Under a Wartime Sky

by Liz Trenow

  The work of Watson-Watt and his team is widely credited with being a major factor in winning the Second World War, particularly in the Battle of Britain but also during the Blitz and in subsequent phases. Sadly, their inventions and the dedication of thousands of radar operators – many of them women – are now rarely celebrated, and are certainly far less widely recognised than the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Radar later developed into microwave technology, which has thousands of applications in everyday life today, such as speed cameras and air traffic control, as well as in space.

  When war broke out, the scientists were moved inland and RAF Bawdsey became the first of dozens of radar stations operating along the south and east coasts of Britain. It continued as an RAF base throughout the Cold War when Bloodhound missiles were sited on the cliffs.

  All around East Anglia are the remnants of wartime airfields, none more chilling than the top-secret RAF Woodbridge (the official name for Sutton Heath), just a few miles inland from Bawdsey. Known as a ‘crash ’drome’, its specially wide runways were designed for use only by aircraft in trouble and it was fully equipped with extra-bright lighting, emergency medical facilities and heavy-lifting equipment to remove the wrecks. More than four thousand planes crash-landed on this airfield during the war, and many lives were saved.

  Felixstowe, one of the most easterly towns in Britain, has always been on the front line of war. At its southern end, Landguard Fort – now overlooked by the giant cranes and gantries of one of the largest container ports in Europe – has its origins in the sixteenth century. The coast is ringed with Martello towers built to defend Britain against Napoleon.

  During the First World War a flying boat squadron at Felixstowe played a critical role in tracking German U-boats and later became the first Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment for flying boats and seaplanes.

  All of this history, plus my early childhood love of the place, made it the perfect setting for Under a Wartime Sky. I hope you agree.

  Here are just some of the books, exhibitions and websites that have helped in my research:

  Gwen Arnold, Radar Days: Wartime Memoir of a WAAF RDF Operator (Woodfield Publishing, 2000)

  Jim Brown, Radar: How it All Began (Janus Publishing, 1996)

  Robert Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (Touchstone, 1998)

  Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–45 (Headline, 2004)

  Ian Goult, Secret Location: A Witness to the Birth of Radar and its Postwar Influence (The History Press, 2010)

  Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Ray Twidale, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe from Old Photographs (The Lavenham Press, 1990)

  Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe at War (The Lavenham Press, 2001)

  Phil Hadwen, Ray Twidale, Peter White, Graham Henderson and John Smith, The Hamlet of Felixstowe Ferry, Pictures from the Past (The Lavenham Press, 1990)

  Gordon Kinsey, Bawdsey: Birth of the Beam (Terence Dalton, 1983)

  Colin Latham and Anne Stobbs, Radar: A Wartime Miracle (Sutton Publishing, 1997)

  Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949 (Viking, 2011)

  Robert Watson-Watt, Three Steps to Victory (Odhams Press, 1957)

  RDF to Radar, a film made by the Telecommunications Research Establishment Film Unit in 1945/46. On DVD from Bawdsey Radar Trust.

  Bawdsey Radar Trust runs the transmitter block museum: www.bawdseyradar.org.uk

  Felixstowe Museum at Landguard Fort: www.felixstowe museum.org

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would never have happened had our friends Niels and Ann Toettcher not decided – in a brilliant, crazy moment – to buy Bawdsey Manor from the Ministry of Defence and set up an English language school there. We were among their first guests and fell instantly in love with the place. The memories of many happy times in that magical place live on in our hearts.

  The wartime history of Bawdsey Manor and in particular the extraordinary story of Robert Watson-Watt’s invention of radar is being wonderfully told through the work of the Bawdsey Radar Trust and the museum they have set up in a wartime transmitter block. Thanks to all who gave me their time and advice, particularly their former chair, Mary Wain.

  Steph Merrett and her team at Felixstowe Library are possibly the friendliest librarians in the world, and were very helpful in sourcing research materials about the town in wartime. Long live libraries!

  I am, as always, eternally grateful to my tireless agent Caroline Hardman and the team at Pan Macmillan, especially my eagle-eyed editor Alex Saunders, whose suggestions at draft stage were really helpful.

  Last but not least, I could not do what I do without the love and support of family and friends – you know who you are.

  In Love and War

  Three women, once enemies. Their secrets will unite them.

  The First World War is over. The war-torn area of Flanders near Ypres is no longer home to troops, but groups of tourists. Controversial battlefield tourism now brings hundreds of people to the area, all desperate to witness first-hand where their loved ones fell.

  At the Hotel de la Paix in the small village of Hoppestadt, three women arrive, searching for traces of the men they have loved and lost.

  Ruby is just twenty-one, a shy Englishwoman looking for the grave of her husband. Alice is only a little older but brimming with confidence; she has travelled all the way from America, convinced her brother is in fact still alive. Then there’s Martha and her son Otto, who are not all they seem to be . . .

  The three women may have very different backgrounds, but they are united in their search for reconciliation: to resolve themselves to what the war took from them, but also to what life might still promise for the future . . .

  Read on now for an extract . . .

  1

  RUBY

  July 1919

  It was like the strangest of dreams, standing here on the deck of the steamship, with the blue sky above, the sun glittering off the sea like a million diamonds. To her right, the grey slate roofs of the little town huddled almost apologetically beneath those magnificent cliffs, so much higher and more brilliantly white than she’d ever imagined.

  She could scarcely believe that she was about to leave the shores of England for the first time in her life. It was not an adventure she had sought, much less desired. Why would she want to cross that treacherous stretch of water, the English Channel, to visit a country so recently torn apart by four years of terrifying, tragic events? She was still only twenty-one and she considered that her short life had been tragic enough, thank you very much, without inviting further danger and heartache.

  What she most wanted, now that peace was here, was to live a quiet, ordered life, honouring his memory by working hard and trying to be kind to others who grieved like her. There were plenty of them, for heaven’s sake. No family had been left untouched by the tragedy. She would keep herself to herself, would never allow anyone else to break her heart. It’s the best I can do, she wrote in her diary, the only thing I can do, when he’s given his future to make ours safe from the Hun. How else can we make sense of it all?

  So when, after serving tea that early June afternoon, his parents solemnly sat her down in one of their overstuffed armchairs and presented her with the Thomas Cook brochure, she’d thought at first it was some kind of a joke.

  ‘Tours to the battlefields of Belgium and France,’ she read out loud. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to go and gawp at the place . . .?’

  She saw Ivy wince, and the words faded in her mouth. Her mother-in-law was as fragile as cut glass, unable to accept that her only child was dead. Never an outgoing person, her health had been frail for as long as Ruby had known the family, which seemed like forever.

  When they’d first started courting, she thought it odd that he rarely invited her back to his house. ‘Mam’s a bit poorly,’ he’d say, or, ‘She complains that I make a mess.’ Now, Ivy was a feeble whisper of a
woman, barely of this world, with a ghost-like pallor from lack of fresh air. She spent much of her time in bed, or at least in her bedroom.

  Ruby and Bertie met at school and stayed friends until one day, when they were walking home together, his hand crept out and took hers. They did not pause, and neither said a word; they walked on in silence. But the warmth of his touch surged like electricity up her arm and she knew, then, that she would be with this boy forever. I love Bertie Barton!! she wrote in her diary that night, framing the words with a wonky circle of red-crayon hearts. She wrote it again and again, on her pencil case, her school notebook, the shopping list, the inside of her wrist. No one ever doubted that Ruby loved Bertie, and vice versa.

  And then, shortly after this, tragedy. Her father, foreman at a boat-building company in their small Suffolk town, was crushed by a marine engine falling from a crane. He died instantly. She couldn’t remember much of the following days – only that her mother seemed to be barely there, so hollowed out, so wrapped up in her grief that she had nothing left with which to comfort Ruby.

  All she can recall, now, is that Bertie was always by her side, holding her as she wept, making endless cups of tea with plenty of sugar and taking her for walks to distract her with his stories of nature: which bird sang which song, what flowers liked to grow in certain places and how their flowering was so carefully orchestrated with the arrival of certain insects; which set of holes in the ground were badger, fox or rabbit. In her memory he grew, almost overnight, from a schoolboy into a man.

  Hugs and hand-holding soon turned into shy kisses, furtive explorations behind the garden shed and, before long, his declaration of love. One evening when they were alone in the house he went down onto his knee and presented her with a diamond engagement ring for which, he admitted rather shamefacedly, his father had loaned him the money.

  Bertie became her entire world. She never looked at another boy and knew she never would. He claimed she was the only girl for him, forever. Bertie and Ruby, forever! she wrote in enormous letters on a fresh page in her diary, encircling the words with yet more hearts.

  They were the perfect fit in every respect: physically quite alike with curly dark blond hair and freckly complexions – neither overly good-looking nor too plain but just ‘normal’, as he loved to say. A matching pair of normal. He said her brown eyes were like ginger wine; she said his reminded her of hazelnuts. They both loved dancing, walking and sharing silly stories or games of cards in the pub of an evening with their close-knit group of friends. And of course, they were going to live happily ever after. She could not imagine that things could possibly turn out otherwise.

  When the recruitment notices were posted on the town hall noticeboard she pleaded with him not to join up. But then the pressure became too much, all the lads were enlisting, so she made him promise to return safe and sound. True to his word, he did return twice on leave from training. He was changed: he seemed to have grown several inches and was certainly stronger, physically, with muscles she had never noticed before. Bertie the joker had disappeared; he was more serious and thoughtful, and struggled to make conversation in larger groups. Indoors, he was fidgety and uncomfortable.

  Only when walking in the woods and fields with Ruby did he appear to relax. And yet, however gently she posed her questions, he still refused to talk much about what they had been going through. Only at the very last moment did he let slip that this would be his final leave for a while: they were being posted. He would not say where.

  They married on the Monday before he left, a hastily convened affair at a registry office. Her mother had been saving for years for this moment and when she saw Ruby in her wedding dress she burst into tears. ‘War or no war, you’ll have a day to remember for the rest of your lives,’ she said.

  And what a day it had been: bright sunshine, puffy white clouds in the sky, the smiles of many good friends and such joy that she felt she might burst. Those two nights at the Mill Hotel afterwards – their honeymoon – were the happiest of her life. Although at first shy with each other, she discovered in herself a new world of passion, of intense bliss, that seemed to have been waiting in the wings for all her girlhood years. She felt complete.

  They spent the daytime walking the water meadows, stopping to watch the mysterious brown fish languidly swimming against the flow of the river, listening to the larks calling overhead and, once, spying the brilliant blue flash of a kingfisher.

  ‘I never want this to end,’ she’d sighed, giddy with gladness. ‘Please don’t go, Bertie. I can’t bear to be without you.’

  ‘I’ll be back soon, I promise,’ he said, and she believed him.

  Even when he left Ruby refused to worry, determined to remain strong and cheerful. That’s what he had asked of her, after all. He was doing his duty for King and Country and he’d promised, hand on heart, that he would stay out of danger. Of course she would miss him, of course she cried herself to sleep. But he would come home before long, she knew that for certain. Bertie never broke his promises.

  So when, five months later, she received a telegram, followed by army form B104-83, dated September 1917 – We regret to inform you that your husband, Albert Barton, is notified as being missing in action at Passchendaele – she refused to consider that he was anything other than just temporarily out of contact. She built a hasty wall around her heart, not allowing herself to contemplate any other outcome. He’s promised to come home safe and he always keeps his promises, she wrote. He’ll turn up, soon enough. She could even hear him: ‘Just popped out for a fag, officer. Didn’t miss me, did you?’ At school he’d always been in trouble for his cheek.

  She would keep calm and carry on, just as the posters exhorted, forcing herself to get dressed each day, to eat the meals which her mother so solicitously cooked for her but which, to her jaded senses, tasted like cardboard. On her way to work she nodded to the regulars on the bus and exchanged the usual pleasantries about the weather. Once there, she applied herself as efficiently as ever, pasting a smile on her face for her colleagues and customers, hoping none of them would ask her about him.

  Word got out, of course it did. He was the boss’s son, after all, at Hopegoods, the men’s and women’s outfitters in the High Street where she worked in haberdashery. After the first round of sympathetic comments her colleagues learned not to mention his name. This sort of news had become almost commonplace.

  But as the months went by and they heard nothing further, Ruby’s protective wall began to disintegrate. She sank into a chasm of grief and guilt that she experienced as real, physical agony, from which she could see no escape. She seemed to be in the bottom of a well, hemmed in on all sides by darkness, with only a glimmer of light too impossibly high to reach and too exhausting to climb towards. There were days when she felt she simply could not carry on and sometimes, walking by the river, she imagined wading through the deep mud and giving herself up to the cold, heartless current. But she never found the courage. Her mother, still struggling with her own bereavement just a few scant years before, did what she could to comfort her daughter, but nothing eased the pain.

  In the face of Ruby’s persistent refusals to go out with them, their once close group of friends drifted away one by one, and gave up inviting her, or even calling round. She stopped writing in her diary because she could think of nothing to say. She felt like an empty shell, the kind you find on the beach, bleached and whitened in the salt and the sun, hard to imagine that it had once held a living creature inside. She could not remember the last time she had laughed.

  But how could she go on living otherwise? Without Bertie she felt like half a person, not really alive at all. She could gain no enjoyment from any of the things they’d had fun doing together: going to the pub, to the cinema, to dances, for walks in the woods. She wore only black, or occasionally charcoal grey. He had made the ultimate sacrifice, she reasoned, so how else could she honour him? It felt insulting to his memory, somehow, to wear anything cheerful. This is how my
life will be from now until I die. It’s only right.

  Her dutifully regular visits to his parents only served to underline their mutual loss. It twisted the knife in her heart to see his mother so devastated, his father so grimly stoic. Afterwards she would emerge exhausted, as though carrying the boulder of their grief, as well as her own. Leaving the overheated fug of their house, she would look up at the sky and inhale deeply, trying to draw strength from the fresh air. One step at a time, she’d say to herself, one day at a time. This misery will soon ease.

  Of course it didn’t, not really. The grief was still so intense it sometimes took her breath away, and at work she would have to hide in the ladies’ toilet until she could compose herself. She discovered, by trial and error, how to present a brave face to the world. At first it was an unreliable mask, so brittle that it threatened to shatter at the slightest unguarded word or prompted memory but, as the days passed, and then weeks and months, the disguise became more durable until now, two years later, it had almost become a natural extension of her real self. In fact, she was no longer sure who her real self was.

  What she did know, however, was that she would never betray his memory. Not again. It had been a moment of madness with a man she’d never met before and had never seen since, but the guilt of it burned her heart with a pain she felt would never ease.

  She viewed these twice-weekly visits to her in-laws as her duty to Bertie, a duty she would bear for the rest of her life. She was still his wife, after all, always would be. Mr and Mrs Barton frequently referred to her as ‘our daughter’. Who else did they have, now that he was gone?

  But conversation was always sticky. Ivy seemed as insubstantial as thistledown, liable to blow away at the slightest wrong word. Albert senior was unchanging, gruff and uncommunicative, but at least he was usually solid and predictable. But she could never have foreseen this moment, this little Thomas Cook brochure, their faces so solemn and expectant.