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Five months later, with his wife now pregnant, Tommy felt that everything was moving too quickly. Though the couple had enjoyed some good times, he knew he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with Else. He loved all women, not just one, and most seemed to love him in return, even though he was too short to be considered classically good-looking. And he had sought the company of women long before his father acknowledged his adolescence by trying to teach him the facts of life. ‘I’ll never forget his opening line,’ remembered Tommy, smiling affectionately at the memory. ‘He began: “I suppose you have heard some dirty stories.” And I had, so it wasn’t too bad a start. He went on to tell me that I should always please the woman before I pleased myself, and I think that was a good lesson to learn.’

Tommy enjoyed his first major affair as a fifteen-year-old on Fanoe, when a married woman twice his age taught him everything else he needed to know about the opposite sex. ‘That created quite a scandal,’ he recalled. ‘My father found out by reading a note she had left for me at our family home, and he wanted to give me a good thrashing. For the first time I resisted, and told him not to raise his hand to me again.’

The amorous Tommy already considered himself to be a man. As the years went by, he was flattered to be told on more than one occasion that he reminded girls of the tough and charismatic film star Humphrey Bogart. Tommy’s military uniform did him no harm either in his pursuit of the opposite sex. Indeed, he remembered: ‘Else and I met in a tailor’s, and she was originally fascinated by my naval cadet’s uniform. She was very complimentary and I suppose I was a bit flattered by the attention.’ But what had attracted him to Else? ‘She had a lot of nice girlfriends,’ he said mischievously. And when asked to describe his wife’s personality, Tommy replied rather uncharitably: ‘She didn’t have one.’ That wasn’t true, of course, but Tommy could never forgive or forget that he had been forced to marry the wrong woman too young.

With so many other women in the world, Else was always going to have a hard time holding on to her man. ‘I like all girls, they are lovely and charming,’ Tommy explained simply. However, he loved the idea of making a difference in the war even more than he loved women. So when Else found herself alone in bed again one night during the late summer of 1940, it wasn’t because of a love rival. Her husband was creeping between sand dunes and pine trees, not in and out of the bedrooms of beautiful women. He had eyes only for the mysterious installation on his native island of Fanoe.

In the darkness, Tommy spotted the rectangular outline of one of the strange devices and heard the faint drone of a plane’s engine somewhere overhead. He thought it sounded like a German sea-plane, though he couldn’t see it. Suddenly, the entire piece of machinery ahead of him began to swivel, as if it were following the aircraft. Then something even more extraordinary happened: ‘They switched on the searchlight and the beam hit the silver-coloured Junker immediately.’ The light’s aim was so precise that Tommy knew he hadn’t witnessed a chance event. There had been no random scanning of the darkness for the origin of the sound: the searchlight had known exactly where to point. For that to have happened, the plane must have been spotted by something far more powerful and sophisticated than the naked eye or binoculars. The precision left Tommy temporarily awestruck. ‘It was that demonstration which made me certain we were dealing with some kind of early-warning system. I was convinced that they now had the capability to plot the position of a ship or plane using radio waves.’

Sneum was well aware that this could be disastrous for the Allied war effort. Since a nearby lighthouse offered a reference point for British planes crossing the North Sea to bomb potential targets in Germany, innumerable aircraft could fall into the trap