Since the train went before the tube began running in the morning, he couldn’t go back to Notting Hill Gate to spend the night, and there wasn’t anywhere in Victoria to sleep. He had to sit up all night on an unbelievably uncomfortable wooden bench.

And once he got on the train, he was even sorrier. Not only did it turn out to be a local, and even more packed than the Lady Jane had been on the way back from Dunkirk, but less than five miles out of London it was shunted onto a siding while three troop trains and a freight train loaded with military equipment passed.

After nearly an hour and a half, the train started up again, went half a mile, and stopped again, this time for no reason at all. “Air raid,” a soldier close to the window said, looking out. “I hope the jerries aren’t out hunting trains today. We’re sitting ducks, aren’t we?” after which everyone spent the next few minutes looking up at the ceiling and listening for the deadly hum of approaching HE 111s.

“I’d rather be back on the front line than here,” another soldier said after a few minutes. “Waiting about for the blow to fall, and not a bloody thing you can do about it.”

Like Polly, Mike thought. It must have been hell for her when she realized her drop wouldn’t open, and worse keeping it to herself these last weeks while he and Eileen talked about options she knew wouldn’t work. But the worst must have been not being able to do anything about it. His lying there in the hospital worrying about what had happened to the retrieval team and whether he’d messed things up by saving Hardy had been bad enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d already been to Pearl Harbor, even if it was a year from now, or, like the day the V-1s started, three and a half years off.

It didn’t matter when it was. It was still heading straight at you. Like the German Army getting closer and closer to Dunkirk, and you sitting there helplessly on the beach, listening to the guns in the distance, and hoping to God a ship would show up and take you off before the Germans got there, and nothing for you to do in the meantime but wait.

Which is what all three of them would have been doing right now if he hadn’t got Daphne’s letter. Thank God it had come when it did. He couldn’t have stood just sitting there cooling his heels. It was a hell of a lot easier to fire a machine gun at the Zeroes or hand up ammunition than to just sit there and be shot at, a hell of a lot easier to take a leaky launch over to Dunkirk than to sit on a beach waiting for the Germans to come.

Or the Japanese. He’d assumed, when he found out Gerald hadn’t come through, that his roommate Charles hadn’t either, but what if he had? What if he was in Singapore, and his drop wouldn’t open, and the Japanese would be there any minute, and he didn’t dare leave Singapore for fear he’d miss the retrieval team?