The Jerry took her glass and gave it to Nan to fill again. I wondered who would have to pay for that wee dram; whisky wasn’t cheap. He passed the glass back to the old woman and they jawed some more. Then he took a silver cigarette case from inside his coat and held it out. She took a cigarette and leaned forward, and he struck a match.

Oh, the look on Nan’s face when the German pilot gave her old auntie a cigarette!

Jane called to the lass.

“He says to tell you, Louisa, that he has great respect for the American Negro. He saw Jesse Owens run in the 1936 Olympics.”

“I’m not American,” Louisa said, her head high.

“I told him you are a British subject.” Jane smiled, her eyes wrinkling so you couldn’t see the color in them. “From an island in the West Indies.”

The pilot took fresh interest in the lass, his brows knotted. He asked a question, and Jane translated in a soft voice. “Do you know the music he played, the piece that made you cry?”

Louisa nodded, and glanced again curiously at the German pilot. “The Hebrides Overture,” she said. “Scottish music by a German composer. Mendelssohn is German, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he was born Jewish,” Jane explained for the benefit of us musical ignoramuses, me and Nan. “Not a Nazi favorite. Mendelssohn’s work is banned in Germany. They pretend he’s not one of theirs.”

I wondered what the pilot would think of me, neither black nor Jewish, but a Traveller. What would he think of my people, who moved from place to place selling horses and willow baskets, collecting old clothes and mending pans, working in the tattie fields and at the berrying? Most British people don’t like us. Surely the Nazis are worse.

I cringed into my uniform, as if it were a costume that didn’t fit.

The outrageous Jerry asked another casual question.

“He wants to know,” said Jane to Louisa, “if you are familiar with the music called calypso.”

The lass nodded. She threw back her shoulders and stood straighter. “But it’s from Trinidad. I’m from Jamaica.”

The Jerry pilot breathed a long, raggedy breath. Then he held a hand toward Louisa. She flinched at first, but at last she reached to shake his offered hand. He looked her straight in the eye, solemn and serious, and repeated, “Calypso.”

“I’m Louisa,” she said.

Nan Campbell spoke up, wiping her hands on her pinny. “He can have Room Number Four, the best double room, at the single-room rate. Ask him how he means to pay.”

Jane asked him.

His eyes flicked up to 648 Squadron’s wishing coins studding the beam above the bar. But he put his hand inside the breast of his leather coat and pulled out a wodge of limp English pound notes in a silver clip.