He shone his torch in front of them. ‘Can you see?’ he said.
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘That’s because there’s nothing there.’ She looked harder. A crater – enormous – a bottomless pit. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty feet,’ Mr Bullock said. ‘And you nearly walked into it.’
He accompanied her back to the post. ‘You’re too tired,’ he said. He held her arm all the way, she could feel the strength of his muscles behind the grip.
At the post she dropped on to a camp bed and blacked out rather than fell asleep. She woke up when the all-clear sounded at six o’clock. She felt as if she’d slept for days but it had only been three hours.
Mr Palmer was also there, pottering about making tea. She could imagine him at home, slippers and a pipe, reading his newspaper. It seemed absurd that he should be here. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing her a mug. ‘You should go home, dear,’ he said, ‘the rain’s stopped,’ as though it were the rain that had spoilt her night rather than the Luftwaffe.
Instead of going straight home she returned to the mound to see how the rescue was proceeding. It seemed different in the daylight, the shape of it oddly familiar. It reminded her of something but for the life of her she couldn’t think what.
It was a scene of devastation, more or less the whole street gone, but the mound, the original mound, was still its own little hive of activity. It would have made a good subject for a war artist, she thought. The Diggers on the Mound would be a good title. Bea Shawcross had been at art school, graduating just as the war started. Ursula wondered if she was moved to depict the war or if she was trying to transcend it.
Very gingerly, she scaled its foothills. One of the rescue squad put out a hand to help her up. A new shift had come on but, from the look of them, the old rescue squad was the one still labouring. Ursula understood. It was hard to leave an incident when somehow you felt you ‘owned’ it.
There was a sudden buzz of excitement around the volcano’s crater as the fruits of the night’s delicate drudgery finally became apparent. A woman, a rope tied under her armpits (nothing delicate about this stage), was extricated by simply hauling her out of the narrow opening. She was passed by hand down the mound.
Ursula could see that she was almost black with dirt and drifting in and out of consciousness. Broken but alive, if only just. She was loaded into an ambulance waiting patiently at the bottom.
Ursula made her own way down. On the ground, a shrouded body lay waiting for a mortuary van. Ursula removed the cover from the face and found the pale-faced man from last night. In the light of day she could see that it was definitely Mr McColl from number ten. ‘Hello, you,’ she said. He would soon be an old friend. Miss Woolf would have told her to label him but when she looked for her message pad she discovered she had lost it and had nothing to write on. Searching in a pocket she found her lipstick. Needs must, she heard Sylvie’s voice say.
She thought about writing on Mr McColl’s forehead but that seemed undignified (more undignified than death, she wondered?) so instead she unshrouded his arm and then spat on a handkerchief and rubbed off some of the dirt, as if he were a little boy. She wrote his name and address on his arm with the lipstick. Blood red, which seemed fitting really.
‘Well, goodbye,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.’
Skirting the treacherous crater from last night, she discovered Miss Woolf sitting behind a dining table salvaged from the wreckage, as if she were in an office, telling people what they should do next – where to go for food and shelter, how to get clothes and ration cards and so on. Miss Woolf was still cheerful, yet heaven knows when she had last slept. The woman had iron in her soul, there was no doubt about that. Ursula had grown enormously fond of Miss Woolf, she respected her almost more than anyone else she knew, apart from Hugh perhaps.
The queue was made up of the occupants of a large shelter, many of whom were still emerging, blinking in the daylight like nocturnal animals, and discovering that they no longer had homes to go to. The shelter was in the wrong place, the wrong street, Ursula thought. It took her a few moments to re-orientate her brain and realize that all night she had thought herself in a different street.
‘They got that woman out,’ she told Miss Woolf.
‘Alive?’
‘More or less.’
When she finally got back to Phillimore Gardens she found Millie up and dressed. ‘Went the day well?’ she said. ‘There’s some tea in the pot,’ she added, pouring it and handing Ursula a cup.
‘Oh, you know,’ Ursula said, taking the cup. The tea was lukewarm. She shrugged. ‘Pretty awful. Is that the time? I have to go to work.’
The following day she was surprised to find one of Miss Woolf’s log entries, written in her clear matron’s hand. Sometimes a buff folder would prove to be a mysterious ragbag and Ursula was never clear how some of these things turned up on her desk. 05.00 Interim Incident Report. Situation Report. Casualties 55 to hospital, 30 dead, 3 unaccounted for. Seven houses completely demolished, approximately 120 homeless. 2 NFS crews, 2 AMB, 2 HRPs, 2 LRP, one dog still operating. Work continues.
Ursula hadn’t noticed any dog. It was just one of many incidents across London that night and she picked up a sheaf of them and said, ‘Miss Fawcett, can you log these.’ She could barely wait for the tea-trolley and elevenses.
They ate lunch outside on the terrace. A potato and egg salad, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, even a cucumber. ‘All grown by our mother’s own fair hand,’ Pamela said. It really was the nicest meal Ursula had eaten in a long time. ‘And to follow there’s an apple charlotte, I believe,’ Pamela said. They were alone at the table. Sylvie had gone to answer the doorbell and Hugh hadn’t returned from investigating an unexploded bomb that had, reportedly, fallen in a field on the other side of the village.
The boys were also dining al fresco – sprawled on the lawn, eating buffalo stew and succotash (or, in the real world, corned beef sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs). They had erected a fusty old wigwam that had been unearthed in the shed and had been engaged in a lawless game of cowboys and Indians until the arrival of the chuck wagon (or Bridget, bearing a tray).
Pamela’s boys were the cowboys and the evacuees were more than happy to be Apaches. ‘I think it suits their nature better,’ Pamela said. She had made them cardboard headbands with chicken feathers attached. The cowboys had to make do with Hugh’s handkerchiefs tied around their necks. The two Labradors were racing around in a state of canine frenzy at all this excitement, while Gerald, still only ten months old, slept obliviously on a blanket alongside Pamela’s dog, Heidi, too sedate for such antics.
‘He’s some kind of token squaw, apparently,’ Pamela said. ‘At least it keeps them quiet. It’s like a miracle. It goes rather well with the Indian summer we’re having.’
‘Six boys in one house,’ Pamela said. ‘Thank God the school term’s started. Boys never flag, you have to keep them busy all the time. I suppose this is a flying visit?’
‘’Fraid so.’
A precious Saturday to herself that she had sacrificed for the sake of seeing Pammy and the boys. She found Pamela drained whereas Sylvie seemed animated by the war. She had become an unlikely stalwart of the WVS.
‘I’m surprised. She doesn’t like other women much,’ Pamela said.
Sylvie now had a large flock of chickens and had stepped up egg production to wartime levels. ‘The poor things are forced to lay day and night,’ Pamela said, ‘you’d think Mother was running an armaments factory.’ Ursula wasn’t sure how you could make a chicken do overtime. ‘She talks them into it,’ Pamela laughed. ‘A regular henwife.’