“No, no one else. But I’m certain Mr. Powney will be home before tonight. The Home Guard meets on Wednesday nights, and he never misses.”
And he doesn’t like to drive in the blackout, which means the soonest he’ll be willing to take me is tomorrow morning, and it’ll take all morning to get there. The evacuation would be half over.
He couldn’t afford to waste any more time here. He’d already missed three days of the evacuation he could never get back. I’m going to have to go back through to Oxford to make Badri find me a drop site closer to Dover.
“Don’t be angry,” Daphne was saying. “I’ll fry you a nice piece of cod for your tea, and Mr. Powney will be here by the time you’ve eaten it.”
“No, I’ve got to go.” He stood up. “I have to file my story with my paper in London.”
“But your tea’s nearly ready. Surely you’ve time-”
Time’s just what I don’t have, he thought. “No, I’ve got to get it in the afternoon edition,” he said and walked quickly out of the pub, out of the village, and up the hill, anxious to get to the drop before it got dark. The shimmer would be less visible in the daytime. Whichever boat had been offshore last night and prevented the drop from opening was halfway to Dover by now, but he wasn’t taking any chances. And the earlier he left 1940, the earlier Badri could set the new drop for.
I won’t care if it takes Badri a month to find me a new drop site, he thought, trudging up the hill. It’ll give me a chance to catch up on all the sleep I’ve lost. Or get over his time-lag. Whichever it was, he could barely make it up the hill. Thank God he was nearly to the top. I hope I don’t fall asleep waiting for the drop to open and miss it-
A half dozen children stood on the edge of the cliff, right above the path down to the beach, talking excitedly and pointing out at the Channel. He looked where they were pointing. A smoky pall covered the horizon, and several black columns rose from it. The fires of Dunkirk.
Christ, what next? Maybe I can bribe them to go away, he thought, and started over to them, but they were already scrambling down the path. “Wait!” Mike called, but it was no use. There were more children down on the beach, and several men. One of them had a pair of binoculars, and two of the kids were standing on Mike’s rock for a better view.
They’d be there till sundown, and if the fires themselves were visible from here, half the night. And in the meantime, what the hell am I supposed to do? he thought. Just stand here and watch my chance at observing the evacuation go up in smoke? Boats full of rescued soldiers were already pulling into Dover.
He turned angrily and started back down to the village. There had to be some other way to get to Dover. The Lady Jane was still here. Maybe Jonathan could pilot it. Or I could. He could follow the coast. And end up on the rocks. Or at the bottom of the Channel, he thought, remembering the water in the hold, but he went out to the quay anyway. Jonathan might know somebody who had a motorbike. Or a horse.
But Jonathan wasn’t on board. “Ahoy! Jonathan!” Mike called down the hatch. “Are you down there?”
No answer. Mike climbed down the ladder, stopping just above the water, which had gotten deeper since this morning. It was nearly up to the bottom rung. “Jonathan?”
He wasn’t there. I’ll have to go back to the Crown and Anchor and ask Daphne where he lives, he thought wearily, looking over at the Commander’s bunk. The gray wool blankets and filthy pillow looked incredibly inviting.
If I could just get an hour or two’s sleep, he thought, suddenly overwhelmed with drowsiness, I could think what to do, I could figure out something. And by then Powney may be back. Or the Commander. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pant legs, waded over to the bunk, and climbed in.
Maybe I’d better start the bilge pump, he thought, but he was suddenly too tired to move. This has to be time-lag. I’ve never felt this tired in my life. He could hardly pull the wool blanket up over him. It smelled of tar and wet dog, and the tail of it was wet from where it had dragged in the water.
The Lady Jane can’t sink in an hour, can it? he wondered, curling up on the bunk. The water sloshed as the boat rocked gently back and forth. That’s all I ask, an hour, and then, if the water level’s still rising, I’ll get up and start the pump. And at some point he must have staggered over, still asleep, and done it because when he woke he could hear it chugging, and could no longer hear the water sloshing.
How long had he slept? He held his arm up to look at his watch, but it was too dark to read it. Whatever time it is, I need to go see if Powney’s back and then go find Jonathan, he thought, and pushed the blanket off. He sat up and stepped down off the bunk.
Into over a foot of freezing water. The pump obviously wasn’t working, even though it was wheezing away. Its chugging filled the hold, so loud it-
“Oh, no!” Mike said and flung himself, splashing, across the hold and up the ladder. That wasn’t the bilge pump. It was the engine. They were moving. He jerked the hatch open.
Onto more darkness. He blinked stupidly at it, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and at the rush of wind and salt spray against his face. “Well, well, what have we here?” Commander Harold’s voice said jovially. “A stowaway?”
Mike could barely make him out in the darkness. He was at the wheel, in his peacoat and yachting cap. “I had a feeling you’d try to get in on this,” he said.
“In on what?” Mike said, hauling himself up onto deck. He looked frantically back toward the stern, but he couldn’t see anything, only darkness. “Where are you going?”
“To bring our boys home.”
“What do you mean? To Dunkirk?” Mike shouted at him over the wind. “I can’t go to Dunkirk!”
“Then you’d better start swimming, Kansas, because we’re already halfway across the Channel.”
“You may go to the ball, Cinderella,” her fairy godmother said, “but you must take care to leave before the clock strikes twelve.” “But what will I wear?” Cinderella asked. “I cannot go in these rags.”
Dulwich, Surrey-13 June 1944
IT WAS LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON BY THE TIME SHE reached Dulwich’s First Aid Nursing Yeomanry post. No one answered her knock. Of course not, she thought, annoyed. They’re all out looking for V-1 fragments. She’d planned to arrive on the morning of the eleventh so she’d have time to settle in, meet everyone, and watch them for two full days before the rockets began, but she hadn’t counted on all the delays the invasion would cause.
The D-Day landings in Normandy might have gone off with scarcely a hitch, but on this side of the Channel, chaos reigned. Every train and bus and road had either been crammed to capacity or restricted to invasion forces. It had taken her a day and a half to arrange transport to London with an American WAC delivering documents to Whitehall, and then at the last moment, the WAC had been ordered to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Portsmouth instead, and when they got there, both car and driver had been commandeered by British Intelligence. She’d spent the next three days in the wilds of Hampshire, vainly attempting to get a seat on a train, and finally hitched a ride to Dulwich in a Jeep with some American GIs, but by then the first V-1s had already fallen, and she’d missed her chance to observe the post in “normal” circumstances.
Though perhaps not. The government hadn’t yet admitted that the explosions were the result of unmanned rockets, and wouldn’t till three days from now. And none of the four V-1s that had hit last night had landed in Dulwich, so that if their post hadn’t been one of those sent to the crash sites by the Ministry of Home Security to gather fragments so the government could determine exactly what sort of weapon they were dealing with, they still might not know. But they obviously had been sent out because there continued to be no answer to her knocking. The post was deserted.