Hornet Flight (12 page)

Her mother looked up, and Hermia saw that tears were streaming down her face.

Hermia went to her and put her arms around her.

“Bets is dead,” her mother said.

“I'm sorry, Mother.”

“She loved me so much,” her mother sobbed.

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you know? She waited all her life for me. Did you realize that? All her life.”

Hermia hugged her mother hard. “I'm so sorry,” she said.

There had been about two hundred Danish ships at sea on the morning of April 9, 1940, when Hitler invaded Denmark. All that day, Danish-language broadcasts by the BBC appealed to sailors to head for Allied ports rather than return home to a conquered country. In total, about five thousand men accepted the offer of refuge. Most sought harbor on the east coast of England, hoisted the Union Jack, and continued to sail throughout the war under the British flag. Consequently, by the middle of the following year small communities of Danes had settled in several English ports.

Hermia decided to go to the fishing town of Stokeby. She had visited the place twice previously to talk to the Danes there. On this occasion she told her boss, Herbert Woodie, that her mission was to check her somewhat out-of-date plans of the main Danish ports and make any alterations necessary.

He believed her.

She had a different story for Digby Hoare.

Digby came to Bletchley, two days after the bomb destroyed her mother's house, with a radio receiver and direction finder neatly packed into a used-looking tan leather suitcase. As he showed her how to use the equipment, she thought guiltily of the kiss in the park, and how much she had enjoyed it, and wondered uneasily how she would be able to look Arne in the eye.

Her original plan had been to attempt to smuggle the radio receiver to the Nightwatchmen, but she had since thought of something simpler. The signals from the radar apparatus could probably be picked up at sea just as
easily as on land. She told Digby she was going to pass the suitcase to the captain of a fishing boat and teach him how to use it. Digby approved.

That plan might well have worked, but in truth she did not want to hand such an important job over to someone else. So she intended to go herself.

In the North Sea, between England and Denmark, there was a large sandbank known as Dogger Bank, where the sea was as shallow as fifty feet in places, and the fishing was good. Both British and Danish ships trawled there. Strictly speaking, Denmark-based vessels were banned from venturing so far from their coast, but Germany needed herrings, so the ban was irregularly enforced and constantly defied. For some time, Hermia had had it in the back of her mind that messages—or even people—might travel between the two countries on fishing boats, transferring from Danish to British or vice versa in the middle. Now, however, she had a better idea. The far end of the Dogger Bank was only a hundred miles from the Danish coast. If all her guesswork turned out to be right, the signals from the Freya machine should be detectable from the fishing ground.

She took a train on Friday afternoon. She was dressed for the sea in trousers, boots, and a loose sweater, with her hair pushed under a man's checked cap. As the train rolled through the flat fen country of eastern England, she worried whether her plan would work. Would she find a ship willing to take her? Would she pick up the signals she was expecting? Or was the whole thing a waste of time?

After a while her mind turned to her mother. Mags had been under control again yesterday at Bets's funeral, appearing calmly sorrowful rather than stricken by grief, and today she had gone to Cornwall to stay with her sister, Hermia's aunt Bella. But on the night of the bomb her soul had been laid bare.

The two women had been devoted friends, but it was clearly more than that. Hermia did not really want to think what else could be involved, but she could not help being intrigued. Setting aside the embarrassing thought of what physical relation there might have been between Mags and Bets, Hermia was shocked that her mother had nourished a passionate lifelong attachment that had remained carefully disguised, all those years, from Hermia herself and presumably from Mags's husband, Hermia's father.

She arrived in Stokeby at eight o'clock on a mild summer evening and
went from the railway station straight to the Shipwright's Arms pub on the dockside. It took her only a few minutes of asking around to learn that Sten Munch, a Danish captain she had met on her last visit here, was due to sail in the morning in his vessel
Morganmand,
which meant “early riser.” She found Sten at his house on the hillside, clipping the hedge in his front garden like a born Englishman. He invited her in.

He was a widower and lived with his son, Lars, who had been on the boat with him on April 9, 1940. Lars had since married a local girl, Carol. When Hermia went inside, Carol was nursing a tiny baby a few days old. Lars made tea. They all spoke English for Carol's sake.

Hermia explained that she needed to get as close as possible to the Danish coast in an attempt to listen to a German wireless transmission—she did not say what kind. Sten did not question her story. “Of course!” he said expansively. “Anything to help defeat the Nazis! But my boat is not really suitable.”

“Why not?”

“It's very small—only thirty-five feet—and we'll be away for about three days.”

Hermia had been expecting this. She had told Woodie she needed to get her mother settled in new accommodation and would be back sometime next week. “That's all right,” she told Sten. “I've got time.”

“My boat has only three berths. We sleep in shifts. It's not designed for ladies. You should go in a larger vessel.”

“Is there one leaving in the morning?”

Sten looked at Lars, who said, “No. Three set off yesterday, won't return until next week. Peter Gorning should be back tomorrow. He'll go out again about Wednesday.”

She shook her head. “Too late.”

Carol looked up from her baby. “They sleep in their clothes, you know. That's why they stink when they get home. It's worse than the smell of the fish.”

Hermia immediately liked her for her down-to-earth directness. “I'll be fine,” she said. “I can sleep in my clothes, in a bed still warm from the previous occupant. It won't kill me.”

Sten said, “You know I want to help. But the sea is not for women. You were made for the gracious things in life.”

Carol snorted scornfully. “Like giving birth?”

Hermia smiled, grateful to have Carol as an ally. “Exactly. We can put up with discomfort.”

Carol nodded vigorously. “Think of what Charlie's going through in the desert.” She explained to Hermia, “My brother Charlie's in the army somewhere in North Africa.”

Sten looked cornered. He did not want to take Hermia, but he was reluctant to say so, wanting to appear patriotic and brave. “We leave at three o'clock in the morning.”

“I'll be there.”

Carol said, “You might as well stay here, now. We've got a spare room.” She looked at her father-in-law. “If that's all right with you, Pa.”

He had run out of excuses. “Of course!” he said.

“Thank you,” said Hermia. “You're very kind.”

They went to bed early. Hermia did not undress, but sat up in her room with the light on. She was afraid that if she overslept, Sten would leave without her. The Munch family were not great readers, and the only book she could find was the Bible in Danish, but it kept her awake. At two o'clock she went to the bathroom and washed quickly, then tiptoed downstairs and put the kettle on. Sten appeared at half past two. When he saw Hermia in the kitchen he looked surprised and disappointed. She poured tea into a big cup and he took it gratefully enough.

Hermia, Sten, and Lars walked down the hill to the quay a few minutes before three o'clock. Two more Danish men were waiting at the dockside. The
Morganmand
was very small. Thirty-five feet was about the length of a London bus. The vessel was made of wood, and had one mast and a diesel engine. On deck was a small wheelhouse and a series of hatches over the hold. From the wheelhouse, a companionway led down to the living quarters. At the stern end were the massive spars and the winding gear for the nets.

Dawn was breaking as the little vessel threaded its way through the defensive minefield at the mouth of the harbor. The weather was fine, but
they encountered a swell of five or six feet as soon as they left the shelter of the land. Fortunately, Hermia was never seasick.

Throughout the day, she tried to make herself useful around the boat. She knew no seamanship, so she kept the galley clean. The men were used to preparing food for themselves, but she washed their dishes and the frying pan in which they cooked almost everything they ate. She made sure she talked to the two crewmen, speaking Danish, getting on terms of respectful friendliness with each of them. When she had nothing else to do, she sat on the deck and enjoyed the sunshine.

Toward midday they reached the Outer Silver Pit, on the southeast corner of the Dogger Bank, and began to trawl. The boat reduced speed and headed northeast. At first they could not find the fish, and the nets came up almost empty. Then, toward the end of the afternoon, the fish started running.

At nightfall, Hermia went below and lay on a bunk. She thought she would not sleep, but she had been up for thirty-six hours, and tiredness got the better of tension. She dropped off within minutes.

During the night she was awakened, briefly, by the volcanic rumble of a flight of bombers overhead. She wondered vaguely whether it was the RAF heading for Germany or the Luftwaffe going the other way, then drifted off to sleep again.

The next thing she knew, Lars was shaking her. “We're approaching our nearest point to Denmark,” he said. “We're about a hundred and twenty miles off Morlunde.”

Hermia took her suitcase receiver up on deck. It was already full daylight. The men were hauling in a net full of flapping fish, mainly herrings and mackerel, and tipping them into the hold. Hermia found it a gruesome sight, and looked away.

She connected the battery to the radio and was relieved to see the dials flicker. She fixed the aerial to the mast with a length of wire thoughtfully provided by Digby. She let the set warm up, then put on the headphones.

As the boat motored northeast, Hermia roamed up and down the wireless frequencies. As well as the BBC's broadcasts in English, she picked up French, Dutch, German, and Danish radio programs, plus a host of
Morse transmissions which she presumed were military signals from both sides. At the first pass up and down, she heard nothing that might have been radar.

She repeated the exercise more slowly, making sure she missed nothing. She had plenty of time. But once again she did not hear what she was listening for.

She kept trying.

After two hours she noticed that the men had stopped fishing and were watching her. She caught the eye of Lars, who said, “Any luck?”

She pulled off the headphones. “I'm not picking up the signal I was expecting,” she said in Danish.

Sten replied in the same language. “The fish were running all night. We've done well—our hold is full. We're ready to go home.”

“Would you motor north for a while? I must try to find this signal—it's really important.”

Sten looked doubtful, but his son said, “We can afford it, we've had a good night.”

Sten was reluctant. “What if a German spotter plane flies overhead?”

Hermia said, “You could throw out nets and pretend to be fishing.”

“There are no fishing grounds where you want to go.”

“German pilots don't know that.”

One of the crew put in, “If it's to help free Denmark . . .”

The other hand nodded vigorously.

Once again, Hermia was saved by Sten's reluctance to appear cowardly in front of others. “All right,” he said. “We'll head north.”

“Keep a hundred miles off the coast,” Hermia said as she put the headphones back on.

She continued to scan the frequencies. As time went by, she became less hopeful. The likeliest place for a radar station was at the southern end of Denmark's coast, near the border with Germany. She had thought she would pick up the broadcast early. But her hopes fell by the hour as the boat headed north.