9th July 1917
Alex MacKay should have been asleep in bed. It was nearly twenty past eleven at night, yet he was sat cross-legged in rough grass sweeping binoculars greedily over an array of warships at rest in the Orkney twilight. He had a practised routine of artfully placing two pillows lengthways in his bed, climbing out the bedroom window, shinning down the drainpipe, then sprinting low to his vantage point like a soldier under fire to avoid being seen. His evening perch afforded an elevated view beyond Hoy’s shores, out over the island of Flotta and the waters of Scapa Flow, to the dark, low folds of Orkney’s mainland beyond.
Scapa Flow, two Norse words the war had made common parlance across the British empire and beyond. Its wind-swept waters, largely enveloped by the islands of Orkney, offered a protected anchorage from which the Royal Navy could control the North Sea. At twelve years old, Alex didn’t really care about why the navy was there, only that it was. He devoured the newspapers for any news of the fleet, though didn’t need a broadsheet to tell him there were nearly two hundred ships in front of him that evening.
