When I finally got to work on the idea, I thought I could set up my young heroine and her aging companion in a pub like the one Dave visited, near a wartime airfield. The local Royal Air Force bomber squadron could somehow get involved with the viewpoint character. I thought it would be fun (fun as in I will enjoy writing this, not as in This story will be lighthearted) if I explored Jamie Beaufort-Stuart’s background as a bomber pilot, which is only mentioned in passing in Code Name Verity.

In June 2018, I received a letter from an Australian reader who reminded me that it wasn’t just British and American men and women who flew in World War II, and requested that if I ever wrote a “Bomber Story,” would I please remember the Australians. As it happened, I was in the midst of writing a Bomber Story. So at my correspondent’s request I included Harry, Gavin, and Dougie as one of 648 Squadron’s aircrews. In fact, the RAF bases in wartime Scotland consisted of very few Scots, and the rest of Scotland was full of foreigners too. There were Polish, French, and Norwegian naval units in Glasgow; Polish, French, and Canadian troops were based throughout the country; there were civilians from Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, and Spain; there were prisoner of war camps in Scotland holding both Germans and Italians. Later in the war, US military troops were also based in Scotland, of which about 10 percent were black. One wartime logging unit was made up of nine hundred men from British Honduras (now Belize).