The bastards! The rotten, evil bastards!
Well, they weren’t getting away with it this time. They couldn’t take your man and your job and your home and not answer for it! She made her silent vow to the piece of wallpaper that flapped in the breeze.
I’ll have ’em for this, Gerry. On our mam’s grave, I’ll have ’em!
The piece of paper tore loose. She watched it slip and slide this way and that to fall at her feet. Tenderly she picked it up. It was all she had left of four years of happiness, and it was very precious. Special too, because it bore witness to her vow.
‘You all right, luv?’ the policeman asked again.
‘I’m fine,’ Vi said. And she was. And fighting mad, too.
‘Got somewhere to go, have you?’
‘Yes. To town – to London Road.’ To the recruiting office, that’s where.
‘Town? You’ll never make it. No trams, no buses, and the roads blocked with rubble. And two unexploded bombs in the Mile End Road. It’ll take all day.’
‘That’s all right.’ She’d got all day. All the time in the world, in fact.
‘Please yourself.’ He had better things to do than argue the toss.
Oh, she would please herself, all right. She would get down to the city centre somehow. Vi McKeown knew every back street and jigger north of the Liver Building, and she would get there. Things had gone too far. They had taken all she had, and nobody did that to a woman of Liverpool and got away with it. She was joining the fight. She wanted in, right in the thick of it. She was joining the Navy and she would go wherever they sent her. What she could do she had no idea; but she would stand on the cliff top at Dover and heave rocks at the arrogant sods, if that was what it took.
She sniffed away the last of her tears and slipped the piece of dirty, rose-covered wallpaper into her carrier bag. Her city was battered and burning. She was alone in the world and owned nothing but the clothes in which she stood, a small attaché case filled with important things and a brown paper carrier bag containing shoes, stockings, and two crystal goblets carefully wrapped in a pair of white cotton knickers.
It wasn’t a lot to show for twenty-five years of living and breathing, but at least she was alive. Now it was time to move on. Pulling back her shoulders, she walked, head high, out of Lyra Street.
This time, she did not look back.
The Countess of Donnington stood at the window of the first-floor sitting room, intent on the street below. She had spent a fear-filled night beneath a stone slab in the meat cellar and, what was more, completely alone. Now the air raid was over and still her husband and daughter had not come home.
Last night’s bombing had caught her unawares in the West End. Normally, to go out alone would have been unthinkable, but unoccupied men were thin on the ground now and invitations almost non-existent. She had gazed petulantly at a mantelpiece empty of deckle-edged cards, remembering the time when she had never wanted for an escort or a party. But most men of her acquaintance were in uniform now, and having the time of their lives, she shouldn’t wonder, with girls young enough to be their own daughters.
The alert last night had sounded just as Londoners were beginning to think that just for once there would be no air raid, and the first bombs fell as the last notes of the sirens gave way to an uneasy, brooding silence. Panic-stricken, she had made her way back to Bruton Street, her feet rubbed into blisters in flimsy evening slippers, wondering how taxis could disappear so completely whenever she needed one.
She could have found shelter, of course. Hotels and restaurants and clubs always opened their doors to anyone caught above ground when the bombing started. But if she was going to be killed, she had tearfully decided, it would be at her home in Mayfair. No one, but no one, would dig Kitty Bainbridge out of a communal shelter in Soho. For Soho was where she had been last evening, wondering what to do and where to go to fill the time; there, in Shaftesbury Avenue, she had seen Lucinda and the airmen. And it was then she had decided that war work or not, her daughter’s excursions with convalescent wounded must stop at once. She had felt quite peculiar and quite, quite shocked; how Lucinda could bring herself to do it was a complete mystery.
So she had made her fear-filled way home to spend another night in the cellar, her moods alternating between terror and self-pity, until the high, sweet sound of the all clear brought relief and anger. When Donnington got home in that ridiculous Home Guard uniform of his and her daughter had torn herself away from those men, then all hell would break loose. The Countess guaranteed it.
Lighting the last of her cigarettes, she inhaled deeply. The world had gone mad, with every capital city in Europe occupied by strutting Nazis. How soon before they were in London, too?
‘At last!’ She espied her daughter rounding the corner from Berkeley Square. Running quickly downstairs, she was waiting in the black and white tiled entrance hall long before the doorbell rang.
‘Sorry about this.’ Lucinda was pale and dust-stained, her eyes dark-ringed. ‘Are you all right, Mama?’
‘No, I am not all right!’ Pent-up emotions broke loose. ‘I have been alone all night! And might I ask where you have been until now?’
‘I’m sorry, truly I am, but I had to look after the boys. They’re still a bit wobbly, you know, and when the bombing got rough I thought I’d better find us all somewhere to go. We were fine in the tube, but it –’
‘Lucinda! Listen to me! I saw you last night, though you chose not to see me, and I cannot understand your casual attitude to life. You imagine this war gives you the excuse to disobey me and do exactly as you wish. You stay out all night. You think more of those creatures, it seems, than your fiancé. You –’
‘Creatures, Mama?’
‘Well, what else is one to call them? I was ashamed last night, deeply ashamed that my daughter should be seen in such company, such –’
‘Such what?’ Lucinda’s eyes flew wide with disbelief. ‘Sorry, but I don’t understand you.’
‘Well, they’re such a terrible sight, aren’t they? Their faces, I mean; so – so grotesque. You’d think they wouldn’t want to be seen in public; but no, there they are, living it up, and my own daughter aiding and abetting them as if she were doing something clever. That tall one, the one with his hands all over you –’
‘Mama, you don’t know what you’re saying.’ Bright red spots flushed Lucinda’s cheeks. ‘I’m not hearing this; I’m not!’
‘Stop playing the innocent with me, child. Sufficient to say I was deeply embarrassed, and the time has come to put an end to this absurdity. You will give up this so-called nursing immediately and you will give me a date for your wedding –’
‘Be quiet, Mama! Shut up and just for once listen to me!’
‘I – I …’ The older woman’s mouth sagged open and remained open. Lucinda, who had always been so obedient, speaking to her mother as if good manners had gone out of fashion?
‘You are without doubt, Mama, the most unreasonable, the most selfish woman I have ever met, and I am not in the least ashamed to be seen with those boys. I’m proud of them, in fact. Yes, they are a terrible sight. They were all fighter pilots and they got hit, you see. Oh, they managed to bale out, but not before their faces and hands had burned. No eyelashes, no eyebrows, no hair, no features any more. That was their reward for trying to keep the bombers away from London, away from people like you, Mama!’ She shook with outrage, her voice thick with unshed tears. ‘The tall one, mind, the one with his hands all over me – on my shoulders, actually, so I could lead him – well, he’s a bit luckier. He’ll never have to see himself day after day in a mirror and wonder if it was worth it because he’s blind, you