Frankie burst into the kitchen, going for the shotgun. It was our agreement. On nights when I was gone, in the event of an air raid he was to take the shotgun down to the cellar and keep it trained on the door. If a German opened the cellar door it was up to him to defend the family. He took the responsibility seriously, but it was still an adventure. He was disappointed to see me.
Elizabeth slipped into the kitchen behind Frankie. She stood with her back to the counter, her eyes wide with fear,watching Frankie as he took the shotgun down from the shelf.
Elizabeth was an evacuee, like Frankie. But her evacuation hadn’t gone as planned. Instead of a safe berth in the country, she’d ended up a prisoner of men who saw the chaotic rush of children as a gift, a way to satisfy their perverted desires. She’d been held captive and put through a hell that no child should have to experience. By the time I carried her out of her bombed-out cell, she was pregnant, and orphaned, her mother killed by the same men who’d tormented her. She’d lost the baby, barely surviving the trauma of being buried alive in a bombed house, and we’d taken her in.
‘Take the gun,’ I said to Frankie. ‘Make sure Elizabeth gets down there safely and don’t leave her. I’ll make sure Mum and Uncle Nob get down OK.’
As soon as Frankie left, I touched Elizabeth on her arm, conscious of the flinch that I knew was automatic.
‘Look after Frankie,’ I said. ‘Don’t let him out of your sight.’
She nodded, her eyes wide and serious. She’d taken a carving knife from the block behind her, but I didn’t let on that I’d noticed.
‘Probably a false alarm,’ I said.
I hurried upstairs. Mum was in Nob’s room, trying to get him out of bed. She turned to me with an exasperated look. Nob was huddled under his blanket, eyes squeezed shut.
‘There’s no budging him,’ she said. It had happened once before. An hour spent pleading with him, while he lay rigid, eyes shut tight, until we’d given up.
‘You go down,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay with him.’
Her eyes flicked to the landing.
‘Go and look after the children,’ I said. ‘Probably nothing anyway.’
She put her hand on Nob’s hand. His was trembling, but no more than usual. She held it, decided, and hurried downstairs.
‘Looks like we’re in it together,’ I said to Nob. I didn’t expect an answer.
I stood at the window, looking out across the moonlit fields.
The air-raid siren sounded again. More short pips. This wasn’t a drill. The farmhouse was solidly built. It had survived several centuries of the worst the English weather could throw at it. If a bomb detonated outside, the walls would probably hold, depending on how close the impact. If there was a direct hit, we’d all be gone, whether we were in the cellar or not.
Either way, I was out of ideas for how to get Nob down into the cellar if he didn’t want to play along.
A shot echoed across the fields. A rifle. Probably someone’s ancient Lee–Enfield, brought back from the first war. One of my distant neighbours, getting over enthusiastic. Perhaps up at The Rocks, the country house between my farm and the town. I pictured a party of men in dinner suits, standing on the terrace, taking potshots at shadows in the sky.
I felt it before I heard it. A vibration. A low buzzing noise, barely audible. I scanned the sky without much hope. Clouds were drifting in front of the moon, and it would be impossible to see the small dark shapes of planes in the dark sky, unless they were flying low.
The Bofors gun fired from its hiding place. Four shots in quick pairs, the percussion hitting the house. Pom pom pom pom. Then silence, the two young women reloading, sighting. The gun fired again, another four shots. They sounded louder, which meant the gun had turned towards us. I hoped they knew what they were doing, it would be a bad joke to get taken out in your own farmhouse by an anti-aircraft gun.
I saw it, above the tree line to the south, heading straight for me. The house shook as it roared overhead. It was low. I hurried out of the bedroom to the landing window where I could see north. A Heinkel. One of their large bombers, flying slowly with no fighter escort. It was already disappearing into the distance, heading up over Ashdown Forest towards London.
It was about to pass out of sight when a glimpse of white flashed in the moonlight. It dropped below the tree line on the horizon, but not so fast I couldn’t register its shape.
A parachute.
8
Every instinct told me to run out of the house and drive up to the Forest, where I’d seen the parachute fall below the tree line. I forced myself to slow down.
I pulled out my map and fumbled for a pencil and ruler. I’d watched the bomber come in over the fields. I could plot its route, up the river, across the woods, over my house. I marked those points on the map, using the ruler to continue the line up to the Forest. One minute from clearing the house to releasing the parachute. If it flew at three hundred miles an hour, the drop would be five miles away. I used my pencil to roughly line up the distance on the scale, and translated that to the line of flight. I marked the predicted landing site with a cross, folded the map and stuffed it in my pocket. Of course, any one of my calculations could have been wrong, but better to try for accuracy than to give up on it entirely.
‘All clear!’ I shouted down to the cellar, standing at the top of the stairs and hoping Frankie didn’t have his finger too tightly on the trigger.
*
Every second of the drive dragged for a minute. I pushed the old delivery van to its limits, hurtling along the narrow country lanes, praying there would be no oncoming traffic.I forced myself to slow down at the worst of the blind corners, opening it up on the straights. Five miles that the bomber covered in a minute took me closer to ten, and felt like fifty.
