They stood facing each other on the path. He lifted his hands and let them fall again. A gesture of despair.
‘I am very sorry, Anne. Very, very sorry . . .’
He was unable to speak more. She saw that he was weeping, the tears sliding down his cheeks. She couldn’t cry with him. She couldn’t seem to do anything but stand there and stare at Stefan, as though he weren’t real and this wasn’t happening at all. If she stood perfectly still he would vanish and everything would go on as before.
But now he was taking holding of her hands and leading her towards the garden seat, making her sit down, though she didn’t want to in the least. She went on staring at him. At last she found her voice and it sounded so calm it might have been someone else talking. Another person who had taken over and was asking a question for her.
‘Is there any hope, Stefan?’
He shook his head. ‘None. I am there. I see.’
The other person spoke again. ‘Tell me what happened.’
He hesitated, very troubled.
‘I want to know, Stefan. Please tell me.’
He gave a deep sigh. ‘Very well. If you want. We were on patrol. Many patrols we have done these days, and we see nothing. But today we are vectored to intercept bandits. We find them. We go after them. Michal, he is shooting one and I see another coming from high at back of him. I try to tell him quick on R/T, but is too late, or he not hear. Then he is hit very bad. One wing is gone. His Hurricane go down fast . . .’ Stefan twisted his hand downwards. ‘I go down too, so I am with him. There is fire and much smoke . . . All the time I am hoping to see parachute. I call him again and again on R/T but there is no answer. Many times I try. I shout . . . I am in terrible fear for him . . . Then I see him go into sea. There is big splash with aircraft. I fly low to see if perhaps he gets out . . . but the Hurricane she sinks very quick and there is nothing. I fly round and round. I look and look but there is just water . . .’ He put his hands to his face. ‘I am very sorry, Anne. I could not help him. I could do nothing. Nothing.’
She looked over his bent head at the white squirrel scampering merrily across the lawn. After its winter hibernation it was full of the joys of spring. She watched it whisk up the trunk of the big copper beech and into the branches where the buds would soon burst into young leaves. The whole garden was full of new life – birds nesting, green shoots sprouting, flowers opening, grass growing. It would all burgeon and blossom and bloom into a summer that Michal would never see.
‘Thank you for telling me, Stefan. And thank you for coming to give me the news yourself.’
He lifted his head. ‘Michal ask me to do this, if it happens to him. I promise. He was my very good friend. I never forget him.’ He spread his hands helplessly and sadly. ‘He ask also I give you this.’
She hadn’t noticed the suitcase tucked away beside the seat. Stefan placed it before her, at her feet. It looked scratched and well-used. A label hanging from the handle bore Michal’s name. She remembered how he had opened it up on the cottage table in the New Forest. I bring food for us. Eggs, bacon, potatoes, a tin of ham, bread, butter, tea, chocolate . . . and, most important thing of all, real Polish vodka.
‘Here is key,’ Stefan was saying. ‘I put everything he has in suitcase. There is not much. We Poles have not many things.’ He paused awkwardly. ‘The car he give to me. He write letter to say this, but it is for you, if you want . . .’
She shook her head firmly. ‘No, thank you, Stefan. I want you to have it. I’d have no use for it. And I couldn’t bear to see it.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘There is letter for you too, in suitcase.’ He groped in the breastpocket of his tunic. ‘I have also something for you. Is photograph. I make one day last summer. I think you like.’
She took the envelope he offered without opening it. Jimmy’s mother had done the same and now she understood why.
Stefan was looking at her anxiously. ‘You want I find someone to be with you before I go?’
‘No, thank you. I’d much sooner be alone.’
He stood up, towering over her, sad but in command of himself again. ‘Michal always speak of you Anne. He love you very much.’
He bowed to her gravely and she watched him walk away down the path.
After a while she put the suitcase on the seat beside her and opened it. Inside she found Michal’s few possessions – his RAF kit, with his best blue uniform, an English-Polish dictionary, a Bible, his silver cigarette case, a bottle of the cologne he used, and the thick, cream-coloured fisherman’s sweater he had worn at the cottage. She lifted it out and held it against her cheek for a moment; it smelled faintly of his cologne. His letter lay at the bottom of the case.
My darling,
If ever you read this, I shall be dead. Stefan has promised he will give it to you. I leave these few things for you, to keep what you wish. I do not want you to be sad for me. You must not be so. I am not afraid to die and I always understood this could happen. I told you once that I had only my life left to give. I give it willingly, for my country and for yours.
There is only one regret and that is that if this happens I shall never know a life with you. And our children will never be born. We would have had the happiest life together, I am very sure of this. But I think your father and mother were right. It is better you are not a widow. Better we had never begun. You must now make a different life. A new beginning. Promise me to do this. One day you will marry some nice Englishman who loves you as much as I do, and who will take care of you and make you very happy.
Remember me sometimes, but only with a smile.
Michal.
She opened the flap of the envelope that Stefan had given her and drew out the snapshot. Michal was standing in flying clothes beside his Hurricane, one arm resting on the fighter’s wing. He was holding his helmet in the other hand and the wind had ruffled his hair. He looked like he had looked on the walk on the Downs – young and carefree. And he was smiling at the camera, and straight at her.
The tears came then, quite suddenly. She buried her face in his sweater and gave herself up to a terrible grief, crying as though her heart would break.
PART 3
ACHIEVEMENT
Fifteen
VIRGINIA’S SPECIAL TRAINING course took place at RAF Yatesbury in Wiltshire and lasted for several weeks. The other WAAF put forward by Section Officer Newman had turned out to be Madge and, big and noisy as she was, Virginia was glad of her company. It made being sent away from Colston less of an ordeal. Before being accepted they had been given another eyesight test. Whatever the mysterious secret work might be, it required perfect vision.
RAF Yatesbury was a huge camp with an enormous number of people. Virginia thought it a grim place. The WAAF huts were two miles from the training building and they had to march there and back while the RAF whistled at them along the way.
Their first lecturer was a middle-aged man who looked and sounded like a kindly, absent-minded schoolteacher. He smiled round at them.
‘You are going to learn all about something called radio direction finding, or radio location. None of you will know anything about this, so let me explain as simply as possible, and from the very beginning.’
He picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the blackboard behind him. First he drew a human head turned sideways, in profile, and marked in an eye. Then, at a short distance, he drew a house and then, above and between them, a sun surrounded by rays. It was like a small child’s picture. He began to make dotted lines, linking the three in zig-zags. ‘The human eye sees an object because the light rays from the sun are reflected from that object to the eye, like this . . .’ The chalk made dot-dot noises across the board. ‘Unfortunately, light waves can’t travel through cloud or fog, or solid walls, and at night, when there’s no sun at all, we have to use artificial light to send that reflection to our eyes.’ He drew another head turned towards a vase of flowers, and then an electric
light bulb suspended overhead. There were more dotting sounds as he joined the three. Then he turned round with a dry smile. ‘Luckily, I never wanted to become an artist.’
There was a ripple of amusement round the room. He was much less frightening than most of the RAF instructors she had come across, Virginia thought. Even though she couldn’t imagine what the childish drawings could have to do with some important, secret work, she was hanging onto every word, like the rest of the class.
He continued in his mild way, making it all seem no more complicated than a cookery class. ‘So, you can see that light waves have their drawbacks when we want to see objects. However, another means has been discovered of enabling us to locate them and in all kinds of circumstances. By using a different kind of wave.’
He paused, and it was a dramatic pause. The room was completely still.
‘Wireless, or radio waves travel at the same speed as light and, like them, are electro-magnetic. And, like visible light waves, they can be reflected from objects in a kind of echo. And they are not affected by the weather.’ He turned to the blackboard again, with an apologetic smile over his shoulder. ‘As a matter of fact, Mother Nature developed this technique millions of years ago to help bats fly at night without bumping into things.’ The chalk squeaked excruciatingly as he drew a rather good picture of a bat, wings outstretched in flight, and then a lamp post beside it. He dotted another line from the bat’s mouth to the post and back again to the ears. ‘Bats send out short bursts of squeaks – inaudible to us, unlike my chalk – and catch the echo when it bounces back at them from an obstacle in their path. Not only can the bat tell there’s something there but where and how far away it is.’
He put down the chalk and brushed his hands together, beaming at them. ‘And you are all going to learn to be like a bat. Only it won’t be squeaks but radio waves. And the objects you will be locating with these echoes won’t be lamp posts . . . but aircraft.’ He paused again as there was a murmur round the room. ‘We know, you see, that the speed of radio waves is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. So, if we send out a wave from a given point and then measure the time it takes to travel to an object and then bounce back again to us, we can easily work out how far away that object is. To give a very simple example, if a radio wave has taken one thousandth of a second to go from your transmitter to an aircraft and back again, it has actually travelled one hundred and eighty-six miles in that time. Therefore, the aircraft it bumped into is ninety-three miles away. All clear so far?’
Beside Virginia, Madge gave a faint groan.
Their lecturer went on genially. He was talking now about something called a cathode ray tube and was drawing a trumpet-shaped diagram on the blackboard.
‘We need to be able to see our echoes as they come back to us, and this is what we use. The returning echoes make electron beams in this tube shoot from the cathode at the narrow end to a screen at the wide end where we can see and interpret what they are telling us . . .’
He turned back to the blackboard. ‘You will see a green light running across the screen like this.’ The chalk shrieked wince-makingly as he drew it. ‘This is called the time base. As each radio wave leaves your transmitter and goes out into space, so a pulse starts across your screen from left to right. If that wave strikes an aircraft it rebounds and is picked up by the receiver. This will deflect your time base down into a little V-shaped depression that you will be able to see, like this. And above your trace you will have a calibrated scale measure in miles to give you your range.’ He looked encouragingly over his shoulder with a small smile. ‘Believe it or not, you will also learn how to take a bearing and height reading on your echo, and even to estimate numbers of aircraft.’
Madge groaned again.
From the innocuous beginning, the course progressed relentlessly. They were taught to convert wavelengths to frequencies and frequencies to wavelengths, about the difference between current and voltage, about magnetic fields, about cathodes and anodes, and exactly how the magical tube produced its trace . . . and after every lecture they had to hand in their notebooks for security. There were stringent tests at the end of each phase. Madge found it hard, but managed to stay the course; others were not equal to it and left. Virginia passed all tests easily.
They were shown a cathode-ray tube in operation. It was encased in a large steel cabinet so that only the screen was visible and an RAF corporal, seated in front and wearing headphones and a mouthpiece, demonstrated for them. Virginia watched, fascinated, as the bright green trace on the screen registered an echo. The corporal read off the range from the marker above the trace and rotated the goniometer control knob with his left hand to give, first, a bearing on the aircraft and then its height. Eventually, they learned to operate the tube themselves. For the practical part of their training they were divided into watches and into night shifts as well as day, and they plotted the dummy tracks onto a perspex plotting table with a chinagraph pencil. It was all a long way from the bat and the lamp post.
A lecturer explained how what they had learned would be put to use.
‘We have a chain of radio direction finding stations all round the coast, as a defence against the enemy. We call them Chain Home, or CH stations, and their object is to provide an early warning of attack. Some use a high beam from very tall masts, others are designed to spot low-flying aircraft, and some are for guiding our fighters from the ground to intercept the enemy. They are all part of a big defensive network. I will take the area controlled by 11 Group, Fighter Command, as an example.’
He sketched a rough map of the south coast of England on the blackboard, from the Thames Estuary to the Isle of Wight, and chalked in six crosses.
‘These are all Chain Home stations.’
He drew a line inland from each cross so that they all converged at a point, like wheel spokes. ‘And here is Fighter Command HQ at Stanmore. Information on enemy aircraft is detected at long range by the CH stations and passed to filter rooms at Fighter Command HQ where it is sifted by Filter Officers, and courses, heights and numbers of aircraft accurately established and identified.’ He marked more crosses on the map and drew lines radiating outwards from the wheel’s centre to them. ‘The sifted information is then passed on by tellers to plotters at Group HQ, Bentley Priory, here, and in these Sector Ops Rooms. Some of you may have been on the receiving end in previous postings. This may seem rather a long way round to you, but the actual time lag from CH to Sector is very short indeed. Controllers very quickly form a clear picture of the enemy aircraft approaching our shores and are able to act accordingly with the squadrons at their disposal. So, you can see that you will be operating an extremely potent weapon against the enemy. And, incidentally, one which enabled us to win the Battle of Britain.’
At the end of the course RAF and WAAF marched together at the passing out parade. Virginia had never been much good at drill, but she marched better than she had ever done – swinging her arms smartly in time and holding her head high. Both Madge and she were posted to the same Chain Home station on the south coast, only a few miles away from RAF Colston, but before they had to report they were given leave. Virginia went home to Wimbledon.
She was shocked by all the Blitz damage in London since her last leave, and by the new gaps in Alfred Road where more houses had been hit. Again, she tried to persuade her mother to move to the country.
‘I’ve told you before, Virginia, that I have no intention of letting the Germans drive me out of my home and leaving it to the mercy of burglars. Besides, they seem to have given up the raids. What’s that peculiar badge that you’re wearing on your arm?’
Virginia fingered her new sparks badge. ‘It’s a special sort of one they gave us at the end of the course.’
‘It looks like some horrible insect. What was this course, anyway?’
‘They were just teaching us a new way of doing clerical work.’
‘Well, you’d think they could find something rather better for
you to do than that – a girl of your background and education. If you had gone into the WRNS I’m sure it would have been quite different. And now they’re suddenly sending you off somewhere else, for no good reason that I can see. It all seems very unsatisfactory. I sometimes wonder if the RAF knows what it’s doing.’
‘Oh, I think they do, Mother,’ Virginia said. ‘I think they know very well.’
The Chain Home station where she was posted was surrounded by a high metal fence and by a thicket of barbed wire. Four gigantic transmitter towers stood in line at the westerly end of the site, and four smaller receiver towers at the easterly end. The taller ones rose more than two hundred feet into the air, dwarfing the nearby village, and could be seen for miles; it seemed ironical when what they did was so secret.
Like the other WAAFS on the site, Virginia and Madge were billeted in the village and they found themselves staying with a Mrs Parsons, an elderly widow. Her small cottage also housed a budgerigar and a large black cat who passed much of its day staring at the caged bird with its yellow eyes – motionless but for the twitching of its tail. Every shelf and every surface in the cottage displayed Mrs Parsons’ collection of spindly blown-glass ornaments – souvenirs, she told them, from trips along the south coast when her husband was alive. They both lived in fear of knocking them off and breaking them.
It was soon clear that nobody in the village had any idea of the true nature of the work done on the station. There were rumours that the huge towers could shoot death rays at the Germans, but Mrs Parsons had her own ideas.
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