Into the Darkest Day: An emotional and totally gripping WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  Sophie flounced inside, edgy and restless, picking up a little vase on the hall table and then putting it down again with a clatter, before twitching away to the fireplace, and then flopping onto the sofa with a long, drawn-out sigh. Carol gave her a reproving look and went into the kitchen. Lily followed.

  “Do you think Tom will visit you?” Lily asked as they were washing up after dinner. She meant it as a peace offering, a way to bridge the stilted silence that had emerged between them since the raid.

  “Would you rather he didn’t?” Sophie retorted, thrusting a soapy plate at her so hard Lily nearly dropped it.

  “Of course I wouldn’t.”

  “Are you quite certain about that, Lily? Because sometimes I think you want the exciting things only to happen to you.”

  This was so unfair, and so patently untrue, that all Lily could do was stare.

  “Oh, I don’t mean it,” Sophie cried. “I know I don’t. I’m just so afraid, Lily. Tom… he’ll be parachuting down behind enemy lines. Can you even imagine? And he’s so brave, I know he’ll be right in the thick of the action. Sometimes I wish I were a man.” She spoke so savagely that Lily simply blinked. “Instead we just have to wait and wait and wait,” Sophie said in disgust as she picked up another plate. “And pour tea and say ‘chin up, duck’ and be so stupid. I can’t stand it. I really can’t.” She threw Lily a sudden, despairing look. “Do you know I envied you, being caught in the raid? Helping someone? I haven’t done a thing.”

  “You and Tom were caught in a raid—”

  “Snogging in a doorway! I should be ashamed of myself, I suppose.” Yet Lily knew she wasn’t.

  “Do you think it will be soon?” she asked. “The invasion?”

  “Who knows.” Sophie still sounded disgusted, and so very tired. “Who bloody knows.”

  As February gave way to March and then April, a sense of expectation silently built but was not rewarded. The winter had felt long and dark and cold; February had been far colder than expected, and on the eighteenth of the month the British cruiser Penelope was torpedoed by a German submarine as it was returning to Anzio, with a loss of four hundred lives. Miss Challis hired another girl to help in the Casualties Section.

  Yet, despite the losses—some of the worst of the war—hope began to unfurl, a tattered flag blowing in a determined breeze. In March, the border with Northern Ireland was closed, causing people to wonder why. Then, in the middle of March, General Eisenhower moved his entire headquarters out of London, and again whispers reigned—all rumor with no reality and no reward.

  Every night, the Mathers huddled around the wireless, longing to hear anything other than the list of losses and the variable victories, wanting to hear John Snagge’s sonorous voice tell them that planes were flying over the Channel towards France, but it didn’t happen. Nearly five years on and everyone was still waiting.

  Throughout those long months of lurching into spring, Tom wrote to Sophie sporadically, claiming he wasn’t “much of one for letters”; Matthew wrote not at all, which Lily tried not to take to heart.

  “Perhaps he isn’t much of one for writing, either,” Sophie said, all sympathy now that she felt somewhat secure in Tom’s affections.

  Lily gave a small, pinched smile. She did not think Matthew’s silence was due to lack of ability.

  Then, in early April, Sophie received a letter from Tom asking if he and Matthew could visit while they were on leave. The weather was warm but dull, and they suggested going to the cinema; Bees in Paradise was playing, and was meant to be, according to Tom, “a real gas”.

  Sophie was in an immediate flurry, ripping out seams of an old dress in order to freshen it up with a bit of bright ribbon, while Lily’s old anxieties about the pigeons in Matthew’s shed rose up. For the last few months, she’d managed mostly to quash them; while he certainly wasn’t out of mind, the potential dangers he presented had been. But now she was going to see him, and she had no idea what he was, never mind how she felt about him, or how he felt about her.

  On one gray afternoon in early April, the two GIs appeared at the door of the house in Holmside Road, familiar yet strange in their uniforms—Tom’s brash smile, Matthew’s quiet containment. They hadn’t changed at all.

  Sophie chatted all the way to the Underground, her voice full of laughter, her manner a bit frantic as she linked arms with Tom and sauntered ahead. Lily gave Matthew a strained smile; this parade to the Tube station felt as awkward as that walk across the Common back in January when they’d first met, which saddened her, because surely they should be better than this by now, on easier terms, at least.

  Then Matthew reached over and touched her arm. “How are you?” he asked quietly, as if he really wanted to know the answer, as if it mattered.

  “I’m all right. It’s been so long.” She didn’t know whether she meant waiting for the invasion, or waiting for him. Perhaps both.

  “It has,” he agreed. “I read about the Mahratta, and I thought of you.”

  Lily’s throat closed. “Only sixteen survivors,” she whispered. And over two hundred letters to type.

  Matthew nodded. “I wonder how you bear it. To only deal with the horror of war, and none of the hope.”

  “Is there hope, in war?”

  He nodded, the movement swift and sure. “There has to be. A belief, a faith that one day this will all be over, and the evil of fascism will be forever wiped from the world.”

  He spoke with such bitterness, such ferocity, that Lily nearly stumbled in her step. He couldn’t be a spy, she thought yet again, filled with buoyant relief. Unless he was simply trying to gain her trust. Her thoughts forever circled.

  “People are starting to hope now, I think,” she said. “You hear things.”

  Matthew nodded again, solemnly this time. “Yes,” he said simply, and that was enough.

  “Come on, you two!” Sophie called back to them. “Or we’ll miss the film.”

  The film was atrocious—a ridiculous comedy filled with scantily clad women inhabiting a mysterious island where men were as good as drones, used only for breeding. Lily couldn’t help but flinch at the crude baseness of it, although, next to her, Sophie hooted with laughter and Tom made appreciative guffaws.

  Matthew’s expression was rigid, and Lily suspected he found the absurdity of it all as excruciating as she did, the wide-eyed women with their exaggerated moues and the buffoonish soldiers bumbling around… it was the grossest parody of what they all knew, making a joke of what was their painful reality, and all for a few cheap laughs.

  Back outside, Tom suggested they all get a drink, and they ended up drinking beer in a shabby pub near Piccadilly, a far cry from champagne at The Berkeley. Sophie squeezed in on the banquette next to Tom, his arm wrapped around her, while Matthew and Lily sat in chairs.

  The mood of the city was both dour and expectant; the evenings were light and warm, and everyone was straining for news that still hadn’t come, and Lily felt that same push-pull here with Matthew, half of her clamoring to demand he tell her who he was, while the other half stayed meekly silent.

  “Will you get any more leave?” she asked in a low voice after several minutes of silence. Tom and Sophie were wrapped up in themselves, her head on his shoulder, making the situation all the more awkward.

  “I don’t know.” Matthew spread his hands in apology. “They don’t tell us much, I’m afraid.”

  “It must be soon, though, surely.”

  “One hopes.”

  Lily caught a bead of condensation on the side of her glass with her finger. “Will you write to me?” she asked, feeling bold for saying as much as that.

  “Do you want me to?”

  Lily looked up in surprise and Matthew gave that lovely quirk of a smile.

  “It’s only, sometimes it seems…” He paused, and Lily leapt in clumsily.

  “I don’t… that is… I would like it very much if you wrote to me. I should have said before.”

  “Good.
I’m glad.”

  He touched her hand briefly with her own, barely a brush, and yet it was enough.

  Lily smiled and looked down, afraid that the expression on her face would be too much for Matthew to see.

  An hour later, they were heading towards the Underground station when Tom broke away from Sophie to stumble towards them, a glazed but happy look on his face.

  “Look.” His gaze was somewhere between the two of them, so Lily couldn’t tell which one of them he was addressing. “Sophie and I, we’re going to find somewhere. Can you make your own way back?”

  “Sophie!” Lily couldn’t keep from calling for her sister, her voice sharpening.

  Tom put a large, clumsy hand on her shoulder, a heavy weight she wanted to shrug off.

  “I care about her,” he said, his tone the sloppily earnest one of a drunk. “I do. I’m going to marry her, you know.”

  Lily stepped back, angry now. “You barely know her, and you’re leaving. Sophie—”

  Sophie was leaning against a hoarding, a cigarette to her lips, refusing to look at her.

  “She’s a grown-up,” Tom insisted. “She can make her own decisions.”

  “Then let Lily talk to her,” Matthew said quietly.

  “Go home, Lily,” Sophie called out, sounding tired. “Just go home. I’m fine.”

  Lily watched in silent outrage as Tom turned and went back to Sophie, slipping an arm around her waist. Together, both of them stumbling a bit, they disappeared into the darkness, to who only knew where. A hotel? A dark alley?

  “I’m sorry,” Matthew said quietly.

  Lily pulled her coat more tightly around her, though the evening was warm.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for.” She shouldn’t feel this desolate. Sophie was simply living her life. And if Tom did marry her, it would be all right in the end, she supposed. “What is going to happen?” she wondered out loud, realizing she wasn’t asking only about Sophie and Tom. “What is going to happen to all of us?”

  Realization, sudden and swift, clutched her by the throat, made it hard to breathe. Tom and Matthew would be in France soon, or maybe Belgium, parachuting behind enemy lines, risking their lives. Nothing was certain, not one single thing. All they had was this moment, and Sophie at least had taken it.

  She turned back to Matthew, who was watching her with the quiet intensity she’d come to know—and like. “I thought you were a German spy,” she blurted.

  Matthew’s expression, strangely, did not change, and he didn’t answer.

  “Are you?” she demanded, feeling both desperate and foolish.

  “A German spy?” He did not sound as surprised, as incredulous, as she would have hoped. “No.”

  Lily shook her head slowly. “But…”

  “Why did you think I was?”

  “The pigeons. I saw them in your shed. There was a message in German…”

  “You went in the shed?” He looked bemused, almost impressed, which confused Lily all the more.

  “What are you?” she asked, a bit desperately. “Who are you?”

  Matthew stared at her, a long, steady look that made her afraid even as it made her hope. She waited, her handbag clutched to her chest, her heart starting to thud.

  “I’m a Jew,” he finally said quietly.

  Lily stared. “A Jew.”

  “A German Jew. I emigrated to America in 1938, after Kristallnacht.” He waited, while Lily’s mind raced.

  Kristallnacht… it had been in the newspapers, but she’d only been fifteen at the time. She couldn’t remember exactly what it had all been about, and she felt a sudden rush of shame at her ignorance.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know—”

  “The night of the broken glass. Jewish businesses were ransacked or destroyed by the Nazis. Jewish synagogues were burned. Jewish men were arrested. And for all of this the Jews were blamed and fined a billion marks.” He spoke flatly, matter-of-factly, yet, for the first time, Lily could hear the German accent he’d been trying so hard to hide. “My father was beaten to death in the office below our home.”

  “Matthew…” Lily gulped in horror.

  “My mother hid me. I was seventeen, and she was afraid I’d be taken to a concentration camp, like so many others. They were looking, asking for me.”

  Lily’s mouth opened and closed. She couldn’t manage a word.

  “I left the next day. I went to stay with my uncle in Munich, and when things calmed down—or seemed to—he arranged my visa and transport on a Spanish merchant ship to America, so I could start a new life. I knew English from school, and I took classes when I arrived. I didn’t want to be German any longer.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Lily had no other words. Tears swam in her eyes and she blinked, causing them to spill down her cheeks. She felt as if she didn’t have the right to cry; Matthew looked stony.

  “I joined the army in 1942, because I wanted to fight the Nazis. I’ve wanted nothing more. I’m no spy, Lily.”

  “I know you aren’t,” she choked. “Of course not.”

  “But you were right to be suspicious. I’m not… like Tom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t say more than that. I was trained separately from him, and I have separate orders. But, trust me, I hate the Nazis more than you do.”

  She stared at him—his fierce eyes, his hands clenched into fists at his side from the force of his emotion. “I believe you,” she said softly. “I believe it all.”

  In retrospect, Lily couldn’t be sure what happened next. Did she step towards him, or did Matthew reach for her? It seemed to happen seamlessly, all at once, so that his arms were around her and his lips were on hers—her very first kiss.

  She closed her eyes as she reveled in the moment—the hard press of his lips, like a seal, and his arms tight around her, as if he were fusing her to himself. She knew the kiss was goodbye, for however long. Maybe forever, and yet in that moment she was still filled with hope and even joy.

  Someone nearby catcalled, and Matthew stepped away from her. “I’ll write to you,” he said. “And will you—”

  “I’ll write to you.”

  “Write—yes.” That crooked smile. “But also… will you wait?”

  Wait? The enormity of his question felt like a wave crashing over her, pulling her under. Wait… for him? “Yes,” Lily said. “Yes.”

  “Even though I’m Jewish?”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Your mother will.”

  “I don’t care.” She spoke with fierce certainty, but Matthew didn’t look convinced.

  “There will be time to talk of such things,” he said, but Lily wondered if there would be. “It’s getting late. Your mother will be worried.” He took her arm and led her down the steps to the station. There was no chance for them to say anything further as they moved with the crowds onto the noisy train.

  In front of the little house on Holmside Road, Matthew kissed her again, brief and hard, and then he said goodbye. It happened so quickly, Lily felt as if she could have blinked and missed it; suddenly he was walking away from her, his head down, and she was tottering down the path to her front door, her head spinning. Everything had changed.

  Five weeks later, Lily and Sophie woke up in the middle of the night to the loud, insistent drone of planes flying overhead, but strangely no air raid siren, making it seem silent, when it was anything but.

  Heedless of the danger, Sophie ran to the window and undid the blackout curtains, throwing open the window to the balmy June night.

  “Sophie,” Lily protested, although she knew it would do no good. Since the night she’d walked off with Tom and had only returned in mid-afternoon, she’d been like a different person, remote, preoccupied, as if she were already somewhere else, waiting for her real life to begin.

  But then Lily felt as if she were somewhere else as well, her mind consumed by the letters that came from Matthew, two or three times a wee
k, revealing nothing yet saying everything, because they were from him to her, and he wanted to write—even if it was simply about what he ate in the canteen, or the color of the sky on a May morning.

  “Lily, look.” Sophie gestured to the night sky, now streaked with light.

  Lily hurried to the window, her mouth opening soundlessly as she stared at the dozens of planes moving purposefully across the midnight canvas of the night sky, like arrows pointing east. So many…

  “What…” she began, but of course she knew. The invasion was happening at last.

  “It’s beginning,” Sophie said, and she sounded triumphant. “It’s finally beginning.”

  Part II

  Chapter Fifteen

  June 6, 1944

  Matthew sat hunched over, his elbows braced on his knees, on one of the metal seats set in facing rows along the length of the C-47 plane as it moved steadily towards the Channel.

  He was wearing seventy pounds of equipment—a parachute on his back, and another strapped to his chest; a gas mask tied to one leg, and a small hoe for digging foxholes attached to the other. From his belt hung a first-aid kit, a bayonet, a trench knife, and two fragmentation hand grenades, along with extra ammunition. He had another grenade in his musette bag, along with all of his personal gear, as well as his most important possession: a bundle of letters from Lily. His shoulders ached and his stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a stone whole.

  Next to him, another paratrooper of the 508th was cracking his knuckles and chewing gum with grim determination. Across from him, a whey-faced boy of no more than nineteen had been sick down his front. Whether that was from nerves or the motion of the plane which had been flying in circles waiting for other planes to join up, Matthew didn’t know. Further down his row, Tom Reese sat, his face set in grim lines. Matthew didn’t meet his eye.

  The last twenty-four hours had felt utterly surreal, as if none of it was actually happening, or, if it was, he was merely an observer to someone’s else drama. He’d felt this way before, back in Fraustadt in 1938, when stormtroopers had broken into his father’s office, smashing glass and hurling papers and books to the floor with looks of naked, savage glee on their faces.