As promised, Bill arranged for a truck to pick us up from the cottage and bring us back to the station. The woman – whose name, in my anxiety over Eirik, I hadn’t even thought to ask – told me she’d hang onto his clothes, wash them and bring them up to the camp. I was so grateful I could have hugged her. I was grateful to Bill for sending the truck, too; by then it was raining hard and the wind was picking up again, and Eirik, although recovered, was quiet and listless. If we’d had to walk, it would have taken me hours to get him back to the camp.
Flight Lieutenant Jackson, the Commanding Officer in charge of the radar station, was waiting for us when we got back. He was in his early forties, around the same height as Bill, with a neat moustache and steady grey eyes. ‘Weather’s taking a turn for the worse now – doubt we’ll be able to get you on another ship for weeks. The flying boats won’t be able to get here either, and there’s nowhere else on this island to land a smaller plane even when it isn’t blowing a gale,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been on the phone to London – MI5 have asked us to interview you at the Manor, and then we’ll have to decide what we’re going to do with you. In the meantime, I’m afraid you and your son will have to stay in your hut. You will understand, I’m sure, that until we’ve checked your credentials and looked into your links with the Norwegian Resistance, that we have to be extremely cautious.’
What he meant, of course, was We have to check you’re not a spy.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, unable to look at him directly. I could tell from his tone he was annoyed, and it made anxiety churn inside me. I found myself flinching away from him, waiting for him to put his face close to mine and for the shouting to start, although of course he did nothing of the sort. All he said, as he went to hold the door open for me, was, ‘And I must ask you to say nothing to anyone about those men being in the Resistance.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
Not only did Eirik and I have to stay in the hut, but a guard was posted outside to make sure we didn’t leave, even for meals. Although I understood the need for caution – until they had interviewed me and made sure I was not a spy, we could not be allowed to roam around the station – I couldn’t help feeling a little humiliated. Every night, Eirik woke shouting from nightmares about the dying German officer and the voyage on the boat that had so nearly ended in disaster, and would cling to me, sobbing, ‘Mamma, I don’t want you to go to prison. Please don’t leave me.’ There was nothing I could say to reassure him. And now we were being treated like criminals!
They are only doing their job, I reminded myself. There is a war on, and I have come from a country occupied by the enemy. They are quite right in thinking I could be a spy.
*
The following day, Eirik and I were taken down to a house at the edge of the radar station called the Manor. Flight Lieutenant Jackson was waiting for us in what looked like a dining room but was now clearly some sort of office, sitting behind a table with a man my own age who he introduced as Sergeant Black. While Flight Lieutenant Jackson quizzed me on everything imaginable – my name, age, where I’d come from, my marital status, work and even my appearance – Sergeant Black jotted down my answers to his questions on a notepad.
‘You say that Milorg were helping you get to Sweden after you were caught passing messages to the prisoners in Kirkenes,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said at last. ‘What changed? Why did you come to Shetland instead?’
I swallowed hard, my skin prickling as I relived those dreadful moments in the barn all over again: the Wehrmacht officer asking for our papers; Eirik crying out in panic; the man turning his gun on him; my lunge forwards with the pitchfork, not thinking about what I was doing until I had already done it and it was too late to take it back.
Murderer. I am a murderer.
But what choice had I had?
I drew in a shaky breath and glanced at Eirik, my heart pounding. ‘May I have a piece of paper, please?’ I asked. ‘And a pen?’
‘Whatever for?’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said.
‘My son speaks enough English to understand what I’m saying,’ I said quietly as Eirik looked at me with round eyes, ‘and he’s already badly traumatised.’
Eirik’s hand wormed its way into mine; he gripped my fingers so tightly they started to go numb.
Flight Lieutenant Jackson frowned into his moustache. ‘Black, would you pass Mrs Dahlström some paper and something to write with?’
‘Yes, Sir.’ Sergeant Black tore his notes off the pad, then slid it and his pen across the table to me.
‘Lille vennen, let go of my hand,’ I told Eirik gently.
‘Perhaps you would like to take this young chap to look at the jigsaw puzzles in the other room, Black,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said, but Eirik shook his head fiercely.
‘I want to stay with Mamma!’ he said, his voice trembling.
‘It’s OK,’ I said to him in English. ‘You can stay, but Mamma needs her hand to write with.’
Reluctantly, he let go of me, biting his lower lip.
I wrote fast, not reading back, my writing scrawling across the page because my hand was trembling so much. When I had finished, I pushed the notepad back across the table for the Flight Lieutenant to read. I felt sick.
Flight Lieutenant Jackson scanned the page, his frown deepening. ‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘Of course, there’s probably no way of corroborating this…’
‘I promise you, Sir,’ I said, drawing myself up and squaring my shoulders, and trying desperately to convey a confidence I did not feel. ‘What I have written is the truth. I’m not here to spy for the Germans, and wherever we end up, all I ask is you do not separate me from my son. He has suffered enough.’
There was a moment of silence, the atmosphere in the room tense.
‘Mamma, these men are very good at asking questions, aren’t they?’ Eirik said quietly in Norwegian, looking up at me.
‘What was that?’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson asked.
I gave him a small smile; I couldn’t help it. ‘He says you are very good at asking questions.’
To my relief, the two men permitted themselves a smile too, and all at once the tension in the room seemed to drain away. We’d passed their test, I realised.
‘Well, he certainly seems to have got the measure of us,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said, clearing his throat. He nodded at Sergeant Black. ‘Will you write up the report and telephone it through to London when it’s ready? Tell them I’m satisfied that Mrs Dahlström is who she says she is, and that we’re prepared to offer her and her son sanctuary here in Shetland.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ Sergeant Black said. He got up and went over to another table in the corner, where there was a typewriter and a big black telephone.
‘Right, Mrs Dahlström.’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson cleared his throat. ‘If you and Eirik are to remain in Fiskersay for the time being, we’d better see if we can find the two of you a more suitable place to stay. My men will be wanting their hut back – it’s rather inconvenient having the entertainment hall out of action.’
‘Thank you, Sir,’ I said. ‘I’m grateful for everything you and your men have done for us – very grateful indeed. And I am sorry we have caused so much trouble.’
He waved my apology away. ‘Can’t be helped. This whole war is a dreadful business.’ He stood and held out a hand. ‘Let me be the first to formally welcome you and your son to the island. If you’d like to return to the hut for the time being, I’ll go and see what can be done.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again, standing too, and shaking his hand as I fought back tears of relief. I was more grateful to him than he could ever know.
*
Two hours later, everything had been arranged. Eirik and I would leave the camp tomorrow morning, and we’d be staying – Flight Lieutenant Jackson called it billeted – at a croft half a mile away with a couple called the Sinclairs. I wondered what they would be like and if they’d mind us being there.
By late afternoon, another storm was lashing the radar station with full force, rain battering against the walls of the hut and the wind screaming like a siren. The stove went out, and when I went to light it again I realised there were no matches left.
‘I’m going across to the office to ask Mr Thomson for some matches,’ I told Eirik, who was lying on his bed, reading a copy of The Beano someone had brought to the camp for us. I wasn’t sure how many of the words he understood, but he was looking at the pictures with a rapt expression. ‘I will only be a few minutes.’
The anxious glance he shot me pierced my heart. ‘I promise I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I added. ‘You don’t want to go out there – the weather’s terrible.’
‘Yes, Mamma,’ he said, although he still looked unsure.
‘When I come back you can read me some of your comic. How about that?’
He nodded, and I went over to kiss him on top of his head. ‘You are so brave, lille vennen,’ I told him, closing my eyes for a moment. ‘I am so proud of you.’
I still didn’t want to leave him, but the hut was growing colder by the minute. I wrapped my shawl – another donation – around me and braced myself to open the door. Outside, the wind slammed into me like a giant fist; it was almost dark, the rain filled with shards of ice. Thankfully, the office was only a short distance from the hut, but I had to cling to the walls of the buildings as I walked so that I wasn’t blown off my feet. It was a relief to get inside again.
The office door was closed, but Archie Thomson was still there; through the small window in the top of the door I could see the light from a lamp, burning low. I knocked and waited for him to say, Come in.
Instead, I heard a low groan.
I knocked again and pushed the door, which was slightly open, with my fingertips. It creaked. ‘Mr Thomson?’ I said.
My only answer was another groan. Heart thumping, I stepped into the office, wondering what I was going to see. Was Archie ill? Hurt? His desk was empty. There was a neat stack of papers in a wire tray on one side, a big black telephone like the one in the Manor on the other, and a typewriter with a dust cover over it. The lamp had been placed on top of a set of metal drawers in the corner, guttering slightly as if it was about to go out.
‘Mr Thomson?’ I said.
‘Who’s that?’ a woman’s voice said, thready and faint. I looked round and saw a slumped figure on the chair in the corner, just beyond the small circle of light thrown out by the lamp. Grabbing the lamp, I went over there. ‘Isabel?’ I said.
‘The baby’s coming,’ she said, looking up at me with an expression like a hunted animal. Her face was pale, sweat standing out in beads on her forehead. ‘I’ve been having pains all day and now my waters have broken. I tried to call Doctor Gaudie but the phone lines are down, so I came to fetch Archie instead but he’s not here. I don’t know if he—’ She broke off, screwing up her face and gasping as another contraction hit her. ‘Please help me,’ she whimpered, and suddenly I was thrown back to that afternoon in the bomb shelter at Kirkenes, kneeling beside Anna Larsen. For several long seconds, I was frozen, overwhelmed by panic, remembering how Anders had shouted inside my head then, as he was shouting at me now: You, help her? What a joke!
No. Think, Hedda, think.
I whirled round and snatched up the telephone receiver but it was, as Isabel had said, quite dead.
‘You can’t have your baby here,’ I said, looking round me. The room was no bigger than a cupboard, the atmosphere damp and cold. ‘There’s nowhere to lie down. Do you think you can stand up and lean on me?’
Isabel nodded, closing her eyes. I helped her to her feet and she slumped against me. My mind was racing as I tried to work out where to take her. I knew there was a medical hut here, but it would be full of men. Where, then?
‘I am going to take you back to the hut I am staying in,’ I told her. ‘It is only a short distance away from here, and there is a bed for you to lie on.’
She nodded again.
We made our way outside into the screaming wind, pausing halfway to the hut as Isabel had another contraction. ‘I can’t do this,’ she moaned when it had passed. ‘It hurts.’
‘You will be all right,’ I said as we reached the hut, injecting a certainty into my voice I couldn’t have been further from feeling. ‘I will help you. I trained as a nurse too, back in Norway.’
Isabel looked round at me with a startled expression. ‘Did you?’
I decided this was not the moment to tell her I had only officially worked at Oslo hospital for a few months, or that I had no experience delivering babies. I took her inside and she lay down on my bed.
‘Eirik, come,’ I said brightly, holding out a hand as Eirik looked round at Isabel in surprise, a question forming on his lips. ‘Would you like to go to the dining hall?’
‘But Mamma…’ he said, holding out the comic.
‘You can bring that with you,’ I said. ‘Come on!’ I was keen to get him out of here before Isabel’s next contraction came; he wouldn’t understand why she was crying out and it would scare him.
‘I’ll be back in just a minute,’ I told Isabel, who pressed her lips together. I hustled Eirik out of the hut and we hurried over to the dining hall.
‘Mamma, you’re walking too fast!’ he complained.
‘I don’t want to be out in this rain and wind,’ I told him, almost having to shout over the noise of the gale. ‘And you don’t want your comic to get wet! Come on, I’ll race you!’
By the time we reached the dining hall, I was breathless and dishevelled. Inside, it was busy, and everyone turned to stare at me as I burst in. To my relief, I spotted Bill sitting by himself at a table in the corner, his hands cupped around a mug. When he saw me, he stood up.
‘Hedda?’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’