That explosion hadn’t even shaken me out of bed. Why would the Luftwaffe send one lonely bomber to an empty wet bus stop guarded by drookit sheep?

It put out the telephone line into Windyedge village for a day or so. But we still had the radios at the aerodrome, so 648 Squadron was all right.

In daylight, plain daylight, the Luftwaffe was back the next afternoon with three Junkers Ju-88 bombers. They went skriking past the Kingsleap Light and swung north along the cliffs. Pimms Section got scrambled out to chase them; Old Flash radioed Deeside to beg help from the Spitfires. And Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell leaped into the Tilly with me as his driver.

“McEwen, is it?” he growled. “Take me to the signal box just before the railway crosses the Clemency Bridge.”

I didn’t have a clue where that was.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I’ve not been along the railway before.”

“What the devil have you been doing these past six weeks? There’s been no active squadron here since October. You could have been checking routes!”

“Petrol, sir.” I swallowed. “I mean, I wasn’t to waste petrol.”

“You have a bicycle, don’t you? Where’s your initiative? Christ.” He had a fight with a map and won. “There,” he said, smacking the limp page as if he’d like to do the same to me. “Get moving—there’s a farm track above the village that’ll take us there.”

It had long grass growing up the middle, being travelled only by tractors and horses, but that didn’t stop Cromwell making me drive full skelter along the cliff tops.

The Ju-88s had cleared off back to Norway when we arrived. But Jamie was up there flying in circles round the smoking holes in the railway line. I knew Silver must be on his belly in the Blenheim’s nose, giving directions, and Tex would be on the floor in the back with the escape hatch open, snapping pictures in the icy wind.

That was the first bomb damage ever I saw. I couldn’t make full sense of it. Where the explosion happened, the track looked like sheep’s wool snarled on a wire fence. Cromwell strode around the wreckage and I trailed along after him with my mouth hanging open.

“Hah! Unlucky fellows,” he exclaimed at last, standing at the edge of the hole in the railway line. “Poor show for the Jerries! They missed the Clemency Bridge. This’ll take a week to mend, I shouldn’t wonder. But if they’d hit the bridge, the line might have been out for months. Where’s my clipboard, Volunteer McEwen?”

Of course I didn’t have his clipboard.

“Good God, you’re inefficient, girl! Go get it out of the Hillman. I’ll ask for antiaircraft defenses to be installed on this stretch of the line. They won’t surprise us here again.”