sleeping, as the light in the room was unchanged when he awoke. Will fumbled his father’s wristwatch off the crate standing on its end by the cot to make a bedside table, which told him it was two o’clock in the afternoon and he’d been asleep for five hours. The Major wouldn’t expect him to be up for another hour, but he felt rested, if stiff from having spent last night’s watch cramped in one position for so long.
The room was empty, but he could hear a faint murmur of voices coming from the radio room next door. He didn’t have clearance to go in there without an invitation or an emergency, so he allowed himself another five minutes of rest while he speculated what the Major might have for him to do that night. The pattern of his shifts hadn’t changed for two weeks straight – lurk, observe, take notes of not very much. So far as he could see, nothing had happened in that time that would mean the mission was closer to being completed.
Hopefully, whatever it was would get him out of the bunker, and not just for observation duty. It was hard going being in such confined and windowless quarters for longer than it took to eat, sleep and, occasionally, wash. The small complex buried in the gardens of Bodingleigh House had been built during World War II as a failsafe in case of a successful invasion and had not been designed for comfort. The radio operators stationed in the grand, mock-Gothic manor house would have decamped to the bunker to carry out covert acts of communication and sabotage, in concert with others stationed at strategic points around the country, and thus achieved victory.
Perhaps because it had never been called into use, it had fallen out of public awareness in the village. It was Will who had rediscovered it, having crashed through an open escape hatch while trespassing to climb trees, in the weeks before his parents took him away. Until he passed on news of its existence, SCREW had a much riskier plan to use an abandoned barn on the estate. The bunker was perfect for their needs; despite a century of neglect, it remained largely intact.
Will first learned about World War II from old Mrs P’s lessons. From what he had read in the tattered books in her classroom, shared with unruly neighbours and their sharp elbows, he could be excused for thinking that history had ended then. For one thing, fashions in Devon had barely changed. The men and women in the old black-and-white photos looked indistinguishable from the adults he saw every day, men dressed in homespun woollens and women in home-sewn dresses and imported nylon housecoats.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Saltash that he realised anyone could wear another colour besides black, navy or brown, and not until he entered basic training as soon as he turned sixteen that he discovered what winning the war had meant in terms of losing the battle with the climate before anyone outside of a scientific and industrial elite even knew there was a battle to be fought. In classes in old Nissen huts, together with the rest of SCREW’s newest volunteers, he had learned another story: of how a frugal generation, brought up under rationing and brutalised by horrors that had to be borne with a stiff upper lip, had been rejected by their children. How a habit of empire had persisted as the old order was remade and maps redrawn, and globalised markets had metastasised the canker of extreme neo-liberalism across the world and turned a diverse planetary ecology into one malignant shopping centre dominated by multinationals.
He had to admit – to himself, he wouldn’t dare say it to anyone else – to being jealous that he hadn’t been alive in a time when you could order anything you wanted, so long as you had cash or access to credit, and have it delivered to you the next day. The way it was described, it sounded like magic. It seemed so unfair, for his generation, that they were lucky to get a new, scratchy home-knitted sweater or socks for Christmas or birthdays and had to work so hard. Life was much better in Cornwall – and, he was told, the rest of the country – than it had been in Devon. It was still harder for generations born since the turn of the millennium than it had been for the previous two.
It was harder to admit, even to himself, that he was still a bit seduced by the glamour of the wartime story absorbed in childhood. The simple narrative of good versus evil, played out in the black-and-white films watched on the school projector, using a generator reserved for special occasions only, held the warm glow of nostalgia and the comfort of certainty. But then he would remember where the fuel for the generator came from, and how the Nazi regime used the fat of slaughtered concentration-camp victims, and feel a bit sick that harvesting still happened, even if the victims were now living.
The bunker was far enough underground to be soundproof. Escape tunnels and hatches in case of discovery, ventilation ducts and tubes containing wiring, riddled the surrounding hillside in a complicated circulatory system. It also had a very basic toilet and shower supplied by a tank fed with rainwater. All of this was news to Will, who had been primarily interested in the fact he had a secret place to go to be sure of being alone and had told none of his friends or family about his discovery. His sisters were a pain, and his parents too caught up in their dispute with the Council; home had been a place of fraught conversations held in low voices behind closed doors. And then weeks later he was gone, and memories of the bunker had faded in the excitement of new impressions and experiences. It wasn’t until after finishing training and volunteering to be posted back to Bodingleigh that he remembered the bunker and realised how useful it could be to SCREW.
It also had its original radio room. Devoid of equipment, it did retain a full set of switch panels, reconnected once the Major had broken into an abandoned military museum in Dartmouth and appropriated the kit they would need to keep in touch with other cells of activists while they coordinated strategy. The upper echelons of the resistance had satellite phones, but they were expensive and could be more easily monitored and tracked. Radio was safer.
With nothing to do but wait, Will made himself useful by putting a pan of water on the cooker to boil. By the time the door to the radio room opened the tea was brewed, using up another precious tea bag. The liquid he poured out was barely brown, but tea-making was more of a symbolic act in the bunker.
The Major came out carrying a folder, closing the door carefully behind him. He stretched and rubbed his neck, running his hand through already untidy hair. He was wearing the unofficial uniform of all SCREW activists – tough black jacket and trousers with plenty of pockets, without insignia. From a distance they could be mistaken for militia.
’Ah, Will, good.’ He accepted the mug Will offered him and yawned. ‘We’ll be having a briefing in half an hour. I’d get yourself something to eat while you can, you’re going to be busy tonight.’
Through the closed door, Will could hear a female voice speaking, relaying information up the line. His stomach fluttered; he was far too excited to eat.
The woman who emerged from the radio room half an hour later was unknown to Will, though her face tugged at his memory. The Major introduced her as Mrs Mason, which Will assumed wasn’t her real name. She was short, in her thirties and pretty, with long dark hair coiled on top of her head, dressed in a knee-length housedress and a nondescript and lumpy cardigan; if he’d seen her outside of this setting he would have pegged her as a wife and mother, happy in the home. Possibly a Door Knocker; not a resistance fighter. Until she raised her eyes from the notepad she handed to the Major and he was caught in a steely gaze that sliced to his core. He was sure she could tell what he had been thinking. His own eyes dropped as he mumbled a greeting.
They gathered around the central table. The Major cleared away old mugs and plates, grabbed a map from the stack tottering on shelves to his side and unrolled it, reclaiming a couple of mugs to hold it down. While he was sorting out his papers, the code knock sounded on the door.
‘Ah, good, bang on time. Let them in, Will.’
These faces were more familiar. Tom, Dick and Harriet, code names the Major seemed to find amusing; two young men and a younger girl Will had trained with in Cornwall, who had connections locally and had been hidden by sympathisers in neighbouring villages. They crowded in and removed damp outer layers, adding to
