A Fragile Peace

  ‘You wouldn’t like it if they didn’t.’

  ‘Well – it isn’t as if anything ever actually happens, is it? I expect they’re raiding Biggin Hill again, or something. Not that that will stop the awful Misses Spencer next door from gathering their revolting little dogs and fleeing to the shelter till the all-clear goes. Listen.’

  From somewhere close in the building there came a series of high, nerve-racking yelps that became more frantic by the second and ended in a long-drawn-out, hair-lifting yowl of protest. Somewhere a door slammed.

  ‘I thought dogs weren’t allowed in shelters?’

  ‘Try telling the Misses that. There they go.’ Libby grinned maliciously, her mood of a moment before once more submerged in self-defensive flippancy. ‘Works like a charm every time. I’m thinking of seducing our warden so that I can arrange for a nice warning for my next party. Mind you, it’d almost be worth a direct hit to get rid of those damn dogs—’

  ‘Libby!’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the fuss the broomstick brigade made last week. It wasn’t as if it were a real party.’ Libby had wandered back into the room and was absently straightening ornaments, fluffing up cushions. ‘Just a few friends.’

  ‘Libby. Listen. What’s that?’

  ‘It isn’t my fault if they live like bloody nuns and go to bed at eight. What’s what?’

  ‘Ssh.’

  The vibrating drone was distant, felt rather than heard.

  ‘I don’t know. Trains perhaps.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like trains to me.’

  The silence was uneasy. The sound swelled.

  ‘Damn me,’ Libby said in mild surprise, ‘it really is an air raid.’

  Celia was leaning from the window, looking to the sky. ‘God almighty,’ she said.

  ‘What is it? Cele? What is it?’ Libby hung out of the other window and was struck to silence. In the park, arms were lifted, fingers pointing. People, suddenly, were running. Mothers gathered their children like hens their chicks and fled to shelter. The airborne armada came on in deadly formation.

  ‘Where are the guns?’ Celia asked of the sky. ‘Where in hell’s name are the guns?’

  As the monstrous flight roared overhead, everything shook. An ornament slipped from a shelf and bounced, unbroken, across the floor.

  Libby was wide-eyed. ‘Where are they going? Where do you think they’re going?’

  In the east of the city, many of those who manned London’s docks and the lifeline of the railway terminals would never live to answer the question. Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on London had begun. On that golden September evening, the bombers came in waves, and along the river flames leapt in their wake, shimmering to the sky. The ground shook for miles around. Hot air blasted glass to splinters, shredding flesh from bone. Then a couple of hours later, with their task apparently accomplished, the raiders turned for home, leaving behind them a stunned population and acres of ruined docks and buildings that blazed like tar-filled torches – which, a few hours later, was exactly what they became.

  As night fell, the men and women who fought to extinguish these great, flaming beacons were struck down by another ruthless onslaught, were blasted by high explosive, buried in rubble, cut to pieces by machine-gun bullets. Below ground, in inadequately prepared shelters, some of them knee- or ankle-deep in brackish water, the civilian population huddled while their homes and, in some cases, their families were wiped from the earth above them. For most Londoners, this was the longest and most awful night they had ever experienced. Until dawn the merciless pounding continued with no break, and when at last the all-clear sounded, it was above the deafening crackle of flame as firestorms whirled and eddied through the skeletons of what had been streets and houses.

  * * *

  Libby lifted a tousled head from the pillow. ‘They’ve gone.’

  She and Celia were in the basement shelter of Rampton Court – which, in the way of such things, was far more comfortable and better served than any public shelter. They had finally been driven down there by dog tiredness and the hope of some sleep after hours of watching the terrifyingly beautiful sight of what looked like half of London in flames. All around them people lay dozing – some of them sleeping as soundly as if they had been in their own beds upstairs – or sat huddled, murmuring to one another in subdued voices.

  Celia was sitting on a cot across the narrow gangway, her stockinged feet curled up under her, smoking an unaccustomed cigarette. ‘I’d better be going. They’re going to need drivers.’ When the night raid had started, she had tried to leave the building and make her way to her headquarters but had been turned back by a justifiably stern policeman and a warden who had threatened that, if she didn’t get back into shelter, he’d bloody well carry her, uniform or no. She stood now, stretching tiredly, slipped her feet into her shoes.

  ‘I was beginning to think they’d never go,’ Libby said a little shakily.

  Celia held out her hand and hauled her to her feet. Libby was very pale and there were tell-tale smudges beneath her blue eyes. It had been a gruelling night.

  ‘You OK?’

  Libby nodded.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s anything left out there.’

  They picked their way through the stirring, recumbent bodies and walked towards the stairs.

  ‘Thank God that’s over,’ a voice said quietly, from somewhere beyond the flickering lamplight.

  ‘Over?’ another repeated bleakly. ‘Don’t you believe it. It isn’t over. It’s just the start. They’ll be back.’

  * * *

  They did come back, despite heavy losses inflicted by the RAF. Night after night for months, they came with never a break, with their incendiaries, their high explosives, their oil bombs, their terror – and after that first night their depredations were by no means confined to the East End. Londoners everywhere grew used to nights underground while above them a holocaust raged. Rescue and fire teams battled against inconceivable odds to reach people buried in the blasted remains of their homes, or to contain the firestorms that threatened to engulf their city. In the morning the shelterers would emerge rumpled, weary and apprehensive to discover that the face of their city had been ravaged yet again. Shattered gas mains and water pipes, collapsing walls, cratered roads, all became regular hazards to be overcome. A DANGER:UXB sign scrawled upon a placard would, after the first few days, draw only the most cursory of glances. If the damned bomb hadn’t gone off by now it was unlikely to do so as you walked past it.

  As the balmy autumn weather finally gave way to winter’s wind and rain, conditions in the night-time city worsened. Shelters that had been merely uncomfortably inadequate in dry weather might become totally untenable in wet. In the crowded working-class areas of the city, where most people had no back garden in which to bury their own Anderson shelter, there simply was not enough provision of public shelters for the civilian population – so, with quiet determination, and against a government ban, the people took over the Underground stations, sleeping on platforms, in passages, on staircases. At first, conditions in these makeshift shelters were intolerable, with toilets still locked up for the night, and nowhere to sit or sleep but on the station benches or the floor. But it was better than nothing, and night after night the trek would begin – men, women and children, laden with blankets and food, would buy their penny ha’penny platform tickets and invade London’s tube system, refusing to budge until the authorities had to bow to the inevitable and provide tiered bunks, primitive but usable toilets and fresh drinking water. From that moment, while above ground the fires raged from street to street, many found friendship, comfort and relative safety in the warrens of the Underground.

  In the more affluent parts of the city, things tended to be, while no less dangerous, at least marginally more comfortable. Most hotels, stores and blocks of flats, like Rampton Court, were more than adequately provided with shelters, some of them positively luxurious. At the Savoy, one could dine and dance with no fear of inter
ruption in the vast shelter beneath the hotel and then, if unwilling to face the hazard of the streets, spend the night – at a price – in a safe, well-protected bed. But not all social life allowed itself to be driven below the ground. As the population of the city – greatly swollen by the influx of service men and women, British, Commonwealth and exiles from almost every overrun country in Europe – became used to the nightly attacks, the dance bands played a little louder, the dancing couples clung a little closer, and clubs, theatres and cinemas were better patronized than ever before. Anything and everything might be counted cause for celebration in this wartime city – a posting, a promotion, a hurried wedding, the mere fact of survival. Over the soundtrack of Gone with the Wind, and the red Raiders Overhead sign flashing beside the screen, could be heard the steady drone of enemy engines, the crash of gunfire, the crump of exploding bombs. More often than not, not a soul left his seat.

  As the convoys in the Atlantic were attacked and the merchant ships were sunk, a shortage of food developed that few families’ careful hoarding over the previous few months could withstand for long. What was the good of a ration book if there were no goods to ration? And though, on the whole, there was little grumbling from a population that, oddly and traditionally, always produced its best in times of crisis, there were some who noticed that the West End shops and restaurants seemed, miraculously, better stocked than most others, and that the magic crackle of a five-pound note – which a fair proportion of the population never got to see, let alone to handle – could produce by some alchemy goods that a moment before had been totally unobtainable.

  ‘Same old story,’ said Sue, good-naturedly when, a little sheepishly, Allie produced a precious tin of salmon for Charlie Jessup’s birthday tea, ‘the rich get fed and the poor get children. Don’t be mingy with it, Rosie, love. Some poor blighter risked his neck for that. An’ it wasn’t the so-an’-so that Allie paid her thirty bob to, you can bet your boots on that.’

  Charlie, smiling, passed the sandwiches. Sue, with exaggerated care, peeled open the bread and peered at the salmon. ‘Funny colour, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s no different than usual.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know, now, would I?’ Grinning, Sue remade the sandwich and took a bite. ‘I never saw it outside the tin before. Me mum couldn’t afford it when it was three an’ six, let alone one pound ten!’

  Allie, uncertain if she were joking, glanced at her and received in return a bland smile and a wink that gave away absolutely nothing.

  In the past months, the two girls had become unexpectedly firm friends. Allie had watched with a mixture of incredulity, concern and amusement Sue’s endless scrapes and scandalous romances, had found herself more than once lending a helping hand when it was needed – which was, in fact, rather more often than was comfortable. Allie had lost count of the number of times she had lied straightfaced to extract her friend from one more jam, or slipped downstairs in the early hours to unlock and slide open a window and watch a slim, silk-clad regulation-breaking leg being flung across the sill as Sue, inevitably laughing, hair dishevelled and uniform rumpled, risked life, limb and liberty for a ‘bit of fun’ and refused to allow barbed wire, barricades or military police to stop her. Time and again, she was carpeted, and time and again her excellent, idiomatic German, undoubted intelligence and quick wits earned her a reprieve: though, to her enormous amusement, her rank of sergeant, conferred automatically with the special posting, was reduced step by step until she was the only Aircraftwoman, Second Class on the team.

  ‘I’ve done you a favour,’ she shrugged at Allie’s consternation. ‘Think about it. I’m the only one you lot can order about…’

  Anyone less amenable to being ordered about, Allie had never met. She laughed. ‘I do believe that you do it deliberately!’

  Sue picked up her cap and squashed it becomingly onto her fair head. ‘It’s got to be some kind of record, hasn’t it? I must be the only one in this army who’s actually making her way down in the world!’

  In mid-November the two of them, for the first time, got weekend passes together. They hitched a lift on an army truck, climbed into the back and bumped their slow and uncomfortable way, through driving rain that found every gap in the tarpaulin that covered them, along the pitch-dark roads towards London. They saw the blood-glow in the sky, heard the sounds of destruction long before they got there.

  ‘God almighty,’ Sue said, uncharacteristically gloomily, ‘here we go again. It’s a wonder there’s anything left to bomb.’

  Allie peered through a rent in the tarpaulin. The rain had eased. Bright fingers of light searched the sky. An ack-ack gun nearby crashed, nearly deafening her. ‘I don’t like the idea of your trying to get right across London in this. Stay with us. There’s a shelter that isn’t too uncomfortable.’ She did not see her friend’s half-smile in the dark. The last night Sue had been in a shelter had been spent with her parents, her two young brothers and three sisters, her grandmother and what seemed like half the population of Bethnal Green. They had spent the cold hours huddled in almost complete darkness with their feet in three inches of water, and the only light relief had been when Gran had taken it into her head to tell a joke that the younger element had no business understanding…

  ‘Mother and Daddy would be pleased to have you, I know,’ Allie said.

  ‘We-ll…’ The ack-ack gun reverberated again. The truck jolted to a sudden stop. They heard an unmistakable, screeching whistle.

  ‘Look out, girls. This one could be ours.’

  With one movement they dived for the floor. A moment later the truck rocked as the bomb went off a couple of streets away. Sirens wailed, whistles blew. Someone shouted unintelligibly. Sue lifted a dishevelled head. ‘That shelter of yours sounds like a better idea by the minute.’

  * * *

  Robert Jordan was alone when they arrived at the flat in Kensington. Myra, he told them, was on duty with her mobile canteen.

  ‘In this?’ Allie asked, doubtfully.

  Her father smiled. ‘Try to stop them. They go from shelter to shelter in the bombed-out areas. People have to eat, and in the worst-hit areas they have no way to prepare the food for themselves.’

  ‘The “Volunteer Ladies”,’ said Sue. ‘God bless ’em.’

  ‘She usually works at a rest centre during the day. Looking after people who’ve been bombed out, getting clothing, bedding and what-not sorted out. She never stops.’

  ‘You must be pretty busy yourself?’ Allie asked, fighting for warmth.

  ‘Fairly, yes. Jordan Industries is doing its bit. I was up in Birmingham yesterday. They’ve had almost as bad a pasting as we’ve had down here. But the factory’s missed it so far. They’re turning out shell cases as if they’ve been doing it for years.’ Robert held his daughter’s eyes with his own. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m as you see. Very well.’ Unbidden, the faint tension that often rose between these two hung now between them, a fragile, indestructible web of disillusion and hurt. Allie turned away from him, tossed her cap onto the table. ‘Will it be all right for Sue to stay the night? It doesn’t seem a good idea for her to try to get home through this.’

  ‘Of course, she must stay. The Underground’s impossible at night anyway. Shall we stay up here? I don’t usually go below unless it gets really bad, at least until Myra makes it back.’ Outside, the rumble of the big guns and the distant concussion of falling bombs accompanied his words.

  Sue threw herself into a deep armchair and looked with frank and cheerful admiration around the elegant, cosily firelit room. ‘This suits me fine. If you’re going to get bombed, I say, get bombed in comfort…’

  Much later, in the early hours of the morning, Myra let herself into the apartment and paused at the sound of laughter.

  ‘…I don’t believe it! What happened?’

  ‘When the foreman saw it lying there, he said – if you’ll excuse the language — “Jesus, it’s a bomb!” And the shift leader said, cool
as you please, “Don’t tell Him, dear. Go and find the army. We’ve got a quota to fill,” and fill it they did, bless them.’

  Sue laughed again, delightedly.

  ‘Almost the whole of the workforce are women now,’ Robert went on, ‘and a fine job they’re doing. I have to admit that if anyone had told me a couple of years ago that we could run Jordan Industries on a war footing with mostly female labour, I simply wouldn’t have believed it. But there they are, at the lathes and the benches, working like Trojans.’

  ‘And earning a fair whack for the first time in their lives,’ Sue put in, grinning. ‘Has it occurred to you what you’re going to do with the working girls once this lot’s over and the boys come marching home again? You could have a revolution on your hands.’

  Myra, standing unnoticed by the door, smiled faintly.

  Robert shook his head. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. They know the agreements we have with the unions. Dilution of labour – use of non-union labour – it’ll all have to stop when the emergency is over. I should think the girls will be all too pleased—’

  ‘—to get back to the kitchen sink, eh?’ teased Sue, gently. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right, Mr Jordan. We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?’ In the past couple of hours, surprisingly perhaps, Sue and Robert had struck up an immediate friendship, and the mood between them was easy.

  Allie, sitting on the rug in front of the dying fire, looked up. ‘Why the lathes and the benches?’ she asked suddenly, almost as if the question surprised her. ‘Why not the manager’s desk? Why not the boardroom?’

  Her father smiled. ‘Because the men already in those positions are mostly – like me – too old to fight. And most of our industry comes under the “reserved occupation” category.’

  ‘Is that the only reason?’