Hornet Flight

The familiar flat shape of the island came closer. It was twelve miles long and a mile wide, with a village at each end. The fishermen’s cottages, and the church with its parsonage, constituted the older village at the south end. Also at the south end, a school of navigation, long disused, had been taken over by the Germans and turned into a military base. The hotel and the larger homes were at the north end. In between, the island was mostly sand dunes and scrub with a few trees and no hills, but all along the seaward side was a magnificent ten-mile beach.

Harald felt a few drops of rain as the ferry approached its dock at the north end of the island. The hotel’s horse-drawn taxi was waiting for the well-dressed couple. The fishermen were met by the wife of one of them driving a horse and cart. Harald decided to cross the island and drive home along the beach, which had hard-packed sand-in fact it had been used for speed trials of racing cars.

He was halfway from the dock to the hotel when he ran out of steam.

He was using the bike’s petrol tank as a water reserve, and he realized now that it was not big enough. He would have to get a five-gallon oil drum and put it in the sidecar. Meanwhile, he needed water to get him home.

There was only one house within sight, and unfortunately it was Axel Flemming’s. Despite their rivalry, the Olufsens and the Flemmings were on speaking terms: all members of the Flemming family came to church every Sunday and sat together at the front. Indeed, Axel was a deacon. All the same, Harald did not relish the thought of asking the antagonistic Flemmings for help. He considered walking a quarter of a mile to the next nearest house, then decided that would be foolish. With a sigh, he set off up the long drive.

Rather than knock at the front door, he went around the side of the house to the stables. He was pleased to see a manservant putting the Ford in the garage. “Hello, Gunnar,” said Harald. “Can I have some water?”

The man was friendly. “Help yourself,” he said. “There’s a tap in the yard.”

Harald found a bucket beside the tap and filled it. He went back to the road and poured the water into the tank. It looked as if he might manage to avoid meeting any of the family. But when he returned the bucket to the yard, Peter Flemming was there.

A tall, haughty man of thirty in a well-cut suit of oatmeal tweed, Peter was Axel’s son. Before the quarrel between the families, he had been best friends with Harald’s brother Arne, and in their teens they had been known as ladykillers, Arne seducing girls with his wicked charm and Peter by his cool sophistication. Peter now lived in Copenhagen but had come home for the holiday weekend, Harald assumed.

Peter was reading Reality. He looked up from the paper to see Harald. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“Hello, Peter, I came to get some water.”

“I suppose this rag is yours?”

Harald touched his pocket and realized with consternation that the newspaper must have fallen out when he reached down for the bucket.

Peter saw the movement and understood its meaning. “Obviously it is,” he said. “Are you aware that you could go to jail just for having it in your possession?”

The talk of jail was not an empty threat: Peter was a police detective. Harald said, “Everyone reads it in the city.” He made himself sound defiant, but in fact he was a little scared: Peter was mean enough to arrest him.

“This is not Copenhagen,” Peter intoned solemnly.

Harald knew that Peter would love the chance to disgrace an Olufsen. Yet he was hesitating. Harald thought he knew why. “You’ll look a fool if you arrest a schoolboy on Sande for doing something half the population does openly. Especially when everyone finds out you’ve got a grudge against my father.”

Peter was visibly torn between the desire to humiliate Harald and the fear of being laughed at. “No one is entitled to break the law,” he said.

“Whose law-ours, or the Germans’?”

“The law is the law.”

Harald felt more confident. Peter would not be arguing so defensively if he intended to make an arrest. “You only say that because your father makes so much money giving Nazis a good time at his hotel.”

That hit home. The hotel was popular with German officers, who had more to spend than the Danes. Peter flushed with anger. “While your father gives inflammatory sermons,” he retorted. It was true: the pastor had preached against the Nazis, his theme being “Jesus was a Jew.” Peter continued, “Does he realize how much trouble will be caused if he stirs people up?”

“I’m sure he does. The founder of the Christian religion was something of a troublemaker himself.”

“Don’t talk to me about religion. I have to keep order down here on earth.”

“To hell with order, we’ve been invaded!” Harald’s frustration over his blighted evening out boiled over. “What right have the Nazis got to tell us what to do? We should kick the whole evil pack of them out of our country!”

“You mustn’t hate the Germans, they’re our friends,” Peter said with an air of pious self-righteousness that maddened Harald.

“I don’t hate Germans, you damn fool, I’ve got German cousins.” The pastor’s sister had married a successful young Hamburg dentist who came to Sande on holiday, back in the twenties. Their daughter Monika was the first girl Harald had kissed. “They’ve suffered more from the Nazis than we have,” Harald added. Uncle Joachim was Jewish and, although he was a baptized Christian and an elder of his church, the Nazis had ruled that he could only treat Jews, thereby ruining his practice. A year ago he had been arrested on suspicion of hoarding gold and sent to a special kind of prison, called a Konzentrazionslager, in the small Bavarian town of Dachau.

“People bring trouble on themselves,” Peter said with a worldly-wise air. “Your father should never have allowed his sister to marry a Jew.” He threw the newspaper to the ground and walked away.

At first Harald was too taken aback to reply. He bent and picked up the newspaper. Then he said to Peter’s retreating back, “You’re starting to sound like a Nazi yourself.”

Ignoring him, Peter went in by a kitchen entrance and slammed the door.

Harald felt he had lost the argument, which was infuriating, because he knew that what Peter had said was outrageous.

It started to rain heavily as he headed back toward the road. When he returned to his bike, he found that the fire under the boiler had gone out.

He tried to relight it. He crumpled up his copy of Reality for kindling, and he had a box of good-quality wood matches in his pocket, but he had not brought with him the bellows he had used to start the fire earlier in the day. After twenty frustrating minutes bent over the firebox in the rain, he gave up. He would have to walk home.

He turned up the collar of his blazer.

He pushed the bike half a mile to the hotel and left it in the small car park, then set off along the beach. At this time of year, three weeks from the summer solstice, the Scandinavian evenings lasted until eleven o’clock; but tonight clouds darkened the sky and the pouring rain further restricted visibility. Harald followed the edge of dunes, finding his way by the feel of the ground underfoot and the sound of the sea in his right ear. Before long, his clothes were so soaked that he could have swum home without getting any wetter.

He was a strong young man, and as fit as a greyhound, but two hours later he was tired, cold, and miserable when he came up against the fence around the new German base and realized he would have to walk two miles around it in order to reach his home a few hundred yards away.

If the tide had been out, he would have continued along the beach for, although that stretch of sand was officially off limits, the guards would not have been able to see him in this weather. However, the tide was in, and the fence reached into the water. It crossed his mind to swim the last stretch, but he dismissed the idea immediately. Like everyone in this fishing community, Harald had a wary respect for the sea, and it would be dangerous to swim at night in this weather when he was already exhausted.

But he could climb the fence.

The rain had eased, and a quarter moon showed fitfully through racing clouds, intermittently shedding an uncertain light over the drenched landscape. Harald could see the chicken-wire fence six feet high with two strands of barbed wire at the top, formidable enough but no great obstacle to a determined person in good physical shape. Fifty yards inland, it passed through a copse of scrubby trees and bushes that hid it from view. That would be the place to get over.