Page 26 of V2

One of the section officers clapped her hands. ‘Very well, listen, please. As you can see, our transport is ready. The sergeants are to travel on the lorry.’ The announcement was greeted by a few good-humoured groans. ‘Sorry, girls. Officers – you’ll be travelling in the jeeps.’

Kay picked up her suitcase. The officers were arranging themselves into groups of three – two to sit in the back and one up front next to the driver. She didn’t want to travel with the wing commander and Flight Officer Sitwell, so she hung around the rear of the column and waited for someone to take pity on her. Finally two women detached themselves from the others and came over to her – one quite tall, blonde, plump and pretty, with a wide, open face; the other thinner, shorter, dark-haired.

The blonde stuck out her hand. ‘Hello, I’m Joan Thomas.’

‘Kay Caton-Walsh.’

‘And this is Louie Robinson.’

They shook hands.

‘Front or back?’ asked Joan.

‘Whichever you prefer.’

‘Why don’t we go in the back and you take the front?’

The two women climbed into the jeep with their suitcases. Kay got into the front. There wasn’t much space. She had to twist her knees to the side and clutch her suitcase to her chest. The driver nodded affably. ‘Ladies.’

Louie said, ‘We’re officers to you, Private.’

‘Sorry, ma’am.’

The jeep with the machine gun mounted at the back jolted past them and took up position at the head of the convoy. Kay said, ‘We have an armed escort?’

‘There are still a few Germans about,’ said the driver. He started the engine. ‘You’ll need to keep your eyes open.’

The column moved off. Kay could see the pale faces of a couple of the sergeants staring out of the gloom from the back of the covered lorry. She didn’t envy them. Not that the jeep was much more comfortable. It had a thin canvas roof and was open at the sides. She drew her coat together to protect her knees against the cold. They rattled off the airfield and onto a country lane, then turned left onto a main road.

The back seats were set higher than the front. Joan leaned forward and shouted in her ear, ‘So where have you come from, Kay?’

She tipped her head back to answer. ‘Medmenham. You’re all Stanmore, I take it?’

‘Yes, that’s right – Filter Room.’

‘I feel a bit of an outsider.’

‘Oh, you mustn’t say that! We’re a very friendly lot, aren’t we, Lou?’

Lou grunted.

‘That’s good to know,’ said Kay. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Joan settled happily back in her seat. In the rear-view mirror Kay could see that the two women were holding hands. Well, well, she thought, and returned her attention to the road.

The Flanders countryside spread out exposed on either side, flat and bare, unprotected by the hedgerows she was used to in England. They passed isolated farms and barns, a big empty greenhouse with most of its windows broken, a line of leafless poplars like the teeth of a broken comb. There was little traffic, apart from the occasional old man on a wobbly bicycle. Nobody was working in the winter fields; there was no livestock. The vastness of the sky only served to depress the landscape further. Layers of monochrome clouds stacked up from the horizon. It began to spit with rain.

The first little town they came to seemed entirely shut. Outside a church, beside an elaborate 1918 war memorial of green oxidised copper, a group of children stood on the corner and held out their hands like beggars. The army vehicles swept past without slowing. The optimism of the autumn, when liberated civilians showered British tanks with flowers, looked to be long gone. Houses, shattered by bombs or shelling, stood roofless beneath the grey sky. The shop windows were empty. My God, thought Kay, with a stab of shock, this place is starving.

They drove eastwards for about an hour. Signs of war were everywhere – tanks on their transporters parked down a side road, the barrels of an anti-aircraft battery poking out of a palisade of sandbags, a stone bridge chipped by bullets and guarded by troops. Buildings seemed to have been burned out at random. One field was a moonscape of perfectly circular waterlogged holes. She wondered if it were true that there might still be some Germans in the area. It seemed unlikely. The battlefront must have swept on weeks ago. Perhaps it was just a story the driver had invented to unsettle them.

Around noon, she spotted a sign for Mechelen, and soon afterwards the convoy entered the outskirts of a town, thundering down a narrow cobbled street of small houses. The black, yellow and red stripes of the Belgian flag hung from a couple of the upstairs windows. Up ahead, rising over the roofs, were the twin spires of what appeared to be a large church.

The lorry with its trailing column of jeeps emerged from the street and drove onto a low bridge spanning a wide canal. In the distance, on what looked like waste ground leading down to the water’s edge, two big, boxy olive-green vans with radar dishes and radio antennae on their roofs were parked behind barbed wire. The dishes were directed away from them, pointing northwards – towards The Hague, Kay guessed. She turned to the back seat to share her excitement, but Joan and Louie had already seen them.

Louie said, with an air of expertise, ‘GL Mark Threes. The latest MRUs.’

At the end of the bridge a yellow road sign pointed left to Antwerpen and Sint-Niklaas, right to Heist-op-den-Berg, Leuven, Brussel. What Kay had mistaken for a church turned out to be a massive fortified medieval gate, on top of which a pair of ugly twin spires of dark slate had been stuck, apparently as an afterthought. The convoy swung around it, passed along a broad, handsome street of big flat-fronted houses and shops, and drew to a halt.