Louisa Adair is not really based on anyone but herself, but a starting point was Lilian Bader. Bader was born in 1918, in Liverpool, England, to a West Indian father and an English mother. After both her parents died she was raised in a convent school where she stayed until the age of twenty—it took her longer than most of her peers to find work because of her color. When Britain entered World War II she joined the NAAFI (which ran military canteens), and early in 1941 she entered the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she was trained as an aircraft-instrument repairer, achieving the rank of acting corporal—and she even got taken up in a Royal Air Force plane so she could see flight instruments in action. Her experience of being taunted as a Nazi by a group of evacuee children who had never seen a German, or a black person, inspired Louisa’s unsettling experience on the bus to Stonehaven.

Only one Jamaican (a white man) flew in the Battle of Britain, possibly the only Caribbean man to do so, though several others, some of them black, flew British fighter aircraft later in the war. The Jamaican who fought in the Battle of Britain was Pilot Officer Herbert Capstick, nineteen years old in the summer of 1940. He was the navigator in a Bristol Blenheim aircraft. After changing squadrons later in the war, he was part of a crew who sank a U-boat in 1942.

I might not have ever paid much attention to the type of plane Herbert Capstick flew, except that a chance remark of Jamie’s in Code Name Verity forced me to create a Blenheim squadron for The Enigma Game. I must have done a quick search, ten years ago, to see what kind of bombers were being flown early in the war, and assigned Jamie to Blenheims. When I began writing this book, after only a little research I soon became obsessed with these overlooked Royal Air Force light bombers.

Thousands of Bristol Blenheims were in service at the beginning of the war, fighting in both the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain; the first bombing raid against Germany was made in a Blenheim. Blenheims were the most plentiful of the RAF’s aircraft as the war began, and more aircrews were lost flying them than any other type of RAF plane. As Jamie mentions, only one Blenheim pilot, Flying Officer Reginald Peacock, became an official ace by shooting down five German aircraft during the fierce air wars of 1940. I didn’t make up the story of the Blenheim crew who flew all the way back to their own base after a mission, shut down the engines, and died on the runway before they were able to climb out.