…Oh, Bill, I have found the most darling house out in the Surrey countryside! The next time you get leave you will have to come and see it with me. I think it will suit us perfectly. It has two acres of grounds, six bedrooms and a spectacular dining room, all just right for entertaining guests. And it’s near Mummy and Daddy, but not too near, if you know what I mean… Of course we’ll need a little place in London too for when we’re there, but oh, I do hope you’ll like the house as much as I do!
I sighed and dropped Rose’s letter onto the table in front of me. For a moment, I tried to imagine it through her eyes: a house set in sunny acres of parkland, roses tumbling around the front door; flower beds and a fountain; a maid shepherding the kids up to the nursery for tea (we’d have a boy and a girl, Rose had already insisted on that); a dog running around. And a pony, of course.
It was idyllic – and utterly impossible. I had no chance of leave right now, not with Shetland being battered by one autumn storm after another, and although I had savings, and my RAF wages were nothing to be sniffed at, I knew they wouldn’t stretch to two acres of grounds, six bedrooms and a place in London too. Rose’s engagement ring, which I’d bought from Cartier in London before I left, had already cost me a small fortune. Anyway, it was highly likely when the war ended, I’d have to go back to Canada. I’d tried to talk to Rose about that little problem before I came to Shetland, but she’d silenced me with a bright, Let’s worry about it when it happens. Not wanting to upset her – she was already on edge after a row with her father, which had been about something terribly boring she wouldn’t tell me about – I’d changed the subject.
Sighing again, I glanced up at the men gathered around the tables nearby. They were laughing and joking over their mugs of tea, their newspapers and card games and their own letters they were writing to family and friends. They all looked so cheerful. That had been me once; now, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what it felt like. Although the NAAFI was busy, I was sitting alone, as I always did. I’d just come off the morning shift up at the operational site – the operators worked a four-watch system at Svarta Ness: 1–6 p.m., 8 a.m.–1 p.m., 11 p.m.–8 a.m. and 6–11 p.m., then two days off to recover – and had come here to get something to eat, with Rose’s letter, which had arrived a few days ago, stuffed into my pocket.
I rubbed my eyes, which ached after the long shift spent staring at the round screen on my receiver console, watching for blips on the bright green line snaking left to right across it that might indicate an incoming raid. The Chain Home station at Svarta Ness was part of an early warning system, a literal chain of radar stations all around the British coast looking out for enemy aircraft. If any were detected, and there was no IFF – Identification Friend or Foe – signal to indicate it was one of ours, then it was action stations: I had to move a cursor to the position of the trace, automatically sending this information to the calculating machine. With my right hand, I’d measure the direction and height, and with my left, move a round lever called a goniometer that allowed me to work out the angle. All this meant we could calculate how far away the aircraft were, their speed and their altitude before telephoning everything through to the filter room at Lerwick, where the Plotters would work out a true picture of the aircrafts’ movements before sending that on to Lerwick Fighter Sector HQ. Here, orders would be given and Fighter Command squadrons scrambled to intercept the raids. Because of the concentration required, and to avoid eye strain, each man on watch took turns to sit at the console for an hour before handing over to someone else, but it was still intense work, and I always came off duty feeling shattered.
I’d been in Shetland for around a month now, coming straight here after my court martial – where I’d been fined and demoted from Flight Sergeant to plain Sergeant – and completing my training course at Yatesbury. RAF Svarta Ness was, as Wing Commander Gray had said, a tiny but busy place, its buildings scattered across the north-eastern-most point of Fiskersay. But despite what he’d told me, I was the only Canadian here; the rest of the men were British, save for one fellow from New Zealand. Elsewhere on the island there were contingents from the Army and Navy, just like in the rest of Shetland. In mainland Shetland, airfields had been built at Scatsa and Sumburgh for the islands’ air defence system, and there was an enormous base for flying boats at Sullom Voe that had been built just before the war and added to as the conflict progressed. What Shetland’s residents must have thought when the military descended upon them en masse I couldn’t imagine, but here on Fiskersay they’d been nothing but welcoming to us so far.
Three miles north-west of Unst, Fiskersay was further away from the Scottish mainland than any other point in the British Isles. The operational buildings – the receiver and transmitter blocks and the power house – were out on the promontory that gave the station its name along with an anti-aircraft battery, all of it heavily camouflaged with banked-up earth and netting woven with strips of green and khaki sacking. At the southern edge of the operational site was the domestic site where I was now: four Nissen huts for the men’s billets, a requisitioned house nicknamed the Manor that had been turned into the officers’ accommodation, the medical hut and the NAAFI that, as well as housing the mess, doubled up as an entertainments hall and cinema. There was also the station office, an air raid shelter and a few sheds used for storage.
I stood, draining my tea and pocketing Rose’s letter again, and made my way outside. It was just after four o’clock, and already the light was fading. Yet another storm was on its way, wind roaring through the camp as I made my way to the gates, huddled inside my greatcoat with my cap jammed down over my ears. Gales of up to a hundred miles an hour were forecast tonight; as a precaution the aerial had been lashed down to prevent it being damaged, and for now the station was off air.
Between the radar station and the island’s main settlement, Talafirth – which everyone called town but was no bigger than a village – lay the Haug, a large, flat-topped hill that sloped steeply towards Talafirth on one side and plunged towards the sea and the jagged cliffs that made up the island’s northern coastline on the other. It was the highest point on Fiskersay, and on its top stood the station’s receiver and transmitter towers. Moving on autopilot, I headed along the muddy road that hugged its flank. My leg ached fiercely, making me limp, but I was used to that now. Breathing hard, I left the road – which had originally been little more than a narrow track; work to widen it so the station could be reached more easily had only been finished in the summer – and clambered up the hill. My boots slid on the wet grass, my ears filling with the thunder of the sea hurling itself against the cliffs somewhere below me. Finally, I reached my destination: a ruined crofter’s cottage near the top of the hill, about two hundred yards from the towers. I found a sheltered spot among the tumbled stones and sat down. I’d discovered this place a week after my arrival on Fiskersay and often came here for some peace and quiet.
Now, I gazed out at the jagged rocks of Svarta Ness directly in front of me. To my right was the shallow, cliff-bound bay of Svarta Wick, and to my left, towards the west, a wider bay with a sandy beach called Odda’s Bay. Another quarter of a mile out to sea was a tiny, uninhabited island, Holm of Odda, with a sharp stack the locals called Odda’s Fang sticking up out of the sea just beyond. It was the sort of landscape that reminded you it had been here long before human beings had found it, and would still be here long after we’d gone.
The waves, whipped up by the wind, were enormous, white-capped and boiling; it wasn’t raining yet, but from horizon to horizon, the sky was an ominous brownish-grey. Another hour or so and the storm would hit Fiskersay with full force. I thought about Rose and how far away she was, and was overtaken by a sudden longing to hear her voice; to hold her.
As I sat there, remembering the last time I’d seen her before I was sent to Fiskersay – we’d been shacked up at a hotel in London and had just made love for the first time in a hurried sort of way, aware that any moment there could be an air raid – a new sound reached my ears, blown towards me by the rushing gale. A boat engine.
I leaned forwards, narrowing my eyes as I scanned the surging waves. From time to time, small Norwegian fishing vessels were spotted passing the island, making their way to the mainland. Apparently, since the start of the war, there had been a steady stream of them, bringing refugees escaping German-occupied Norway. Sometimes boats were seen going the other way, too, usually at night, and there were rumours of an operation going on between Britain and Norway, all top secret, of course. No one on Fiskersay asked any questions, because we knew we wouldn’t get any answers.
The note of the engine was unmistakable: the steady, distinctive tonk tonk tonk of a Norwegian fishing vessel. It rose and fell with the wind, faint at first but coming closer.
Suddenly I spotted the boat. With its wooden sides and small white-painted cabin, it looked like a toy in a giant’s bathtub, plunging through the heaving water about half a mile away. The top of its main mast was broken, hanging down, and it was heading straight for the jumble of jagged rocks beyond the cliffs of Svarta Ness, its engine useless against the brutal power of the wind and the waves. My heart began to pound. There was nowhere safe to land a boat on the northern side of the island in weather like this. If it hit the rocks, everyone on board was doomed.
As I jumped up and started down the hill, the sound of the engine cut out. Then I heard the drone of an approaching aircraft. It was another sound I was all too familiar with: the snarl of a German plane, a Junkers Ju 88. Moments later it came into view, flying low and fast under the lid of dirty-coloured cloud, and I saw the muzzles of its guns flash as it began firing on the Norwegian vessel. Immediately, to my surprise, there were flashes of return fire from the boat.
I ran all the way back to the camp, my gait shambling and awkward, gritting my teeth against the pain in my leg and cursing myself for not being able to move faster.
‘Another Norwegian boat off the Ness. Jerry’s firing on her,’ I gasped as I burst into the NAAFI. Everyone turned to stare at me. I grabbed onto a chair to steady myself; my leg was threatening to buckle underneath me.
Up on the point, the anti-aircraft guns began booming, their sound carried towards the dining hall by the wind. The Ju 88 – which, with no radar cover at Svarta Ness due to the storm, had managed to sneak in undetected – had finally been spotted, though too late for whoever was on board that boat, I reckoned.
The mess erupted into action.
‘Are you OK, old man?’ said Lewis Harper, noticing my grimace as I tried to straighten my leg out. Lewis was one of the other radar operations I shared a hut with who’d been on watch with me this morning. Too breathless to answer him, I nodded. No one here knew what had happened to Robert; I’d told them I’d been in an accident while I was on aircrew, and left it at that.
Lewis clapped me on the shoulder and followed the others outside. Ignoring the pain in my leg, I went after them.
At some point now lost to history a set of steep, rocky steps had been cut into the cliffs near the edge of the camp, leading down to the little bay at Svarta Wick. Most of the men were gathered near the top, looking out to sea. I joined them and, after a moment, spotted the boat. It was much nearer to shore now; the waves had pushed it around the point and it was drifting towards the rocks, listing dangerously as it was pummelled this way and that. I could see bullet holes in the deck. There were no signs of life on board at all.
‘What’re we gonna do?’ I yelled to Lewis, trying to make myself heard over the roar of wind and water.
‘Briggs has gone to alert the C.O.,’ Lewis yelled back. ‘Might have to try and get a boat out there.’
‘In this?! No chance!’
‘I know, but what else can we do? Can’t get through to the Air Sea Rescue chaps – we’ve already tried – and it’s not like they’d be able to do anything anyway, not in these conditions.’
In the end it was the sea itself that made the decision for us. A particularly large wave rolled in, hurling the boat, which by now was almost flat on its side, forward. I held my breath, sensing the others doing the same. Then the wave broke and the boat was thrown towards the base of the cliffs at the head of the bay where it finally capsized. At the same time, the storm broke and rain began lashing down.
The station’s Commanding Officer, Flight Lieutenant Jackson, arrived at a run, a heavy length of rope looped over his shoulder, and threw it to us. I caught it. ‘Tie yourselves together!’ he shouted over the roar of the wind. ‘No one’s going down there unsecured – you’ll get washed out to sea!’ He also thrust a torch at me that I shoved into the inside pocket of my coat, and handed Lewis an axe. ‘Use that to get into the boat,’ he yelled at us. ‘There’s no chance of lifting it – it must weigh forty tons or more!’
My leg was still throbbing, but I barely noticed as I looped and knotted the rope around my waist. Lewis did the same, then handed it to the men behind him, Len Kane, the radar operator who had come all the way from New Zealand, and Alistair Briggs, a radar mechanic from Yorkshire. By the time the rope ran out we’d formed a human chain of eight men, fastened together as if we were about to climb a mountain. With me leading, we made our precarious way down the steps. Funnelled into the narrow, steep-sided bay, the power of the water was terrifying. The tide was almost in, and only a tiny strip of sand remained for me to stand on as, squinting against the spray and rain stinging my face and eyes, I tried to work out how on earth I was going to get to the boat, now caught on the rocks just metres away.
I have to do this, I thought. If there’s anyone in that ship left alive, I owe it to Robert to save them. And Des.
‘Hold on!’ I yelled at Lewis. ‘We’ll have to try and climb over the rocks!’
It was a perilous scramble, made all the more awkward by the pain and stiffness in my injured leg; if it hadn’t been for the rope around our waists and the other men at the back of the chain hanging on for grim life, I had no doubt whatsoever the four of us would have been dragged out to sea in an instant. As it was, every time a wave came in we had to crouch, gasping, all the air punched out of our lungs by the freezing water. The rocks were covered in barnacles that sliced my palms and knees and cut my trousers to ribbons.
At last, we reached the boat. Lewis began chopping at the side of the boat with the axe while Len, Al and I pulled at the planks, trying to work them loose. At last, the four of us had managed to make a hole big enough to crawl into. Taking a deep breath, I went first, reaching into my pocket for the torch Flight Lieutenant Jackson had given me and tearing off the paper masking the lens. It was horribly claustrophobic under the boat, the noise of the waves crashing against its other side almost deafening. I shone the torch straight in front of me and saw the men straight away: three of them dressed in fishermen’s garb – trousers, boots, heavy knitted white jumpers – huddled and unmoving among the rocks and seaweed and splintered wood.
As I straightened up again something bumped against the top of my head. I shone the torch upwards, and saw another man hanging upside down behind me, trapped between two barrels that were still secured to the deck with heavy bolts. One of the barrels had fractured, and sticking out of it was a machine gun; the source of the return fire I’d seen coming from the boat. This poor bastard must have been the one who was manning it. I knew as soon as I pulled him down and dragged him out into the stormy half-daylight that there was nothing I could do for him. There were bloodstains across the front of his sweater; his eyes were staring, his mouth hanging open, his skin a dreadful shade of whitish-blue that brought memories of Des roaring back. Lewis, who had clambered through the hole after me, grabbed him under his arms and helped me pull him free before coming back for the others. All of them had been shot to death too. Laboriously, Lewis, Al, Lenand the other men passed the bodies back along the chain until all four were propped up at the bottom of the steps in the cliff. Who were they? I wondered. They might have been dressed as fishermen but with the boat armed to the teeth, it was clear they were anything but.
Then, in the gap between one wave hitting the boat and the next one thundering in, I heard a faint cough. I looked round, aiming the torch beam at the shadows, trying to work out where it had come from. I couldn’t see anyone else.
Another cough. It sounded as if it was coming from behind somewhere, or inside somewhere.
Of course. The cabin.
‘Hello?’ I called.
No answer.
I shouted for Lewis, who was outside the boat again now, to come back. ‘What is it?’ he said when he reached me. ‘Someone else here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard something, but—’
I paused as it came again, muffled but distinct. ‘There.’
‘But where’s it coming from?’
‘The cabin,’ I said. ‘Must be.’
Lewis tried to crawl nearer to where I was kneeling, but the rope around his waist stopped him. He cursed. ‘Damn it.’
‘Untie yourself,’ I told him, fumbling with the knots around my waist with stiff, numbed fingers. ‘It’s no good being tied up like this under here. We need to be able to move freely. We’ll be safe enough until we go back out.’
We freed ourselves from the rope, Lewis yelling to the others so that they knew what we were doing. Above us, a wave crashed over the rocks and against the bottom of the boat, making it sway and creak; Lewis glanced up, a brief flicker of anxiety passing across his face, but he did as I asked, and I tied the end of the rope to what remained of the boat’s main mast, a jagged stump poking down from the middle of the deck, so it wouldn’t get washed away.
Unhindered, I could now crawl across to the boat’s cabin, although my path was blocked by a mass of splintered wood from the deck. I set the torch down and Lewis and I pulled the wood aside, working frantically. The cabin was smashed too, the walls buckling outwards and windows and portholes broken, but eventually we managed to get around the side to the door and between us, wrench it open.
‘Hello?’ I yelled into the darkness beyond. There was no reply; I could hardly see a thing. I climbed in, my hands out in front of me, and my fingers brushed against the back wall of the cabin, which was curiously shallow. I began feeling around until I found what felt like a seam in the wood.
‘There’s something here – another space at the back of the cabin,’ I told Lewis, who was right behind me. ‘Shine the torch in.’
He did and I saw, directly in front of me, a board nailed against the wall. When the top of the boat had landed on the rocks, the board had been pushed outwards and started to come away from the wood around it, revealing a space behind. Near the top was a gap my fingers could almost fit into; I managed to wriggle them into it and began to pull. With a crack and a groan and a screech of nails working free, the board came away and a white face stared at me out of the gloom.
‘Bloody hell, what’s a child doing in here?’ Lewis said as I stared back, my heart pounding.
‘Hello?’ I said.
The kid coughed again. It sounded nasty, coming from deep inside his chest.
‘You on your own in there?’ I said. He shook his head, a movement so small I almost missed it.
‘Who else is with you, buddy?’
He whispered something I didn’t quite catch. Holding on to the edge of the doorway, I crouched down, ignoring the pain that zigzagged through my leg. ‘What was that?’
He whispered it again, glancing over his shoulder. It sounded like Mamma.
‘OK,’ I said, my mind racing. ‘We’ll get you out first. Can you hold on to me?’
I reached out and hooked my hands under his arms so I could lift him. He was lighter than I expected, his clothes soaked and filthy.
‘Mamma,’ he croaked as I passed him up to Lewis.
‘Got the torch?’ I asked. Lewis handed it to me, and I shone it into the space, which was really no more than an alcove. Lying in the corner was what, at first, I thought was a bundle of rags. Then I realised it was another person, their arms thrown over their head as if to protect themselves.
I scrambled across. When I turned them over, I saw it was a woman, her face the same nasty shade of whitish-blue as the fishermen, or whoever they’d been. Shit. This must be the kid’s mother – was she dead too?
Suddenly I realised that there was water lapping around my knees. It hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. The tide was still rising; if Lewis and I stayed in here much longer we’d be carried back out to sea with what remained of the boat.
I hauled the woman out of the cabin, grunting with the effort; she was a dead weight in my arms. ‘The other men have got the boy back onto dry land,’ Lewis said. Then he saw the woman. ‘Shit.’
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I don’t think this old tub’ll last much longer.’
We tied ourselves together and to Len, Al and the others with the rope again and, carrying the woman awkwardly between us, wriggled back out through the hole in the side of the boat. Just as we did, another enormous wave broke over the top of it. With a horrible groaning sound the boat began to shift sideways as the sea began to drag it back out. I pressed myself flat, clinging to the woman for dear life with one hand and gripping onto the rough surface of the rocks with the other, gasping. A tug on the rope from Lewis got me moving again and somehow we made it back across the rocks and onto the beach that had now almost disappeared entirely, passing the woman to Al and Len.
They carried her up the steps. I barely had the energy to follow them, and Lewis had to hold on to my arm as we made our own way back up onto the clifftop. As the others laid the woman down a safe distance from the cliff edge, I collapsed onto the wet grass, gasping, my head against my knees. I was soaked to the skin and cold to my bones, shivering so hard my teeth clacked together. Somewhere nearby I could hear the boy crying.
A hand touched my shoulder. I looked up and saw Lewis. ‘She’s alive, just,’ he said. He was shivering too. ‘We’re taking everyone back to the station. Can you manage?’
I nodded, although I didn’t refuse when he reached down to help me to my feet. The rope was still round my waist; my fingers were so cold I could hardly manage to untie it. I looked over my shoulder and saw and saw a boiling mass of water where the rocks had been. Of the boat, there was no sign, save for a single plank of wood sticking straight up towards the sky. I shuddered.
‘Where to?’ I asked Lewis as we reached the camp.
‘Medical bay?’ he said, then shook his head. ‘Blast, can’t do that – it’s full up with influenza cases at the moment.’
He was right; the ’flu had been tearing through Svarta Ness these last few weeks, taking out men like ninepins. I’d managed to avoid it so far and was hoping to keep it that way.
‘How about we put ’em in our hut for now?’ Turning, I saw Al Briggs behind me. ‘We can bunk in the NAAFI tonight.’
Unable to see a better solution, I nodded.
‘I’ll see about some dry clothes for everyone,’ Al said, and he was off again.
I followed Lewis into our billet. Hut 1 housed eight men altogether – along with me, Lewis and Al, there were Brian Jenkins and Pete Green, two more operators, and three other mechanics, Jamie, Colin and Wilf, who were currently on watch up at the ops site. Against the walls were four metal-framed beds with hard, sectional mattresses we called ‘biscuits’, one pillow and a khaki-coloured blanket; we had little cabinets next to them for our personal effects and each bed had clothes lines hung around it. There was a radio set on a little table at the far end of the hut, and photographs of Hollywood film stars and various drawings pinned to the walls. In the middle of the hut was a small stove with a flue going straight up out through the curving roof. The stove was still banked up from the previous night, giving out a few meagre rays of heat. As the other men dragged two of the beds together and laid the woman and the boy down on them, Lewis and I went over to it for a minute, rubbing our hands together and trying to get warm.
The woman, who was still unconscious, was around my age, early- to mid-twenties, and the boy, her son, looked about five. They had the same high cheekbones, the same nose, slightly turned up at the end. The boy stared at us without saying anything, wheezing as he struggled for breath. What on earth were you doing out on that boat? I thought as I stared back.
Al returned carrying towels, blankets and two sets of pyjamas. ‘Damned if I could find owt that’d fit ’em,’ he said in his broad accent. ‘Better than nowt, though, I reckon.’ Dumping everything on one of the other beds nearby, he added, ‘The Corp got a call through to Doctor Gaudie at Talafirth – he’s on his way.’
We didn’t have our own doctor at Svarta Ness; the camp was too small. Instead, like everyone else here, we relied on the island’s doctor, Archibald Gaudie, a gruff, no-nonsense man in his sixties, and Fiskersay’s nurse Isabel Thomson.
I grabbed a towel. There was no room for embarrassment; working quickly, Lewis and I stripped the woman and the boy out of their sodden clothes and got them dried off. We dressed the woman in the pyjamas, but the boy was too small for anything but a shirt, which completely swamped him. As Al had said, though, it was better than nothing.
Al, meanwhile, had been building up the fire until it roared. As Lewis and I tucked the woman and the boy into our beds, wrapping blankets around them, Flight Lieutenant Jackson came in, water dripping steadily off the hem of his coat.
‘Doctor’s on his way. How are they?’ he said.
‘The woman’s not come round yet, Sir,’ I said.
Jackson shook his head. ‘Christ, what filthy bloody weather,’ he said as the wind hurled itself at the thin walls of the hut, making them shudder, and a squall of rain drummed against the roof like machine-gun fire. Then he remembered the boy, who was watching him with round eyes. ‘I mean, what, ahem, filthy weather. These two are lucky to have survived…’ He trailed off. An image of the four men, drowned and lifeless, swam into my mind, and suddenly I wanted a whisky, badly.
I was shivering harder than ever, Lewis too. Jackson noticed. ‘Bloody hell, look at the state of you both,’ he said, finally noticing my bloody knees and hands, and my shredded trousers. Lewis didn’t look much better. ‘Go and find something decent to wear and get yourselves a hot drink. Last thing I want is you coming down with pneumonia – this flu that’s going round is bad enough. I’ll wait with these two until Doctor Gaudie arrives. And Gauthier? Harper?’ he added as we turned to follow Al and the others out of the hut. Lewis and I stopped and looked back at him. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You did a damn fine job out there.’
Gratefully, we murmured our own thanks, and went in search of dry clothes and tea.