It was fearsome to watch the haar sea mist roll in and the moonlight disappear, and after the first planes came back, to spend a terrible hour waiting for the section leaders—and, God pity her, for Louisa. I heard the engines, Adam and Jamie flying round and round above us out at sea, as if it were too foggy for them to land. They circled most of another hour. No one outside the radio room knew what was happening. The beacon stayed dark, and Adam and Jamie stayed in the air.

Then came the battle over the lighthouse. You couldn’t see anything but flashes in the clouds, like distant lightning.

And then, hurrah, hurrah, the beacon winking on, and the planes roaring in with their landing lights shining, safe as houses.

I fired up the Tilly and raced to meet Jamie’s Blenheim trundling over the frozen grass. I got there before any other body and was halfway up the wing myself when the crew tumbled out. I hugged that rear gunner as tight as I could hug, and felt wee arms in deep padding hugging me back. God be thanked.

“All right, lads?” I asked, when we all had our feet on the ground.

“Not dead yet,” Jamie answered cheerfully. “Give us a smoke, lass.”

“Got the shakes again?”

“Don’t be silly. Takes more than a mite of cloud and a few squirts of machine gun fire to make me lose my nerve.”

I lit him a cigarette anyway, and he gave it to Louisa, who I’m guessing had never smoked in her life. Clever lass passed it to Silver straightaway—she knew she’d blow her cover if she started choking and spluttering over her first cigarette. Silver took a drag, handed it back to Jamie, and went to open the van.

“We’d better get this gunner to bed, don’t you think?” he said. “His toes might be a bit cold, and he’s in no state for debriefing.”

“Right you are!” said Jamie.

Chip was still snoring as Jamie and Silver carried him into their barracks. Louisa stayed out of the way and rode home with me on the back of my bike as Jamie and Silver headed to ops to be grilled about their flight.

“Give that Swiss milkmaid a bollocking for leaving her light on” was the last thing Jamie told us.

Louisa:

Scolding Elisabeth Lind for her blackout violation wasn’t the first thing on my mind as I limped up through the inky stairwell in the Limehouse. My feet had never been so cold in my entire life.