A thrumming. Outside the window. Growing louder.
Ellie kneels up in her bed, glancing over to Dottie who is still asleep under her covers. She peeks behind the blackout curtain. The sky is clear blue, with a few puffs of clouds hovering around the early morning sun. Then she sees it. A flash of sunlight on a metal wing as it banks and heads back towards the city centre. Growing larger as it approaches. The bomb falling through the blueness, past the oak trees on Victoria Terrace. An enormous crash. A cloud blowing up skywards, pink with brick dust. The black cross on the bottom of the wing as the Heinkel powers over the house.
Dottie bolts upright in her bed. ‘What’s that?’
‘Get out of bed, Dottie. Hurry. They’re bombing. We’ve got to get to the cellar.’
Throwing back the covers, Dottie jumps out of bed. Ellie tosses her the dressing gown her sister had left in a heap on the old Persian rug and shrugs into her own. She grabs Dottie’s hand and pulls her sister towards the bedroom door.
‘Ellie, wait! I can’t find one of my slippers.’
Another crash, near the city centre.
‘It doesn’t matter. Come on.’
Ellie flings open the bedroom door. Their father is on the landing, his thin brown hair dishevelled, his round glasses sitting crookedly on his face. He has pulled on his white cricket jumper over his striped pyjamas and stuffed his feet into green wellies.
‘Hurry up, girls, hup hup.’
Dottie runs over and clings to her father. ‘Poppy. We didn’t hear a siren.’
‘No, dove. There wasn’t one.’
Ellie hurries down the stairs after her father and sister. ‘I saw a bomb come down. It looked like it was near Ruthie’s house.’
‘Don’t worry, Ellie Mae. They’ve got the Anderson shelter. They’ll be fine.’
***
Ellie runs past the red-brick church at the bottom of the road and rushes around the thick hornbeam hedge into Victoria Terrace. The cobbled street and neat rows of terraced Victorian cottages she knows so well are coated in a thick sheet of grey dust. A smoking mountain of rafters, smashed roofing slates and charred furniture sits in the space where Numbers 43 to 51 once stood. The once proud oak trees behind the cottages are nothing but skeletons, their leaves blasted off by the force of the bomb. The acrid smell of burning sap seeps up her nose and scrapes against her throat as she swallows.
She hurries towards the empty space where Ruthie’s cottage should have been, her feet crunching on broken glass hidden by the dust. She coughs as the brick dust settles in her throat. A team of men in the tin helmets and navy overalls of the Auxiliary Fire Service sift through the debris, pulling at pieces of rubble as they lean into the pile, listening. A frazzled-looking young woman in a navy AFS uniform is unloading a tea urn from the back of a staff car by the kerb.
Ellie stumbles over to her, leaving a trail in the grey dust. ‘Excuse me. Do you know where the people living here are? I’m looking for my friend Ruthie. She lives here with her brother and her parents. They have an Anderson shelter.’
The young woman’s pale blue eyes sweep over Ellie. She has a round, friendly face under her tin helmet. She shifts her gaze back to the tea urn and shakes her head. ‘They didn’t find anyone in the shelter.’
‘But if they weren’t in the shelter …’
The young woman looks back at Ellie. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She reaches out and squeezes Ellie’s arm. ‘They wouldn’t have known what was happening.’
Ellie’s heart jumps in her chest. ‘What do you mean by that?’ She can hear her voice rise. ‘What do you mean? Maybe they went to a neighbour’s—’
‘There wasn’t any siren. There was only one plane. It took everyone off guard. They would have been sleeping. I’m so very sorry.’
Tippy’s Tickle, Newfoundland – 12 September 2001
The motorcycle bumps down a potholed road running alongside a narrow inlet, which pokes into the rocky landscape like a giant finger. On a spit of rocky land to the left, a white clapboard church with an aluminium steeple sits with its back to the churning ocean. They round a hill and pass the chain-link fence and steel gates of a cemetery. St Stephen’s is spelled out in black letters across the two curved gates, and a wooden bench, bleached grey, sits just inside the gate, with a view over the weather-battered headstones to the puffing ocean.
‘What are those?’ Sophie shouts into Sam’s ear, pointing at the water spouts.
‘Whales.’
‘Whales?’
‘Humpbacks. Minkes. Finbacks – they’re the second largest after the blue whale. We’ve got those too, down off the southwest coast. Sperm whales, of course. Orcas. Lots of dolphins. It’s whale paradise around here.’
Sam steers the bike through a village with box-like houses painted white, dark red and vivid blue. Ropes of bright orange buoys the size of bowling balls hang over peeling picket fences like necklaces. As they approach a small general store, a long-haired black dog the size of a small bear rushes out the door and down the white wooden steps, barking huskily.
‘Good grief!’ Sophie pulls her elbows into her body and huddles against Sam’s back.
Sam slows the bike to a stop and reaches out to the panting dog. ‘Hey there, Rupert. Did you miss me? Where’s Becca? Come on, let’s go find her and Ellie.’ He undoes the chinstrap of his helmet and winches it off his head. ‘Welcome to Tippy’s Tickle.’
Sophie takes off her helmet and slides her leg over the seat, her velvet skirt riding up her thighs despite her best efforts. Stumbling onto the gravel drive, she thrusts the helmet at Sam. ‘Why on earth is it called that?’
‘Tippy’s Tickle? Well, legend has it an old fisherman named Tippy saw a mermaid in the tickle here years ago.’
‘What’s a tickle?’
Sam points to the narrow inlet. ‘That is. Narrow inlets. We call them tickles here. They’re like fingers of water tickling the rock. Usually between islands or an island and the mainland. The church isn’t on an island, but the spit it’s on is close enough to an island. The church gets cut off sometimes in the spring. Then it really is an island and the only way to Sunday Mass is by boat.’
She tugs her skirt back into place. She looks up to catch Sam grinning at her. ‘What?’
‘I don’t think Tippy’s Tickle has seen quite the likes of you since old Tippy saw that mermaid.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ She squints at the single-storey wooden building perching on a raised concrete foundation. Two large white-framed sash windows frame the white-screened door, and an odd octagonal bay clings onto the left side of the modest dark red clapboard building like the afterthought of a builder harbouring delusions of grandeur. A sign above the door reads F. Quick and E. Parsons, Props. in bright yellow letters.
‘What’s this place?’
‘It’s your aunt’s store.’ Sam dismounts and adjusts the bike’s kickstand. ‘It’s the heart and soul of the town. Ellie prints her art over in the room with the bay window when she’s not schooling Becca, and Florie sells it to any tourists who manage to find their way here, along with basic provisions. We get the tourists here for the icebergs in the spring and the whales in the summer. Ellie’ll probably be at the printing press with Becca this time of day.’