Page 29 of V2

She circled around behind them, passing so close Kay could hear the rapid ticking of the watch. Finally the bespectacled Joyce Handy raised her hand. ‘Got it, ma’am!’ The flight officer stopped the watch. ‘Twelve minutes, eight seconds – useless!’ She bent to check Joyce’s calculations. The WAAFs all straightened. She turned on them at once. ‘Don’t stop, you silly girls! Keep going until you’ve all done it.’ With an angry click, she restarted the watch. Kay put her head down again.

One by one over the succeeding minutes they finished and raised their hands. Kay was fourth. She sat back in her chair exhausted as Sitwell took her paper. Barbara, she was pleased to note, came in last. The flight lieutenant sorted through their answers.

‘Well, at least you all got there in the end.’ Her tone softened. ‘Well done. But slow – too slow! Remember – pilots will be risking their lives on the basis of what you do. Imagine it’s your brother or your boyfriend in that cockpit. Don’t, for God’s sake, send them on a pointless dangerous mission because you couldn’t do your part in time.’ She tore up the papers and dropped them into a waste basket. ‘Right. We’ll go again.’

The next time was better – ten and a half minutes – and in the run after that Kay was the first to finish, in eight minutes and two seconds. Twice Sitwell fed them false coordinates and let them struggle to make sense of it before she stopped them. ‘If the data is obviously wrong, for God’s sake say so quickly, and we can go back to Stanmore and MARU and tell them to check.’ By now, to her surprise, Kay realised she was enjoying it. There was a pleasure in the mental absorption, in the conjuring of arcs and map points from what looked like random numbers. There was a freedom, too, in not being able to think about anything else. She lost all sense of time and place and was almost disappointed when the flight officer announced that they had just concluded their last practice run, with their best time of the day: six minutes, fifteen seconds.

‘Take a break, ladies, while I confer with the wing commander.’

Kay pushed back her chair and stood. Her neck and shoulders were locked with tension. She rotated her head. There was a satisfying, exhausted ache in a specific area of her brain that she associated solely with mental effort. She had not felt like this since her finals at Cambridge. Joan said, ‘Well done, Kay. Do you fancy a fag?’

‘I certainly fancy some fresh air.’

‘Come on, then.’

‘Do you think we should?’

‘Why not? Let’s ask.’ She went over to Sitwell, who was talking to the wing commander. ‘Ma’am, is it all right if we stand in the street for a few minutes?’

‘All right, but don’t go far.’

They climbed the stairs. While they had been in the vault, the daylight had gone. Outside, a soft misty rain was falling. In the glow from the street lamp the tiny droplets swirled like smoke. Across the road, a few lights showed in the windows of the headquarters. Joan lit a cigarette. Kay stood in the middle of the pavement, took off her cap and let the dampness cool her head. She could hear the voices of some of the other women emerging behind them, talking in murmurs. She yawned and belatedly put her hand to her mouth. ‘Sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired.’

‘I call it the end-of-shift headache.’ The tip of Joan’s cigarette brightened as she inhaled. ‘What did you do before the war, Kay, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I was a student. I was called up straight from university. What about you?’

‘I worked at a stockbroker’s in the City.’

‘When did you start in the WAAF?’

‘Nineteen forty. Just before the Battle of Britain. Never thought I’d end up here.’

Kay felt too exhausted to talk. She smoothed down her wet hair and replaced her cap. She thought of the German soldiers in the woods seventy miles away. They had never been able to work out at Medmenham how the V2s would be launched. In July they had gone back over all the old coverage of Peenemünde trying to find a clue. Just beyond one of the giant elliptical earthworks was a fan-shaped stretch of foreshore, entirely bare, which they reckoned was the launch site. She had stared at it for a long time before the obvious fact had struck her. She had called out to Starr: ‘Look at this, sir.’

He had leaned over her, his hand on her shoulder. ‘What about it?’

‘There isn’t a rail line.’

‘So what?’

‘It must mean they can bring up the rockets by road. In which case, they don’t need a dedicated bunker to launch from – any bit of old concrete or asphalt will do.’

The hardest thing to spot was often what was directly in front of you.

One of the other WAAFs came over. ‘Can I have a cigarette, Joan? I’ll pay you back.’ It was Barbara. She looked at Kay. ‘You seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly.’

‘God knows why. I suppose there’s a lot of mathematics in what we do at Medmenham.’

Barbara inserted the cigarette between her lips and muttered, ‘Sorry I was a bitch earlier.’

‘That’s all right.’

Flora Dewar appeared behind them. ‘Flight Officer Sitwell wants us all downstairs right away.’

Barbara returned the unlit cigarette. ‘Bloody Sitwell.’

They descended into the vault and took their former places around the central table. Kay exchanged nods with some of the others. Joyce, Gladys, Molly … It was the better part of wartime, how easily one made friends. It had been the same from the first day of her basic training. Women you would never normally have spent five minutes with became as close as family. Adversity bred intimacy. She was already starting to feel she had known them for years.