All of them were, of course, familiar with the sight and the function of a stirrup pump. The devices had been around from the beginning of the war, after all, but since this was the first time they were going to be given the equipment in an official capacity as recognised fire-watchers, rather than individual householders, a mood of determination and responsibility was very much in evidence amongst the older members of the group, especially the Misses Barker, who had been telling Drew how they had wanted to volunteer to drive ambulances during the last war but how their parents had refused to let them.
‘I expect that was because they wanted to protect you,’ Olive offered, overhearing the conversation and giving Tilly a meaningful look.
There wasn’t time for Tilly to retaliate, because a knock on the door had her mother going to admit Sergeant Dawson and one of the young messengers employed by their local ARP unit, who had wheeled round the wheelbarrow from which he and the sergeant removed a Redhill container, a long-handled scoop, a hoe, a galvanised metal bucket and the stirrup pump itself, carrying them into the kitchen, where they carefully put them down in the middle of the circle formed by the would-be fire-watchers.
‘Ideally every household should have its own pump, but we’ve been issued with only enough to provide each street with a couple at the moment,’ Sergeant Dawson informed them before accepting Olive’s offer of a cup of tea.
‘Olive’s given us chocolate as well,’ Miss Mary Barkers told Sergeant Dawson happily.
‘It’s from Drew really. His mother sends it to him from America,’ Olive put in quickly. Nancy wasn’t here but she’d become so aware of her neighbour’s tendency to find fault that automatically she felt defensive.
‘After we gave young Barney his English lesson the other day he asked us if he could have a look in our tool shed to see if there are any spare wheels in there. Of course, we had to tell him that there aren’t.’
The two Misses Barker were retired teachers, and at Sergeant and Mrs Dawson’s request were giving Barney extra lessons to make up for the time he had had off school before they had taken him in.
‘He’s hoping to build himself a bit of a go-cart with some boys he’s got friendly with at school,’ Sergeant Dawson told them. ‘They’ve got some ideas of making their own fire truck. Some of the older boys started making them and following the fire engines, and now the younger ones want to do the same. Barney says that he wants to make an Article Row fire truck.’
‘Oh, how brave of him!’ Jane Barker applauded, asking her sister, ‘Might there be something in the shed amongst Father’s things that he could use, Mary?’
‘Aren’t you worried that Barney could get hurt?’ Olive asked the sergeant.
‘There’s no harm in him making his fire truck, but when it comes to him using it you can be sure that I shall be keeping a very watchful eye on him,’ he assured her.
Olive busied herself pouring the sergeant and the messenger boy cups of tea. After handing the messenger boy his cup she hesitated. If Tilly hadn’t been so deeply engrossed in her conversation with Drew she could have asked her to give the sergeant his tea, but as it was she had no alternative but to take a deep breath and then offer him the cup and saucer.
‘Thanks, Olive.’
When a man had large hands, as Archie Dawson did, it was unavoidable that that hand should touch her own when he took the cup and saucer from her. That might be completely natural, but her own reaction to that brief contact was neither natural nor acceptable in a widow of her age where a married man was concerned, Olive mentally chastised herself.
‘I’ve heard that in some streets they’re setting up a collection so that they can buy their own extra pumps,’ Eric Charlton, one of the tenants who rented number 48, one of Mr King’s properties, announced. A short mousy-looking man with a thin moustache, who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture and who had turned his back garden into a model of a ‘grow your own’ plot, his comment earned him the immediate disapproval of Mr Whittaker from number 50.
‘Ruddy government,’ he said angrily, ‘making us pay for what they should provide us with. It’s bad enough having to form our own fire-watching team without being expected to pay for equipment as well.’ Scowling he glowered at poor Mr Charlton, who huddled closer to his rotund wife, as Len Whittaker gave vent to his feelings.
Anxiously Olive listened to him. His anger did not bode well for the unity of their small group.
As though he had guessed what she was thinking, Archie Dawson leaned towards her and told her in a comforting undertone, ‘Don’t worry about Mr Whittaker leaving, Olive. I reckon he’s just taken the huff because you’ll be having the stirrup pump at this end of the Row. After all, it isn’t as though he couldn’t afford to buy himself one. He’s reckoned to be pretty comfortably off.’
‘You wouldn’t think so from the state of his house,’ Olive whispered back, equally discreetly, as she stepped back slightly from him and tried not to blush when she saw the slightly questioning look he was giving her. She had to stop being so silly. Archie Dawson was a neighbour, after all, and a very good one. He had done nothing wrong. ‘I’ve started taking him down a plated-up Sunday dinner since the Longs left, and number 50 is so thread-bare inside you’d think that he didn’t have two pennies to rub together,’ she told him, determined to behave normally. ‘Poor Mr Charlton was only telling Sally the other day that he’s worried that the seeds from the weeds in Mr Whittaker’s garden are going to blow over and take root in his plot. He has to wage a constant war against them.’
‘A bit like us, then, with these,’ the sergeant told Olive with another smile, gesturing towards the waiting equipment before turning back to the assembled volunteers and telling them, ‘I know that most of you will be aware of how incendiary bombs work, but since we’ve had the Germans dropping this new and more dangerous version of them on us I thought that to start off I’d just run through with you exactly what they are. German planes drop a large bomb casing loaded with small sticks – bomblets – of incendiaries. This casing is designed to open at altitude, scattering the bomblets in order to cover a larger area. Originally the purpose of these was to light up targets for the following planes to drop much heavier bombs on, but since they’ve realised how much damage these incendiaries can inflict on people and their homes, the Germans have taken to dropping even more of them, and they’ve modified them to make them even more dangerous.
‘An explosive charge inside them ignites the incendiary material, which is usually magnesium. This causes a fire, which can extend six to eight feet around the bomb, showering anyone who tries to get close to it with burning pieces of metal. Magnesium can’t be put out by throwing water on it, although of course the fires caused by the sparks can be dowsed in water. It is because of these sparks that we have to have buckets of sand in which to dowse the incendiaries, and why we need to act with speed before they can explode properly.
‘The actual incendiaries, as many of you will have already seen, are bomblets weighing about two pounds, contained in a relatively narrow cylinder. At one end of this cylinder there is a set of sharp fins, which enable the incendiary to penetrate surfaces such as roof tiles and the wooden beams beneath them. It is very, very dangerous for anyone to try to pick up one of these incendiaries without taking the precautions I am going to outline to you in a minute. I must stress how dangerous these newer incendiaries are. They are at their most deadly when they are nearly burned out because that’s when their flames reach the explosive, which is located under the fin. It is therefore the fin and just above it that is the most lethal part of these devices.’
‘Well, I’d heard that the best way to