Authors: Margaret Pemberton
The
whoosh
Kate had come to recognize as being the sound of dropping incendiary bombs filled the air. She looked across the lamp-lit shelter towards Leon. His concentration seemed to be
entirely on the map he was studying. A slight frown knitted his eyebrows. They were extremely nice eyebrows; well-shaped and attractively winged.
Sensing her eyes on him, he raised his head slightly and looked across at her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said comfortingly, ‘for the moment everything is falling on the
City.’
‘The City? Not the East End? How can you tell?’
‘I’m a sailor,’ he said with the easy, friendly smile she had grown so accustomed to. ‘I can judge distances by sound.’
She believed him. She believed everything he told her because it was impossible to even imagine him telling an untruth.
He returned his attention to the map and outwardly she returned hers to her knitting. Inwardly she was praying that St Paul’s wouldn’t be hit; that when she and Leon looked out over
the City in the morning they would still see Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece and not a burning pyre.
Leon’s attention, too, drifted. Instead of concentrating on what the British army’s next move would be in North Africa and what part the navy might play when Libya’s coastal
strong-points were attacked, he found himself staring across at Kate.
Her head was bent over her knitting, the needles flashing like quicksilver between her long, supple fingers. He thought her very beautiful; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There was
strength as well as delicacy in her features. It showed in the stubborn set of her chin and in the pure line of her jaw. Once she had made her mind up about anything, he suspected it would be the
very devil to get her to change it. Yet she was also heartachingly loving and gentle. Not towards him, of course. Towards him she was friendly and generous and he had the common sense to know that
that was the most he could ask for. It was the way she treated Hector that revealed the innate loving gentleness that so attracted him, as well as the way she talked about the coming baby.
The atlas lay forgotten on his knee. From perilously near, Woolwich or Greenwich, there came the sickening crump and blast of falling bombs. The tin walls of the Anderson vibrated. The ack-ack
guns on the Heath pounded deafeningly. Hector whined and crept even closer to Kate’s feet. She broke off from her knitting to put a hand down to him, comforting him.
Watching her, Leon felt a lump form in his throat. Once, long, long ago, a woman with the same gentleness in her eyes and the same kind of inner strength, had also broken off from her knitting
and stretched a hand down comfortingly. He couldn’t have been more than three years old, for when he was four years old she had died in the street of a heart attack, a loaf of fresh bread and
a bunch of flowers in her arms.
He shut off that memory, as he had shut it off for twenty-three years. It was too painful; too traumatic for him to dare to dwell on it. Instead he remembered the warmth and comfort of sitting
at her feet while she knitted or sewed, telling him stories and nursery-rhymes.
In memory he could almost feel the flickering yellow flames of the fire and see again the pictures she had helped him to find in the red-hot coals. He never remembered her as being anything
other than soft-spoken and loving, yet she had been strong, too. She had had to be, marrying a West Indian sailor fifteen years her senior in pre-First World War Britain. If mixed marriages were
regarded as unpleasant oddities now, in 1940, they were regarded as being little more than obscene violations of nature in 1912. She had been a schoolteacher from a conventional, middle-class home
and not for the first time he wondered how she had endured the insulting and salacious remarks he knew she must have met with.
The noise of plane engines and explosions was horrendous, nearly as deafening as a bombardment at sea. He noticed that though Kate was still knitting, her face was ashen. He touched her lightly
on the knee.
‘It’s all right,’ he shouted across to her. ‘Everything is falling on the City. There won’t be many lives lost. All the businessmen will be safely at home in their
Andersons.’
She smiled, a touch of embarrassed colour flaring in her cheeks, ashamed that she hadn’t been thinking of the businessmen who worked in the City but only of the survival of St
Paul’s.
He mistook the colour in her cheeks for discomfort at the way he had touched her to attract her attention. Cursing himself for an idiot, he once more outwardly returned his attention to the
atlas. After all the care he had taken ever since he had moved in with her not to say or do anything that might raise the awkward spectre of sex and make her feel uncomfortable, why had he tapped
her on the knee and not on her arm? It was an action taken without thought, but he knew now how she would react to any increase of familiarity between them and was appalled at how fiercely
disappointed he felt.
Once again he began to think of his father and mother and what an odd couple they must have made. His father had been born in 1864, a year before slavery was officially abolished in the United
States of America. He had been very black and defiantly proud of his blackness.
A smile tugged at the corner of Leon’s mouth. His mother had always insisted that he attend Sunday School and even after her death and up until his father’s death, when he was eight
years old, he had done so. It was in a book given out at Sunday School that he had first seen pictures of African tribal chieftains: naked, with war-paint on and standing amongst spears, they had
looked magnificent.
They had also looked, apart from their nakedness and splendidly barbaric finery, just like his father. It was then that it had occurred to him that there was something exciting and special in
being black. His father was certainly special. It had been quite a revelation and from that moment on any racial insult hurled at him in the school playground, or worse, the classroom, was robbed
of any power to hurt. The ones who hurled the insults were the losers and the ones to be pitied. They weren’t special. They didn’t have a special dad who could, if he wanted to, easily
look like a magnificent warrior.
There was a lull in the nightmare bombardment. ‘Do you think it’s over?’ Kate asked, breaking in on his thoughts of the past. ‘Could we take a look outside?’
He didn’t think it was over for one minute, but he knew how claustrophobic many people found it, hiding semi-underground and not being able to see what was taking place around them.
‘I think we could get a little air,’ he said, more than happy to have a look-see himself. If it hadn’t been for ensuring her safety, he wouldn’t for one minute have even
entered the Anderson. Despite the handicap of his injured leg, he would have been volunteering his services at the nearest ARP post.
Mindful of her discomfort when he had touched her knee, he didn’t offer her his arm as she stepped outside into the night, but he watched her feet with hawk-like concern, ready to steady
her instantly if she stumbled.
‘Dear Lord,’ she whispered devoutly as she reached the top of the shallow flight of steps and stood on the overgrown grass of the garden. ‘Look at the sky, Leon! It looks as if
it’s full of blood!’
Everywhere was red. Even though they couldn’t see across the city and the river from where they were standing, it was obvious that the worst fires of the war were raging. The smell of
burning hung in the air like fog. Kate felt a dusting of ashes sweep her cheek. Tears stung her lashes.
‘Could we go up on to the Heath and take a look across the city?’ she asked a little unsteadily. ‘Though you can see best from the Park, you can also get a good view from the
north-west corner of the Heath.’
Giant searchlights swept and re-swept the stained sky. ‘No,’ he said, knowing what it was she wanted to see and knowing that it would have to wait until morning. ‘This little
lot isn’t over yet, Kate.’
Even as he finished speaking there came the roar of a fresh wave of approaching aeroplanes and the nearby ack-ack gun opened up, blasting upwards to no very good effect but making those who
could hear it feel that at least some kind of retaliation was taking place.
‘We’d better take shelter again,’ he said, fearful for her safety. ‘We’ll go up to the Heath the minute the all-clear sounds.’
She nodded, her fingers crossed, thinking of St Paul’s and wishing as hard as she was able.
‘The City has been pulverized,’ Harriet Godfrey said to her six hours later as Kate made her a cup of tea. ‘It’s been the worst night of the war.
Indescribable. Unbelievable.’
‘We’ve seen the damage for ourselves, from a distance,’ Leon said quietly. ‘It looks like a raging hell down there.’
‘It is,’ Harriet Godfrey said, her voice thick with weariness. She had been on duty all the way through the nightmare of the raid and was utterly exhausted. ‘God knows when the
fires will be brought under control. The fire services are doing their best but the water mains were hit and the back-up service from distant pipes failed.’
‘What about the Thames?’ Kate asked, hugging the knowledge of the miraculous escape of St Paul’s Cathedral to herself like a comforting blanket. ‘Couldn’t the
firemen take water from the Thames?’
‘It was low-tide last night,’ Leon said, answering the question for her. ‘I don’t suppose the water could be reached.’
‘It couldn’t.’ Harriet Godfrey accepted the cup of tea Kate proffered her and reached with an unsteady hand for the sugar-spoon. ‘The tide has turned now but the damage
has been done. Huge swathes of the City have been reduced to charred rubble. I felt as if I were living through the Great Fire of London in 1666. The streets in the City are still as narrow as they
were then and fire just leaps from one building to another.’
‘But they didn’t hit St Paul’s,’ Kate said, unable to refrain from putting her heartfelt feelings into words.
‘Incendiaries certainly did hit St Paul’s,’ Harriet said, not wanting Kate to be under illusions. ‘That the Cathedral isn’t a smouldering shell this morning is due
entirely to the vigilance of its fire-watchers and their swift, preventative action. The trouble in the streets around it was that the buildings, being all banks and offices, were not only locked
but double-locked. No-one was fire-watching in them. No-one was able to smother an incendiary the instant it landed.’
‘They will in future,’ Leon said dryly. ‘You can bet your life there’ll be laws brought in immediately to ensure that no property is left unguarded.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Emmerson,’ Harriet Godfrey said, rising wearily to her feet. ‘But any such laws will be too late for the Barbican and Moorgate areas of
the City. Almost every single building is ruined.’ She turned to Kate. ‘Thank you for the tea, Katherine. It was much appreciated. I’m going to bed now before I fall asleep on my
feet.’
During the next forty-eight hours, as firemen and volunteers continued to fight the raging fires, Leon set about making the Anderson even more comfortable for Kate. He removed
one of the school-benches and replaced it with a narrow single bed. Though he hadn’t referred to it, he had been appalled by the discomfort she had endured, heavily pregnant and all night in
the Anderson without being able to even sit comfortably, let alone lie down. He assumed her father, when he had furnished the shelter, had had little idea of the length of time raids would last.
And he could have had no idea that his unmarried daughter would become pregnant.
‘It looks like Buckingham Palace,’ Kate said in grateful amusement when he showed her the results of his labours. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen in Magnolia
Square. Jack Robson, Charlie’s son. He’s in the Commandoes but is home on a forty-eight hour pass.’
‘He’s a good bloke,’ Leon said, referring to Jack as Kate put a plate of sausage and mash in front of him. ‘He’s converted the Misses
Helliwells’ Morrison shelter into a table tennis table and he and Mavis have been having a rare old time showing off their table tennis skills to Emily and Esther.’
‘Emily and Esther?’ Remembering the way she had overheard Emily Helliwell speak of Leon to Miriam Jennings, Kate’s eyebrows rose. ‘Are you referring to Miss Emily
Helliwell, Magnolia Square’s famed clairvoyant and palm-reader, and her sister, Miss Esther Helliwell? And if you are, since when did you get on first name terms with them?’
‘Since the day I rescued their cat from the clutches of a rather vicious bull terrier.’
‘Was Faust wearing his gas mask at the time?’ Kate asked, amused. ‘He was almost the first Magnolia Square inhabitant to be kitted out with one.’
It was Leon’s turn to be amused. ‘No,’ he said, chuckling as he speared a sausage. ‘And he didn’t have it in a canister around his neck, either.’
The laughter died from Kate’s eyes. ‘How is Esther?’ she asked, dispirited by the knowledge that there had been a time when she would have known; a time before her
father’s internment; a time when she had called in to have a cheery word with the wheelchair-bound Esther almost as often as she had called in at the Jennings’. ‘The raids must be
horrendous for her,’ she said, wondering how on earth the two old ladies managed through an air raid on their own. ‘Is she suffering terribly?’
Leon speared another sausage with his fork and chuckled. ‘Suffering? You’re joking. Esther doesn’t suffer through a raid. She enjoys them!’
Kate’s jaw dropped and her mouth fell open.
Leon’s chuckles increased. ‘Esther’s exact words when I asked her how she coped with the stress of an air raid were, “Stress? Stress? Bless you for being so concerned
young man, but the truth is, I haven’t had so much excitement for years!”’
As a bitterly cold January edged into a freezingly cold February, Leon was able to dispense with his crutch not only in the house, but outside of it too. Acting as an
unofficial fire-watcher for Magnolia Square, his fund of anecdotes about the Square’s inhabitants increased. He told Kate of how the Jennings’ had found an unexploded bomb in their rear
garden and of how Miriam had strapped it firmly to Billy’s back and sent him off on his bicycle with instructions to deliver his cargo to Shooters Hill Police Station.