"Would you like some breakfast?" Vi asked, prying a pin open with her teeth.
He shook his head. "Did Nelson approve the reinforcements?"
"No," Twickenham said in spite of Vi's signalling him not to.
"You must tell Nelson it's an emergency," he said, hugging the blanket to him as if he were cold. "I know why they're after me. It was before the war. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. I wrote a letter to The Times ."
I was grateful Swales wasn't there. A letter to The Times .
"Come, now, why don't you go and lie down for a bit?" Vi said, securing a curl with a bobby pin as she stood up. "You're tired, that's all, and that's what's getting you so worried. They don't even get The Times over there."
She took his arm, and he went docilely with her into the other room. I heard him say, "I called him a lowland bully. In the letter." The person suffering from severe sleep loss, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.
"Has he mentioned what sort of day job he has?" I asked Twickenham.
"Who?" he asked, still typing.
"Jack."
"No, but whatever it is, let's hope he's as good at it as he is at finding bodies." He stopped and peered at what he'd just typed. "This makes five, doesn't it?"
Vi came back. "And we'd best not let von Nelson find out about it," she said. She sat down and dipped the comb into the glass of water. "He'd take him like he took Olmwood, and we're already short-handed, with Renfrew the way he is."
Mrs Lucy came in carrying the incident light, disappeared into the pantry with it, and came out again carrying an application form. "Might I use the typewriter, Mr Twickenham?" she asked.
He pulled his sheet of paper out of the typewriter and stood up. Mrs Lucy sat down, rolled in the form, and began typing. "I've decided to apply directly to Civil Defence for reinforcements," she said.
"What sort of day job does Jack have?" I asked her.
"War work," she said. She pulled the application out, turned it over, rolled it back in. "Jack, would you mind taking this over to headquarters?"
"Works days," Vi said, making a pincurl on the back of her head. "Raids every night. When does he sleep?"
"I don't know," I said.
"He'd best be careful," she said. "Or he'll turn into one of the walking dead, like Renfrew."
Mrs Lucy signed the application form, folded it in half, and gave it to me. I took it to Civil Defence headquarters and spent half a day trying to find the right office to give it to.
"It's not the correct form," the sixth girl said. "She needs to file an A-114, Exterior Improvements."
"It's not exterior," I said. "The post is applying for reinforcing beams for the cellar."
"Reinforcements are classified as exterior improvements," she said. She handed me the form, which looked identical to the one Mrs Lucy had already filled out, and I left.
On the way out, Nelson stopped me. I thought he was going to tell me my uniform was a disgrace again, but instead he pointed to my tin hat and demanded, "Why aren't you wearing a regulation helmet, warden? 'All ARP wardens shall wear a helmet with the letter W in red on the front,'" he quoted.
I took my hat off and looked at it. The red W had partly chipped away so that it looked like a V.
"What post are you?" he barked.
"Forty-eight. Chelsea," I said and wondered if he expected me to salute.
"Mrs Lucy is your warden," he said disgustedly, and I expected his next question to be what I was doing at Civil Defence, but instead he said, "I heard about Colonel God-aiming. Your post has been having good luck locating casualties these last few raids."
"Yes, sir," was obviously the wrong answer, and "no, sir," would make him suspicious. "We found three people in an Anderson last night," I said. "One of the children had the wits to bang on the roof with a pair of pliers."
"I've heard that the person finding them is a new man, Settle." He sounded friendly, almost jovial. Like Hitler at Munich.
"Settle?" I said blankly. "Mrs Lucy was the one who found the Anderson."
Morris's son Quincy's surprise was the Victoria Cross. "A medal," he said over and over. "Who'd have thought it, my Quincy with a medal? Fifteen planes he shot down."
It had been presented at a special ceremony at Quincy's commanding officer's headquarters, and the Duchess of York herself had been there. Morris had pinned the medal on himself.
"I wore my suit," he told us for the hundredth time. "In case he was in trouble I wanted to make a good impression, and a good thing, too. What would the Duchess of York have thought if I'd gone looking like this?"
He looked pretty bad. We all did. We'd had two breadbaskets of incendiaries, one right after the other, and Vi had been on watch. We had had to save the butcher's again, and a baker's two blocks further down, and a thirteenth-century crucifix.
"I told him it went through the altar roof," Vi had said disgustedly when she and I finally got it out. "Your friend Jack couldn't find an incendiary if it fell on him."
"You told Jack the incendiary came down on the church?" I said, looking up at the carved wooden figure. The bottom of the cross was blackened, and Christ's nailed feet, as if he had been burned at the stake instead of crucified.
"Yes," she said. "I even told him it was the altar." She looked back up the nave. "And he could have seen it as soon as he came into the church."
"What did he say? That it wasn't there?"
Vi was looking speculatively up at the roof. "It could have been caught in the rafters and come down after. It hardly matters, does it? We put it out. Come on, let's get back to the post," she said, shivering. "I'm freezing."
I was freezing, too. We were both sopping wet. The AFS had stormed up after we had the fire under control and sprayed everything in sight with icy water.
"Pinned it on myself, I did," Morris said. "The Duchess of York kissed him on both cheeks and said he was the pride of England." He had brought a bottle of wine to celebrate the cross. He got Renfrew up and brought him to the table, draped in his blankets, and ordered Twickenham to put his typewriter away. Petersby brought in extra chairs, and Mrs Lucy went upstairs to get her crystal.
"Only eight, I'm afraid," she said, coming down with the stemmed goblets in her blackened hands. "The Germans have broken the rest. Who's willing to make do with the tooth glass?"
"I don't care for any, thank you," Jack said. "I don't drink."
"What's that?" Morris said jovially. He had taken off his tin helmet, and below the white line it left he looked like he was wearing blackface in a music-hall show. "You've got to toast my boy at least. Just imagine. My Quincy with a medal."
Mrs Lucy rinsed out the porcelain tooth glass and handed it to Vi, who was pouring out the wine. They passed the goblets round. Jack took the tooth glass.
"To my son Quincy, the best pilot in the RAF!" Morris said, raising his goblet.
"May he shoot down the entire Luftwaffe," Swales shouted, "and put an end to this bloody war!"
"So a man can get a decent night's sleep!" Renfrew said, and everyone laughed.
We drank. Jack raised his glass with the others but when Vi took the bottle round again, he put his hand over the mouth of it.
"Just think of it," Morris said. "My son Quincy with a medal. He had his troubles in school, in with a bad lot, problems with the police. I worried about him, I did, wondered what he'd come to, and then this war comes along and here he is a hero."
"To heroes!" Petersby said.
We drank again, and Vi dribbled out the last of the wine into Morris's glass. "That's the lot, I'm afraid." She brightened. "I've a bottle of cherry cordial Charlie gave me."
Mrs Lucy made a face. "Just a minute," she said, disappeared into the pantry, and came back with two cobwebbed bottles of port, which she poured out generously and a little sloppily.
"The presence of intoxicating beverages on post is strictly forbidden," she said. "A fine of five shillings will be imposed for a first offence, one pound for subsequent offences." She took out a pound note and laid it on the table. "I wonder what Nelson was before the war?"