‘Yes, she has … but you’ve no need to speak about her like that. She’s all right, is Nurse Johnson.’ Rosie knew that crossed-armed, jaw-jutting stance of her father’s meant another row was in the offing. He was likely to hit the roof when he found out what arrangements she’d made, and spit out a few more choice names for the nice nurse.
‘Go and see if little ’un’s all right, shall I?’
‘She’s fast asleep; I’ve only just come out of the bloody front room and you know it,’ Rosie retorted in response to his cantankerous sarcasm.
‘How long are we going to keep calling the poor little mite “she”? Getting a name, is she, before her first birthday?’ John continued sourly.
His barbs were starting to get on Rosie’s nerves but she reined in her temper. They had a serious conversation in front of them and she’d as soon get it over with. ‘Come and sit down in the kitchen, Dad. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
Rosie took her father’s elbow and, surprisingly, he allowed her to steer him along the passage.
‘Let’s wet our whistles.’ Rosie began filling the kettle, hoping to keep things calm if not harmonious between them.
John pulled out a stick-back chair at the kitchen table and was about to sit down when he hesitated and glanced up at the ceiling. Rosie had heard it too: the unmistakable sound of aeroplane engines moving closer.
‘Must be some of ours,’ Rosie said, putting the kettle on the gas stove and sticking a lit match beneath it.
There’d been no warning siren and the afternoon was late but still light. The Luftwaffe mostly came over under cover of darkness. Since the Blitz petered out last May, German bombing had thankfully become sporadic and Londoners – especially East Enders who’d borne the brunt of the pounding – had been able to relax a bit.
John peered out of the window, then, frowning, he opened the back door and stepped out, head tipped up as he sauntered along the garden path. His mouth suddenly fell agape in a mixture of shock and fear and he pelted back towards the house, shouting.
But the sirens had belatedly begun to wail, cutting off his warning of an air raid.
Rosie let the crockery crash back to the draining board on hearing the eerie sound and sprang to the back door to hurry her father inside. Before John could reach the house a short whistle preceded an explosion in a neighbour’s garden, sending him to the ground, crucified on the concrete at the side of the privy.
Crouching on the threshold, arms covering her head in instinctive protection, Rosie could hear her father groaning just yards away. She’d begun to unfold to rush to him when debilitating terror hit her. She sank back, shaking and whimpering, biting down ferociously on her lower lip to try to still her chattering teeth. Tasting and smelling the metallic coppery blood on her tongue increased the horrific images spinning inside her head. She rammed her fists against her eyes but she couldn’t shut out the carnage she’d witnessed in the Café de Paris a year ago. Her nostrils were again filled with the sickly stench of blood, and her mind seemed to echo with the sounds of wretched people battling for their final moments of life. Some had called in vain for loved ones … or the release of death. Limbless bodies and staring sightless eyes had been everywhere, tripping her up as she’d fled to the street, smothered in choking dust. For months afterwards she’d felt dreadfully ashamed that she’d instinctively charged to safety rather than staying to comfort some of those poor souls.
‘Rosie … can you hear me …?’
Her father’s croaking finally penetrated Rosie’s torment and she scrambled forward, uncaring of glass and wood splinters tearing into her hands and knees. She raked her eyes over him for injuries, noting his bloodied shin, although something else was nagging at her that refused to be dragged to the forefront of her mind.
‘Think me leg’s had it,’ John cried as his daughter bent over him.
Rosie was darting fearful looks at the sky in case a second attack was imminent. The bomber had disappeared from view, but another could follow at any moment and drop its lethal load. Obliquely Rosie was aware of neighbours shouting hysterically in the street as they ran for the shelters, but she had to focus on her father and how she could get him to safety in their cellar.
‘Take my arm, Dad … you must!’ she cried as he tried to curl into a protective ball on hearing another engine. Thank goodness this aeroplane, now overhead, was a British Spitfire on the tail of the Dornier. ‘Come on … we can make it … one of ours is after that damned Kraut.’ Rosie felt boosted by the fighter avenging them and murmured a little prayer for the pilot’s safety as well as their own. But then her attention was fully occupied in getting her father to cooperate in standing up. He was slowly conquering his fear and squirming to a seated position with her assistance.
Regaining her strength, she half-lifted him, her arm and leg muscles in agony and feeling as though they were tearing from their anchoring bones. Gritting her teeth, she managed to get both herself and her father upright. With her arm about his waist she dragged him, limping, into the kitchen. John Gardiner wasn’t a big man; he was short and wiry but heavy for a girl weighing under eight stone to manhandle.
Slowly and awkwardly they descended the stairs to the cellar, crashing onto the musky floor two steps from the bottom when Rosie’s strength gave out. John gave a shriek of pain as he landed awkwardly, attempting to break his daughter’s fall while protecting his injured limb.
Rosie scrambled up in the dark, dank space and lit the lamp, then crouched down in front of her father to inspect him. The explosion had left his clothes in rags. Gingerly she lifted the ribbons of his trouser leg to expose the damage beneath. His shin was grazed and bloody and without a doubt broken. The bump beneath the flesh showed the bone was close to penetrating the skin’s surface.
Her father’s ashen features were screwed up in agony and Rosie noticed tears squeezing between his stubby lashes. She soothed him as he suddenly bellowed in pain.
‘Soon as it’s over I’ll go and get you help,’ she vowed. ‘We’ll be all right, Dad, we always are, aren’t we?’ She desperately wanted to believe what she was saying.
Rosie thumped the heel of her hand on her forehead to beat out the tormenting memories of the Café de Paris bombing. It seemed a very long while ago that she’d gone out with two of her friends from the Windmill Theatre for a jolly time drinking and dancing to ‘Snakehip’ Johnson’s band, and the night had ended in a tragedy. Three of them had entered the Café de Paris in high spirits but only two of them had got out alive.
Rosie forced the memories out of her mind. She sprang up and dragged one of the mattresses, kept there for use in the night-time air raids, closer to her father, then helped him roll off the floor and on to it to make him more comfortable. There was some bedding, too, and she unfolded a blanket and settled it over him, then placed a pillow beneath his head.
Sinking down beside her father, Rosie pressed her quaking torso against her knees, her arms over her head as the house rocked on its foundations. Another bomber must have evaded the Spitfire to shed its deadly cargo.
‘We’ve taken a belting … that’s this place finished … we’ll need a new place to live,’ John wheezed out between gasps of pain, his voice almost drowned out by the crashing of collapsing timbers and shattering glass. ‘Come here, Rosie.’ He held out his arms. ‘If we’re gonners I want to give you a last cuddle. Be brave, dear … I love you, y’know.’
They clung together, terrified, the smell of John’s blood and sweaty fear mingling in Rosie’s nostrils. After what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes the dreadful sounds of destruction faded and the tension went out of John. Pulling free of his daughter’s embrace he flopped back on the mattress, breathing hard.
‘That’s it over then, if we’re lucky. Everything