Door No. 2
The Patrol
If the Germans came, they would go underground and fight on.
An illustration, not a portrait of the Bodiam patrol.
Everyone in Hurst Green is keeping something back. Most of it is small: a grudge, a worry, a feeling with nowhere to go. Some of it is not small at all.
In the summer of 1940, men from the farms around Bodiam were sworn to a secret so complete that some of their own families never knew. They belonged to the Auxiliary Units, a secret stay-behind resistance force formed that July. If the Germans came, they would go underground and fight on.
By day they were tractor drivers and farm labourers, a dairy farmer, a head gardener, a coal merchant. Most of them worked for Guinness Hop Farms, in the hop gardens around Bodiam and Udiam. Nothing about them would have caught your eye in the lane.
The patrol was real. Its men are named, with respect, on The Real Patrol.
The patrol in The Shadows of War is drawn from theirs, and the novel keeps its secret as carefully as they kept their own. Its characters are invented, and their story is their own. What is borrowed from history is the shape of the thing: a secret held, at home, by ordinary people, in a village where everyone notices everything.
In the novel, that secret comes closer to Lily than she could ever have guessed. Who keeps it, and what it costs, is for the book to tell.
From the chapters
The true history
The men of the Bodiam patrol
Ten names, their trades, their base in the Round Wood, and the women of the secret wireless station at Heathfield.
Read the real historyBegin at the beginning
Read the first three chapters, free.
The story opens in September 1938, a year before the war, on a farm in the High Weald.
The first three chapters, as a PDF
The Prologue and the first two chapters, about 45 printed pages, to read wherever you like. We will email you the link.