The Anderson shelter was a corrugated steel shell, six-by-six-by-four, buried to a depth of four feet in the yard behind the house and covered with two feet of soil. She shuddered when she stooped to enter the shelter, a seeping, insect-ridden tomb. Her slippers splashed in the mud. She hesitantly settled onto the plank seat, then draped the blankets over herself and the baby. The dank shelter smelled of earth and sausage.
She glanced again at her baby, still at her breast. A tear slid down her cheek, but she caught it before it dropped on John. Maybe the war would spare him. So far it had. In all the excitement, he hadn’t missed a swallow.
Archibald Fair argued he was the first to know the invasion had begun. “And I came close to being the first dead, too.”
Fair was a Home Guardsman, a pharmacist—“Chemist,” he corrected me—who was assigned to guard a VP, a vulnerable point, a two-lane bridge near his home. XII Corps of the Home Guard—by then officially called the Local Defence Volunteers—had posted an entire platoon, over forty men, at the bridge. That early morning Fair was some fifty yards downstream from the bridge. It was an antiquated stone structure, but the Ministry of Works had determined it capable of the heaviest loads, and the span had endured many Allied armored convoys.
He had served his time in the Great War and still limped from a bullet that shot off much of his heel. He had doubted the Home Guard would take him. But the Guard’s only requirement was that the volunteer “be capable of free movement.” That he was, even if he hobbled.
Fair was stationed in tall grass and among bushes along the brook. The night was as black as he ever remembered a night, and he could not see the bridge, much less the fellow Guardsman he knew was a few paces up the stream.
An Invasion Alert No. 2. The Germans could come tonight, his lieutenant had warned. Judging from the drone of airplanes overhead, which had begun in earnest about midnight, the lieutenant might be right for once. Fair stroked the stock of his rifle, but was not reassured. The weapon dated from the Indian Mutiny, a relic removed from a display cabinet at the Imperial War Museum. German propaganda called the Home Guard franc tireur, a murder band, but at times like these, late on a lonely night, he felt more a member of a Broomstick Army, another German sobriquet.
He soothed himself by repeating over and over, “Those wretched rats are wrong and not soothing,” the phrase he had been told any suspected German spy attempting to pass himself off as English would mangle in an interrogation.
Archibald Fair heard nothing but the planes. No movement in the grass, no tossing of branches, not even the whisper of the passing water. He had thought during the Great War that he developed a sixth sense for imminent danger. It failed him that night.
A hand reached out of the darkness from behind Fair, cupped his chin, and yanked his head back. A knife blade slashed across his neck, and Fair toppled into the grass. Heavy boots stepped across him and disappeared along the embankment.
“The Lord pulled my number that night,” he said after the war. “But the German commando bungled it.”
Fair told me the German must have been holding the knife backward, so the blunt edge of the blade creased his neck.
I replied this was unlikely, given the probable caliber of the commando.
He then said perhaps the blade didn’t touch him at all, but only the blade guard did.
Implausible, I said.
He replied with force, “Then you tell me how it happened.” He added, “Cheeky colonials,” under his breath.
I had no better explanation.
Fair was in the grass only a few seconds. He rose to his knees, lifted his weapon, said a short prayer to the saint of antique rifles, and squeezed the trigger. The German blew down and stayed down. Screaming an alarm, Fair dashed toward the bridge, almost tumbling over the commando’s body.
A yellow flare was instantly launched from the east side of the span, and gunfire erupted from all directions. Fair fell again, this time with a bullet in his hip. He could recall only the beginning of the fierce firefight for his bridge, a fight the Home Guard lost, but for which his unit received the first LDV battle honor of the war.
Richard Richman had been called away from his vicarage after evensong to attend to a parishioner, Agnes Smathers, who had been dying, on and off, for much of the year. This had been another false alarm, but the old woman hadn’t come around until after one in the morning, gasping and fanning herself with her hand and begging the vicar’s pardon again. The vicar wondered whether the Church of England maintained records on which of its faithful had received the greatest number of last offices before finally expiring. Richman wanted to nominate Mrs. Smathers. The road to her small home was well worn by his Austin Twelve.
The war had not touched Richman yet, and he preferred it that way. He was sixty-four years old, a peaceable man, seldom driven to anger, always forgiving. He had been too old for the Great War, and he remembered being glad of it. Let the others do the fighting. He had not been engulfed by war fever then or now. He might even have called himself a pacifist, but not to anyone else.
He shifted the Austin into a lower gear and crested a small rise. He drove slowly, unable to see much beyond the auto’s bonnet. The headlights had been covered with the official pattern mask, resembling a black coffee tin with three slits in the end.
His church had not sustained bomb damage, but his ministry had suffered nonetheless. The bells in the tower had been silenced, to be used only as alarms. And because his church hall was the largest room in the village, it had become a wet canteen, serving beer to servicemen, of all the shocking sacrileges. But he had forgiven the military authorities for that outrage, just as he would forgive the Germans once they came. Absolution was his business. And he would meet the German invaders with the dignity and forgiveness required by his station.
The Austin rounded a corner, paralleling a stone fence overgrown with ivy. He should have been able to see the church, another fifty yards along the road, had the windows not been covered. All of them were papered over, except his beloved rose window, the only stained glass in the chapel, which allowed little light through, and, as he told me, “God would have struck me dead had I covered it.” Looking for the church, seeking comfort in its solid, familiar lines, he saw instead a German soldier jump from the fence to the road.
A German, no question, even when seen in the meager light of the Austin’s lamps. Long-necked helmet, stick grenades, and a vicious little machine pistol. The commando may have been as surprised as the vicar, because the German tried to do two things at once, raise his weapon and reclimb the stone fence.
“I had given myself over to God decades before,” Richman told me, “and I think at that instant God gave me back. I have utterly no other explanation for the sudden fury that gripped me.”
The vicar stamped on the accelerator. The Austin surged forward. Richman twisted the steering wheel, sending the auto toward the wall. The German managed to take two strides before the fender rammed him, bowling him against the wall. The Austin glanced the stones.
The good vicar, apparently as fearless as he was peaceable, craned his neck out the window to see the commando attempting to rise. The Schmeisser was on the ground, as were two grenades. His helmet was in the middle of the road, upside down and still spinning. Richman slapped the gearshift into reverse.
“I think it was the only time in all the years I owned that Austin Twelve that I actually kicked up gravel.”