She wondered how much aggravation it had cost Mike to pull rank and do her this favour – quite a bit, to judge by the way Starr had marched past her while she was sitting in the lobby of the Air Ministry and driven off without offering her a lift back to Danesfield House. Wing Commander Knowsley, lost in thought, had also ignored her. The bushy-browed officer from Bomber Command had given her a knowing wink. Finally, when the flight lieutenant who served as Mike’s aide had descended the stairs half an hour later to hand over her orders – ‘The Air Commodore asked me to give you this’ – his manner had been one of cold distaste, like a footman sent down by his master to pay off a tart.
Word of this would spread, she thought. Starr would see to that. She wanted very much to leave before the others were awake, but she didn’t dare set the alarm in case she disturbed them. She rolled onto her back and dozed through the night, occasionally hearing the cry of a waterfowl on the Thames or the hooting of the owls in the big elms. When she checked the clock for what felt like the twentieth time and saw that it was nearly six, she finally decided to risk it. She eased herself out from beneath her blanket and struck a match. The rasp sounded to her as loud as a gunshot. She lit a candle.
She had gone to bed half dressed. It took her only a couple of minutes to put on her skirt and jacket. She sat on the edge of the mattress and squeezed her stockinged feet into her shoes. The floorboard creaked. Someone stirred. A voice in the wavering shadows cast by the candle whispered, ‘What are you doing?’
It was Shirley Locke – inevitably.
Kay whispered, ‘Going to the loo.’
‘Why are you dressed?’
‘Never mind. Go back to sleep.’
She finished tying her laces, stood and put on her cap. Her suitcase was already packed. She shrugged on her heavy coat, closed the travel clock and slipped it into her pocket along with her papers.
‘Are you eloping?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
She collected the candle, picked up her suitcase and fumbled with the door handle.
‘When will you be back?’
‘I’m not sure. Go to sleep.’ She felt unexpectedly tearful at the thought of sneaking away from her friends like this after more than two years. ‘Will you say goodbye to everyone for me? Give them my best?’
‘Kay—’
She closed the door. By the light of the candle, she made her way along the passage to the far end of the hut and out into the morning. A cold gust of wind flattened the flame and blew it out. She threw away the candle and set off along the path.
The blackout at Medmenham was still strictly enforced, even though no German bomber had encroached anywhere near Marlow for years. The great house was entirely dark. It was impossible to imagine that behind its heavy curtains, at that moment, a hundred people were working.
She walked with her suitcase in her hand up the middle of the gravel drive, between the black masses of the rhododendrons, towards the guardhouse, conscious of a certain absurdity in heading off to war in such a fashion. Despite her years in the WAAF, she had never so much as sat in an aircraft, let alone flown in one. She hadn’t even been abroad, not properly – not unless one counted a school trip to Paris in 1937. And yet precisely for that reason, she felt a great sense of exhilaration, as if she were breaking out of prison. After all, what had her life consisted of up to now? A sheltered Dorset village of ancient golden-stoned houses, a thatched cottage shared with her mother and her younger sister, the teaching nuns of Our Lady’s Convent, a single-sex Cambridge college and then the seclusion of Danesfield House.
At twenty-four, she had only had one lover apart from Mike – a pilot her own age she had met during a Phase One debrief at RAF Benson, a relationship that had barely lasted a month before he was posted to Scotland. They had both been virgins. In some ways he was even younger than she was. But his descriptions of his solo reconnaissance sorties in an unheated Spitfire – swaddled in two sweaters, a leather flying jacket, two pairs of socks and a double layer of gloves; climbing alone over the North Sea through the tropopause into the dark blue stratosphere, where the temperature was minus seventy; the frost crystals forming on the Perspex canopy and the icicles in the tiny cockpit glinting in the brilliant sunlight; his terror that his oxygen might fail and he might pass out; switching on his camera and circling in the thin air eight miles above Berlin (so high that he could see the Baltic coast and the curvature of the earth) – his experiences of life were so far beyond anything she could imagine, she could not help comparing his existence ruefully to the littleness of her own.
At the main gate, a Bedford van was waiting, its engine running, the heater turned up full blast. The man behind the wheel was drinking from a thermos flask. She said, ‘Are you waiting for me?’
The corporal in the guardhouse the night before had checked his rota and said he was sure he could fix up a lift for her: a driver had to make an early-morning delivery to Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe before going on to the Air Ministry. ‘He’ll drop you off at Northolt in time, ma’am, no trouble.’
‘Yes, ma’am. Morning. Hop in.’
He was middle-aged, Cockney, cheerful. She could barely make out his face. He cleared a space on the seat beside him. ‘Tea?’
‘That would be very kind.’
He refilled the cup. She resisted a prissy urge to wipe the rim. It didn’t taste much like tea. It was weak and sickly with saccharine and made with dried milk. But she was grateful for it, and when he offered her a cigarette, she took that too, even though she didn’t really smoke. She sat with her suitcase balanced on her knees, trying not to cough, staring through the windscreen at the empty road as the van climbed, gearbox grinding, through the woods towards High Wycombe. He talked away and she pretended to listen. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’ It was like being in a London taxi. She finished the cigarette, wound down the window and threw it out. Ten minutes later, they drove into the fake Buckinghamshire hamlet that concealed the headquarters of Bomber Command, with its mock manor house and make-believe church steeple. ‘Just give me a mo,’ he said.
She waited while he delivered a box of photographs. In the darkness she could just make out the building where she had briefed the planners about Peenemünde the previous summer. They had built a scale model based on her analysis of the photographs – the power station and the liquid oxygen plant on the west of the island, the main test firing area and the experimental workshops and factory to the east. They had been particularly interested in the housing estate, with its school and meeting hall, and the barracks, and when she had asked why, a solemn young man who reminded her of a curate had said that they planned to attack in the early hours of the morning, when the scientists and technicians would still be asleep, so that they could kill as many as possible: ‘It’s the personnel we’re after as much as the facilities.’
The raid had been mounted on the night of the August full moon. At Medmenham they had been alerted an hour before the air fleet took off – six hundred heavy bombers, more than four thousand aircrew, two thousand tons of high explosive. None of the airmen was given the true reason for attacking an objective of which they had never heard. She had sat by the Thames as the sun went down and the moon rose and had imagined the Lancasters streaming out across the North Sea in tight formation. Mike had told her later that forty planes had never made it back. When Dorothy Garrod’s section had analysed the post-raid reconnaissance photographs the following day, many of the test facilities were disappointingly unscathed, but the roofless houses and dormitories appeared through Kay’s viewfinder like the ruins of Pompeii.
The driver returned from his errand. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep to discourage his conversation, but after a few minutes the pretence became a reality and she didn’t wake up until the van came to a sudden halt and she heard voices. She opened her eyes.
A day
of sorts had dawned, it seemed reluctantly, over straggling suburban fields. Beyond the high chain-link fence, in the grey light, she could make out the shapes of aircraft hangars and a control tower. Behind them, on Western Avenue, a drone of morning traffic headed into London. The driver had his window down and was talking to an RAF policeman holding a clipboard. The policeman leaned into the cab and asked for Kay’s papers. She passed them across. He studied them and flipped over a few sheets on his clipboard. It all seemed to take a long while – too long – and it occurred to her that even at this last minute, the ponderous bureaucracy of the Air Ministry could thwart her.
‘That’s fine, ma’am.’ He handed back the papers. ‘I’ll take you over.’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said to the driver. ‘And the tea. And the cigarette.’
She climbed out of the van and followed the policeman through the gate and onto the airbase. She had never been to Northolt before, but it felt very much like Benson – the same steady breeze across the wide flat space, the sweet pervasive smell of aviation fuel, the ugly and impersonal low buildings, a sense of transience made permanent, the distinctive cracking sound of the Spitfires taking off and landing. After the talkative Cockney driver, the policeman was mercifully taciturn. He led her round the back of the administration block, past bare flower beds separated off from the cinder path by whitewashed stones, through a narrow door and along a dark corridor to a waiting room with wooden chairs around the bare walls and a steel-framed window beside a door opening onto a concrete apron. Ground crew were fuelling a big twin-engine transport plane. She recognised it from the identification chart at Medmenham. A Dakota. In the distance, a dozen Spitfires were parked in a line.
She stood at the window watching the preparations. A Morris 8 staff car appeared, painted in the RAF’s drab grey-blue, drove along the edge of the apron and parked in front of the plane. Out of the rear seat clambered the bank-manager figure of Wing Commander Knowsley. He contemplated the Dakota and tugged nervously at his tunic to straighten it. From the other side came a tall, thin middle-aged woman in WAAF uniform with the twin stripes of a flight officer on her sleeve – one rank up from Kay’s. The driver began to empty the boot of wooden boxes and a couple of long tubes that looked like rolled charts. A bus rattled to a halt behind the Morris. A red-faced WAAF sergeant emerged, followed by half a dozen others, jolly-looking women in their twenties carrying their suitcases. After them came the section officers. Kay counted seven in all. She studied them uneasily. She had never been good at joining in with a gang, especially not one that had already formed. Something about the way they were laughing together reminded her of a school lacrosse team at an away match. She picked up her suitcase and went out onto the apron.
No one paid her any attention. The WAAFs were already lining up to board the plane. The thin flight officer was supervising the ground crew, who were loading the boxes into the tail section. Knowsley had his back to her, talking to the pilot. She waited till his conversation ended.
‘Wing Commander?’
He turned and peered in puzzlement through his thick spectacles.
She saluted. ‘Section Officer Caton-Walsh, sir.’
Recognition spread across his face. ‘Yes, of course. You were at the Air Ministry.’ He returned her salute. ‘Cicely!’ he called to the flight officer. ‘This is your new recruit.’ The woman looked irritated at being interrupted. She came over, frowning. Kay saluted her. She had a hard, humourless, clever face. Knowsley said to Kay, ‘Flight Officer Sitwell is our scientific observer. This is Section Officer Caton-Walsh from Medmenham.’
The woman ran a sceptical eye over her. ‘Medmenham – so you can use a slide rule?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Logarithms?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have some grasp of mathematics?’
‘Some, yes.’
‘You’ve heard of Euler?’
‘No, ma’am.’ Kay already regretted her reply.
‘Jacobi? Legendre?’
She shook her head.
‘The theorem of the ballistic curve?’
‘No.’
‘Then you don’t have much of a grasp at all!’ Sitwell sighed. ‘Well, I suppose you’re probably no worse than the rest of them. You’d better get on board.’
‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you.’ Kay saluted.
The door was just behind the wing. Feeling vaguely humiliated, she climbed the steps and ducked her head into the gloomy, crowded cabin. Ten seats on either side faced one another. Almost all were occupied by WAAFs. There were a couple of army officers. Square windows behind the seats admitted a weak morning light. Everyone’s luggage was at their feet. She picked her way awkwardly along the centre of the fuselage until she found an empty place on the left near the front.
‘May I?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The WAAF sergeant shifted along reluctantly, just enough to enable her to squeeze into the seat, then very pointedly turned her head away. Kay smiled a greeting around the other women. None would meet her eye, officers or sergeants. Clearly she was unpopular before she’d even started. Well damn them, she thought, with sudden irritation, and damn that dried-up old stick who’s in charge of them. She dragged the two halves of her seat belt out from beneath the WAAFs on either side of her and clipped them together.
At the back of the cabin, Flight Officer Sitwell stooped through the doorway, followed by the wing commander. They took the last two seats. One of the ground crew stowed the steps and closed the door. The engines coughed into life. The propellers sawed the air. The pitch rose quickly to a roar, and with a lurch the plane began to trundle across the apron and onto the concrete runway.
It was too noisy to speak. They all stared straight ahead. Kay could feel the tension. The accident rate on these flights was notorious. There was always a chance, even at this stage in the war, of encountering a stray Luftwaffe fighter. The WAAF opposite her was moving her lips, and Kay realised she was saying a prayer. She turned away, embarrassed, to look out of the window. She felt her own anxiety clench inside her chest and tried to concentrate on the take-off. So this was what it was like – the pause at the top of the runway, the sudden acceleration that forced you off balance, the buildings and the trees flashing past, and then the transition to slow motion as the landscape fell away and your stomach seemed to fall with it. The Dakota shuddered and creaked as it turned eastwards. She glimpsed the traffic on Western Avenue, the red-roofed houses, and then all too quickly veils of cloud whipped across the window and the view disappeared.
They seemed to be climbing too steeply for the power of the engines. The cabin bounced and rattled. The WAAF who had been praying began to cry. Kay gripped the edge of her seat. It felt as if they were in a submarine trying to surface. After what seemed an inordinately long time but was probably no more than two or three minutes, they breasted the clouds and the cabin was filled with sunshine. The Dakota levelled off. Flying beside them about three hundred yards away she noticed a Spitfire. It was maintaining the same course and height as theirs. Through the window opposite she could see another. They must have been given a fighter escort. Either someone important was on board whom she had not recognised, or this was for the WAAF unit.
Once everyone had registered the Spitfires, the tension relaxed. The WAAF stopped crying. Kay searched her pockets for a handkerchief, unfastened her seat belt and leaned across the aisle to offer it to her. The sergeant gave her a grateful look. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ She wiped her eyes and offered it back.
Kay waved it away. ‘Keep it for now. I’m Kay Caton-Walsh, by the way.’
‘Ada Ramshaw, ma’am.’
‘Where were you before this?’
‘Filter Room, Stanmore. Do you know where we’re going, ma’am?’
‘Belgium, I believe.’
The Dakota jolted violent
ly, lifting her out of her seat. She refastened her belt. For the next fifteen minutes the plane threw them around like a fairground ride. A few places to her right, one of the soldiers was sick over his luggage, and the stench quickly filled the cabin. Kay felt her stomach coil. She put her hand to her nose and turned away to look out of the window again. The clouds were a sea of foam far beneath them. She wondered if they had crossed the English coast yet. She tried to visualise one of the maps from Medmenham. A straight course to Belgium would take them just north of Dover across the North Sea to Ostend. What was that? About a hundred and fifty miles? And what was the cruising speed of a Dakota? Two hundred miles an hour, more or less? The journey shouldn’t take them too much longer.
It must have been about fifteen minutes later, when she sensed by the pressure in her ears that they were descending, that her eye was caught by a movement. What looked to be a thin white fountain was rising like a needle point at tremendous speed far in the distance at an angle of about forty-five degrees. As it climbed, its contrail broadened and in several places sheared as it was caught by the crosswinds, leaving behind a narrow broken arc of cloud. She watched it for a few moments, hypnotised, then shook the shoulder of the unfriendly woman to her left. ‘Look! Is that what I think it is?’
The sergeant turned to follow her gaze. ‘My God, it’s a bloody rocket! Girls – there’s a V2!’
Everyone on the left side of the Dakota pressed their face close to the window. Those on the right got up and bent over their shoulders to get a better view. The plane rocked. They slid into one another. The door to the cockpit was flung open. A man’s voice shouted, ‘Sit down, for God’s sake, you’re destabilising the plane!’
As people returned to their places, Kay crouched down in her seat and twisted her head for a final glimpse, but the V2 had already passed out of sight on its way to London.
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