Chapter Two - War

But there hadn't been a war that year. It had been peace with honour, whatever that meant.

Not much, it had turned out.

'Thank heaven for Chamberlain', John had said, switching off the radio in September 1939.

'Are you mad?' Nancy had asked, eyes flashing. 'As far as I can see, that muttonhead has done nothing but take us to war.'

'He gained us a year.'

'To do what? Get married?'

'To re-arm.'

With that, John had got up and left the Beckfoot drawing room.

The remaining Swallows and Amazons had looked at one another in silence.

'Well that's that, then,' Uncle Jim had said eventually, 'I didn't think I'd see another.' And then he'd paused, and said, 'Damn,' as if he'd really meant it.

Titty had stared out of the window at the gentle slope of the Beckfoot lawn, and the river, lake, and fells beyond it, and seen great tanks crash through the wooded slopes, and great black aeroplanes spread like smoke across the clear sky. Dorothea had squeezed her hand, but it hadn't made her feel much better.

Nancy had sat on alone for a while, finding things, once again, tremendously hard to believe.

That same afternoon she found John in their room at Beckfoot, folding shirts. His uniform jacket was hung over the back of a chair.

'Darling,' he said. 'I got a telegram this morning. I've been posted to the south coast. Dover. Mine-laying, I should think. I'm leaving tonight.'

'Then I'm coming with you,' she said at once.

'Nancy, we have to think seriously about the possibility of an invasion. I'm not sure I want you in Dover.'

'Well, I'm not sure I want you in a bloody mine-layer in the Channel. But there we are.'

John found himself skewered by her fierce gaze. He grinned suddenly. 'Simmer down, Blackett. I couldn't be without you.'

She smiled back. 'You'll never have to be.'

'I'll find us a house there as soon as I can, and wire you. Might be a bit rough, to begin with.'

'Hey,' she said lightly, 'You know me. Rough and ruthless.'

He took her in his arms. She didn't feel rough to him. In fact, she'd never felt more vulnerable.

In the tense months that followed, John had been as good as his word, and she'd followed him down to Dover. Alone in their small house as John patrolled the channel in a makeshift mine-layer, crippled with worry for his wife, Nancy had longed, although she never admitted it, for the lakes and fells of home. Later, as the BEF retreated and she heard booming terrible gunfire from across the horribly narrow English Channel; as soldiers in crude khaki filled the Dover streets; as the first towns of the south coast were raided by German fighters and bombers; and as London, burning and blitzed, left a red glow in the sky at night and pall of smoke over the country by day, she longed, as she'd always done, to fight and triumph, no matter the cost, over adversity and the enemy: an enemy that wasn't, this time, Uncle Jim and his book or Squashy and his gulch-jumping or John and the Swallows and their friendly battles in small boats, but an amorphous, terrible, fascist evil, sat just there across the Channel, and hell-bent on destruction and an unthinkable triumph of its own.

John, in his snatched moments of shore-leave, could see a change in her. Despite her continuing cheerful intensity and ringing laughter and occasional bouts of barbequing billygoats, John could see a new and furious anger at the back of those clear green eyes.

It had frightened him terribly.

At the beginning of 1941, John got a new posting.

'New commission,' he told Nancy over a rather grim supper in a London hotel. 'Brand new battleship; Prince of Wales. She's a beauty.'

Nancy eyed him. She asked him a one-word question. 'Where?'

He swallowed, and told her. 'North Sea. At first.'

'Can't be helped, I suppose.'

'No. I suppose it can't.' He paused. This next bit wasn't going to go down well. 'Look here, Nancy. I can't go unless I know you're safe. You can't stay in London.'

'Rot. The Admiralty's perfectly safe. Half of it is underground anyway.'

'Nancy, please.'

'The worst is over, anyway.'

'The worst is not over, you little idiot.'

'Susan and Peggy are here.'

'Please. I need you safe.'

'Damn you, John.' She was suddenly shouting. 'You think I can sit in Beckfoot by myself, when all this is happening here?' She made an expansive gesture at the tape criss-crossing the dining room windows, the piles of rubble outside.

John caught her hand. 'You're my wife. You should at least try listening to me, once in a while.'

'I told you I wasn't the marrying type, John.'

They glared at each another for a second, and then John looked away.

He held Nancy's fingers tight. 'Please.'

'No. Could you turn down your commission?'

'Of course not. It's my duty.'

'Then this is mine.'

He knew she'd won.

He tried to grin. 'Horrendous meal, isn't it?'

'Dreadful.' She smiled as she continued to hold his hand.

He stirred the objects on his plate with his fork. 'I have no idea what this is meant to be.'

'Conger eel?'

He laughed, properly. 'I love you, you know. So much.'

'I know.' Her eyes, fixed and burning on his, said the unspoken.

They said their final goodbyes in a hired rowing boat in Portsmouth harbour. She was as neat as he'd ever seen her in her Wrens uniform, but she was still the same old Nancy as she rested on her oars on the bow thwart and grinned at him in the old grand Nancy-manner. She'd clung to him last night, in the darkness after the sex that she still couldn't seem to enjoy fully, and wept silently, but now, on a cold day in Portsmouth harbour, she was grinning, and telling him not to be a duffer.

'Give 'em what-for,' she said, lightly, and John managed a laugh, and reached over to awkwardly pat her knee, encased in her hated woollen stockings.

'I'll be back soon,' he said, forcing the words out over the sudden lump in his throat.

'Galoot! Of course you will,' Nancy cried, and then she leaned over and hugged him tightly through his Navy greatcoat. She felt ridiculously small in his arms, and John crushed her to him desperately until she squeaked. He pressed his face into the set waves of her hair, and tried to breathe steadily. He could feel her wet cheek pressed against his own, her mouth, sticky with lipstick, soft against his hairline and ear, and the hot rush of her breath as she whispered in his ear, 'You still look ridiculous in that uniform.'

And John, laughing properly this time, pushed her away, and wiped her eyes and his own with his handkerchief. Sitting back on the stern thwart, he said, 'Come on, Petty Officer Walker, smartly now. Square away for the Prince of Wales.' And Nancy said, 'Aye, aye, sir,' and set to her oars.

A horrendously rushed and clumsy kiss on the pontoon, and then it was over. He was walking up the gangplank, hand at the salute to the duty officer on deck, she was back in the rowing boat and pulling away, and by the time he'd turned back round, she was gone.

Note: Those of you who know your WW2 naval history might guess that the next chapter won't be very jolly...