He watched Woody walking across to the other side of the aerodrome.
‘Say cheese!’ someone called from behind him. It was Jones, holding up Daniel’s Box Brownie, taking a photograph.
‘Give it here,’ Daniel snapped, reaching out for his camera. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
Jones pulled a face and handed it over.
Daniel carried his camera from the dispersal hut and slumped down into the basket-weave chair from which it seemed as though he had only risen a few moments ago. He closed his eyes, trying to settle his thoughts.
The phone rang again.
Chapter Eleven
21st September 1940, West Kingsdown, Kent
‘Hurry up in there!’ a clipped, well-spoken voice called from the other side of the toilet door. ‘What are you doing in there, Elsie Finch?’
‘Oh, just be patient, for God’s sake,’ Elsie retorted spiritedly, knowing full well who was on the other side.
She went through the motions of flushing the toilet, despite not having used it. She ran the tap, the water gushing noisily into the sink while she stared at herself in the mirror. The tiredness was starting to manifest itself in her features. She felt sure that, if anyone looked closely enough at her eyes, they would see there—very clearly—something more than the usual trials of work taking its toll on her.
She took an aspirin from her bag and swallowed it down with a mouthful of tap water. For the past week, she had experienced terrible period pains like she had never felt before. As usual, her breasts were tender, yet her period had not yet started. Could I be… She couldn’t bring herself to think of the word. And yet the thought persisted, buzzing around her head like an assiduous insect. She was just very late, that was all. It happened. Since she’d been living with the other girls for the past month, all of their periods had gone haywire. Just yesterday Betty had said that she’d once heard that the periods of women living together—she gave the example of nuns, of all people—often became synchronised. She couldn’t offer any explanation as to why other than to say that it was ‘all to do with the moon.’ Elsie hadn’t believed it at the time, but maybe that was the reason for her unusual lateness. She pulled her blue uniform jacket tight over her belly. It didn’t feel any different. Or did it, now that she was looking closely at it? Maybe it was a bit tighter.
‘Elsie Finch, if you don’t speed up in there, I’m going to kick this bloody door down!’
Elsie grinned and opened the door to see Violet Christmas, dancing some ridiculous toilet-needing jig. Violet frowned. ‘Move out of my way, Elsie Finch,’ she said, barging past her. ‘You really are a tiresome creature at times.’
Elsie allowed normality and the sounds of work to seep back into her head and to slowly wrap themselves neatly around her marauding sense of worry, banishing it into the recesses of her mind. She strode along the short corridor to the operations room, the hum of activity becoming louder. As she neared the double doors the muddled noise began to separate into the individual sounds that characterised the room, day and night: whispered urgent telephone conversations; the purr from the raft of R/T receivers; mumbled discussion; chairs scraping and the footsteps of operators hastening about the place. Elsie liked the noise. It was the sound of determination and resolved focus.
She was only now, five weeks in, getting used to the new place. Following on from persistent raids on the aerodrome at Hawkinge, the station’s new commanding officer, Flight Lieutenant Budge announced that the Air Ministry had decided to move them to safer, higher ground. West Kingsdown, as the highest point in north Kent, had been selected. Elsie, along with Betty, Rosemary and Aileen had been given twenty-four hours’ notice to pack up and leave. When they had arrived at their billet, Elsie had been delighted to find that the quirky girl that she had met in line at the Air Ministry, Violet Christmas, was also going to be living and working with them.
Opening the door, Elsie entered the operations room—it was in a converted toy factory and was much larger than Maypole Cottage. It was as though, all of a sudden, the value of their work had been perceived higher up the war food chain. They had been granted more receivers and more WAAF operators and, at long last, a new complex telephone system had been installed. Thankfully, the days of listening helplessly to gloating Luftwaffe pilots, flying unseen above a squadron of Spitfires, were gone. The awful times of a fellow operator screaming, ‘Look up! Look up!’ and not being able to take action fast enough to warn them, were over. They had managed to get the process of hearing intelligence over the R/T to passing that information to the necessary units, pilots or control rooms down to just one minute.
Elsie wandered through the maze of machines to an office at the back of the operations room. It was grey, windowless and held the permanent stench of stale smoke. Being situated next door to the Intelligence Office, it had very quickly been dubbed the Unintelligent Office. It was bland, nondescript and used for a variety of purposes—the copying up of log books, the jotting down of some administrative work, the grabbing of a few minutes’ break or an animated discussion over some piece of uncertain intelligence.
On one of the desks, Elsie had set out a great stack of operation logs, a map of England and a pad and pencil. She picked up a log book from the top of the stack just as the door opened and in walked Violet, carrying two mugs of black coffee. She handed one to Elsie. ‘What have we got, then?’ Violet yawned, taking a sip from her drink, then
