of effort.
She lifted her head and rotated it to relieve the stiffness. Her eyes ached. Even so, she was in a better state than she had been the previous evening. She had slept deeply, without dreams, as if her mind had been determined to heal itself. She had barely been aware of Shirley’s coughs and sneezes, or of Maud and Lavender, her two other roommates, coming in tipsy and giggling at nearly midnight, after a double date with a couple of pilots at the Hare and Hounds. And Sunday morning was the blissful high point when they took their bath. They were each allowed four inches of hot water a week, and they pooled their ration to ensure one full tub and followed a rota to determine who went first. Today it had been her turn to go last, but for once she didn’t mind the greyish water and floating hair; it was luxury enough simply to wallow in the lukewarm depths and wash away the last of the dust. She wondered how Mike was doing. She thought she might call the hospital in a minute, not to try to speak to him, just to ask a nurse how he was. There could be no harm in that, could there?
She returned her eyes to the magnifier.
Hers was a strange sort of war, observing the panoramic struggle as if she were a god on Mount Olympus. She felt guilty at how absorbing she found it: more like an extension of Cambridge than proper military service. Her call-up papers had arrived in her pigeonhole at Newnham on her twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1941. The day after her final examination in June, she caught an early train from Cambridge with orders to report to an RAF base in Gloucester for basic training.
That had been an eye-opener for a convent girl from Dorset. Accents so thick – Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian – and so studded with swear words she could barely understand what they were saying. The Nissen hut slept thirty, with a separate latrine and bathhouse. On her first night she heard shrieks of pain from one of the cubicles and tapped on the door politely: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘No, I’m fucking well not all right, you posh cunt, I’m having a fucking baby!’ It became a catchphrase for the rest of their training, as they drilled and marched and exercised, struggled with their ill-fitting uniforms and drew their meagre pay (one shilling and eight pence a day): ‘Are you all right?’ ‘No, I’m having a fucking baby …’
At the end of two weeks, they were told where to report next. She was the only one assigned to RAF Medmenham. She cried when she left the others. They had become her closest friends. The first person she saw when she arrived at Danesfield House was Dorothy Garrod: ‘I put in a word for you, dear. You’ll find the work quite stimulating. I believe I have now recruited the entire department of archaeology …’
She was promoted to aircraftwoman 1st class.
The following May – 1942 – the duty intelligence officer gave her a folder of photographs taken from a Spitfire 40,000 feet over the north German coast. ‘Tell me something. You have a degree in history. Did the Romans ever get as far north as the Baltic?’
‘Yes, it was where they got a lot of their amber. Why?’
‘Would they have built any amphitheatres up there?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so, no. Actually, certainly not.’
‘Then what the devil are these?’
She studied the coverage of what appeared to be an island, with an airfield and a lot of construction under way. They certainly looked like amphitheatres – one huge elliptical embankment and three big circular earthworks in the woods very close to the sea. What could they be? Empty reservoirs, possibly? She checked the map reference to see where the photographs had originated. Peenemünde, Usedom. The name meant nothing to her. That had been the start of her relationship with the rockets.
‘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