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.”
“A bee?” Parrish, who had heard one on an ambulance run, said. “It’s not like any bee I ever heard. A hornet perhaps. An extremely large, extremely angry hornet,” and Mary was forced to take her word for it. By the end of the first week of attacks, she still hadn’t heard one nearby. That was the problem with