31 May – 1 June 1940

Mary Wooler heard about the desperate evacuation from France on the evening of the Friday, 31 May, on the BBC news. It was the first time the public had been told about it. The operation had already been underway for five days.

She spent a sleepless night, mostly on the phone to the War Office, trying to find out what had become of her son. It sounded as if the struggle to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk was failing. It was chaotic, an unfolding disaster. Nevertheless she was told that elements of Gary's division were scheduled to be brought back to Hastings, on the south coast, if they made it back at all. So that was where she had to be.

On the Saturday morning she set off from her rented apartment in London in her hired Austin Seven, with its white-painted bumpers and plastic visors on the headlamps, to drive down to the coast.

The drive ought to have been simple enough. Her plan was to head roughly south-south-east, passing through Croydon, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, before cutting through the Sussex countryside until she came to Hastings via a little place called Battle, where the English had once faced the Normans. That was the theory.

But she never knew where the hell she was. Even as she drove she saw gangs of workmen cutting down direction markers, and unscrewing metal plates with village names. No names! She was a journalist and historian who had always made her living from words, and she thought how odd it was that to protect their country the English were stripping it of its words, of the layer of meaning that gave the landscape its human context: words that were a mish-mash of Norman French and Norse and Old English and even a bit of Latin, relics of other tumultuous days, words like bullet holes. Well, it might or might not confuse General Guderian and his Panzers, but it sure as hell confused Mary.

Still, the sun was a beacon in the clear sky. She took her bearings from that and just kept on running south. It wasn't that big a country, and she had to hit the coast in the end.

And meanwhile this first day of June was exquisitely lovely, one of those early summer days that England served up so effortlessly. Over a crumpled green carpet of fields and hedgerows, the birds soared like Spitfires. It didn't make sense, Mary thought. How could all this coexist with the horrors of the European war, unfolding just a few tens of miles away? Either the war wasn't real, or the summer's day wasn't; they didn't fit in the same universe.

Once she was through the last of the inland towns and neared the coast, the signs of war became more evident. There were pillboxes at the road junctions, some of them so new you could see the concrete glisten, still wet. She was nervous every time she crossed a bridge, for the Home Guard were mining the bridges, Great War veterans and kids too young to be conscripted who might or might not know what they were doing with high explosives.

And then, when she got close enough to glimpse the sea from the higher ground, she came upon more traffic. Most of it was heading the other way, inland, a steady stream of private cars, families, mum, dad, the kids, the dog and the budgie in its cage, with roof racks piled high with suitcases and even bits of furniture. Despite the official orders to 'stay put', as Mary had heard the new Prime Minister Churchill saying on the BBC, whole towns were draining northward, looking for safety. And in among the fleeing English were refugees who must come from much further away, buses and lorries full of civilians, women and children and old folk, and a sprinkling of men of military age. Jammed in, grimy, exhausted, they stared out at the glistening English landscape as they passed.

At one crossroads there was a hold-up. An Army truck had thrown a tyre, and a couple of soldiers were labouring to replace it. The soldiers had stripped to their khaki shirts in the heat of the summer sun, and as they struggled with the heavy wheels they bantered and laughed, cigarettes dangling from their lips. The traffic had to inch past, the laden buses and trucks bumping up on the verge to get by.

Mary found herself stuck opposite a bus that was marked for Bexhill and Boreham Street. She looked into the eyes of one little boy, who sat on the lap of a woman, presumably his mother. He was maybe eight or nine. His hair was mussed, and the dirt on his face was streaked by dried tears. He wore what looked like a school blazer, but the colour was odd – bright orange, not the English fashion. He said something, but she couldn't make out his lip pattern. But then he could be speaking French, or Dutch, or Walloon – maybe even German. She mouthed back, 'Welcome to England.'

At last she came to a coastal town. But which one?

She tracked a rail line until she reached a small station. No name signs. A train stood here, evidently kept back for troops; somebody had chalked 'WELCOME HOME BEF' on the side of a wagon. It made sense that once you had the troops back you would rush them inland, away from the dangers of the coast. But there were no troops to be transported; the train stood idle.

She got to a sea road and turned left, following the line of the coast. To her right the sea lay steel grey and calm, glimmering with highlights, studded with boats. The tide was low, and there was a beach of shingle and rocks, covered by tangles of wire and big concrete cubes. These coastal works were just the outer crust of an entire country turning into a fortress, with hundreds of miles of coastline reinforced, and elaborate systems of defences reaching far inland. The beach just ran on as far as she could see, curving gently into a bay ahead of her, to the east. Hastings had a harbour, but there was no harbour here; she wasn't in Hastings.

She wasn't sure what to do. She'd driven non-stop from London. She was stiff and thirsty and, having had little sleep, was conking out.

She parked the car roughly at the beach side of the road and clambered out. It was about noon now. The light of the sun, the salty sea air hit her like a strong gin. The coast road was busy with vehicles, and there were plenty of the uniforms she had got used to in London – Army khaki, the Navy's deep blue, the lighter slate blue of the RAF, and women in the uniforms of the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or the Navy Wrens.

She walked a little way along the beach. Signs ordered civilians to keep off, and warned that the shingle was mined. And if she looked out to sea, this brilliant summer day, she could actually see the war in Europe, the glint of aircraft swooping low, and she heard the distant crump of guns. A pall of smoke rose up, towering, remote. She found herself noting her impressions for when she next filed some copy. She had barely ventured out of London since the day war had been declared back in September. She tried to imagine this scene being played out in her own homeland, the Atlantic coast fortified in this way.

But the evacuation was in progress too. In the deeper water Navy ships glided, blue-grey silhouettes, while smaller ships filed steadily towards France and back again, trawlers, drifters, crabbers, shrimpers, fishing smacks, a few lifeboats, and many yachts and small motorboats. Big barges lumbered, emblazoned with the name 'Pickfords', intended to haul cargo around the coast. Some of the beach line had been cleared so the boats could ground, the barbed wire cut and pulled back, the tank traps shoved aside. Waiting on the shingle there were stretcher parties, she saw, and the WVS, the Women's Voluntary Service, had set out tables done out with little Union flags and signs saying 'WELCOME HOME OUR BOYS'. Tea boiled in huge urns, and sandwiches piled up on plates. But the tea went undrunk, the sandwiches uneaten.