“I raised my hands to surrender, but nobody was interested,” Hathaway told me. “Hurt my feelings a bit, I don’t mind telling you.”
Moments later the glider was empty of the living. Wrapping his blanket around himself, Hathaway tumbled off his bed and stepped over the rubble to look through the gap in his wall along the glider’s fuselage. He narrowed his eyes, trying to see through the night. Wehrmacht troops were gathering at the edge of the pasture. One other Gigant had landed safely, but the third had slammed into a post head on, cleaving the glider lengthwise almost to its rudder. Only a few Germans were emerging from the metal carcass.
“They took off at a trot, the lot of them, leaving the wounded and their aircraft behind.”
Using a crowbar and wire cutters, Hathaway spent the rest of the night freeing two injured Germans from the Gigant. He hauled them as carefully as he could out of the glider and lay them on his bed. One seemed grateful for the water and headache powder the dairyman gave him. The other was dead by the time Hathaway offered him the cup.
The dairyman recalled, “Only at dawn did I have time to wonder about the rest of England and what was to become of us all.”
Or perhaps the first person to know England’s hour had come was Jane Ridgeway, who early that morning was walking along the river near her farm, picking her way in the darkness along the path, knowing that in only five hours she would be trudging the opposite direction, along the same route, returning to her cows.
The work on the farm was endless, and she was a city girl, not accustomed to the hours or the toil. And worse, she had volunteered for it. She sighed, hitching the handles of her shoulder bag higher. She brushed her rough hands together. In moments of self-pity, she seized on the calluses that had grown across her hands in a broad array. Calluses on calluses. They would never go away, she thought angrily. She had always been proud of her graceful hands, with their slim fingers and long nails.
She laughed bitterly as she remembered all the time she had spent practicing her gestures in front of a mirror, trying to imitate Vivien Leigh, whom she had seen in Gone With the Wind three times at the Empire Cinema in London. Now her fingers looked little better than the tines of a manure fork.
Jane stumbled over a stone on the path and quickly righted herself, once again adjusting the hand bag. To her left was an embankment, spotted with bushes and a few trees, which led down to the river. When the clouds parted for a moment, she could see yellow, fleeting ripples on the silent water. She walked along in the darkness and did not look toward the clouds when she heard the airplanes. They were always overhead, the RAF or the Luftwaffe. She hadn’t been swept up in the plane-spotting rage early in the war and had never been able to tell the difference.
Jane Ridgeway was a member of the Women’s Land Army. She had volunteered out of a sense of duty, unlike many girls on her assigned farm, who had joined to escape the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and she received no little satisfaction from that fact. She had been given four weeks’ training and was paid twenty-eight shillings a week, from which were deducted room and board, leaving her almost nothing. All day, from darkness to darkness, she milked cows and pitched hay, cleaned stalls and lifted milk tins. One of the few rewards of her service was her uniform: khaki breeches, a green jumper, and a hat with a broad brim. She was in livery, which was more than many of the girls at home could say.
She and six other Landgirls were billeted in a nearby cottage, and she was only a hundred yards from the house when she heard a distant splash, then another and another, reminding her of waves breaking against the shore, a sound she had grown to love during her family’s holidays in Brighton before the war. She turned to the river and held her hand to her eyes as if shading them from sunlight. She saw nothing but the emptiness of night.
Again the splash came, and in the darkness she saw a gray haze hovering between banks of the river. She heard a man’s cry.
Another rent in the clouds allowed the moonlight through. The haze took form as a parachute, and it plunged into the river. Four others already dappled the black water, spread over the surface like stains. An unseen man still struggled below one of them, turning and twisting the fabric, but soon was still. The moonlight held, and the sky soon was filled with parachutes, descending along the waterway.
Another soldier hit the water and quickly sank from sight, the parachute floating on the water, marking his end. Then another, who disappeared just as quickly. The paratroopers’ heavy packs and weaponry acted as anchors. Perhaps a few saw their fate in the sudden break of moonlight, because they furiously yanked at their lines. It was too late. One by one, they followed each other into the river, which allowed little struggle before taking them.
Jane Ridgeway counted twelve paratroopers, all drowned, before she started to run. Other soldiers may have landed in the field on the other side of the river, but she could not be sure because the night had closed in again. Breathless and holding her hands in front of her to ward off branches, she ran toward the cottage.
Or Elizabeth Cooper may have been the first to know. Early that morning she was nursing her three-month-old, John. She walked to and fro in her home, cooing to him and rocking him, kissing his bald head. John, she suspected, needed none of this affection. Food was his only concern. God, he was an eater. Because he regularly drained her and bawled for more, she kept an extra ration of milk in the cooler. Ten pounds, two ounces at birth, and he had been slapping on the weight since. Eat and sleep, give her a grin once in a while. He did little else. She loved him for it.
Mrs. Cooper knew of the danger that night, of the invasion alert. She had been preparing her home for it: hiding her mother’s silver tea service under a floorboard in the barn; disabling her automobile by removing the rotor arm; storing a string of sausages—containing so little meat the British called them “breadcrumbs in battle dress”—in the Anderson shelter. Even little John had been swept up in the war. Instead of the Marmet pram he deserved, he had to make do with the government’s utility pram, a fragile box perched on hard tires, with no springs or padding. She had paid ten pounds for the pram, and thought it utterly worthless, until a neighbor offered her fifteen. John would have to make do until his father, an RN officer stationed at Folkestone, could return on leave to improvise a proper one.
Mrs. Cooper told me after the war that she had no reason to walk to her parlor window, other than to move John about. She turned off the table lamp, then pulled aside the blackout curtain. She leaned an elbow against the middle pane for support. She gazed out, seeing nothing in the darkness, aware only of the warm comfort of the baby’s sucking.
The room flashed white and just as abruptly returned to darkness, as if from a photographer’s bulb. The light was followed by a sharp report that rattled the window against her elbow. She yanked the baby away from the glass and covered his face with her hand. A second blast illuminated the road in front of her home, followed by a series of other detonations.
She saw a telephone pole begin to topple, lit by flashes that made the falling pole appear jerky, like an old cinema. Other poles followed like dominoes, filling the road with wire. Five or six explosions, she could not be sure, and then it was over except for the ringing in her ears. John did not seem to notice and continued to empty his mother.
Mrs. Cooper rushed out of the room and grabbed a few blankets from the hall chest with her free hand. She pushed aside the blackout cloth, wrestled with the knob, then nudged the back door open with her hip. She quickly crossed the yard.