They were fairly taken aback. I told them about the Bedford two-tonner and the Citroën Fifteen. I didn’t say, Oh, please, like a schoolgirl, but my face must have conveyed the message.

The car was a Humber Pullman. Nothing on the Citroën, of course, but comfy for the brass and for the wilting driver who I belted tightly into the front seat. After I’d ferried them all back to Heliopolis I begged to be put into the driving pool but nothing doing, it was army girls only. I got a lift back to Alexandria, dreadfully low. All the time I was behind the wheel I hadn’t worried about James for a single second.

A week later I went back to the parachutes. I simply could not do nothing, and I had learned in the meantime that James had parachuted from his plane. I packed with a cold precision, for the sake of all the other airmen, and saved my tears for the evening. Célia and I prayed together, her voice continuing steady when mine broke off.

—

A month later I received a letter from a Mrs. Iris Acton.

His widow. I swear, I was so deranged those words went through my mind. He was dead, and—almost worse—he’d been married all along.

Stupid. He was true to me. And how would his widow know about me anyway? I ripped the envelope apart. Yes, Mrs. Iris was his mother. But he could still be dead. Please let him not be dead.

She was writing at his request. He was in a prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan in Silesia.

I burst into awful choking brays of joy that brought Célia, violently alarmed, from the other end of the house.

—

Later that day I leafed through Papa’s atlas looking for Silesia. Found it, a patch of territory on the double page marked Allemagne-Pologne. “Lower Silesia,” I said, looking up at Peter. “Germany.”

He gave a pale smile. “I think it depends on your point of view,” he said.

The camp was a Stalagluft, Peter explained. A prison for airmen. They got parcels from the Red Cross but not all the time. When there were no parcels it was cabbage soup. “But he’ll meet old friends there,” Peter told me. “They play cricket, and learn languages.”

“Sounds quite jolly,” I said without conviction.

—

James and I began to write to each other. Small questions: how my uniform looked awful however much I ironed it. At the end of a page of scribbled trivia I apologized for my nonsense. He wrote, Your nonsense is keeping me going.