Lying together, we heard the planes, the sound half obscured at first by the breeze, then swelling towards us, engines straining across the sky. Angus sat up.

‘They are ours?’ I asked, only half joking. Without my specs I couldn’t even see the planes, let alone their insignia.

‘Yes, definitely ours. Off on a practice run, I expect.’

The sight of the planes had pulled his mind back to his training, his job.

‘Can’t escape it for long, can we?’ I said, sitting up. ‘Oh, I do wish we could see what’s going to happen.’

Seldom has a wish been more ill-guided. In our ignorance of the future that afternoon we sat, peaceful and loving in our barley field between Birmingham and Coventry, cities whose solid, familiar faces would be shattered almost beyond recognition by the approaching storm.

Chapter 12

As we waited through the intense days of the Battle of Britain, Angus was sent to Canada to complete his training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The inhabitants of Apple Valley en route to Moose Jaw stopped their train and deluged the lads with the red fruit which gave the place its name. Before he left again, Angus gave me a book of poems.

‘Some of them are my favourites,’ he said. ‘I want you to keep this for me.’

The collection was by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I found them hard to understand but for glimpses of beauty in them and my favourite was the simplest: ‘Heaven–Haven – A nun takes the veil’:

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

I kept the poem in my head as a charm, a conjuror of peace, even if there was none in the world.

‘Every day I thank God selfishly,’ I wrote to him, ‘that you have, as yet, no wings on your uniform.’

God was on people’s lips more than usual in any case. With autumn came the bombing. At the height of the blitz on Birmingham I went to church with my mother. I had moved to live back at home now my training was complete.

‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us, o’er the world’s tempestuous sea,’ we sang. The church was packed and people stood in the aisles. We all needed something to hold on to.

Mummy was tense as a trip-wire. I stood with her one day while she was wrenching the pale flesh from a boiled pig’s head for brawn.

‘Wouldn’t this be a good time for you to go back to nursing?’ I ventured. ‘They’re short-handed everywhere.’

Daddy was working incessantly it seemed. Days, nights, any demand that came he tried to meet, as if he had something to prove.

‘How can I?’ Mummy said briskly. ‘There’s the house to run, all the garden – there’s so much to do. And no Simmons.’ Simmons had volunteered for the ATS.