Blackout - Connie Willis

Saltram-on-Sea-29 May 1940

MIKE STARED AT THE GIRL. “WHAT DID YOU SAY?” HE asked. He had to have heard her wrong.

“I said, the bus came yesterday. It comes on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

Which meant today was Wednesday the twenty-ninth, and he’d already missed three days of the evacuation.

“It used to be every day,” she said, “but since the war-”

“But Friday’s the thirty-first,” Mike exploded. “There has to be a bus before then.” The entire British Army would have been evacuated by then. He’d have missed the whole thing. “What about Ramsgate? When’s the next bus that goes there?”

“I’m afraid that’s Friday, as well,” the girl said. “It’s the same bus, you see.” She’d retreated warily up a step, and he realized he’d been yelling.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “It’s just that I was supposed to be in Dover this afternoon to cover a story, and now I don’t know how I’m going to get there. How far’s the nearest train-I mean, railway-station?” If there was one in the next village, maybe he could walk to it.

“Eight miles,” Daphne said, “but there haven’t been any passenger trains from there since the start of the war.”

Of course. “What about a car? Is there one in the village I could rent-I mean, hire? Or someone I could pay to drive me into Dover? I could pay-” Oh, Christ, what was the going rate for renting a car in 1940? “Three pounds.”

“Three pounds?” Her eyes widened. “I always heard Yanks were rich.”

Which meant that was way too much. “I’m not rich. It’s just really important I get there today.”

“Oh. Mr. Powney might be able to take you in his lorry,” she suggested, “but I don’t know if he’s back yet.”

“Back?”

“He went to Hawkhurst yesterday to buy a bull,” she explained. “He may have decided to stay over. He hates driving in the blackout. I’ll ask Dad. Back in a moment.” She ran back up the stairs, glancing flirtatiously over her shoulder at him as she went. “Dad?” he heard her say. “Is Mr. Powney back from Hawkhurst yet?”

“No. Who’s that you’re talking to, Daphne?”

“A Yank. He’s a reporter.”

Mike couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. After a minute, Daphne ran back down the stairs. “Dad says he’s not back, but he should be sometime this morning.”

“And there’s no one else here with a truck-I mean, a lorry? Or an automobile?”

“Dr. Grainger has one, but he’s not here either. He’s visiting his sister in Norwich, and the vicar donated the tires on his to the rubber drive. And what with the petrol rationing, I-oh, here’s Miss Fintworth,” she said as a thin, frowsy-haired woman came in. “Our postmistress. Perhaps she’ll know when Mr. Powney’s coming back.”

She didn’t. “Would you give this to him when he arrives?” she asked, handing Daphne a letter. Daphne stuck it with several others behind the bar, and Miss Fintworth went out, brushing past a toothless old man on his way in.

“Mr. Tompkins will know,” Daphne said. “Mr. Tompkins,” she called to him, “do you know when Mr. Powney’s coming back?”

Mr. Tompkins muttered something Mike couldn’t make out at all, but Daphne apparently understood it. “He says Mr. Powney told him he planned to start back as soon as it was light. So he should be here by nine or half past.”

Nine-thirty, and then it would take them at least two hours to drive to Dover, which would put him there by noon. If Powney didn’t have to put his new bull away first or milk the cows or feed the chickens or something.

“Here, I’ll make you a nice cup of tea while you wait,” Daphne said, “and you can tell me all about the States. You said you were from Omaha? That’s in Ohio, isn’t it?”

“Nebraska,” he said absently, trying to decide whether he should walk north of the village and try to hitch a ride or whether he was better off waiting here.

“That’s in the Wild West, isn’t it?” Daphne asked. “Are there red Indians there?”

Red Indians? “Not anymore,” he said. “How many-?”

“Do you know any gangsters?”

She was clearly not an historian. “Nope, sorry. How many vehicles go through here in a day, Daphne?”

“A day?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I will have that cup of tea.”

“Oh, good. You can tell me all about-where did you say you were from? Nebraska?”

Yes, but thanks to Dunworthy changing my schedule, I didn’t have time to research it, so I don’t know anything about it. It was obvious Daphne didn’t either, but he’d still better avoid the subject. “Why don’t you tell me about the village instead?”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing to tell. Scarcely anything happens in this part of the world.”

Less than fifty miles from here the British and French armies were being pushed into a desperate corner by the Germans, a makeshift armada was being organized to go rescue them, and the outcome of the entire war depended on whether that rescue was successful or not, and she didn’t know anything about it. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. The news of it had been kept out of the papers till the evacuation was nearly over, and the only contemps who’d known about it were those who’d seen Dunkirk’s smoke on the horizon or the trains full of wounded and exhausted soldiers arriving home.

And Saltram-on-Sea didn’t have a train station. But it did have boats, and Mike was surprised the Small Vessels Pool hadn’t been here. Its officers had driven up and down the Channel coast commandeering fishing boats and yachts and motor launches and their crews to go pick up the stranded soldiers.

“I suppose you’ve been in lots of exciting places,” Daphne said, setting a cup of tea in front of him. “And seen lots of the war. Is that why you need to get to Dover? Because of the war?”

“Yes. I’m writing a story for my paper on invasion preparations along the coast. How has Saltram-on-Sea prepared?”

“Prepared? I don’t know… we’ve the Home Guard…”

“What do they do? Patrol the beaches at night?”

“No. Mostly they practice drilling.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And sit in here bragging about what they did in the last war.”

So whatever had kept the drop from opening last night, it hadn’t been the Home Guard. “Do you have any coastwatchers?”

“Dr. Grainger.” Who was in Norwich, visiting his sister.

Mr. Tompkins piped up from his table with a string of unintelligible syllables. “What did he say?” Mike asked Daphne.

“He said our boys will never let Hitler get to France.”

Yes, well, right now Hitler was in France, had taken Boulogne and Calais, and was about to take Paris.

“Dad says our boys will chase Hitler back to Berlin with his tail between his legs,” Daphne said. “He says we’ll have the war won in two weeks.”

Doesn’t anybody ever see a disaster coming? Mike wondered. This was just like Pearl Harbor. In spite of dozens of clues and warnings, the contemps had been caught completely off guard. They hadn’t seen the World Trade Center coming either, or Jerusalem, or the Pandemic. And at St. Paul’s, the day before a terrorist walked in with a pinpoint bomb under his arm and blew the cathedral and half of London to smithereens, the burning topic had been whether or not it was appropriate to sell Light of the World T-shirts in the gift shop.

At least the contemps here had the excuse that the news from France had been heavily censored. On the other hand, they’d been at war for over eight months, during which Hitler had sliced through half of Europe like a knife through butter. And Dunkirk was right across the Channel. You’d think they’d have figured out something was up.

But apparently not. None of the farmers and fishermen who came in over the next hour discussed anything but the weather, and all Daphne was interested in talking about was American movie stars. “I suppose you meet a lot of them, being a reporter. Have you ever met Clark Gable?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding even more disappointed than when he’d told her there weren’t any red Indians. “He’s my favorite film star,” and proceeded to tell him the entire plot of a movie she’d seen the week before, involving spies, amnesia, and an epic search for a lost love. “He searched for her for years and years,” Daphne said. “It was terribly romantic.”

And meanwhile, up in Dover, the Royal Navy’s organizing boats into convoys, and retired sailors and paddleboat captains and fishermen are volunteering to man them, Mike thought, and I’m missing it. And it wasn’t as if he could go back to Oxford and try again. Once an historian had been in a temporal location, he couldn’t be in it again, and that wasn’t just one of Dunworthy’s overprotective precautions. It was a law of time travel, as a couple of early time travelers had found out the hard way. The night of the twenty-eighth and now the morning of the twenty-ninth were off-limits to him forever.

Maybe I can do what’s left of the evacuation and then go back and come through and do the first three days, he thought, but Dunworthy would never let him. If something went wrong and he was still here when his deadline on the twenty-eighth arrived, he’d be the one who was dead. And on a second try there might be even more slippage.

Nine o’clock, and then nine-thirty and ten, came and went with no sign of Mr. Powney. I can’t afford to sit here all day, Mike thought and told Daphne he was going to go look around the village.

“Oh, but I’m certain Mr. Powney will be along soon,” Daphne said. “He must have got a late start.”

So did I, Mike thought. He told her he needed to interview some of the other locals on invasion preparations, made her promise to come find him if Powney arrived, and left the inn. Somebody had to have a vehicle in this place. It was 1940, for God’s sake, not 1740. Somebody had to have a car. Or a boat, though he didn’t like the idea of going out in the Channel, which was full of mines and U-boats. More than sixty of the seven hundred small craft that had participated in the evacuation had been sunk. He’d only go by boat as a last resort.

But even though he looked in every alley and back garden, he didn’t see anything, not even a bicycle. And Dover was too far to make it on a bicycle. He walked down to the quay, where three fishermen, including toothless Mr. Tompkins, were lounging and discussing-what else?-the weather.

“Looks bad,” one of them said without taking his pipe out of his mouth.

Mr. Tompkins mumbled something unintelligible, and the other one, who smelled strongly of fish, nodded agreement.

“I need to get to Dover,” Mike said. “Is there anyone here who’d be willing to take me there in his boat?”

“I doot yill fond onion heerbuts,” Mr. Tompkins said.

Since he shook his head as he spoke, Mike interpreted that as a no. “What about one of you? I could pay…” He hesitated. Three pounds was obviously too much. “Ten shillings,” he said.

That was obviously too little. Tompkins and the fishy one immediately shook their heads. “It’s blowin’ up a storm,” the pipe smoker said.

The Channel had been “as still as a millpond” the entire nine days of the evacuation, but Mike couldn’t very well say that. “I’ll pay you a pound.”

“Nay, lad,” the fishy one said. “Channel’s too dangerous.”

Clearly none of these three would be volunteering to go to Dunkirk. He’d have to find somebody else. He started down the quay. “Harold mot be able to run you up,” the pipe smoker called after him.

“Harold?” Mike said, coming back.

“Aye, Commander Harold,” he said and the fishy one nodded.

A naval officer. Good. He’d know how to steer clear of U-boats and mines. “Where can I find him?”

“Ye’ll fand’m ont’ Lassie June,” Mr. Tompkins said. “He’s bin work nonner sin smale vises skill litter coom furnit buck.”

Mike turned to the pipe smoker. “Where can I find the-what did you say the name of his boat was?” but before he could answer, Mr. Tompkins said, “Tletty Gin.” He pointed down the dock. “She’s doonthur at thind nix harbin ersees pride.”

Which meant God knew what, but there weren’t that many boats lined up along the dock, and their names should be painted on their bows. He thanked the trio for their help, such as it was, and walked down the pier, looking at the tied-up boats: the Marigold, the Princess Margaret, the Wren. The names didn’t sound very warlike, but then neither had the names of the yachts and barges and fishing smacks that were about to pull off the biggest military evacuation in history: the Fair Breeze, the Kitty, the Sunbeam, the Smiling Through.

But hopefully they’d been in better shape than this bunch. Most of them were ancient, none had been scraped or painted in recent memory, and one, the Sea Sprite, had its motor spread out in pieces on its deck. Obviously it wasn’t going to Dunkirk, but some of the others would. Boats from every coastal village had been involved. He wished he’d had time to memorize the list of small craft that had been part of the evacuation so he’d know which, if any, of these had participated.

And which of them had made it back. The list had had asterisks next to the names of the ones that had been sunk. If he hadn’t wasted a whole afternoon waiting to see Dunworthy, he’d know which was which.

He reached the end of the dock. No Tletty Gin. Or Lassie June. He started back along the row. “Ahoy!” a voice called, and Mike looked up to see an elderly man in a yachting cap at the railing of a forty-foot launch. “You there! Are you from the Small Vessels Pool?”

“No,” Mike said. “I’m looking for a Commander Harold.”

The old man broke into a broad-and, thankfully, toothy-smile. “I’m Commander Harold. You must be from the Admiralty. You’ve come about my commission. Thought I’d never hear from you. Come aboard.”

This was Commander Harold? He had to be seventy if he was a day, and no wonder he hadn’t heard from the Admiralty about being commissioned. Mike peered at the bow, looking for the boat’s name. There it was, so badly faded he could hardly make it out. The Lady Jane.

An unlucky name for a boat. Lady Jane Grey had only lasted as queen something like nine days before they’d chopped her head off, and the launch didn’t look like it would last long either. It was covered with barnacles and hadn’t been painted in years. “Come aboard, lad,” the Commander was saying, “and tell me about my commission-”

“I’m not from-”

“What are you standing there for? Come aboard.”

Mike did. Up close, the old man looked even older. His hair under the yachting cap was white and fine as thistledown, and his hand, snapping a salute, was gnarled with arthritis. “I’m not from the Admiralty either,” Mike said hastily. “I’m-”

“Suppose they’ve a new wartime department just for issuing commissions. In my day, His Majesty’s Navy didn’t have all these departments and regulations and forms to fill up. What would have happened to Lord Nelson at Trafalgar if he’d had to fill up all the forms they have nowadays?”