dearly but not the drudgery of running the estate, so had escaped frequently to enjoy the European lifestyle with her daughter before the war and before she had become ill and had succumbed to cancer the year before.
All at once, the boat Vivi was travelling in hit a considerably large wave, and an arc of cold foamy spray reached right down into the cabin, covering her shoes and soaking her stockings, reminding her she was on her way to work for the British underground in France. Because that had been the real reason for the notice in the newspaper. It was a recruiting campaign that vetted individuals who could be advantageous to the Allies’ undercover military operations in Europe.
With not much else on her horizon and with the exciting talk of learning how to parachute and handle live ammunition, Vivi had been willing to give it a shot, if for nothing else than to have a great after-dinner story to regale her friends with on returning. But there had been no glamour when she’d got there, the basic training had been extremely demanding, with SOE – a branch of the secret service – putting her through many rigorous tests of endurance and physical training to see if she would break under pressure. It had been her sheer obstinance and stubbornness that had kept her in the game, and every time they lost another recruit who buckled under the strain, Vivi had set her sights on the prize, determined not to fail. They had put her through her paces for months, first in the south of England and later in the north of Scotland, where she’d been trained in every kind of necessary skill, from how to operate her wireless to how to perform hand-to-hand combat. But nothing could prepare her for the tremendous fear Vivi felt right now. She swallowed it down. She could do this.
As the little fishing boat bobbed towards the sunrise and the land she could now see coming into view, Mr Thompson eyed her again with concern. Vivi remembered with fondness him selling fish right out of his boat on the beach when she was a child.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ He offered her tea from a canteen he had above deck.
She eyed it distrustfully. ‘Do you have anything stronger?’ she enquired, quirking her eyebrow.
He chuckled and offered her a swig of a flask he had in a breast pocket. ‘You’ll do well, Vivienne,’ he stated with assurance. ‘You always were bold as brass. I can remember chasing you away from my boat more than once when you tried to steal my fish.’
Vivi enjoyed the memory. She’d completely forgotten about the days when her older sister Caroline would dare her to do such things.
‘I got away with one once,’ she reminded him, with a smirk. ‘This is a little different than stealing fish,’ she added, passing him back his flask.
‘Ah, but there’s that brave streak that’s inside you, Vivi. Not everybody has it, and you’ll find it when you most need it.’
Vivi smiled. His words of reassurance helped her a little, though her stomach was in knots.
As the sun came up, fingers of pink and red sunlight illuminated the rugged rolling rose-coloured granite of the coastline, the jagged stone rounded smooth by the constant buffeting of a relentless and dangerous sea. Dotted along the shoreline were stone cottages, still darkened in sleep, where a mixture of welcome and fear greeted her as Vivi contemplated her next step. She was glad to finally be back on solid ground, but what waited for her ahead?
The captain cut his motor and glided to a desolate rocky cove where, overhead, seagulls screamed and swooped, dropping mussels and oysters onto the rocks below for their breakfast. Usually, SOE preferred to parachute in their operatives, and they had trained Vivi to do that. But with the inclement weather they had been experiencing and Vivi’s thorough knowledge of the coastline, her superior officer had been convinced to allow her to travel in this unorthodox way.
As they drifted to the cove the French fishing fleet always used, their boat disguised to blend in, it astounded Vivi how ordinary everything seemed – a sweet little beach, a perfect spot for a family holiday. Except for the barbed wire, of course, and the ominous swastika billowing in the breeze on top of a bluff. Not having been in France since before the war, she hadn’t known what to expect with the occupation – soldiers waiting