Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  Anna boasted a little at the secretarial school about her escape, but no one was very impressed. By now most of the people still remaining in London had a bomb story of some sort. If they hadn’t lost any windows they had just failed, by some remarkable coincidence, to be in some building which had received a direct hit. Madame Laroche had returned from a public shelter at dawn to find that a landmine had somehow got through her roof without exploding and was now dangling from its parachute at the top of the staircase, ready to go off at the slightest tremor. This had so unnerved her, on top of the worry about her family in Belgium, that her doctor had ordered her to rest in the country.

  The school hardly missed her. It had almost run down, anyway. There were scarcely a dozen students left and it had become impossible to take down dictation and read it back, for the special paper for the machines had come from Belgium and there was no more to be had. So the students practised by moving their fingers on empty keyboards while the one remaining teacher read out light novels to them. It was perfectly logical, but sometimes, as Anna listened to yet another chapter of Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie after walking through the broken streets, it occurred to her that this was a strange way of spending what might be the last days of her life.

  At night everyone now slept in the basement. Its stone floor was cold and hard, so if you wanted to be at all comfortable you had to drag the mattress down from your bed. But it always seemed like the last straw, after a largely sleepless night, to have to drag it all the way up again when the All Clear went at dawn.

  The cellar they slept in had been a storage room and Anna hated it. To reach it you had to go down a narrow flight of stone steps from the dining room to the kitchen and then down a few further steps beyond it. It was little more than six feet high and both damp and stuffy. Once you were installed on your mattress, listening to the air raid outside and staring up at the low ceiling, it was easy to imagine everything collapsing above you, and Anna had an unreasonable wish, even when no bombs had fallen nearby, to keep checking that the stairs to the dining room were, still there.

  Sometimes when she could not bear it any longer she would whisper to Mama, “I’m going to the lavatory,” and in spite of the grumbles of the other sleepers she would pick her way across them and go up into the deserted main part of the hotel. She would climb up the four flights to her room and stay there, with the sound of the bombs and the guns, until she felt ready to brave the basement again.

  One night when she entered her room she was startled to see a figure outlined against the window which, by some freak of the blast, had remained unbroken.

  “Who is it?” she cried.

  Then it turned and she recognised Papa.

  “Look,” he said, and she joined him in the darkness.

  The night outside was brilliant. The sky was red, reflecting the fires on the ground, and in it hung clusters of orange flares which lit up everything for miles around. They looked like gigantic Christmas decorations floating slowly, slowly down through the night air, and though Anna knew that they were there to help the Germans aim their bombs she was filled with admiration at the sight. It was so bright that she could see the church clock (which had long been stopped) and a place on the rooftop opposite where some of the tiles had been ripped off by the blast. In the distance yellow flashes like lightning were followed by muffled bangs – the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park.

  Suddenly a searchlight swept across the sky. It was joined by another and another, crossing and re-crossing each other, and then a great orange flash blotted out everything else. A bomb or a plane exploding in midair – Anna did not know which – but the accompanying crash sent her and Papa scuttling away from the window.

  When it was over they looked out again at the illuminated night. The orange flares had been joined by some pink ones and they were drifting slowly down together.

  “It may be the end of the civilised world,” said Papa, “but it is certainly very beautiful.”

  As the days grew shorter the air raids grew longer. By mid-October the All Clear did not sound until half-past six in the morning and it was hardly worth trying to get to sleep afterwards.

  “If only this fine weather would stop!” cried Mama, for when the weather was bad enough the bombers did not come and they had the incredible, marvellous experience of sleeping all night in their beds. But one bright day followed another, and though it was exhilarating, each morning, to go out in the crisp autumn air and find that one was still alive, each night the bombers came back and with them the closeness and the fear in the basement.

  One night the sirens sounded earlier than usual, while everyone was still having supper. They were followed almost immediately by the drone of planes and a succession of crashes as bombs fell not far away.

  One of the Poles stopped with a forkful of shepherd’s pie half-way to his mouth.

  “Bang-bang!” he said. “It is not nice when people are eating.” He was a large middle-aged man with an unpronounceable name and everyone called him the Woodpigeon because of his passion for imitating a pair of scraggy birds which haunted the yard behind the hotel.

  “They’re going for the stations again,” said Frau Gruber.

  “Oh surely not!” cried the German lady whose husband had been killed by the Nazis. “They went for the stations yesterday.”

  The Hotel Continental lay half-way between Euston and St Pancras and when the Germans tried to bomb the stations it always meant a bad night.

  “But not did they hit them,” said the Woodpigeon, and then everyone froze as a tearing, whistling sound was followed by an explosion which rocked the room. A glass slid off one of the tables and broke on the floor.

  “That was quite close,” said Mama.

  Frau Gruber started in a matter of fact way to collect the dishes.

  “It’s prunes and custard for pudding,” she said, “but I think we’d better leave it and go to the shelter.”

  While Anna went to fetch her mattress from her room there was another crash and the whole building – walls, floors, ceiling – moved perceptibly around her. She grabbed the mattress quickly and rushed down the stairs with it bumping behind her. For once she was glad to get down into the basement – at least it didn’t move.

  Frau Gruber had hung up a blanket in the middle of the storage room, so that the men could sleep on one side and the women on the other. Anna pushed her mattress into an empty space and found herself next to the German lady whose husband had been killed by the Nazis. Mama was somewhere behind her. Before she had time even to lie down there was another shattering crash and Frau Gruber, who had been tinkering with the prunes and custard in the kitchen, abandoned them and made for the storage room.

  “Oh dear,” said the German lady, “I do hope it’s not going to be one of those awful nights.”

  This was followed by an even louder crash and then a third, fortunately farther away.

  “It’s all right,” said Anna. “He’s passed us.”

  The Germans always dropped sticks of six or more bombs in a row. As long as the explosions were coming towards you it was terrifying, but once they had moved past you knew that you were safe.

  “Thank God!” said the German lady, but Anna could already hear the drone of another plane.

  “They’re coming in on a different flight-path,” said Frau Gruber. Mama added, “Straight overhead,” and then the next lot of bombs began to fall. They listened to them screaming down from the sky. One…two…three…four very close – five and six, thank goodness, receding. Then there was another plane and another – it can’t go on like this, thought Anna, but it did.

  Next to her the German lady was lying with her eyes shut and her hands clenched on her chest, and on the other side of the blanket she could hear the Woodpigeon muttering, “Why you not hit the station and go home? You stupid, silly Germans, why you not can hit it?”

  At last, after what seemed an eternity, there was a lull. The last bomb dropped by one plane was not followed
immediately by the sound of another plane approaching.

  It was quiet.

  For a few moments everyone waited and when nothing happened they began to move and relax. Anna looked at her watch. It was still only ten o’clock.

  “That was the worst we’ve had,” said Mama.

  Papa lifted a corner of the blanket and looked through. “Are you all right?” he asked, and Anna nodded. Curiously enough she did not feel her usual urge to see if the stairs were still there. How silly, she thought – if they really collapsed one would hear it.

  “Well, we may as well try and get some sleep,” said Frau Gruber and at the same moment there was a distant thud and the light went out.

  “They’ve hit a cable,” said Frau Gruber, snapping on her torch.

  “The kind Germans have switched off for us the light,” said the Woodpigeon, and everyone laughed.

  “Well, I won’t waste the battery,” said Frau Gruber and the cellar was plunged into darkness.

  Anna closed her eyes so as not to see it. She had been frightened of the dark when she was small and still was. It was quiet except for some bumps in the distance. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, and she drifted off into sleep. Suddenly everything seemed to explode. The cellar shook around her and before she could collect herself in the darkness another bomb came screaming down, the loudest she had ever heard, it burst with a huge roaring reverberation that was almost too loud to hear and something came down on top of her and covered her, she could not see or breathe, it was what she had always dreaded …

  And then she moved and found that it was only the blanket which had fallen on her, and the white faces of Papa and the Woodpigeon appeared with a click of Frau Gruber’s torch.

  “Are you all right?” said Papa.

  She said, “Yes,” and lay where she was without moving, still filled with the terror of it. Next to her the German lady was crying.

  Mama began to say something but stopped because there was another plane above them and the bombs came tearing down again.

  “I’ll just take a look,” said Frau Gruber after the last one, and the cellar leapt and darkened as she moved with her torch into the kitchen.

  “All right,” she said. “We’re still standing.”

  Anna lay quite still.

  “I mustn’t panic,” she thought. But she wished the German lady would stop crying as the cellar shook with another explosion.

  At the rate they’re bombing us, she thought, we’re bound to be hit.

  A wave of terror swept over her, but she managed to contain it. If she could just get used to the idea, she thought. If she could manage to keep calm when it happened. Because they always came to dig you out, and if you didn’t panic you didn’t use up so much oxygen, and then you could last until they came.

  Mama leaned over to her in the darkness. “Would you like to come next to me?” she said.

  “I’m all right here,” said Anna.

  Mama could not help her.

  Another plane came over and another stick of bombs tore down.

  If I think about it now, thought Anna, if I imagine it, then when it happens, when I’m trapped in a little hole with tons of rubble on top of me …

  Again the terror surged over her.

  She tried to fight it down. I mustn’t fight and scrabble to get out, she thought, I must keep quite still. There may not be much room, much air …

  Suddenly she could almost feel the tight, black cavity shutting her in and it was so frightful that she leapt into a sitting position as though she had been stung, to make sure it hadn’t happened. She was panting for breath and Mama said, “Anna?” again.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  The German lady was moaning and beyond her two Czech voices were murmuring some kind of prayer.

  I have to get used to it, she thought, I must! But before she had even finished the thought such terror engulfed her that she almost cried out. It was no good. She couldn’t do it. She lay with clenched teeth and clenched hands, waiting for it to subside.

  Perhaps it won’t be so bad when it happens, she thought. Perhaps it’s worse thinking about it. But she knew that it wasn’t.

  The planes kept coming and the bombs kept bursting while the German lady wept beside her. Once Mama shouted at the German lady to control herself and at some time during the night Papa moved his mattress over to Mama so that they were all near each other, but it made no difference.

  She lay alone in the dark, trying to shut out the terrible picture of herself screaming mutely in a black hole.

  At last she became so exhausted that a kind of calm came over her. I’ve got used to it, she thought, but she knew that she hadn’t. And when at last the shuddering crashes stopped and a little light filtered into the cellar with the sound of the All Clear, she thought, well, after all, it wasn’t so bad. But she knew that this, too, was untrue.

  When they inspected the damage they found that the few remaining windows had gone. The top of the church tower which Anna had been able to see from her room had collapsed and there was a ragged hole in the roof of the church. And on the other side of Bedford Terrace, only a few yards along, where there should have been a house, there was only a heap of rubble in which nobody and nothing could have survived.

  “Direct hit,” said the porter.

  “Who lived there?” asked Anna.

  She was standing in the cold morning air in her trousers and an old sweater. The wind blew through her clothes and she had wrapped a handkerchief round her hand where she had cut herself on a piece of broken window glass.

  “Refugees from Malta,” said the porter. “But they always went to the public shelter.”

  Anna remembered them – frail, dark-skinned people in clothes far too thin for an English autumn. As soon as the air-raid warning sounded they would pour out of the house with a curious twittering sound and hurry fearfully down the street.

  “All of them?” she asked. “Did all of them go to the public shelter?”

  “Nearly all of them,” said the porter.

  Then a large blue car swept round the corner from Russell Square, negotiated some rubble in the road and stopped inexplicably outside the hotel. The driver opened the door and a little round man climbed out. It was Professor Rosenberg.

  “I heard it was bad last night,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Anna nodded and he swept her ahead of him into the lounge where Mama and Papa were drinking some tea which Frau Gruber had made.

  “I think the girl should get out of all this for a bit,” he said. “I’m driving back to the country this evening. I’ll pick her up and take her with me.”

  Anna demurred. “I’m all right,” she said, but tears kept coming into her eyes for no reason and Mama and Papa both wanted her to go.

  In the end Mama decided it by shouting, “I can’t stand another night like the last with you here – I wouldn’t mind if I knew you were safe!” and Papa said, “Please go!” So Mama helped her to pack, and about five o’clock she drove off in the back of the Professor’s great car.

  She leaned out of the window, waving frantically until the car had turned the corner. All the way to the country she carried with her the picture of Mama and Papa waving back as they stood among the rubble of the shattered street.

  Chapter Ten

  It was night when they arrived. Already as the car had zigzagged out of London, detouring round blocked streets and unexploded bombs, dusk had begun to fall, and the Professor had urged the driver to hurry so as to get clear of the city before the bombers came. Anna climbed out into the country darkness, sensed rather than saw great bushy trees surrounding a large house and caught a whiff of acorns and autumn leaves before the Professor propelled her through the front door. While she was still getting adjusted to the brightness of the hall a gong sounded somewhere in the depths of the house. The Professor said, “Go and find your Aunt Louise,” and disappeared upstairs.

  Anna wondered where Aunt Louise coul
d be and, for lack of a better idea, decided to follow the sound of the gong. She went through a large drawing room furnished with soft chairs, sofas and elaborately shaded lamps, into an equally large dining room where the long lace-covered table was laid for about a dozen people. There she found another door covered in green baize and had just decided to open it when the gonging stopped and Aunt Louise, dressed in a long velvet gown, burst into the dining-room with the stick still in her hand.

  “There will be no dinner …” she announced.

  Then she saw Anna and threw her arms round her, accidentally hitting her with the padded end of the stick.

  “My dear!” she cried. “Are you all right? I told Sam to bring you. Are your parents all right?”

  “We’re all all right,” said Anna.

  “Thank God,” cried Aunt Louise. “We heard that last night was terrible. Oh, it must be so awful in London – though here, too, there are problems. The dinner …” She drew Anna through the green baize door. “Come,” she said. “You can help me!”

  In the narrow corridor beyond they met two maids in frilly aprons.

  “Now Lotte! Inge!” said Aunt Louise. “Surely you must see reason!” But they looked at her sulkily and the one called Inge sniffed. “What’s said can’t be unsaid,” she remarked, and the one called Lotte added, “That goes for me too.”

  “Oh really,” wailed Aunt Louise. “Who would have thought, just because of some kippers!”

  They passed the kitchen with five or six saucepans steaming on the range.

  “Look at it!” cried Aunt Louise. “It will all spoil,” and she almost ran to a room beyond. “Fraulein Pimke!” she shouted and tried to open the door, but it was locked and Anna could hear someone weeping noisily inside. “Fraulein Pimke!” Aunt Louise shouted again, rattling the door handle. “Listen to me! I never said anything against your cooking.”

  There were some unintelligible sounds from within.

  “Yes I know,” shouted Aunt Louise. “I know you cooked for the Kaiser. And for all the highest in the land. And I wouldn’t dream of criticising, only how was I to know that the maids wouldn’t eat kippers? And then, when the butter ration…Fraulein Pimke, please come out!”