V2

by Robert Harris

  Flight Officer Sitwell said, ‘Gather round, ladies.’ She waited until they were all in place. ‘So this is where you’ll be working from now on. We’ll be reporting from here direct to 11 Group Filter Room. The GL Mark Threes parked between here and the canal are part of a detachment operated by a new mobile advance reporting unit. 105 MARU will alert us as soon as they detect a V2 has been launched. The watch team, consisting of two officers, will plot the first coordinates of its trajectory, exactly as we practised in England. In addition to radar, there will be backup data from parabolic sound mirrors, but these are to be regarded as a secondary rather than a primary source. If in doubt, use the readings from radar.

  ‘As soon as Stanmore has the confirmed coordinates of the point of impact, it will be your job to extrapolate the parabolic curve back to the launch point. Each individual officer will work on her own, and then check her findings with her teammate. In case of a discrepancy, the calculations will be checked again, either with me or with Wing Commander Knowsley, until we determine the true result. Team B, consisting of two sergeants, will then convert the data to a map grid reference, which will also be checked before being radioed to Fighter Command.

  ‘Our objective is to complete the calculations within six minutes of receiving all data. That’s the optimum time to enable our fighters to be over the targets before the enemy has time to fully disassemble their equipment. Every second is precious.

  ‘Any questions so far?’

  Her angular profile swung like a gun turret around the circle of WAAF officers. Louie Robinson raised her hand. ‘When will we be starting, ma’am?’

  ‘Oh eight hundred tomorrow morning. It will take us until then to get the system up and running. You’ll be divided into four watches of two officers. Each pair will work a six-hour shift. Obviously our aircraft can only attack the launch sites in daylight, so priority will be given to those first two shifts, but don’t despair if I put you on nights: according to the Dutch resistance, the Germans return to the same launch sites and use them again, so what we do overnight will provide targets for attack later.’

  Barbara said, ‘Where will we be staying when we’re not here?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no room to sleep in headquarters, although you will be able to spend your rest hours there, and meals will be available. Besides, for security purposes we would prefer it if you were dispersed rather than gathered in a single location. Arrangements have been made for you each to be billeted with a separate family around the town, within walking distance of HQ. I cannot emphasise too strongly that the work you are doing here is most secret. Do not – I repeat, do not – talk about your reasons for being in Mechelen. Remember, the Germans were here for more than four years and only left a couple of months ago. We cannot take the loyalty of the local population for granted. Be wary of strangers, however friendly, and take particular care when you are walking between here and your billeted accommodation.

  ‘Wing Commander? Would you like to say something?’

  Knowsley was talking into one of his telephones. ‘Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?’ He shook the receiver and glared at it. He glanced across at the WAAF officers. ‘Damn thing!’ He slammed the receiver down hard in its cradle and came around from behind his desk.

  The maps Kay had seen being loaded at Northolt had now been fixed to big cork noticeboards and attached to the wall beside the safe. One showed London and the south-east corner of England, a second the coast from Ostend to Amsterdam, taking in the territory to the south as far as Brussels; a third showed south-east England and the North Sea as far as the Dutch coast. The fourth – familiar to Kay from Medmenham – was a large-scale chart of Holland from the Hook of Holland to Katwijk aan Zee.

  Knowsley picked up a box of coloured pins. ‘Right. This is where we are,’ he said, sticking a red pin into Mechelen, ‘and somewhere around here is where the V2s are coming from.’ He put a pin into The Hague. ‘That’s a distance of roughly seventy miles. As you can see, we’re just seventeen miles south of the port of Antwerp, which is the only city apart from London currently being targeted by the V2. Both are receiving roughly the same number of missiles. For now, we’re concentrating on the London attacks, but our aim in the next week or two is to extend our coverage to include the launch sites that are hitting Antwerp.

  ‘So, although the street outside looks peaceful enough, never forget we’re on a battlefield, which is why we’re sitting below ground in a bank vault, and why you’re going to be dispersed around the town when you’re not on duty. This is a new kind of warfare – the warfare of the future, I dare say – and we’re attempting something new as part of fighting it. The first rocket will hit London in five minutes. You have six minutes to stop the second. I want you to give it everything you’ve got. A lot of people are depending on us. All right?’ He nodded around vaguely, as if embarrassed at his own theatrics. ‘Good. Carry on.’ He went back to his desk and his silent telephones with evident relief.

  Sitwell said, ‘All right, everyone. Find yourself a seat.’

  Kay took one of the eight places around the pushed-together tables. Each had been neatly laid with a slide rule, a book of logarithm tables, graph paper, a notepad and two pencils. On the blackboard, the flight officer was making rapid marks in chalk. She stood aside to reveal:

  y = ax2 + bx + c

  ‘We’ll start with the basics.’ She looked down the table. Her eyes rested on Kay. ‘New girl – what is that?’

  Kay felt her mouth go dry. She took a guess. ‘It’s the formula for calculating a parabolic curve, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Sitwell. ‘Although you’d have to be pretty dim not to have worked that out, given why we’re here.’ She started writing again, in hard, jabbing motions that sent chalk dust sprinkling to the floor. ‘So let’s see if you can tell me…If the equation is this…’ she gestured to the board:

  f(x) = 2x2 + 8x

  ‘…what are the values of a, b and c?’

  Once again she looked directly at Kay. She had a sadistic light in her eyes that reminded Kay of Sister Angela, one of the nuns who had taught her algebra at school and who would hit her on the hand with a ruler if she made an error. For a few long seconds her mind fogged with panic, until years of Sister Angela and days and nights in the Phase Three room at Medmenham came to her rescue.

  ‘I would say…a equals two…b equals eight…and c equals…’ She hesitated before adding uncertainly, ‘Zero?’

  ‘Congratulations.’ The flight officer looked slightly disappointed. ‘You have passed your entrance exam.’ She wiped the board clean. ‘Now, ladies, we shall work on some serious trigonometry.’

  * * *

  —

  They worked on through the afternoon. For an hour they practised the basic algebraic calculations required to work out a parabolic curve. Then Flight Officer Sitwell produced a stopwatch and announced they would move on to dummy runs. She chalked up an imaginary set of height and velocity readouts provided by the radar unit, waited five minutes, then gave them the coordinates of the shot-fall of the missile. ‘Go!’ She started the stopwatch.

  The sequence of calculations required to plot height and distance, to discover the apex of the curve, to calculate the launch position by converting the distance into miles, and then to locate the origin of the arc on the large-scale map and provide the grid reference – all of it required a level of concentration that made Kay’s head swim. The slide rule became slippery in her sweaty fingers. ‘Six minutes!’ barked the flight lieutenant. ‘You should be done by now!’ And then: ‘Ten minutes! Come on, ladies! Those wretched Germans will be out of the woods and back in their mess drinking beer if you don’t get a move on!’

  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 f
light 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.

  Flight Officer Sitwell was wiping the blackboard clean. When the last of the calculations had been expunged, she turned to face them. ‘We’ll follow the same shift pattern as we do in England. And we’ve arranged you into the following pairs.’ She picked up a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘Section Officer Colville and Section Officer Caton-Walsh will take the first watch, starting at oh eight hundred tomorrow morning.’ Kay glanced across at Barbara, but she was staring straight ahead. ‘Section Officers Robinson and Dewar will take the second shift, at fourteen hundred. Section Officers Hepple and Astor will take the third, at twenty hundred hours. And I’m afraid that means Section Officers Handy and Thomas will have the graveyard slot, from oh two hundred to oh eight hundred.

  ‘If you have any questions, please remain behind. Otherwise, you are free to return to headquarters. There is transport waiting to take you to your billets. You will each be given a small amount of food, which you will take with you and present to the woman of the household. Remember, please, that many civilians in Belgium are close to starving. No doubt you are hungry too, but be tactful, and eat sparingly. By all means take your slide rule and logarithm tables and practise, practise until you can perform these calculations in your sleep. I shall see you all tomorrow.’

  * * *

  —

  The Flanders evening was dark, wet, silent. Kay sat in the front of the jeep, her suitcase and the small box of rations stowed in the back. She had been given a name – Dr Maarten Vermeulen – and an address, with no other details. It was obvious as soon as they left HQ that the driver didn’t know the way. He had a little hand-drawn map, and every so often he would stop and Kay would have to get out and squint up at the unfamiliar street names. They drove through an empty square and across a bridge. A lamp reflected weakly in the black water. Here and there, along a wide, deserted street, a few lights showed behind thick curtains. It was the old central part of town – that much she could make out. The tall, flat-fronted buildings with their patterned brickwork and elaborate windows summoned vague memories of Flemish paintings. It wouldn’t have surprised her to see a nightwatchman with a lantern.

  After doubling back a couple of times and passing the same church twice, they entered a cobbled alley with high brick walls on either side into which were set heavy, ancient wooden doors. The silhouettes of houses rose behind them. The driver pulled up, shone his torch on the map and then on the house numb
er and announced they had arrived.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘That’s what it says here, ma’am.’

  They clambered out of the jeep. He was flustered, in a hurry, muttering that he had other WAAFs to drop off around town. He retrieved her suitcase and the box of food, deposited them on the wet pavement, wished her goodnight and drove away. She looked around. She had no idea where she was, let alone how to find her way back to the bank the next morning. For the first time, she felt a twist of panic, which she at once suppressed. As dangers went, it hardly ranked with flying alone eight miles above Berlin. She turned the metal ring of the gate handle, picked up her suitcase, tucked the cardboard box under her arm and put her shoulder to the wood. The hinges squeaked and gave reluctantly.

  A path of worn stones led across a small muddy garden to a front door. She rang the bell and stepped back to look up at the tall house. A crack of yellow light shone from a window on an upper floor, quickly extinguished as the curtain was closed. After a minute she heard a shuffle of feet on the other side of the door, the sound of bolts being drawn back, a key turned. It opened part way. One side of an elderly male face peered out at her over the door chain.

  ‘Dr Vermeulen?’

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘I’m Section Officer Angelica Caton-Walsh of the British Royal Air Force.’

  A single rheumy eye rolled in exasperation, exposing yellow whites. He said something angrily in Flemish.

  Kay said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Je ne parle pas anglais!’

  ‘Peut-on parler français?’