Vic took a breath. He shouldn’t ask this, and he knew there would be no satisfactory answer, but he was going to, all the same. ‘Why was I actually named by someone, sir, do you think?’

Watson-Watt shook his head. ‘That is for me to deal with, Mackensie. Now, back to work and think no more of it.’

‘That Frank Wilkinson is a snake in the grass,’ Johnnie opined later, as they dissected the interview. Vic remembered the terror a snake might cause in the village in India, and how his ayah would refuse to allow him out of the house because one of the gardeners had spied a cobra or other venomous creature in the flower beds, or lurking under the veranda.

Then, as now, he felt the ground shifting beneath his feet.

7

Everyone in Felixstowe was familiar with the sight of the seaplanes based at the station where Mark worked. Each day you would see them lumbering into view, landing on the water and motoring towards one of the long jetties that stuck out like fingers into the sea just beside the Napoleonic fort at Landguard. There seemed to be any number of them coming and going. Some, according to Mark, had been sent here for testing from other stations around the country and even from abroad.

He was obsessed by everything and anything to do with flying, and it had become so all-consuming that it was almost impossible to get him to talk about anything else, like when his friend Billy Bishop might be coming back for the holidays. He spoke about the test pilots so reverently, as though they were gods, his eyes sparkling as he described their skill and courage, how they brought in planes with broken engines or, once, when a propeller had fallen off; how they could analyse precisely what would make a plane fly faster, or higher. They were clever, brave and cool as cucumbers – particularly a certain Captain Burrows, who seemed to feature more frequently than any of the others in Mark’s thrilling tales of aerial derring-do.

So it had come as no real surprise when he’d announced, on Easter Sunday, that he was going to apply for pilot training. An uncomfortable silence fell over the table, eventually broken by Pa: ‘Well, that’s great news, lad. You’ll really get to see the world. And the girls will be falling at your feet.’

Mark blushed as Ma stood abruptly and began to collect the plates. A few seconds later they heard the loud crash of shattering crockery.

‘Go and help your mother, Kathleen,’ Pa said quietly. ‘And close the door.’

She was standing at the kitchen sink, staring out of the window, shards of china at her feet. ‘Why can’t he just apply to be an engineer instead? It’d be just as interesting and nothing like to so dangerous. Look what happened to that other chap.’ A few years earlier, a plane had simply broken up in the air not far from Felixstowe, falling into the sea and killing the pilot instantly. He had been buried with full military honours, his coffin processed through the town.