‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of number ten, Downing Street …’
Edward silently beckoned her over. Fitz perched on the arm of the chair, clutching her father’s hand. She looked around at the others in the room. Every single one of them looked incredibly solemn as they focused on the radio broadcast. A few minutes later, it was over.
‘Oh, dear Lord,’ said Cook, her hand going to her throat. ‘We’re at war.’
Chapter 3
Fitz wasn’t sure what she was expecting to happen once war had been declared. To begin with, essentially, nothing changed in her day-to-day life, but she felt on tenterhooks, as if she was waiting for something to happen. She just didn’t know what.
With Michael’s boarding school and, indeed, Fitz’s finishing school now ruled out, the new governess came in mid-September and largely, Fitz had nothing to do with her. Miss Winters was there for the sole purpose of teaching Michael. Fitz’s twenty-first birthday came and went in a very subdued manner. No frivolous party or extravagant meal. It hadn’t seemed right to celebrate her entrance into adulthood now the country was at war.
To keep herself busy and to do what she could to aid the war effort, Fitz had joined the Women’s Land Army and, much to her surprise, had earned some praise from Camilla. It wasn’t often Fitz managed to do something her stepmother approved of. Her father had been even more pleased when she had gone to work at a local farm owned by Jack Howard, whose son had been called up, with Fitz taking his place.
‘I thought you might end up in a different part of the country,’ said her father when she’d told him where she had been assigned. Personally, Fitz wouldn’t have minded a change of scenery, but she acknowledged there were advantages to being able to eat and sleep at her own home. She’d heard some of the land girls were having it quite rough, with not very comfortable digs and apparently one of the girls from Badcombe village was having to sleep in a hay loft.
For the most part, Fitz enjoyed her work on the farm where she spent her days driving the tractor and moving bales of hay about for the animal feeds. The winter saw an extremely hard frost which lasted months rather than weeks into 1940, making getting up before dawn most mornings quite a struggle.
Fitz had to cycle in the dark down to Jack Howard’s farm due to the blackout and on more than one occasion misjudged the roadside and ended up in a ditch or a hedge.
The warmer weather of spring, together with lighter mornings and evenings, couldn’t come too soon for Fitz. It was now mid-May, and Winston Churchill had been elected as the new prime minister to take over from Neville Chamberlain. When Fitz arrived at the farm, she could tell straight away that Jack was not in the best of spirits. His frown was as deep as the furrowed fields.
‘Morning, Jack,’ said Fitz.
‘If you say it is,’ came the reply which confirmed her assessment of his mood.
‘Is everything all right?’ she ventured, taking off her regulation issue land-girl coat. The cycle ride to the farm had already warmed her up.
‘No. I take it you haven’t heard the news?’
Fitz shook her head. ‘I went straight to bed last night.’ She had been so tired; she’d had her evening meal and taken herself upstairs foregoing her usual habit of sitting by the radio with her father to listen to the latest news on the war.
‘We’re pulling out of Dunkirk,’ said Jack. ‘We’re running from Hitler.’
‘Really?’ Fitz was surprised. From what she’d gathered from her father and, indeed, Jack, Winston Churchill was a no-nonsense fighting man and was determined to stand up to Hitler. ‘Why are we withdrawing?’
Jack tutted. ‘Underestimated the Jerries, didn’t he? Old Churchill.’
The Germans had invaded France the previous week and with little resistance from the British Army, they looked set to storm their way right through to Paris in a short space of time. And then, as Fitz had heard people in the village shop saying, Hitler would have his sights set on Britain.
Although concerned, Fitz hadn’t felt especially worried, and when she’d spoken to her father about it, he’d assured her that Britain would stand fast. She wondered now if her father had really believed that or was simply trying to protect her from the truth. It all sounded very real and not just village gossip.
‘What’s going to happen now?’ she asked, hearing the uncertainty in her voice.
‘Well, get our boys home, regroup and decide what to do next,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t think sending the boys back over there is going to work, not when they’ve just sent us packing. It will have to be in the air we fight them.’
There had already been numerous German bombing raids on the country, but they had thus far been military targets. ‘Will the Germans keep bombing us?’ asked Fitz.
‘Look, I don’t want to worry you or anything, Fitz,’ said Jack, ‘but in my humble opinion as a farmer, yes they will. And it will only get worse from now on.’
As the days went by Fitz was glued to news of the Dunkirk evacuation as it began to filter in through the media. She couldn’t help noticing the different tone in which they were reporting. Unlike Jack, who was all doom and gloom, the newspapers were making it sound like a positive thing and not the rearguard action Jack had come to call it.
Fitz never missed an opportunity to listen to the radio or read the newspapers – not through excitement like some of theyoung boys in the village who were running around with sticks and ‘shooting’ each other – but through a certain amount of fear and a desire to know. Possessing knowledge made Fitz feel more involved somehow, more aware so she could come to her own conclusions. It gave her a sense of control, in as much as anyone could have in the circumstances.
By the beginning of June, a truer picture of the withdrawal was beginning to emerge, along with stories of just how awful those days on Dunkirk beach really were, not to mention the enormous loss of life and the Navy destroyers, ironically, destroyed.
It was brought into sharp focus when Fitz was at the farm one day and Jack received the dreaded telegram informing him his son had been a casualty at Dunkirk and had died on the French beach on the last day of the evacuation.
The news had broken Jack and his wife, Peggy. Their grief was raw and visceral. Fitz understood grief enough to know that losing a child, no matter how honourably, was the worst possible thing for a parent to experience.
