Authors: Connie Willis
“No,” he said soberly. “Thank you.”
I left him and went back downstairs. They were still discussing Violet.
“I’m really becoming worried about her,” Mrs. Lucy
said. One of the ack-ack guns started up, and there was the dull crump of bombs far away, and we all stopped to listen.
“ME 109’s,” Morris said. “They’re coming in from the south again.”
“I do hope she has the sense to get to a shelter,” Mrs. Lucy said, and Vi burst in the door.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, setting a box tied with string on the table next to Twickenham’s typewriter. She was out of breath and her face was suffused with color. “I know I’m supposed to be on watch, but Harry took me out to see his plane this afternoon, and I had a horrid time getting back.” She heaved herself out of her coat and hung it over the back of Jack’s chair. “You’ll never believe what he’s named it! The
Sweet Violet
!” She untied the string on the box. “We were so late we hadn’t time for tea, and he said, ‘You take this to your post and have a good tea, and I’ll keep the jerries busy till you’ve finished,’ ” She reached in the box and lifted out a torte with sugar icing. “He’s painted the name on the nose and put little violets in purple all round it,” she said, setting it on the table. “One for every jerry he’s shot down.”
We stared at the cake. Eggs and sugar had been rationed since the beginning of the year, and they’d been in short supply even before that. I hadn’t seen a fancy torte like this in over a year.
“It’s raspberry filling,” she said, slicing through the cake with a knife. “They hadn’t any chocolate.” She held the knife up, dripping jam. “Now, who wants some, then?”
“I do,” I said. I had been hungry since the beginning of the war and ravenous since I’d joined the ARP, especially for sweets, and I had my piece eaten before she’d finished setting slices on Mrs. Lucy’s Wedgwood plates and passing them round.
There was still a quarter left. “Who’s upstairs taking
my watch?” she said, sucking a bit of raspberry jam off her finger.
“The new part-time,” I said. “I’ll take it up to him.”
She cut a slice and eased it off the knife and onto the plate. “What’s he like?” she asked.
“He’s from Yorkshire,” Twickenham said, looking at Mrs. Lucy. “What did he do up there before the war?”
Mrs. Lucy looked at her cake, as if surprised that it was nearly eaten. “He didn’t say,” she said.
“I meant, is he handsome?” Vi said, putting a fork on the plate with the slice of cake. “Perhaps I should take it up to him myself.”
“He’s puny. Pale,” Swales said, his mouth full of cake. “Looks as if he’s got consumption.”
“Nelson won’t steal him anytime soon, that’s certain,” Morris said.
“Oh, well, then,” Vi said, and handed the plate to me.
I took it and went upstairs, stopping on the second-floor landing to shift it to my left hand and switch on my pocket torch.
Jack was standing by the window, the binoculars dangling from his neck, looking out past the rooftops toward the river. The moon was up, reflecting whitely off the water like one of the German flares, lighting the bombers’ way.
“Anything in our sector yet?” I said.
“No,” he said, without turning round. “They’re still to the east.”
“I’ve brought you some raspberry cake,” I said.
He turned and looked at me.
I held the cake out. “Violet’s young man in the RAF sent it.”
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m not fond of cake.”
I looked at him with the same disbelief I had felt for Violet’s name emblazoned on a Spitfire. “There’s plenty,” I said. “She brought a whole torte.”
“I’m not hungry, thanks. You eat it.”
“Are you sure? One can’t get this sort of thing these days.”
“I’m certain,” he said, and turned back to the window.
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 I 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 newspapers. 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 farther 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 mustache,” 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 the 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 smell; 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 antiaircraft 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 bannister 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 pickax. 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 pickax without the necessary authorization of duties. This officer, who was younger than me and broken out in spots under his powdering of brick dust, didn’t have a pickax, 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, overbright light like headlights in a fog. I could see Jack on his hands and knees halfway down the mound, stabbing with the bannister. 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 anymore?”
He went on jabbing with the bannister. “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 farther 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 farther on. I gave it up, broke off another of the bannisters, and got down beside Jack.
The beam was not the only thing holding the joist down. The rubble looked loose—bricks and chunks of plaster and pieces of wood—but it was as solid as cement. Swales, who showed up out of nowhere when we were three feet down, said, “It’s the clay. All London’s built on it. Hard as statues.” He had brought two buckets with him and the news that Nelson had shown up and had had a fight with the spotty officer over whose incident it was.
“ ‘It’s
my
incident.’ Nelson says, and gets out the map to show him how this side of King’s Road is in his district,” Swales said gleefully, “and the incident officer says, ‘Your incident? Who wants the bloody thing, I say,’ he says.”
Even with Swales helping, the going was so slow, whoever was under there would probably have suffocated or bled to death before we could get to him. Jack didn’t stop at all, even when the bombs were directly overhead. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, though none of us heard anything in those brief intervals of silence, and Jack seemed scarcely to listen.
The bannister he was using broke off in the iron-hard
clay, and he took mine and kept digging. A broken clock came up, and an egg cup. Morris arrived. He had been evacuating people from two streets over where a bomb had buried itself in the middle of the street without exploding. Swales told him the story of Nelson and the spotty young officer and then went off to see what he could find out about the inhabitants of the house.
Jack came up out of the hole. “I need braces,” he said. “The sides are collapsing.”
I found some unbroken bed slats at the base of the mound. One of the slats was too long for the shaft. Jack sawed it halfway through and then broke it off.
Swales came back. “Nobody in the house,” he shouted down the hole. “The colonel and Mrs. Godalming went to Surrey this morning.” The all clear sounded, drowning out his words.
“Jack,” Jack said from the hole.
“Jack,” he said again, more urgently.
I leaned over the tunnel.
“What time is it?” he said.
“About five,” I said. “The all clear just went.”
“Is it getting light?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Have you found anything?”
“Yes,” he said. “Give us a hand.”
I eased myself into the hole. I could understand his question; it was pitch-dark down here. I switched my torch on. It lit up our faces from beneath like spectres.
“In there,” he said, and reached for a bannister just like the one he’d been digging with.
“Is he under a stairway?” I said, and the bannister clutched at his hand.
It only took a minute or two to get him out. Jack pulled on the arm I had mistaken for a bannister, and I scrabbled through the last few inches of plaster and clay to the little cave he was in, formed by an icebox and a door leaning against each other.