And so it begins, what feels like the beginning of the end. It is the 7th of September, and I am sitting, listening to the radio, looking out at dusk overtaking my garden, but the news coming through the speaker in the clipped tones on the BBC, overlaid with static, is all of disaster and defeat.
The fall of France was a stunning blow, but just the start. Within days shipping the channel was being attacked from the air, The Channel no longer safe, and as for Elizabeth against the Spanish, our last defence. In early July news bulletin after news bulletin talked of raids on Dover, Southampton, Maidstone. Holiday destinations, pleasant days out in the Austin in the seemingly ancient days before the war. These places are the front line now, bombed from their air, bristling with guns, awaiting what can only be delayed - the certainty of invasion. All I could think then and all I can think now is: how can it have come to this? That we must contemplate battling for the streets of Bournemouth? Brighton and Hove? Littleport and Shoreham?
On the 9th of July, the Germans bombed Norwich for the first time. On the 30th of July, Surrey street was smashed. I headed planes overhead that night, and distant flashes reflected off clouds in the sky. More bombing? Anti-aircraft guns? How have we all, in so short a space of time, begun to talk about, and think in terms of, such things?
Rationing, messages against hoarding, 'Keep Calm and Carry On', but the news doesn't stop. How much are we being told, when what we know is awful enough? Fighter bases across the South East are ablaze, pummeled by the Luftwaffe day after day. How many fighters have we lost on the ground, before they are ever airborne? The Germans called the start of this Adlertag... 13th of August, Eagle Day. These are the unbeaten, victorious Germans that felled France in weeks.
19th of August and the news was worse than ever. Huge RAF losses on the ground, my sleep full of burning wrecks. Towns and cities across the South, East and Midlands hit. I need sedatives to sleep, and my days are dominated by nerves. I've never been the best like that, not since Thesselonkia, not since 1916, but it isn't a funk. I overheard some say it is time to 'give it up', make peace like the French did, see what we can save, and I almost yelled. We have no choice but to hang on, and it is better to go down fighting, make an end that may be remembered if that is all that is left to us.
My reading material hasn't helped. What kind of fool with weak nerves reads H.G.Wells 'The War of the Worlds' and Homers 'The Illiad'. I cannot decide if we are the Trojans, crushed by the Greeks, backed by capricious Gods, fighting our last amongst our burning homes, or if, The Empire humbled, we are ants beneath the Martian's feet, the heat ray slicing to and froe, dealing merciless death from above. Oh God, oh to be deprived of an imagination... to be the butcher in Hingham, with his 'bit of a bust-up down south yesterday."
Churchill made a speech in Parliament on the 20th. 'Never in the field of human conflict'. But he was so wrong about France, and I could barely listen to him with the country on the brink of oblivion. It was naive bluster, nothing more.
Audio: Never in the Field of Human Conflict
I have all the food I can, hidden around the house. I have children, a wife... I have an old service revolver from my Thessaloniki days. My daughter asked if it were for the Germans, and of course, I said yes, but this War is all but lost, and what do we, what does my family, do? Do we stay put as German gliders land on the beach at Holkham, and armoured columns advance from a London decked in Swastikas?
We might run, like the French, clogging the roads across the Fens, trying to get North, but for what? To be machine-gunned from the air outside Spalding? To have made it to Birmingham or Leeds as the Nazis arrive? To end in an internment camp, or flee again to starve on the fells of the Yorkshire Dales?
The tension is unendurable, the doubt, the fear, the anger, the helplessness, and above all the waiting. The greatest skill of all, and I don't have it... half the time I feel on the edge of nervous exhaustion, and tonic wine and sedatives my only refuge.
The 24th August saw a huge raid on London, and then news, the feeling of a fightback, a raid by the RAF on Berlin. I felt euphoric at the news, not all is lost, we can take the fight to them! But hope seems like a childish illusion, a temporary reprieve for the Trojans. A moment of misplaced optimism from Well's narrator at Stains and Chertsey when the artillery brings down a Martian fighting machine before the guns were swept out of existence by the heat ray. The day after our token Berlin raid, fighter after fighter was shot down over southern England or destroyed on the ground. More RAF aircraft were destroyed on that day than on any day so far.
I walked alone for hours at the weekend, my wife, understanding as she always does, kicking me out of the house with a sandwich and a thermos of tea. I sat looking up at the sky, hearing aircraft in the distance, I don't know who's, and I don't know where they were going. Germans on an errand of destruction? Ours in the hopeless task of defence? I looked up, and I had a terrible, terrible thought. I have my gun, and I have enough bullets for us all. Two daughters, my wife, and I. When I thought that I screamed at the top of my voice, and then I cried like a child.
So I sit here, in Norfolk, listening to the radio, to news of still greater fire and destruction - a mass raid, bigger by far than any previous, not aimed at airfields, or aircraft, but at London. A people, at factories, at the beating heart of the Empire. Night is now complete, quiet, calm. Cool but not cold, a gentle breeze, a perfect late summer evening. Except for the fact that, in all likelihood, these are the last days of the Great Britain that I know.
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