It sometimes doesn’t feel real when you’re there. You’re so focused on flying and firing. Afterward, you feel choked up or frightened—especially if it’s gone badly, and you have miles of empty sea to cross in a broken plane, and your mates are dead. But in battle, there’s nothing else to think about.

Suddenly the Messer just stopped playing. He shot off east as if he couldn’t be bothered to waste time with us. I don’t think he was out of ammunition; he must have been low on fuel. He’d probably already been pushing his luck, with all that haring about after his missing wingman, and now he couldn’t risk the toll an air battle would take on whatever was left in his tanks.

Thank God—thank God. Thank God I hadn’t lost these kids on their first operational mission.

By the time Ignacy found us we were alone and heading home under the pearly gray sheet of sky.

“You blooming great fool, Mazur, you’re on report,” I snarled at Ignacy over the radio.

“Save it, Scotty,” said Silver gently through the intercom, which Ignacy couldn’t hear. “Wait till we’re on the ground.”

I was seething. I took a deep breath.

“Get back in formation, Pimms Section.”

That was the only order they paid attention to all afternoon.

I wondered briefly if the lost Messerschmitt pilot had been disobeying orders too. But only briefly; that was someone else’s problem, and Pimms was mine.

Louisa:

Look at that lion kill. That’s what I thought Daddy said to me, pointing out the bus window along the road to Granny Adair’s, on the edge of St. Andrew Parish back in Jamaica. I was only little, sitting on one of his knees and wedged against the window by his canvas duffel bag on the other. Around us were people with luggage and groceries and chickens, and the smell of sweat and tobacco. Daddy pointed to the limekiln every time we passed it, and I always thought he said, That’s an old lion kill. I thought that abandoned stone-and-brick building, half-buried in ferns, was a place where brave and terrible people took lions to be slaughtered. Whenever we went to Granny Adair’s and passed that place it gave me a queer, nervous thrill of fear and mystery.

The limekilns at Windyedge village made it all come back. Just when Ellen said that—Those are limekilns. And again when she left us, as I looked up at the pub sign with its painted limekilns. The back of my neck prickled chilly, even beneath Jane Warner’s warm fur coat.

I wasn’t a fool-fool country gal and I knew they were just limekilns. But maybe it was the German plane that gave me the shivers.