They came back after a month, and settled down into a little flat in Harrogate. The Boden family had given Marjorie a little coupe as a wedding present, and this made her free to run around and meet her family and meet her friends when Oliver was at work with the Aston Martin. They had a fine time in those last few months before the war. They ranged the country in their little cars, motoring, sailing, dancing, and having fun together with a young crowd of their friends. All Yorkshire, and all life, was open wide for them.

Then the war came. A war is not at all a bad time for young people; it brings movement to them, travel, and adventure-all the things that young people long for. In the Yorkshire set that the Bodens moved in there was great excitement. Most of the young men wanted to go into the Air Force and be pilots; Oliver Boden was unusual in that he plumped for the Navy. He knew a little about navigation and the tides by this time, and the thought that one day he might rise to command a trawler as a naval officer thrilled both Marjorie and Oliver. A trawler was a real tough, man-sized job: better than sitting in a mouldy aeroplane and dropping things.

He got his commission in October, 1939, and went down to Brighton for his training, to a large, new municipal casino newly christened H.M.S. King Alfred. Marjorie went with him and stayed in a hotel on the sea-front which was his billet, thrilled to the core with all the uniforms and signs of war at sea. For the five weeks it took to turn him into a naval officer they had a lovely time. The work was not too strenuous and he could spend each evening with her in their billet. They drank a good deal of beer and saw a good many pictures, and they met a great number of young R.N.V.R. officers from all corners of the world. They felt that they had never had such a good time before.

He passed out of King Alfred after five weeks, a full-fledged sub-lieutenant with a wavy golden ring upon his arm. He had put in for trawlers, and a trawler it was that he got, though not the sort of trawler that he had envisaged. He was posted to a very old, decrepit ship at Portsmouth that tended the buoys in the swept channel; her name was Harebell. She could do six knots after a boiler clean, not quite so much before it. She was commanded by a very old R.N.R. lieutenant who kept a little newspaper shop in Southampton in the days of peace, and her duty was to waddle out and replace buoys in the approaches to the harbour that had been blown out of place.

Young Boden knew it was a dud job, but it thrilled him to be doing it. He knew that it was an apprenticeship for better things. He went at it in the right frame of mind, humbly learning from his captain the rudiments of his trade-how to handle stiff wire ropes and how to handle ratings with a grievance; how to read a hoist of signal flags and Admiralty Fleet Orders.

Marjorie went with him to Portsmouth and lived in the Royal Clarence Hotel in some considerable luxury. Each morning he would have to go off at about seven o'clock unless he had had a night on, when he did not come home at all. Each morning she would walk down to the Battery and watch the ships going out; usually she would see Harebell waddle out at half the speed of other ships, with Oliver very noble in a duffle coat upon the bridge, or standing over men who worked with ropes and winches in the well. In the late afternoon she would walk down to meet him at the dockyard gate; then they would go back to the hotel and have a few drinks with their friends, and a grill, and then perhaps the pictures.

He went to Portsmouth in December, 1939. In April, 1940, Harebell was blown up, and sunk in three minutes.

Oliver Boden never had a very clear idea of what really happened. A couple of Heinkels had paid their nightly visit to the Solent to drop magnetic mines, and the trawlers had been out at dawn as usual and pooped three of them off. Harebell had pottered out in the forenoon to shift a buoy and Oliver was up upon the bridge with the skipper as they passed the Elbow. He remembered saying "Starboard Five" down the voice-pipe, and then he glanced ahead. He saw the water cream on both sides of the ship beside the well, and he felt through the deck a tremendous jolt beneath his feet. He saw the well deck split, and a vast mass of water coming up towards him; then the blast took him and threw him back against the binnacle, breaking two ribs. He remembered falling from a height into the water, and a great pain in his chest, and the salt down in his lungs. Then he was up again upon the surface coughing and choking, and feebly trying to blow air into the life-saving waistcoat that Marjorie had given him to wear instead of a Mae West. There was the mainmast of the Harebell sticking up out of the water near to him, and eight men of a complement of twenty-one struggling to reach it with him. There was no sign of the skipper. A motor-pinnace picked them up in a few minutes, and took them all direct to Haslar Hospital.

Marjorie heard about it from the Captain of the Dockyard. She was having lunch alone in the hotel when she was called to the telephone, and suffered a succession of irritating commands to wait a moment, please. She could not understand who was calling, or what they wanted, but a vague apprehension grew in her. It could not be that anything had... happened.

Then Captain Mortimer himself came on the line. She had met him once at a sherry party, and she was rather frightened of him. He said: "Look, Mrs. Boden. We've had a bit of bother here this morning, I'm afraid. Your husband is in Haslar Hospital, but he's not badly hurt." There was a silence. "Are you there?"

She said: "I'm here. What was it-what happened?"

"I don't want you to ask that, Mrs. Boden. You know how it is these days. I don't talk about things that happen here, and you've not got to, either. Your husband's got a couple of ribs broken, but they tell me he's quite comfortable. You can see him for a very short time this afternoon at about four o'clock. Do you know where to go?"

He told her, and impressed on her again the necessity for reticence. She rang off, and went back to her lunch in the dining-room, but she ate nothing more. Presently she went up to her room, and threw herself down upon the bed. There were nearly two hours to wait till she could go to Haslar.

In that two hours she changed a good deal. She was only twenty and life had never hit her very hard. The war had been a great game up till then. People got killed, of course; she knew that in the abstract. But not people that you knew, people that really belonged to you. For the first time she faced the fact that Oliver might have been killed that day-in fact, had probably escaped it very narrowly.

Later she went to Haslar, and heard from an over-garrulous sick-bay steward that two-thirds of Harebell's complement had, in fact, been killed, including the captain. She saw Oliver for about two minutes, white and motionless in bed, his head red on the pillow, smiling at her with his eyes, but drowsy with the drugs that they had given him for shock. Then she went back to the hotel.

She sat for a time in the lounge, hoping that some other officer's wife would come in that she knew, that she could talk to. But no one came, and presently she went and dined alone. By nine o'clock she was in bed, but not to sleep.

The appalling nature of the disaster that might have come to her shook her very much. She came of Yorkshire stock, accustomed to face facts; she now faced the fact that she had very nearly lost Oliver. She might still lose him; she had heard of deferred shock. She simply could not visualize what life would be like without him. Oliver had always been there, ever since she could remember. They always had done things together, all their lives. All their lives they had given their spare time to each other. All of their lives, unknowing, they had been in love.

She lay for hours, blindly miserable, hating all ships and the war; hating the Royal Clarence Hotel, and the grill-room, and the drinks, hating Portsmouth and the Navy. If only they could be back in Yorkshire as they had been once, forgetting all this beastliness! All their lives they had been so happy there. She saw the Chalmers' greystone house, and she saw the Bodens' greystone house, and she remembered all the fun that they had had together, with all the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, for so many years. And now, in contrast this...

She cried a little into her pillow, and presently she cried herself to sleep.

She did not sleep for long. She was awake again by about four; she got up and sponged her face. Then she lay down again, grave and thoughtful. She knew quite well now why everything had been fun up in Yorkshire in those days. It was because her father had been in love with her mother, and George Boden had loved Mrs. Boden, and there had been lots of children. People without children lived in flats and places like the Royal Clarence Hotel, but when you had a family you had to do things differently. A family meant you had to have a house, and the bigger the family the bigger the house-a big greystone house in Ilkley or in Burley, with lots of children and young people in and out of it. That was what she wanted now, with all her heart and soul.

They had avoided children; she now felt that they had been very wrong. Marriage without kids was a silly business, an affair of fiats and cocktail-bars that held no solid Yorkshire happiness. A family meant home and happiness. And anyway, she thought with grim realism, if they had a baby there'd be something left for her if Oliver were-killed.

Oliver did not die; in fact, he made a very quick recovery. She used to go and sit with him each afternoon; he had a cabin overlooking the garden quadrangle, bright with spring flowers. And suddenly one afternoon she said: "Nolly, I vote we have a crack at a kid pretty soon."

There was a pause. "They slobber," he said gently.

"I know they do."

"And they get sick all over you."

"I know." She was holding his hand.

"It must be pretty lousy for you, all alone and doing nothing all day," he said. "If that's what you want, it's all O.K. with me."

She said: "You'd like it too, wouldn't you? I mean, it'd be rather fun."

He temporized. "They smell just terrible..." he said.

"Not if you manage them right." She made an appeal to his better instincts. "I mean, it'd be just like having a puppy and seeing it grow up into a decent dog."

"You wouldn't like to have a puppy instead?" he enquired. "You'd see the results quicker."

She said: "I won't be fobbed off with a puppy."

He said: "All right-have it your own way. I was only trying to help. If we don't like it we can always leave it on a doorstep, and get a puppy."

Presently he was up and about, walking with difficulty, and later they went back to Yorkshire for three weeks' leave. In that time the battle of Flanders reached its climax and everybody who was fit to handle a boat went over to Dunkirk; in Yorkshire they knew little of what was going on. Oliver was irritated and upset when he discovered from the newspapers what he had missed. His leave, which had been pleasant enough when it began, now irked him, and he began to write letters to the Admiralty for another ship.

He applied this time to be posted to a trawler in the Humber or Mersey area, in order to be closer to their home if Marjorie were going to have a baby. He did not get it; he was posted instead to a trawler in the Forth, based on Port Edgar. Marjorie went up there with him and stayed in the Lothian Hotel, overlooking the Firth of Forth, with the other naval officers' wives; Boden was able to spend about two nights a week on shore with her.

The work was more interesting, and more what he had joined the Navy to do. His ship was H.M.T. Grimsby Emerald, and the commanding officer, a middle-aged lieutenant R.N.V.R., was a bank manager in civil life and had been in trawlers in the last war. They used to go sweeping up and down the Forth in pair with another trawler, and now and again they had the satisfaction of creating a shattering explosion on the sea bed. Then they would heave-to, drop a bucket over the side for the harvest of stunned fish, repair the sweep, and go on, hoping to do it again. It was pleasant enough during the summer months of June, July, and August. From time to time Marjorie would go in to Edinburgh and come back with a copy of the Nursing Times or else a little book on Infant Management; these she would read in bed at night and sometimes read out bits of them to Oliver if he were there.

Presently it became necessary for her to go to London, to visit a particular shop in Bond Street. This, she explained to Oliver, was all part of the ritual. Only the experts of the Radiant Cradle Company Ltd. knew the ins and outs of this most difficult and intricate affair, and if you got the wrong sort of wool, for example, the baby would develop something horrible and die. Then they would have to start all over again, which would be troublesome.

Oliver said again: "Much better have a puppy. They're hardier," and took her in to Edinburgh to put her in the sleeper for London. The Battle of Britain was then just beginning, and London had had about a month of raids. Oliver's sister, Helen Boden, had a little flat up at the top of an old house in Dover Street, and Marjorie had reckoned to stay with her there. On account of the raids, and at Oliver's insistence, she changed her plans and sent a telegram to a school friend who lived outside at Harrow to invite herself to spend a couple of nights with her.

There was no answer to that telegram before she left Edinburgh, but that did not worry them. Oliver took her to the Waverley grill-room and they split a bottle of burgundy to make her sleep, and then they went to the train together. In the cramped, delicately furnished little sleeper he took her in his arms and kissed her.

"So long, old thing," he said. "Look after yourself." She said a little tremulously: "So long, Nolly. Don't go and bump another mine before I get back."

He left her, and the train carried her away into the night He went back to his duty in Grimsby Emerald, and Marjorie arrived in London next morning, fresh and cheerful after a good night. The train was three hours late, on account of the raids, and everybody seemed to think that it had done very well to lose so little time.

She had heard nothing from her friend at Harrow, and so rang her up. It seemed that there was trouble: mother had bronchitis and there was a trained nurse sleeping in the spare room. Marjorie was really very glad. Honour was satisfied; there was now no alternative to sleeping in Helen's flat in Dover Street, and it would be great fun if there really was a raid.

She went to Dover Street and saw the caretaker who lived down in the basement, a Mrs. Harrison. Helen, it seemed, had gone to Yorkshire for a few days, but she had left word with Mrs. Harrison that Mrs. Boden might turn up to use the flat, so that was quite all right. Marjorie went up to the top floor and unpacked her things; she had slept there before. Each time she used the flat she envied Helen again, for living free and independently in London in a real flat of her own, in Dover Street.

She went out, and walked down Piccadilly, looking in the shop windows. She bought a warm blue scarf for Nolly in the Burlington Arcade because it took her fancy, and she bought a little silver cigarette-lighter at Dunhill's, which she would keep for his birthday in November. Then she had lunch at the Chinese restaurant, partly for the novelty and partly because it was quite cheap, and she was Yorkshire bred.

And after lunch she went to the Radiant Cradle Company in Bond Street and spent two hours with them. She came out a little dazed, having spent a good deal of money on little bits and pieces that were obviously necessary. Having a baby, she thought, was a terribly expensive matter, but quite fun. Everybody in the shop had been so very, very nice to her. Her heart warmed to the Radiant Cradle Company.

She went back to the flat and made herself a cup of tea, feeling rather at a loss. It was fun to be alone in London, but she felt she wouldn't like to have too much of it; she was almost glad to be going back to Port Edgar the next day in spite of the boredom when Oliver was at sea. It would be awful fun if he could come to London next time with her. She could not think of anyone in London at that moment that she knew, so when her tea was finished she went out and saw a film.

She came out of the cinema at about seven, on a warm September evening. There had been a raid warning while she was in it, but ten minutes later the All Clear had sounded, and when she came out there was nothing unusual to be seen. She knew little about London restaurants except the Piccadilly Hotel, and she did not feel like going there alone. So she went back to the Chinese restaurant again and had another peculiar meal, and so back to Dover Street in the gloaming.

The warning sounded again as she went in, at about nine o'clock, and gave her a tremendous thrill.

It was hot in the flat beneath the roof, though all the windows were wide open. She took off her shoes and her dress, put on a kimono and went and leaned out of the window. There were a few searchlights stabbing the evening sky and a low rumble of gunfire in the distance to the south; she listened to it with pleasurable excitement. Perhaps it would develop into a real blitz, with fires and bombs and everything; something to brag about when she got back to the Lothian Hotel. In the street below her people seemed to be scurrying quickly to their homes.

The blue sky darkened into night; at about ten o'clock the first bombs fell. Overhead, very distant, she could hear the faint noise of an aeroplane; from that time onwards the drone was continuous. Whatever aeroplanes they were, she thought they must be flying at a very great height, five or six miles, perhaps. She wondered if they were German bombers or British fighters; there was no means of telling which.

Presently bombs began to fall all over London, some not more than half a mile away, it seemed to her. There was the glow of fire towards the east, and several times from Piccadilly she heard the clang and rumble of fire engines coming from the west. The gunfire from the park not far away was continuous; each time that one particular gun fired her window rattled and the floor shook a little beneath her feet. Splinters of shell fell down from time to time upon the roofs with a sharp rattle, and once a large piece, probably a fuse, fell with a great crash of slates not far away. She kept back under cover after that, and only gazed diagonally upwards through the window at the little bursting stars spattering the sky above.

After a time it seemed to her that her top room was not the safest place of all to be in at. that time. She opened the door of the flat and went downstairs in her kimono to see what anybody else was doing. She found a little knot of people sitting on the stairs of the bottom flight; there was no cellar or shelter to the house. She went upstairs again and fetched a cushion and her eiderdown, and came down again to join them, sitting most uncomfortably upon a stair.

The raid went on and on, the detonations sometimes distant, sometimes very close at hand. She stayed down there on the cold stairs for over two hours, weary and bored and rather cold, and most uncomfortable. At about one o'clock the bombing and the gunfire died away, and for the first time there was no sound of aircraft overhead.

Somebody said at last: "Sounds like the end. Give it another ten minutes." Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. There had been no All Clear, but people started drifting up to bed; Marjorie went up too, took off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, and slipped thankfully between the sheets. In five minutes she was asleep.

A second wave of bombers came half an hour later, and the gunfire began again and woke her up. She did not stir from bed, being very tired. She lay and listened to the raid for nearly an hour, and presently dozed off again, accustomed to the noise.

She woke to the shrill scream of the bomb that hit the house next door, an instant before it burst. She had no time to do anything, hardly time to realize what the noise denoted, before the appalling thing happened. Her bed was lifted bodily up into the air and slammed down again upon the floor, and a great pressure blast came on her that made her cry out with the pain in her ears. Then, as she watched, the solid wall at the end of her room split and crumbled and dissolved in shreds of plaster, and was gone, and a thick, choking cloud of dust was over everything that made her gasp for breath. She lay petrified with fright in bed; then something happened to the roof above her. A half-ton coping stone came crashing through the ceiling and fell down on to the lower half of the bed. The bed collapsed down on to the floor and she lay pinned there, stunned with the shock and with the pain in both her legs.

She struggled to sit up, and the pain bit and gnawed her legs, piercing, unbearable. She lay back white and trembling, and fearful of what this might mean for her. She thought: "This is the sort of thing that gives people a miscarriage"; indeed, it seemed to her that people had had miscarriages for something rather less than she had got. She felt that she must try to lie back quietly and rest. Presently, when she was a little calmer, she would cry out, and somebody would come.

Below her, in the street, there were confused noises of men shouting and the rumble of falling masonry and brick. Slowly the thick choking dust began to settle; it settled thickly on the ruins of her bed, upon the sheets, upon her arms, her face, her hair. As the cloud slowly cleared she found that she could see straight out ahead of her where the wall used to be; she looked into a torn, incredible gap, vacant, that had been the house next door. Above the shattered roof of the next door but one she could see the stairs pin-pointed in a deep blue sky.

Suddenly, from the stairs outside the door behind her head there was a sound of scrambling, and a man's voice. It was calling: "Is anyone up there in the top rooms? Is anybody up there?"

She answered weakly: "Yes, please. Me. I'm here." "Which room are you in?" "In the front, on the top floor."

"Can you get out on to the landing, where I can see you? Come carefully, because the stairs are down."

She said: "I can't move. There's something lying on my legs."

There was a momentary pause. Then the voice said: "All right, lady-take it easy. I'll come up to you."

The scrambling noises recommenced. She heard a voice say: "Bert, there's a woman up on the top floor. I'm going up. Stand from under, case the whole bloody lot comes down." And presently, crawling upon his belly on the floor that swayed and teetered beneath his added weight, a man came to her.

She saw him faintly in the starlit darkness, through the fog of dust. He was a very dirty man, in a tin hat and a blue boiler-suit, with an armlet bearing the letters A.F.S. He was a man of about fifty, still lean and athletic. He said: "This floor isn't quite what it might be. Come on, lady. Let's get out of this toot sweet."

She said: "I can't move, I'm afraid. I think both my legs are broken. Look."

He switched on an electric torch and examined the wreck of her bed. He tested the weight of the coping stone with his hands: it was utterly beyond his power to shift it. In three weeks of intensive raids this man had learned a great deal, had amassed a sad store of experience. He knew that there was only one thing that could save this girl. A doctor must come up, alone, because the floor would bear no more than one, and amputate both legs where she lay. And he must do it quickly.

He said: "Look, lady, I'm going down to fetch my mate to give a hand with this. We'll get you down okay. Just lie there quiet and stick it out, and don't move round more'n you've got to. I'll be back inside ten minutes." Then he was gone, and she was left alone again. She heard him slithering and scrambling down the staircase well. His visit had comforted her, had eased her fears; she knew now that everything was going to be all right. The little noise of the incendiaries, the six or seven quick plops as they fell among the wooden ruins of the roofs and floors, passed her unnoticed; she heard the growing clamour in the street, but did not understand.

A sharp, bitter smell of smoke was blown to her. In sudden fear she raised her head and saw, arising from the ruins of the house next door, a tongue of flame. She stared at it dumbfounded. Then she realized it meant the end.

In those last moments she was agonized by thoughts of Boden, and of their dependence on each other. She cried: "Oh, Nolly dear, I've gone and let you down! Whatever will you do?" The smoke came pouring up the staircase well and gushed around her, products of combustion, stifling and merciful. In a few moments she lost consciousness.

The fire shot up into the starry night, enveloping the ruined houses, violent, uncontrollable. It made a flaming beacon in the night a hundred feet in height; the Germans took it for an aiming point and sowed the area with bombs. It was two hours before the sweating, cursing firemen got it down.

The news came to Boden forty hours later, in this way. H.M.T. Grimsby Emerald came in at about seven in the evening and dropped anchor off the trawler base. A lamp began to flicker from the signal tower. The captain stood in Monkey's Island beside the signalman and spelled it out.

He turned to the lad. "All right. Nip down and tell Mr. Boden."

The signalman went up to Boden on the forecastle. "Captain said to tell you, sir, there's been a signal. You've got to report to the captain's office, on shore. They're sending the launch out for you."

Boden glanced ashore; already the launch was casting off from the quay. "My Christ!" he said. "I'd better go and get clean."

Ten minutes later, in a collar and his best monkey jacket, he slipped over the side into the launch. He landed at the harbour steps still straightening his tie. There was an officer he knew slightly waiting for the ferry, an R.N.V.R. serving in Rodney. To this chap Boden remarked "Baa," according to the custom of the service at that rime, and passed on to the Naval Centre and the office of the captain (Mine-sweepers).

In the outer office he asked the secretary, another R.N.V.R. officer: "What does he want me for?"

"I don't know, old man." Instinctively, Boden knew that he was lying.

He went into the inner room, his hat under his arm, and there was his father, standing with the captain.

"Eh, lad," George Boden said directly. "I've brought bad news, and you must take it like a man."

And then, in plain unvarnished terms he told him what had happened.

The next few days passed in a horrible, unreal dream. He went in to Edinburgh with his father and they caught the night train down to London. His captain with unobtrusive naval kindness had telephoned to C.-in-C. Rosyth, the admiral himself, explaining the position, who in turn had telephoned demanding sleepers at an hour's notice, so that on that first night young Boden had a chance of sleep. His father dosed him well with allonal, and he slept fitfully to London.

They went to Dover Street and saw the blackened ruin of three houses, with men working to dislodge the crumbling, tottering walls in clouds of dust and filth. They went to the A.F.S. station, a garage in a near-by mews, and there they interviewed an awkward, embarrassed man of fifty with grizzled grey hair, still wearing a tin hat and a dirty boilersuit. They gave a statement to the police for records. There was nothing more that they could do in London, and they went home to Yorkshire.

Oliver Boden stayed there for three days. Then, because there was nothing for him to do there, and because he ached to get away from everything, he took the train north to Port Edgar, and reported back for duty.

He made two more sweeps in Grimsby Emerald. They anchored off Elie, on the north side of the Firth, one evening; the captain let a few of the ratings go on shore to stretch their legs. He pressed Boden to go with them, but the boy refused.

"I don't feel like it, sir, if you don't mind," he said awkwardly.

The late bank manager went himself, and walked about the little greystone town for an hour, and had a drink at the hotel. And coming back on board in the twilight, he saw Boden standing alone up in Monkey's Island, and went up to him.

"Fine night," he said, for want of something to say. "Anything doing?"

"No, sir." The boy hesitated, and then said: "Sir, would you mind very much if I put in to leave the ship?"

The older man said: "I should mind the hell of a lot. Probably help you over the side with the toe of my boot." Boden smiled faintly. "Still, I'd probably get over it. If that's what you want, I'll see the captain for you, if you like. What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. But I want to get away from here."

The other nodded. "I know. Not much fun going on shore."

"No, sir."

Two days later he was saying the same thing to his captain in the Naval Centre at Port Edgar. "I don't like coming on shore here, sir," he said awkwardly. He was flushing, and fumbling with his cap. "Do you think I could get in some ship going overseas?"

"I don't know about that. Sit down, Boden. Have a cigarette." He made the boy comfortable, and a little more at ease. "You've only been in trawlers, haven't you?"

"Yes, sir. I was in a ship called Harebell before this."

"I remember," said the captain directly. "She was sunk. You haven't had much luck."

"No, sir."

"I don't think you'll get overseas at once, Boden. You're not a gunner, and you're not a navigator. You're a trawler officer. I tell you what I can do for you, though. I can put you forward for an anti-submarine course, and you can go on in an A/S trawler on the west coast somewhere. Would that suit you, do you think?"

"I'd like that, sir." Boden hesitated, and then said: "I'd like to do something a bit more active than just sweeping up mines all the time."