she had briefed the planners about Peenemünde the previous summer. They had built a scale model based on her analysis of the photographs – the power station and the liquid oxygen plant on the west of the island, the main test firing area and the experimental workshops and factory to the east. They had been particularly interested in the housing estate, with its school and meeting hall, and the barracks, and when she had asked why, a solemn young man who reminded her of a curate had said that they planned to attack in the early hours of the morning, when the scientists and technicians would still be asleep, so that they could kill as many as possible: ‘It’s the personnel we’re after as much as the facilities.’
The raid had been mounted on the night of the August full moon. At Medmenham they had been alerted an hour before the air fleet took off – six hundred heavy bombers, more than four thousand aircrew, two thousand tons of high explosive. None of the airmen was given the true reason for attacking an objective of which they had never heard. She had sat by the Thames as the sun went down and the moon rose and had imagined the Lancasters streaming out across the North Sea in tight formation. Mike had told her later that forty planes had never made it back. When Dorothy Garrod’s section had analysed the post-raid reconnaissance photographs the following day, many of the test facilities were disappointingly unscathed, but the roofless houses and dormitories appeared through Kay’s viewfinder like the ruins of Pompeii.
The driver returned from his errand. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep to discourage his conversation, but after a few minutes the pretence became a reality and she didn’t wake up until the van came to a sudden halt and she heard voices. She opened her eyes.
A day of sorts had dawned, it seemed reluctantly, over straggling suburban fields. Beyond the high chain-link fence, in the grey light, she could make out the shapes of aircraft hangars and a control tower. Behind them, on Western Avenue, a drone of morning traffic headed into London. The driver had his window down and was talking to an RAF policeman holding a clipboard. The policeman leaned into the cab and asked for Kay’s papers. She passed them across. He studied them and flipped over a few sheets on his clipboard. It all seemed to take a long while – too long – and it occurred to her that even at this last minute, the ponderous bureaucracy of the Air Ministry could thwart her.
‘That’s fine, ma’am.’ He handed back the papers. ‘I’ll take you over.’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said to the driver. ‘And the tea. And the cigarette.’
She climbed out of the van and followed the policeman through the gate and onto the airbase. She had never been to Northolt before, but it felt very much like Benson – the same steady breeze across the wide flat space, the sweet pervasive smell of aviation fuel, the ugly and impersonal low buildings, a sense of transience made permanent, the distinctive cracking sound of the Spitfires taking off and landing. After the talkative Cockney driver, the policeman was mercifully taciturn. He led her round the back of the administration block, past bare flower beds separated off from the cinder path by whitewashed stones, through a narrow door and along a dark corridor to a waiting room with wooden chairs around the bare walls and a steel-framed window beside a door opening onto a concrete apron. Ground crew were fuelling a big twin-engine transport plane. She recognised it from the identification chart at Medmenham. A Dakota. In the distance, a dozen Spitfires were parked in a line.
She stood at the window watching the preparations. A Morris 8 staff car appeared, painted in the RAF’s drab grey-blue, drove along the edge of the apron and parked in front of the plane. Out of the rear seat clambered the bank-manager figure of Wing Commander Knowsley. He contemplated the Dakota and tugged nervously at his tunic to straighten it. From the other side came a tall, thin middle-aged woman in WAAF uniform with the twin stripes of a flight officer on her sleeve – one rank up from Kay’s. The driver began to empty the boot of wooden boxes and a couple of long tubes that looked like rolled charts. A bus rattled to a halt behind the Morris. A