“The German High …? What exactly are we picking up?”

“A German prisoner of war,” Cess said. “We’re picking him up at his prison camp and driving him to London. He’s ill, and the Red Cross has arranged to have him sent home to Germany. But first we’re driving him to Dover through the staging area in Kent so he can see our invasion preparations firsthand.”

“A few rubber tanks, wooden planes, and a sewer-pipe oil refinery? Those were meant to fool a reconnaissance plane from twenty thousand feet up, not a—”

“No, we’re going to show him the real thing,” Cess said, “ships, aeroplanes, everything. He’s only going to think he’s in Kent. That’s why we have to drive to Gravesend this afternoon. We’ve got to map out a false route so the colonel can accidentally overhear us talking about where we are.”

It was a clever plan. With signposts down all over England, the colonel would only have their word for where they were, and if they could convince him he was in Kent and he went home and told the German High Command, it could help convince them the Allied attack would come at Calais.

But it played hell with his plan to find Atherton. He could hardly ask a soldier where Denys was with the colonel listening. He’d have to get away from him and Cess.

“You said we’ll be gone two days,” he said. “Where are we spending the night? At an Army camp or in Portsmouth?”

“Neither. We’re bringing him straight to London.”

“But I thought you said we wouldn’t be back in time for Chasuble’s date?”

“Chasuble said that. He’s convinced something will go wrong and we’ll blow the gaffe,” Cess said. “No, we’re not to stop for anything, except to go to the loo. And we’re not to let the colonel out of our sight for a moment. Lady Bracknell wants both of us with him at all times.”

When peace breaks out again (as it will, do you know) and the lights come on again, we shall look back on these days and remember gratefully the things that brought us cheer and gave us heart even in the glummest hours.

—NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENT,
1941

Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

BY FIVE TILL TEN, THE GROUP HE WAS WAITING FOR STILL hadn’t arrived at the museum, and it was pouring rain. The American couple had given up trying to set him up with their daughter and gone off to find “someplace dry” and have “a decent cup of coffee, if there is such a thing in this country, Calvin,” which was a blessing, but there was no sign of any other visitors.

What if they all went to the exhibit at St. Paul’s instead? he thought. Or what if this isn’t the right day? What if the exhibit doesn’t begin till tomorrow? Or began yesterday?

At one minute till, an elderly museum guard appeared, unlocked the doors, and let him come inside the lobby to wait. “Today is the first day of the ‘Living Through the Blitz’ exhibition, isn’t it?” he asked the guard.