Weaver

I

31 May – 1 June 1940

Mary Wooler heard about the desperate evacuation from France on the evening of the Friday, 31 May, on the BBC news. It was the first time the public had been told about it. The operation had already been underway for five days.

She spent a sleepless night, mostly on the phone to the War Office, trying to find out what had become of her son. It sounded as if the struggle to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk was failing. It was chaotic, an unfolding disaster. Nevertheless she was told that elements of Gary's division were scheduled to be brought back to Hastings, on the south coast, if they made it back at all. So that was where she had to be.

On the Saturday morning she set off from her rented apartment in London in her hired Austin Seven, with its white-painted bumpers and plastic visors on the headlamps, to drive down to the coast.

The drive ought to have been simple enough. Her plan was to head roughly south-south-east, passing through Croydon, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, before cutting through the Sussex countryside until she came to Hastings via a little place called Battle, where the English had once faced the Normans. That was the theory.

But she never knew where the hell she was. Even as she drove she saw gangs of workmen cutting down direction markers, and unscrewing metal plates with village names. No names! She was a journalist and historian who had always made her living from words, and she thought how odd it was that to protect their country the English were stripping it of its words, of the layer of meaning that gave the landscape its human context: words that were a mish-mash of Norman French and Norse and Old English and even a bit of Latin, relics of other tumultuous days, words like bullet holes. Well, it might or might not confuse General Guderian and his Panzers, but it sure as hell confused Mary.

Still, the sun was a beacon in the clear sky. She took her bearings from that and just kept on running south. It wasn't that big a country, and she had to hit the coast in the end.

And meanwhile this first day of June was exquisitely lovely, one of those early summer days that England served up so effortlessly. Over a crumpled green carpet of fields and hedgerows, the birds soared like Spitfires. It didn't make sense, Mary thought. How could all this coexist with the horrors of the European war, unfolding just a few tens of miles away? Either the war wasn't real, or the summer's day wasn't; they didn't fit in the same universe.

Once she was through the last of the inland towns and neared the coast, the signs of war became more evident. There were pillboxes at the road junctions, some of them so new you could see the concrete glisten, still wet. She was nervous every time she crossed a bridge, for the Home Guard were mining the bridges, Great War veterans and kids too young to be conscripted who might or might not know what they were doing with high explosives.

And then, when she got close enough to glimpse the sea from the higher ground, she came upon more traffic. Most of it was heading the other way, inland, a steady stream of private cars, families, mum, dad, the kids, the dog and the budgie in its cage, with roof racks piled high with suitcases and even bits of furniture. Despite the official orders to 'stay put', as Mary had heard the new Prime Minister Churchill saying on the BBC, whole towns were draining northward, looking for safety. And in among the fleeing English were refugees who must come from much further away, buses and lorries full of civilians, women and children and old folk, and a sprinkling of men of military age. Jammed in, grimy, exhausted, they stared out at the glistening English landscape as they passed.

At one crossroads there was a hold-up. An Army truck had thrown a tyre, and a couple of soldiers were labouring to replace it. The soldiers had stripped to their khaki shirts in the heat of the summer sun, and as they struggled with the heavy wheels they bantered and laughed, cigarettes dangling from their lips. The traffic had to inch past, the laden buses and trucks bumping up on the verge to get by.

Mary found herself stuck opposite a bus that was marked for Bexhill and Boreham Street. She looked into the eyes of one little boy, who sat on the lap of a woman, presumably his mother. He was maybe eight or nine. His hair was mussed, and the dirt on his face was streaked by dried tears. He wore what looked like a school blazer, but the colour was odd – bright orange, not the English fashion. He said something, but she couldn't make out his lip pattern. But then he could be speaking French, or Dutch, or Walloon – maybe even German. She mouthed back, 'Welcome to England.'