The Londoners (27 page)

‘I ’eard that, Daniel Collins!’ Miriam said furiously, rounding on him so suddenly that one of her metal hair curlers went flying into the street. ‘And if you think
’avin’ a ’earse is such a good idea I’ll tell Albert to stick it outside
your
’ouse and then we’ll see how you like it!’

‘I fink we’d better go dahn The Swan, Daniel,’ Charlie said nervously. ‘I fink things are gettin’ a bit ’ot ’ere.’

‘I think I’ll come with you,’ Mavis said, rightly judging that most of the fun was now over and that her father would be in need of all the family support he could get.
‘Are you comin’ with us, Carrie?’

‘No. I haven’t even stepped inside the house yet and I’ve Rose to bath and put to bed.’

Ever since Ted had marched away to training camp Mavis had taken to calling in for a drink at The Swan more and more often and it was a habit Carrie strongly disapproved of.

She said now, impatience replacing relief in her voice, ‘Shouldn’t you be making Billy and Beryl’s supper? Where are they? Or don’t you know?’

‘They’ve taken Bonzo up the ’eath,’ Mavis said, well aware of Carrie’s disapproval and totally uncaring of it. ‘Billy will be racin’ down the banks of
the gravel pit near Black’eath Village, crankin’ his arms and screechin’ at the top of his voice and pretendin’ to be a Stuka dive-bomber and Beryl and Bonzo will be the
poor little sods dived upon. When they come ’ome they’ll know where I am and come down for me and I’ll give them some money for some chips. OK?’

‘Not with me,’ Carrie said shortly. ‘And it wouldn’t be OK with Ted, either.’

‘What Ted doesn’t know ’e can’t grieve over,’ Mavis said philosophically, ‘and I’m not carryin’ on this argument any longer. Mum’s given
enough of a free show for one day without you and me givin’ another.’

It was a statement Carrie couldn’t disagree with and as Mavis began to saunter off towards Magnolia Hill and The Swan, accompanied by Charlie and Daniel, she turned to Kate, saying
wearily, ‘I’ll pop up and see you later. After I’ve bathed Rose.’

Kate nodded and, as she walked away from the cluster of neighbours still gathered around the Jennings’ gateway, she heard Hettie saying insistently, ‘I don’t care what anyone
says. If that horse is pulling a hearse it should have purple plumes on its head!’

‘I’ve never been so shocked by anything in my life,’ Miss Pierce said to her half an hour later as she sat at Kate’s kitchen table after popping in on
her from Miss Godfrey’s. ‘When Mr Muff told me you had been dismissed I thought he’d taken leave of his senses. “She can’t have been dismissed,” I said to him.
“I’m the Personnel Officer. No-one is dismissed without my being informed of the decision beforehand.” Then he told me of your interview with Mr Harvey.’

Kate had made her a cup of tea and her fingers tightened on the handle of her teacup. ‘I realized then that the gossip flying around the offices had come to Mr Harvey’s ears and
that, disbelieving it, he
had
dismissed you.’

Her pleasant, plain face was deeply concerned. ‘Harriet thinks I should request an interview with Mr Harvey and that I should tell him that I know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the
gossip about yourself and his grandson
is
true and that . . .’

‘No!’ Kate pushed her chair away from the table and stood up so suddenly that tea slopped into her cup’s saucer. ‘Mr Harvey wasn’t only abusive to me because he
thought I was lying about my relationship with Toby, he was also abusive to me because of my German blood. He’s a horrid, hideous old man and I don’t want to have anything to do with
him ever again!’

Miss Pierce regarded her with an appalled expression. ‘But don’t you think . . .’ she began. It was a sentence that remained unfinished. A sound neither of them had ever heard
before impinged on their consciousness. It was a dull, heavy roar. A roar that was becoming ever louder.

‘Planes!’ Miss Pierce said, pushing her chair away from the table and rising unsteadily to her feet. ‘Hundreds of them! Are they ours or are they German?’

It was still daylight and Kate rushed towards the back door, flinging it open. Eastwards, over the Thames, the sky was dark with approaching bombers.

‘
They’re German!’
she shouted to Miss Pierce as air raid sirens screamed into life. ‘
Run into the shelter! I’ll be with you the minute I’ve got
Hector!’

From where she was standing she could see Mr Nibbs sprinting down the length of his garden towards his Anderson shelter, his braces down and his trouser flies open, indicating that the Germans
had caught him at a very inconvenient moment. Dimly, over the cacophony of wailing sirens and the increasingly deafening roar of the fast-approaching planes, Charlie could be heard shouting
frantically for Queenie.

‘
Harriet!’
Miss Pierce said urgently. ‘
What about Harriet? We can’t leave her on her own at a moment like this!
’

Hector had already bolted to Kate’s side, terrified by the din. Kate grabbed hold of his collar and thrust him towards Miss Pierce. ‘
Take Hector and get into the
shelter!’
she shouted at her. ‘
I’ll go for Miss Godfrey!’

As she wrenched the door open, she saw Bob Giles on the far side of the square, sprinting hell for leather towards the vicarage.

Over nearby Woolwich and the Arsenal and ammunition factories, bombs were already falling. Knowing that at any second similar deathly cargoes would be plummeting down over Lewisham, Catford and
Blackheath, she hurtled up Miss Godfrey’s path and steps, praying to God that the front door would be off the latch. For the first time in her life she burst into Miss Godfrey’s home
without knocking.

‘Miss Godfrey!
Miss Godfrey!’
she shouted, racing through the house towards the kitchen. ‘Miss Pierce is already in my garden shelter! Come on! There isn’t a
second to lose!’

Miss Godfrey strode to meet her, tweed-suited as always. A tin hat emblazoned with the letter ‘A’ for ambulance was strapped firmly beneath her chin. Her gas mask canister was over
her shoulder and her arms were full of blankets.

‘Go back and join Miss Pierce immediately, Katherine,’ she said authoritatively. ‘As a voluntary ambulance driver it is my duty to report immediately to my ARP
Centre.’

Kate stared at her aghast and then, knowing instantly that it would be useless to argue with her, she spun on her heel and, with Miss Godfrey close behind her, ran towards the still open
door.

The thunder of aircraft and the force of exploding bombs blasted their eardrums. The sky above Woolwich and all points east along the Thames was an inferno of flames and billowing smoke.

For one brief instant Miss Godfrey halted, barely able to comprehend the sight that met her eyes. ‘
Dear God in heaven!’
she whispered. ‘
They’re razing the
East End to the ground!’

Kate couldn’t hear her, but she could read her lips. She thought of the crowded tenements in Poplar and Canning Town and East Ham and knew that at last, after the long period of the
‘Phoney War’ when Hitler’s attention had been focussed upon the Netherlands and Belgium and France and the previous few weeks, when the war had been fought out between RAF and
Luftwaffe
fighter pilots, what everyone had always dreaded was finally happening. The war had come to London and people were being crushed and blasted and burnt to death in their
homes.

The bulk of the bombers were nearly directly overhead and as Miss Godfrey began to sprint out of the Square in the direction of the ARP Centre only three other figures were visible. One of them
was Daniel Collins in his Auxiliary Fire Service uniform, quite clearly as courageously intent on the same destination as Miss Godfrey. The other two were Billy and Beryl.

Billy was staring up at the planes in rapt wonderment. Beryl, a hair-ribbon adrift and hanging loosely down over her right ear, was standing beside him, her hand trustingly in his.

Bombs were beginning to fall much nearer now. Shrapnel was dancing down the far pavement and as Kate raced across to them she was aware of a great feeling of suction and compression pulling and
pushing her.

‘
Come with me!
’ she shouted to Billy, seizing hold of Beryl and tucking her bodily beneath one arm as acrid smoke billowed around them, almost robbing her of breath.
‘
For the love of God, Billy!
RUN!’

Billy didn’t want to run. He wanted to watch the bombers and the massive explosions destroying the docks, and the fires in Woolwich leaping hundreds of feet high.

With a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, Kate hauled him protestingly after her; off the street and into her front garden; up the short pathway and then the flight of steps leading
to her front door. Everything around them, even the ground beneath their feet, seemed to be lifting and falling. In the house, pictures were tumbling off the walls and as they sped through the
kitchen Kate saw that the cup Miss Pierce had so recently been drinking out of, and which she had left on the kitchen table, lay in shattered smithereens on the floor.

‘Faster!’ she gasped again to Billy who had blessedly begun to co-operate with her. ‘
Run faster, Billy!’

Together they ran down the back-garden path and the steps leading to the Anderson shelter, tumbling into it on top of a distraught Miss Pierce and a terrified Hector.

‘Thank God!’ Miss Pierce said devoutly and then, as Miss Godfrey failed to follow them, she said urgently. ‘But where is Harriet? Why isn’t Harriet with you?’

Kate pressed a hand against her heaving side. ‘She . . . insisted . . . on going to the . . . ARP Centre,’ she gasped with difficulty. ‘She’s a . . . volunteer . . .
ambulance driver.’

Miss Pierce closed her eyes momentarily and then said tautly, ‘Yes. Of course. I forgot.’

She was sitting on one of the two long, low benches with which Carl Voigt had furnished the shelter and as she took Beryl from Kate’s arms she said, ‘Do you think this, is it? Do you
think the invasion has begun?’

Hector was whimpering in distress and Kate sat close to him, stroking him reassuringly, ‘I don’t know,’ she said as a terrific rushing noise indicated a stick of bombs falling
perilously close by. ‘It may be that Hitler is just trying to destroy the docks and Woolwich Arsenal before invading.’

The blast of an explosion rocked the corrugated steel protecting them. ‘That wasn’t the docks or Woolwich,’ Miss Pierce said ashen-faced. ‘That was only streets
away.’

‘I want my mum,’ Beryl said, her lip quivering. ‘I don’t like these big bangs. Bonzo didn’t neither and he ran home.’

In the wake of the last, terrifyingly near explosion, there came another sound. The long, echoing rumble of falling bricks and masonry.

Mindful of Beryl and Billy’s listening ears neither Kate nor Miss Pierce said a word but over the top of Beryl’s head their eyes held and both knew what the other was thinking. Had
the destroyed building been occupied? Had it been a house in Magnolia Square? Had it perhaps been the home of someone they knew?

‘This is a real adventure Miss, ain’t it?’ Billy said to Miss Pierce with relish, hugging his knees to his chin as he sat on the wooden planking which was the floor of the
shelter. ‘Can you hear the guns? They’re our guns. I bet it’s the destroyer moored at Greenwich that’s firing ’em. I bet we ain’t ’alf giving them bombers
’ell.’

‘I sincerely hope your assumption is correct, young man,’ Miss Pierce said, greatly cheered by the idea that part of the mayhem was being occasioned by Royal Navy guns.

‘Want my mum,’ Beryl said again, beginning to cry. ‘Don’t like it in ’ere. I want my mum to stop the noise.’

Before Kate could make a comforting retort Billy said cheerily, ‘If anyone could stop this shindig, our mum could. She ain’t ’alf a tartar when she’s roused. Grandad says
she’d scare old ’itler ’alf to death and that if Churchill ’ad any sense ’e’d use ’er as a secret weapon.’

Despite the gravity of the situation Miss Pierce’s lips twitched in a spasm of amusement. Kate was too anxious about the mental agony Mavis was bound to be enduring, not knowing where her
children were, to be similarly entertained.

‘The minute there’s a lull we’ll run down to your house,’ she promised Beryl, hugging her close.

Another thought struck her and she said to Billy, ‘Has your mum got an Anderson of her own or will she be in with your gran and grandad and Carrie and Rose?’

‘She’ll be in with Carrie and Rose and Gran and Grandad,’ Billy said confidently, ‘and with our great-gran and Christina and Bonzo.’

‘Great heavens!’ Miss Pierce said, diverted as always by tales of the Lomaxes’ and Jennings’ goings-on. ‘So many people in a shelter this size? They’ll be
like sardines in a tin.’

‘It was a bit of a tight squeeze when we did it for practice,’ Billy admitted, ‘but it was cosy. Grandad’s fitted it up with all sorts of knick-knacks. A rug and blankets
and a pack of playing-cards. He’s even got a guzzunder dahn there for Beryl.’

‘A guzzunder?’ Miss Pierce asked, mystified, aware that the drone of aircraft was rapidly receding and that the brunt of the attack was over. ‘What is a guzzunder?’

Billy stared at her, not able to believe her ignorance. ‘A chamber-pot,’ he said with as much patience as he could muster. ‘One wot guzzunder the bed.’

As Miss Pierce tried to stop herself from chuckling, Kate’s entire attention was taken up by the need to reunite Beryl and Billy with Mavis at the soonest possible moment.
‘It’s stopped,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’m going to make a run for it with the children. You stay here with Hector, Miss Pierce. I shan’t be long.’

‘But the all-clear siren hasn’t sounded yet! The planes may come back! There may even be unexploded bombs in the street!’

‘It’s only a matter of a few hundred yards and the sooner I put Mavis’s mind at rest the happier I’ll be.’ Kate took hold of Beryl’s hand. ‘Are you
ready, Beryl? Are you going to run as fast as you can?’

Beryl nodded. She’d been able to run fast ever since she could remember. If she didn’t, there was always the danger Billy would leave her behind.