Page 13 of V2

‘Kay! You’re back from London? I heard you were in a car crash.’

Wing Commander Leslie Starr, her section leader, had come up quietly behind her and bent his head next to her ear. He ran his hands over her shoulders and squeezed the tops of her arms. ‘The Wandering Starr’, they called him. ‘But you’ve got a cut …’ He touched her temple. ‘How are you feeling?’

She turned to look up at him and at the same time managed to twist herself free. ‘More or less human now, thank you, sir.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ She couldn’t have made her distaste more obvious if she’d slapped him in the face. He didn’t seem put out. She supposed it must happen to him all the time. ‘I gather the V2 launch site coverage is signed out to you?’

‘Yes, sir. I had a day off. I thought I’d run over it again to see if we’d missed anything.’

‘And have we?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Damn.’ He picked up one of the photographs and held it out at arm’s length to examine it, frowning, chewing his lip. For the first time, she noticed that he looked unusually agitated. ‘Stanmore’s just been on to say they’ve tracked eight V2s so far today, five on target.’

Stanmore was shorthand for Bentley Priory, another stately home, this one on the northern edge of London, which served as the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command. Its Filter Room monitored all incoming enemy aircraft.

‘Eight? In one morning?’

‘That’s on top of the four yesterday, one of which hit Woolworths in Deptford and killed more than a hundred and fifty, mostly women and children.’

‘Oh God.’ She put her hand to her mouth. That must have been the blast she’d heard on Chancery Lane.

‘Another hit Holborn. Plus there were five on Friday. I’ve been told to drop everything and go up for an emergency meeting at the Air Ministry right away.’ He glanced at the photograph again, and then at her, weighing her up. ‘You’d better come with me.’

‘Yes, sir. What do you want me to do?’

‘Sit there and look pretty.’ He tossed the photograph back onto the desk. ‘Meet me in the hall in ten minutes, okay?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The prospect of an hour or more in the back of a car with the Wandering Starr was not appealing. ‘Sir,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll need authorisation to take these out of the building.’

‘I’ll tell Registry.’ He half turned to go, then turned back again. ‘If you were in London yesterday, you must have heard them.’

She felt herself redden. ‘I did, sir, yes.’

‘Bloody Germans – never know when they’re beaten.’

After he had gone, she gathered the photographs together and put them back in the file. Ten minutes didn’t give her much time. She hurried out of the room and down the stairs, back to the hut to collect her greatcoat and put some make-up in her bag. By the time she reached the main hall, he was already waiting. She cast a wistful glance at the public telephone. No chance of ringing the hospital now.

Outside, he held the car’s rear door open for her.

‘Do you mind if I sit in the front, sir? I don’t want to be sick all over you.’

Before he could object, she slid in next to the driver. The car crunched over the gravel and pulled away down the long drive. After tapping his foot irritably for half a minute, Starr grunted and opened his briefcase. When they turned onto the Henley road, Kay wrapped herself in her greatcoat, closed her eyes and pretended to doze.

She had never been to the Air Ministry before. Usually the top brass came down to Medmenham for briefings. That was how she had met Mike, eighteen months ago. By then, the intelligence people had begun to receive reports that the Germans were testing some kind of long-distance weapon capable of striking England, and the amphitheatres at Peenemünde had assumed a more sinister significance. Fresh reconnaissance flights were ordered, and the new photographs were a shock. She remembered the day they came in. A huge complex, practically a small town, was under construction, with its own power station and a harbour to bring in coal. Later, on a fan-shaped stretch of open foreshore, they observed what they described carefully in their report as ‘a thick vertical column about forty feet high’.

Air Commodore Templeton was one of half a dozen senior figures who travelled to the Phase Three section to see it for themselves. He pulled up a chair and sat next to her, not all flirtatious and creepy like Starr and one or two of the others; just serious, focused, intelligent, asking a lot of questions. She was acutely aware of his physical presence, a kind of compact power. When someone told her he had been a hero in the Battle of Britain, she wasn’t surprised. He was said to be the youngest commodore in the RAF.

In June 1943, on the Whit Bank Holiday Monday, Churchill himself came to take a look at what they were now sure was a rocket. He was driven over from Chequers with Mrs Churchill. Their daughter, Sarah, a glamorous red-headed actress, worked in Phase Two. Kay was struck by how small and pink he was, with a complexion like one of the sugar mice she used to buy as a child, and how when he bent forward to look through her viewfinder, he smelled not of cigars but of eau de cologne. Mike was one of the officers in the Prime Minister’s entourage. After the Churchills had driven off back to Chequers late in the afternoon, he hung around and rather shyly asked if she fancied a drink in the pub: ‘It is a holiday, after all.’

So many pubs after that! The Hare and Hounds. The Dog and Badger. The Old Bell in Hurley. The White Hart at Nettlebed. The Compleat Angler hotel on the Thames at Marlow, where they had stayed in bed the entire weekend and taken their meals in their room in case they were recognised by someone from Medmenham, the swans swimming back and forth directly in front of their window with a newly hatched flotilla of eight fluffy grey cygnets. ‘They mate for life,’ she told him, as he lay with his head in her lap, ‘and sing just before they die.’ ‘You’re such a romantic.’ ‘Well, one of us has to be.’

He was ten years older than she was, had joined the RAF long before the war, a professional airman. Would he leave his wife? He always said he would. He said they had only married on the spur of the moment in the summer of 1940 when it seemed that every day might be their last. Now she worked all week in intelligence at Bletchley, doing something so secret she wouldn’t tell even him what it was. ‘We hardly knew one another …’ ‘We’ve grown apart …’ ‘This bloody war …’

The memories drifted through her mind with such a strange and lazy intensity that she didn’t really notice where they were until an hour had passed and they were in the centre of London, driving down Southampton Row towards the corner of Chancery Lane. She sat up with a start of recognition. The road was still cordoned off.

Starr turned his head to look. ‘That must be where the Holborn rocket landed. Christ, it only just missed the ministry …’