Then the war had to begin again; the Germans were led to their prison, and the rest of us got ferried back to the airfield in the Tilly. Sitting on the floor in the back of the van, leaning against Silver’s shoulder, the Bach was still with me like a lullaby, and I was asleep in the five minutes it took to ride to our barracks.

I dreamed I was leading Pimms Section over a shining sunlit sea hunting for U-boats. But there were no ships and no submarines, nothing but the shadows of coral reefs below clear turquoise waves all the way to the horizon, and dolphins leaping. When I tried to make a radio call to the other planes, nobody answered. The only thing I could hear on my headset was the high, haunting trill of a flute. It wasn’t Bach, though. I didn’t recognize the music, but I knew it was Mendelssohn.

Ellen:

Och, it didn’t fash me I missed the interview with the German prisoners. I had my own fun. I drove Phyllis to Stonehaven to collect the German translator who came on the train the next day.

We’d been told her name, Sergeant Elisabeth Lind. She’d been told to look for the Tilly, I suppose. At the rail station I got out of the van first, and the translator made straight for me as she came through the barriers.

She wore a smart gray Parisian suit—though it must have been a mite outdated—beneath a sealskin coat as sleek as slate and soft as silk. Her hair, the color of ripe straw, was done in a tight plait around her head, like a picture postcard of a German milkmaid, if milkmaids went about in fur coats and matching pillbox hats. Her face was made up like a film star’s, with long thick eyelashes and red lips.

I didn’t recognize her straightaway because of the hair and makeup, but the moment I saw her eyes, clear bright hazel in her bonny vixen’s face, I knew who she was—Jamie Stuart’s wee German-speaking sister. The pair of them at Windyedge together!

I must have gawped, because she gave her lips a quick tap with a finger in a glove trimmed with soft gray chinchilla, telling me to hush, and I remembered that she was using someone else’s name.

A cloud of soldiers and railway men buzzed about her like eager bees. She’d shared out her things amongst them—a small case, an even smaller overnight case, a handbag, and a gas mask. God pity us, I thought, swallowing a laugh and thinking of the 648 Squadron lads.

She minced up to me like a fairy in furs. I felt tall and awkward as she held out her small hand for me to shake as if we’d never met. She said, “Volunteer McEwen? I’m Sergeant Elisabeth Lind.”