‘No.’ Mary looked around, and realised she had got turned about. ‘I’m not sure which way is which, to tell you the truth.’
‘That’s common enough. The nearest shelter is under the castle. Come on, I’ll take you.’ She held Mary’s arm and led her quite confidently through the dark. But the girl limped as she walked.
Mary said, ‘You’re hurt yourself.’
‘Kicked out an incendiary. Got a bit burned. Feel foolish, actually. I’ll live.’
Mary was an independent sort, but she was happy to let the girl take charge. ‘Thank you, um—’
‘Doris Keeler. Just call me Doris. Are you American?’
‘Yeah. Mary Wooler. Good to meet you, Doris.’
‘I’ve got an aunt in America. Just visiting, are you?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Well, you picked the right summer to visit England. Here we are.’ The castle wall loomed before them, and they hurried through an arched doorway. Doris shone her torch on a sign, white on black, with a large ‘S’, an arrow, and the word ‘SHELTER’. They hurried down a narrow staircase.
VII
Mary found herself in a tunnel-like vault, with walls of brickwork. The light was dim, coming from electric lamps hung roughly on the walls, but there was a stack of candles and what looked like old-fashioned oil lamps standing by. Doris snapped off her torch and took off her helmet, revealing brown hair tied back into a tight bun. Her features were regular, strong rather than pretty; she looked competent.
The vault was already crowded, the people packed in rows on the floor like sardines in a tin, mostly women, children and older folk, and a few men of service age. They were settling in for the night, Mary saw. There were beds that looked like official provision, but they had already been occupied. Otherwise people had brought down heaps of blankets and deckchairs and bits of carpet, and were making up nests under the vault’s curving walls.
The place was quite organised, with trestle tables bearing tea urns manned by WVS volunteers. An oil stove was burning, and a cooking smell filled the muggy air. One section of the vault had been fenced off by a couple of blankets; from the smell Mary guessed that the privy was back there.
Doris led Mary to a first-aid table, where mothers sat with sick children in their arms. Mary protested, but a volunteer here, a stern middle-aged woman, took a brisk look at her knee, fingering the joint - ‘a bit of bruising, that’s all there is to that’ - and washed her scraped hand, dabbed it with antiseptic and gave her a bit of bandage. Doris said nothing about the injury to her own foot, and Mary didn’t prompt her.
Doris found a bit of wall where they were able to sit, their backs to the brickwork. She fetched Mary a cup of tea, and set her helmet down on the floor between her crossed legs. They were surrounded by people, a warm fug of wriggling bodies, a stale smell of woollen clothing, a murmur of conversation. Mothers tucked in their children, three or four to a bed. A lot of people were reading, papers and Penguin paperbacks. One old man who looked like a rabbi was reading a leather-backed holy book. It was all quite cosy, and few people seemed afraid; it had all become a routine, Mary supposed. But she could hear the deep rumble of aircraft engines, the distant slam of bombs, and the hammering shudder of the ack-ack fire. There was nothing gentle about the night.
‘I needed a break,’ Doris said, sipping her own tea. ‘It’s been a long night already.’
‘It’s all very organised,’ Mary observed.
‘Wasn’t like this in the beginning. My word, after a night down here you could have sliced the air up and carried it out.’
‘But, you know, speaking as an outsider I’m impressed by the way the Brits have adapted. Coping the way you do.’ All this achieved by a nation, repelled by the industrialised slaughter of the Great War, that had never wanted this conflict.
Doris sniffed. ‘Well, a bit of common sense and an ounce of courage get you a long way in my experience. Actually we haven’t been hit so hard, not yet.’
‘No. Not like the coastal towns. I’ve been staying in Hastings. The people there shelter in caves.’
‘Really? Well, the coast’s been getting it, they say, and the airfields and the like. Softening us up before old Hitler invades. So they say.’
‘I don’t think they’ll invade.’
‘No. They don’t need to - that’s what’s said. They can just starve us out, can’t they, with their U-boats in the Atlantic?’
‘Do you have family? A husband?’
Doris eyed her; she’d evidently asked an awkward question. ‘Well, my husband was with the BEF. He didn’t come back from France.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I got a Red Cross postcard. He was in a POW camp outside Paris. They say they’re now being shipped further east, off into Germany, to be used for labour.’ She laughed. ‘I suppose it takes even the Germans a bit of time to move a whole captive army, four hundred thousand men.’
Mary told her about her son. ‘I suppose I was lucky. Gary came back in one piece, more or less. He’ll recover soon.’
‘And he wants to fight again?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘It’s all a frightful mess, isn’t it? I miss my Bob, of course, and so does Jennifer. I don’t suppose we’ll see him before this beastly war is done.’
‘Jennifer?’
‘My little girl.’ She opened her coat and dug out a photo, of a sunny pre-war day, showing Doris herself, a smiling, prematurely bald young man, and a little girl of five or six.
‘She’s pretty. Where is she now?’
‘Well, I have that aunt in America. Somewhere called Kentucky, she lives. We had a bit of money saved up before the war, and we decided we didn’t want Jenny off in the country somewhere, but with family. So we bought her passage. She’s up in Liverpool at the moment, but she’s supposed to sail next month on the City of Benares. She’ll be safe in America, won’t she? I’m afraid I don’t know anything about your country, nothing but what’s in the movies.’
‘People are kind. Just like here. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
‘Well, after she went off I thought I may as well do something useful, and I joined the ARP. But I miss her ever so much.’ She was absent for a moment, and then she deliberately brightened, as if remembering to do her job. ‘So what are you doing here in England?’
‘Actually I was here before the war. I’m a historian; I was researching aspects of the late medieval. When the war came I stayed on, but I’m working as a stringer for a paper in Boston.’
‘A what?’
‘A correspondent. But actually I’m here in Colchester to do a bit of historical research. I’m following up a document somebody gave me.’ It had been Ben Kamen, the young Austrian Jew who had befriended Gary. ‘It concerns the Emperor Claudius. Colchester was a great Roman centre - a military garrison, just like it is now. But I’ve found my way to the archive of a monastery outside the town, where a medieval monk called Geoffrey Cotesford lived towards the end of his life. Funnily enough Cotesford knew a Wooler, who was maybe one of my husband’s ancestors ... Oh. I’m sorry.’
Doris smiled. ‘Do I look a bit lost? That’s rude of me. I don’t know much history. Who’s this Claude?’
‘Claudius. The Roman emperor who conquered Britain.’
‘Wasn’t that Julius Caesar?’
‘No. Long story.’
‘I don’t even know anything about this blooming great castle we’re sitting under. The Normans built this, didn’t they? William the Conqueror and his lot.’
‘Well, yes. But that’s a long story too. This vault was built by the Romans, but it’s not really a vault. Colchester used to be the capital of the ancient Britons. After the Romans conquered it they built a huge temple to Claudius, right on this spot. This vault is actually the foundation of the temple, like a big concrete raft.’
‘So the Romans came, then the Normans, and now here we are hiding under it all from the Germans.’
‘Well, that’s history for you.’
&
nbsp; The folk in the shelter were growing quiet now, the children shedding their excitement and settling down to sleep, some of the adults talking in soft murmurs. In the shadows of one corner near the WVS table, Mary saw one couple with their mouths locked together in passion.
Doris said softly, ‘I can’t hear much engine noise, can you? Maybe we’ll get away with it tonight. I’ll need to go back out in a minute, check that everybody is where they should be. We’ve got lists we have to tick off, or we get stick from the officers. But maybe tonight—’
There was a wallop, like a great fist slamming down. The ancient vault shuddered, and bits of dust and brickwork hailed from the roof. Suddenly the place was alive with noise, kids screaming, somebody with a splash of blood-red on his forehead calling for help. Doris clung to Mary’s hand, suddenly scared; Mary put her arm around her.
There was another wallop, even more violent, and the lights flickered and died.
VIII
14 September
Hilda Tanner found Ben Kamen just where his Home Guard commander said he would be, out in the country a couple of miles or so north of Hastings, digging holes in the ground with a gang of other men.
She parked her car and walked through a field of corn stubble. It was a fine, bright Saturday afternoon, with just a hint of autumn coolness in the air. The field was cluttered with broken-down tractors and other vehicles, and loops of wire big enough for Hilda to have stepped through.
In the distance to the south above Hastings, an aerial battle was in progress. Hilda felt like a veteran of the air war, for the radar stations, including her own, had been getting a pasting. She recognised the way the Messerschmitt 109s were flying, in their ‘schwarms’ of four aircraft, and the Stuka bombers diving down onto their targets like predatory birds. The guns on the ground were firing back, releasing balls of fire that lanced up towards the planes. A big pall of smoke rose up from the ground, beyond her horizon. Perhaps one of the planes had gone down. The sky was full of smoke and colour; the Messerschmitts’ tracer bullets were bright yellow and green.
It was an astounding sight when you stopped to think about it. But the workers in the field didn’t even look up. Such spectacles had filled the sky around the towns and ports and airfields of southern England for a month now. There had been one day of relief, when the Luftwaffe had launched a massive raid on London: the Saturday Blitz, the papers had called it, Saturday 7 September. Everybody had hoped, shamefully unless you were in London itself, that the Germans were changing tactics, that they had abandoned the idea of winning the aerial war and were resorting to terror against civilians. But then the usual pattern had resumed, as the Luftwaffe had pursued its objective of knocking the RAF out of the war through sheer attrition.
Hilda approached the work party. Ben was working alongside an older man of maybe fifty. The other Home Guard men leaned on their shovels and wolf-whistled and larked about, showing off their puny muscles, calling in their ripe Sussex accents, ‘Oi, WAAF! That uniform fits you pretty nice.’ ‘Hey, WAAF, what’s he got that I haven’t got?’ ‘Tell you what he hasn’t got. A bit of skin on the end of his knob ...’
She acknowledged it all with a tight grin and kept walking. The older man waved them silent. ‘Stop drooling, you lot.’ He had a faint Irish burr, and big hands, a farmer’s hands, the biggest hands Hilda had ever seen.
Ben stuck his spade in the ground, wiped his hands on his trousers, and faced Hilda. ‘It’s lovely to see you. You came all the way out here for me?’
‘Well, I’ve got a couple of messages for you.’
He asked intently, ‘From Mary Wooler?’
‘Yes, and from Gary too. Me and Gary actually.’ She held herself straight, and hoped she wasn’t blushing.
‘Well, well. Look, I’d give you a hug if I wasn’t sweating like a good’un. Tom, do you mind?’
‘You take a break, don’t mind me.’ Tom continued to scrape at the ground.
Ben took his jacket from a heap of stakes, spread it on the ground and gestured for Hilda to sit. He squatted easily on the ground himself. He took a swig from a milk bottle full of water, and offered it to Hilda; she refused.
‘Fun, is it, digging holes in the ground?’
‘Oh, the glamour,’ Ben said. ‘But you know the theory. We’re just trying to muck up every field and open space to stop planes and gliders landing.’
‘It’s no ruddy fun,’ Tom growled. ‘The ground’s baked hard as concrete. You can see what we’re up to, though.’ He pointed to a row of completed installations; they were simple tripods of scaffolding, like the frames of teepees. ‘I grow my peas and beans up poles set like that.’
Hilda called, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be digging your garden - um, Tom?’
‘Given half a chance,’ he said with a grin. ‘But I’ll tell you what, sooner this than route marching. First time we went marching, our Home Guard platoon, a quarter of a century just fell away in a flash. I’ll swear I could smell the cordite and the mud. I was in Flanders, see. Never thought I’d be back marching again, not in my lifetime. Well, well.’ He sighed, and continued to ram his spade into the reluctant ground.
‘Tom’s been a good mate,’ Ben said. ‘Keeps the other lads off a bit.’
‘Give you a hard time, do they?’
‘Nothing I can’t handle. Funny, though, they bait me for being a German and a Jew.’
‘But sooner here than that internment camp, from what Gary told me from your letters.’
‘Oh, yes.’ In late June Ben Kamen’s name had come up on a list of potentially enemy aliens. While waiting for his tribunal, he had been taken off to an internment camp in Liverpool. ‘It was a half-finished council estate in a place called Huyton. What a hole. But the tribunal eventually classed me as a C.’ Category A were considered hostile to the war effort; B were for some reason doubtful; C were friendly and no threat. ‘But even then, when I joined the Home Guard, they kept me away from the guns and handed me a shovel instead. Funny, that.’
‘Well, it’s behind you now.’
‘I hope so,’ he said fervently. ‘How’s your war? I think I expected to see you up there by now.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘In a Spit or a Hurricane. I hear they are planning to send women to the front line.’
‘So they are, but I’ve no training. I’m working at an observation station on the coast.’ She had picked up the habit of not using the word ‘radar’ unless it was necessary.
He looked at her. ‘It’s coming, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘The invasion.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Just looking around. Piecing bits together. I mean, the work we’ve been doing, you can see the logic.’ He mimed an enclosure with his hands. ‘You have this crust around the coast - tank blocks, barbed wire, ditches, mines. Then further back we’ve been building what they call the stop lines. Natural barriers like rivers and canals and forests, but reinforced with tank traps and pillboxes. Defence in depth. You can see it taking shape.’
‘I don’t think they’ll come,’ Hilda said. ‘For one thing they haven’t been able to knock out the RAF. Those Me109s of theirs are too short-range. The Hurricanes and Spits can always retreat to fields in the north of England. The Luftwaffe can’t win.’ That was the official line. But, Hilda had heard it said at work, all the Germans actually needed to do was to beat the RAF back from the skies of southern England, and achieve ‘local air superiority’. And Hilda knew from her own experience that if they kept battering at the airfields and radar stations and sector stations of the south-east, the delicate system of command and control behind the RAF’s operations could soon crumble. It would actually be better for Britain’s prospects in the war if the Luftwaffe turned on London again. But she said firmly: ‘No, they won’t come. And all your digging will be for nothing!’
‘So where’s Gary now?’
‘Well, he’s recovered. He’s been reposted, a lot of the BEF veterans have. Now he’s to be with an i
nternational unit in the Twenty-ninth Brigade. He’s due to join it on Friday.’ She hesitated. ‘They’re stationed north of Eastbourne. I was hoping he’d be sent to the Twenty-first. A lot of the veterans are with them, north of London.’
‘They’re reserves up there, the Twenty-first?’
‘Yes. But they’re short of front-line troops.’ Hilda had heard rumours about the troops in the field - eight divisions, something like a hundred and fifty thousand men, with another forty thousand north of the Thames. It might have been twice that if not for the loss of the BEF. It was thought the Germans could muster a force outnumbering the British by at least two to one. ‘We shouldn’t talk like this,’ Hilda said. ‘Spreading rumours.’
‘But don’t you feel the need to talk?’ Ben said, and he laughed nervously. ‘I’m cursed with an active brain, Hilda. I’m an academic, for pity’s sake, I worked with Gödel himself. Now they’ve got me digging a hole in the ground.’ He made a spinning motion by his temple. ‘I can’t help thinking, thinking, working it all out.’
‘Yes, and you yak and yak about it,’ Tom said sensibly. ‘My advice to you is to enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.’ He stuck his spade into the earth again.
Ben said, ‘I think that was a hint. You said you had messages for me?’
‘Can you come into town on Friday, in the morning? Meet us at the house. Gary’s got something to say to you before he gets posted - we both have.’
Ben nodded. After the way he had helped Gary after the return from Dunkirk, the two of them had stayed close.
Hilda went on, ‘And I know Mary Wooler has some material for you. History stuff.’
Ben’s eyes gleamed. ‘I expect the war effort can spare me for a couple of hours. I’ll see you then, Hilda.’
‘Good. All right—’
‘Holy Mother of God.’ Tom had stopped digging, and was staring south.
Over Hastings, one of the barrage balloons had been set alight. Subsiding gently, deforming, it was drifting down the sky, a brilliant teardrop.
IX
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