell him off for interrupting since I wasn’t being formal anyway. ‘We’ll polish up formation flying on our way to Windyedge. And I’ll keep my ear to the ground so we don’t get in trouble with Old Cromwell again.’

I looked around the room at these few friends and strangers. And Silver, my best friend, always watching my back. Pimms and Madeira, B-Flight’s lads. My lads.

I raised my own teacup. ‘To Windyedge!’

‘To Windyedge!’

The applause was polite rather than thundering, but at least they applauded.

‘Nice speech, Scotty,’ said Silver, grinning at me. ‘That’s got everybody ready for a fight. I look forward to us all being official aces.’