out. Camberley poked her head in again and said, “The Major says everyone not on duty’s to go down to the shelter.”
“How many planes does she expect will crash tonight?” Talbot grumbled.
A hundred and twenty, Mary thought, pulling on her robe. They trooped, grumbling, down to the cellar and then back up five minutes later when the all clear went, shrugged out of their robes, and got into bed. Mary did, too, even though she knew the siren would go again in another-she glanced at her watch-six minutes.
It did. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Fairchild said, exasperated. “What are they on about now?”
“It’s a Nazi plot to deprive us of our sleep,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said, flinging back her bedclothes, and there was a crump to the southeast. Croydon, Mary thought happily, and right on time.
So was the next one, and the next, though none of them were close enough for her to be able to hear their engines. She wished again that she’d listened to a recording of one. She needed to be able to recognize the sound if she heard one coming when she was in Bomb Alley, but at least she knew what the explosions were. None of the other FANYs seemed to grasp the situation at all, even when Maitland and Reed returned from their incident with tales of flattened houses and widespread destruction. “The pilot must have crashed with all his bombs still onboard,” Reed said, even though they’d heard four other explosions by then.
“Was it one of ours or theirs?” Sutcliffe-Hythe asked.
“There wasn’t enough left of it to tell,” Maitland said, “but it must have been a German plane. If it was one of our boys coming back, they’d have already dropped their load. The incident officer said he’d heard it come over, and it had sounded like it was having engine trouble.”
“Perhaps Hitler’s running out of petrol and is putting kerosene in their fuel tanks,” Reed said. “Coming back, we heard another one go over, stuttering and coughing.”
There was another rumbling boom to the east. “At this rate, Hitler won’t have an air force left by tomorrow,” Talbot said.
They’re not planes, Mary said silently, they’re unmanned rockets. And it was obvious she needn’t have worried about arriving too late to observe their pre-V-1 behavior-they were still exhibiting it.
They went back almost immediately to discussing the dance Talbot was going to the Saturday after next. “I need someone to go with me,” she said. “Will you, Reed? There’ll be heaps of Americans there.”
“Then, no, absolutely not. I hate Yanks. They’re all so conceited. And they step all over one’s feet,” and launched into a story about a dreadful American captain she’d met at the 400 Club. Even Camberley’s shouting down the cellar steps that there was another incident and Maitland and Reed’s hurrying off to it didn’t deter them. “Why would you want to go to a dance with a lot of Yanks, Talbot?” Parrish asked.
“She wants one of them to fall madly in love with her and buy her a pair of nylons,” Fairchild said.
“I think that’s disgraceful,” said Grenville, the one with the fiancй in Italy. “What about love?”
“I’d love to have a new pair of stockings,” Talbot said.
“I’ll go with you,” Parrish said, “but only if you’ll lend me your dotted swiss blouse to wear the next time I see Dickie.”
It had never occurred to Mary that the FANYs wouldn’t tumble to what was going on once the rockets started-especially since, according to historical records, there’d been rumors since 1942 that Hitler was developing a secret weapon. Then again, historical records had said the siren had gone at 11:31.
And they would realize soon enough. By the end of the week there’d be 250 V-1s coming over a day and nearly eight hundred dead. Let them enjoy their talk of men and frocks while they could. It wouldn’t last much longer. And it meant she was free to listen for the sirens and explosions and make certain they were on schedule.
They were, except for one that should have hit at 2:09 but didn’t, and the last all clear of the night, which went at 5:40 instead of 5:15.
“It hardly seems worthwhile to go to bed,” Fairchild said to Mary as they dragged back upstairs. “We go on duty at six.”
But the sirens won’t start up again till half past nine, Mary thought, and there won’t be a V-1 in our sector till 11:39. I hope.
She was worried about the one that hadn’t hit at 2:09. It was supposed to have fallen in Waring Lane, which was even nearer than the cricket grounds. They should have been able to hear it.
Which meant it must have landed somewhere else. That fit with British Intelligence’s deception plan. On the other hand, the 2:09 was the only one that hadn’t been at the right time and-as near as she could tell-in the right place, which meant it could also be only an error. Though a single error was all it would take to end her assignment abruptly. And permanently.
She was relieved when the 9:30 siren and the 11:39 V-1 were on schedule and even more when she saw the V-1 had hit the house it was supposed to-though when she saw the destruction, she felt guilty for having been so happy. Luckily, there were no casualties. “We’d only just left the house, me and the wife and our three girls,” the house’s owner told her, “to go to my aunt’s.”
“It’s her birthday, you see,” his wife said. “Wasn’t that lucky?”
Their house had been blown so completely apart it was impossible to tell if it had been made of wood or of brick, but Mary agreed with them that it was incredibly lucky.
“If the bomber’d crashed five minutes earlier, we’d all have been killed,” the husband said. “What was it? A Dornier?” Which meant they still thought all these explosions were caused by crashing planes.
But when they got back to the post, Reed greeted them with, “The general I drove to Biggin Hill this morning says the Germans have a new weapon. It’s a glider with bombs which go off automatically when it lands.”
“But a glider wouldn’t make any noise,” Parrish, who was on despatch duty, said. “And Croydon says they heard two come over this morning and they both had the same stuttering engines Maitland and Reed heard.”
“Well,” Talbot said, “whatever they are, I hope Hitler hasn’t got very many of them.”
Only fifty thousand, Mary thought.
“I drove a lieutenant commander last week,” Reed said, “who said the Germans were working on-” She stopped as the siren sounded and they all trooped down to the cellar. “-on a new weapon. An invisible plane. He said they’d invented a special paint which can’t be seen by our defenses.”
“If our defenses can’t see them, then why do the sirens sound?” Grenville asked, and Fairchild said, “If they can make them invisible, one would think they could make them silent as well, so we wouldn’t hear them coming.”
They have, Mary thought. It’s called the V-2. They’ll begin firing them in September, by which time surely it’ll have dawned on you that these are rockets and not gliders or invisible planes.
Or bombs shot from a giant catapult-a theory they discussed till the all clear went half an hour later. “Good,” Fairchild said, listening to its steady wail. “Let’s hope that’s the last one for tonight.”
It won’t be, Mary thought. The alert will sound again in… she glanced at her watch… eleven minutes, if it was on schedule, which she was beginning to be confident it would be. The explosions had been on time all day, and when she looked at the despatcher’s log, there was a 2:20 A.M. ambulance call to Waring Lane. Which only left Bethnal Green.
When the evening papers came out, she felt even more confident. Not only was the Evening Standard’s front page identical to the one she’d seen in the Bodleian, but the Daily Express said there’d been four V-1s on Tuesday night, though it didn’t say where they’d landed.
The newspapers also settled the issue of what the V-1s weren’t. The Evening Standard’s headline read, “Pilotless Planes Now Raid Britain,” and they all described them in detail. The Daily Mail even had a diagram of the propulsion system, and the conversation in the shelter turned to the best way to avoid being hit by one.
“When the sound of the engine stops, take cover promptly, using the most solid protection available and keeping well away from glass doors and windows,” the Times advised, and the Daily Express was even more blunt. “Lie face-down in the nearest gutter.”
“Keep watch on the flame in the tail,” the Evening Standard suggested. “When it goes out, you will have approximately fifteen seconds in which to take cover,” which made the Morning Herald’s advice to go to the nearest shelter utterly impractical. But in general the press had it right. Though they couldn’t agree on the sound the V-1s made and none of them mentioned a backfiring automobile. Descriptions varied from “a washing machine” to “the putt-putt of a motorbike” to “the buzz of a bee.”
