IN THE LONG SUMMER OF 1940, Lewis and William learned to identify planes. Edwina had managed to procure black silhouette cards from a friend in the Royal Observer Corps, and every free afternoon they bicycled up into the hills and found a spot where they could scan the sky, cards at the ready.
The approaching drone of an engine brought a rush of excitement, and they soon recognized some planes from theengine noise alone. Junkers 88, Heinkels, Messerschmitts, Wellingtons, Blenheims, Lancs—they wagered on their favorites. At first the German planes were only occasional raiders, and after the first few it didn’t occur to the boys to be afraid.
To them the war still seemed a distant and imaginary thing. They played “English and Germans” with the other children in the village streets, and in the dark evenings they sat round the kitchen radio with John and Cook, listening to Tommy Handley’s ITMA and “Appointment with Fear,” which made them feel much more frightened than the news broadcasts, and Lewis learned to imitate Lord Haw-Haw so well that he kept Cook in stitches.
But as the weeks passed, more and more airplanes passed overhead and the radio broadcasts became more dire. France fell and Italy entered the war; John Pebbles joined the Home Guard, drilling on the Downs with an old shotgun borrowed from the Hall’s gun room; Holland fell, then Belgium, and people began to say that on still nights you could hear a distant rumbling, the sound of the guns in France. Lewis got himself up in the small hours on several occasions and went out in the yard to listen, but all he ever heard was the hooting of the owl that lived in the barn and the shuffling noises made by the horses.
In June, when the evacuations began from Dunkirk, Winston Churchill, now prime minister, pledged over the wireless, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender,” and Lewis tried hard to imagine that there were people fighting, and that his brothers were somewhere among them. Inspired by Mr. Churchill’s valiant words, he and William had long discussions about how they would resist if they were invaded, and in a clearing in the woods they made a makeshift shelter from an old tent of Mr. Cuddy’s and some tinned goods they had begged off Cook.
