I looked hesitantly at the slice of cake, guilty about my greed but hating to see it go to waste and still hungry. At the least I should stay up and keep him company.
“Violet’s the warden whose watch you took, the one who was late,” I said. I sat down on the floor, my back to the painted baseboard, and started to eat. “She’s full-time. We’ve got five full-timers. Violet and me and Renfrew — you haven’t met him yet, he was asleep. He’s had rather a bad time. Can’t sleep in the day — and Morris and Twickenham. And then there’s Petersby. He’s part-time like you.”
He didn’t turn around while I was talking or say anything, only continued looking out the window. A scattering of flares drifted down, lighting the room.
“They’re a nice lot,” I said, cutting a bite of cake with my fork. In the odd light from the flares the jam filling looked black. “Swales can be rather a nuisance with his teasing sometimes, and Twickenham will ask you all sorts of questions, but they’re good men on an incident.”
He turned around. “Questions?”
“For the post newspaper. Notice sheet, really, information on new sorts of bombs, ARP regulations, that sort of thing. All Twickenham’s supposed to do is type it and send it round to the other posts, but I think he’s always fancied himself an author, and now he’s got his chance. He’s named the notice sheet Twickenham’s Twitterings, and he adds all sorts of things—drawings, news, gossip, interviews.”
While I had been talking, the drone of engines overhead had been growing steadily louder. It passed, there was a sighing whoosh and then a whistle that turned into a whine.
“Stairs,” I said, dropping my plate. I grabbed his arm, and yanked him into the shelter of the landing. We crouched against the blast, my hands over my head, but nothing happened. The whine became a scream and then sounded suddenly further off. I peeked round the reinforcing beam at the open window. Light flashed and then the crump came, at least three sectors away. “Lees,” I said, going over to the window to see if I could tell exactly where it was. “High explosive bomb.” Jack focused the binoculars where I was pointing.
I went out to the landing, cupped my hands, and shouted down the stairs, “HE. Lees.” The planes were still too close to bother sitting down again. “Twickenham’s done interviews with all the wardens,” I said, leaning against the wall. “He’ll want to know what you did before the war, why you became a warden, that sort of thing. He wrote up a piece on Vi last week.”
Jack had lowered the binoculars and was watching where I had pointed. The fires didn’t start right away with a high-explosive bomb. It took a bit for the ruptured gas mains and scattered coal fires to catch. “What was she before the war?” he asked.
“Vi? A stenographer,” I said. “And something of a wallflower, I should think. The war’s been rather a blessing for our Vi.”
“A blessing,” Jack said, looking out at the high explosive in Lees. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see his face except in silhouette, and I couldn’t tell whether he disapproved of the word or was merely bemused by it.
“I didn’t mean a blessing exactly. One can scarcely call something as dreadful as this a blessing. But the war’s given Vi a chance she wouldn’t have had otherwise. Morris says without it she’d have died an old maid, and now she’s got all sorts of beaux.” A flare drifted down, white and then red. “Morris says the war’s the best thing that ever happened to her.”
“Morris,” he said, as if he didn’t know which one that was.
“Sandy hair, toothbrush moustache,” I said. “His son’s a pilot.”
“Doing his bit,” he said, and I could see his face clearly in the reddish light, but I still couldn’t read his expression.
A stick of incendiaries came down over the river, glittering like sparklers, and fires sprang up everywhere.
The next night there was a bad incident off Old Church Street, two HEs. Mrs Lucy sent Jack and me over to see if we could help. It was completely overcast, which was supposed to stop the Luftwaffe but obviously hadn’t, and very dark. By the time we reached King’s Road I had completely lost my bearings.
I knew the incident had to be close, though, because I could smell it. It wasn’t truly a smelclass="underline" it was a painful sharpness in the nose from the plaster dust and smoke and whatever explosive the Germans put in their bombs. It always made Vi sneeze.
I tried to make out landmarks, but all I could see was the slightly darker outline of a hill on my left. I thought blankly, We must be lost. There aren’t any hills in Chelsea, and then realized it must be the incident.
“The first thing we do is find the incident officer,” I told Jack. I looked round for the officer’s blue light, but I couldn’t see it. It must be behind the hill.
I scrabbled up it with Jack behind me, trying not to slip on the uncertain slope. The light was on the far side of another, lower hill, a ghostly bluish blur off to the left. “It’s over there,” I said. “We must report in. Nelson’s likely to be the incident officer, and he’s a stickler for procedure.”
I started down, skidding on the broken bricks and plaster. “Be careful,” I called back to Jack. “There are all sorts of jagged pieces of wood and glass.”
“Jack,” he said.
I turned around. He had stopped halfway down the hill and was looking up, as if he had heard something. I glanced up, afraid the bombers were coming back, but couldn’t hear anything over the anti-aircraft guns. Jack stood motionless, his head down now, looking at the rubble.
“What is it?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He snatched his torch out of his pocket and swung it wildly round.
“You can’t do that!” I shouted. “There’s a blackout on!”
He snapped it off. “Go and find something to dig with,” he said and dropped to his knees. “There’s someone alive under here.”
He wrenched the banister free and began stabbing into the rubble with its broken end.
I looked stupidly at him. “How do you know?”
He jabbed viciously at the mess. “Get a pickaxe. This stuff’s hard as rock.” He looked up at me impatiently. “Hurry!”
The incident officer was someone I didn’t know. I was glad. Nelson would have refused to give me a pickaxe without the necessary authorization and lectured me instead on departmentalization of duties. This officer, who was younger than me and broken out in spots under his powdering of brick dust, didn’t have a pickaxe, but he gave me two shovels without any argument.
The dust and smoke were clearing a bit by the time I started back across the mounds, and a shower of flares drifted down over by the river, lighting everything in a fuzzy, over-bright light like headlights in a fog. I could see Jack on his hands and knees halfway down the mound, stabbing with the banister. He looked like he was murdering someone with a knife, plunging it in again and again.
Another shower of flares came down, much closer. I ducked and hurried across to Jack, offering him one of the shovels.
“That’s no good,” he said, waving it away.
“What’s wrong? Can’t you hear the voice any more?”
He went on jabbing with the banister. “What?” he said, and looked in the flare’s dazzling light like he had no idea what I was talking about.
“The voice you heard,” I said. “Has it stopped calling?”
“It’s this stuff,” he said. “There’s no way to get a shovel into it. Did you bring any baskets?”
I hadn’t, but further down the mound I had seen a large tin saucepan. I fetched it for him and began digging. He was right, of course. I got one good shovelful and then struck an end of a floor joist and bent the blade of the shovel. I tried to get it under the joist so I could pry it upward, but it was wedged under a large section of beam further on. I gave it up, broke off another of the banisters, and got down beside Jack.