Page 21 of V2

She had gone to bed half dressed. It took her only a couple of minutes to put on her skirt and jacket. She sat on the edge of the mattress and squeezed her stockinged feet into her shoes. The floorboard creaked. Someone stirred. A voice in the wavering shadows cast by the candle whispered, ‘What are you doing?’

It was Shirley Locke – inevitably.

Kay whispered, ‘Going to the loo.’

‘Why are you dressed?’

‘Never mind. Go back to sleep.’

She finished tying her laces, stood and put on her cap. Her suitcase was already packed. She shrugged on her heavy coat, closed the travel clock and slipped it into her pocket along with her papers.

‘Are you eloping?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

She collected the candle, picked up her suitcase and fumbled with the door handle.

‘When will you be back?’

‘I’m not sure. Go to sleep.’ She felt unexpectedly tearful at the thought of sneaking away from her friends like this after more than two years. ‘Will you say goodbye to everyone for me? Give them my best?’

‘Kay—’

She closed the door. By the light of the candle, she made her way along the passage to the far end of the hut and out into the morning. A cold gust of wind flattened the flame and blew it out. She threw away the candle and set off along the path.

The blackout at Medmenham was still strictly enforced, even though no German bomber had encroached anywhere near Marlow for years. The great house was entirely dark. It was impossible to imagine that behind its heavy curtains, at that moment, a hundred people were working.

She walked with her suitcase in her hand up the middle of the gravel drive, between the black masses of the rhododendrons, towards the guardhouse, conscious of a certain absurdity in heading off to war in such a fashion. Despite her years in the WAAF, she had never so much as sat in an aircraft, let alone flown in one. She hadn’t even been abroad, not properly – not unless one counted a school trip to Paris in 1937. And yet precisely for that reason, she felt a great sense of exhilaration, as if she were breaking out of prison. After all, what had her life consisted of up to now? A sheltered Dorset village of ancient golden-stoned houses, a thatched cottage shared with her mother and her younger sister, the teaching nuns of Our Lady’s Convent, a single-sex Cambridge college and then the seclusion of Danesfield House.

At twenty-four, she had only had one lover apart from Mike – a pilot her own age she had met during a Phase One debrief at RAF Benson, a relationship that had barely lasted a month before he was posted to Scotland. They had both been virgins. In some ways he was even younger than she was. But his descriptions of his solo reconnaissance sorties in an unheated Spitfire – swaddled in two sweaters, a leather flying jacket, two pairs of socks and a double layer of gloves; climbing alone over the North Sea through the tropopause into the dark blue stratosphere, where the temperature was minus seventy; the frost crystals forming on the Perspex canopy and the icicles in the tiny cockpit glinting in the brilliant sunlight; his terror that his oxygen might fail and he might pass out; switching on his camera and circling in the thin air eight miles above Berlin (so high that he could see the Baltic coast and the curvature of the earth) – his experiences of life were so far beyond anything she could imagine, she could not help comparing his existence ruefully to the littleness of her own.

At the main gate, a Bedford van was waiting, its engine running, the heater turned up full blast. The man behind the wheel was drinking from a thermos flask. She said, ‘Are you waiting for me?’

The corporal in the guardhouse the night before had checked his rota and said he was sure he could fix up a lift for her: a driver had to make an early-morning delivery to Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe before going on to the Air Ministry. ‘He’ll drop you off at Northolt in time, ma’am, no trouble.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Morning. Hop in.’

He was middle-aged, Cockney, cheerful. She could barely make out his face. He cleared a space on the seat beside him. ‘Tea?’

‘That would be very kind.’

He refilled the cup. She resisted a prissy urge to wipe the rim. It didn’t taste much like tea. It was weak and sickly with saccharine and made with dried milk. But she was grateful for it, and when he offered her a cigarette, she took that too, even though she didn’t really smoke. She sat with her suitcase balanced on her knees, trying not to cough, staring through the windscreen at the empty road as the van climbed, gearbox grinding, through the woods towards High Wycombe. He talked away and she pretended to listen. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’ It was like being in a London taxi. She finished the cigarette, wound down the window and threw it out. Ten minutes later, they drove into the fake Buckinghamshire hamlet that concealed the headquarters of Bomber Command, with its mock manor house and make-believe church steeple. ‘Just give me a mo,’ he said.

She waited while he delivered a box of photographs. In the darkness she could just make out the building where she had briefed the planners about Peenemünde the previous summer. They had built a scale model based on her analysis of the photographs – the power station and the liquid oxygen plant on the west of the island, the main test firing area and the experimental workshops and factory to the east. They had been particularly interested in the housing estate, with its school and meeting hall, and the barracks, and when she had asked why, a solemn young man who reminded her of a curate had said that they planned to attack in the early hours of the morning, when the scientists and technicians would still be asleep, so that they could kill as many as possible: ‘It’s the personnel we’re after as much as the facilities.’

The raid had been mounted on the night of the August full moon. At Medmenham they had been alerted an hour before the air fleet took off – six hundred heavy bombers, more than four thousand aircrew, two thousand tons of high explosive. None of the airmen was given the true reason for attacking an objective of which they had never heard. She had sat by the Thames as the sun went down and the moon rose and had imagined the Lancasters streaming out across the North Sea in tight formation. Mike had told her later that forty planes had never made it back. When Dorothy Garrod’s section had analysed the post-raid reconnaissance photographs the following day, many of the test facilities were disappointingly unscathed, but the roofless houses and dormitories appeared through Kay’s viewfinder like the ruins of Pompeii.

The driver returned from his errand. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep to discourage his conversation, but after a few minutes the pretence became a reality and she didn’t wake up until the van came to a sudden halt and she heard voices. She opened her eyes.

A day of sorts had dawned, it seemed reluctantly, over straggling suburban fields. Beyond the high chain-link fence, in the grey light, she could make out the shapes of aircraft hangars and a control tower. Behind them, on Western Avenue, a drone of morning traffic headed into London. The driver had his window down and was talking to an RAF policeman holding a clipboard. The policeman leaned into the cab and asked for Kay’s papers. She passed them across. He studied them and flipped over a few sheets on his clipboard. It all seemed to take a long while – too long – and it occurred to her that even at this last minute, the ponderous bureaucracy of the Air Ministry could thwart her.

‘That’s fine, ma’am.’ He handed back the papers. ‘I’ll take you over.’

‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said to the driver. ‘And the tea. And the cigarette.’

She climbed out of the van and followed the policeman through the gate and onto the airbase. She had never been to Northolt before, but it felt very much like Benson – the same steady breeze across the wide flat space, the sweet pervasive smell of aviation fuel, the ugly and impersonal low buildings, a sense of transience made permanent, the distinctive cracking sound of the Spitfires taking off and landing. After the talkative Cockney driver, the policeman was mercifully taciturn. He led her round the back of the administration block, past bare flower beds separated off from the cinder path by whitewashed stones, through a narrow door and along a dark corridor to a waiting room with wooden chairs around the bare walls and a steel-framed window beside a door opening onto a concrete apron. Ground crew were fuelling a big twin-engine transport plane. She recognised it from the identification chart at Medmenham. A Dakota. In the distance, a dozen Spitfires were parked in a line.

She stood at the window watching the preparations. A Morris 8 staff car appeared, painted in the RAF’s drab grey-blue, drove along the edge of the apron and parked in front of the plane. Out of the rear seat clambered the bank-manager figure of Wing Commander Knowsley. He contemplated the Dakota and tugged nervously at his tunic to straighten it. From the other side came a tall, thin middle-aged woman in WAAF uniform with the twin stripes of a flight officer on her sleeve – one rank up from Kay’s. The driver began to empty the boot of wooden boxes and a couple of long tubes that looked like rolled charts. A bus rattled to a halt behind the Morris. A red-faced WAAF sergeant emerged, followed by half a dozen others, jolly-looking women in their twenties carrying their suitcases. After them came the section officers. Kay counted seven in all. She studied them uneasily. She had never been good at joining in with a gang, especially not one that had already formed. Something about the way they were laughing together reminded her of a school lacrosse team at an away match. She picked up her suitcase and went out onto the apron.