“Dr. Grainger.” Who was in Norwich, visiting his sister.
Mr. Tompkins piped up from his table with a string of unintelligible syllables. “What did he say?” Mike asked Daphne.
“He said our boys will never let Hitler get to France.”
Yes, well, right now Hitler was in France, had taken Boulogne and Calais, and was about to take Paris.
“Dad says our boys will chase Hitler back to Berlin with his tail between his legs,” Daphne said. “He says we’ll have the war won in two weeks.”
Doesn’t anybody ever see a disaster coming? Mike wondered. This was just like Pearl Harbor. In spite of dozens of clues and warnings, the contemps had been caught completely off guard. They hadn’t seen the World Trade Center coming either, or Jerusalem, or the Pandemic. And at St. Paul’s, the day before a terrorist walked in with a pinpoint bomb under his arm and blew the cathedral and half of London to smithereens, the burning topic had been whether or not it was appropriate to sell Light of the World T-shirts in the gift shop.
At least the contemps here had the excuse that the news from France had been heavily censored. On the other hand, they’d been at war for over eight months, during which Hitler had sliced through half of Europe like a knife through butter. And Dunkirk was right across the Channel. You’d think they’d have figured out something was up.
But apparently not. None of the farmers and fishermen who came in over the next hour discussed anything but the weather, and all Daphne was interested in talking about was American movie stars. “I suppose you meet a lot of them, being a reporter. Have you ever met Clark Gable?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding even more disappointed than when he’d told her there weren’t any red Indians. “He’s my favorite film star,” and proceeded to tell him the entire plot of a movie she’d seen the week before, involving spies, amnesia, and an epic search for a lost love. “He searched for her for years and years,” Daphne said. “It was terribly romantic.”
And meanwhile, up in Dover, the Royal Navy’s organizing boats into convoys, and retired sailors and paddleboat captains and fishermen are volunteering to man them, Mike thought, and I’m missing it. And it wasn’t as if he could go back to Oxford and try again. Once an historian had been in a temporal location, he couldn’t be in it again, and that wasn’t just one of Dunworthy’s overprotective precautions. It was a law of time travel, as a couple of early time travelers had found out the hard way. The night of the twenty-eighth and now the morning of the twenty-ninth were off-limits to him forever.
Maybe I can do what’s left of the evacuation and then go back and come through and do the first three days, he thought, but Dunworthy would never let him. If something went wrong and he was still here when his deadline on the twenty-eighth arrived, he’d be the one who was dead. And on a second try there might be even more slippage.
Nine o’clock, and then nine-thirty and ten, came and went with no sign of Mr. Powney. I can’t afford to sit here all day, Mike thought and told Daphne he was going to go look around the village.
“Oh, but I’m certain Mr. Powney will be along soon,” Daphne said. “He must have got a late start.”
So did I, Mike thought. He told her he needed to interview some of the other locals on invasion preparations, made her promise to come find him if Powney arrived, and left the inn. Somebody had to have a vehicle in this place. It was 1940, for God’s sake, not 1740. Somebody had to have a car. Or a boat, though he didn’t like the idea of going out in the Channel, which was full of mines and U-boats. More than sixty of the seven hundred small craft that had participated in the evacuation had been sunk. He’d only go by boat as a last resort.
But even though he looked in every alley and back garden, he didn’t see anything, not even a bicycle. And Dover was too far to make it on a bicycle. He walked down to the quay, where three fishermen, including toothless Mr. Tompkins, were lounging and discussing-what else?-the weather.
“Looks bad,” one of them said without taking his pipe out of his mouth.
Mr. Tompkins mumbled something unintelligible, and the other one, who smelled strongly of fish, nodded agreement.
“I need to get to Dover,” Mike said. “Is there anyone here who’d be willing to take me there in his boat?”
“I doot yill fond onion heerbuts,” Mr. Tompkins said.
Since he shook his head as he spoke, Mike interpreted that as a no. “What about one of you? I could pay…” He hesitated. Three pounds was obviously too much. “Ten shillings,” he said.
That was obviously too little. Tompkins and the fishy one immediately shook their heads. “It’s blowin’ up a storm,” the pipe smoker said.
The Channel had been “as still as a millpond” the entire nine days of the evacuation, but Mike couldn’t very well say that. “I’ll pay you a pound.”
“Nay, lad,” the fishy one said. “Channel’s too dangerous.”
Clearly none of these three would be volunteering to go to Dunkirk. He’d have to find somebody else. He started down the quay. “Harold mot be able to run you up,” the pipe smoker called after him.
“Harold?” Mike said, coming back.
“Aye, Commander Harold,” he said and the fishy one nodded.
A naval officer. Good. He’d know how to steer clear of U-boats and mines. “Where can I find him?”
“Ye’ll fand’m ont’ Lassie June,” Mr. Tompkins said. “He’s bin work nonner sin smale vises skill litter coom furnit buck.”
Mike turned to the pipe smoker. “Where can I find the-what did you say the name of his boat was?” but before he could answer, Mr. Tompkins said, “Tletty Gin.” He pointed down the dock. “She’s doonthur at thind nix harbin ersees pride.”
Which meant God knew what, but there weren’t that many boats lined up along the dock, and their names should be painted on their bows. He thanked the trio for their help, such as it was, and walked down the pier, looking at the tied-up boats: the Marigold, the Princess Margaret, the Wren. The names didn’t sound very warlike, but then neither had the names of the yachts and barges and fishing smacks that were about to pull off the biggest military evacuation in history: the Fair Breeze, the Kitty, the Sunbeam, the Smiling Through.
But hopefully they’d been in better shape than this bunch. Most of them were ancient, none had been scraped or painted in recent memory, and one, the Sea Sprite, had its motor spread out in pieces on its deck. Obviously it wasn’t going to Dunkirk, but some of the others would. Boats from every coastal village had been involved. He wished he’d had time to memorize the list of small craft that had been part of the evacuation so he’d know which, if any, of these had participated.
And which of them had made it back. The list had had asterisks next to the names of the ones that had been sunk. If he hadn’t wasted a whole afternoon waiting to see Dunworthy, he’d know which was which.
He reached the end of the dock. No Tletty Gin. Or Lassie June. He started back along the row. “Ahoy!” a voice called, and Mike looked up to see an elderly man in a yachting cap at the railing of a forty-foot launch. “You there! Are you from the Small Vessels Pool?”
“No,” Mike said. “I’m looking for a Commander Harold.”
The old man broke into a broad-and, thankfully, toothy-smile. “I’m Commander Harold. You must be from the Admiralty. You’ve come about my commission. Thought I’d never hear from you. Come aboard.”
This was Commander Harold? He had to be seventy if he was a day, and no wonder he hadn’t heard from the Admiralty about being commissioned. Mike peered at the bow, looking for the boat’s name. There it was, so badly faded he could hardly make it out. The Lady Jane.
An unlucky name for a boat. Lady Jane Grey had only lasted as queen something like nine days before they’d chopped her head off, and the launch didn’t look like it would last long either. It was covered with barnacles and hadn’t been painted in years. “Come aboard, lad,” the Commander was saying, “and tell me about my commission-”
“I’m not from-”
“What are you standing there for? Come aboard.”
Mike did. Up close, the old man looked even older. His hair under the yachting cap was white and fine as thistledown, and his hand, snapping a salute, was gnarled with arthritis. “I’m not from the Admiralty either,” Mike said hastily. “I’m-”
“Suppose they’ve a new wartime department just for issuing commissions. In my day, His Majesty’s Navy
