I dropped her by a row of dark cottages in Snatt’s Road.
‘You could find another job,’ I said.
‘She’s all right,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t pay too much attention.’
She climbed out of the van, and I handed her the basket. The cloth covering slipped. A grey pork chop, presumably stolen from Kate’s kitchen. I replaced the cloth.
‘Don’t come back,’ she said. ‘Better for everyone.’
I waited in the van as the front door opened. An old woman looked out, left and right, cautious. She grabbed the basket and pulled it in, along with the girl. The door slammed shut. Not such a crime, taking a bit of food from the big house, back to your mum.
7
The air-raid siren carried across the fields.
‘One raider, south by south-east.’
The watcher replaced the handset on her field telephone. She was a young woman, barely out of school, but she seemed to know what she was doing. Her partner, another efficient young woman, put down her mug of tea and scanned the sky to the south.
I’d written to the War Office during winter and offered a corner of my land for an anti-aircraft emplacement. An unworkable corner, filled with sandstone outcrops. There’d been months of silence after my letter, and I’d forgotten about it. Then, out of the blue, a ten-tonne lorry had rumbled down the lane, towing a 40 mm Bofors gun, its seven-foot barrel still glistening with packing grease. State of the art for bringing down enemy planes. The only problem was, the Germans had as many as we did. Bofors, the Swedish manufacturer, was doing a roaring trade selling them to both sides.
‘You should go,’ the watcher said. ‘Take care of your
people.’ She picked up her binoculars. There was enough light left in the sky for her to scan the southern horizon, where the South Downs loomed. Her partner, the gunner, hefted a four-round clip of shells and loaded them into the gun. She took her seat and powered up the sighting mechanism.
‘It’s going to be a full moon,’ I said. ‘I doubt the Germans will want to drop their best and brightest on a night whenany idiot with a gun can pick them off. If I were them I’d wait for a dark night.’
‘Would you want a clear sky or clouds?’ the watcher asked. ‘If you were going in?’
‘I’d go by boat for a start,’ I said. ‘I’m too old to start throwing myself out of an aeroplane.’
‘Clouds would be better for the safety of the pilot and the plane,’ she said. ‘Not much chance of being shot down if they don’t know you’re there. But it would be useless if you wanted to drop your people in a specific place. You wouldn’t be able to navigate unless you had incredibly accurate bearing and distance. Even then, you’d probably drop them miles from where you wanted them.
‘I’d do it on a clear night, but no moon,’ she continued. ‘You’d want someone on the ground with some kind of signal so you could drop your men in the right place.’
It sounded like she’d been thinking it through. Strange times, when a young woman was sent out to watch for invaders, and even to contemplate mounting a counter-attack.
‘Maisie, I’m sure Mr Cook’s got places to be,’ her partner said. Quite right. We’d let our guard down.
We listened to the noises of the evening. An owl. A rustle in the dry leaves. The siren wailed again, still the standard warning, no indication of whether a plane had actually been sighted.
The watcher unclipped her handbag and took out a pistol. She broke it open and checked the chamber. She closed it and put it back into her bag. A nervous ritual.
‘If it’s one or two, I’d let them land and give them a chance to surrender,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t seem particularly sporting to pick them off when they’re floating down out of the sky.’
‘What if it’s thousands of them?’
‘If it’s the invasion, ditch the uniforms,’ I said. ‘Come to the house. We’ll find you some farmworkers’ clothes you can change into. They won’t shoot farmers if they’re thinking straight.’
The siren changed to a short series of pips. Enemy sighted.
*
I hurried into the kitchen, not bothering to take off my boots. A loaf of bread cooled on the rack, and the oven was still warm.
Feet clattered down the wooden stairs, unmistakably Frankie, the young boy with his enthusiasm for war not yet dimmed by reality.
Frankie had come to us a month earlier as part of the evacuation scheme, one of the great waves of children sent out of the cities before the bombers arrived. All through ’38 and ’39 the perceived wisdom had been that the day the war started, England’s great cities would be levelled. ‘The bomber will always get through’ the headlines had screamed. Frankie hadn’t taken to country life at first. He was warming to it slowly, but I could tell he was counting down the days until he could get back to the slums of London, back to his family.
