Yorkie was nearly ten years older than the rest of us, a career RAF man, and his windburned face and thin mustache gave him a permanent cynical look. The West Indian lass edged away from him cautiously. I didn’t think she’d had much experience with men.

Bother, I thought; I ought to keep an eye on him.

But I knew that Phyllis already thought so too, and Ellen wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. And he wasn’t doing anything forward or suggestive—just being very generous with his cigarettes.

Louisa:

It was Ellen who fished the cigarette paper out of the ashtray.

She smoked faster than everybody else, no-fuss efficient. Phyllis looked like she was joining in to be polite, and Jane was taking her time, enjoying it. Bill Yorke showed me how to put my cigarette together, but I let it go out almost the second after he lit it. I’d never smoked, and I could just imagine what Mummy would say if I started now, in the pub surrounded by sweaty airmen! So everybody else puffed away around me.

Meanwhile I perched on the edge of my seat, trying not to show how excited and anxious I was, while they described how the U-boat sank the British ship and how maddening it had been not to be able to do any damage to it. Oh God, I knew how that felt. I was torn between wanting to leap up and tell them so, and choking on fresh anger that maybe Daddy’s ship went down because it wasn’t equipped to defend itself. Also, oh, I was jealous. I wanted to be Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, pointing my guns at the deadly underwater shadow. I wanted to be David Silvermont, able to see in the dark, up in the nose of the Blenheim, spotting lifeboats. I even wanted to be Chip Wingate, rescuing survivors by radio. I ached with it.

And I wished I knew how to smoke, because it would have been something to do with my hands, a way to pretend I was calmer than I felt. I thought of Mummy sitting on the veranda by herself one evening in May of 1935, quietly guarding the house by the light of her cigarette. Daddy was away and I was only ten. There’d been strikes and riots in the northern ports off and on all that month, and then, in a protest march in Kingston that day, a woman was shot by the police. Mummy didn’t seem scared; but she smoked and smoked all alone on the veranda long after she’d told me to go to bed.