When Vic first arrived, the atmosphere at the Manor had been rather like a dignified gentlemen’s club, but now all that had changed. The sense of urgency was palpable. While everyone worked hard, weekends were for letting off steam, and the formerly peaceful air of the place was now shattered by the noise of football games, rowdy bathing parties and picnics. Someone overheard Vic practising ragtime tunes on the out-of-tune upright piano in the hall and he was reluctantly press-ganged into performing for one of the variety shows staged every Sunday evening. Thereafter he sometimes found himself addressed as ‘Maestro Mac’.

While non-commissioned RAF men were billeted in temporary huts, their officers were to be given rooms in the Manor, so this meant new sleeping arrangements for the civilian scientists and engineers. They would have to share, chosen by lottery. Vic feared he’d be stuck with Frank or one of the other more tricky customers, so when the list went up he was greatly relieved to find that he’d been paired with Johnnie. They were allocated one of the bedrooms on the first floor of the Red Tower.

‘Lucky bastards,’ he heard Frank muttering behind him. ‘You’re on the VIP corridor. Who’d you have to bribe to get that one?’

‘What do you mean, VIP?’ Johnnie asked.

‘They’re the largest rooms with the best views, where the family used to live.’

He was right: the room was fully twenty feet square, with two full-length windows overlooking the gardens and the sea. Squinting to the right, you could even glimpse the mouth of the estuary and Felixstowe beyond.

‘Whatever did we do to deserve this?’ Johnnie asked.

‘Search me,’ Vic said.

The scale of the room dwarfed its meagre allocation of furniture, which was the same as that in the smaller rooms: two narrow iron-framed beds, military issue, with the thin hard mattresses everyone called ‘biscuits’, two thin-ply wardrobes incorporating a chest of drawers, two wooden chairs. They discovered hidden behind a screen a large, rust-stained Victorian hand-basin, and the taps even worked. What luxury.

In addition they had apparently inherited from a former occupant two baggy, ragged easy chairs and a coffee table, placed in front of the window. Johnnie sank into one of the chairs before rising again with a yelp. ‘Bloody hell, those springs are a bit sharp.’ He felt the back of his trousers. ‘Hope I haven’t torn anything.’

‘We’ll have to steal cushions from the Green Room,’ Vic said. ‘But who cares, old chum, when you’ve got a view like this? I could look at it forever.’

‘How long do you think we’ve got?’

‘What, here?’

‘Now the RAF’s taking over, will they stand us down, do you think?’

‘Cripes, do you really think so?’ The notion simply hadn’t occurred to Vic, and it certainly wasn’t welcome. How could he face going back to those dusty old labs at Cambridge after the excitement of Bawdsey?

By now it was clear that they were not going to be stood down any time soon. Even as his original ambitions were being turned into reality, Robert Watson-Watt’s restless mind was already moving ahead.