The Last Wolf (13 page)

They had been spared to fight another day. Either the British had been too busy landing their forces to notice their presence, or Lady Luck had been on their side. As for the dud torpedoes, full investigations were promised by the Flag Officer.

Only a handful of enemy ships had so far been sunk by U-boats since the war had begun, which was disappointing but, elsewhere, the news was good. The Panzers had broken through the Ardennes and crossed the Meuse into France, and the British forces were being systematically driven out of Norway.

Question 5. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets Mr Darcy she believes him to be proud and disagreeable. Why does she eventually change her opinion?

Outside, the sun was shining and in the examination room it was hot and stuffy. Heads were bent, pens scratching away. Miss Dunn, the invigilator, got up from her seat on the dais and walked slowly up and down the aisles between the rows of desks, making sure that nobody was cheating.

It wasn't a difficult question. English Literature was one of Stroma's best subjects and she knew
Pride and Prejudice
practically by heart, but her mind kept wandering. Whether she passed her School Certificate or not no longer seemed to matter – not after what had happened in France and what might happen now in England. Paris had fallen to the Germans. They had driven their tanks all the way across Europe and their soldiers had been goose-stepping down the Champs Elysees. Adolf Hitler himself had been to see the Eiffel Tower.

There didn't seem very much to stop them doing the same thing down the Mall. Just the English Channel, and it wasn't very wide. ‘A moat', Shakespeare had called it. Everyone expected Hitler to try to invade very soon. And if he succeeded, it wouldn't matter a row of beans why Elizabeth changed her mind about Mr Darcy. Miss Dunn stopped beside her desk and frowned. Stroma bent her head again and began writing.

At the end of the summer term, she went home to London for the holidays. There was no question of her going to Craigmore; not with the invasion threat. Nor was there any question of her leaving school, as she had wanted. She was to stay on for two more years and take her Higher School Certificate, the parents said. She wasn't old enough to be called up and, as they had pointed out, she would be far safer at school in the country than in London. Not only German troops, but German
bombs
were expected. Hundreds of air-raid shelters had been built all over London and there was now one at the bottom of their garden – an ugly corrugated iron thing sunk into the mud and full of slugs. When the bombs started coming, they were supposed to go down there and, if it was night-time, sleep in the bunks. Shop windows had been boarded-up, statues taken away, anti-aircraft guns set up in the parks, yet more trenches dug, yet more sandbags piled high, miles of barbed wire unrolled.

In August, she went to stay with Rosanne's family near Reigate in Surrey. Rosanne's brother had been posted missing at Dunkirk and there was still no news of him. Rosanne was convinced he had been killed and Stroma did her best to cheer her up.

‘He might have been captured and made a prisoner-of-war.'

‘We'd have heard about it from the Red Cross by now.'

‘Not necessarily. Our neighbours' son is missing, too, and they haven't heard anything either. Please, don't give up.'

The air in the house felt heavy with grief. Rosanne's mother tried hard to be cheerful but her eyes were red from crying and the father barely spoke. Mealtimes were sombre and silent – the clink of knives and forks loud against plates, the grandfather clock ticking away like a metronome. A framed photograph of Jeremy in his army uniform looked down on them from the mantelpiece. He looked very decent, Stroma noticed, which somehow made it all the worse.

One sunny afternoon they went for a long walk. From the back of the house, cornfields stretched away into the distance and, in the nearest field, a tractor towing a reaper was chugging round, the ripe corn going down in swathes before the knives. They leaned their arms on the five-barred gate and watched.

Stroma looked up into the blue and cloudless sky, shielding her eyes from the sun. Far above them, two shapes wheeled about like birds, the sun glinting off their wings. Only they weren't birds. They were planes. Fighters. One was chasing after the other, both of them twisting and turning. They had left vapour trails behind them – a pattern of white skeins like tangled wool against the blue. She caught hold of Rosanne's arm and pointed upwards.

Though they could see the two planes, they couldn't hear them – not until they came much lower and they heard the roar of their engines and the sharp stutter of gunfire. They flung themselves to the ground by the gate as the fighters streaked overhead. The leading fighter had RAF roundels on its fuselage and wings, the one that followed had sinister black crosses. The RAF plane banked sharply when it reached the trees at the edge of the field. One wing broke away suddenly in pieces and the rest of the plane hurtled on over the hedge and nose-dived into the next field, exploding with a bang that made the ground shake. Flames and black smoke rose up into the air and there were more explosions and a terrible stench of burning rubber and fuel. The German fighter shrieked past and circled the field triumphantly before it climbed away. Rosanne was screaming and screaming.

The tractor driver crawled out from under cover of his machine and ran towards the gate in the hedge where he stopped and stood staring into the next field. An inferno of flames was crackling away merrily, thick black smoke billowing upwards, Added to the stench of burning fuel and rubber was another horrible smell that might have been burning flesh.

The tractor driver was still staring over the gate. Rosanne had stopped screaming. There was nothing any of them could do. They waited until a fire engine came bumping and swaying along the edge of the field, its bell ringing urgently and pointlessly.

Stroma went home at the end of the week. The newspapers were full of reports of the battle taking place between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Streams of German bombers were coming over every day to bomb the aerodromes in the south of England and with them came German fighters, like the one she and Rosanne had seen. There were lists of casualties every day in
The Times
– RAF, Royal Navy and Army.

Towards the end of August, Hamish turned up on leave, looking very smart in his sub-lieutenant's uniform. He had finished his training at HMS King Alfred. Soon he would be off to war. He would be ‘in the thick of it', he told Stroma enthusiastically.

‘Where will they send you?'

‘Don't know yet. It's on the cards that we'll be sent to stooge around the Channel – just in case the Germans are stupid enough to try and invade us.'

‘Everyone seems to think they will.'

Hamish shook his head firmly. ‘Well, I don't. They haven't yet succeeded in wiping out the RAF, and they'd have to do that before they have a hope. Anyway, they won't get past the Royal Navy, I promise you.'

‘Will it be a destroyer, like you wanted?'

‘Don't know that either. I hope so. They're terrific attack ships and I can't wait to have a real crack at the U-boats. They'll be infesting the North Atlantic. They've got it far too easy now.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Since France fell, you chump. The Germans have occupied all the French ports on the Atlantic so the U-boats will be camped right on the doorstep. Before that they had to go hundreds of miles to get anywhere near our convoys. Still, we've got a lot of new tricks up our sleeve, so they won't be having it all their own way, I can tell you.'

Hamish stayed for a few more days before he received orders to join his ship at Liverpool. To his disappointment it wasn't a destroyer in the end but a Flower class corvette, and, to his disgust, her name was HMS
Buttercup
.

The Germans bombed London on 7th September. It had been a beautiful sunny day and Stroma had spent it reading a book in a deckchair in the garden; she was still there when the air-raid siren suddenly started wailing. Her father was at the hospital, but her mother came running out of the house, carrying Delilah under one arm and a struggling Kipper under the other. They went and sat in the Anderson shelter with the slugs. Delilah settled quietly on one of the bunks, but Kipper, claws bared, escaped outside with an indignant yowl. Cats weren't stupid.

The bombers were evidently heading towards the East End of London – hundreds of them, by the sound of it. The drone of their engines was like the rumble of thunder, and their bombs screamed as they fell and exploded with a dull crump. The raid went on until past four o'clock the next morning and when Stroma and her mother crawled out of the shelter at the All Clear they saw that the whole eastern sky was fiery red.

The bombers had gone for the docks. There were frightening photographs in the newspapers – pictures of blazing warehouses, terrace homes reduced to rubble, fire hoses snaking through dockland streets, exhausted firemen, wounded civilians and bodies.

And the bombing went on and on. Night after night, regular as clockwork, the German planes came over to bomb London – not just the East End now, but the rest of the city. The first ones would drop their incendiary bombs to set fire to buildings, then the ones following would aim for the fires. The anti-aircraft gunners did their best with ear-splitting barrages, so did the searchlight crews and the balloon operators, but they couldn't halt the Germans. Stroma's father was dealing with casualties at the hospital and hardly ever came home, and she and her mother spent the nights in the shelter where spiders had moved in to join the slugs. They took blankets and pillows but sleep was impossible with a raid going on overhead. How could you fall asleep when any moment you could be blown to smithereens? Stroma lay wide awake, listening to the bombers and the bombs and the guns while Delilah, oblivious to it all, slept curled up at the end of the bunk.

She went back to school by train for the start of the autumn term. Paddington Station had lost most of its glass roof and evacuees crowded the platforms – little children wearing luggage labels tied to their clothes and herded by large WVS women in green and maroon uniforms. Some of the children were crying but most of them were dazed and silent. Out in the country it was peaceful and although there were air-raid shelters at the school and everyone carried gas masks, they were never put to use.

The Germans went on bombing London and in November they started to attack other cities – Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Sheffield, Manchester. Coming back from school for the Christmas holidays, Stroma saw the damage as the train approached Paddington. Houses destroyed or blown wide open, floors collapsed, curtains left hanging at shattered windows, fireplaces still clinging to walls, a bath balanced crookedly on a beam.

The house opposite Stroma's home had taken a direct hit and the family who had lived there were all killed. Up and down the road, windows and doors had been blown out, roofs wrecked, broken glass and shrapnel swept into the gutters.

Hamish wrote a letter. Of course, he couldn't say where he was or anything about his ship. Just that he was fine, that the food was OK and that he was learning a lot.

Christmas was quiet – not counting the air raids. The blackout and the bombs made going out to the cinema or theatre risky, so it was boring too, and most nights were spent in the shelter at the bottom of the garden. Condensation ran down the iron walls, the blankets felt ringing wet and there were pools of stagnant water on the floor.

On the last night of the year, Kipper went missing. As usual, he had refused to come near the shelter and he didn't turn up for his breakfast in the morning. Stroma hunted all over the house and garden, and walked up and down the neighbouring streets, calling his name, but there was no sign of him. He was never seen again.

The U-boat left the port of Lorient in France on a bleak January morning. The off-duty watch were lined up smartly on the upper deck and an army brass band played on the quayside where a large crowd had gathered. Reinhard had a clear view of the scene from the winter garden behind the bridge: the musicians puffing and blowing, their jack-booted conductor chopping away with his baton, the crowd's faces all turned to watch the boat casting off – other U-boat men, soldiers, dockyard workers, nurses from the military hospital. It would have been much the same in his father's day, in a different war.

A small number of the watchers were French girls. Among them, he noticed, was Celeste, who had enlivened his shore leave. He could see her wearing a coquettish little red hat with black feathers, standing on tiptoe to wave and smile and blow kisses. He rather despised her and the other French girls for giving themselves so willingly to the enemy occupiers of their country, but perhaps he ought to despise himself instead? In any case, it was very likely that some of them were actually informers who would give away the time of a U-boat's departure to the enemy. Perhaps Celeste herself, who was still blowing kisses? And, if not the whores, then the dockyard workers. There were ears listening and eyes watching everywhere.

The massive bomb-proof concrete and steel-doored bunker that would provide a row of pens for the U-boat flotillas was beginning to rise up against the skyline. Before long, boats returning from a patrol would be able to enter a flooded pen directly and tie-up well out of sight and reach of the enemy. They would be repaired, refuelled, re-armed, re-stocked under safe cover and emerge again like wolves quitting their hidden lair. He liked the analogy: it was apt. A U-boat was very much like a wolf – a sleek, grey killer that hunted its victims by stealth and cunning, sometimes in packs, sometimes alone. And other captured French ports would provide similar lairs – Brest, St Nazaire, La Pallice, Bordeaux . . . all within easy reach of the North Atlantic and the enemy.