Overhead, a war was being fought out in the air, Messerschmitts and Spitfires and Hurricanes tearing into each other over fleets of German bombers. Nobody looked up to watch.
Hilda grunted and swore as she rammed the car through the clogged traffic. Ben could see the ring on her finger, her mother's ring, just a little too big for her; Hilda, focused, seemed to have forgotten it was there.
'So, Pevensey,' she said. 'We'll reach my radar station first.'
'I can drive on from there. I'm a lousy driver, but I know the way.'
'It's an observation post, yes?'
'And a defensive point, and a headquarters… There are a bunch of Canadians there. They fortified the old castle. I'm surprised your radar station is still operational.'
She glanced at him. 'I suppose it doesn't matter if I tell you now. The RAF is withdrawing, moving the fighters back from the forward bases. They'll operate from deeper inland now. Before sunset we'll have to decommission my station. Scrap the gear if we can't bring it back out of the threatened zone. Well, here we are.'
She lurched off the road, throwing Ben sideways.
An unprepossessing station lay ahead, locked behind a fence of barbed wire. Ben glimpsed masts, seven or eight of them, hundreds of feet high, and blocky buildings. The station had already taken damage, Ben saw; part of the fence had blown down.
'This is it. Good luck.' Leaving the engine running, Hilda leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and hurried out of the car. Then she was gone, off at a run to her station.
'You too,' Ben murmured. He slid across to the driver's seat. He gave himself thirty seconds to familiarise himself with the strange controls of this English car. Then he turned the car around with a squeal of tyres and rejoined the traffic stream, heading west towards Pevensey.
XIII
Hot air pulsed over Mary, a compression that squeezed her chest. The whole shelter lifted and shuddered, and bits of stuff, the wireless and the tin cups, rattled and fell off their shelves. The shelter's roof clattered, as if handfuls of gravel were being dropped on it.
But the noise was muffled. She touched her ears to see if they had been stopped up by dirt or dust. They were clear. She could hear little but a ringing noise.
It made her mind up. Whatever came next, she couldn't just sit in here, waiting to be bombed out. She had her handbag with her papers, and all her cash, her gas-mask, her rucksack, her briefcase. She glanced around the shelter. She picked up the camping stove and set it carefully on the floor.
Then she clambered up the little ladder and emerged into George's garden. The soil, and George's potatoes and carrots, were covered in debris, bits of brick, wood slats, slates, and a layer of dust. There was heat in the air, and a smell of dust and sewage. Yet she could still hear little. The planes washing overhead sounded dull and distant.
She made her way through the house and out to the street. She locked George's front door carefully behind her.
She walked down the street, heading for the sea front. This was Hastings' Old Town, a tangle of streets crammed into a valley between two sandstone hills, steep and crowded, long terraces of houses assembled over centuries. Today there was chaos, brick and broken glass spilled all over the road, people running, distant screaming.
She found that the big bomb had fallen slap bang on top of a large corner house on the High Street. Mary just stood and stared. A crater had been dug deep into the ground, and broken pipes and cables jutted out like snapped bones. The house itself had been sliced open, exposing the interiors of rooms, so it looked like an immense doll's house. In one upper storey room a big iron bed dangled perilously over the drop. There was an extraordinary, repellent stink, of dust, ash, burned meat, sewage.
People swarmed all over the smashed house. A fire tender was pulled up outside, and firemen grappled with a hose, spraying the lower floors with water. Men of a Heavy Rescue Squad were hauling their way through heaps of brick, trying to get through to rooms at the back of the house. Some worked with bare hands, and others laboured to get joists and blocks and tackles in place, to lift heavier beams and slabs of wall. They were already streaked with dirt and sweat.
And people were being brought out of the building, some walking, some not. Stretcher parties bore their inert loads, sometimes just on bits of planking. At hastily assembled first aid stations the victims were treated and marked with labels, a code Mary had come to know through her experience of such raids: X for internal injury, T where a tourniquet had been applied. Two kindly ladies from the WVS, in their bottle-green uniforms and felt hats, handed out the inevitable cups of tea, the reward for every 'bombee'. But others had been less fortunate. Mary saw a row of bodies lined up on the ground like fish on a slab. An ARP warden, a woman, was checking names off a list, and studying the bodies for identity cards and rings and other means of identification.
Somebody touched her shoulder.
It was George. His face was caked with sweat and dust and dirt, and blood was smeared over his dark uniform. He was speaking to her.
She shook her head. 'I can't hear you.' She tapped her ears.
He leaned closer and shouted, 'I said, what are you doing here? I thought you were in the shelter.'
'I couldn't stay.'
'If you're not going to a shelter, get out of town.'
'George, I can't go. Not while this is going on.'
'It's not your fight.'
She shook her head. 'But it's Gary's. Look, I'll go help those WVS women. I can pour a cup of tea.'
He eyed her, then stood back. 'All right. Your funeral.' He glanced at the sky. 'What time is it? The light's going. I don't think this is going to let up all night-'
There was another shuddering crash. They both staggered, and a bit more of the ruined property collapsed.
George ran off towards the latest catastrophe, blowing a whistle. It occurred to her that she should have taken the opportunity to tell him about Battle. But it was already too late.
She walked determinedly towards the WVS team.
XIV
20-21 September
Transport Fleet D sailed from Boulogne at 1800 hours on 20 September, S-Day Minus One. It was one of four fleets setting off that day, carrying Army Group A, the Ninth and Sixteenth Armies. From west to east, Fleet E was to sail from Le Havre, D from Boulogne, C from Calais, and B from Dunkirk, Ostend and Rotterdam. Fleet A, a figment of Wehrmacht planning, had only ever existed on paper. It was the beginning of an elaborate marine choreography, designed to land nine divisions, two hundred thousand men, on the beaches of southern England in three days.
Ernst's barge, one of a group of four, was towed by a tug out of the harbour. The men gripped the barge's reinforced sides, nervous even before they passed through the harbour mouth.
The noise was tremendous. The great guns at Boulogne had been shouting for hours, mighty twelve-inchers firing across the Channel to bombard the English defensive positions even before a single German landed, and when Ernst looked up he saw a curtain of shells flying across the sky above him.
The barge itself had been heavily modified, with concrete poured over the floor, the hull strengthened with steel plate, and the sharp prow replaced by bat-wing doors and a ramp at the front that would drop down to allow them to land. The wheelhouse was cut down and surrounded by sandbags. This barge was meant to carry grain down a river. Now it would carry seventy men and four trucks across an ocean. The barge lay low, and with every wave salt water splashed over the gunwales, soaking the men huddled inside it. The doomsayers said gloomily that the Channel surges could be twenty feet high. Every day of his training Ernst had been struck by the contrast between the sleek perfection of his Army equipment and the ramshackle nature of the transports that would take him and his gear across the Channel. The boatman, the binnenschiffer, laughed at the men's discomfort.