In Farleigh Field: A Novel of World War II

Pamela looked at his retreating back with admiration. He represented the backbone of Britain at this moment. A skinny, awkward bookworm, yet determined to keep going for as long as it took to defeat Hitler. She felt ashamed of her own depression and lack of faith as she went to retrieve her bicycle and rode into town.

Her digs at Mrs. Adams’s boarding-house were close to the station, and a train whistled as it approached the platform. If my parents could see where I’m living now, Pamela thought, with a grim smile. But then they had no idea where she was working or what she was doing. Under the Official Secrets Act, she was not allowed to divulge anything to anybody. It hadn’t been easy to persuade her father to let her leave home, but she had turned twenty-one and come out into society, so he could hardly forbid her. And when she had said, “I want to do my bit, Pah. You said it’s up to us to set an example, and I’m setting one,” he had reluctantly agreed.

She dismounted from her bike and wheeled it along the pavement. She felt sick with hunger and tiredness, but she sighed as she wondered what breakfast would await her today: the lumpy porridge made with water? Bread fried in the drippings from last Sunday’s scrag end of mutton? Toast with a scrape of margarine and watery marmalade if they were lucky. And her mind drifted to the spread on the sideboard back at Farleigh: the kidneys and bacon and kedgeree and scrambled eggs. How long before she could go home? But if she went home, how would she force herself to come back?

There was a newsstand outside the station, and a headline read “Hero Comes Home.” Pamela glanced at the front page on the pile of newspapers. Since the war began and paper was scarce, the print had become smaller and more crowded and the pictures tiny. But there, halfway down the front page of the Daily Express, she spotted a grainy photograph of a man in RAF uniform and recognised the jaunty grin. She fished in her pocket for tuppence and took the newspaper. “Ace pilot Flight Lieutenant Jeremy Prescott escapes against all odds from German prisoner-of-war camp. Only survivor of a breakout.” Before she could read any more, her legs buckled under her, and she sank to the ground.

Instantly there were people around her, arms lifting her up.

“Steady on, love. I’ve got yer,” one voice said.

“Bring her over to the bench, Bert, and someone go in the station café for a cup of tea. She’s as white as a sheet.”

It was the kindness more than anything that produced a great heaving sob from deep within Pamela. All the tension, the long nights, the hard work, the depressing news escaped from her in that one sob, and following it, the tears started streaming down her cheeks.

She felt herself carried and placed gently on a seat. She found she was still clutching the newspaper.

“What was it, love—bad news?” the woman at the newspaper stand asked.

Pamela’s body was still shaking with sobs. “No, it’s good news,” she managed to gasp at last. “He’s alive. He’s safe. He’s coming home.”



That afternoon she received a message to report to Commander Travis. Her heart skipped a beat. What could she have done wrong? Had someone reported the incident at the station? She was heartily ashamed and embarrassed about her complete lack of control. Pah would have been mortified, would’ve told her she had let the side down. And now she worried: Had she said anything she shouldn’t? She had heard rumours about people who had said too much, breached security. They disappeared and were never seen again. There were nervous jokes about where they had gone, but nobody laughed too much. The jokes might have been true.

But then one was not summoned to the deputy director for everyday matters. She jumped on her bike and pedalled back to the campus. Commander Travis looked up from his paperwork as she came in. He motioned to the chair beside his desk. She perched on the edge of it.

“I hear you had a little trouble earlier today, Lady Pamela?” he said. The formality of her title in itself was worrying.

“Trouble, sir?”

“I hear you collapsed on the street outside the station. Are you not eating enough? I know the food is not exactly always appetising.”

“I’m eating enough, sir.”

“The night shifts? They take their toll on the body, I know.”

“But we all have to rotate and do our share. I don’t enjoy them. I never seem to get enough sleep when I’m on night shift, but it must be the same for everyone else.”

“You are quite well?” he asked, giving her a knowing stare. He waited a second or two before he added, “Do you have a particular attachment to one of our young men?”

She actually laughed then. “I’m not pregnant if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“You don’t look like the fainting type to me.” He leaned closer to her across his desk. “So what’s up?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I feel so foolish. And you’re right. I don’t make a habit of doing that sort of thing.”

He thumbed through her file. “How long since you’ve taken leave?”

“I went home for a couple of days at Christmas, sir.”

“Then you’re overdue.”

“But we’re understaffed in Hut Three. It wouldn’t be right to . . .”

“Lady Pamela. I expect our people to do first-class work. I can’t have them cracking up on us. Take a week off.”

“But there would be nobody to take my place, and we can’t have . . .”

“When does your current rotation finish?”

“At the end of the week.”

“Then work your rotation and go home then.”

“Oh, but sir . . .”

“That’s an order, Lady Pamela. Go home. Have a good time and come back refreshed.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

It was only when she came down the steps of the big house that the full implication of this struck her. She would be going home, and Jeremy was safely back in Britain. He might already be at Nethercote. Suddenly everything was right with the world.





CHAPTER TWO


Farleigh Place


Near Sevenoaks, Kent

May 1941



It was the gamekeeper’s boy who spotted it first. He had been out at dawn checking the traps (since wartime rationing had meant that rabbit was on the menu, even at the big house). It was a chore he had taken on willingly, loving the freedom and solitude of the countryside, still in awe of the wideness and greenness of it all, of the immense arc of sky like pale-blue glass overhead. After the flat in Stepney and the alleyway with its small strip of grubby sky, Farleigh still seemed too improbable to be real.