standing on end. John appeared last, jogging down the hill from his cottage, the shotgun in his hand glinting in the faint light.
“I heard engines before the explosion,” John told them. “There’s a plane down, and the sooner we get there the better. There’s some in the village that might do something daft.”
A meaningful glance passed between John and Edwina. “Terence Pawley?” she asked.
John nodded. “Among others.”
Lewis knew that Mr. Pawley’s son Neville had been reported missing in France last week and that Mr. Pawley had been ranting wildly about getting his hands on Germans.
“Right.” Edwina sighed. “Come on, you two. You’re old enough to make yourselves useful.”
“I’ll get the car—it’s quicker,” John said, and ran for the garage.
Mr. Cuddy tightened the belt on his dressing gown. “I’m coming with you.”
Edwina turned back to him and said, “No, you’d better stay here, Warren. I need you to organize relief, if it’s needed. The boys can act as runners.”
Then John brought the Bentley round and the three of them piled into it and they were off down the drive. The sky above the village had begun to glow faintly red, lighting the way, and Lewis thought suddenly of how long the journey from village to house had seemed to him the first night he had come here, when the way was unfamiliar. His stomach clenched with anxiety at the thought of what they might find. He knew Edwina had been tactful as well as practical with Mr. Cuddy. The villagers had learned that the tutor spoke German: with feelings running high, there had been some talk of his being a spy.
John drove as fast as the blackout would allow, and as they rocketed round the last corner flames sprang from a crater gouged in one side of the village green, and out of the flames rose a bent, black shape: the tail of a plane—no, two planes, charred and twisted together in an obscene embrace.
As they spilled out of the car and ran towards the gathered onlookers, the smell caught Lewis in the throat—the hot oiliness of burning fuel combined with the sickly sweetness of roasting meat.
“What’s happened?” he heard Edwina ask.
“A Wellington bomber,” a man said, and when he turned towards them Lewis saw that his face was streaked with soot and sweat. “Must have collided with the German plane. We couldn’t get anyone out.”
“Roasted,” said Terence Pawley beside him, with what sounded almost like glee. “The lot of them. Serves them right, bloody Huns.”
“Shut up, Terence.” The sooty-faced man turned towards him angrily. “There’s our boys dying in there as well.”
Lewis thought he heard a faint sound, an echo of a scream, and the smell threatened to rise up in his throat and choke him. He was able to make it to the edge of the green before he threw up his supper. And then he realized that he was crying, and that William was beside him, white-faced with distress.
“They must have known they were going to die, trapped like animals,” William said, but Lewis only straightened up mutely and wiped a shaking hand across his mouth.
They watched from a distance until the flames died and the wreckage took shape in the slow- spreading dawn. The German plane was revealed as a Junkers 88, and there were bits of both planes scattered all over the village. “A miracle,” everyone murmured, that none of the houses had been hit. As the day wore on, it became evident that the debris was not strictly mechanical—the postmistress fainted dead away upon finding a severed leg in her garden, and other grisly bits of human remains continued to turn up for days afterwards. The younger children hunted for souvenirs with great enthusiasm, but for Lewis and William the war had abruptly ceased to be a game.
As the hot days of August wore on, the raids into London became more frequent. And although life went on much as before, Lewis woke often in the night from dreams of fire that left him heartsick with fear.
On Saturday, the 7th of September, a few minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, the boys were bicycling up Holmbury Hill when they heard the drone of engines overhead. Both stopped and glanced up— checking almost automatically now to see whether they were fighters or bombers—to find the sky filled with German planes. Hundreds of them—heavy, pregnant bombers surrounded by squads of smaller fighters—swept in majestic, inexorable order across the sky towards London.
When the last plane had disappeared into the distance, they turned and cycled back to the Hall as if the winds of hell were behind them. They found everyone, even Edwina, gathered round the kitchen wireless, and there they waited for news. The reports were garbled, inconclusive, but as the hours passed, Lewis’s dread grew into a terrible sense of certainty.
Towards evening, Cook brewed them another pot of tea, and making up some bread to go with it, she insisted that they must eat something. But that week the cat had got into the ration of butter, reducing them to putting drippings on their bread, and for Lewis what had been meant as a comfort was an unbearably sharp reminder of home. Pushing his plate aside, he ran blindly out of the kitchen.
He sought refuge in the barn. Over the months he had come to find the sounds and scents of the animals comforting, and eventually he settled down on one of the bales of hay near Zeus’s stall and drifted into an exhausted sleep.
He woke in darkness, disoriented, to the sound of William’s voice and a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.
“Lewis, wake up. It’s the East End. They’ve said on the wireless. The Germans have bombed the Docks.”
“What?” He sat up, his mouth dry.
