if I especially ask people to keep quiet about it. I think I’ll be able to get beer, and lemonade for the children, and I can muster one drink apiece, I think, for the toast. But it’ll have to be a bring-your-own-sandwiches-and-buns affair, I’m afraid.’
‘They won’t mind that, darling. Since rationing, it’s been the done thing.’
‘Yes – and a get-together and a dance can’t do anything but good; help everybody forget bloody Hitler for a few hours.’
‘There’s a parish-council meeting tonight. I’ll mention the hall then. I take it you’ve booked the band for the Saturday night and not for our actual date?’
‘For Saturday, October the fifth, if that’s all right?’
‘It’ll be fine.’ He pushed back his chair, crossing the room to stand at her side as she gazed out of the window. ‘Do you often think of Giles? I know I do.’
‘Yes. Sometimes I’m angry still about his death; other times I wonder what would have happened if he’d lived. Alice would still be Lady Sutton and she and Tom could never have married.’
‘Nor Daisy been born. I suppose his death was a part of the order of things, though sometimes I resent it.’
‘You resent God’s will, and you a man of the Church?’ She could not resist, sometimes, mocking God. There were times, still, that she blamed Him for Andrew’s death.
‘Priests can doubt. We are human, Julia – flesh and blood.’
‘Yes, thank God.’ She turned to gather him to her, kissing his mouth. ‘And if I’m not mistaken, that was Mary with the tea tray. I’m dying for a cup. And could you remember to post these on your way to the meeting?’ she smiled, picking up two envelopes. ‘Letters to Drew. And, darling – could you remember to call in on Reuben, some time soon? Alice told me it was his birthday, yesterday. His ninety-fifth, I think, but even Alice isn’t sure, so don’t mention it. Whilst you are there, tell him about the party. I’d like it if he felt up to coming – Mother would like it, too. Just spread the word, will you, once you’ve agreed we can have the hall?’
‘The old ones might not feel up to it. It’ll be quite a long walk for some of them.’
‘It will,’ Julia frowned. ‘I’ll have to see if I can get a gallon of petrol on the black market, then I could run them there in the car. I suppose you couldn’t spare a coupon, Nathan? You get more than I do.’
‘My extra petrol is for parish work, and you know it! And what do you mean – on the black market?’
‘We-e-ll, there are one or two hereabouts who seem to be able to get under-the-counter petrol, by all accounts.’
‘Then let them, though their consciences can’t be worth much if they stopped to think that seamen are being killed bringing it here.’
‘Only kidding!’ She smiled to picture the headlines in the Yorkshire Post: ‘VICAR’S WIFE IN PETROL SCANDAL’. ‘And ssh!’ she commanded, opening the conservatory door, smiling in her mother’s direction.
‘Ah, there you are!’ Helen Sutton returned the smile. ‘I think, Nathan, that you can smell a teapot a mile away. Tilda’s made us egg-and-cress sandwiches – dried egg, I suppose it is. I’ll be glad when your hens start laying, Julia. Be a dear and pour, will you?’
‘Of course.’ There were days, Julia thought gratefully, when her mother was like the Helen of old; today was one of them. And she would enjoy the party, she really would. Her mother had always loved surprises. ‘The hens should start laying very soon, Gracie says. Just a couple of weeks now and we’ll have our own fresh eggs, at least a dozen a week.’
‘Hmm. The land girl. She’s doing very well, Catchpole said. It was so beautiful and sunny this morning that I went to the kitchen garden – did I tell you? I wanted to see the orchid house, really. One of the white ones is putting up late buds for some reason. Now do hurry and pour, Julia, before the tea gets cold …’
On that sixth day of September, fighter pilots along the south coast waited. Some lolled in chairs outside a makeshift mess; others lay, hands behind heads, on the grass, trying to relax. They had all existed on catnaps, hastily swallowed sandwiches and cups of strong sweet tea for weeks, jumping suddenly alert to their feet, running in a half-daze to their waiting fighters as klaxons blared or sirens wailed.
Now they walked and talked, even laughed sometimes, like automatons, trying not to notice that Johnny who snored and Mike who chain-smoked were no longer there.
Most times they took off in haphazard fashion, grouping their fighters into arrowhead formation once they were airborne and undercarriages up, their leader talking to them over the radio, calming nerves that twanged.
Sometimes a pilot they had thought killed would return, hands in pockets, his face split by an ear-to-ear grin.
‘Bailed out,’ he might say with studied nonchalance. ‘Had to ditch and thought I’d bought it. But the rescue lads got to me. Bloody cold it was, in the drink. Wet, too!’
Such understatement really meant that a pilot had been shot down, had ejected and landed in the Channel. And when he had given up hope of ever being found, an air-sea rescue launch had picked him out of the water.
The sea shall not have them, was their motto. Neither the sea nor the Krauts! A pilot saved from the sea was a pilot airborne again within a week.
But often missing pilots did not return, and scarcely trained flyers with little more than twenty solo hours behind them came to take their places. It seemed that the future of Britain, of freedom itself, was held in the hands of a few unblooded youths, who hurled their anger and despair at everlasting formations of German planes set upon bombing them out of existence.
Obliterate the first line of defence; immobilize the fighters, then the rest would be easier. Soon, thought the German High Command, the tides would be high and full and right for the invasion of the arrogant little island that stood, bomb-happy, between them and total victory.
And so pilots waited in the early-morning sun of that sixth September day; waited uneasily until ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, and noon. The NAAFI van came with tea and bacon sandwiches and cigarettes as it always did, but not the Luftwaffe. And ground crews who cared for the planes, and aircraftwomen who stood around plots, ears strained for instructions that would tell them that the bombers were coming again, waited and waited but the sky above them was high and blue and empty.
On a day when it was stretched to the limit, when one more sortie would have been a sortie too many, Fighter Command, from its Air Chief Marshal to the lowest erk, asked with disbelief where the Dorniers and Stukas and Heinkels were, and what had happened that they seemed not to be coming.
And on that day, Hitler ordered the calling off of his squadrons, not knowing that two more days under pressure – perhaps even less – would have seen Fighter Command in disarray. It was the miracle Britain had been pleading for and it seemed that at last God had begun to listen to prayers spoken in the English tongue. Had Britain been given a reprieve – until next spring, maybe?
No one knew. None dared speak of his hopes. The men only knew that on that early-autumn day, neither klaxon nor siren nor the drone of enemy bombers broke the long, waiting silence.
One by one, exhausted pilots slipped into sleep. It had been a terrible and at times despairing summer, but for the moment the fight had been won. The youths who flew Hurricanes and Spitfires had earned the right to call themselves men. The September tides that would have carried an invasion fleet to England’s shores flowed then ebbed again, and all along the French and Dutch coasts invasion barges lay unmoving.
Soon, winter seas and skies and gales would ensure that for six months at least, Britain would be safe from invaders. The battle for Great Britain, it seemed, had been won.
In a fury of frustration and rage, Hitler ordered his