As they spilled out of the car and ran towards the gathered onlookers, the smell caught Lewis in the throat—the hot oiliness of burning fuel combined with the sickly sweetness of roasting meat.
“What’s happened?” he heard Edwina ask.
“A Wellington bomber,” a man said, and when he turned towards them Lewis saw that his face was streaked with soot and sweat. “Must have collided with the German plane. We couldn’t get anyone out.”
“Roasted,” said Terence Pawley beside him, with what sounded almost like glee. “The lot of them. Serves them right, bloody Huns.”
“Shut up, Terence.” The sooty-faced man turned towards him angrily. “There’s our boys dying in there as well.”
Lewis thought he heard a faint sound, an echo of a scream, and the smell threatened to rise up in his throat and choke him. He was able to make it to the edge of the green before he threw up his supper. And then he realized that he was crying, and that William was beside him, white-faced with distress.
“They must have known they were going to die, trapped like animals,” William said, but Lewis only straightened up mutely and wiped a shaking hand across his mouth.
They watched from a distance until the flames died and the wreckage took shape in the slow-spreading dawn. TheGerman plane was revealed as a Junkers 88, and there were bits of both planes scattered all over the village. “A miracle,” everyone murmured, that none of the houses had been hit. As the day wore on, it became evident that the debris was not strictly mechanical—the postmistress fainted dead away upon finding a severed leg in her garden, and other grisly bits of human remains continued to turn up for days afterwards. The younger children hunted for souvenirs with great enthusiasm, but for Lewis and William the war had abruptly ceased to be a game.
As the hot days of August wore on, the raids into London became more frequent. And although life went on much as before, Lewis woke often in the night from dreams of fire that left him heartsick with fear.
On Saturday, the 7th of September, a few minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, the boys were bicycling up Holmbury Hill when they heard the drone of engines overhead. Both stopped and glanced up—checking almost automatically now to see whether they were fighters or bombers—to find the sky filled with German planes. Hundreds of them—heavy, pregnant bombers surrounded by squads of smaller fighters—swept in majestic, inexorable order across the sky towards London.
