“I think I know,” I said.
“How could you?” Resentment crept into her voice, as if I had trespassed.
“You and Daphne. You’re both wonderful, special in your own way. Some of that comes from your father-how you were brought up, sure-but there has to be quite a bit of your mother in both of you. Look to the best of yourself.”
Diana was quiet for a minute, staring into space, thinking.
“Yes, I never thought about it that way. Does the best of you come from your father, Billy?”
“I think so. My best efforts, anyway. I don’t know if I can ever live up to him.”
“That’s the same mistake Thomas always makes. He thinks he needs to equal Father in everything. But that goes after it backward, don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t.”
“If you want to play that silly game of competition between father and son, think about what your father was doing when he was your age, not what he’s accomplished since then. What was your father doing when he was as old as you are?”
“Shipping out from the States in the last war,” I said, seeing where she was going.
“Was he an officer?”
“No. He ended up a sergeant.”
“See?”
I did. We laughed a bit, and I tried not to think about Dad’s time in the trenches, and how all the gold braid in the army wouldn’t make up for living through that. We talked some more about Seaton Manor, horses mostly.
“Then the war came,” she sighed, a sigh burdened with all the sadness the room could hold. Memories of childhood at the manor with Daphne and their brother, Thomas; growing up with horses and the peaceful English countryside all around them; replaced with bombing raids, defeat, and death.
“Thomas was the first to leave, when his Territorial Army unit was called up. The Essex Brigade.”
“He’s in North Africa now?”
“Yes, did Daphne tell you? Thank God he wasn’t at Tobruk. Twentyfive thousand boys captured, can you believe it?” Neither of us could. I tried to imagine what twenty-five thousand men marching into prison camps looked like, and failed.
“Did you and Daphne join at the same time?”
“No, you must know it’s always up to the oldest to break new ground. Daphne was quite smart about it, too, joining the WRENs. It appealed to Father, with his naval background, even though he was against it at first. When I joined, there was hardly a squabble.”
“Why didn’t you join the WRENs, too?”
She shrugged, dismissing the idea of following in the footsteps of her older sister. I knew the look.
“I wanted to do something on my own, to go to a place Daphne and Father never had been. I heard that FANY units were being trained as telephonists to serve at headquarters in the field. It seemed terribly romantic at the time, to free a man to fight and be at the front at the same time.”
“In my limited experience, HQ is never at the front.”
“Well, closer than anywhere in England, and closer than we ever thought it would be.”
“Blitzkrieg,” I said, sounding out the word the world had never even heard of just a few short years ago.
“Yes. I was with Lord Gort’s headquarters, as I said. We were in Belgium. It was May, and I remember there were flowers blooming everywhere. Warm days and sunshine greeted us. We had our communications all set up; everything was working perfectly. The Germans hadn’t attacked yet. They were to our front, the Belgians on our left, and the French to our right.”
“And then?”
“Then the Germans were everywhere. They hit us from the front and cut right through the French lines south of us. Panzers and Stukas, that’s all anyone talked about. We had to fall back, and at first it seemed just like a setback, that we’d take up new positions and stop them. But nothing stopped them. Telephone lines were all cut, we pulled out, and found ourselves on a road full of refugees. The Stukas came, making that awful screaming sound, almost worse than the bombs.”
She was wringing her hands, staring off into space, listening for the sound of dive-bombers. I had heard them, too. In newsreels. The Stuka dive-bomber had sirens built into their wings, so when they dove on a target it made a god-awful screaming noise. Maybe I had seen her in one of those newsreels, a haunted face in a truckload of FANYs, while I waited for the first reel of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
“Pull back, pull back, that’s all we ever heard. The Germans started out in front of us, and then we couldn’t withdraw fast enough to keep them out of our rear areas. Headquarters actually was in the front lines, since we were nearly surrounded.” She laughed bitterly.
“But you got out OK? From Dunkirk?” I wanted this story to end well, but I knew there was something else, something that had happened to her there.
“Yes, I got out. On a destroyer. We had been pressed into service as nurses, since we all had some basic first-aid training. There were a lot of wounded. Quite a lot. We took doors from houses when we ran out of stretchers.”
Diana wasn’t talking to me anymore. Her voice was low as her eyes stared straight ahead and saw the ghosts of Dunkirk, long lines of men standing in the sand awaiting deliverance or death. Her cheeks were streaked with tears as she told of the wounded men being loaded onto the destroyer, and tending to them on decks slippery with blood.
“It was terrible, not while I was actually doing something, but as soon as I stopped moving for a minute, it would just all be too much. When we left the pier it was crowded with men, some yelling and screaming, but most silently waiting their turn. I thought I had seen the worst of it at that moment, sailing away aboard that destroyer, watching those faces on the shore disappear as we headed into the Channel.”
She shook her head, wiping tears from her eyes as she did so. I took her hand in mine, gently, to let her know I’d wait. I could hear the alarm clock on the nightstand ticking. Her hand slipped from mine as she spoke again.
“We heard aircraft, high above us, and we thought they were ours, since they didn’t attack. But they must have been German fighters, flying cover. Some of them dove down and strafed the smaller boats. I was standing at the rail on the stern deck, checking my life vest, when I heard them. Stukas.” She spat out the word, and pressed her hands to her ears.
“Everything was so loud,” she said, her eyes squeezed shut and her head bowed, as if she were taking cover. “The Stukas and those sirens, the guns on the destroyer firing up at them, some of the men screaming, everything happening while the ship was zigzagging at top speed. We had to hang on to the men on stretchers so they wouldn’t slide off the deck. There were men everywhere-below decks, on every surface above deck. Everyone wanted to get out. Isn’t that funny? They were the lucky ones!”
“You don’t have to-”
“The first group missed us. I could see their bombs as they let them go. Each one would dive, drop its bomb, and then zoom up, as if it was suddenly lighter than air. It was almost beautiful. I followed each bomb down, and each one missed, either to the side or behind us. We were drenched by the splashes, but it seemed we were charmed. Five planes, five misses.”
Diana looked up, as if those bombs were still falling above her. I wasn’t even there.
“But then five more came, right after those. The gunners were still firing at the last of them when the second wave came. The first bomb hit just forward of the bow, but it must have damaged the ship. We were all thrown forward, and it started to slow. The second hit square on the forward deck. There was a huge explosion, and I was thrown backward by the force of it. Black smoke was everywhere. I couldn’t see a thing. I could feel the heat, though, coming up from the bow. We were practically dead in the water, just our forward motion keeping us going. Then the ship started to list.”