I tossed all our gas masks, my one as well, and Louisa’s satchel and flute and her own two cardboard suitcases, on top of the luggage in the back, and slammed the door. God pity her, how had Louisa ever managed that lot on her own? She must have hidden pools of strength. I could guess where the fed-up look came from.
It was no easy task getting Jane into the Tilly, either. Her old arthritic knees didn’t do any bending, and the seat in the cab was high. She couldn’t manage to stand on the running board. Louisa and I had to lift her in feet first – with our arms full of fur, it was like lifting a bear.
At last we managed it, and Louisa climbed in on my side to ride in the middle, and I climbed in behind the steering wheel. Louisa sat right up on the edge of the seat like a tiny tot so she could see over the dashboard.
‘And now you are high enough to get a braw view of Windyedge as we come down the lane,’ I said to them as I started up the van.
Windyedge Aerodrome sits on top of the moor above the fishing village it is named for, just south of Aberdeen. It has sat there some time, built before the Great War, in the early days of flying. About it runs a proud stone wall, with its good looks all ruined by a high wire fence topped off with barbs. The road follows the wall for a mile and a half, past lookout towers and bunkers for anti-aircraft cannons. The other side of the road is all wind-bent hedge and fields and wild woodland.
I drove through this drearysome landscape as I’d done a hundred times before, one hand resting on the gear stick and the other lightly steering as we passed along the narrow lane. The road was dry, and the clouds seemed far away, high and rippling, a sky like a wide sheet of grey river pearls.
One black spot floated low over the North Sea like a fly on my windscreen.
I blinked.
Not a spot: an aeroplane. Such a totsy wee speck before it became frightening: before I knew how close it was going to get to me.
‘That’s a German plane,’ said Louisa.
‘Don’t be daft!’ I said. ‘It’s coming in to land.’
‘I don’t know what kind it is,’ she told me. ‘But I can tell them apart. I was in London all through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.’
The plane had wings like blunt butcher’s knives, not the tapered wings of our Hurricanes and Spitfires. It screamed in low over our heads.
‘That’s a German plane,’ the lass Louisa insisted. ‘It’s a German fighter.’
‘They’d be shooting at it if it was a German plane,’ I said uneasily. ‘See the watchtower? There are guards there, with machine guns. There’s an anti-aircraft battery just below them that you can’t see from here, and another at the edge of the cliffs.’
The old woman, Jane Warner, didn’t say anything. She and Louisa craned their necks away off their shoulders and swivelled their heads around, trying to see in back of them to watch as the plane landed. But I had to keep my eyes on the road.
We passed the aerodrome entrance and its guards’ shed. The lane gives a sharp turn there, heading downhill. Below us now, Windyedge village lowered itself cottage by cottage into its dark and narrow harbour. Down there was a post office playing at being a shop, a handful of cold-looking stone dwelling places whose thatched roofs were tied down with rope so they couldn’t blow away, and a Presbyterian chapel behind a shut door, all with small, deep-set windows to keep their inhabitants in a state of eternal darkness. Beyond the harbour lurked a little beach, but you couldn’t get to it through bales of barbed wire and concrete blocks that were supposed to keep German tanks and troops from unloading there. It felt like the most unwelcoming place on God’s earth in 1940.
You had to go into the village a ways and back up another narrow lane to get to Nancy Campbell’s pub. The pub was perched above a row of four stone arches built right into the hillside, like underground lairs. Heavy oak and iron doors fitted into the archways, and these were soundly locked and bolted to keep folk out.
‘Those are limekilns,’ I told Louisa. ‘Where they used to make lime, for concrete and plaster, back in the day. That’s why the pub is called the Limehouse. Then they got used as a prison, for deserters in the Great War, and—’
I shut up my blethering. She didn’t need to know that my two uncles had been locked up in those limekilns for a week after they got caught ‘trespassing’ on the airfield ten years ago, in peacetime – snaring rabbits. That’s my family connection to Windyedge. It doesn’t fash me – it made my mam split her sides laughing when I told her I was getting paid to work there now. But I wouldn’t want anyone to know.
The Tilly whinged and complained as it slowly climbed the steep lane past the old limekilns. Waiting for us at the top of the hill was the hotchpotch of granite walls and blue slate roofs of the Limehouse, like an old laird’s castle collapsed into the moor. A few tall Scotch pines tossed their limbs restlessly about above it in the wet wind.
The pub sign was a painting of the four limekiln arches. Louisa gave a shudder as we pulled up in front.
‘I expect you’ll find Scotland a great deal colder than where you come from,’ I said. ‘But you’ll be warm enough inside. There are gas fires in the bedrooms.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Louisa answered through tight lips. ‘I’ve only come from London just now.’
I helped to unload the old woman’s things, but I couldn’t stop to move them in. I was meant to be on my way back to the airfield, not wasting Air Ministry petrol running errands for Nancy Campbell. As I turned the Tilly to face about so I didn’t have to reverse down the lane, I saw Louisa holding the door open for the old woman. I wondered how the brown-skinned lass would cope with Nan when they met for the first time.
Not my lookout, I thought with relief, as I headed back to RAF Windyedge.
I didn’t have any idea who was in the plane that had just landed, but I didn’t take Louisa’s warning very seriously. It was likely some bigwig, or prisoner even, who needed to be shuttled someplace. The airfield staff would miss me right away if they needed me.
Sergeant Norbert Fergusson was standing outside his guard’s hut in front of the barrier to the aerodrome drive, watching the sky through field glasses.
I cranked down the window of the Tilly and leaned out. ‘What is it, Nobby?’
‘Bloody Jerry just landed on our airfield,’ he said through his teeth.
Shaness. The oath in Traveller cant hissed in my head, though I’d taught myself not to speak it aloud. Louisa had been right. It was a German plane.
‘Why didn’t we shoot him on his way in?’ I exclaimed.
‘The ack-ack lads on the north side gave him a burst, didn’t you hear? But then they stopped. He had his cockpit open, waving a big white sheet behind him, and his Luftwaffe markings are all covered up, too. Looks like he means to surrender, or something.’
‘Get the barrier up,’ I told him. ‘They might need me to drive somebody somewhere.’
‘Better you than me if there’s a bloody Jerry involved,’ said Nobby, and raised the barrier.
I went along the gravel drive as fast as I dared. I was in two minds as to whether I ought to hurry in case I got in trouble for not being about when I was supposed to, or to go slowly so I didn’t have to meet any German airmen. The Tilly’s tyres spat up pebbles behind me. I passed the concrete barracks and the aircraft hangar with its faded green paint, and pulled up in front of the operations building.