‘No. You must have dreamt it.’
I run my hands through my hair, dislodging a dusty feather, and don’t argue.
I’m too disorientated. And cold.
But I didn’t dream those flares.
They were real.
Weren’t they?
Because what about the planes?
The noise from them felt real too …
I close my eyes, replaying it.
‘I gotta run,’ Ana says. Distantly, I’m aware of her voice. ‘Everyone’s waiting in the library. You need to move, too. Make sure you have some breakfast before make-up, yes?’
She doesn’t wait for an answer.
And I don’t give her one.
I don’t watch her go, either.
I’m too busy staring at the window, my entire body shaking, wondering if it’s possible that Mum’s right after all, and I’m on the cusp of some kind of breakdown.
Chapter Four
Iris
February 1943
RAF Doverley, North Yorkshire
It had been a long time since Iris was last in Yorkshire. She’d been born here though, in a village called Heaton, not three miles from Doverley. As a child, she’d often trespassed on the dark, rain-sodden grounds she’d just tramped through, but had never dared to venture so far as this house. Rather, it had been to the derelict old gamekeeper’s cottage, deep in the woods, that she’d always scampered, losing endless hours inside its crumbling walls. She’d been caught there once by Lord Heaton, when he’d been out walking his setters.
Get out of there this instant, he’d yelled.
What would he think, she wondered, if he were to learn that that scruffy girl who’d outrun him, all the way to his iron gates, was now a resident of his home?
She doubted he’d mind too much; she had been put up in this attic, after all: the old servants’ quarters.
Probably, he’d consider that quite fitting.
It wasn’t her first time in a servant’s room. When she’d left school, age fourteen, she’d gone into service as a housemaid at an aristocratic pile in Surrey. Her mother would have hated it for her. Iris hadn’t much liked it for herself. She remembered how, arriving in Surrey, she’d been handed her monochromeuniform and sworn to herself,I won’t wear this my whole life.Back then, she had, of course, still thought of life as something that most usually went on for decades. But that had been 1933, and whilst she’d been learning to set a table with perfect angles for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Hitler had been getting himself appointed Chancellor of Germany. When, in 1937, aged eighteen, she’d used her squirreled away savings to secure a place at secretarial college, the Spanish Civil War had been raging. Two years later, and this world war they were all now embroiled in had kicked off. By that point, she’d qualified for her secretarial diploma, which had been enough to get her through the door with the RAF, who she’d assumed would want her as a typist, only her interviewer had been tasked with sourcing radio operatives, so that’s what she’d trained as – in another uniform after all: just air force blue, rather than black and white, with a peaked cap that was currently dripping rain down her neck.
She should remove it, she knew. Take her sopping overcoat off, as well.
She was too tired to do that, though.
Instead, she dropped her head forwards, resting it against the glass of her new bedroom’s window. Behind her, Clare lay face down on the bed she’d flung herself on, drenched too. No one had been waiting for them at Heaton when their train had arrived from London – delayed, as trains mostly were these days – so they’d had no choice but to head to Doverley on foot, lugging their belongings with them. They hadn’t exactly been given a warm welcome when they’d arrived, either. Rather, when the base adjutant had come out to meet them in the driveway, umbrella aloft, he’d torn a strip off them for being so late.
‘Have you seen the time?’ he’d barked.
‘I haven’t dared look, sir,’ Clare had replied. ‘My watch isn’t waterproofed.’
‘Are you being smart?’
