With a lurch of sickness Saffie knew. Daddy was not home yet and she strained like Fleur for the sound of helicopters overhead. She could hear her mother’s voice keening. It was this soft, monotonous sound that had woken her, that and her mother’s fear. It shimmered across the night and reached both children, touched them with cold fingers and they shivered at their mother’s terror.

‘Oh, God!’ Fleur whispered. ‘Oh, God in heaven. Please. Please. Let him come in safely. I beg you, God.’

Both girls sat up abruptly as one. Stared at their identical selves.

‘Daddy!’ they whispered and reached for each other, catching their mother’s panic.

At that moment they heard the aircraft engines. Behind dense cloud came the faint sound of rotary blades. Clear, like knives cutting through the blackness, the sound of helicopters rumbling and whirring their way home. Tail-lights winking and blinking like comforting fireflies through the purple massing clouds, which were growling with thunder and bursting with violent wind and rain.

Saffie and Nikki leapt out of bed and ran to their mother.

‘Hurry!’ they called out into the night. ‘Hurry, hurry, Daddy. Hurry, Fergus…Hurry, everyone…the storm is coming. Hurry, hurry before the lightning comes…’

The sound of engines was louder now, near to them, and suddenly out of the clouds, in formation, five helicopters appeared out of the night.

‘Hurrah!’ Saffie and Nikki shouted. ‘There they all are…hurrah!’

‘Shush, darlings. Shush! I need to listen.’ Fleur’s voice was trembling.

They watched as the helicopters hovered over the airfield. One turned in a circle as if testing the power of the wind and then dropped slowly at an angle to land at the airfield beyond their sight.

The next two helicopters were being buffeted up and down and they too circled quickly, one after the other, well apart, and turned and dropped from sight into the darkness.

‘Three down!’ Fleur let out her breath like a sigh. A violent damp wind wrenched the shutter from her hand and it crashed back against the house, and then the rain came in slanting, weaving arcs, blowing crossways, bringing great suffocating black clouds which obscured their vision.

A white streak of lightning shot into the night making the children jump back. They all heard but could not see the fourth helicopter drop from the clouds. The engine was making a lot of noise as the pilot searched for the airfield lights below him.

The last helicopter emerged from cloud and circled. Daddy. It seemed to the twins to move nearer to the house, as if to say, I know you’re watching…I’ll be home in thirty minutes, Peapods.

Daddy was always last down. It is like being the captain of a ship, he’d told the twins. Your men’s safety comes first.

They saw the red flickering tail-light against the lightning as the helicopter hovered, tried to turn and drop out of the savage wind to land. But it was impossible. It was caught as the eye of the storm lifted and threw it about the sky like a toy. Pilot and machine were suspended and buffeted against a backdrop of lightning shooting and cracking across the sky like fireworks.