There was a boom of thunder, and more lightning, multiple flashes building on each other. Vaughn twitched at eachboom. I felt it too. We’d survived the trenches, but we hadn’t left them behind.
‘We’ll go in tonight,’ Vaughn said, in his best attempt at a command voice. It came out like a man trying to convince himself he knew the right way forwards. I’d heard that tone all too often. Invariably, it meant my men and I were heading into trouble, our lives subordinate to an officer’s need to show the world he was a man to be reckoned with.
70
Elizabeth was glowing after her day in the driving seat. She sat taller in her chair.
‘You did all right on that tractor,’ I said, as Mum handed out plates of sausages and mash. ‘Think you might be able to give Bill Taylor a hand ploughing all those fields, now we’ve got the harvest in?’
Elizabeth shrugged, but her eyes met mine and there was a smile in there, beneath the darkness.
‘What about me?’ Frankie asked.
‘Give it a year,’ I said, ‘and we’ll get you up there too. You both did us proud today.’
Big Ben tolled eight on the wireless, and Mum turned it up.
‘Good evening,’ the BBC newsreader said. ‘Today, Marshal Pétain, the premier of France, signed an armistice with Germany ending all hostilities. We go straight to Number Ten for an address by the Prime Minister.’
The mood in the kitchen changed. For a minute we’d let ourselves forget the war, celebrating the harvest the way farming families had for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Reality came back, through the hissing static of the radio broadcast. I pictured a room of technicians, flicking switches to connect us to Downing Street. Incredible that in a second we would have a direct line from the Prime Minister to our farmhouse kitchen.
‘It has come to us to stand alone in the breach and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do,’ Churchill said. ‘We await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come.’
I put my hand on Elizabeth’s, expecting her to flinch, but she let it rest there, as we listened to the Prime Minister telling us our world was about to end.
‘We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock,’ he continued, ‘or – what is perhaps a harder test – a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy – we shall ask for none. But all depends now upon the whole life-strength of the British race in every part of the world and of all our associated peoples and of all our well-wishers in every land, doing their utmost night and day, giving all, daring all, enduring all – to the utmost – to the end.’
There was a hiss of static, as the radio technicians waited to learn if there was more to the speech. I nodded to Mum and she turned the radio off.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘whether the Germans invade tomorrow, or next week, or not at all, those stooks will have to be brought in and stacked, and the land will have to be ploughed and seeded for next year.’
Elizabeth squeezed my hand, and Frankie nodded. I’d sounded more confident than I’d felt, but I believed what I said. One of the great comforts of farming, compared to soldiering, farmers come and go, but the land remains.
71
The dead-letter drop was a stone next to a small waterfall. One of the many streams that threaded through the undulations of the Forest, running through wet weather or dry, fed by seemingly inexhaustible springs. The locals called the place the Garden of Eden. On a hot day, a pretty place to bring your family for a picnic, sit on the heather and listen to the burbling water. On this stormy night, the swollen stream gushed over the short drop and churned in the receiving pool, making drifts of white foam that clung to the banks.
Bunny had told me to alert him to our coming. It was a critical part of the plan. A weak link. He’d promised they’d check the drop site every couple of hours, day or night, rain or shine. I looked around but didn’t see anyone, and didn’t fancy my chances. Perhaps they had someone surveilling it from a distance.
My note was brief:
Tonight
I’d rolled the paper and put it in a cigar tube, sealed with paraffin wax.
The rain beat heavily on my hat and my waxed coat. I sounded like a drum, announcing my presence to the whole of the Forest. I took one last look around, and put the cigartube in the shallow hollow clearly created for the purpose, replacing the sandstone rock on top.
If the note got to Bunny, the plan would work. If it didn’t, the whole thing would be over before it got going. I’d be leading a team of Nazi sympathisers into a sensitive military installation, after Churchill had broadcast to the nation that the invasion may come tonight. Everyone would be on the lookout.
72
Three cars sat next to each other, parked under the redwoods. Big, black, expensive.
The front door was open, and undefended, William Washington evidently elsewhere. Voices came from the library and I stopped to listen.
‘Get this right and they’ll give you Sussex and Kent.’
‘What about you?’ Vaughn said.
