Read Chapter 1: The Boy's Letter

The wireless had been quiet all morning, which Arthur Briggs had learned to read as its own kind of bad news. Static hissed and crackled from the set in the corner of the kitchen, a sound as familiar as the gulls working the harbor, but the voices that usually broke through—the BBC announcers with their clipped, careful optimism—had stayed away. Instead there was only the sea wind rattling the window frame and the smell of last night's coal fire hanging in the air.

He was mending a net on the table when the post came. Not that he'd expected it to. The boy's last letter had arrived eleven days ago, and Arthur had read it so many times the creases had gone soft and gray as cloth. The paper was thin, the kind the army issued, and the handwriting had been squeezed tight to fit the page, as if George had been rationing space along with everything else.

The knock at the door was a boy from the post office, cycling uphill with his cap pulled low against the wind. He handed over a single envelope and was gone before Arthur could offer him tea.

Arthur stood in the doorway a moment, the envelope light in his hands. The name on it was his own, but the address had been crossed out twice and re-addressed, and the paper was smudged with something dark along one edge that might have been oil or might have been blood. He opened it there, in the doorway, the wind tugging at the corners.

*Dear Dad,*

*Don't worry about me. We're holding on fine. The Tommies here are good lads and we've got the sea at our backs, so there's nowhere for Jerry to go but the way he came. I've been thinking about the boat. Remember when you took me out past the Goodwin Sands that summer and I got sick over the side and you laughed so hard you nearly fell overboard? I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Seems a long way off now.*

*They say we might get leave soon. I don't know if that's true. Tell Old Tom I still owe him for the time he covered for me when I nicked that jam from the pantry. And tell Mum—*

The sentence stopped. The ink trailed away like a line cut short. Underneath, in a different hand, smaller and neater: *Posting delayed. Your son is well. He will write again when he can.*

Arthur read it twice. Then he folded it carefully, the old way, in thirds, and put it in his breast pocket over his heart. He stood in the doorway a long moment, looking down at the harbor where the *Perseverance* sat at her mooring, gray and solid against the gray water, her nets furled and her hull showing the honest wear of twenty years of work.

She was a trawler, not built for war. Seventy feet of oak and riveted iron, with a wheelhouse that leaked when the wind came from the east and an engine that coughed twice before it caught on cold mornings. But she'd crossed the Channel a hundred times for cod, and she could cross it again for other reasons.

He found old Tom where he always found him at this hour: on the harbor wall, pipe in his teeth, watching the tide turn. Tom was sixty-seven and had been sailing with Arthur for thirty of them. His face was a map of weather—lines cut deep as grooves in a plank—and his hands were permanently stained with tar no amount of scrubbing could shift.

"Got a letter," Arthur said.

Tom didn't look at him. He kept his eyes on the water. "The boy?"

"Aye."

"Bad news?"

Arthur took the letter out and handed it to him. Tom read it slowly, moving his lips around the words, then handed it back.

"He says he's fine."

"He says a lot of things." Arthur tapped the pocket where the letter now rested. "They're at Dunkirk. I heard it on the wireless before it went quiet. The Belgians surrendered. The army's backed up against the sea with Jerry closing in."

Tom took his pipe from his mouth and tapped the ash into the harbor. "That's a bad spot to be."

"It is."

They stood in silence a moment. A gull cried somewhere overhead, thin and desperate-sounding.

"So what are you thinking?" Tom asked.

Arthur looked at the *Perseverance*, riding easy at her moorings. "I'm thinking she's got a full tank and clean nets. I'm thinking the sea's calm enough and the days are long."

"You're thinking you're going to sail into a war."

"I'm thinking about my boy."

Tom turned and looked at him then, properly looked, the way he'd looked at him thirty years ago when Arthur was a green lad signing on for his first trip and scared out of his wits. "They've got boats, Arthur. The navy's going over. They won't leave our lads stranded."

"Maybe not." Arthur shrugged his shoulders, settling the weight of it. "But the navy can't take every little boat that needs taking. And George is my boy. I'm not going to sit here mending nets and listen to the wireless while he's waiting on a beach."

Tom was quiet for a long moment. Then he put his pipe back in his mouth and nodded once, decisively.

"Right then. I'll get the stores. You check the engine."

Arthur felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't realized was clenched. "You don't have to come, Tom. You're not—"

"I'm not young," Tom cut in. "I know what I am. But I can still coil a line and keep a lookout, and you'll need two pairs of hands if the weather turns. The boy stole my jam. I'd like to collect on that when this is over."

Arthur almost smiled. It came out as something closer to a grimace, but it was the nearest thing to a smile he'd managed in days. "We'll need water. And fuel if we can get it. And food that won't go off."

"I know what to get." Tom was already moving, heading up the harbor steps with the brisk, rolling gait of a man who'd spent his life at sea. "You check the old girl. I'll be back before you've got her turned over."

Arthur stood alone on the wall for a moment, looking out at the Channel. The water was gray and flat, the color of old pewter, and the light was thin through the clouds. Somewhere out there, across that stretch of water, his boy was on a beach. His boy, who'd been sick over the side of the boat that summer and had laughed about it afterward, who'd nicked jam from the pantry and lied about it badly, who'd signed up the day after war was declared and told his father not to worry.

He'd signed up with bright eyes and a straight back and no idea what he was marching toward.

Arthur turned away from the water and climbed down to the *Perseverance*. She smelled of diesel and fish and the accumulated salt of two decades of work. He ran a hand along her rail, feeling the grain of the wood, the memory of every trip they'd made together.

"Come on, old girl," he said quietly. "One more crossing."

The engine turned over on the third try. Probably needed new plugs. He checked the fuel—full, thank God—and the water tanks and the winches and the nets. The nets wouldn't matter where they were going, but it was hard to stop checking for things that didn't matter. A lifetime of routine was a hard thing to break.

Tom came back an hour later with two sacks of provisions and a coil of rope over his shoulder. He'd brought bread and cheese and a tin of biscuits, a bottle of fresh water and something wrapped in brown paper that Arthur decided not to ask about. He stowed it all in the cabin while Arthur checked the radio—it was still dead, just static—and then they were ready.

It was afternoon now, the light beginning to go gold at the edges. Arthur stood on the deck and looked at the little harbor. The houses climbing the hill, the pub where he'd celebrated births and endured wakes, the church spire against the gray sky. This was where he'd raised the boy. Where he'd taught him to bait a hook and tie a knot and read the sky for weather. Where he'd let him take the wheel for the first time when he was barely tall enough to see over it, Arthur's hand hovering at the spokes in case he needed to correct, but he never had.

He didn't know if he'd come back to any of it.

He didn't let himself think about that.

"Casting off," Tom said from the bow, his voice carrying over the water.

Arthur went to the wheelhouse and took the wheel. The wood was worn smooth where his hands had touched it a thousand times. The engine grumbled beneath his feet, and the deck vibrated with the particular hum of a boat that was ready to give everything it had.

He looked out at the Channel. The water was calm now, but it wouldn't stay that way. It never did.

"Let's go get our boy," Tom said from the deck.

In the wheelhouse, Arthur pushed the throttle forward. The *Perseverance* leaned into the water and began to move, cutting a clean white line across the gray of the harbor. Behind him, the town drew back, small and shrinking. Ahead of him, the Channel opened out, wide and empty and full of things he couldn't see.

Somewhere out there were his boy, and a beach, and a war.

Arthur Briggs held the wheel steady and did not look back.