“Yeah, we did,” the veteran agreed. “Another million to go and we win the fuckin’ war.”
“Think anybody back home’ll give a good goddamn?” Cade asked. Klein shook his head.
–
Air-raid sirens woke Daisy Baxter out of a sound sleep. They hadn’t sounded when the Russians bombed Norwich. If this wasn’t a drill or a mistake, the enemy was hitting somewhere closer to Fakenham now.
“Sculthorpe!” Daisy gasped, and jumped out of bed. She hurried down to the cellar, trying not to break her neck on the dark stairs. Whether going down there would do any good if an A-bomb hit the air base, she didn’t know. She didn’t see how she could be any worse off, though.
Antiaircraft guns began to hammer. Sculthorpe lay just a couple of miles from Fakenham. If an A-bomb did hit there, this little town would catch it hard.
Explosions thundered. The Owl and Unicorn shuddered above Daisy’s head. She whimpered like a terrified animal. If the pub fell down above her and blocked the stairs, would she have to stay here till she starved or suffocated?
Explosions, she realized. Plural. With an atom bomb, there’d be only one. But watch out for that first step-it’s a dilly!
So the Russians were dropping ordinary high explosives on Sculthorpe. They didn’t think the airfield was important enough for fancy, expensive atomic weaponry. Fakenham wasn’t in danger unless they missed badly-which, from everything she’d heard about bombing last time here and in Germany, they might well do.
But, unless the Owl and Unicorn took a direct hit, it wouldn’t collapse like that. She breathed easier. She also hoped that whatever the Reds were dropping, it would miss the runways and Nissen huts-the Yanks called them Quonset huts-to the west.
The sirens wailed for about fifteen minutes. No new bombs had fallen for some little while when the all-clear finally warbled. Daisy went up to the ground floor, opened the door, and looked around. Not much to see, not when Fakenham was blacked out. A couple of other people were also peering about.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” George Watkins called from across the street.
“Now that you mention it,” Daisy said, “no.” They both laughed shaky laughs and ducked back inside.
More sirens sounded in the distance. Daisy tensed, fearing a second wave of Russian planes. Then she realized they weren’t air-raid warnings. They were the sirens fire engines used. One thing she could be sure of: with fuel and planes and bombs and buildings, plenty at Sculthorpe would burn.
She didn’t know what time it was. The night was clear. She found the moon. By where it stood in the sky, she guessed it was about two in the morning, give or take an hour. She could go back to sleep…if she could go back to sleep.
She decided to try. She had nothing to lose, and it was cold down here. It wouldn’t be warm in her bedroom, either. She had a coal brazier and a hot-water bottle, very Victorian but not very effective. Steam radiators and gas heat were little more than rumors in Fakenham.
A glance at the glowing hands of the clock on her nightstand told her it was twenty-five past two. She nodded, pleased her celestial timekeeping had come so close. Then she burrowed under the blankets. They were all wool except for the quilted comforter on top. Nothing wrong with them at all. What the feeble outside heat sources couldn’t do, they could.
Whether they could calm her leftover fear and jitters was liable to be another story. Somewhere in the bathroom-or was it downstairs? — she had a packet of fizzing bromide powders. The stuff was supposed to calm your nerves and help you sleep. Getting out to look for it seemed more trouble than it was worth, though. She snuggled under the familiar weight of bedclothes. Either she’d sleep or she wouldn’t. If she didn’t, she’d pour down tea all day-and probably wouldn’t sleep much tomorrow night, either.
The alarm clock’s insistent bells woke her at a quarter after six. As she silenced the clock, she realized she hadn’t killed it when the air-raid sirens wailed. As fuddled as she’d been then, that was a stroke of luck.
She went downstairs, heated water for her morning cuppa, and fried a banger on the stove. Then she warmed up some leftover mash she had in the icebox: a fine British breakfast. She turned on the wireless to listen while she washed the dishes. If you didn’t stay ahead of the game as best you could, you’d be hip-deep in rubbish before you knew it.
“Russian aircraft attacked several landing strips in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland last night,” said a suave BBC newsreader with an accent so perfect, you wanted to sock him in the face. “Relatively little damage was done, and only conventional bombs were dropped. Alert RAF and U.S. Air Force night fighters have claimed three enemy bombers shot down, with two more so badly damaged that they appeared unlikely to make a safe return to their distant bases.”
He made it sound as if the Russians had carried out nothing worse than nuisance raids. It hadn’t seemed that way to Daisy. But then, when you measured attacks on air bases against leveling Norwich and Aberdeen, their importance on the grand scale of things shrank.
She readied the pub for another day’s business. A fresh barrel of bitter went under the tap. All the ashtrays were clean and empty; all the pints and halves behind the bar gleamed. She ran the carpet sweeper to get rid of ashes and potato-crisp crumbs in the rugs. She kept telling herself she ought to buy a Hoover, but she hadn’t done it yet.
As she worked, she wondered whether anyone but the locals would come in. If the airmen at Sculthorpe were confined to base, as they might well be, she’d lose most of a day’s trade. She shrugged. She had to get ready. If she was and they didn’t come, that would be annoying. If she wasn’t but they did, that would be disastrous.
Come they did, as soon as the Owl and Unicorn opened for business. For them, the raid the night before seemed to have been more exciting than terrifying. “We must have irked Ivan, or he’d not have come after us like that,” an RAF flying officer opined between pulls at a pint.
“How bad was it?” Daisy asked.
“Well, it wasn’t good,” the officer said. “They hit a barracks and wrecked a couple of planes and smashed up the runways. We’ll have bulldozers and steamrollers the way a picnic has ants.”
“A barracks? No, that doesn’t sound good at all,” she said.
“It wasn’t,” the RAF man said. “Actually, the bomb didn’t hit square. It blew in one wall, and then the roof fell down. One bloke-a Yank; this was an American barracks-has to be the luckiest sod ever hatched. He was near the far wall. The blast blew him out of his cot and through the window next to it…and all he has to show is a cut on one cheek. You wouldn’t care to play cards against a chap who can do that.”
“I don’t know. He may have used it all up there,” Daisy said. “If he were a cat, that would be eight lives out of nine, wouldn’t it? Eight and a half, maybe.”
“Hadn’t looked at it like that. You may be right.” The flying officer flashed what he no doubt thought of as his best lady-killing smile. “You’re as smart as you are pretty, dear.”
“Oh, foosh!” Daisy said. That and the look on her face made the flyer deflate like a punctured inner tube. Later, she thought she might have let him down more easily. But sometimes such a stale line made her not care what she came out with.
Bruce McNulty strode in that afternoon. He had a bandage taped to his left cheek. For a moment, Daisy thought nothing of it. Several RAF men and Americans had shown up with one minor injury or another-or with one and another. But then she made a guess: “Are you the bloke who went through the window during the raid?”
“Oh, you heard about that, did you?” He made as if to chuckle, but his face clouded over instead. “Yeah, I made it. Some buddies of mine didn’t. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be here myself-know what I mean?”