Chapter Four
Iris
RAF Doverley, North Yorkshire
It had been a long time since Iris was last in Yorkshire.
She’d been born here though, in a village called Heaton, not three miles from Doverley.
As a child, she’d often trespassed on the dark, rain-sodden grounds she’d just tramped through, but had never dared to venture so far as this house.
Rather, it had been to the derelict old gamekeeper’s cottage, deep in the woods, that she’d always scampered, losing endless hours inside its crumbling walls.
She’d been caught there once by Lord Heaton, when he’d been out walking his setters.
Get out of there this instant, he’d yelled.
What would he think, she wondered, if he were to learn that that scruffy girl who’d outrun him, all the way to his iron gates, was now a resident of his home?
She doubted he’d mind too much; she had been put up in this attic, after all: the old servants’ quarters.
Probably, he’d consider that quite fitting.
It wasn’t her first time in a servant’s room.
When she’d left school, age fourteen, she’d gone into service as a housemaid at an aristocratic pile in Surrey.
Her mother would have hated it for her. Iris hadn’t much liked it for herself.
She remembered how, arriving in Surrey, she’d been handed her monochrome uniform and sworn to herself, I won’t wear this my whole life.
Back then, she had, of course, still thought of life as something that most usually went on for decades.
But that had been 1933, and whilst she’d been learning to set a table with perfect angles for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Hitler had been getting himself appointed Chancellor of Germany.
When, in 1937, aged eighteen, she’d used her squirreled away savings to secure a place at secretarial college, the Spanish Civil War had been raging.
Two years later, and this world war they were all now embroiled in had kicked off.
By that point, she’d qualified for her secretarial diploma, which had been enough to get her through the door with the RAF, who she’d assumed would want her as a typist, only her interviewer had been tasked with sourcing radio operatives, so that’s what she’d trained as – in another uniform after all: just air force blue, rather than black and white, with a peaked cap that was currently dripping rain down her neck.
She should remove it, she knew. Take her sopping overcoat off, as well.
She was too tired to do that, though.
Instead, she dropped her head forwards, resting it against the glass of her new bedroom’s window.
Behind her, Clare lay face down on the bed she’d flung herself on, drenched too.
No one had been waiting for them at Heaton when their train had arrived from London – delayed, as trains mostly were these days – so they’d had no choice but to head to Doverley on foot, lugging their belongings with them.
They hadn’t exactly been given a warm welcome when they’d arrived, either.
Rather, when the base adjutant had come out to meet them in the driveway, umbrella aloft, he’d torn a strip off them for being so late.
‘Have you seen the time?’ he’d barked.
‘I haven’t dared look, sir,’ Clare had replied. ‘My watch isn’t waterproofed.’
‘Are you being smart?’
‘Gosh, I hope not, sir. Although I’m so tired after that walk, I hardly know.’
‘And what about you?’ he’d snapped at Iris.
‘What about me, sir?’
‘Is your watch functional?’
‘I haven’t checked either, sir.’
‘Because of the rain?’
‘Yes, sir. Plus, it’s really quite dark.’
It had been. Not a seam of light had escaped Doverley’s blacked-out windows, or penetrated the thick, scudding clouds above.
Still, not so dark that Iris had missed the adjutant’s narrow-eyed stare.
‘Now, I know you’re being smart,’ he’d said.
‘I’ll try not to be in future, sir,’ she’d replied.
At which his eyes had become slits.
He’d kept her and Clare out in the rain whilst he’d run through Doverley’s rules (no mischief between the sexes; no leaving the base without a pass; no bath to be run deeper than four inches; no alcohol for WAAFs, anywhere …
); then, to make matters more uncomfortable, when he’d finally led them up to Doverley’s front door, Iris had tripped on an uneven step, falling painfully to her knees.
‘Careful,’ the adjutant had remarked, ‘you’ll want to watch yourself there.’
Her kneecaps were still smarting now, and she’d ruined her stockings, which she held little hope of being able to replace.
She’d have been fine at the base she and Clare had just left in Norfolk.
Before Christmas, it had been taken over by the USAAF, who were always handing out packs of impossible-to-get nylons.
Their airmen had them issued as part of their kit: a tool for making themselves welcome so far from home.
But it was all RAF personnel at Doverley, so there’d be no more stockings, or gum; just plenty of long nights, waiting for these boys now flying thunderously overhead, to come home.
For the past minute, Iris had been watching them all take off, the attic window giving her a direct view to the base’s burning flare path.
She hadn’t seen one like it before. All the runways at her previous postings had been electric.
Those static lights hadn’t crackled, or made the air around them dance with heat.
These torches were hypnotic, she thought; ethereal and other-worldly.
Menacing too, though.
More than anything, menacing.
Because what was their purpose, if not to facilitate death?
That’s what the crews above were flying towards, after all: either their own, or those of the strangers they’d shortly find.
And how many, now breathing, would be gone before the night’s end?
Iris couldn’t bring herself to guess. She felt no pleasure, thinking of the assault these throbbing planes were about to unleash; no satisfaction that, after the relentless pounding the Luftwaffe had given Britain, Britain was now very much giving one back.
She was just weary, deeply weary, that, more than three years into this hideous war, it was still all going on.
And afraid, sickeningly afraid, for Robbie.
Tim too, of course.
Stepping away from the window, she moved her gaze to the attic’s sloping roof.
The dark ceiling lamp swayed with the force of the planes’ cacophony.
And Robbie and Tim were inside one of them.
Robbie was flying one of them. Unbelievably, after all these years that Iris had spent wondering about him, he was now just a few hundred feet from where she stood, with Tim as his navigator, piloting a Lancaster called Mabel’s Fury, probably without a clue that she too had been stationed back here.
She hadn’t asked to be. Although she and Clare had realised a transfer was on the cards when the USAAF had arrived in Norfolk, and had hoped to stay together, they’d also known they’d be given no say in whatever happened to them next.
Happy as Iris had been when their matching move orders had arrived, her elation had given way to shock the instant she’d learnt that RAF Doverley was where they were headed.
She hadn’t imagined that she’d find anything but sadness waiting for her when she arrived.
But just this morning, she and Clare had been issued with the particulars of 96 Squadron’s active crews to memorise on their journey up, and there Robbie and Tim’s names had been, at the very top of the list, in typeset black and white.
‘Someone you know?’ Clare had asked Iris, noticing her sudden stillness.
‘Yes,’ Iris had said. ‘Or knew, anyway.’
‘It’s not … ’ Clare had begun, looking over Iris’s shoulder. Then, ‘Oh. Oh.’
And now, the sound of the planes was growing quieter. Already, Iris was having to strain to hear them.
How long would it take them to reach the continent from here?
Not that long, surely, over the North Sea.
Then it would be straight into enemy flak, and the guns of patrolling ME-109s.
Drawing a sharp breath – needing, quite suddenly, to distract herself – Iris moved to her bed and, sitting on it, leant over the edge, pulling out her case, which she’d kicked beneath.
She needed to keep busy, she resolved. Unpack.
She didn’t unpack.
She looked up at the ceiling again.
The lamp’s swaying had stilled.
Other than for the drumming rain, there was no longer any noise coming from above at all.
‘He’ll be all right,’ came Clare’s voice.
‘Will he?’ said Iris, bringing her gaze down to meet her friend’s sympathetic stare. She understood this fear Iris was feeling, of course, all too well. She – in love with a pilot whose identity she’d confided in no one but Iris – had been scared for him since 1 September 1939.
‘Of course he will.’
‘How can you know?’
‘I have powers.’ Clare smiled. ‘This is the beginning of your story. Not the end.’
‘Robbie and I have had our beginning.’
‘Fine. This can be your middle, then.’
‘Our middle,’ Iris echoed. ‘I like that.’
‘Good. Now –’ swinging herself to sitting, Clare reached for her own case – ‘what do you say to a medicinal brandy?’
‘You’ve twisted my arm.’
‘Excellent. If you wouldn’t mind seeing to the lights.’
And, whilst Clare rooted around for the bottle, Iris got up to do just that.
She paused again at the window, before letting the blackout fall. The flares were all being extinguished now, disappearing one-by-one. It came to her that when they burned again at dawn, they’d stand for something very different: life, not death; hope, and home.
Let him still be here to see them, she entreated whoever might be listening, up in the silent sky. Let Clare be right, and let this be our middle.
I wasn’t ready for our end.
She dropped the blackout down.
I never will be, not for that.