The Night Raid

by Clare Harvey

  Praise for Clare Harvey:

  ‘Will delight all those who love a good wartime story’ Dilly Court

  ‘Brilliant. I was swept away by this unforgettably powerful tale of love and courage in the face of war. This beautifully written, pacy and impressively researched story binds together a group of flawed individuals in an intricate and fascinating drama, full of heart-stopping moments. Clare Harvey writes with a directness and an honesty that pins you to the page’ Kate Furnivall

  ‘The sense of period, the descriptive prose and the superb writing make The English Agent a real page-turner. Clare is certainly a gifted storyteller’ Ellie Dean

  For Chris, because

  ‘To my shame, I must admit many are the corners of my life into which I dare not peep.’

  Dame Laura Knight

  (from her autobiography, The Magic of a Line)

  Prologue

  She groped, unseeing, until her fingers connected with something soft. ‘I’ve got you,’ she said, tugging at the cloth, but there was no answer from the lumpen mass of overall-covered limbs.

  Her eyes were streaming, the smoke hot-acrid in her nostrils. Coughs razored up her parched throat.

  The site of the fire was further in. Through squinted lashes she could make out the orange glow at ground level. If the flames reached the gas cylinders they’d be done for, but the flames hadn’t reached the cylinders – not yet – and there was still a chance she could pull the woman to safety.

  She wedged her clog against the edge of a lathe base for leverage, and heaved at the sleeve cuff she held. The body shifted an inch or two, but didn’t pull free. She yanked, harder this time, but the body was heavy as a wet sandbag, caught on something. If only she could see – but the smoke was hot-thick. She slid down onto the concrete floor. She’d have to feel her way. She could hear sirens, and shouts calling her away, but the sounds were muffled as birdsong beyond a window pane, as she focused on her task.

  She crouched low, feeling her way down the length of the overalls: strap, waist button, side pocket, trouser leg – nudging and shoving at the inert form as she went – all the way down. Here it was: a foot caught up in one of the twirling gas hoses.

  Her fingers twisted the looping rubber, unhooking it from the woman’s foot, tugging her leg free. At last.

  The boiling air was quicksand, pooling and sucking and swallowing them up. She had to get them both out, fast. She had to get them down to the shelter, in case the fire spread and the whole thing blew.

  She shuffled back, following the line of the overalls with her fingertips. She grabbed at the shoulder straps, and pushed her foot again against the lathe. She strained and wrenched, the cloth cutting into her palms.

  This time the body moved, and she followed the momentum, jerking and tugging and pulling it out, along the factory floor, away from the flames. Her breath came in grunting gasps, painful, as the heat seared her lungs. There was sweat and tears in her eyes, and a metallic taste in her mouth. The woman’s head jolted awkwardly over the concrete floor, but there was no time to take care. There was no time.

  Suddenly there were hands at her shoulders, shouting voices, and the woman’s body was pulled away, backwards, towards the shelter door: We’ve got her, now get inside, for God’s sake.

  No, wait.

  She saw the easel, the canvas pale against the orange-grey of the growing fire. The painting was so close to completion: those butter-smooth faces that had taken weeks to create. She broke free of the hands that grabbed her.

  It will only take a second to get the painting.

  She turned and ran back towards the flames.

  Three months earlier

  Chapter 1

  Laura

  ‘What do you say, Harold?’ Laura said.

  ‘Hmm?’ Harold looked up from the crossword.

  ‘About Nottingham,’ she continued.

  ‘What about Nottingham?’

  He hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. She’d come straight in here after the telephone call from Ken Clark to tell him all about it and he simply hadn’t listened. Laura narrowed her eyes, sucked in a breath and repeated herself: ‘They want me to do another one like “Ruby Loftus”. They loved it, Harold, and they say they want more. This time they said to have two women, to show team spirit and all that. Of course I said it would cost more – a double portrait, twice as long, six weeks’ sitting at least, I said. I asked for double and they’ve gone away to discuss figures. I suspect I won’t get double, but K will have to more than match what they gave me for the Ruby Loftus one, which would certainly keep the wolf from the door.’

  Harold put down his pencil and stroked his chin, regarding her through his pebble glasses. The light from the hearth highlighted the defined lines of his head, edging his skull green-gold. How she’d love to paint him just like that, contained in firelight. If only he’d let her. Her husband had never once let her produce even so much as a sketch of him, although he’d painted her portrait when she was no older than the young waitress who was wobbling towards them through the cluttered tea room.

  ‘You’ve only just got back from Wales,’ Harold said. His face betrayed no emotion, features barely moving as the words emerged. And yet it felt – it always felt – like a kind of rebuke.

  ‘I thought you could come with me this time,’ Laura said, as the girl arrived at their table with her teetering tray. ‘Revisit some of our old haunts; what do you say?’

  The tea things clattered onto the polished table: cups, saucers, teaspoons, teapot, milk jug, saccharine tablets in a condiment dish. ‘I’ll be back with the scones presently,’ the girl said, head-bobbing, fair hair escaping from the hair roll. She couldn’t be much more than fourteen, dear thing, Laura thought. Wonderful clear skin, the colour of – the colour of Sennen sand at sunset. Yes, that was it: a particular shade between oyster and ivory, overlaid with a rose wash. Delicious.

  ‘Thunder and lightning,’ Laura said, remembering, as the girl turned away.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Missus Knight?’

  ‘Be a dear and bring the black treacle when you come back. I like my cream tea the Cornish way.’

  The girl nodded and was gone. Harold had picked up his pencil again and was staring down at the crossword.

  ‘Harold!’

  He looked up. ‘I was just letting it brew a while. Terribly weak, the tea, recently – beginning to wonder if they’re reusing the leaves,’ he said.

  ‘We were discussing the Nottingham commission,’ Laura said. ‘Guns again – Royal Ordnance Factory down near the Trent somewhere – Bofors and suchlike. Remember how everyone used to say that the lace-making girls were the prettiest in England? They’ll all be on munitions now – there’ll be no shortage of faces to paint. What do you think?’

  ‘Does it matter what I think?’

  Laura tutted. ‘Don’t be like that. You could come with me. After all, it’s not as if you’ve anything else to occupy yourself with.’

  She saw him stiffen, grasp the pencil and lower his gaze. She’d gone too far. She always went too far, never seemed to know how to keep it buttoned. A better wife wouldn’t hurt her husband’s pride by making reference to his lack of employment, she supposed. But she wasn’t a good wife, never had felt good enough for Harold. And in any case, was it her fault the blasted war meant all the usual portrait work he did for the great and the good had effectively dried up? And the War Artists’ Advisory Committee would never offer him work – Harold wouldn’t have accepted, even if they had.

  Laura sighed and looked out of the window. The telephone wire cut through the westering sky, down towards the fields, where a herd of cows coming home was a rub of charcoal against the dun-mauve backdrop. She put out her fingertip and pulled it ac
ross the wet mist condensation on the bottom of the pane. ‘I thought you’d like to come,’ she said, turning away from the fading light to face her husband.

  ‘Why?’ he said, still staring down at his paper.

  ‘Nostalgia. A trip down memory lane – a trip down Waverley Street, Noel Street and onto the Boulevard, for that matter. Oh, Harold, remember all that?’

  ‘It was a very long time ago,’ Harold said, putting his newspaper and pencil on the windowsill and picking up the teapot.

  ‘Milk first!’ Laura said, snatching up the jug as he began to pour the tea. They ended up pouring at the same time, brown and cream liquids splashing together into beige whirlpools in their cups. A storm in a teacup, Laura thought.

  They picked up their cups and lifted them to their lips at the same time. It often happened like that: years of togetherness had synchronised their movements. Years of togetherness – but so often apart, since that first time in November 1916:

  ‘Must you go?’ he said. And she’d had to strain to catch his voice, because of the wind and the gulls and the distant waves breaking on the shore. She didn’t reply.

  He was in three-quarter profile, and she couldn’t make out his expression from where she stood. All she could see was the edge of his face: features like one of the wind-gnarled hawthorns in the Cornish hedgerows, moulded from resistance to the whipping breeze. If only she could paint him here, right now, Laura thought. He looked so solid and unyielding, a wonderful contrast to the translucent sweep of Sennen Cove, with its sequinned waves and mother-of-pearl morning skies. For a moment she began a mental composition: the crescent bay curling, and Harold in the chair, looking out to sea. She thought how she could use the two gulls and the skeins of high cloud to draw the eye around, through the silver-blue sky. And Harold himself – her eyes darted over his form, sketching him in her mind’s eye: the strong line of his chin, the plane of his brow – etched against the liquid light. How she longed to paint her husband, but how stubbornly he had always refused.

  She was roused by the clop of hooves from the lane beyond the cottage. Mr Trevallion was here with the dog cart to take her to the station. To take her to the station, to chug away on the train, all the way to London, and then to change onto another train to Surrey. She wouldn’t reach Witley Camp until tonight. She wouldn’t see another Sennen morning for weeks, months maybe. ‘Mr Trevallion’s here,’ she called out, but still he didn’t turn to face her, remained staring out to sea, muffled in his coat and the tartan travel rug on his lap. His sketchbook lay unopened on the rattan table next to him, with one long, unused pencil on top.

  ‘Be sure he always has his sketchbook and pencil nearby,’ Laura told the girl, when she was packing her things last night. ‘We don’t know when he’ll be ready to start drawing again. We must be prepared for when he does.’ But the sketchbook had remained closed for almost two years now, and Laura was beginning to wonder if Harold would ever work again. Wondering, too, if he’d ever claw his way out of the hole he’d disappeared into and emerge as the real Harold, the talented, clever, wonderful artist she’d married.

  Three steps cleared the distance between them across the frosted grass. She could taste the salt in the air, and hear the kettle whistling in the kitchen, as she leant over to say goodbye.

  ‘I’ll write,’ she said, feeling the sand-smooth rub of his freshly shaved cheek against hers, smelling his familiar, woody scent.

  He grabbed her hand, then clutched her fingers so tight it hurt. ‘What do they think about your husband being a conchie?’

  ‘We’ve been over this, Harold.’

  ‘Why must you go off and paint soldiers?’

  ‘Harold, we are at war, like it or not. Nobody will pay me to paint children flying kites at the seaside or pretty women on the clifftops any more.’

  ‘But soldiers, Laura, training for war. If you leave now, you’re a part of that, you know, a part of that whole machine of death. You’re as much a part of it as I would have been if I’d let myself be conscripted.’ Her wedding ring cut painfully into her flesh as he grasped her hand, tighter still. ‘Don’t you see? Laura, can’t you see what you’re doing?’ She looked into his face: the strong features she’d always so admired, his serious eyes. Harold was holding her hand, looking into her eyes, and talking to her again, after all these months of silence and dislocation. Unbearable.

  Dimly she heard Mr Trevallion calling her from in front of the cottage. ‘Harold, we have no money,’ she said, slowly, as if talking to a child. ‘We cannot eat your principles. We cannot put your principles on the fire to warm the cottage. We cannot use your principles to pay the maid, or to pay for your medication or the visits from Doctor Nightingale.’ She tore her hand from his. ‘I’m leaving now, Harold.’

  She half-ran towards the gate. From the corner of her eye she could see the girl coming out of the back door with Harold’s hot water bottle and medicines, her yellow dress like an upside-down daffodil, swaying as she walked along the path. Ahead, in the lane, Mr Trevallion was heaving her trunk into the cart. He looked over at her and grinned his gap-toothed grin. She paused at the gate, fumbling with the latch, turning back to take one last look at her husband. But the girl was fussing with his rug, and from here all she could see was the back of his head, as the girl flurried and chafed him like a nervous pastry cook around a plate of petits fours.

  She yanked the gate and pushed through, turning her back on the glorious Sennen morning.

  ‘Do say yes, Harold. Come with me to Nottingham and we can stay in an hotel and peek at the ghosts of our former selves, chasing helter-skelter through the Lace Market,’ Laura said now, replacing her cup in its saucer.

  ‘Laura, stop exaggerating. Never once did we play tag in the marketplace. The tales you tell make it sound as if we were street urchins together.’

  ‘We weren’t much more than that, Harold. I was just fourteen when you painted my portrait, remember?’

  It was Harold’s turn to sigh.

  Laura heard the kitchen door slam and saw the girl struggle in with the tray of scones. She had to dodge and weave through the other tables to reach them. The Petersons’ terrier, Kipper, yapped at her heels as she passed, and she had to step over Mr Jones’s awkwardly angled leg, which jutted out between the honeymooners’ table and the fireplace. The honeymooners were touching toes beneath the table and shovelling buttered crumpets into their mouths. Ravenous, poor things – the exertions of love do seem to make young people terribly hungry, Laura thought. The girl finally arrived, apologising for the delay. Laura shifted the teapot onto the windowsill, next to the ashtray, to make room for the plate of scones. ‘Not much cream, I’m afraid, Missus Knight, but I found your special treacle. Mr Peterson has been keeping it back for you,’ the girl said.

  ‘Marvellous! How very sweet,’ Laura said. The girl gave a flustered smile. ‘And you’re doing a wonderful job, too. What’s your name, dear?’

  ‘Rosie.’

  ‘Lovely name. It suits you. You’re new, aren’t you?’

  ‘Started last week, Missus Knight.’

  ‘I only got back today. What happened to Marjorie?’

  ‘Her papers came. She went to join the Wrens.’

  ‘Really? She’ll look awfully good in that uniform with a figure like hers, won’t she? Well, I have to say, I think you’re doing very well, Rosie. Keep it up!’

  The girl thanked her and left. Laura watched her threading back towards the kitchen. Dear thing. She turned her attention back to her husband, who was already biting into a scone topped with clotted cream and black treacle – her treacle.

  ‘Harold, that’s my treacle. Mr Peterson has been saving it for me.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Laura,’ Harold said, shaking his head and reaching for his teacup.

  It was stuffy in the hotel tea room, with the fire and the tightly packed clientele: small movements, small conversations, a small palette of colours: green-grey-brown, and the dull amber of the fire in
the hearth. Dear Lord, where was the life in it all?

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question about Nottingham,’ Laura said, taking a scone and smothering it with the remains of the cream.

  Harold swallowed and wiped his lips with a napkin. ‘I really don’t see why you feel the need to go through the pantomime of getting my permission, Laura. When has it ever mattered what I think?’

  Chapter 2

  George

  ‘Ey up, purple warning’s just come through, boss.’ The skinny lad placed the intercom receiver back in its cradle and reached for his helmet. George closed the doorway behind him, cutting off the light from the stairwell. He could see well enough; it was a clear night, with a gibbous moon sinking towards the western horizon. Searchlights sprang up, tickling the underbelly of the skies.

  The planes were just a faraway buzz, almost drowned out by the clunk and hum of the factory below them. ‘Don’t worry about that, Alfie,’ said George, reaching out for the helmet. Distant sirens yowled like feral tomcats. He raised his voice a notch. ‘You get yourself downstairs and get some dinner down you. I hear it’s jam roly-poly for pudding.’

  ‘But if there’s a raid, Mr Handford?’ The lad’s eyes were large in his pale face, his still-breaking voice stumbling over the words. ‘I d-don’t mind staying until the all-clear.’

  The buzz was louder, more definite now. George turned towards the sound. ‘They picked a nice night for it,’ he said, listening for the sonic trajectory. ‘Sounds like they’re headed west,’ he said. ‘Business over Derby again, I’ll wager – poor blighters. Now, you get yourself downstairs.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’ Alfie let go of the helmet.

  ‘Go on, before I change my mind.’

  The young fire watcher gave a nervous smile and bobbed back down the stairwell. The door banged shut behind him. George fitted on the helmet. The strap dug in under his chin. He fiddled with it, but couldn’t loosen it, so took it off again and hung it on the hook next to the intercom. He shouldn’t be up here at all, really. He could easily send someone else up to cover Alfie’s break. The Board thought that the duty manager should be present at mealtimes, to show a friendly side to management and boost morale. But George had no need for chit-chat over lumpy custard, or – God forbid – someone suggesting a sing-along.