Under a Wartime Sky

by Liz Trenow

  ‘Yes, I did, sir, with Frank’s help.’

  ‘None of this sir business, please. I’m Robert, remember?’

  ‘Yes, s . . .’ He found it impossible to envisage ever being comfortable enough to call this man by his first name.

  ‘If you’ve finished your tea, perhaps you would like to come to my office so that I can fill you in on our work here?’

  ‘Good luck, old boy. See you on the other side,’ someone whispered.

  Robert Watson-Watt’s office was perhaps the most opulent Vic had ever seen, thickly carpeted with walls lined in gold-embossed leather above panels of oak carved in an ornate linen-fold pattern. Through stone-mullioned windows was the same astonishing view he’d admired from the terrace. On the table between two leather sofas sat a tray with the remains of tea, including a large slice of fruit cake and a couple of Garibaldi biscuits.

  ‘Take a seat, old chap, and do help yourself. Never could stand the biscuits, not since someone told me the raisins were squashed flies, but I’m told they’re perfectly edible. And the cake is pretty good.’

  Vic demurred, then weakened. ‘It’s been a long time since breakfast, s . . .’

  Robert Watson-Watt arranged himself comfortably on the opposite sofa, stretching out his legs and leaning back, hands linked behind his head and elbows akimbo. It was a pose that conveyed ultimate confidence without any need for assertion, and Vic wondered whether he would ever achieve such a state of self-assuredness.

  ‘Go for it, lad. Keep the wolf from the door till supper. Now, I suppose you’ll be wanting to know what you’ve let yourself in for?’

  With his mouth full of cake, Vic could only nod.

  ‘Well, it all started when the Air Ministry asked us to develop a death ray. Something that would kill a sheep at a hundred yards, that was their criterion.’

  Vic swallowed. ‘Surely that would require so much power . . .?’

  ‘Just so. We managed to persuade them the idea was completely bonkers, because you’d need to cart around a ruddy great power station just to stun the poor animal. But a colleague suggested that radio waves might prove useful in other ways.’

  He paused again, peering over his spectacles, his eyebrows raised. Vic was familiar with the expression, the very same that his physics teachers used to adopt.

  ‘For shipping, sir?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Watson-Watt jumped in with a hint of impatience. Failed that test, then, Vic thought to himself. ‘They’ve been doing that to detect icebergs ever since the Titanic went down. But what we’re doing is different, you see, which is why we have to keep it so ruddy secret. If we can perfect this thing, we’ll get Hitler on the back foot.’

  He leapt up and began to pace, as though unable to contain his energy.

  ‘This thing, sir?’ Vic prompted, after a few moments.

  ‘The thing is, Mackensie – is it okay if I call you that?’

  ‘Of course, everyone does.’

  Watson-Watt stopped and turned to face him. ‘The thing is that it’s not just icebergs or shipping we’ll need to detect, it’s aeroplanes. Of course there will be tanks and artillery on the ground, but any future war will be won or lost in the air. There are already reports of Mr Hitler amassing hundreds of them, and that can only mean one thing: he’s planning to drop all kinds of hell – high explosive, incendiaries, poison gas – onto our cities and factories. And our people. It will be an altogether different kind of warfare, more terrifying and just as deadly. We have to find a way to stop them.’

  He took his seat again, leaning forward with his legs crossed beneath him like a coiled spring, and lowered his voice confidentially. ‘What we’re doing here has never been done before anywhere in the world, Mackensie. Imagine a vast spider’s web suspended in the sky between us and Europe.’ He drew a wide circle with his arms. ‘Now, think of that web as being made of pulsating radio waves. It’ll be completely invisible, and undetectable – but as soon as anything tries to penetrate it, we will know, in time to send up our own fighters to shoot them down.’

  Vic found that he’d been holding his breath. He could see it all too clearly. Over the past few weeks he’d tried again and again to speculate what it was he’d been recruited for, and although he’d assumed it would be something to do with defence, he’d never for a moment imagined it might be anything as astonishing and ambitious as this. And he was going to be part of the team developing it.

  ‘It sounds bloody brilliant, sir,’ he breathed. ‘’Scuse my French.’

  ‘But does it work, you’re going to ask?’

  Vic nodded.

  ‘The answer is yes, and no. Our first experiment was a near disaster, but we did actually manage to track a plane at around eight miles, which was enough for them to stump up some funding. We started in Orford, which is a desolate strip of sand just north of here; then, thank goodness, this place came up. Here we are, in paradise, I think you’ll agree.’

  ‘It certainly is the most beautiful place, s . . . Mr . . .’

  ‘Robert. But there are many problems, and that’s where you come in.’

  For the next hour they exchanged ideas about how to solve the innumerable difficulties in developing such a system. Apart from the practical matters of finding the right places to set up transmitter masts and receiving stations and training staff to use the screens and interpret the blurry blips and squeaks they emitted, there were many knotty scientific problems: how to compress transmitters currently weighing several tons so they could fit inside a plane, how to make the equipment mobile, how to improve low-level coverage, avoiding confusion with church towers and the like – and, perhaps most importantly of all, how to identify aircraft as ‘friend or foe’.

  ‘What we have so far is a very basic system. An old horse and cart, if you like,’ Watson-Watt said. ‘But it is slow and unreliable, and the wheels keep falling off. What you lot are going to do is turn it into a Rolls-Royce fit to win a war. And we don’t have long. Political insiders suggest two years, maximum. So I’ll see you at tomorrow morning, eight o’clock sharp in the Stable Block.’

  ‘Yes, s . . .’

  His audience with the big man was over.

  Watson-Watt stood and opened the door. ‘And bring that big brain of yours with you, Mackensie. You’re going to need it.’

  5

  Summer slipped away, and Kath found herself squeezing into her school uniform once more. It was too small and the buttons of her blouse kept popping open, but Ma said it wasn’t worth getting a new one just for a term, and produced a couple of safety pins.

  Walking the familiar route to school that first morning she’d pulled her raincoat hood around her face, fearful of being recognised, but within a few days she discovered that her exam resit companions weren’t all ‘thickos’, as she’d so uncharitably called them. Most were kids just like herself who had simply failed to study hard enough. United by a shared sense of the world’s injustices, they soon settled into a supportive friendship group.

  Which was just as well, because Billy Bishop had dumped her. He was off to engineering college and told her it wouldn’t be fair to carry on when he was so far away. Anyway, he said, they were both too young for a serious relationship. Although in her heart she knew he was right, she was hurt and annoyed that it was him, rather than her, who’d ended it.

  She’d been relieved to discover they were only expected to revise the previous year’s curriculum, so everything felt much more familiar, and without the distractions of Billy and her old classmates it was much easier to get down to homework. A couple of hours each evening began to pay off, and she found herself for the first time actually interested in her subjects.

  She re-read Silas Marner, the text prescribed for the English syllabus, and even enjoyed it. When the teacher asked ‘What is this book about?’ she put up her hand. It was about a weaver who was wrongly accused of theft, she said, and became so miserable all he could think of was his hoard of gold. The teacher interrupted. ‘
That is the plot of the story, Kathleen, what happens. But I asked what you think the book is about?’

  A familiar knot of panic bunched in her stomach. She hadn’t a clue what the teacher was getting at.

  ‘After you’d finished it and closed the book, did you think about it at all?’ the teacher prompted.

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Then what did you think about it?’

  Kath took a deep breath: ‘Silas thought money could make him happy, but in the end he realised that it couldn’t.’

  ‘Excellent answer. Money can’t buy happiness. And what else is it about?’

  ‘We shouldn’t judge people just because they have something wrong with them, like his fits?’

  ‘Good answer again. George Eliot was herself a bit of an outsider, because . . .’

  Kath didn’t hear the rest of the explanation because she was so startled by the revelation: the author of this book was a woman. Why had she changed her name to a man’s?

  Rather than display her ignorance in class, Kath went to the library after school and, perhaps for the first time in her life, headed to the section signed Reference Books. There, she found a long shelf of heavy tomes called the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Taking out a volume bearing the letters E–H, she read the story of a feisty woman called Mary Ann Evans who rebelled against her family, went to London to become a journalist, lived ‘in sin’ with a married man, flouting the disapproval of Victorian society, and finally achieved success and happiness. But she always wrote under a man’s name so that her work would be taken seriously. What a woman, Kath thought.

  It wasn’t only English that began to fire her imagination. In the past, any mention of numbers, of multiplication and division or, worse, algebra and geometry, had seemed to freeze her brain. But their new teacher explained everything very simply, with drawings that helped her to visualise what the numbers really meant. After that, if she ever got stuck on a calculation, she could imagine a tree full of apples, and a great wind that blew some of them onto the ground. Or an orchard full of trees and all the boxes of apples at the side after harvest, and how some boxes went to market or were added to the boxes from another farmer, and some rotted, and so on. Somehow she discovered that numbers weren’t so terrifying after all.

  Because they were seated in alphabetical order, she found herself sharing a desk with Adam Merriweather, a geeky lad with terrible acne and heavy black-rimmed glasses. What is a clever boy like him doing in revision classes? she wondered. She ignored him at first, before learning from another student that his mother had died just before the summer exams, and he’d failed to turn up for them.

  After that she made a special effort to be nice to him, and her friendship was well rewarded: whenever she got stuck with a difficult equation, she would turn to him for help. In class, he would whisper in her ear or write in pencil on the side of her workbook. On a few occasions, she invited him home for tea after school, when Maggie would ply him with tea and cake before they sat down to their homework.

  Curiously, the subject she came to enjoy most was the one she’d disliked most before: geometry. Mark, who was obsessed with flying, often talked with Pa about aeroplane design, bandying about terms like ‘vector’ and ‘wind speed’. He would make illustrations with lines and arrows that looked like meaningless doodles, until one day the teacher drew a circle and wrote beside it ‘360 degrees’. She shaded in half of the circle and wrote ‘180 degrees’, halved that once more and wrote ‘90’, then halved again and wrote ‘45’. At last Kath understood what an angle was.

  The teacher drew shapes and suggested they should imagine them as hedges around a field. From the lengths of the hedges and the angles between them, you could work out the area of grass in the field. If that was too complicated, you could draw in imaginary hedges to divide the field into shapes that were simpler to calculate, then add them up.

  By the end of the lesson, Kath understood that geometry was simple if you just applied common sense. Degrees were just a way of measuring angles; lines were just like the boundaries of something. You could even add speed to use them to calculate less tangible things like, as Mark said, wind direction, or the lift applied to an aeroplane’s wings. Her teacher returned the essay about Silas Marner with a big ‘A’ written in red at the bottom, alongside the words, ‘Excellent work’. And for her maths homework she was frequently awarded eight or even ten out of ten.

  ‘Turns out we were right, Kathleen Motts,’ the teacher said.

  ‘Right, miss?’

  ‘You’re a bright kid, if only you’d start believing in yourself.’

  The only other excitement in the town that autumn was the clandestine visits of King Edward to his mistress, who was reputed to be staying in a grand house on Undercliff Road. It was all supposed to be terribly confidential, although in a place like Felixstowe few secrets passed unnoticed or unremarked upon, even if they were only spoken about in hushed tones.

  That October, all became clear. Mrs Wallis Simpson was granted a divorce from Mr Simpson at Ipswich Crown Court, and the press speculated that she and the King were planning to get married, if only they could persuade the authorities to turn a blind eye to the fact that she was a divorcee. For a few brief weeks reporters and photographers crowded the town, and Felixstowe was in the national headlines: CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS LOOMS AFTER WALLIS DIVORCE, they screamed.

  The day before Kath’s maths exam resit, she and Joan joined a large crowd at the Town Hall to hear the mayor’s announcement that King Edward had abdicated, and his brother George was to become king instead. She couldn’t understand why everyone cheered – it seemed a tragedy that the man had been forced to resign just because he’d fallen in love with someone who had committed the supposedly heinous crime of being a divorcee.

  Just before Christmas, Kath learned that she had passed all of her exams. To celebrate, Pa treated the whole family to a meal at the Alexandra Cafe. This was their favourite place for special occasions; the tables were formally laid with starched white cloths and silver cutlery, the service was attentive, the food plain but plentiful and the views over South Beach were spectacular.

  ‘But we have those at home every Friday,’ her mother chided when she chose fish and chips.

  ‘But this is proper sit-down fish and chips. On a plate. With a knife and fork.’

  ‘They taste better in newspaper,’ Mark muttered.

  ‘That’s just silly,’ she said, but afterwards thought that he was probably right. Somehow the chips were duller without the smell of newsprint.

  ‘So, my girl, now that you’ve proved you’re a clever clogs after all, how’s about going to college next year?’ Pa said, after they’d ordered.

  ‘It doesn’t start till September, so I’ve still got time to think, haven’t I?’

  ‘And while you’re thinking, what are you going to do with yourself?’ Ma asked. ‘You could earn some money, for example. What about waitressing? In a nice place, mind, somewhere like here, clean with a decent class of clientele who tip well. Let’s ask the manager before we leave.’

  ‘No, Ma, please don’t. You’re so embarrassing.’

  Two weeks later, Kath found herself kitted out in a black shirt and skirt, with a frilly white pinafore and a stupid little starched white cap pinned precariously to her head, ready for what the manager called a ‘trial day’ at the Alexandra. ‘If you’re any good we can offer you a few shifts a week between now and Easter,’ he said. ‘Once the holiday season kicks in there’ll be plenty of work.’

  After her first shift she dragged herself home, swearing never to return.

  ‘My feet hurt, my arms hurt, everything hurts,’ she groaned, collapsing onto the settee. ‘The manager is a grumpy old bastard and the diners are miserable. They complain all the time. I ran myself ragged all day and got just one and six in tips.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Ma said. ‘Just think of the new clothes you’ll be able to afford, come the summer.’

  Kath
did get used to it. In fact, as she gained experience she even began to enjoy her new skills: how to lay the tables in the right arrangement for breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea or supper, how to carry four filled plates at a time, ranged up each arm, how to serve vegetables with a spoon and fork, always from the left side, or from the right for drinks and ready-plated food, being able to describe each dish on the menu fluently and learning the daily specials off by heart.

  She liked the other waitresses too, especially Nancy, who had a wicked sense of humour and kept them all in fits when business was slow, describing her romantic escapades. A couple of years older than Kath, she was one of the most experienced members of the waiting staff, having been at the Alex, as everyone called it, for nearly a year.

  Nancy was not exactly pretty, more what they called ‘striking’ with her unusual height – at least five foot ten, Kath figured – and gold-blonde hair with a natural wave. At work she wore it up, of course, but at the end of a shift when she freed it from numerous kirby grips, her curls cascaded down her shoulders like a Hollywood starlet.

  The manager muttered disapprovingly about the bright red lipstick she wore at all times, but Nancy didn’t care. She was so cheerful and efficient at her job that the customers loved her, and she always received the best tips of everyone on the shift. Some of the other girls talked behind her back, even suggesting she was ‘fast’, but Kath assumed they were just jealous. She heard how Nancy spoke to the diners, perfectly polite and deferential but with a teasing tone that made their eyes sparkle, even the women. She saw how the men slipped sly looks as she walked away. Kath wanted to be more like Nancy: bright, confident, funny and eye-catching.

  As the days lengthened day-trippers and holidaymakers began to arrive in greater numbers and there were more shifts. Over the Easter weekend the cafe was busier than she’d ever seen it. They were so rushed off their feet she scarcely noticed when a large group of around ten men arrived. The manager bustled about, pulling three tables together by the window.