Olive had redecorated the room herself, painting the walls cream, and the picture rail green to match the smart, shaped plain pelmet, and curtains in a lighter green pattern of fern leaves. During the winter months, drawn over the blackout fabric, the curtains gave the room an air of cosy warmth, whilst in the summer they let in the light. Olive had made the curtains herself using a sewing machine borrowed from the vicar’s wife.
A stylish stepped mirror hung over the gas fire. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring, and over it was a patterned carpet in green, dark red and cream to match the dark green damask-covered three-piece suite. On the glass and light wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, stood a pretty crystal bowl, which she’d bought in an antique shop just off the Strand. Against the back wall, behind the sofa, was a radiogram in the same light wood as the coffee table.
Olive had been perfectly prepared to push her precious furniture to one side to put a bed up in the room for Dulcie, but Dulcie had gone up in her esteem for insisting on not ‘putting her out’, as she had called it.
In the ticket office Agnes heard the all clear with great relief. She hadn’t really slept at all, partly because of the bombs and partly because of her anxiety about Ted’s mother. Now she had to get up and get back to her voluntary duties. Not that she minded. Her truckle bed wasn’t very comfortable, and Miss Wood, who also worked in the office and had volunteered to come in overnight, had snored dreadfully.
People were already starting to make their way out of the underground, a small stream of yawning, tired-looking humanity: mothers carrying babies, fathers with children, on their shoulders, families with older children, their silence punctuated by the laughing and whistling of several men who staggered past the ticket office carrying bottles of beer.
Mr Smith, who had emerged from his office looking, Agnes noticed, every bit as spruce as though he had only just arrived at work and not spent the night there, glared after them disapprovingly.
‘Disgraceful, carrying on like that. And at a time like this,’ he told Agnes.
‘Perhaps they were trying to cheer themselves up,’ she replied.
‘Make a nuisance of themselves, more like.’
‘I’ve heard that at some of the undergrounds they’ve had people organising singsongs,’ Miss Wood confided to Agnes, when Mr Smith had gone ‘up top’ to see ‘what was what’. ‘I can’t see Mr Smith encouraging that here.’
Agnes didn’t like to think of how much more damage the bombs must have done overnight. The noise had been dreadful.
Would Ted have time to come into the office to see her? He’d want to see his family safely home, of course, and then he’d have to come back to work himself. She wasn’t going to think about Ted’s mother not speaking to her. Agnes swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Ted was her hero and she wanted so very much for his family to like her. There was no getting away from her shaming background, though. As one of the other children at the orphanage had told her, ‘If your ma leaves you outside the orphanage and then scarpers, that means that you’re a bastard and that you’ve got bad blood in you ’cos your pa didn’t want to marry your ma.’
Agnes had known from the way that Ted talked about his mother and their family life that being respectable was important to her. This thought brought another lump to Agnes’s throat, and her eyes began to sting.
It was daylight when Sally left the hospital, with the kind of misty smoke haze hanging over the city that September mornings could bring. But this was a different kind of haze: small black smuts and even hot cinders were floating down from the sky. She could smell burning in the air, a smell with which all Londoners were becoming familiar. This morning’s smoky haze smelled unpleasantly of tallow fat. In the direction of the docks a red glow lay on the sky like a painful raised weal on a patient’s flesh, betraying the savagery of the wound they had suffered.
Just as Sally had left, one of the theatre porters, also going off duty, had told her with real shock in his voice, ‘St Paul’s nearly got it last night. Dropped an eight-hundred-pound bomb on it, Jerry did. Landed right in front of the steps and would have blown the whole front to bits, but someone up there,’ he had gestured towards the heavens, ‘wasn’t going to let Hitler get away with that.’
Now Sally felt impelled to go and view the cathedral herself – just to make sure it wasn’t damaged.
Of course, the area around it had been cordoned off, and a crowd had gathered at a safe distance. From what she could see, soldiers, the Home Guard, policemen and fire fighters were all busy working by the steps.
‘Got to dig the bomb out, and that will take some doing,’ a man standing next to Sally informed her.
‘They’ll have the bomb disposal lot in, of course,’ another man put in, older and possibly ex-military himself, from his upright bearing.
As comments and opinions flew back and forth – East End accents mingling with upper class and the falsely ‘refined’ tones adopted by those who wanted to ‘better themselves’ – the fate of Sir Christopher Wren’s cathedral drew the people of the city together in a common cause.
Once she had assured herself that St Paul’s was undamaged, Sally started to make her way back to Article Row. At least working nights meant that she was avoiding the sleeplessness of night raids. She’d never thought it lucky to be doing night shifts before, she smiled to herself ruefully, acknowledging the shouted, ‘Watch out for the hoses,’ from a fireman with a nod of her head, as she stepped carefully over them.
From the evidence of the large basket on the other side of the street, incendiaries had obviously been dropped. These bombs were easy enough to put out if one was swift to collect them on a shovel and douse them in water or sand before the chemicals inside them exploded, but the baskets in which they were dropped contained hundreds, and even the most fleet-footed fire watcher couldn’t possibly extinguish them all. Once the fires took hold, no building was safe. Apart from shattered windows, the buildings either side of the road seemed to be intact, although from the evidence of so many hoses, their interiors would now be soaked and damaged, Sally thought sympathetically.
A flat-bed lorry was parked at the end of the street, a salvage team working busily to clear up the mess of roof slates, and broken glass. Sally could see two men removing broken glass from one of the windows, one of them giving a warning shout to the other as a large piece from higher up fell towards him.
As though she was watching it in horrific slow motion Sally saw the man giving the warning putting out his hand towards his workmate; saw this man looking up and then stepping back and stumbling; the glass catching the morning light; the sticky tape that had once secured the edges rolled back in pale brown ringlets. She saw the glass slicing into the first man’s arm; the bright plume of arterial blood shooting upwards; the silence and then the frantic surge of men towards their injured comrade.
Sally ran to the men. ‘Don’t try to remove the glass,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m a nurse. Barts.’
The men immediately fell back respectfully, except the one supporting the injured man.
‘He needs to get to hospital,’ he told her unnecessarily, his voice gruff with shock.
‘Yes,’ Sally agreed, kneeling down beside the injured man, who was now looking, to her, that familiar shade of grey-green white that came with shock and loss of blood. ‘But first we need to tourniquet his arm.’ Because if they didn’t he wouldn’t get there at all, at least not alive, Sally recognised, although she didn’t say that to the men.
‘There’s a first-aid kit in the cab of the fire engine,’