Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Vanessa de Haan 2018

Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (seascape); © Shutterstock.com (letter and plane)

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Vanessa de Haan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it

are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008245764

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008229818

Version: 2018-01-23

Dedication

To my weird, wonderful and extensive family

– you know who you are –

and to Amelia Grace Jessel, in memory.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Hymn

Prologue

Chapter 1: Jack

Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Charlie

Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Olivia

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8: Jack

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Charlie

Chapter 11

Chapter 12: Olivia

Chapter 13

Chapter 14: Charlie

Chapter 15: Olivia

Chapter 16: Jack

Chapter 17: Charlie

Chapter 18: Jack

Chapter 19: Olivia

Chapter 20: Jack

Chapter 21: Charlie

Chapter 22: Jack

Chapter 23: Charlie

Chapter 24: Olivia

Chapter 25: Jack

Chapter 26: Olivia

Chapter 27: Charlie

Chapter 28: Olivia

Chapter 29: Charlie

Chapter 30: Olivia

Chapter 31: Jack

Chapter 32: Charlie

Chapter 33: Olivia

Historical Note

Acknowledgements

We, Who Live Now

About the Author

About the Publisher

Hymn

Eternal Father, strong to save

Whose arm does bound the restless wave

Who bidst the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep

O hear us when we cry to thee

For those in peril on the sea

O ruler of the earth and sky

Be with our airmen as they fly

And keep them in thy loving care

From all the perils of the air

O let our cry come up to thee

For those who fly o’er land and sea

O Trinity of love and might

Be with our airmen day and night

In peace or war

Midst friend or foe

Be with them wheresoe’er they go

Thus shall our prayers ascend to thee

For those who fly o’er land and sea

This famous hymn, written by William Whiting in 1860, is also known as the Navy Hymn and sung at naval occasions around the world. This is a version frequently used by the Fleet Air Arm.

Prologue

The roof stretches across the railway station like the skin of a drum, magnifying the sounds: the tapping and pounding of feet, the trains clanking, the rumble of wheels, the shout of a guard, the whistle of a porter. At the ticket office, there is no sense of where the queue ends or where it begins. A man bashes on the glass, his voice raised in anger, frustration. Tickets are scarce. Everybody here wants to get away, to follow the children who have been evacuated to safer parts of this now unsafe country. The air is sticky and humid. In the haze, little things stand out: two sailors balancing on a stack of cases, one singing as the other accompanies him on a squeezebox. The drifting smoke from the newspaper seller’s pipe; the neat rows of black-and-white print on his stand. A cluster of soldiers, their uniforms smart, the leather of their boots supple and clean, their dark, heavy rifles pulling at their shoulders.

A policeman tails a group of suspicious-looking lads that trickle away from him like mercury, slipping through gaps that close as quickly as they open. He loses them again as they circle a girl dressed in a pale-green coat, a cerise ribbon tied around her matching hat, a bright splash of colour among the drab browns and greys of suits and caps. The policeman glimpses the lads once more as they sidestep the expensive leather cases at the girl’s feet. Then they are gone again, like the brief flash of the bracelet she is fiddling nervously with beneath the cuff of her jacket: now you see it, now you don’t.

The sounds swirl into one cacophony – the sobs of children, the wails of babies, the tinny squeezebox and the guard shouting into the loudspeaker, the scream of another train pulling free from the throng and towards the light. And then suddenly all noise is drowned out by a new sound, one that Londoners will soon grow accustomed to, but this is the first time they have heard its ear-splitting warning. For a moment, the station freezes, caught in a sliver of time. The babies stop wailing. The man stops banging the window. The squeezebox exhales with a breathless sigh. A thousand pairs of eyes widen, a thousand hearts stop beating.

And then there is chaos. Hands fly up to ears. People scream and clutch at each other. Others gape, bewildered. ‘It’s the gas!’ ‘A bomb!’ ‘They’re coming!’ Some people throw themselves to the floor while others blindly follow each other, staggering from one foot to the other, unsure which way to run. People fumble for their gas masks, trying to remember the drill. The straps pinch and catch at their hair; the rubber digs into their faces; the horrible smell fills their nostrils.

The crowd takes on a life of its own and surges towards the Underground, sweeping everything before it, pushing aside anything that will not join the plunging wave. The girl in the pale-green coat is caught up in the rush. She stretches out for her luggage, but it has scattered and she is knocked one way and shoved another and then swept along for a little while, all the time trying to reach back with a pale hand for her bags. The policeman is too busy trying to calm the uncalmable to notice that the girl has been swept up by the hoodlums he had his eye on. Now her bags are lost, but at least she has been carried on the tide to the safety of the Underground.

The siren wails through the empty station. The concourse is a mess of scattered things. Luggage is strewn across the floor like flotsam, bags split open, a favourite teddy has been trampled, the newspapers have toppled to the ground, the thick headlines declaring war smudged and smeared by a myriad of shoes. The ticket seller cowers beneath his desk. The guards and porters have disappeared. The only sign of life is a group of naval ratings who have remained on their platform and are being lined up by a young officer. The officer issues his instructions and smooths his impeccable uniform. The boys do not take their eyes off him, drawing confidence from his easy manner, the authority borne of fine breeding and education. They form neat rows of bell bottoms and white-topped caps. The officer calls out another command, and this time the words echo clearly across the silent emptiness. The wailing has stopped.

The alarm is a mistake, a faulty air-raid siren. The station begins to fill up as people return to search for their lost companions, their abandoned luggage. Soon it is as if the concourse never emptied. The ticket seller clambers up from the floor, dusting the dirt from his trousers and resetting his cap upon his head. A new customer bangs at the window while the people behind him jostle for their original positions in the reformed queue. The policeman has long lost his intended targets. No doubt more will be along any moment. Pickpocketing is as much a problem today as it has always been in these crowded places, and the chaos of a war is not going to help matters. He spies the girl in the pale-green dress grappling for her bags and goes to help, his hand resting on his truncheon, his chin sweaty beneath its strap. Together they count the bags. None is missing. Now another figure emerges from the crowds, small and bird-like beneath a thick fur stole – the only one to be seen in such weather. The girl reaches out to her mother, and the policeman summons a porter to place the bags on a trolley, then touches his helmet in farewell as the porter relays the lady, the girl, and their luggage towards the sleeper for Inverness, skirting around a jumble of bicycles, freight, prams and trunks.

The sleeper is already at the platform. Men are rubbing cloths over its black and maroon paint. The girl and the lady search for the correct carriage. Further along the same platform, the young naval officer is ushering the ratings into the dining car, the only carriage with any space left. The boys chatter and laugh as they jostle for a seat until the officer reminds them that they are representing His Majesty’s Naval Service, and they stifle their smiles behind their hands. Three pregnant women heave themselves into another carriage. A child cries, snotty hiccups that she tries to blow into a handkerchief. A toddler holds her other hand, sucking bleakly at his free thumb. Passengers already on the train lean out of the windows, hands grasping like sea anemones for a last touch of friends and family. One of them is the girl in the pale-green dress, but the woman she has left on the platform has already issued a brief goodbye and turned on her heel, and there is nothing to do but retreat reluctantly into the safety of her compartment.

There are fewer people on the platform now, more guards and porters in their dark-blue uniforms, polished buttons and cap badges glinting. The doors slam and slide. The guard blows his whistle, and there is the whoosh of steam, and slowly, slowly the train starts to move. A woman with puffy red eyes runs alongside, trying to catch a glimpse of a friend or child slipping away. A guard manages to grasp her by the shoulders and hold her back. Someone screams, but the sound is drowned out by the train’s whistle. The carriages jerk forward, away from the confines of the hot and crowded station and out into the warm light. In the dining car, some of the boy seamen are already resting their heads against the windows, eyelids drooping, while others play cards or elbow each other and giggle when they think no one is looking. Their officer adjusts his tie and then runs a finger over the golden wings stitched on to his sleeve and smiles to himself. In the sleeper berth, the girl in the pale-green dress runs her hand over the starched white sheets and sighs. Outside, London begins to slip by faster and faster as the train gathers speed, past narrow gardens and rows of houses, the sun reflected in their windows, making it seem as if the city is on fire.

CHAPTER 1
Jack

The boys tumble out of the station and on to the streets, laughing as they go. It is warm out here, but the air is fresh, and they enjoy the feel of the sun on their skin and the space to move away from the crowds. They follow the tallest of the boys, Stoog, a skinny, athletic-looking lad with hooded eyes and a pent-up energy like a coiled spring. He hustles along a line of people waiting to go in to the cinema, knocking a man’s hat to the ground. ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ shouts the man, shaking a fist, but the boys don’t care. They laugh and run faster until they finally reach the river and stop to catch their breath.

It is high tide. In the afternoon sun the Thames gleams amber. The boys lean over the railings and watch the ships as the water slaps at the wall below. The shimmering expanse is as busy as the crowded streets behind them. Along the opposite bank a row of Thames barges, their sails neatly furled, swing and turn together on the tide. Sturdy tugs shoulder through the flow, hiccuping black smoke as they go, while another barge tacks across the running river, her dusky red-brown sails flapping and cracking in the wind. Motorboats carve their way past dredgers. The smell of river mud mingled with coal smoke, sewage, oil and tar is as familiar to the boys as the smell of their own mothers.

Stoog is the only one who doesn’t lounge lazily against the rails. Instead, he prowls up and down the pavement. ‘Come on, then,’ he says. ‘Show us what you’ve got.’

The boys turn, leaning back against the metal and digging into their pockets. They casually pull out a variety of watches and wallets, a lady’s purse, a gold watch chain. Stoog nods down the line, until he reaches Jack.

Jack keeps his hands plugged deep in his trousers. He can feel the bracelet, the smoothness of the pearls under his fingers, the cooler sharpness of the sapphire surrounded by winking diamonds. It is the most expensive thing he has ever held, more valuable than a year’s worth of wallets and watches.

‘Go on, then,’ says Stoog.

Jack shakes his head, gripping the bracelet more firmly in his fist.

Stoog steps closer. ‘Go on.’

‘Not this time,’ says Jack.

‘It’s off my patch.’

‘It’s not your patch. We all work it.’

‘You work it because I let you.’

‘I can work anywhere I want.’

‘And who’s going to sell it on for you?’

‘You don’t own this city, Stoog.’

Stoog takes a step towards him, his eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a challenge?’ he says.

‘What if it is?’ says Jack, and he takes a step sideways, dodging the hand as it darts towards him. He legs it without looking back, Stoog’s curses ringing in his ears, leaving the rest of the boys standing there, open-mouthed. Jack is the only one who would dare question Stoog, but they all know that they never get a fair price. Well, if Jack’s going to take one last risk like this, he wants it to be worth it.

Jack has already reached the other side of the bridge, but Stoog is not far behind and Jack knows that he won’t give up easily. He forces himself on, down towards Tooley Street. This is his territory, where he was born and brought up. But it’s Stoog’s too, and sure enough, Jack can hear the ragged breath of the older boy closing in. His only chance is to get to somewhere Stoog can’t follow. But he is still a long way from the docks.

He hears the familiar swish of trolleybuses swinging along on their cables. Even better, there is the tail end of a queue, and a vehicle is beginning to pull away from the stop. He lunges and swings up on to the platform, bending double to catch his breath and grinning at the sight of Stoog receding into the distance.

The conductor’s legs come into view, and Jack takes his time to right himself. He is panting and his legs are shaking. He pretends to fumble for loose change, but the conductor knows his type and is shaking his head and getting ready to see Jack off at the next stop. And now Jack can see another trolleybus close behind, and he knows that Stoog will be on it.

Jack is already down and running again. The docks are within reach. But Stoog is after him, reinvigorated too. Passers-by jump out of the way. Jack is fast, but Stoog is gaining. Now Jack can see the entrance to the docks, and he is almost there, and he finds the strength from somewhere, urging his legs to move, and his chest is about to burst and the breath is burning in his lungs.

He dodges the new sentry, posted fresh this week in case of Nazi invasions. Stupid guard isn’t even looking in his direction, but the man does catch sight of Stoog, which makes Jack smile again. But the sentry can’t stop Stoog: the older boy shakes him off and is now yelling Jack’s name, and pushing past bemused gangs of dock workers. Jack begins to wonder whether he’s made the right choice. Carl isn’t going to be happy. Carl’s dad even less so.

Although it is evening, the docks are still in full swing: there is always cargo for the lightermen to deliver ashore or for the stevedores to load carefully into holds. There is such a tangle of masts and funnels, cranes and ropes that it is hard to determine what is river and what is dry land. Dockers and sailors whistle and shout to each other, struggling to be heard above the whir and grind of machinery, the bump and clatter of barges, and the splash of the water. Jack has the advantage of surprise, being the first runner, but the gathering crowd soon closes up on Stoog. Dockers don’t take kindly to outsiders. Stoog is swearing and wriggling, but he is no match for men who spend their days hauling and heaving freight.

‘Stop that bloody thief!’ Stoog is shouting. And now hands are reaching for Jack too, grasping fingers with torn, black nails, knuckles stained by tobacco. He tries to dodge, but he is tiring. He manages to pull away once more, jinking down behind the metal feet and runners of one of the large cranes and then between a stack of crates. He is alone, but it won’t be for long. His brain is working at high speed, his eyes processing in double-time. There is a wooden shack. He twists into it before his followers around the corner. It is a risk he has to take; he cannot push himself any further.

He is in a putrid darkness. The air is close, the stench makes him gag. He hears the crowd approaching, Stoog still shouting his name. His heart hammers in his chest. The footsteps draw nearer. He presses himself into the inkiest of shadows, the bile filling his mouth as the smell infests his nostrils. The door swings open and a ray of light picks out the pole suspended above the trough of muck. Jack holds his breath and shrinks into a ball. He hears the scuff of boots on the ground, senses the energy of the crowd.

Then his heart lurches. Something shifts in the gloom. He is not alone.

His companion moves to block the door, a large, impassable, barrel-chested shape.

‘There’s a lad on the run,’ says one of the pursuers. ‘You seen anyone?’

A low voice growls back: ‘Can’t a man take a shit in peace?’

Jack’s knees are seizing up, but he does not dare move. The man stands at the door, and the crowd mutters and moves away, the shadows through the slats of the shack darkening and lightening as they go. They drag Stoog with them, still kicking and biting.

Jack collapses to the filthy floor and retches.

The crowd has gone, and now the creak and crunch of the cranes fills the air once more, the sound of foremen shouting their orders and the trolleys and trucks rumbling past. The man at the door steps out into the light. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s be seeing you.’

Jack has no choice but to follow. Even though the air outside is still fetid with the stink of the river, it is nothing compared to the latrines. And now there is also the faint, sweet scent of cut wood, for Surrey Docks is a timber dock and there are planks piled in every corner, huge logs bumping and rolling against each other in the water, packed on to the narrowboats that wait on the canal, even swinging above their heads.

Jack eyes the man warily. ‘Why didn’t you turn me in?’ he says.

The man shrugs. ‘You want to watch yourself with those dockers,’ he says. There is a tear in the arm of his shirt that reveals the striking colours of blue and green tattoo ink on his skin. Great patches of sweat have stained his armpits, and even the creases of his face are ingrained with grime.

‘I can handle it,’ says Jack. ‘My dad and my brother both worked the docks.’ His legs have stopped trembling and he pulls himself up straighter, squares his chin.

‘And where are they now?’

‘Fighting the Jerries.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘I’d be doing the same if I was old enough.’

The sailor shakes his head. ‘What are you? Fifteen? Sixteen? Give it a couple of years and you’ll be squeezed into a uniform too; sent off to the knacker’s like those carcasses we bring in to the Royal Docks.’

‘I’m no coward.’

‘What are you running from, then?’

Jack looks at his feet. ‘Nothing. A misunderstanding.’ He feels the weight of the bracelet in his pocket and colours.

The sailor sighs, his cap lifting as he scratches the back of his head. ‘You want to steer clear of a lad like that,’ he says. ‘He’s got a badness about him that ain’t going to lead nowhere good.’

‘Does it look like we’re friends?’

‘It looks to me like you is on the edge. One push and you’ll end up just the same.’

‘I’m different. He doesn’t want me working here, but that’s what I’m doing from now on.’

‘I ain’t talking about working here, boy. Just as I ain’t talking about signing up to another man’s war. I’m talking about freedom. Changing your destiny. Choosing your own path. I’m talking about the ships.’

‘Ain’t that just swapping one uniform for another?’

The man roars with laughter, youthful eyes bright beneath his tattered sailor’s cap. ‘I don’t mean the Navy, boy. You want to be a merchant seaman. No one telling you what to do except for your own kind.’

‘But I ain’t never even been on a boat.’

‘Ent nothin’ to it. Listen.’ The man leans closer. ‘I was like you once, except I had no ma or pa, not a penny to my name. I slept in ditches and drains until I was eight, and then I found myself a berth. Now I’ve sailed to every country you can think of and plenty you can’t. I’ve seen wonders you’d never imagine: beasts of the ocean, castles in the sky, men that breathe fire, women what change shape. I’m free to work when and where I want. Hell, I’ve even got me own stash of gold.’

And he laughs and his great jaw opens, and Jack can indeed see the yellow metal glittering in the back of his dark mouth.

Jack shakes his head. ‘There’s my mum, my sister …’

The man is suddenly serious again, urgent. He thrusts his face right up against Jack’s, and Jack can smell the tobacco on his breath. ‘I can see you’re a brave lad,’ he says, ‘but it takes a proper kind of bravery to turn your life around.’

Then he puts his head back and laughs again, moving away as he does.

Jack catches sight of something in the sailor’s hand, winking and blinking in the sunlight. ‘Oy!’ he says, snatching at the bracelet. ‘That’s mine.’

The sailor holds the jewel out of reach. ‘No wonder you was running,’ he says. ‘It’s a fine piece …’

Jack blushes, ashamed, but the anger is a stronger emotion, and he lunges again, grabbing the bracelet from the man’s hand and backing away.

The man grunts, as if satisfying some inner itch. ‘Perhaps it’s too late already,’ he says. ‘You’s in too deep.’

Jack doesn’t want to listen any more. He has inched far enough, and now he turns and stumbles away from the latrines, slipping back among the dock workers, those men with the same worn and weary expressions as his father. He keeps his head down, cap pulled low, occasionally throwing a glance back over his shoulder, but the gold-toothed sailor has vanished into the maelstrom of the docks.

A little further on, he finally reaches his destination. Carl nods a curt hello. He is shorter and stockier than Jack, and he keeps his hair shaved close, which makes his neck look thicker and his shoulders broader. ‘What’re you doing here?’ he says.

‘Thought I’d come and check we were all right for tomorrow.’

‘’Course,’ says Carl. He peers at Jack more closely. ‘But what’re you really doing here?’

Jack shrugs and tries to look nonchalant. ‘Fancy going to the pictures?’

But Carl knows him better than that. ‘Whatever you’ve done,’ he says, ‘you better have left it at the gates. My dad’s not going to let us work together if—’

Jack cuts him off. ‘It was nothing,’ he says. ‘Just Stoog kicking off …’

‘I thought you were putting all that behind you?’

Jack cannot meet his eye. ‘I am. I have …’

‘A new start, you said …’

‘Just drop it, will you?’

Carl doesn’t push it. He and Jack have been best friends for as long as they can remember – brought together on the docks, and in the same class since they were sent to primary. The boys watch Mr Mills work for a while. He is a deal porter: unloading and stacking the long planks that arrive on the steamers from overseas and the narrowboats from upcountry. It’s a skill that’s up there with the best on the docks, and means regular employment, a far cry from the casual labour that Jack’s dad had to rely on. But it’s still hard work. Jack can barely lift one plank; Mr Mills carries three or four at a time. He wears a leather cap with a long bit dangling down to protect his shoulders. It is like watching an acrobat, the balancing and judging where best to lay the next plank on the towering pile, the skipping from mound to mound, and all the time the planks on his shoulder tipping up and down while his legs and feet work to keep his body stable.

When he spots Jack, Mr Mills jumps down from the top of the mountain as sure-footed as a goat, his muscles bulging and flexing with effort. He is breathing heavily, his broad chest expanding and contracting against his braces. His calloused hands are full of splinters. ‘Jack,’ he says, his low voice betraying his dislike. The scar on his cheek is a pale, raised streak down his red face; Carl’s family have Jewish blood, and the mark is a souvenir from the fight against the fascists in Cable Street.

‘Mr Mills,’ says Jack, nodding back.

‘I thought you two was going to work tomorrow?’

‘We are. But since he’s here now, can we go to the pictures?’ says Carl.

Mr Mills rubs his scar and eyes Jack. ‘You’ll have to be up early …’

‘We know …’

‘I want you back by dark.’

‘Sure.’

‘Or I’ll have your mother on my case …’

‘I’ll be back.’

Mr Mills gives Jack another narrow look and then rubs Carl’s head, and Carl pushes him away, laughing, then the boys disappear once more into their city.

Jack settles the cap firmly on his head, pulling it down tight. He creeps out without waking his sister. It is easier now that she sleeps in their mother’s bed. He will pick her up later in the morning, once his mother has been at work for an hour or so. The guilt that plucks at his insides is tinged with worry: Betsy still can’t read properly, and now that the school has relocated to the countryside it looks as if she never will. He knows she will be cross when she wakes – she likes to stick as close to him as his own shadow these days – but the docks are no place for a child.

Dawn is breaking. The sky is leaden, pressing down on him with a suffocating heaviness. It is cold, and he half jogs down the high street to try to keep warm. Past the air-raid siren. Past the navy blue police box, and the sandbagged shop fronts – the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the hosiery shop, the tobacconist, the pawnbroker. The stillness is broken by an ancient fire engine and a taxi pulling a water pump that trundle past in the opposite direction. Probably a drill. Everything’s a drill these days. Sometimes he wishes the Nazis would come and drop a bloody bomb. That at least might be exciting.

Jack has been good as his word, working the docks with Carl for the last two weeks, avoiding Stoog and the others. Today the boys are heading to the East and West India docks, Jack’s favourites, where the air smells of spices and oils, of spilt rum and sacks full of tobacco left to mature in the warehouses. Much of the work is still beyond even Carl’s ability – rolling or repairing the heavy barrels, or portering coal and grain – and they stay out of the way of the seasoned gangs with their vicious case hooks, but there is still plenty of work to be found. The boys take what they can get: an hour here or there loading and unloading the smaller carts and trolleys, separating cargo on the floors of the warehouses, jemmying open chests for the customs officials.

They cross from dock to dock, hitching a lift in a cart or a truck or a barge, or they take the train from the Royal Docks, with its vast refrigeration sheds packed with ghostly pale slabs of meat. There is cheese arriving from Europe, and fabric from India, apples and grapefruit from Australia, Palestine. Persian carpets, and silks from India pass beneath cars and buses dangling from great chains. Passenger liners deposit travellers from New Zealand, the Canaries, South Africa, Brazil. Everything is in multiples: lines of people, crates of food, stacks of timber, barrels of wine – once, even, four elephants for the circus.

Carl catches up with Jack on the bridge. The sky has lightened to a pale grey, and there is an eerie mist like a sheen on the river. They are dockside before first call-on, down where the cavernous warehouses and towering chimneys loom reddy-orange in the watery light. The familiar thud and crash of boat and barge mingles with the shouts and curses of men. Jack hears the warning to look out as an unsecured load crashes to the ground, sees the glint of metal as another worker digs his sharp case hook into a sack, savours the smell of coffee and cocoa beans on his tongue.

Today there is a shipment of bananas. Jack watches the green bunches trundle down from the ship’s holds on creaky conveyor belts. A man with a horse and cart waits patiently while the first lot of fruit is loaded on to trolleys for the waiting trains and lorries. Carl and Jack have worked with this man before. Once the bulk of the bananas have gone, they help him place the fruit into wooden crates and pack them around with straw. The conveyor belt creaks and squeaks and groans. Jack glances up to the gunwale of the ship, but the gold-toothed sailor is not there. The sailors looking back at him have skin the colour of the roasted chestnuts that he sometimes buys as a treat for Betsy in the winter, their white teeth flashing like chalk on slate.

The driver jumps on to the back of the cart and Carl and Jack hand the crates up to him. Jack’s arms ache: bananas are heavier than they look. There are other crates of fruit here already, apples and grapefruit that make the back of the cart smell like sunshine and sugar. Jack’s mouth waters.

When they have finished, the man hops down and chats to the dockers, while the boys rest their weary arms. The horse seems unfazed by the constant commotion. It stands with its head low, eyes half-closed, ears flicking one way or the other, resting each hind leg in turn. Jack runs his hand along the animal’s flank. It is soft and warm. He leans against it, sucking up the heat through his sleeves. After the hard work, his sweat is starting to cool.

‘Make the most of these,’ says one of the dockers to the cart driver, removing his flat cap and scratching his head. ‘Reckon you’ll be lucky to see any more for a while.’

‘Problems with supply?’ asks the cart driver.

The docker shakes his head. ‘Not at the other end. But these poor bastards are having a job getting through.’ He indicates another man, a sailor.

The sailor nods his head. ‘Sea’s swarming with Nazis,’ he says.

‘Going to starve us out?’

‘Don’t seem to make a difference what the cargo is. They’ll take a pop at anything. Even passenger ships.’

The men shake their heads and suck their teeth.

‘What if the country runs out of food?’

‘That’s never going to happen.’

‘Government’s talking about rationing butter and bacon in case we get short.’

‘Let’s hope it don’t come to that.’ The sailor shares cigarettes out around the group. They light them, the smoke curling in thin blue lines into the air. The smell reminds Jack of his dad.

‘You heading back out there?’

‘Got to.’

‘Got anything to protect you?’

‘’Course not. But I heard we might get a Navy escort.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’

They stand in silence for a bit, pulling on their cigarettes. The tobacco burns and crumbles and turns to ash that flies away, dissolving into nothing.

Above them, someone starts to rattle the conveyor belt. The sailors are leaning over the edge. One of them whistles, a shrill note that makes the men on the ground look up. ‘That’s us, then.’ The men start to disperse. ‘See you next time.’

‘Let’s hope.’

‘Good luck.’

‘See you.’

The men tip their hats at each other. The cart driver drops his butt on the ground, grinds it out with his boot. At last he is ready to go. He jumps up on to the driver’s bench and the boys clamber up on the back of the cart. They lurch off, past queues of lorries, their goods covered in canvas, waiting to be sent to all the corners of the world. Past a warehouse full of vast tusks sorted into piles of various sizes. Past men in top hats, stroking their glossy moustaches.

Jack leans against a bouncing crate. Carl tips his cap to the back of his head and rubs at his short hair. It looks soft, like the fur of the rabbits that hang in rows outside the butchers’ shops.

Jack swings his legs, enjoying the ride. ‘You ever thought about getting work on a ship?’ he asks.

‘Funny you should say that,’ says Carl. ‘My dad’s been on at me to give it a go. Says the docks are a mug’s game. He’s not fifty yet, but his back’s done in and his shoulder’s all but seized up. Sometimes my mum has to help him get out of bed in the morning …’

‘What about them Nazis?’

‘If the war lasts, then we’ll all have to face them somewhere, I guess.’

The cart bounces and bumps as the city unfolds behind them: streets clogged with men and women and horses and carts and bicycles and buses and trucks. The shops are busy now, chalkboards propped up outside, doors swinging open and shut beneath bright hoardings advertising brown ale and Rowntree’s pastilles.

At Covent Garden, the boys help place the boxes of fruit on to wooden barrows. A man walks past with a dozen wicker baskets stacked on his head, the tower swaying like a huge snake. Broad-bosomed women sit on the kerb, flowers in their hats, deep in conversation. Men pull barrows and crates this way and that. Horses chomp at bags of hay. Vehicles come and go. You’d never believe there was a war on.

The cart driver presses a ha’penny into Jack’s hand. ‘Thanks, lads. See you again,’ he says.

Jack pockets the shiny coin, swallowing his disappointment. Three hours of honest work earns less than the brief second it takes to snatch a wallet.

They drift towards the arched entrance to the market. The air is a pandemonium of people bartering over fruit and vegetables and flowers. Beyond a clump of ragged children, Jack spots a familiar face. Vince.

Carl puts a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘You’re doing good without them.’

Jack shakes him off, pulling the ha’penny from his pocket and shoving it into Carl’s hand. ‘We can’t split this,’ he says, ‘it’s not enough.’

‘You got to stick at it.’

‘I’ve just got one more thing to offload.’

‘There’s always just one more thing …’ says Carl, but Jack is already making after Vince, who is sliding down a back alley, hugging the wall as if he wants to sink into the brickwork.

Jack blocks his path. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he says.

‘Well now you found me,’ says Vince, his eyes glittering like the sewer rat that he is.

‘I’ve got a bracelet,’ says Jack.

‘I heard you had something.’

‘It’s a proper fine one.’

Vince narrows his eyes. ‘Thing is, jewels is tricky things to get rid of,’ he says.

‘Oh, come on. It’s never stopped you in the past …’

‘Give me something to go on, then.’

Jack describes every pearl and stone in detail. He has taken the bracelet out from beneath his mattress nightly to admire its workmanship.

Vince is quiet for a moment, as if mulling over the sum in his head. ‘I’ll give you ten pound,’ he says eventually.

‘Ten pound?’ says Jack. ‘It’s worth ten times that.’

Vince shrugs. ‘Maybe through the proper channels …’

‘You mean through Stoog?’

‘That’s the way it works, my friend.’

‘I’m not your friend,’ says Jack, grabbing him by the collar.

Vince throws his hands out to the sides, twisting on the end of Jack’s fist. ‘It ain’t my fault,’ he says. Jack yanks the neck of the shirt hard before releasing his grip so that Vince yelps, then backs away, rubbing the pinched pale flesh of his neck. ‘What you do that for? You know I got to keep Stoog sweet …’

‘I’ll find someone else to take it,’ says Jack.

‘You can try. No one else is going to touch it. Stoog’s put the word out.’

‘Who does he think he is? Al fucking Capone?’

Vince shrugs. ‘Someone’s got to be in charge,’ he says, ‘or else the whole system falls apart.’

Jack feels the anger bubble up inside him. ‘I don’t need the money, anyway,’ he says. ‘I’m doing fine going straight.’

‘Looks like it,’ says Vince.

Jack glares at him for a moment and then spits his contempt on to the ground at Vince’s feet. But Vince is already sidling on down the alley, as slippery as a jellied eel.

It takes Jack some time to find a pawnbroker who will accept the bracelet and its tenuous provenance. The shops with their three gold baubles hanging above the door are easy to find, and he makes sure it is far enough north not to impact on his patch. The price is pitiful – worse, even, than what Vince offered – but Jack cannot take the risk of the bracelet hanging around the house any longer – and he does not want to have to crawl back to Stoog, cap in hand.

Carl and Jack take the day off on Sundays, even though Jack could do with the extra work. Betsy and Jack like to meet Carl down by the river at Cherry Garden Pier. It’s become a tradition. The siblings don’t even bother to say goodbye to their mother. She likes to lie in on Sundays. Dead to the world now that she’s toiling all hours. It seems wrong to Jack that his mother is working on site, building a new bridge across the river, of all things. He can’t get used to her leaving in her overalls, walking like a man in those clumpy boots, with that scarf around her head. In the evening her face is smudged with dirt, and she stinks of grease and oil. He wonders what his dad will think when he comes back. He wonders where his dad is. On the Belgium–France border, they’ve been told. But Jack’s not sure exactly where Belgium is.

Carl is waiting for them in the usual spot. The tide is out, and they roam the muddy beach, searching for treasure among the slimy pebbles and bits of smooth, gnarled wood. Sometimes there are old coins, medieval pins, Roman pottery to be found. Stoog says he once saw a severed hand, but no one believes him.

They find a place to sit on the driest bit of the shoreline furthest from the water. In the distance Tower Bridge sticks two fingers up at the sky. The river oozes towards the sea. Ships of all shapes and sizes run with it and against it. The dredgers are at work scraping their clawfuls of silt away from the banks and dumping them into the middle of the river. Jack breathes the smell of the dank shore deep into his nostrils.

Carl throws a stone as far as he can. It plops into the water. ‘My dad’s inquiring about that place at sea school,’ he says. There is an apologetic tone to his voice.

Jack’s heart sinks, but he can’t blame his friend for wanting to do something about his life.

‘You could come?’ says Carl.

‘I can’t,’ Jack says, tilting his head in Betsy’s direction. ‘You know my dad wanted me to keep an eye on the girls.’ He tries to raise a smile, but it’s impossible. He is destined to be stuck here, scraping a living while other people travel the world, or fight the Jerries. It isn’t fair.

‘Any trouble from Stoog?’ Carl asks.

‘I’m steering clear.’ Carl still does not know about the bracelet business, and Jack has managed to avoid Stoog for now. There is an uneasy truce on the streets as the city waits to see what the war has in store for it.

Carl is silent for a moment, watching Betsy sift through the rubbish on the shore. Her shoes and socks are wet, and her hands are filthy. Her long dark hair is matted like a bird’s nest. ‘Don’t give up now, Jack,’ he says. ‘You’ve worked hard at staying out of trouble.’ Jack does not tell him that he has already started to thieve again. Three wallets in almost as many days. He had forgotten what easy money it was compared to the lugging and scrimping down at the docks. Blackout has its advantages, after all.

Betsy tugs at Jack’s sleeve.

‘Look,’ she says. She holds a piece of coloured glass up to the light. Although it has been polished smooth to a hazy green on the outside, inside it there is an imperfection – a crack – that looks just like a star. ‘It’s for you.’

‘Don’t you want to keep it?’

‘Promise you won’t send me away like the other kids?’

‘I’m not planning on it.’

‘Promise.’

‘Fine! I promise.’

‘Then I want you to have this to remember your promise.’ It’s the most she’s said in weeks. Her solemn brown eyes peer out at him from under the tangle of her hair.

‘I don’t need it to remember,’ he says, grabbing hold of her and rumpling the top of her head.

‘Take it.’ She presses the glass into his hand until it hurts.

‘All right!’ he says. ‘I won’t forget. You’re not going anywhere.’ He pulls her down next to him and gives her a squeeze. They watch the sky darken and lighten as clouds shift across it, chasing each other away from the city. They are each lost in their thoughts.

It starts to drizzle, blobs of cold on their skin. Jack stands, yanking Betsy up too. ‘Come on,’ he says. The three of them make their way towards the embankment. The rain trickles down their backs and over their gas mask boxes, softening the cardboard and making the doodles on Betsy’s blur at the edges.

The boys start to run, but Betsy can’t keep up. Carl grabs her and hoists her over his shoulder as if she weighs nothing more than a coat. She hangs there giggling as he trots up the beach and the uneven stone steps towards the road. Jack laughs too: he had forgotten what Betsy’s happiness sounded like. It rolls and falls from her mouth like a song in time with Carl’s strides, and her long hair flies out behind them like seaweed.

CHAPTER 2

Sunday, a year later, and they no longer meet at Cherry Garden Pier. In fact, Jack has not seen Carl for weeks. The Nazis have started to fly their bombs across the Channel, and Mr Mills keeps an even tighter rein on his son.

With fewer and fewer ships making it through, there is hardly any work at the docks. The men clamour for jobs; the gangers struggle to keep them under control. There is nothing for Jack. He is bottom of the heap. It is no longer a question of whether he stays straight. He does what he can to survive.

Betsy and Jack wander the streets and parks, making the most of what little daylight there is and enjoying the break from the daily drudgery of their lives. It has been raining heavily, and there are dirty puddles on the road. The pavement is dark and shiny. The wheels of the traffic splosh through the water and spray them with mud. They wander past their old school. It has been taken over by the air-raid wardens, and doubles as a first-aid post. The playground where they used to play hopscotch and marbles and kick-the-can is empty now, apart from sandbags and a big board with a clock face on it, telling them what time blackout is tonight. An ARP warden has just finished moving the hands. It’s the same warden who patrols their street, shouting through the letterbox if he thinks there’s any light showing at night.

They are at the edge of the park when Betsy tugs on Jack’s sleeve. ‘Look!’ she says. It is the first time he has seen her smile for weeks. The cumulative effect of fear, poverty and boredom has ground them both into near silence; his face is as pinched and drawn as hers.

Carl is waving at them across the grass. The boys greet each other warmly, and Betsy lets Carl hug her. He lifts her clean off her feet. She looks pitifully scrawny dangling there against his stocky frame. The three of them linger in the park, relaxing in each other’s company, catching up on all those weeks missed.

‘I’m going at the end of the month,’ says Carl.

‘Going?’

‘Don’t you remember? Sea school.’

‘So it’s actually happening? You’re leaving me for dust.’

‘It’s not too late, Jack. You could still come. There’s space …’

‘You know I can’t …’

Carl shrugs. There is no point pressing on. ‘How you been keeping anyway?’

‘I get by.’

Carl frowns, but there is no time to expand, because at that moment they see more familiar figures approaching: Tommy and Vince are swaggering along the path. Beside them is Stoog, carrying a football and walking with jerky movements, as if at every step he expects trouble.

Jack can sense Carl’s irritation. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘they’re not that bad. Have a game? It’ll be like the old days.’

‘I thought you two had fallen out?’

‘We fell back in again.’ It is true that they have buried the hatchet for now, but there is always a simmering tension where Stoog is involved, and Jack knows that he has not forgiven him. But Jack needs Stoog again, as he needed Carl before. Stoog can get him work. On the street they’re brothers of a kind.

‘You know you can’t trust him …’

‘I have to trust him. I’ve got no choice.’

‘There’s always a choice.’

‘Please?’ Jack puts a brotherly arm around Carl, and Carl rolls his eyes, but nods.

The incomers are upon them. ‘Up for a game?’ says Jack.

Stoog shoots Carl one of his looks. They have never got on. The other boys watch in silence. Stoog puffs out his chest, enjoying being the one on whom the decision rests. He nods slowly. The boys grin.

They call to a couple of the other boys who are scattered across the park. Jack recognises Eddy, who used to be in Betsy’s class, one of the many kids who trickled back to the city after the first round of evacuations to the country. ‘Why don’t you two go and look for conkers?’ says Jack.

Betsy nods at Eddy shyly and they wander off towards the large horse chestnut tree on the edge of the path. Eddy swings his gas mask up into the tree. Betsy giggles and does the same. They run to where the green balls are knocked down on to the wet grass, cracking them open to see if any are worth keeping.

The older boys set up a football pitch, using their gas masks to mark the goal posts. ‘Only thing they’re bloody good for,’ says Jack.

‘And this,’ says Stoog. He takes his mask out and holds it over his face, making a loud farting noise. The boys laugh. Stoog is in charge again, and everyone is in their rightful place.

It has turned into a breezy day, and the ground has dried a little but it is still slippery. Jack soon warms up. It is good to be doing something physical, to be chasing his friends and to feel his heart pumping and to be thinking of nothing else but the ball. Soon they are caked in mud. Stoog forgets his attitude, and Carl belongs for a moment. They point and laugh at each other, and their cheeks glow as steam rises from their skin and dissipates into the cool afternoon air.

But their fun is short-lived. A man in a tin hat is making his way across the grass towards them. ‘Come on, lads,’ he shouts. ‘Time to get home now.’

It’s the ARP warden. The boys roll their eyes at each other.

‘Just a bit longer …’ says Tommy.

‘No,’ says the warden. ‘The dark’s coming in fast tonight and we’re expecting trouble.’

The other boys moan too, and then Stoog picks up the ball and flings it at Jack, who flings it at Tommy, who pretends to fling it at the man. The man reacts instinctively to catch it, but there’s nothing to catch. The boys laugh, and Tommy drops the ball on to the ground as if to start the game again.

‘Come along, now.’ The man’s cheeks have turned scarlet. ‘It’s time to be going home.’

‘All right, all right. Keep your hair on, old man,’ says Stoog.

‘Watch your mouth, sonny.’

‘Who’re you telling to watch their mouth?’

‘Who do you think?’ says the man, squaring up to the boy. The rest of the boys form a ring around them. Betsy and Eddy stop looking at conkers. The tension vibrates in the cool air.

Carl steps in. ‘Let’s leave it there. He’s only trying to help.’

‘Never thought a Jew boy would be on the same side as a fascist,’ says Stoog, spitting the words as he cranes his neck around Carl, trying to push him out of the way. The ground is soggy beneath their feet. The sky is darkening.

‘Don’t you call me a fascist,’ says the warden.

‘Why? What you going to do about it?’

‘Yeah. What you going to do?’ Vince says, the excitement high in his voice.

Stoog and the man circle each other like tomcats.

‘Jack?’ says Carl. ‘Don’t let this happen …’

Jack is torn between backing both boys. ‘Maybe we should go,’ he says. ‘It’s almost too dark to play anyway …’

Stoog snaps around, shoving his face close to Jack’s and saying, ‘That’d be just like you. Running away …’

And the warden says, ‘Now, now. I don’t want any trouble …’ But Stoog is already turning on him and he pulls his arm back and thumps the man in the side of the head with his bony fist, knocking his helmet on to the ground. There is a cracking sound and blood but Jack isn’t sure whether it’s from the warden’s ear or Stoog’s knuckle.

And Carl is yelling, ‘Stop it,’ but Stoog is already swinging again, and this time he is aiming at Jack and hissing under his breath, ‘This one’s for the docks,’ and he lands a punch right in Jack’s eye, and there’s a stinging pain and a mist descends and all Jack can think of is whacking him back.

Carl is still shouting at them to stop, but Jack doesn’t care. Stoog may be skinny, but he’s fast and he’s accurate. Tommy steps in to help Jack, and then Vince thwacks him in the mouth, and all of a sudden the game has turned into a brawl of fists and teeth and pulled hair and ripped clothes and no one is really sure who is hitting who but all Jack knows is he’s furious – furious at Stoog for hitting him, furious with curfew and blackout, furious with feeling hungry all the time, furious with his dad and his brother for going away, with Carl for getting out and doing something with his life, furious with the whole bloody lot of it. And he’s thumping and smashing and he can taste the blood in his mouth and hear the crunch of bone and the thud of flesh and it feels good to be in the moment, not to worry about where it’s all heading.

It is Carl who manages to stop him. He grabs Jack with the grip of a deal porter’s son, pulling him out of the fray.

‘Let me go,’ says Jack, twisting away from Carl, trying to scratch at his face, kick his shins, anything to release the hold. But it takes more than that to bring Carl down. ‘Let me go,’ says Jack again.

But Carl is furious. There is a vein throbbing in his neck and he is panting. ‘What’s bloody wrong with you all?’ he says as the other boys draw back sheepishly, spitting the blood from their mouths. No one has seen Carl lose his temper before. ‘Take a look at yourselves!’ He points at the warden. ‘He could be your father. Your granddad.’ And now he turns on Jack. ‘And you,’ he says, ‘you’re the worst of all. You had a chance to do something different, but you’re going to end up just like them. Well, I wash my hands of it. You go ahead and kill yourself. I’m out of here.’

He has finally released Jack. They stand chest to chest, eye to eye. Jack clenches his fists, the rage still pumping around his system. He hears a whimper, and a small, cold hand closes around his wrist. He glances down. Betsy. He looks at the warden, a grey-haired old man who is picking his helmet up with trembling hands. He takes a step backwards. The boys and the warden wait for the explosion. He takes another step backwards, and grabs hold of Betsy’s hand. ‘Fuck you, Carl,’ he says. ‘And fuck you, Stoog. Fuck the lot of you.’ And he turns and staggers away, dragging his sister with him across the muddy grass.

The other boys begin to disperse, and the warden doesn’t leave until the last boy fades into the twilight.

A month later, and the raids have grown steadily worse. London has now had nineteen consecutive days and nights of relentless bombardment, of noise and smoke, flame and dust. The docks have been obliterated, the mighty cranes are twisted and contorted into strange shapes, the warehouses flattened, the barges charred embers. Barrels of alcohol explode like gunpowder; paint melts and pours into the Thames, turning it into a river of fire. The deal porters’ timber went up on the first night of the raids. The firemen couldn’t get close enough to quench the inferno. It still burns, lighting the way for the next bombs.

The money from the bracelet is long gone. The only good that came of it was the sewing machine that Jack’s mother uses to make new clothes out of the old. But clothes don’t put food in their stomachs, so Jack has found new ways of getting by that inevitably involve Stoog.

He pulls a package wrapped in paper from his bag and offers it to his mother. Six fat sausages peep out. ‘Mostly gristle,’ he says. His mother takes the parcel. She’s given up asking where he gets these things. She places it on the side in the kitchen. She cannot bring herself to look at him.

Later, Jack lies on his back and stares up into the darkness, listening to his mother’s dry cough, the wail of next-door’s baby, the hollow thud of an air raid in the distance. They have moved their mattresses into the small front room. They sleep in their clothes. The shelter Jack so proudly built with his brother and father is useless. It is cramped and smelly, and most of the time inches deep in fetid water.

In the distance the sky is bright with flames. There is the whine of sirens. Probably another attack on the docks. He is so used to it, he feels himself begin to drift off. A floorboard creaks and a ghostly shadow moves from his mother’s mattress towards him. A small voice says, ‘Jack? You awake, Jack?’ Betsy climbs in next to him. She is so slight that she easily fits on to the single mattress.

‘Come here,’ he says, hugging her trembling body tightly. As he smooths her dark curls, Betsy’s breaths begin to lengthen. She scratches at her head. Lice. They’ve all got them.

Jack cannot remember what it was like not to feel hungry. Food is rationed, there are queues at the shops, and their mother doesn’t have time to wait in them because of her job. Jack has plenty more profitable things to do than wait for a slab of butter, and Betsy refuses to be separated from him. There are rats everywhere. Tommy says they’re as big as terriers down his street. Stoog has been catching them and selling them for meat.

There is a whistle outside the window. Speak of the devil. Jack and Betsy are immediately wide awake and scrambling out into the cool air of the streets. Stoog leers at them in the moonlight. ‘Got a good feeling about tonight,’ he says.

Tommy and Vince are here too, and other faces that Jack and Betsy recognise. They make their way through the park where they used to play cricket and football, now home to the anti-aircraft brigade. They hug the shadow of the tree line. Jack can just make out the pale wall of sandbags and the dark shape of the three-inch gun behind it, the movement of the men of the Royal Artillery, too tense and expectant to notice the youngsters who should be safely tucked up in a shelter.

They move in silence. There is no point in trying to talk above the squealing sirens that send everyone else scurrying under tables and staircases, deep down into the underbelly of the Tube stations. But not them. They know there will be rich pickings about.

They pause at Tower Bridge, lining up one by one to gaze at the river. The moon glitters in oily patches on the surface of the water. There are shapes down there: boats battered and sunk by the previous nights’ raids. Fuel and timber still burn, pale lights flickering among the ripples. Above them, searchlights criss-cross the sky, illuminating the trailing tendrils of the monstrous barrage balloons that float fatly there. Further away, black smoke curls up from the docks, blotting out the moon like a cloud.

They hear the German planes before they see them. They can identify each type as well as any anti-aircraft regiment. No British up there yet. They can just make out the bombers, flying wing tip to wing tip above the river, following the trails of moonlight flashing on the surface, searching for the small fires lit by the incendiary devices that exploded earlier, mythical birds seeking their prey. Betsy’s eyes grow wider. Time stands still. The sound of the engines roars in their ears, rumbles in their chests. Thud thud thud. Like a heartbeat.

The planes are almost on top of them. The rat-a-tat-tat of the anti-aircraft guns starts up. Suddenly the planes swing to the left, to their side of the river, the south side, over the docks again. They catch a glimpse of light in a cockpit. And then … Boom!

The noise slams through them. They are running again, this time in the wake of the planes. The searchlights try to pick out the bombers in their pale beams, but they fail. The drone of more bombers joins the battery from the ground. Shrapnel tinkles like metal rain on the roofs. The fire engines come clanging along the road.

And now the Allied planes come swooping in to try to fight them off. But the boys aren’t interested in dogfights these days. They are running over rubble, and the air is full of dust and bangs and wails – human and inhuman. Fires rage across the city. Boy Scouts run from warden to warden, shouting above the din. But relaying messages won’t fill empty bellies.

Jack and Betsy stay together, but the others fan out, looking for the butchers and the grocers, anywhere for a bargain. ‘You all right, Bets?’ says Jack. She nods. Her teeth shine white among the smudges of dirt on her face.

There is a flash of light to their right. Jack is sure they haven’t been hit, but a split second later they are lifted clean off their feet. They slam back into the wall of a house, whose windows are blown in at the same time. The air is knocked right out of Jack’s chest and it takes a good few seconds for him to realise what has happened. All he can hear is a high-pitched ringing. Betsy is lying next to him. She has hit her head, and for a moment he isn’t sure whether she’s alive or dead. There is a trickle of red on her forehead, but then her eyes flicker open, and relief rushes through him and he leans over to grab her bony body in a hug, her wiry little arms gripping him back.

Around him, the world seems different, as if he is looking through a prism: the objects are crystal clear yet haloed with coloured light. He blinks and shakes his head, trying to clear the outlines that are seeping into a haze. The piercing echo of the blast is beginning to subside in his ears, but the sounds are still distorted. There are groans coming through the blown-out window next to him. He struggles to his feet and squints into the yawning hole. There is glass and splintered furniture and smashed crockery everywhere, dust settling over it like snow. He cannot locate the source of the moaning.

Jack tells Betsy to wait where she is. He takes off his coat and lays it over the windowsill where jagged glass still sticks up from the wooden frame. He climbs carefully into the house. The pictures have been blown clean off the walls, and a large dining table has been thrown on its side, and now he sees there is a man sitting on the floor next to it. Jack stops, unsure whether to climb straight back out. The man is ghostly pale, covered in dust. He appears unharmed, but confused: ‘Have you seen her?’ he keeps saying. ‘Have you seen her?’

There is no sign of anyone else.

Jack stands there for a moment. Behind him the torn curtains flutter and flap in the breeze. It is the perfect opportunity to grab something, before the man comes to his senses. Jack’s eyes flicker across the room. He is quick to recognise the objects of value. He snatches up a bent photograph frame and a twisted silver candlestick.

On the floor, the man is still moaning as he starts to dig into the pile of plaster and brick with his bare hands. Jack knows he could recover at any moment. He starts to back away, towards the window, clutching his loot in one hand. At the sound of glass crunching beneath Jack’s feet, the man suddenly stops digging and stares up at Jack with eyes large as saucers. Jack is ready to run, every muscle tense. But the man doesn’t seem to be able to see anything through the tears that are making dark tracks down his pale cheeks. ‘I know she’s here,’ he says. ‘Have you seen her?’ And he turns back to his scrabbling in the debris.

Jack is almost out of there. He allows himself one last glance around the place, in case he’s missed anything. It is then that he spots the headscarf. It is hidden from the man on the floor by the great broken back of the dining table. The horror hits him like a blow to the chest. The scarf has the same pattern as his mother’s favourite one. He cannot help taking a step forward. His eye picks out the arm, the legs, the body of a woman who, apart from a light dusting of ash, seems untouched, as if sleeping peacefully among the ruins. His gaze is drawn back to the familiar headscarf, the sprinkling of pale flowers on a blue background. It is exactly the same as his mother’s, except the pale flowers of this one are being swallowed up by the dark stain that is spreading, and he knows that the head beneath it is crushed and that this woman will never get up.

The man has noticed the look on Jack’s face. He has stopped digging and is staring at Jack again. ‘She’s here,’ he says. ‘I know she is …’

Jack tries to swallow, to clear his throat, but the words choke with the dust in his mouth. The man turns back, attacking the rubble even more frantically, and Jack wants to reach out to stop him, and he crouches down and puts a hand on the man’s shoulder, but the man carries on scratching, and Jack can see that the rubble is turning black and the man’s fingers are turning black, and Jack realises it is blood: the man’s hands are bleeding as he scrapes and scratches at the rubble. And Jack wants to say sorry, sorry for the body in the rubble, sorry for taking the picture frame and the candlestick, but he just doesn’t know how.

Suddenly, bizarrely, there is a knock at the front door, and a voice calls out, ‘Mr Knightley? Mrs Knightley?’ Jack stands as an ARP warden comes into the room. She too is smeared with dirt and dust. ‘Mr Knightley?’ She peers into the gloom, shines her torch across the ruins of the house until the beam lands on Jack, dusty and wild, a scavenger on the prowl.

‘Who are you?’ she asks. Then, spotting the silver still clutched in his hand: ‘Put those down! How dare you …?’

‘I was going to …’ but Jack’s voice tails off. There’s no point in explaining. He is what he is. He does not have the kind of bravery or even the kind of words it takes to turn a life around.

‘Get out!’ she is saying. ‘Go on! Out, you animal!’ He dodges her blows, and scrambles to the window, dropping the frame and the candlestick as he climbs back out the way he came in, his cheeks burning with humiliation. He shakes his coat out and grabs hold of Betsy’s small hand, and they’re off again. He suddenly has an urgent desire to reach home.

Jack tries not to look at the things that loom out of the night. Is that an arm or a foot? An ARP warden picks it up. His eyes have a faraway look, as if he’s trying not to see it either. Jack blinks, and through the swirling clouds he sees Tommy – or it might be Vince – rifling through the outer garments of a legless piece of flesh. How has he never noticed this horror before? He closes his eyes, and the broken body of the woman, her head crushed in his mother’s scarf, swims there. When he looks again, there is a lady without any skirt or shoes or stockings on. She is stumbling along the road, naked from the waist down, her charred skin lit by the flames of a thousand fires. And there, behind her, is Stoog, and he is rattling the bent and broken doors, searching high and low for whatever he can lay his hands on. Jack trips on, over a baby squashed and pulped in the gutter; beneath a bare tree, its branches adorned with limbs instead of leaves. And all the time the jangling bells of the fire engines and the crunching of the rubble underfoot and the cries for help and the dust filling their lungs so that he is choking on death.

Jack squeezes Betsy’s hand tighter, pulling her on. They are nearly at Southwark Park Road when they catch sight of Stoog and the others again. Stoog is grinning. He has got what looks like a haunch of meat and some new boots. The other boys’ bags are full, and they are carrying things too: Jack glimpses a stiff chicken, its feathers dull, its neck thin and long, a pair of gentleman’s silk dressing gowns.

The all-clear siren is sounding, calling out across the city that the danger has passed. All over London people will be coming out of their shelters, wondering what they will find.

‘What you got?’ says Stoog.

Jack shakes his head.

‘Nothing? But …’

Jack holds up his hand. ‘Don’t,’ he says. A terrible, morbid feeling has settled in his bones.

Stoog grins disdainfully and moves off. The other boys follow. Their faces are speckled with grime; they are camouflaged soldiers fighting their own battles. They melt away into the war-torn city before anyone can ask questions. Jack watches them go and is filled with disgust at what they have all become.

He and Betsy make their way home. Ash floats through the air, settling in their hair. Small flames still burn around them: wisps of light in the dark. The fires cast a creepy guttering light across Jack’s broken neighbourhood. The high street is unrecognisable. Walls are missing. You can see right in to people’s bedrooms. Clothes flap across the ground. Twisted metal lies everywhere. The moon is reflected in a mirror on someone’s wall. A bed half hangs from a first storey.

The pub on the corner that marks where they turn for their road is a furnace, flames burning in every window. Clouds of black smoke billow from the roof into the sky. There are fire wardens everywhere, clutching their stirrup pumps, aiming their hoses at innumerable streaks of flame. Boys and girls younger than Jack, many of whom he knows, fill buckets of water for them. Others race around with wheelbarrows full of sand, which they tip on the flames. Girl Guides in their blue uniforms soothe the injured and carry water and blankets to the shell-shocked.

They almost stumble into a deep crater halfway down their neighbouring street. Jack starts to jog. Broken glass crunches and crackles beneath his feet. Betsy runs to keep up. But it is all right. The houses at their end are untouched. Their home is still there. The front door is still on its hinges.

His mother is behind it, chewing her lip. ‘Where have you been?’ she shouts as soon as they fall into the hall.

Jack hesitates for a moment. The relief that surges through him is quickly replaced by defensiveness. ‘Down the Underground,’ he says. No need to look at Betsy. She will always back him up. But their mother doesn’t question them; that they are here and alive is enough. She kneels down and opens her arms and clings to them in the dark.

Outside, sirens still scream and bells still ring. The clean-up will continue all night. Inside, the three of them slump on the floor. Betsy is a ghost, her face and clothes so pale with ash, the dribble of dried blood a dark scar across her forehead.

Their mother leans her head back against the wall, a knot of exhaustion. ‘Enough is enough,’ she says. She picks something out of Betsy’s hair. She does not catch Jack’s eye. ‘It’s just us left,’ she says.

‘Don’t say it.’ Jack clenches his fists.

‘They’re gone. Both of them. They’re not coming back.’ There has been no news of his dad or Walt. They did not return with the men from Dunkirk.

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ says Jack.

‘I do.’

They stare at each other.

‘There’s a special train leaving in the morning. Another round of evacuations. I’ve booked her on it.’ She doesn’t need to carry on. Jack’s shoulders sag. He cannot fight any more. His mother is right. He cannot keep his sister safe. No one left in this smouldering city is safe.

Betsy’s eyes widen as the news sinks in. She shakes her head and inches back towards the door. ‘You promised,’ she says. Jack cannot stand the accusation in her voice, her eyes. He stops her, clasping her tightly, smoothing her smoky hair, filled with the dust of the dead. He feels her knobbly shoulders shiver beneath his sore hands, and he feels the piece of glass from Cherry Garden Pier burning like a hot coal in his pocket.

They wake early to the scratch of metal on rubble as London clears away debris on top of debris. Jack’s mother dresses Betsy in her only coat. Her shoes are so threadbare now that Jack shoves some cardboard into them to cover up the holes. He can barely look at his mother. He can barely look at himself.

His mother has written ‘Betsy Sullivan, Drummond Road, London SE17’ on a large white label. She ties it to Betsy’s coat, as if she’s a piece of lost luggage. ‘I’ve done you lunch, my love,’ she says. Her voice is almost a whisper. A tremor runs through it, but she has no more tears to cry. ‘Jam sandwiches. And I made your favourite biscuits.’ She has used their week’s ration of butter and sugar for these instead of the stale bread she usually tries to get away with.

Betsy holds the bag with her food in it. Jack holds her little suitcase. His sister has been polished and scrubbed. She looks as tidy as if she is off to church. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he clears his throat. He must be strong for her. He takes her hand. Their mother hovers in the background. ‘Right, you,’ he says, struggling to force the words out as they scratch and catch in his throat. ‘Let’s go.’

They pass walls teetering on the edge of collapse, hosepipes and buckets of sand, burning gas pipes, curtains flapping in the wind in buildings that look like dolls’ houses with their fronts left open. They pass the posters telling mothers to send their children away, people who look like they haven’t slept for weeks. They look out for live wires, particularly where the streets are waterlogged. Everywhere there is the smell of sewage, and wet, charred wood.

At Paddington Station, Betsy is pushed and pulled into one of the many groups of children. They all have the same wide, staring eyes. Some of them are crying. Betsy bites her lip and swallows, but she won’t cry. Jack feels his heart break. It actually breaks in two right there. He stands next to his mother. He feels her coldness. She is their mother, but she’s a shell. She steps forward towards her daughter. ‘Betsy love, I’m sure you’ll be back by …’ She cannot finish her sentence. The word ‘Christmas’ is too gay and bright and precious to exist at this moment. She tries to bend down and kiss Betsy’s pale cheek, but she is split from her by the ample figure of a buxom woman in a tweed suit.

‘Where are they going?’ Jack asks the woman, who is checking off a list.

‘We’ll tell you when they get there,’ she says, without looking up.

Jack smacks her clipboard, making a sharp sound. Now he’s got her attention. ‘Tell me now,’ he says.

‘You’ll find out in due course,’ she says, glancing at him as her lip curls. She is not intimidated. ‘Now hurry along. You’re only making it more difficult for your sister.’ She is right. He can see that Betsy’s bottom lip is quivering. He lets her usher Betsy towards a group of children who are then herded down the platform by more women in tweed suits. Betsy doesn’t even turn to wave goodbye, she just lets herself be carried away on the tide of other bewildered children. The battered gas mask box bumps against the back of her legs.

His vision blurs as she is ushered up into the train. The platform is an empty space, devoid of life as he is devoid of feeling. His fingers close over Betsy’s piece of glass, and he feels the familiar rage trickle into his bloodstream. The woman with the clipboard is still here, ticking things off her list. He grabs hold of the top of her arm. ‘You can’t just send them off and not know where they’re going,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘You wouldn’t do it to your own kids …’ He wants to crush her. He feels so impotent. The woman struggles to shake herself free, but Jack won’t let go, and she makes a strangled yelp for help, and suddenly there are people descending on him from all sides, and his mother cries out and there is a policeman, his helmet bobbing above everyone’s heads, his buttons a neat, shiny row down his front, and Jack’s mother has a hold on the policeman and they are talking and pointing, and Jack’s rage turns to fear. Would his mother turn him in? She has sent her only daughter away. Perhaps she will do the same to him. And he cannot take it any longer – the relentless inevitability of it all.

Jack does not stop running until he reaches Carl’s door. He hammers and hammers, and eventually it opens, a narrow crack through which Mr Mills is peering. The man is not happy to see him, but Carl is there in the corridor, and he whispers quietly to his father, who eventually moves aside.

Jack does not care that his eyes are red and his grubby face is streaked with tears. He reaches out to Carl. ‘Can I come?’ he asks. ‘Can I still come with you?’

And Carl pulls him inside, where it is bright and warm and he feels the weight of his friend’s arm across his shoulder.

CHAPTER 3
Charlie

Charlie braces himself against the heavy swell. The Atlantic Ocean stretches mile after choppy mile in every direction – every crinkle in every wave could hide a U-boat. The first British ship was sunk out here in the North-western Approaches, just hours after Chamberlain’s radio broadcast, and not much later than the sleeper train was pulling away from London towards Inverness all those days ago. It was an unarmed passenger ship, torpedoed as the evening meal was being served.

He scans the flight deck, flat apart from the island with its shiny black pom-pom guns. What a sight an aircraft carrier is! She carries the might of fifteen hundred men and more than fifty folded planes anywhere in the world, transporting them safely in her enormous belly like a battle-ready whale.

Charlie steadies himself again: even a ship this size bounces like a cork on these waves. The planes are being brought up on the lifts from below. This is what he’s been waiting for. No more exams. This is the real thing. Squadron 843’s stumpy Blackburn Skuas appear first. He scratches his head and runs his fingers through his hair. He’s glad he’s not flying one of these new fighter planes. Give him a good old-fashioned bi-plane and an open cockpit any day.

He shakes his legs and arms out to get the circulation going. His sheepskin-lined clothes are warm but cumbersome. He smiles to himself as he remembers target training. He has always been a good shot. Calm and steady, like his plane. And she may be slow, but boy, does she respond to his touch. He can make her do whatever he wants with the lightest pressure from his hands and feet. They can swoop and climb, turn and stop, bank, dive, soar, roll, loop the loop … although that’s a court martial, of course – if you’re caught.

‘Either you’re young and brilliant or young and stupid,’ one of his instructors had said.

‘A little bit of all three, I suspect, sir,’ he’d answered, grinning. But he isn’t. The one thing you can’t call Charlie is stupid. He’s sensible, and he can assess a situation in a split second. He knows what he’s capable of and he knows what his plane’s capable of. That’s why the training was a doddle.

‘Thinking about a pretty lady again, boyo?’ says Mole, his words whipped away by the wind.

‘You could say that,’ says Charlie. And actually, he has allowed himself to think of the girl from the train, but not out here on the flight deck. Here, he needs to focus. He slips his arms into the Mae West, wriggling to make it more comfortable on his shoulders. ‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘Too many damn straps and buckles and safety clips.’

‘Mind your language in front of young Billy the Kid,’ says Mole. He nods at the boy standing next to them. Bill is actually a little older than Charlie, but he seems younger without Charlie’s breezy self-confidence. He is their TAG. The plane’s telegraphist–air gunner. He is quiet and respectful. But then, he is only a lower-deck rating. He is also perpetually unflustered. Important if you find yourself in a sticky situation.

Bill smiles and makes a gesture like firing a gun with his hands, before he slips on his leather gloves.

‘Come on, Billy. Let’s do this,’ says Mole. The Welshman has taken the Kid under his wing. He takes everyone under his wing. He’s an astute observer, and has a gift for making people feel at ease. Both traits useful when you’re the navigator in a cockpit flying at almost two thousand feet.

The fleet has received a distress call from an unarmed and lonely cargo ship two hundred miles away. It is being chased by a German submarine. It is too far for the fleet’s ships to get there quickly, but the pilots will.

The airmen were immediately at the ready. They are always at the ready, whether they are standing by in the ready room or writing letters in the wardroom or asleep in their cabins. The flight deck crew indicate that the Skuas are good to go. Charlie says a silent prayer for them. There is ribbing in the wardroom about Charlie’s squadron’s old Stringbags, but out here on the wind-lashed flight deck, there is nothing but respect for each other.

Charlie shivers: part anticipation, part wind chill. There is no dread: this is what it’s all about. At last he can put the training into practice.

‘Number four crew, stand by to scramble!’

Charlie nods at Frank and Paddy – the other two squadron pilots – and their crew. The Fairey Swordfish have been run into place. They rise and fall at the far end of the ship. The flight deck crew unfurl their wings as the airmen lumber towards them like bears in their thick boots and Irvin jackets – but in a moment they too will be weightless, as graceful as the most delicate of insects.

Charlie can see the bombs strapped in racks beneath their plane. Mole and Billy disappear behind her wing and haul themselves up into the cockpit. Charlie nods at Tugger, solid and windswept on the deck. He reaches for the handholds, climbing up above the wheel, over the wing and into the front of the cockpit. He hands Tugger the crank handle, sits down on the parachute, clips himself in, yanks his goggles down, pulls his harness tight, starts his cockpit checks.

Tugger, his large body squeezed between a strut and the body of the plane, fits the handle into its hole and starts to turn, slowly at first, then faster. Danny, wedged further down, helps him. Through the howl of the wind Charlie hears the whizz of the motor. Tugger and Danny wind, faster and faster. Their arms become a blur. Charlie gets ready with the throttle, mixture, switches, trim. He can tell from the sound that it’s time to flick her into life.

With a cough and a splutter, the propeller starts to rotate. The men still crank. The smoke from the plane’s engine belches out and is whisked away on the wind. The propeller is a spinning blur, just the paint on its tips visible, a yellow circle. Tugger and Danny can finally stop. They jump down on to the deck. Tugger runs around the wing to the rudder. Danny does the same on the other side. They lie on the struts beneath the tail fin, holding the plane steady as Charlie does his final checks. The legs of their overalls ripple and flap in the slipstream. The engine warms up to a throaty roar. Tugger and Danny can feel she’s ready. They glance back at Charlie. Thumbs up. As one, they run to the wheels. The chocks are away. Charlie is free.

The deck stretches out in front of him. Beyond the deck, the sky and the ocean. The ship is head to wind, ready for take-off. The sound of wind and machine is thick in his ears now, and Mole’s voice, through the rubber Gosport tube that links them together. ‘Steer two six zero.’

‘Roger, two six zero.’

Charlie opens the throttle and the Swordfish answers with a growl. He checks the revs, the pressure, the temperature. He gives the thumbs-up to the flight deck crew, and they’re away, the world slipping past faster and faster, the wheels bumping. And then all is clear and smooth and they are dropping off the end of the ship and up, up into the sky.

‘Steer two one zero,’ says Mole in his ear.

‘Roger, two one zero,’ he replies.

Charlie has perfected his deck take-off, but every flight is like the first. The sky opens up before him as the ship disappears behind until it is a dot among the shifting waves. It is beautiful. Breathtaking. Nerve-wracking. Exhilarating. It is like nothing else in the world. The sea sparkles miles below. He fancies he sees the curve of the globe. He trusts his plane implicitly, as he trusts Mac and the Kid, Tugger and Danny, almost more than he trusts himself.

Mole starts to hum some ditty down the tube, Charlie catching parts of the tune before they are snatched away on the slipstream. The observer is always singing as he scratches away with his pencils and compass on the charts. Charlie has no idea how he manages to balance the boards and the rubbers and all the other paraphernalia, since he isn’t really sitting down at all. It is only Charlie who gets a proper seat. The others perch on nothing more than a cross bar.

It is an hour’s flight to the merchant ship. Nothing to do but enjoy it. He uncricks his neck, rolls his shoulders to loosen them up as much as he can in the cramped seat. The sky is a patchwork of dark and light. Visibility is good. The sun breaks out, and Charlie could be four years old again – on his first flight: there’s the same roar of the wind, the rumble of the plane – and him, weightless, soaring into the endless sky, his father behind him, beaming with pride, his mother’s face receding way, way below, creased with worry. His thoughts drift to the girl he met on the train. Olivia. Perhaps he could bring her up here one day. She is the kind of girl his mother would have approved of. Or at least, he thinks she is. He remembers his mother talking about families, and how she hoped that one day he would meet the right person, like she had. She had laughed, imagining herself as a grandmother. In his memory, they are stretched out on a picnic rug on the beach. His father must have been swimming in the sea. The air is warm, and he is lying looking up at her, and she is stroking his head, her curly hair a hazy halo of gold around her smiling face. He is not sure whether the memory is true or false. It feels real, but he must have been only five or six. The year before they both died.

Mole has stopped humming. ‘Dead ahead.’ The words bring Charlie back to the present. As usual, the observer’s calculations are spot on, and already they are closing in on the merchant ship. Charlie pushes all thoughts from his mind. The world shrinks. As they approach, one of the Skuas flies past them, back towards the carrier. ‘Must be low on fuel,’ Mole yells down his ear. Charlie nods, concentrating. Ahead, he sees another Skua wheel around like an angry seabird. He sees the tiny bombs fall and the plumes of smoke and spray as shrapnel bursts from the sea where they land. It swoops in low – too low – next to the ship. As the mess clears, he can see that the plane is in trouble: smoke trails from its nose. Damaged by its own bomb, it splashes into the sea.

‘Bugger,’ says Charlie. ‘Where’s that U-boat?’ All he can see is the merchant ship, a long and low smudge on the sea, her drab sides a dusky contrast to the red ensign that flutters at her stern. She is hove to, rocking in the waves.

‘Must have dived,’ says Mole.

Charlie loops around the merchant ship. He needs to assess the situation as quickly as he can. It looks as though some of the crew are still on the ship. But the ship’s lifeboats are in the water – and full of crew waving at them frantically. There is a lot of debris around them, some of it from the plane that just crashed. But another plane is missing. Did that go down too? There are two yellow life jackets – the missing airmen? – swimming towards the merchant ship; a third bobs inertly on the waves. Charlie has swung the plane right back out to sea. He works the port rudder and they turn towards the ship again. They must be eight hundred yards away when, ‘There! There!’ Mole suddenly yells.

The submarine is rising. Its conning tower and gun break the surface first as water cascades off its back. Charlie’s heart thumps. This is not a dummy run with pretend bombs. It’s the real thing. He swallows. His mouth is suddenly dry. Time moves slowly. Second by second. His thoughts are clear as a reflection in a puddle on a still day.

It’s all in the timing. He drops the plane lower over the water. Closer and closer. The submarine lies alongside the merchant ship, sleek and black. Wait, wait. Wait. Now! Charlie presses the button, and, as they pass over, the Kid starts to fire, clack-clack-clack, manoeuvring the gun into position. There is a thud that resonates in their chests as the bomb Charlie released explodes, and spray spatters the back of the plane.

Mole cranes his neck to see behind. ‘Good shot, boyo,’ he shouts. ‘It’s dived again. Won’t go far. It’s Germans on the ship. Five of them. Must have boarded before we got here.’ Charlie knows the Germans will take whatever provisions and information – and British – they can and then scuttle the ship with their torpedoes.

He circles again. He can see the life jackets have reached the ship and are being hauled out of the water. The third life jacket still bobs near to where he first spotted it. The Kid keeps his finger on the trigger as he swings the gun back and forth, always ready. Sure enough, the U-boat resurfaces. Charlie goes in for the attack. This is their last bomb. He needs to make it count. Five hundred yards. His hand is on the button. ‘Steady, boy,’ says Mole. Four hundred yards. Three hundred. He presses the button. The charge dislodges from its bracket. Another thud resonates through their bodies and seawater spurts into the air as the bomb explodes. They can’t see anything through the smoke and the froth.

‘Spot on!’ says Mole.

‘Thanks for the shower,’ says the Kid.

‘You were beginning to smell.’

‘That’s it. We’re all out,’ says Charlie.

The sub is on the surface again. The German crew are scrambling to get off the captured ship and back to their submarine. There is a kerfuffle, and the British airmen leap off the ship and into the water, yellow blobs in the dark sea.

The Kid yells from behind, ‘Take us in closer, Charlie. Let me have a go.’ But Charlie doesn’t dare. It’s a mess down there. The submarine is trying to pick up her German crew, who in turn are trying to grab the British men from the water. Training doesn’t prepare you for this.

Mole is in his ear. ‘Here comes back-up, boyo.’

Frank and Paddy are here at last. But too late: the greedy shark has swallowed its German crew and its British prize. Charlie is relieved that he doesn’t have any more bombs to drop. He doesn’t want to make that decision. Frank and Paddy go in for the kill. But the submarine sinks back into the ocean with its catch. As a final goodbye it sends its own torpedo to take out the merchant ship. Charlie spots the track of the missile under the water but there is nothing he can do. The merchant ship flinches, spewing black smoke up into the air. Her back is broken, and, as dark clouds cascade into the sky, she too sinks deep into the sea.

It is as if she were never there.

Mole doesn’t sing on the way back to the carrier. There is just the sound of the air rushing past, and the hum and rattle of their aeroplane. Charlie has kept his crew and his plane safe, but seeing a ship die leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. He tries not to dwell on the captured airmen, men whose hands he grasped only moments ago on the flight deck, who will either never wake again, or find themselves in an enemy camp.

They are about eight miles from the rest of the fleet, close enough to see the carrier in the distance, when suddenly Charlie hears Mole’s breath catch in his throat. At the same time, Charlie sees it too.

‘Forty-five degrees starboard,’ says Mole.

Charlie presses the foot pedals to operate the rudder. The plane responds immediately. He dips the starboard wing. There is shadow, and above it a mark like a white scar in the water. Charlie feels a shiver of anticipation. There’s no mistaking the track of a periscope.

The U-boat is heading straight for the rest of the fleet, approaching at a ninety-degree angle. It is almost close enough to attack. The British ships won’t have seen it yet, but Charlie can’t warn them: radio silence must be kept at all times in case the Germans pick their messages up. They have no bombs left, either. There’s only one thing to do.

‘Take me in!’ yells the Kid.

Charlie doesn’t even have to think about it. It’s the only way they can alert the fleet. He feels the gunner’s weight shift as he leans out over the side of the plane, searching for his target. The hunter is about to become the hunted.

Charlie has his own gun in front of him. Its barrel gleams gold in the afternoon sun. He drops as low as he dares, the plane’s wheels almost skimming the dark crests of the waves. Charlie opens his gun. As they pass, the Kid lets rip. Clack-clack-clack.

‘Diving!’ says Mole, and, although the Kid fires a little longer, swinging the gun as they bank around, the U-boat has gone. In its place is a mass of seething green. They may not have done the slightest damage, but at least they have warned their ships that the enemy is on the prowl.

The aircraft carrier is now close enough to make out the tiny figures on the high deck. She is still sideways on to the U-boat, the worst position to be in if you’re about to be fired at. But she is beginning to turn. The three airmen look down over the edge of the cockpit. At the same moment they spot the telltale streaks of white under the water. The submarine has fired, but the carrier is still turning, turning, and she manages to swing her great mass head-on to the submarine, and the torpedoes pass either side of her and safely into the empty water behind.

At once, the destroyers that have remained with the aircraft carrier go on the attack, like a herd of grey sea elephants rounding on the enemy. The sea is churning foam as they drop their charges, and the air is bursting with noise that dies away as the ships stop. They wait. Charlie’s blood pumps in his ears.

The sea settles back to a ripple, and then the submarine slowly breaks the surface. Its conning tower has been damaged. White horses break against its monstrous sides. But it is broken. Charlie sees men jumping into the water.

Charlie needs to land: he is very low on fuel. The carrier signals with its lamp. The Kid signals back. The great ship turns head to wind. Her wake is a foamy ribbon fluttering out behind her. Charlie approaches alongside. He glimpses the pink faces of his fellow sailors looking up as they pass. He swings the plane one hundred and eighty degrees, lines himself up, considers wind speed, direction. The flat of the landing deck stretches before him. He can see the white stripes. The metal wires strung across it. The batsman with his ping-pong bats. He slows the engine right back. The ship slices through the water ahead of him, the V of the waves spreads out, ever increasing.

He pulls a lever on his right to lower the hook beneath the plane. The batsman holds the bats out level. He is on line. About fifty yards to go. He drops the tail. Nose up. It is just the deck and the plane, the batsman, and Charlie. And then he is over the deck, the batsman gives ‘Cut’, and, as the plane’s wheels make contact, the crew lurch against their harnesses and bounce and scrape as the arrester hook tugs at the wires that slow the plane down, and they finally come to a standstill. Charlie unclips himself. His legs are stiff as planks of wood.

Mole squeezes his shoulder. ‘Top landing, boyo,’ he says.

The plane’s propellers slow and stop. They clamber out, back on to their version of solid ground, the steady, humming mass of their aircraft carrier. He has grown accustomed to the rumble of the engine and the rush of the air. But now there is the sound of the sea and the Tannoy and the shouts of men. The ship is manic with activity as the other Swordfish come in to land. The flight deck crew clear the way as they manoeuvre the planes back towards the lift.

Charlie heads for the island. He removes his helmet and goggles as he goes. His legs are coming back to life. He is desperate to pee, but he has to report to the captain first.

Captain Turnbull is a man of determination. He acknowledges Charlie as he approaches, but keeps his head cocked to the side as he listens intently to the pilot of the Skua that returned earlier and to Paddy, who has made it here already. The captain’s eyes are bright above the black bags. He has a shock of white hair, although he must be in his mid-forties – about the same age as Charlie’s father would have been. And Charlie is the same age as his father was at the beginning of his own generation’s Great War. Life gone full circle.

‘Nice work, pilot,’ says Captain Turnbull as Charlie reaches them, and the other pilots nod a welcome.

‘Thank you, sir,’ says Charlie. He ruffles his hair up with his fingers, where it has been plastered to his head beneath the leather helmet.

‘Your first operation and our first prisoners-of-war,’ says the captain, indicating to the destroyer that is picking up the men from the submarine. ‘And not a casualty among them. Not from the U-boat, or among our fleet, thanks to you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Keep it up and you’ll go far.’

‘I hope so, sir.’

‘Shame about that merchant ship.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We lost four men. Two dead. Two prisoners.’

‘That’s right, sir,’ says Paddy.

‘Attacks are getting worse.’

Paddy nods. ‘They are, sir.’

‘You think they were part of a coordinated effort? Or just a bit of luck?’

‘Hard to tell, sir. The sea is chock-full of them at the moment.’

They all gaze towards the destroyer. Charlie imagines the Germans being hoisted on board, their heads hung low. There is no honour in being captured.

‘It seems that your beloved Fairey Swordfish may not have had its day, FitzHerbert,’ the captain says, still looking out of the window.

‘Certainly hasn’t, sir.’

‘Could indeed be our secret weapon against these U-boats.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Pass my thanks on to the rest of your crew.’

‘I will, sir.’

The captain turns back to the other men and his charts. Charlie is dismissed.

Back on the blustery deck, Mole and the Kid are also staring out at the destroyer as the last of the Germans is transferred on to the ship. Charlie knows it will be the U-boat commander, the eagle of the Third Reich glinting on his peaked cap.

‘Dry clothes and a stiff drink, that’s the order of the day, boyo,’ says Mole.

‘Just my tot’ll do me,’ says the Kid.

Charlie starts to undo his coat as he follows Mole to the wardroom. He slaps the Kid on the shoulder on his way past. ‘Good job today, Billy,’ he says. The Kid nods and grins. ‘Now go and tell everyone how you were responsible for taking Britain’s first prisoners-of-war.’

‘I will. Thanks, Charlie.’ The Kid disappears off to his own mess deck.

‘First POWs, eh?’ says Mole. ‘Now that calls for a party.’

There are great celebrations throughout the ship that night. Below deck, the men cram into their messes. Once the rum lies warm in their bellies, they don’t notice how cramped everything is. The air grows warmer, and the atmosphere lighter. The cooks slap extra food on the airmen’s plates.

In the wardroom, Charlie and Mole drink gin with the rest of the officers. Lieutenant Commander Widdecombe, the squadron commander of 686, will write to the captured and dead men’s families in the morning. For now, they will focus on the positive. Flying is what they were born for, and this war will show the world what they are capable of. Charlie’s thoughts drift to the girl on the train. The men mistake the flush in his cheeks for booze, but really it is because he is remembering how Olivia had walked down the carriage, tucking her hair nervously behind her ears as she followed the waiter who was trying to find a spare table for her to sit at. But of course there were his cadets, lounging oafishly across the seats, ogling the poor girl and making inappropriate remarks until he had brought them into line. He could hardly blame them: she was extremely attractive. Charlie had been momentarily lost for words before inviting her to share his table, and breakfast had somehow been an intimate affair, even among the clinking of plates and cutlery, and the stares of his giggling charges in their crumpled uniforms. And then there had been the fantastic luck that she was going to stay with Nancy, of all people. Her aunt, his godmother. If that isn’t fate, he doesn’t know what is. He hadn’t been able to resist writing to both her and Nancy, to tell the latter what a delightful girl she had coming to stay, and to tell Olivia how much he enjoyed meeting her. He smiles to himself as he dares to contemplate her writing back.

He feels Mole’s arm around his shoulder. ‘Now you’re definitely thinking of a pretty lady,’ the Welshman says, his flushed face inches from Charlie’s. Charlie nods, grinning back, and Mole clears his throat and starts one of his songs. Charlie can feel the music vibrate and rumble in his chest as he places his own arm around the observer’s shoulder. Side by side, they are an odd couple: the tall, angular Englishman and the short, dark Welshman. They have been flying together for almost six months, more time than Charlie has ever flown with anyone before. He is called Mole because of his habit of staring at the charts so closely that his nose almost touches them. But of course, his vision is perfect really.

Their shipmates believe the Swordfish are their guardian angels. And Charlie has to admit, they do look like angels up there, floating and weaving through the sky. And Olivia, with her golden hair and her pale blue eyes, is an angel too. The drink warms his belly and the music fills his head as he leans back and gently glides away into the clouds.

CHAPTER 4

It is only a few days later, his hangover barely cleared, that Charlie hears the shocking news that a British aircraft carrier has been torpedoed and sunk off Ireland, with few survivors and more than five hundred dead. The men’s grief is deep and unfathomable, like the ocean they feel cast adrift on. Everyone knows someone who died. The Kid is distraught. He has lost a close friend from his home town. They joined up together. There are boys and men, sailors and pilots, telegraphists and signalmen, photographers and marines, stokers and plumbers, cooks and gunners, mechanics and joiners and sailmakers – all gone, along with two entire squadrons of Fairey Swordfish. It could so easily have been Charlie’s ship.

The Admiralty is nervous. They cannot afford to lose another aircraft carrier: bad for morale, bad for publicity, bad for the coffers. Charlie’s ship has orders to withdraw from submarine patrol. The men are dismayed. They would like nothing better than to avenge their brothers. They hear that the submarine that attacked her has escaped and that the German Kriegsmarine are elated, boasting of their success. The sailors fume and mutter below deck. But orders are orders. When you’re in the Royal Navy, you do what you’re told.

Tonight Charlie’s carrier is returning to the naval base at Scapa Flow. As they approach, Charlie’s eyes take in the gentle peaks of the Orkneys. Waves rush out in front of the ship as the land appears and disappears with the rise and fall of the ship. One minute it’s there, the next all he can see is the sky. They negotiate the trench of Hoxa Sound, the only part deep enough for the aircraft carrier’s draught. The channel leads them to the shelter of Scapa Flow, the natural harbour nestled beneath mainland Orkney and protected by a chain of islands.

Hills rise out of the mist on either side. Ahead, a line of wooden buoys floats along the top of the water: the boom defence. The nets lie like hidden curtains beneath: interlaced circles of metal designed to prevent submarines getting in, and to snag enemy ships. Tugboats pull the booms out of the way, and the aircraft carrier slides in. Everyone breathes a little easier: they are safe.

Another battleship heaves into view, standing out proudly in contrast to the wilderness. A thrill runs through Charlie when he sees her. She is an important part of the Royal Navy’s history, launched in 1914 at the start of the Great War, and, although she is too slow to keep up with the more modern ships in the fleet, she is ideal for training – this is where the boys he escorted up here on the sleeper were headed. The ship holds a special place in Charlie’s heart: his father served on board as first lieutenant towards the end of that Great War.

They drop anchor about seven hundred yards from the older ship. The heavy chain rushes out of the hawsepipe with a rattle and a splash, and plummets to the bottom of the harbour. The men get ready to relax. Some prepare for a night of cards or building models or listening to the radio. Others will go ashore to stretch their legs. Charlie is surprised to find a letter delivered into his hand. Hope leaps in his chest like a fish. He opens the envelope slowly, savouring the rarity. His eyes scan down the page, across the spindly words that fall over each other until they get to the end: Olivia. The girl from the train. He props his back against the wall, stretching out his legs across his bunk as he settles down to read.

The letter makes him smile. He loves the description of her journey from the station to Taigh Mor. He knows that road well. It is one of his favourite journeys, winding its way through the Highlands, passing only the occasional cottage, the tops of the hills almost touching the sky, the burns glimmering in the distance, the sudden smattering of hardy, ragged sheep or a lone red deer. It is a journey back in time.

He is delighted to discover that Nancy has lodged Olivia in the little bothy down by the loch. He wonders whether she knows that her uncle did that bothy up as a wedding present for his then young wife before the last war, and how special it was to the pair of them. He has no doubt that the place will work its magic on her. There is something so charmingly naïve about her letter. She has been cosseted and kept from the real world. He can’t help feeling excited at the prospect of her learning to love Scotland as he does.

What he would give to be there now. To lie in the silence broken only by the murmur of water on shingle and the rustle of the trees, instead of the hollow clanking of his ship and the thoughts and voices of so many men. Ironically it is only a few miles around the coast, but it might as well be a thousand miles away.

Charlie resists the urge to hold the letter to his nose, to breathe her in. Can it really be only ten days since they met? And now she has replied. Things couldn’t be better. He rests his head back against the cabin wall. Life is good. His first goal was to fly, and now that he’s doing it, the rest of his dreams will follow. Suddenly his future is something that is tangible, ready to be plucked in all its shining glory as soon as the war is over.

Night is drawing in and the light is fading. The aircraft carrier’s signal lamp winks its message to ask whether they can join the men on the battleship for a few drinks. Charlie is bursting with energy. He feels as though he could do anything. He joins Paddy and Frank, Mole and some of the other officers who want a closer look at the veteran ship. They motor across the black water of the harbour. The movement of a small boat is completely different to that of the aircraft carrier; the smell of salt water and the sloshing of the waves more powerful. The sea glints where the small light on their launch catches the ripples.

Although the old battleship – like all ships – is in blackout, Charlie can just make her out in the twilight: the pom-pom guns next to the funnel, and the huge fourteen-inch guns at the front trumpeting up to the sky, the lifeboats dangling on their davits like hanging baskets. The sound of the water changes as it slaps ineffectually at her sides.

‘Boat ahoy!’ Someone shines a light down on them. They blink up at it, unable to see anyone behind the brightness. An officer is there to greet them. He grabs Charlie’s hand firmly, gripping his forearm with the other hand. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he says.

It does them good to see new faces. The officers relax into a catch-up, trading stories of German reconnaissance and squeezing each other for news of home and where they might be sent next. Charlie wonders whether his father ever sat in this same wardroom, among the chink of glasses and the hum of men.

‘Any on-shore entertainment here?’ asks Frank.

‘Not unless you like sheep,’ says one of the officers, a man with a long, narrow nose.

All the men laugh, but Charlie says, ‘I love it up here. Think I might buy a place one day.’

Mole grunts. ‘Not on a sub-lieutenant’s pay, you won’t,’ he says.

‘I won’t be a sub-lieutenant for ever,’ says Charlie.

‘No,’ says Mole. ‘Knowing you, you won’t.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ says one of the older officers, with a wry smile, ‘you’ve got it all mapped out: captain, commodore, admiral?’

Charlie looks down at his drink. The liquid sloshes against the glass. ‘Doesn’t everyone want to progress?’ he says quietly.

‘Life never turns out how you expect,’ says the man with the narrow nose.

‘I do know that,’ says Charlie, thinking of his dead parents, feeling a lump in his throat and desperately trying not to let it escape into his mouth.

The older man is leaning forwards: ‘I had it all mapped out too. Pipe. Slippers … And look at me now. Back on a bloody ship, faced with another war.’

‘Isn’t it your duty—’ Charlie starts to say.

‘Duty? Duty! Don’t talk to me about bloody duty. I did my duty last time around …’

‘Leave him alone, Bruce. He’s only a youngster.’

Charlie is sweating. It is partly the whisky, partly embarrassment, partly anger. He grips the tumbler in frustration. He’s not that young. He’s twenty, the same age as his father was at the start of the last war, and he’s already doing things that boys can only dream of.

Bruce downs his drink, sighing as he tops up the glass again. ‘No offence, old boy,’ he says, rubbing his hand across his eyes and settling back in his chair. ‘I’m just a weather-beaten old fool, and you’re right. I’m glad we’ve got a bunch of optimists to see us through …’

To Charlie’s relief, the conversation is brought to an end there, as a rating knocks at the door to ask if the officers need anything further. Charlie recognises the freckle-faced boy immediately as one of the batch he escorted up here on the train. He gets to his feet and crosses the wardroom. ‘Summers, isn’t it?’ he says.

The boy nods, his cheeks colouring. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How’s it all going?’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘They treating you well?’

‘Of course.’ Summers shifts nervously from foot to foot.

‘Is it all you thought it would be?’

‘And more, sir.’

‘I gather your training class is coming over to our ship tomorrow, to get a taste of life on an aircraft carrier?’

‘I believe so, sir.’

‘Well, I’ll look out for you, then. Send my regards to the other cadets who travelled with us, won’t you?’

‘I will, sir. Thank you, sir.’ Summers nods, still red-cheeked as he disappears away down the corridor.

Charlie feels as though he has reasserted some authority. He turns back to the men in the room, dusting down his jacket. ‘Probably time for us to get back,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long few weeks.’

Back on board his own ship, Charlie stands on the flight deck for a moment before heading down to his cabin. The harbour is so quiet that he can hear the capital ship’s boatswain’s mate piping down. The piercing notes echo across the water like a strange bird’s cry. Above him, the sky starts to shimmer. There is a line of sparkling luminescence in the sky, a ribbon of undulating neon pulsing over the ships. At the edge it is aquamarine and blue, and the stars still twinkle in the darker velvet sky around it. The Northern Lights. Instead of coal-black, the sea is beginning to glimmer luminous green. It is a moment of wonder, like receiving a letter. Charlie wonders if Olivia is watching them too: they are connected by this inky water that bleeds into the nooks and crannies of the northern shores of Britain.

Mole puts an arm around Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Don’t take it to heart, boyo. It’s been a hell of a week.’

‘What’s wrong with aiming high?’

‘Nothing at all. But you should remember there is more to life than just this. I know you’ve had it drummed into you by that fancy school you went to.’

‘Don’t they teach you the same at grammar school?’

‘Yes. But I also know you need more than that for a happy life.’

‘You mean, a wife and family? Like you.’

‘Exactly. Man cannot live by bread alone … there’s drink and women and singing …’ Mole starts to sing. It’s a song that Charlie recognises as ‘Calon Lân’, one of the Welshman’s favourites. The notes bounce across the harbour and out towards the hills. As his voice fades, so too do the lights in the sky, and once again they are left in silence and darkness. Charlie feels a deep hollow in the pit of his stomach and with surprise he realises his eyes have filled with tears. Must be the whisky. He leaves Mole on deck and heads for the isolation of his cabin.

Charlie is woken by a loud bang. It is 0104 in the morning. The night is black as coal. He stumbles to the door of his cabin. A signalman trots along the corridor. ‘It’s the battleship, sir,’ he says. ‘Some fuel or ammunition gone up in the bows.’

Charlie nods. Through his porthole he can hear a faint tinny voice. Probably a message on the ship’s Tannoy system. ‘OK. Thanks, Walker. Let me know if they need help.’

‘Will do, sir.’ Walker jogs back along the corridor, his feet reverberating through the metal tunnel.

Charlie turns back to his cabin and closes the door. He isn’t concerned. After all, this is a naval base. They couldn’t be safer. He has almost reached his bunk when there is another almighty boom. There is no mistaking that noise. It is an explosion – and a large one. He opens the porthole and sees flames across the water. He grabs his clothes, his boots, and runs up on deck still clambering into them. He pushes past the crowd of men to the rails. The battleship is listing like a drunk. Everyone is shouting at the same time: ‘Away lifeboat’s crew! What else can we do? Hurry!’ Charlie runs for the tender they used only a few hours ago. But it has already cast off with Frank and a petty officer to go and help. The aircraft carrier has switched on her searchlight and aims it at the water where the vast ship is now floundering, almost flat on her side.

Men and boys are scrabbling from every part of her in desperation. They are sliding down her hull, jumping into the water, crying out from where they are trapped inside. Fierce white flames rip out of the vents and portholes as there is another echoing blast. Suddenly the ship heels further, the weight of her guns pulls her over and under and she vanishes from sight, sinking towards the mud of the harbour floor, with so many men still screaming from within. The bitter stench of cordite stings Charlie’s nostrils. The sea thrashes with survivors and debris. Cries. Flames. Frank’s tender joins a converted drifter moving among the objects in the water. The drifter has managed to rescue several people. More clamber at the sides to be hauled in by their friends. They cry out in terror. Other bodies float face-down in the water. A few of the men strike out for land. It is less than a mile’s swim. The sea is an oil slick. Deadly and viscous. There is smoke everywhere.

Charlie helps transfer the rescued men from their own tender on to the deck. Many are wearing only their nightclothes: vests and pants. They shiver uncontrollably. Their skin is covered in oil. Some are burnt. Their skin is blackened, blistered, bubbled. Some of them die there and then on the deck. The oil has coated their lungs and they can’t breathe any more. Others whimper and cry out. The legs of the men who slid along the hull of the ship as she went down are shredded: the barnacles have ripped into their skin. Their teeth chatter with cold and shock. Among the faces of the survivors Charlie cannot find one that he recognises – not Bruce or the officer with the narrow nose.

At four in the morning they give up looking for survivors. The sea is ominously quiet. There is no life left upon its dark and indifferent surface. ‘Any sign of Summers?’ Charlie says to Frank when he hauls himself back on to the ship. ‘Summers? With the freckles?’ Frank shakes his head, tries to say something, but it comes out as a gurgle. Charlie gets him a drink and a blanket. ‘Come on, Frank. Have some of this.’ He holds the drink to Frank’s lips, but before he can drink, Frank turns and retches violently. ‘They were stuck in the gangways. We could hear them. They couldn’t get out …’

For a moment Charlie hears again the voices of those boys and men who cried out as they sank and the icy water filled the corridors and they scrabbled to get past each other. It was too crowded and dark and they were half asleep or in a nightmare, and they gulped great mouthfuls of air, and then water, until they were silenced for ever.

They give the survivors whatever clothes and rum they can find. No one knows what caused the explosion, although there are rumours that the impossible has happened and a U-boat has sneaked like a wolf into the lambing shed. More than eight hundred men have drowned within yards of them. Many were only boys, asleep in their hammocks. It is impossible to comprehend. They were supposed to be safe. Charlie sits in the yellow light of the wardroom in silence. Tonight he has stared death in the face and he will never forget it. It doesn’t matter how old or experienced you are. In the eyes of death, all men are equal.

That a German U-boat managed not only to infiltrate the impregnable Scapa Flow but also sink an iconic battleship is a devastating blow not just to the Navy, but to a nation that believed it ruled the waves. The men fret about the families and friends they have left behind in the towns and cities, the villages and hamlets of home. The odds of war are stacking up against them. The Germans have pushed relentlessly on, into France, the Netherlands, Belgium. Sometimes it feels as though the Navy is all that stands between the enemy and Britain.

Charlie’s aircraft carrier is assigned a new captain as Captain Turnbull is promoted to commodore, his expertise needed elsewhere. Captain Pearce is a mean little man, cross that he’s been called back from retirement; already fed up with the constant demands of life at sea, particularly on his weary old bones. He had imagined his life would end differently, preferably in the garden with his prize dahlias, but another war has put paid to that. He has no experience of flying, and the pilots cannot stand him. Worse, he believes the Fairey Swordfish to be outdated relics of the past: he cannot see their advantages. He makes them fly in the most terrible conditions, unaware of the finely-tuned capabilities of individual pilots and planes. He sometimes makes them fly without their accompanying plane guard, which means a downed crew would be left to fend for themselves in the water. The carrier is deployed to the African coast to search for a German commerce raider that has been causing havoc. Captain Pearce sweats and grumbles about the heat. Then they escort a damaged cruiser back to Britain, ending up a few months later – and after the turn of the new year – back at a windswept Scapa Flow. The captain shivers and moans about the cold. They say goodbye to the Blackburn Skua squadron, who are left – to their delight and everyone else’s envy – to add to the defences in northern Scotland.

The only joy at this joyless time is another letter from Olivia. Charlie thinks longingly of a visit to Loch Ewe, but there is not time to get there overland for a day’s leave, and Captain Pearce won’t allow them longer: they have been assigned to the Mediterranean fleet for exercises. He consoles himself over the weeks by savouring every word that she has written. It sounds as if she is settling in, as he knew she would. His mouth waters when she talks about how rationing doesn’t affect her because she has milk and butter and fresh eggs in exchange for helping on the Macs’ farm, and later there will be honey from Mrs Ross’s bees. She has been preparing the ground for vegetables in the walled garden under Greer’s beady eye, and the housemaid, Clarkson, has been teaching her to forage for young shoots of nettles and wild garlic. There is even talk of trapping rabbits.

Charlie’s aircraft carrier is called back from exercises soon enough, and near to Scotland: it is to make up part of the large British fleet trying to prevent the Nazis from taking Norway. The Germans are pushing into Scandinavia, creeping closer to Britain every day. The first British civilian is killed: a young man the victim of an air raid on Scapa Flow. Charlie shudders: his anxiety about Olivia’s safety rises. He has received another two letters from her, and they are fast becoming the only things he has to look forward to, apart from the hours spent flying. He rereads the letters daily. They warm him up and pour a little colour back into the grey and white world of snow and ice that is life on the Norwegian Sea. She is expert at painting a picture of the landscape. When Charlie closes his eyes, he can see the liquid gold of autumn bracken, the spring riot of red and orange and white magnolia, rhododendron and azalea, the gnarled silver alder trees all hung with pale green lichen and the changing colours of the loch.

Conversation on board often turns to home, and now Charlie feels he can join in. Mole talks about his young son and wife. Billy wants to get back to his childhood sweetheart. They gently tease each other. Mole and Billy quiz Charlie about Olivia, and he smiles and tells them to mind their own business, but that she has hair the colour of the rising sun and eyes the colour of the morning sky, and they laugh and say he hasn’t got a hope in hell: he’s fallen hook, line and sinker.

The Norwegian campaign is fought furiously on land and at sea. The Norwegian ports, tucked inside the folds of their magnificent fjords, are taken and lost, and taken again. Navy warships engage in constant battle with Nazi destroyers. The snow-covered hills are either obscured by smoke or lit by flashes of gunfire. The sound of heavy artillery booms across the sea. The icy waters are full of the wrecks of ships from both sides. The British, the French, the Polish, struggle to halt the enemy. The men on the ground fight viciously. They are hampered by heavy snow.

Olivia’s letters turn yellow, and the ink begins to fade. It doesn’t matter: Charlie knows them off by heart. He keeps them close. They will protect him from harm. The squadron’s morale is low, not least because of Captain Pearce. The captain briefed them earlier in the ready room, his face devoid of emotion. ‘If Hitler gets control of the Norwegian coast, he’ll be able to reach our supplies coming through the north Atlantic. And he’ll be able to reach Britain more easily. This is an important moment, men: the first airborne torpedo attack from a carrier of the war. You are history in the making. Let’s not make a hash of it.’

Their target is a German battlecruiser in Trondheim Fjord. Taking her out would be a substantial blow to German morale, and give the Allies a valuable boost. But they all know it is too early to fly – they will not be able to see the target until there is at least a little daylight. They should wait for another hour. But there is no telling Captain Pearce.

The Swordfish take to the skies. The sun has not yet risen. Below them is darkness; above the stars glitter like thousands of candles. It is confusing, disconcerting. Usually it is lights that twinkle below them, and darkness above. For a second Charlie’s brain is muddled. It feels as if he is flying upside down. He is tempted to right the plane. He checks the faintly glowing instruments in the cockpit again. He has to trust them. Night flying is all about trust: for the engineers who keep the instruments working, to the pilots who keep the planes flying, and the observers who find their way home. Charlie has heard of pilots getting confused, spinning upside down and losing control in similar conditions.

‘Did you see that?’ Mole asks.

Charlie shakes his head. He was too busy concentrating on the needles and dials and numbers around him.

‘Starboard,’ says Mole.

Charlie senses the Kid move, and picks up the shift in tension too. Could it be the German ship? Could something that large manage to slip so silently across the sea? Easily. But he can’t see anything. The wind rushes in his ears. Is that the faint pale mark of waves breaking behind a ship? Or a trick of the light? Captain Pearce’s words ring in his ears. They must not fail. There’s nothing for it. Mole unpacks a flare. Charlie gives him the thumbs-up. The safety and hum of the darkness is theirs for a moment longer, and then phshshshsh, Mole drops the flare and it falls downward, a spiralling comet of light heading into nothing, nothing, and then suddenly streaks of light explode into the air around them, followed by a barrage of gunfire.

‘Bloody hell, Mole!’ Charlie dips the plane sideways and lower, swinging through the hail of ammunition.

It is not the battlecruiser. It is a German destroyer. It will have to do – they have blown their cover now. Charlie steadies the plane through the flak and lines himself up for a torpedo run. The cockpit is lit by flashes of tracer fire. It gives him some sense of direction, but as he looses the missile, he has no idea whether it has found its mark.

‘Just get us out of here,’ says Mole.

‘Damn,’ says Charlie, partly because he knows Captain Pearce will be disappointed, and partly because there are two neat holes in the fabric of the plane near his right elbow, where bullets have passed straight through. If she was made of metal, she’d have been blown apart. As it is, she is flying, but something doesn’t feel right.

‘You all right, Mole?’ Charlie shouts behind him.

‘Fine, boyo. You just get us home safely.’ Mole reads him the correct course, squinting in the orange glow of his tiny lamp. They will be there in sixteen minutes.

Charlie doesn’t want to let them know that the plane isn’t responding properly. But then, he doesn’t need to. Her juddering and balking do the job for him.

‘What is it?’ Mole asks. ‘Propeller? Fuel tank?’

‘I think it’s the port wing,’ says Charlie.

Mole peers into the dark. ‘Can’t bloody see,’ he says.

The problem is getting worse. The plane dips on her port side. They all lean to starboard, trying to right her, but it’s just a reaction, it won’t do anything.

‘Hang on,’ says Mole. Charlie feels him jiggering around with something. It’s his chart lamp. Mole tries to light the wing, leaning out of the cockpit as far as he can. ‘Pin’s been blown out. The wing is folding.’

It makes sense. The wing rattles and jangles ominously.

‘Shit,’ says Charlie.

‘No need for bad language, boyo,’ says Mole.

‘Will we make it?’

‘Depends if it folds.’

The way it’s shaking, Charlie thinks folding is pretty likely. The weight shifts again in the cockpit behind him. Mole starts to hum, but the noise isn’t coming through the Gosport tube: the notes are drifting out into the night.

‘What are you doing?’ Charlie asks.

‘Never you mind, boyo,’ says Mole.

Charlie can feel vibrations beneath his feet. He tries to look behind, but he can’t see anything. He hears Mole say something to the Kid, and the noise of a clip clicking on to something. He senses Mole stand up, the balance of the plane changing. The wing is juddering now.

‘Mole? What …’

‘You just fly, boyo.’ The voice is almost in his ear. Fingers appear next to him in the cockpit. The Welshman has clambered out on to the wing.

‘Get back in …’ But Charlie’s words are pulled into the slipstream. He can just see one of Mole’s arms wrapped around one of the metal struts.

‘You’re a fool,’ says Charlie, but he knows Mole can’t possibly hear him above the screaming of the wind and the rumble of the engine. He concentrates on keeping the plane balanced, checking the instruments, sensing the plane, as if it’s part of him. The extra weight on the wing is pushing it down, but still the plane is coping, and then suddenly it feels right again. Mole edges back into the cockpit, toppling in sideways with a thud. He gives a whoop of delight and bursts into song.

Charlie starts to laugh. He can hear the Kid laughing too. They are all laughing into the night air with a mad joy at being alive. The plane is still coughing and spluttering. Her engine must be damaged too. But he trusts her. She will get them back safely.

As they reach the ship, Charlie flashes the red light on his starboard wing twice, followed by the green light twice. The ship signals back, and the faint path of guiding lights comes on. He has done this landing a hundred times and it makes no difference in the dark. He looks for the batsman’s signal. The lights on the bats are dim but legible. The plane gulps and spits, and when they land he can hear and smell the petrol spewing out of her.

The propeller chokes to a standstill, and Tugger’s face materialises out of the gloom. ‘What have you done to her?’ he asks. ‘And the hell’s this?’ Tugger points at the running repair that Mole has done. Charlie walks around to inspect it, for once glad to be back on solid ground.

The Welshman has used his bootlace to tie the pin back in. It’s pretty heroic. He will dine out on it for months.

‘She’ll be all right,’ says Mole. ‘If anyone can fix her up, it’s you.’

Tugger suddenly steps back and salutes, and Captain Pearce appears behind Charlie. In the dim dawn light, his eyes are cold and hard, his lips thin and his eyebrows bristling. ‘Wrong bloody ship,’ he says. ‘What did you think you were doing?’

Mole and the Kid and Tugger stand there, eyes glazed, faces expressionless. Charlie’s cheeks burn. ‘I know that, sir,’ he says. ‘But once …’

‘And you’ve damaged the plane. Reckless. I’ve a good mind to send you home for reassessment. God help us, if you’re the best we’ve got …’

‘It was impossible to see out there, sir …’

‘Don’t you bloody answer back! You’re an idiot, and that’s it. I will have to report this.’ He turns and stomps back to the bridge.

Charlie swallows in the silence. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ says Mole. ‘He’s a bitter old fool who should be in a flowerbed.’

‘Preferably six feet under it,’ says Tugger. ‘And don’t worry about the plane. She’ll be fine.’

‘We did good, Charlie,’ says the Kid.

But the captain’s words wound Charlie deeply. He is not used to falling foul of those in charge. He feels diminished. Only one person doesn’t see his faults: Olivia. Her letters are a lifeline to cling to in turbulent water. He clings to them all the tighter.

CHAPTER 5
Olivia

Olivia sits on a bench at the station. The heat is already almost unbearable. Her pale green travelling outfit is crumpled and creased. She fans herself with her hat. The din of people and trains arriving and departing has died down. Trucks and cars, horses and carts, troops and families have been and gone, churning up the dust, making it twirl in the warm air before it settles back in a thin layer over everything. In a way she is glad that she is alone, no longer at the mercy of the wandering eyes and nudges of strangers, like the impertinent ratings on the train who had frightened her with their whispering and pointing. She wishes Charlie, the officer who rescued her at breakfast, had got off here too, but he changed for the train to Thurso, taking his raucous charges with him. She feels comforted as she remembers his protective arm ushering her to safety, the aura of confidence. And then she smiles once more at what turned out to be a wonderful coincidence. Charlie’s godmother her aunt? Funny how one chances across these connections, but perhaps not so unusual among her class.

Olivia reaches to fiddle with the bracelet at her wrist, a nervous habit, but then her heart sinks as she remembers that she has lost it, and tears prick at her eyes. She feels so vulnerable sitting here on this bench in the middle of nowhere, travelling on her own for the first time, no handsome officer to protect her now. The fact that she has lost the one treasure that she owns makes her feel all the more so. Perhaps she left it at Stoke Hall, but she is sure she can remember clicking the delicate clasp together and pulling her cuff down over it yesterday morning. Maybe it came loose during the panic when the faulty siren went off at the station. And then there was that boy with the wild eyes … but that’s unfair – the kind of thing her mother might say. He only helped her find her way to the Underground. No. She must have left it at home. The thought of home, and her bedroom, with its pretty bedspread and her favourite lamps with the hand-painted flowers twisting up their stands, and Jasper, her old teddy bear, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, and Nanny, who always knows what to do, and all the other familiar things she loves, sends a hot, thin tear sliding down her cheek.

She hears a cough and looks up, wiping her face with the back of her hand. The stationmaster is looming over her. ‘Are you sure I can’t call someone for you, miss?’ he asks.

‘Absolutely,’ says Olivia. ‘My aunt will be here any minute.’

He looks disbelievingly up the empty road. ‘Perhaps you got the wrong day, miss.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she snaps at him, immediately regretting it, but she is hot and tired and worried.

‘Maybe she’s driving slowly. To save on petrol.’

Olivia nods and tries to sit up straight and look as if it is a perfectly normal thing to be sitting outside a train station on one’s own.

Eventually a small car materialises slowly out of the haze and draws to a lazy stop outside the station. A sprightly old man with silver hair and a dour expression clambers out of the driver’s seat. His eyes narrow when he sees her, and he tips his head.

‘Lady Bowman?’ he says, with a strong accent.

The stationmaster appears again, and the driver becomes more animated as the two men exchange pleasantries in a language that Olivia does not recognise while the porter packs her cases into the back of the car. Olivia waits for them to finish. It takes a while; neither man appears to be in a hurry. The sun gleams on the car’s shiny black paintwork, the polished chrome of its radiator and the spokes of its wheels. She fans herself with her hat, and tries to look composed. At last the man is ready to go. He climbs straight into the driver’s seat and leans across to do the passenger door from the inside so that she must pull it open for herself. He sweeps a length of twine and a box of fishing weights on to the floor at her feet, where there is already a pair of galoshes and a rain hat. The car smells of rotten fish, and when she turns to look behind her, there is a creel dripping seawater all over the back seat; a straggle of grassy seaweed caught in the netting glistens at her. She shudders and faces forwards again, leaning her head against the side window.

The journey to Poolewe takes almost four hours. Four hours, and they pass not one other human being. Just a few lonely crofts tucked away in the folds of a hill here and there. The fine morning has become muggy, the air heavy, crackling with energy. Olivia stares at the scenery passing by: great bleak spaces of wilderness, long empty expanses of water. Her clothes stick to her, damp against the leather of the seat. In the back, there are small pale deposits of salt where the seawater dripping from the creel has dried. The driver does not speak. He stares resolutely at the road ahead, occasionally grunting when they bump over a particularly deep rut.

Olivia’s mind wanders. What an exhausting few hours she’s had. From the thrill of the station and air-raid siren, to the boy with the wild eyes at the station, and then Charlie, so handsome in his uniform, so gallant, off to protect the seas. Well, if he can face the Nazis, she’s sure she can face some Scottish solitude.

She sticks her hand out of the open window. Beyond her fingers, the desolate emptiness stretches on forever. She closes her eyes. The breeze pushes at her arm, cools her skin, blows in her hair. It reminds her of climbing out on to the roof at home, the view so different to this one: the neatly rolled grass court where the rabbits crouch, flashes of brown and white in the long grass at its edge; the cedars with their stately, sweeping branches; the cobbled stable yard with its bell tower; the pale dovecote next to it; the mottled doves, half-pigeon now, circling above.

At last they turn through an ornate pair of iron gates and bump along a potholed drive at the end of which is a large white house. Taigh Mor. Olivia scrambles out on to the gravel, glancing up at the smart black windows, and then across the lawn that sweeps down to an enormous loch surrounded by hills. The front door is wide open, but instead of Aunt Nancy appearing, Olivia is greeted by an elderly servant with hair that was once black but is now peppered with grey.

‘Your aunt sends her apologies,’ says the servant. ‘But she’s a wee bit tied up with unexpected visitors. She says Munro’s to take you down to the bothy, and she’ll be there as soon as she can.’

Olivia stares at the maid blankly.

The man who she assumes is Munro grunts as he opens the trunk and starts to unload the cases, handing two to her, by which she understands that she is meant to carry them.

‘Shouldn’t we leave them here?’ she asks.

‘Oh no,’ says the maid. ‘You’ll be needing your things.’

‘You mean I’m not staying in the house?’

‘No, no. Didn’t I say? You’re in the bothy. You’re very lucky. She doesn’t usually let anyone stay down there.’

The maid disappears back into the house. Olivia’s bottom lip trembles. Munro looks her up and down with disgust. She digs her nails into her palm. She won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

She traipses after him down a dry, rutted track covered in wispy, pale grass that soon becomes a tunnel flanked by twisted rhododendron bushes beneath thick woodland. The house disappears behind them. The air is cooler here, and birds and other creatures call warnings to each other as they trudge on. Olivia’s fingers ache, the blood squeezed out of them by the handles of the bags. A layer of dirt attaches itself to her shoes. They will soon be ruined.

Eventually, they emerge into the sunlight on another lawn that ends only a couple of hundred yards away at the shore of the loch. To their left is a small white cottage, bright beneath the dark Scots pines of the woodland behind.

Munro puts the bags down on the stone steps.

‘Is this it? Is this the bothy?’ she asks.

‘Aye,’ he says. ‘You go and have a look around. Take your time. We’ve plenty of it.’

Olivia climbs the steps. The door is propped open with a large pebble. Inside, it is cool compared to the thundery heat outside. It smells of flowers and the sea. Along the sills are old shells, stones, sea urchins, and driftwood that have paled in the sunlight over the years. To the left is a small sitting room that looks out towards the loch; on the right is a tiny kitchen warmed by a large range stove, and a bedroom that is just large enough for a bed and a dressing table, also with a view of the loch. Someone has blown the dust from the kettle, there are fresh sheets on the bed, the cupboards are filled with food, and the windows have been flung open. At the back of the cottage an old lean-to has been converted into a lavatory accessible through the kitchen; the other half acts as coal shed and wood store.

The entire cottage is smaller than the folly at Stoke Hall.

Munro is still standing on the steps, staring out towards the loch. The only sound is the rasp of water on the shingle and the whisper of wind in the leaves behind the bothy. What Olivia would give to hear a familiar noise: the whistle of the groom, or cook shouting in the kitchen, or Pike banging the gong for tea. She makes a noise, a half-strangled sob, and Munro turns to look at her, his eyebrows knitting together. He clears his throat. ‘Where would ye like to start?’ he asks.

‘I don’t want to start anywhere,’ says Olivia.

‘Would ye rather fish?’

‘No,’ says Olivia. ‘I don’t want to fish. And I don’t want to stay in this hovel. I can’t understand what I’m doing here. I just want to go home.’

He watches her without blinking, and then slowly shakes his head as she runs past him and back up to the house.

Olivia stumbles through the front door and across the echoing hall, wildly trying every door to every empty room until she finds the occupied one. It is a large drawing room with French windows opening out on to the lawn and grand views of the loch, the sea a sliver of silver beyond it. And there at last is her aunt, head bent over a table, deep in conversation with a couple of men. As her niece enters, Aunt Nancy looks up, a smile breaking across her face. ‘Darling girl,’ she says. ‘So sorry. We’re just wrapping up here …’

Olivia stops, suddenly self-conscious. She smooths the creased pale-green coat and pats her blonde hair. Her hat is lying somewhere on the floor of the bothy. She is out of breath, and aware that she is not entirely decorous before these men.

Her aunt bustles out from behind the table, extending her arms and clasping Olivia’s face in her hands. ‘Look at you! You must be exhausted. Have you found everything you need?’

‘I … Well …’

‘Did Munro show you how to light the stove? Don’t you love it? It’s my favourite place in all the world. So special …’

Olivia swallows, aware that the men are watching her. ‘It’s just,’ she says. ‘It’s just … so … so lonely.’

‘Such bliss.’

‘But couldn’t I stay here? I’d so love to catch up with you …’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for catching up. I can’t wait to show you about the place …’

‘But I really don’t want to stay down there. Isn’t there a spare bed here?’

Aunt Nancy’s smile is beginning to look a little worn. ‘There just isn’t enough room at the moment, what with Commander Shaw and Brigadier Worthington here.’ The men nod apologetically. ‘And more arriving tomorrow.’

‘But I’m your niece!’

‘And these are my guests …’

‘But what will I do? There’s no one to help me …’

‘There’s Munro …’

‘I don’t think Munro wants anything to do with me …’

‘Hush, hush.’ Her aunt is holding up her hand. She ushers her out into the hall. ‘Now what exactly is the problem?’ she asks.

Olivia starts to list. ‘There’s no bath.’

‘There’s a tin bath in the shed.’

‘How am I meant to fill it?’

‘From the tap.’

‘You mean with a bucket?’

‘You’re jolly lucky there’s running water. I had it put in especially for you. We used to have to fetch it from the burn.’

‘There’s no electricity.’

‘Did Munro not show you where the oil lamps are kept?’

‘I don’t know how to light a fire.’

‘Munro will show you.’

‘I don’t know how to cook.’

‘Then it’s about time you learnt.’

‘I want to go home.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I’ll take myself.’

‘The station is at least a twenty-four-hour walk …’

‘Surely Munro can give me a lift?’

‘No one will give you a lift. There’ll be petrol rationing soon, and besides, your mother has asked me to keep you here. Now pull yourself together. You’re making a scene. I can’t think what my sister is doing bringing up a creature with no idea how to think or do anything for herself. Do you know what I was doing at your age?’

Olivia does not reply.

‘I was driving ambulances in France for injured and dying men. You think living in a warm cottage by the side of a loch, where your family have sent you to be safe, is a hardship? I could tell you things that would fill your childish slumbers with nightmares. I could tell you how I watched your uncle bleed to death before I could get him home. And now here you are, in his home, safely. I do not want to hear such nonsense again. Now stand up straight and behave as a woman of your standing should. With a bit of bloody backbone and some good grace.’

Olivia swallows, shamefaced. She has only met her aunt a couple of times. She had been fooled into thinking that she was like her sister, Olivia’s mother, a quiet and kind, gentle person. But this steely creature whose young life was forged in that Great War is nothing like her. In the dark of the great hall, poor, dead Uncle Howard stares down at them through the gloom, handsome in his olive-green army uniform and peaked cap, painted into a frame from which he will remain for ever twenty-five years old.

Aunt Nancy pats her shoulder. ‘Now,’ she says. ‘I’ve said my piece and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s done and dusted. Come and have some tea and meet the brigadier and commander properly.’

Olivia hopes her cheeks will stop burning before she re-enters the drawing room.

After that first afternoon, Olivia resigns herself to this temporary new life. There is no time to mope: Aunt Nancy is determined that her niece will be useful, helping in the garden and on the farm now that all the young men have rushed off to join up. She soon has Olivia digging for potatoes with Greer the gardener, hauling creels in and out of the water with Munro, wheeling manure, drying seeds, not to mention plucking pigeons with the maid and cook, who she now knows as Clarkson. Her time in the bothy is spent reading through the cobwebbed copies of books on the shelves, learning by trial and error how to cook, how to keep the greedy stove going, and how to light a fire in the sitting room, how to wash her own clothes, how to refill the oil lamps, to make her own bed.

Then the first letters arrive from Charlie, and Olivia is hugely grateful to him, for her aunt seems to warm to her a little. She really doesn’t need Aunt Nancy to encourage her to write back to the young officer; she enjoys it, writing letters as though Charlie is a diary, a confidant. For although she is busy, she is terribly lonely. Her aunt is always preoccupied with visitors and paperwork – something to do with joining the FANYs again, as far as she can glean from Munro – and the local schoolchildren – of which there are only a handful – are all half Olivia’s age. The other neighbours are kind, but they are not companions, and she still does not speak Gaelic.

The letters she receives back from Charlie are her only friends in those long hours of loneliness. And they make Olivia appreciate her own situation all the more when she reads about conditions on his ship, and how he keeps a sense of humour about the horrible cockroaches that invade, capturing and racing them against each other. Of course she has no idea where he is, but she shuffles closer to the fire when he writes of the snow and ice, and how he has to be winched out his pilot’s seat after a flight, his hands stuck like claws until someone brings him a steaming cup of cocoa.

As the days pass, Olivia’s truculence begins to ebb. The world slows to the lazy chewing of one of the cows that watch her with liquid eyes from beneath their thick, curly brown hair. Munro has indeed taught her to fish, and how to catch shiny green prawns in the rock pools. She is captivated by things she never knew about: baby starfish no bigger than a fingernail, seals lumbering across the rocks, the sudden flash of a pine marten’s creamy chest.

She speaks to her mother on the telephone once a week, but she does not miss home as much as she thought she would; somehow the pull of the breeze sweeping in off the loch and down from the hills is hard to resist. Take today, for example. It is one of those blustery autumn days, the weather as changeable as her moods can be. This morning she was eating corned beef from the tin while the rain lashed against the window as she tried to play patience in the yellow glow of an oil lamp. Now she is following the tumbling, churning burn that careers down the hill behind the farm between the thick, sodden bent heads of bracken. She sticks to the rocky bits, using the boulders as steps. When she looks up, she has to narrow her eyes as the rain drives into them. When she looks back to the loch, far below, only the pale foam of whipped-up water delineates dark grey water from dark grey sky. She is drenched to the bone.

She is looking for Mac, who farms behind Taigh Mor. One of his sheep has got stuck, and she has been sent to help. She finally spots him, a small green figure in a flat cap crouched on the rocks like moss. The sheep is still stuck. The farmer isn’t surprised to see her there. He doesn’t even glance up. But Olivia is growing used to the quiet, calm manner of the locals – and in a situation like this, there’s no time for pleasantries. The banks down to the burn are steep here, carved into the hillside over thousands of years. The sheep has slipped and got wedged between some rocks. It is in an awkward position, about level with Mac’s head. It bleats in their faces, a loud, raspy, aggressive mixture of fear and confusion. Its musky fleece is heavy with the rain.

Mac shouts above the crash of the water, his voice thick and lilting like the burn in calmer times. She is quicker to tune in to the inflections now. ‘I cannae get behind, lassie,’ he says. ‘We need to tie a rope.’

Olivia looks up at the steep rock. The rain streams down her face and drips off her nose. Mac points further up, jabbing with his finger. The sheep gets noisier, the sound a hoarse bark. ‘You want me to climb up there and throw the rope down?’ she says.

Mac nods and gives her the rope. He looks so small and wrinkled, like a walnut. She heads away further up the hill, past a craggy rowan tree that marks a deep pool, and to the boulders above. Her feet slip with every step, and she has to be careful not to catch her ankle in one of the uneven, bottomless holes. It is steep, and for a moment her head spins. She is in the right place: from here she can see the top of the sodden sheep and Mac’s flat cap. She crawls out on to the rocks. They scrape into her knees, cutting through her flannel trousers. She lies down and inches forward to look over the edge. Mac and the sheep are directly below her. There is nothing to grab on to, just the weight of her body holding her to the ground. Her heart thumps against solid rock. She dangles the rope down. It takes a few goes, but she manages to feed it in behind the sheep, and Mac disappears to scrabble for the end underneath the creature. He reappears, gives her the thumbs-up, and then she throws the other end of the rope down to him and scrambles away from the edge, her hip bones grazed against the rock.

By the time she gets back, Mac has tied the rope around the sheep. They each take the rope in their hands and begin to pull. The rope burns, but, with a struggle and a grunt, the sheep is freed. It rolls on to the ground for a moment, a bundle of legs and wool. Then it stands up and trots away with a dismissive bark.

‘Ungrateful creature,’ says Mac, and they both burst out laughing, wiping the water from their faces, unsticking their feet from the squelching mud.

‘Will it be all right?’ Olivia asks.

‘Thanks to you, lassie.’ Mac smiles, and she can see his eyes are brilliant blue in the leathery face.

In the farmhouse, Mrs Mac says, ‘Stay for something to eat, won’t you?’ She offers Olivia a slice of cake and a cup of tea. She drapes a towel around Olivia’s back and rubs at her scraggy hair to soak up some of the rain. The simple movement touches something deep in Olivia. It is nice to be mothered.

‘Hard work out there without our boys,’ says Mac.

‘I think the girl will do just as well for now,’ says his wife.

Olivia smiles, pleased. ‘Where are your sons?’ she asks, her mouth full of fluffy sponge.

‘Moved away. Got wee ones of their own now,’ says Mrs Mac.

Mac lifts a picture down from the mantelpiece. ‘There we go,’ he says. ‘Callum and Angus and their wives and our three grandchildren, Mary, Hamish, and wee Gus. Taken in the spring.’

It is a fine picture. Callum and Angus are in their uniforms, their wives looking at them proudly, the children at their feet. ‘When will they next come to visit?’ asks Olivia.

‘Och. We won’t be seeing them for a while,’ says Mrs Mac. Her lips are set in a thin line. ‘Silly boys. They’re back with their regiments. They’ll be off to France any day soon.’

‘Now, now,’ says Mac. ‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Olivia is surprised to see that his hands are trembling as his cup rattles on its saucer.

Olivia drops in to Taigh Mor on her way back to the bothy. The rain has cleared, and now the bracken is shining yellow and orange beneath trembling aspen leaves that flash and flutter gold in the breeze. There are four shiny black cars parked on the drive in front of the house, all polished to perfection, the rain pooling in small puddles like ink on their bonnets. Leaning against one corner of the large house are four men, chatting and smoking cigarettes. The smoke curls white into the air. They stop to look at Olivia without interest as she crunches across the gravel, before turning back to their conversation. In the distance, the pale sea reflects the pale sky.

As usual, the heavy front door is open. Olivia walks slowly in. Like her own home down south, it is cool inside, but the wooden floors are bare of rugs, and the furniture is dark and dusty. There are antlers all over the walls, spiky and forbidding, and she suddenly longs for the light and airy bothy. Uncle Howard’s eyes follow her along the hall, still unused to seeing a youngster in the house. Olivia’s skin tingles; she is suddenly aware of her damp clothes, her tangled hair, her muddy boots.

There are nine men with Aunt Nancy in the drawing room, all with their backs to her. One of them seems familiar, with a jocular round face and a cigar, but he is probably simply a returning visitor, of which there seems to be a steady stream. Olivia would dearly like to know what goes on at these meetings, but has to be satisfied with evasive explanations about her aunt doing her bit for the war effort and reminding Olivia proudly of her role in France in the last war – which inevitably leads to memories of Uncle Howard and the end of the conversation.

‘Come in, darling. Come in,’ says Aunt Nancy, motioning at Olivia. Olivia points at her filthy feet, but Aunt Nancy shakes her head. ‘Don’t worry about those. These floors have seen far worse.’ She introduces Olivia as her niece, and Olivia is sure she glimpses a flash of disapproval as the men take in her mud-stained trousers and unkempt hair, but they are too polite to say anything before turning back to help themselves to one of Clarkson’s home-made biscuits.

‘Dreadful news,’ says Aunt Nancy. ‘It was the bloody Nazis that got into Scapa Flow. Can you believe it?’

‘You mean …’

‘Yes exactly. Those poor boys … Torpedoed! Charlie was up there too.’

‘How awful!’ Olivia’s hand goes up to her mouth.

‘No, no. Don’t worry. He wasn’t on board. But he was in the harbour. All those poor souls. You must write to him.’

‘I have.’

‘I mean carry on. It’s our duty to bolster the morale of men who are away fighting. Letters mean more than you can ever realise. Your Uncle Howard lived for them …’ She peters out. The men stir their tea awkwardly.

The round-faced man clears his throat and takes a puff on his cigar. It is clear that he wants to get back to business.

‘Well, you’d best be off then, darling,’ says Aunt Nancy. ‘I’m sure you have plenty to do.’ Olivia turns to leave, knowing when she is dismissed. ‘Oh’ – Olivia stops, her hand resting on the doorframe – ‘and don’t be alarmed if you see more ships in the loch. Scapa Flow is obviously compromised, and these chaps need somewhere else to hide their ships.’ The men stare at her. ‘Hush, hush, of course,’ says Aunt Nancy, putting her finger to her lips.

On the track back to the bothy, Olivia breathes in the autumn air. Out here, no one cares what she looks like. She makes the most of it, splashing through puddles that are orangey-brown, the colour of peat. On her right she is dwarfed by vast umbrellas of gunnera, still holding water from this morning’s storm. On her left, ancient rhododendrons line the steep bank, their twisted branches and trunks an impenetrable tangle. A myriad of birdsong echoes through the plants. At the end of the track, the view opens out again into the vista she has come to love. There is the bothy on the edge of the wood, its knobbly stone facade bright white against the autumn fire of yellow and orange and red. The bright flowers that surrounded the cottage in the summer are no longer colourful but drooping with seed heads of all shapes and sizes. The lawn that runs down to the beach is still lush and green. The loch is calm, just the dark breath of a sudden breeze rippling across it. As she reaches the steps of the bothy, some seagulls fly up from the water with worried cries, the droplets from their legs fracturing their clear reflections. Startled, Olivia turns to see what has frightened them, and, as she does, she catches sight of something that – even with her aunt’s warning – makes her breath snag in her chest. On the other side of the island, where the fishing fleet shelters by the village of Aultbea, a vast grey mass of metal rises out of the water. It is a British destroyer. Next to it, the fishing trawlers are mere specks. Olivia takes in the heavily armoured bridge, the fat funnel, the mast like a crucifix reaching up to heaven, the spiky gun turrets, the guns that seem to be pointing in every direction and from every part of her. This is what war looks like: cold and grey and forbidding. She shudders and goes into the bothy, closing the door firmly behind her for the first time in weeks.

CHAPTER 6

At first the ships come and go without incident. Olivia gets used to them gliding silently into the loch, tries not to let their presence disturb her. But then, in early December, German mines punch a hole in a battleship at the mouth of the loch. Olivia is awake when it happens, lying in bed, a pale light pencilled around the window frames, a chill breeze blowing through the open window, while she is as warm as one of the eggs beneath Mac’s chickens. A boom, and she is out of bed and pedalling to Aultbea, where worried locals try to send her home again, but not until she has seen the divers go down in their suits to inspect the damage. She wants to write to Charlie about it, because it is frightening to think that the Germans must know there are ships here now. But of course she can’t.

Nor can she write about the special pass she has been given to show she is allowed to be here, for Loch Ewe is now Port A, a secret base, the perfect place for the Admiralty to hide their ships. Or the plane that passes low over her one afternoon when she is out checking fences for Mac. Or the black puffs of flak in the air beneath it, and how – a second later – the thud of the anti-aircraft guns that are now positioned at the mouth of the loch reaches her ears. It is an eerie, ominous blast that echoes in the gullies behind her, sending a shower of snow from the branches of small trees nearby, and on up the glen. The plane growls on, and she is frozen to the spot until it is over her, quite low – low enough to see the pilot seated inside – low enough to see the black cross painted beneath its wings. She is sure she sees the pilot raise his hand in greeting, and then the plane passes over the peak and dips out of sight.

After that, she makes an effort to traipse up to the big house every day to listen to the news on the tortoiseshell wireless, and to talk to Aunt Nancy, who seems to know more than the authoritative voice of the BBC broadcaster. She hears how Norway is lost, and she wonders if that was where Charlie was, and where he will be sent next. Chamberlain resigns, and Churchill takes over. With Norway secured, the Germans turn their attention to a massive assault along the Western Front. They push the Allies back and back until they are trapped along the north coast of France, on the beaches and in the town of Dunkirk. Olivia hears about the miracle of Dunkirk, how so many men are delivered safely home across the Channel. She picks up whispers that Charlie might have been involved. She wonders whether the Macs’ boys, Callum and Angus, are among those that were saved. She lies awake at night, staring into the dark, knowing that Britain is all alone.

Olivia is in the echoing hall at Taigh Mor, talking to Mother about how Stoke Hall is now being used as a barracks for hundreds of soldiers. It is early summer and, with the Nazis occupying the Channel Isles, the threat of invasion is once again a reality. Hard to believe on such a beautiful summer’s day. As usual the large door is wide open, the sunlight from outside banishing some of the gloom from the vast room. The silhouette of a man throws a shadow across the door. For a moment Olivia doesn’t recognise him, but when she replaces the receiver and sees the features fall into place, there is Charlie, tall and tanned, in his uniform, and looking every part the war hero. It is strange – like meeting an old friend who she somehow doesn’t know at all. She isn’t sure whether to embrace or shake hands, but he takes charge, bending down to kiss her cheek, and she feels his uniform prickly against her skin.

She hides her hands behind her back, suddenly conscious that her fingernails are ingrained with dirt. But Charlie is looking at her feet in amusement. These days she doesn’t bother with shoes when it’s warm – she grew out of her old ones ages ago, and there is nowhere to buy more. She borrows whatever she can find from Aunt Nancy’s boot room when she needs to. Her feet are thick-soled, and she thinks nothing now of running over rocks and gravel.

She blushes and looks up at him. ‘I’m afraid I’ve grown rather wild,’ she says.

‘I think it’s rather charming,’ he says. There is something different about him that she can’t put her finger on: a sadness or an emptiness behind his smile.

‘Aunt Nancy will be thrilled that you’re here.’

‘I certainly am,’ says her aunt, appearing behind her.

Charlie grins. ‘Lady M.’ He stoops to kiss her and she holds his face in both her hands as though admiring a child.

‘It’s so good to have you home,’ she says, ushering him and Olivia into the drawing room.

Charlie strides to the French windows and looks out at the ships on the loch. ‘How many are coming in now?’ he asks, his voice suddenly sharper, more officious.

‘A lot more. It could become a useful place for convoys to congregate.’

‘Any permanent site?’

‘On its way. Should be up and running by this time next year. For now, officers are messed at the hotel or here. Others are billeted with various people – wherever there’s room.’

‘What about the mines?’

‘We’ve had no more problems …’

‘I heard there’d been a U-boat?’

‘Dealt with immediately.’

‘We’ve also had the Luftwaffe over,’ says Olivia.

Charlie looks anxiously at Aunt Nancy. ‘I hadn’t heard about that.’

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ says Aunt Nancy. ‘Just reconnaissance. There are far more dangerous things going on elsewhere. Please don’t look so worried, my dear. Scapa was a terrible, terrible tragedy. But it won’t happen here. Now how about going for a swim? It’s lovely out there.’

Charlie looks as though he’s going to say something else, but then turns to the windows again. Beyond the warships, the water is sparkling seductively. ‘We can still swim?’ he asks.

‘Of course!’

He takes a deep breath and exhales, as if banishing bad thoughts. Then he turns back to face them, the frown gone from his face. ‘Good idea,’ he says. ‘I’m boiling and filthy from the train. It took an age.’

‘I’ll take you across to Firemore,’ says Olivia. ‘I’d like to put out some lines anyway.’

Charlie grins. ‘Who is this?’ he asks Aunt Nancy. ‘Certainly not the prim girl I met on the train last year.’

‘I’m not prim!’

‘I’m only teasing. But you are quite different.’

‘So are you.’

Charlie glances at her and then down at his feet. ‘Yes. I suppose I am,’ he says. He is not smiling any more.

Firemore beach is on the south side of the loch, a long horseshoe of reddish golden sand. Charlie insists on taking both oars, while Olivia throws the creels and lines over the side, the muscles in her brown arms tensing with effort. When she has finished, she hangs over the edge, enjoying being rowed by someone else for once. She sees silver slivers of sand eels dart beneath the boat, and dangles her hands in the water, leaving glittery trails. The loch is calm and the air is warm; the heat makes her light-headed. Two oystercatchers flit past, black and white against the pale water, their distinctive peeping whistles ringing out across the loch, their orange beaks and pink legs vivid against the blue sky. They flash their white underbellies before turning and sweeping back around, the white V on their backs and the white stripes down their wings in perfect symmetry. She wants to ask Charlie whether he flew at Dunkirk, but the words won’t come. The familiarity of their letters doesn’t seem to translate when he is actually here, in front of her. She closes her eyes, the world a haze of unanswered questions behind her eyelids.

Charlie suddenly stands, setting the boat rocking. Before she can tell him to sit down, he has unbuttoned his shirt, taken off his trousers, and leapt overboard, his pale body distorted beneath the water. He breaks the surface, his hair flashing in the sunlight, sleek against his head. ‘Are you coming in?’ he asks.

‘What about the boat?’

He laughs. ‘She’ll be fine. There’s not a breath of wind, and the tide is on the turn,’ he says. ‘Chuck the painter over the side and let her go. I’ll grab her in a minute.’

Olivia needs no further encouragement. She slips off her shorts and pulls her top over her head, already dressed in her bathing costume. She throws the end of the rope into the water and leaps over the side with a whoop, scattering the fish and sending glittering droplets into the air.

The change in temperature makes her draw her breath in sharply when she emerges. She slips under the water again. Relishes the coolness, the translucent green, the muffled sound of Charlie’s voice above. Then she breaks the surface again, and everything is bright and clear. She can just touch the bottom. Her toes scuffle along the cold sand, trying to get a purchase. She joins Charlie and grabs hold of the side of the boat, helping to tug it in to shore, their legs kicking out beneath the hull. His arms are strong and thick next to hers; the water glistens like dew drops on the blond hairs.

They drag the boat up on to the beach. It shooshes along the sand, leaving a groove. The tide is out and the beach is vast. They are the only creatures on it, apart from some sandpipers that fly up and settle further away, whistling to each other as they go. Charlie’s skin is pale where it has been covered by his uniform. His chest is smooth and hairless.

They soon dry in the heat of the sun. They eat sandwiches while sitting on the sand, digging their toes through the warm, dry top layer into the cool damp below. Afterwards, they explore the beach, turning over heavy stones to look for crabs that burrow secretively away from them. Olivia climbs a mound of rocks and surveys the loch. The water is cobalt blue further out, turning to emerald green as it grows shallower. To the left she can clearly see the open sea, the hills at the mouth of the loch gradually sloping into it until there is nothing, just endless ocean. It is easy to pretend the smattering of ships and the pillboxes aren’t there.

Charlie calls out and points at a round shape like a brown balloon bobbing on the surface of the water. Olivia spots it just as the seal disappears from sight. ‘Oh!’ she says, disappointed.

‘It’ll come up again,’ says Charlie. ‘There!’ It is much closer this time. Close enough to make out the mournful black eyes and mottled head.

‘Sing to it,’ says Charlie. ‘That’s what they say. If you sing to them, they come closer.’

‘I’m not going to sing to it,’ says Olivia self-consciously, then laughing as Charlie starts to sing, ‘God Save Our Gracious King’, and the seal watches them both, bemused, before disappearing again.

‘You’ve scared it away,’ says Olivia.

But Charlie is undaunted and carries on, tunelessly. The next time the creature comes up, it is a bit closer. So Olivia joins in, and they stand there singing as the sun beats down and the sandpipers feel braver and rush closer on their tiny legs, and the minutes stretch and mould into hours, and war and the cold ships that lie on the other side of the island are far from their minds.

Charlie is insistent that he teach Olivia how to shoot. He borrows an old air rifle from the gunroom at the back of Aunt Nancy’s house. Uncle Howard’s shotguns and rifles line the walls neatly, like sentries on duty. The room smells of gun oil and leather.

He hands her the gun. ‘Practise first,’ he says. ‘The principle is the same.’

Olivia holds it awkwardly while Charlie rigs up paper targets outside. The targets seem tiny, but Olivia is beginning to learn that she likes a challenge. Her first few shots are way off the paper, but she quickly gets her eye in and it turns out she’s pretty good. Soon she is just a hair’s breadth off the centre. Charlie nods as he watches her break the rifle and feed another silver pellet into it. She snaps it shut, aims and fires. There is a tiny hole in the bull’s-eye. And again. She hits it four times in a row.

‘I guess you’ve either got it or you haven’t,’ she says, smiling.

‘All right, all right,’ says Charlie, laughing. ‘Let’s try with the proper rifle.’

The sporting rifle is much heavier. Olivia lies next to Charlie on the ground. First he demonstrates how to put the safety catch on. Then how to lock and unlock the bolt, and where to lay the smooth, pointed bullets. She takes one and slides it into its chamber.

Charlie shows her how to steady the gun. ‘Use my arm, if you need to,’ he says. He pulls the rifle up and into her shoulder. The cold stock touches her warm cheek.

‘Feel there?’ he says. ‘Where the stock sits comfortably?’ She nods.

‘Now, when you fire, you squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull it. Just squeeze.’ He holds his hand over hers to demonstrate. ‘This rifle will have more of a kick than the air rifle. So make sure you hold it in.’ She can feel his breath on the tip of her ear.

‘Line up the sight like you usually do,’ he says. She drops her head. Looks along the top of the barrel. Adjusts the position until the marker sits between its dip.

‘Fire when you’re ready. But only if and when you’re a hundred per cent ready, with a clear, true shot.’

She pulls the trigger and there’s a zipping noise and the rifle kicks back against her shoulder. Charlie gets to his knees, squinting at the target: there is a neat hole ripped just on the edge of the bull’s-eye.

‘Looks like you’d give my gunner a run for his money,’ says Charlie. Olivia grins. ‘Seriously, though.’ Charlie’s brow furrows, and he sits back on his heels so he can look at her properly. ‘This could be useful if things get sticky.’

‘I don’t think I could shoot someone, if that’s what you mean,’ she says. ‘Not even a Nazi.’

‘I hope it won’t come to that, but you might get short of food. It sounds ridiculous now it’s summer, but once winter comes again I think rationing will really bite …’

‘We’re stocking up. We’ve been pickling and bottling like mad.’

‘But there are many more people living here at the moment – and you’ll need fresh meat once it’s too cold to fish. Get Mac to show you which deer need taking, and you’ll have fresh venison.’

‘Mac’s given all that up.’

‘He may have to change his mind.’

She sits up too, dusting the soil from her elbows. ‘Do you really think things are going to get that bad?’ she asks.

‘I’m sure they will. The Germans are in the north of France. They’re in the Channel Islands, for God’s sake. It’s only a matter of time before they strike.’

‘Sometimes it’s hard to believe that anything will happen. All we’ve had here are a couple of ineffective mines and some fly-pasts. You know, Mother said she’d heard it called the “phoney war” in London.’

The colour drains from Charlie’s face. ‘Is that what you think?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I suppose I’ve been lucky, that’s all …’ Olivia is startled by the sudden change. His eyes have clouded to a turbulent green. His whole body is tense. He starts to walk away.

‘Charlie …’ she calls out after him. He doesn’t turn to look at her, just carries on walking, his back straight, his hands gripping the rifle, knuckles white. She has to jog to catch up. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘I know you’ve had a terrible time …’

‘You don’t know anything,’ he says. ‘You’re just a child.’

‘Then tell me?’ she says. She rests her hand gently in the crook of his elbow. He slows a little, and then sits on a fallen tree. Olivia sits next to him. The bark is old and spongy, crumbling a little beneath their weight.

‘I couldn’t,’ he says. ‘It’s not the kind of thing a girl like you should hear.’

Olivia leans against him, and he puts out his hand and she holds it in hers. ‘I’m here if you want to,’ she says quietly. They sit in silence for a long time, while the branches of the trees creak and rub above them.

A week’s leave is over quickly. Charlie has shown her his favourite spots. He has taught her how to build a small fire on the beach to cook her catch on, finding the driest leaves and hearing them crackle as they catch and burn. He has taken her up to the string of freshwater lochs, and to the places where the golden eagles glide on thermals high above the hills. The osprey nest was not used this year – possibly because of all the commotion around the loch, but it meant they could get a bit closer to examine the great heap of twigs and branches. Sometimes, in the evenings up at Taigh Mor, she catches him staring at nothing and glimpses that darkness or hardness again in his eyes. But she doesn’t pry.

She tries to be cheerful on his last day, but she knows she will miss having him around. His case is packed and he is getting a lift to Inverness with some of the other returning sailors. ‘Thank you,’ he says, taking her hands in his.

‘For what?’

‘I’ve had the best leave ever. Like one of the summers of my childhood. Swimming. Shooting. Fishing. Heaven.’

‘Do you know where you’re going next?’

He shakes his head. ‘But I do know I’ll be back as soon as I can next get leave.’

She kisses him on the cheek. ‘Be careful, won’t you?’ she says.

‘You’ll write?’

She nods. ‘Of course,’ she says.

‘In that case, I can do anything.’ He stands up straight, smoothing his sleeves down, every part the young officer. The light bounces off the stripes on his sleeves, but the cap throws his face into darkness.

With autumn comes terrible news from down south as the Luftwaffe begin to attack London and beyond, night after night. The RAF struggles to keep them at bay. Returning home is out of the question. Mother tries to keep her tone light on the telephone, but Olivia can hear the buzz of exhaustion beneath. Stoke Hall is so close to the coast, there could easily be a stray bomb – or even an intentional one. There was a furore recently when two parachutists were seen landing in the Fir Wood, but the soldiers who are now camped out in the gardens went to investigate and found the two German airmen dead. The thought of those two dead men – German or not – dangling among the dark and spiky conifers, puts her own inconveniences to shame. She stops moaning about the security checkpoints that have sprung up at all the roads coming into or leaving the area – Gairloch, Achnasheen, Inverness. There is even one at Laide, near Mrs Campbell’s shop, where Olivia is sent to stock up on tea for Aunt Nancy, which the shopkeeper marks neatly in their ration books. And now more ships begin to arrive at the loch – this time a hotchpotch of merchant ships, refuelling before setting off on their long and treacherous journeys across the ocean. Sailors and soldiers begin to outnumber locals significantly.

The news from Charlie is intermittent. It seems he does not have time to write, and each long stretch without a letter is accompanied by a fear that there will be never be another one. But Aunt Nancy tells her not to worry, making a passing reference to Fleet Air Arm pilots helping the RAF over London. ‘Charlie will be fine. He’s extremely accomplished. You just keep writing. Give him something to look forward to,’ she says.

As the nights draw in and winter approaches, the fish supplies dwindle. Olivia thinks it is time to take Charlie’s advice. ‘I’m too old to take you up there, lassie,’ says Mac, pointing at his creaking knees and swollen knuckles. But Olivia soon works him around.

Mac is impressed by Olivia’s marksmanship and her quiet respect. They walk and climb and inch for miles up into the hills that turn from purple to gold and russet through the autumn. Olivia learns how to throw a piece of torn heather into the air to determine which way the wind is blowing. She learns how to track, and how to avoid a herd. She learns their habits, where they like to shelter, where to eat. She learns how to use a spyglass without it catching the light. She learns how the fog distorts sound and distance. She knows when a mist will settle and when it will clear. Together they crawl and creep for hours, above the clouds, across peat bogs and through the heather, and over boulders and up glens, only to turn back if the stag is too fine. Mac teaches her to hunt the frail, as well as poor quality and weaker beasts. Thistle, the old stalking pony, is brought back into service. Olivia slowly gains the pony’s trust, and when she shoots her first stag and Mac grallochs it, she learns the fine art of balancing a stag across the pony’s stalking saddle. Mac hangs the beast in the large, cold game larder. He butchers it himself, swift and deft despite his arthritis.

The Macs have a sailor billeted with them, a steward who has never tried venison before, but is keen to sample anything that hasn’t been salted or dried or stewed within an inch of its life. He chews on the meat thoughtfully, nodding his head and licking his lips. ‘I think this would go down well in our messes,’ he says. ‘Could we buy some? Our men are always clamouring for fresh meat.’

The idea snowballs. Word spreads around the ships, and Olivia is soon inundated with orders, from sailors, soldiers, and Wrens. She is worried about what Aunt Nancy will say, but her aunt is thrilled that she is showing initiative. ‘And Clarkson could do with some decent meat to serve to the officers we have billeted here,’ she says. She even takes the time to show Olivia how to write the orders in a ledger and keep a note of the money coming in and going out. It is the longest amount of time she has spent with Olivia since she arrived. ‘Watch those men,’ she says. ‘Don’t think they won’t try for a bargain just because you’re a girl.’ But Olivia is as canny as anyone, and she turns it to her advantage. She finds the men are keen to talk, and even keener for a smile. Many of them have been away at sea for weeks and miss female company.

Mac is delighted: he gets a cut, and Olivia starts to offer his eggs and milk too. They turn more of the garden over to growing vegetables. Other locals offer what they can: last year’s jam; Ben Munro’s apples; Mrs McLellan’s chutney. Mrs Campbell comes in on the business, always happy to receive more supplies for her store – particularly when the roads are blocked with snow and she is running low. Olivia learns how to drive Aunt Nancy’s ancient Austin and, each week, she transports whatever she hasn’t sold directly to the ships to Mrs Campbell’s shop. By late autumn, they even have a buyer from Edinburgh, who bumps along the single track road from the city once a week to collect venison or lobsters for his restaurant.

It is deep winter, and fresh meat stocks are running low again. The stag-hunting season is over, but there are plenty of hinds to be taken. Olivia is up and out of the house before dawn breaks across the loch. There is no need for a torch: the snow that settled overnight has turned the world luminous. Something crackles away into the undergrowth, startled by the crunch of her feet on the path, in turn setting a bird fluttering and flapping through the branches above. Then silence again. A world muffled by snow. Beyond the trees, the loch: grey and silent as the ships packed with sleeping men. She has grown to love this time in the morning, the only time there is true peace and quiet these days. The roads are empty once again and she can slip into the hills unnoticed.

Her pass and gas mask and ID card are gathering dust on the dressing table in her bedroom. She has no need of them; she knows how to get past the checkpoints and guards, crossing between Gairloch and Poolewe undetected by following the low road along the shoreline like the other locals. And there are no checkpoints up in the hills. No one would be foolish enough to cross them without local knowledge.

The hills are where she is headed now. She cannot see them, but she can sense them looming in the darkness ahead, steady and solid, unmoving and unmoved by the world’s turmoil. By the time she gets to the farm, the sky is beginning to glow aquamarine as dawn breaks. The tack room is empty. A faint orange glow of embers breathes among the ash as she opens the door to retrieve Thistle’s saddle. The pony comes straight to her now, letting her slip on his head collar without a fuss. She adjusts the stalking saddle, holds her hands under the pony’s mane, where he is warmest, and presses her face against his shaggy grey fur, breathing in the horsey smell.

She leads him out over the cobbles. The snow is dirty here, trampled with mud and grit. The pony snorts, clearing his nostrils into the chilly air. His bright dark eyes peer out at her from beneath his ragged forelock. She glances down at herself, pleased at how her camouflage has turned out. She has butchered her aunt’s debutante dress, sewing it into a new outfit that covers her clothes so she is white all over. Underneath she has on her woollen jumper and the flannel trousers and knee-length socks that she always wears to keep herself warm. She has used the arm of an old fur coat to make a cosy scarf for her neck. The rifle sits cold and heavy across her back as they trudge away from the farm.

Now it is morning. The loch is a mirror far below. The snowy peaks, jagged and bright, reflected in its surface. Down nearer the shore, the trees stand out against the white, the prickly and black conifers, and the twiggy and twisted leafless winter trees. The shoreline is a smudge of orange, just beginning to show beneath the melting snow. From here, the loch is so large and shining that it is easy to misread the size of the ships that lie on its surface.

The hills sweep up out of the ground ahead of her, their tops still wreathed in cloud. But the sky is blue, the heavy snow clouds have moved on, and it will be a fine day. She follows the burn, a glimmering crack, the water sparkling like a necklace of diamonds among the softer white of the fresh-fallen snow. By the time she reaches the rowan pool, she has worked up quite a warmth. The rowan tree is hung with frosted particles like sugar icing. The only sound is the beat of tiny wings as some snow buntings fly up, white like rising snowflakes, apart from the flash of black on their wings.

She leaves Thistle by the tree, tied to a boulder. He is also well camouflaged: only the tips of his grey tail and his unruly mane – and his knobbly knees – standing out. His neat little black hooves are hidden, sunk into the snow. She sets to work in the silence, her brow furrowed in concentration. She reads the tracks: the delicate Ys of the birds busily criss-crossing all over the place; the long oval shapes of a hare; the solid shuffle of a grouse; the stealthy holes of a fox. The snow is yellow in places where an animal has peed. There are dark holes where rabbit droppings have steamed through to the ground.

She has to be careful. The snow has drifted deeply in places, hiding crevices and cracks in the ground. She comes across the multiple tracks of deer not much further up. They have sheltered in the lee of the hill, where the boulders make a natural cave. The wind seems to have shifted, possibly because of the lie of the peaks above her. There is less snow on the ground, more for the deer to eat. She creeps forward. Peers beyond the next boulder. She cannot see the herd – but she can see a stag. Either the hinds are around the corner, or they have scarpered and this is a lone male. She crouches, inching forward on hands and knees to get a better look. The stag is about four hundred yards away from her, in a dip across a narrow part of the burn. Still no sign of any hinds. Her rock is slippery. She moves carefully, hoping she won’t cause a vibration that dumps the snow above on top of her.

The stag snuffles at the ground. Suddenly it lifts its head. Its nostrils dilate. Olivia stops and drops flat, her cheek scratching against the hard crust of snow. She slowly lifts her head. The stag is staring at something she cannot see, in the opposite direction. He is magnificent: all muscle and searching eyes and flared nostrils. His ears swivel. His neck is thick and shaggy. There is the black scar down his flank. He flicks his tail. The tips of his nostrils move, in and out, twitching, smelling, searching for whatever it is he thinks he’s heard.

As the stag turns and springs away, a loud crack whips out across the snow and Olivia sees the animal stumble awkwardly as if he has been hit, but then his feet find the ground and he is off like the wind across the hillside and down the pass and deep into the crags and contours of endless wilderness.

Olivia’s heart races with him. For a moment her mind is blank, and then she wonders who else could be up here in the snow and the wind? And who would go for a stag at this time of year? Or a stag like that at any time of year?

She doesn’t dare move. She doesn’t want anyone to spot her. She strains to see anything against the glare. And then she spots something: a figure wading through the snow, dark against the sparkling crust. Olivia presses herself as flat as possible down on the rock. She wants to see who it is, but she can’t. They are still too far away.

The figure draws slowly closer, hampered by snow. As it approaches, Olivia holds her breath: she doesn’t want the vapour to give her away. She can’t see his face, but it is definitely a man. He looks at where the stag was. Glances around. He looks down at the ground again. He paces around, shaking his head and pulling his arms tighter around his body, rubbing at his shoulders. His clothes are flimsy, too thin in this cold. A sudden gust dislodges some snow from above her and the movement makes the man jump. He stares in her direction, his body rigid. Waves of fear course through her body. Surely he will see her. But now he is hurrying away as fast as he can. She lies still until the desperate figure is out of sight, feeling the cold and damp seep into her knees and elbows. By the time she dares to move, she is stiff as new leather. She pulls herself up and then slips and scrambles back down the hill as quietly as she can, not wanting to look back, half-expecting the man to jump out at her. She is relieved to see Thistle still there, his eyes half-closed, unaware of her panic. There is some comfort in his presence, but not much. As they stumble and trip down the hill, she keeps glancing over her shoulder. But there is no sign of anyone else.

It takes almost two hours for her to reach the farm. Her clothes are now damp with sweat, and Thistle is fed up with being pulled, digging his feet into the ground in protest. The fire in the tack room is leaping in the grate, warming the backs of the men who are seated at the table, cupping hot mugs of tea laced with whisky from the bottle that Mac keeps behind the old dresser. As soon as they see Olivia’s face, they slam their mugs down, the sound marking an end to their easy conversation.

‘What is it?’ Mac asks.

‘There’s someone out on the hill.’ Mac frowns, his blue eyes sinking into the leathery face. ‘With a gun,’ she adds. The men scrabble to their feet, chair legs scraping on the flagstones. Someone runs to fetch Ben Munro, who arrives on his bicycle, dressed in his Home Guard uniform and carrying a rifle. Olivia repeats what she has seen. The men discuss in Gaelic. Mac collects two more rifles and a shotgun, talking to his wife quietly in the doorway of the house.

‘Off you go now,’ Ben Munro says to Olivia. ‘Run home. Stay indoors until you hear otherwise.’

‘Don’t you want me to come and show you?’

‘Och no, lassie. It’s no place for a young lady up there.’

‘But …’

‘Go on, now.’

Olivia watches the men tramp up into the hills, small, steady, determined. She feels a sudden stab of anxiety for the pathetic creature she saw out there. She turns for home as the men fold into the hills as if they are a part of them.

Hours later, when the only sound on the hill is the trickling of water back towards the loch, Ben appears at the bothy. ‘We couldn’t find anything,’ he says. ‘It’s been snowing, and a herd has trampled right through there.’

‘I suppose he’s hiding somewhere,’ she says, thinking out loud.

‘No, no. Whoever it was is probably sitting by a nice warm fire somewhere towards Gairloch.’

‘You think it was a local?’

‘We’ve had poachers for centuries. I’m sure we’ll have them for centuries more. Your aunt is nae bothered. And nor should you be. There’s plenty to go around.’

‘But he didn’t …’

‘Look,’ says Ben, ‘whoever it was will be long gone. No one can survive out on those hills in these temperatures. We’ll stay vigilant, but keep off the hill for a wee while. Find yourself something more ladylike to do. Mrs Munro is still looking for more people to help knit scarves for the troops …’

Olivia nods, but she has no intention of doing such a thing. She would rather be captured by Germans than join the knitting circle.

CHAPTER 7

Winter finally turns to spring, and Thistle can be let out into the small paddock behind the farmhouse while Olivia cleans out his stable. She rubs the pony down in the yard, watching the dust dance in the bright, cold sky, running her hand along his flank as he blows in her hair. She slips the head collar from his shaggy head, untangling the thick mane where it catches in the buckle. Thistle shakes his whole body, from his velvety nostrils to his broad rump, a huge shudder of relief. Then he wheels around and races off across the field, head down, bucking with freedom, searching for the patches of grass that lie temptingly in the sunshine.

Back in the stable, clearing the dirty straw, not for the first time Olivia wishes there was a light so she could see better. There are three other stalls, empty and bare, and beyond them a load of old feed bins and farming implements. She doesn’t like to venture back there, where it is dark and dingy and hung with curtains of dusty cobwebs. She is shaking the clean bedding out when she hears a strange noise above the rustle of dry straw, and her heartbeat quickens. She stands still, head on one side, listening in the silence. ‘Is anyone there?’ she says. There is no answer. The hairs on her skin start to prickle. She grabs the pitchfork. There is a swish of movement again. A rat? She peers into the gloom, takes a step closer. She doesn’t dare go right in. The sunlight is on her back. It cannot penetrate further. She squints, leans forward, pointing the pitchfork into the darkness.

There is a faint sound: ‘Pleez …’ It is so quiet that she has to strain to hear, which means she can’t scream as a shape begins to evolve in the shadows, a shape that turns out to be a person holding his hands up above his head. ‘Pleez,’ he says again.

‘Don’t you come any closer,’ she says, jabbing the fork in his direction.

He stops there, half hidden. He is desperately thin. His top is grimy, and his trousers are torn down one side and stained with dirt. His feet are bare. He smells of stale sweat, filth, and fever. She would have thought he was a tramp, if it wasn’t for the unmistakeable insignia stitched on to the right side of his jacket: the eagle of the Third Reich, the Nazi swastika clasped in its claws. She remembers the two dead parachutists swinging in the Fir Wood. She thinks of Charlie’s letters and the poor men who never come back. ‘Pleez, Fraülein,’ he says again. He rests his puny arms on his head, too exhausted to hold them up, surely too exhausted to harm her.

Still, she keeps her distance. She indicates that he can drop his arms. His thin face contorts into a grimace, and she notices that one of his eyes is swollen shut.

‘Who are you?’ she asks.

He says something she doesn’t understand, but then stops as he starts to cough, a rasping, phlegmy sound that rattles in his chest and makes him double over with the effort. ‘Shh,’ she says, holding up her finger and moving a little towards him. ‘Shh.’ He tries to stop, swallowing the coughs behind his hand as he collapses wheezing to the floor.

Olivia doesn’t call for Mrs Mac. She is surprised to find that she isn’t scared. He may be German, but this emaciated creature is no threat, and she remembers well the look on the men’s faces when they set off in pursuit of him. Which reminds her. Gun. He must have one somewhere. She makes the shape of a gun with her hand. ‘Revolver?’ she says. He scrabbles backwards into the dark.

‘No. I’m not going to shoot you,’ she says. ‘Your gun?’

He shivers, uncomprehending, staring up at her from his one good eye.

She runs to fetch a torch from Mrs Mac, telling her she plans to do a full spring clean. When she returns, she shines the light around the back of the stable, picking out the shadows of the old feed bins, buckets, ropes, shovels, all covered in a thick layer of dust, shed from animals and hay over the years. The German is huddled right back into the far corner, a shadow within a shadow. He has made a bed from some old straw, with a pillow – his life jacket – stuffed with more. Apart from the grubby clothes he is wearing, there is a leather jacket and some decent-looking boots, which are lying on their sides.

She can hear the breath bubbling in his lungs. She knows he needs warm clothes, decent food. She is fascinated and repelled. His puffy eye is weeping. He moves towards her and she backs away. He slumps into the corner, dejected, coughing, too weak to move. She immediately feels bad. ‘I’ll try and bring you some clothes,’ she says. He doesn’t look at her. ‘And clean water.’ He still doesn’t look at her, and then the cough starts barking in his chest again. There is a noise out in the yard. The German looks up at her, his eyes wide with fear. Someone is calling her name. Olivia puts her finger to her lips and then backs out into the light, leaving him alone in the darkness once more.

Olivia visits the German when it is safe to do so, sloshing the rancid water he had been drinking out on the cobbles and replacing it with fresh, borrowing a bale of fresh straw to spread out for him, removing the old straw when she is mucking out the pony. She lugs warm water in a bucket, leaving him to peel off his filthy clothes and scrub at his filthy skin. She finds some clothes that must have belonged to Uncle Howard in the dressing-up box at Taigh Mor. Eccentric, but at least they are clean and warm. She takes the man’s uniform and buries it far away, deep in soft peat. Once the grime is washed off and the sickly pallor has faded from his skin, she can see that he has hazel eyes and mousy-coloured hair.

At first they struggle to communicate in broken English, using hand signals and pictures drawn in the ground to clarify meaning, like a child’s game of charades. Slowly, Olivia learns that his name is Hans, and that his plane was shot down at sea. Somehow he managed to drift to shore and climb up into the hills. He has a revolver, but no bullets: he used the last the day he tried to shoot the stag. He missed because of the damage to his eye. He followed her tracks back to the stable and hid, surviving on a mixture of stale pony nuts and the occasional foraged vegetable from the walled garden. He is twenty. The same age as Charlie.

Hans lets her clean the bad eye with salt water, drawing his breath in sharply as she dabs at it. The eyeball was punctured by a piece of Perspex from the cockpit of his plane, and although Hans managed to pull it out, and the eyeball itself seems to have healed, the shard also cut the skin at the corner, and it is this that has become infected. Olivia washes it every day, but the skin remains hot and swollen, and she knows that Hans’s temperature is high. She raids the tack room, finding an old bottle of iodine, the brown glass marked with skull and crossbones. She dabs it on the wound, feels Hans’s body go rigid, sees his eyes water with unshed tears. She remembers how painful iodine is even on grazed knees. She stops, but he indicates that she must carry on. Tears come to her own eyes, because he is so very brave and he does not make a sound. She cleans it this way every morning and evening, until at last the wound stops festering and starts to heal, and now the cough begins to clear up, and finally colour returns to Hans’s pasty cheeks.

The fear of discovery grows less with each day that passes, and as they both relax in each other’s company, that corner of the stable becomes almost like home. They play cards: Pelmanism and rummy. Hans picks up English a lot more quickly than Olivia has managed to pick up Gaelic. He has a gentle, shy smile and calm manner. He is the complete opposite to what she’s heard and read about Germans. She feels guilty for liking him, but then why shouldn’t she? They can’t all be bad, can they? Olivia wonders how many of the Wrens and soldiers who career around the loch have ever met a real German. Is it just the uniform that gives the enemy away? Or is it something deeper?

Hans shows her the crumpled photograph that he keeps in his pocket. She studies it in the crack of light that slopes in through a missing tile in the stable roof. It is a picture of Hans, his mother and younger brother. A shaggy mongrel lies with its head on Hans’s foot. The little brother is wearing lederhosen, a serious expression on his face. Hans is smiling in his Luftwaffe uniform. His mother’s arm is linked through his and she is looking up at him proudly. She is wearing a flowery dress. She looks no different to Olivia today. In fact, Olivia looks more Germanic with her pale eyes and blonde hair. Hans gazes sadly at the photograph before putting it carefully back into his pocket. Olivia thinks how similar they are; both in a place they never intended to be; both isolated from friends and family.

‘What is your home like?’ she asks.

‘My home town is Dresden,’ he says. ‘It is very beautiful. Many old houses. Much history. Very different to here.’

‘It sounds like London,’ she says.

He nods. ‘It also has a big river. The Elbe. We live near it. I like to walk my dog there.’

‘I’m not sure it would be very safe walking a dog in London these days …’

‘So sad,’ he says. ‘I would like to visit London one day.’

‘If there’s anything left …’

He clicks his tongue, shaking his head as if he cannot believe the world. ‘I will help rebuild it,’ he says. ‘I will be an architect when this is over.’

‘Is that what you always wanted to do?’

He nods. ‘My father has – had – an architect business in Dresden.’

‘What is he doing now?’

‘He is a captain in the Kriegsmarine.’

‘No!’ she laughs. ‘Mine is too …’

‘Let’s hope they never meet.’

Spring begins to warm the air, and soft new leaves unfurl on the trees as the days begin to lighten. Up in the hills, the stoats start to lose their creamy winter coats, their faces and backs turning russet brown again. Somewhere a cuckoo is calling. The sound gladdens Olivia’s soul: it means summer is approaching. The wind drowns out the sound of traffic on the road. As she battles to hang the washing out on the blowy line, the sheets snapping and cracking against her, she almost forgets why she is here – and how once she had not wanted to be.

What with preparing the ground for planting vegetables, and being able to fish for salmon and brown trout again, with negotiating with kitchen staff or directly with the men on the ships, she has less time to spend with Hans. She brings him books from the bothy to read when he dares to crawl closer to the stable door. ‘I must thank you for all your kindnesses,’ he says.

‘Anyone would have done it.’

‘I know that this is not true.’

‘Well, you don’t seem too frightening to me.’

‘I am certainly not the ideal of the Reich’s Aryan Herrenvolk.’

‘I’m hardly the ideal daughter, let alone British subject …’

He smiles, but the smile quickly crumbles. ‘It is strange that you are on one side and I am on the other simply because of where we are born.’

‘We call it a quirk of fate …’

‘Like whether you are rescued by an English girl … or lose your life in the sea …’

‘Looks like fate has been good to you …’

‘Perhaps.’ Hans holds a hand over his good eye and squints towards the light.

‘Is it any better?’ says Olivia.

He shakes his head. ‘It is not painful,’ he says. ‘But the sight is blurry. Like flying in fog.’

‘Maybe it will improve with time …’

‘No. I fear it will be like this for ever, and I will never fly again. This is something I cannot bear.’

‘I know someone who would understand that.’

‘You have a friend who flies?’

‘He lives for it …’

‘I hope he never suffers this …’

‘What do you think you’ll do instead?’

‘You mean until the war is over? I will be forced to work at a desk. Or in a prisoner camp …’

They sit there in silence for a moment, both trying to see into an unforeseeable future. Olivia throws the cards at him. ‘Let’s stop being morbid,’ she says. ‘Look on the bright side. It means you won’t have to drop any bombs on me …’

He smiles. ‘Now who is being morbid?’

She laughs. ‘Imagine there was no war, and we met at a party … What would we be talking about? Music or something …’

‘Ah,’ says Hans, his face lighting up with memories. ‘Now music is something we Germans can certainly be superior about. After all, we have given the world Brahms, Mendelssohn, Handel …’

‘Hang on … I think we can claim Handel as one of our own …’

‘How do you figure this?’

‘He’s an honorary Englishman. He loved it so much over here that he ended up staying …’

‘Things were surely less complicated in those days.’

The days lengthen. More hours of daylight mean more chance of discovery. As much as she wants him to stay, she has to persuade Hans to move on. ‘You won’t be able to hide for much longer,’ she says. ‘More people are arriving every day. They’ve commissioned an official naval base at Aultbea now. And you must leave before the winter comes again. Do you have somewhere to go?’

‘There are places,’ says Hans. ‘Places of sympathy.’

Olivia holds her hand up to stop him. She doesn’t want to know in case anyone ever asks and she feels obliged to tell them.

She draws Hans a map of how to cross the hills without nearing a checkpoint. She collects food over the weeks, and he stows it away carefully. ‘You stand a good chance before the weather turns,’ she says. ‘And you might even pass for English, you know. You’re speaking it really well.’

‘I have the best teacher,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

Olivia smiles, feels the tears prick her eyes.

More buildings have been erected at Aultbea, and a mass of Wrens have joined the soldiers and sailors who now throng the area around Loch Ewe. They sit behind the wheels of cars and trucks, at the helm of small boats delivering supplies and letters to the ships. They run errands. They man the offices. They drive messages to Inverness. They collect personnel. They move munitions. They are cooks, stewards, telephonists, radio operators. Two of the Wrens – Gladys and Maggie – often drive to the cottage to play cards or lie on the lawn outside. They are only a couple of years older than Olivia. She can’t help admiring their uniforms, their strong sense of purpose. She grills them for information about life as a Wren. They laugh and tell her she should join. ‘But I’ve still got almost a year before I can,’ she says.

‘It’ll come around soon enough,’ says Gladys, who is always immaculately turned out. She has kind eyes and a genuine smile. Her best friend Maggie is fiery haired and fiery tempered as well as curvaceous: she looks as if she’s about to burst out of her uniform at any moment, the buttons straining at her chest. The three of them are lying on the lawn, soaking up the warm sunshine.

‘We’ve been talking to your aunt,’ says Maggie.

‘You never told us you had a friend in the Fleet Air Arm,’ says Gladys.

‘What squadron is he in?’

‘Eight-five-eight,’ says Olivia. ‘Fairey Swordfish.’

‘Any idea where he is now?’

Olivia shakes her head.

‘I wonder if he was involved in the Taranto raid. That was all Swordfish. Incredible, those old bi-planes … Who’d have thought it?’

‘Wasn’t Taranto the first all-aircraft attack by our Navy?’

Gladys nods. ‘Not only that, they destroyed half of the Italian Navy’s capital ships and gave us the upper hand in the Med …’

‘I don’t think that was Charlie’s squadron,’ says Olivia. ‘Or if it was, I don’t think he was involved. The Fleet Air Arm have been helping out over London.’

Both Wrens grimace. ‘God knows the RAF needed them.’

They are silent for a moment.

‘I take it he wasn’t flying stringbags over London?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. And I’m sure he’d be offended if he knew you were calling them “stringbags” …’

‘It’s what we all call them. Said with much love …’

‘Unless he’s got no sense of humour …?’

‘Actually, he has a great sense of humour.’

‘Don’t tell me he’s handsome too?’

‘Has he got a girlfriend?’ Maggie primps her hair as if styling it in a mirror.

Gladys squints at Olivia. ‘You’re a dark horse,’ she says. ‘You never told us you were sweet on anyone.’

‘I’m not! He’s more like a brother …’

‘That’s a classic hedging line!’

‘It’s true …’

‘Keeping him all to yourself, eh?’ says Maggie.

‘That’s enough from you,’ says Gladys. ‘You’ve got Rob.’

‘And Danny,’ says Olivia.

‘I don’t believe you should focus all your efforts on one man.’

‘We can see that.’

‘And if you really are going to confine yourself to one – then you’ve got to try the goods before you commit. Otherwise you may be in for a lifetime of disappointment.’

Gladys shakes her head, laughing. ‘You’re incorrigible,’ she says, pushing Maggie in the shoulder so that she falls back on to the grass.

‘Don’t you act all innocent with me,’ says Maggie. ‘I know you’ve enjoyed the odd fumble after lights-out.’

‘I’m not quite in your league, though, am I?’

Olivia goes to fetch a jug of water, taking the opportunity to wind up the gramophone again and avoid the conversation. She suddenly feels foolish next to these liberated girls who know so much about relationships and men. Charlie is the closest thing she’s ever had to a boyfriend, and she couldn’t exactly call him that. He really is more like a brother. She enjoys his company, but she could never imagine …

She wanders slowly back out, sipping her drink, watching the others lean back on their elbows and look out across the loch. The swallows flit up and disappear into the eaves of the house. The gramophone scratches to a stop. Peace descends for seconds, but is broken by the drone of a plane. A Junkers 88 appears, a growing dot in the distance. They are such a common sight now that the girls just lie there, watching it approach. The planes usually circle the loch on reconnaissance and then disappear back to Norway again.

Suddenly Gladys jumps up and grabs hold of Olivia’s arm. ‘Inside! Now!’ she yells as she starts dragging Olivia towards the cottage. ‘Kitchen table!’

But Olivia resists, standing motionless, enthralled as she sees the first tiny charge drop towards earth. This is no reconnaissance plane. Maggie pushes her: ‘Come on,’ she says and Olivia starts to run, but can’t help glancing back to watch the tiny bomb float down, down, and then explode among the ships on the loch. The bang of the anti-aircraft guns starts to fill her ears, tracer fire trailing up through the air. But the plane avoids the bullets and carries on. Boom

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