It fell, the first of a stick of six, on the Lower Road, about two hundred yards in direct flight from where he stood, but before he had regained his balance, and steadied himself by grabbing the stairhead rail, a second bomb landed in Delhi Road, and then the third, in the Nursery, directly opposite.
He heard Cora’s scream from the hall, and the harsh jingle of splintering glass, as the blast emptied the lead frames of the front door. The house seemed to rock, like a vessel struck broadside on by a tidal wave, and he pitched forward across the landing, his head almost touching Esther’s bedroom door, that appeared to fly away from him as he shot towards it. He had a glimpse of Esther, standing by the bed, fawn mackintosh draped over her long, linen nightdress, her dark hair clamped under gleaming clips, and in the moment of impact he thought it odd that she had not been thrown down, as he had been, but had managed to remain bolt upright, looking across at him, with an expression of surprise.
Then the fourth bomb fell, but no one in Number Seventeen heard its approach. It whistled down just like the others, but their ears were still singing with the previous explosions, beside which the descending whistle was like the chirrup of a sparrow.
It burst squarely on the small concrete slab, immediately outside the kitchen window, and the sole witness of the explosion, a War Reserve constable sheltering under the bank in Shirley Rise, saw Numbers Seventeen, Fifteen, and Thirteen bulge out, hover, and then rocket away almost brick by brick, into the meadow behind the Avenue.
He remained crouched until the other two bombs had exploded, over towards Addington, and then he remembered his duty, and ran, whistle shrilling, into the reeking Avenue.
As he pounded along, he heard the ambulance bell clanging in Shirley Rise, and before he had recovered from the spasm of coughing, brought on by the clouds of brickdust, both ambulance and heavy rescue tender, had swung into the Avenue, and the scene was alive with running figures, shouting to one another across a pile of debris masking a large crater in what had been the gardens of Numbers Seventeen, Fifteen, Thirteen, and Eleven and Nine.
Long before the all-clear had sounded neighbours had begun to drift out of the houses opposite, and gape at the havoc a five-hundred pound bomb had made of the odd numbers across the road.
Searchlights were turned on the rubble, but the rescue work was half-hearted, for it seemed clear to the most optimistic that nobody in the group of houses nearest the corner could have survived.
They were wrong, however, for they soon discovered that somebody was alive in Number Thirteen. They could hear screaming, and Jim’s second-in-command, old Hopner, the man who had been so upset by the shambles in Delhi Road, but had since learned how not to be sick during rescue operations, was detailed to dig his way into the ruin through the front-room windows. Here, pinned by the foot under a heavy dining-room table, he found old Mrs. Coombes, very much alive, swearing like a bargee, and obstinately refusing to yield up the tin box that contained her jewellery and insurance policies.
Everyone else in the stricken houses was dead. Mrs. Coombes’ lodgers, Mrs. Crispin, and her two nephews, whose father was far away in Palestine, and the morose Mrs. Frith, who had lived at Number Seventeen for as long as anyone could remember, and whose husband, they now recalled, had run away with someone else before the war, and now lived in Wales. Outside Number Seventeen, in front of the ragged oblong where the front path had been, they found the body of an unknown young woman.
Jim knew Mrs. Coombes’ lodgers, and the Crispin family, and was also able to identify Mrs. Frith, but there was doubt about the identity of the young woman, who was thought to be a passerby until Albert Dodge, of Ninety-One, joined the recue team as a volunteer. Albert told them that this young woman must be Sydney Frith’s girl-friend, who had been staying in the house, and this set them digging for Sydney, whom they did not find until noon, the following day.
They found him eventually, or all that remained of him, for Sydney had been caught by the blast soughing between the thick wall of the stairs, and the thinner, interior walls of the main bedrooms. The wave had sucked him clear of the wreckage, and out across the gardens, flinging him over the little greenhouse, where his father had once consoled himself with potted hyacinths, and tossing him into the brick-strewn meadow, fifty yards or more from the house.
No one had thought of looking for him here, until one of the rescue squad found part of an R.A.F. tunic draped on the fence of Number Five, nearer the corner. It was Albert Dodge who found him, and helped to cover the body with a tarpaulin. As he did so he remembered Sydney’s rebuke, of the previous day, and found himself wishing that he had given the poor little beggar an old ‘one-two’ after all, for what did it matter now? What would it have cost him, to do a silly, little thing like that?
Soon the casualties were tabbed, and driven away, two from Number Thirteen, three from Number Fifteen, three more in Number Seventeen, four from the remaining houses, a total of twelve human sacrifices to a madman’s dream of world conquest.
The rubble was levelled, relatives were notified, and the people in the houses opposite found that they could now look right across the meadow to the woods.
There was one other casualty in the avenue that night, ‘Strike’, Jim Carver’s retriever, whose heart burst at the impact of the third bomb, the one that fell in the Nursery. Jim found the dog dead in his basket when he returned to Number Twenty for a short break during the morning. Everybody had been too busy to notice him until then, for he had grown very lazy lately, and spent most of his time asleep, beside the kitchen fire.
Jim called to him as he stirred his tea, and was surprised when Strike failed to poke his yellow head over the rim of the basket, and roll his eyes at his master, the way he had done every morning when Jim came in from next door. Jim called again:
“Strike! Strike, old boy! Did they give you a bit of a shake-up last night, boy?”
When there was no answering creak from the basket, and the tail did not stir, Jim got up, and knelt down beside the hearth. He saw then that Strike was dead, and his teeth bit sharply into his lip, for he was very fond of his pet. Strike was at least fifteen, a great age for a golden-haired retriever, and although Jim had long since been resigned to Strike’s death, from old age, it hurt him to realise that the old dog’s heart had succumbed to the roar of high explosive, and that no one had even noticed his passing.
He called to Louise, who was upstairs, making beds.
“Come down, Lou! Old Strike’s dead…the bastards have killed old Strike!”
Louise came running, tears in her eyes, and they turned the dog in his basket, confirming their fears.
Jim straightened, and tugged at his moustache, his teeth still pressed to his lower lip.
“He was a damned good dog, Lou, a damned good dog! No one ever had a better dog!”
He sat down, and swallowed a mouthful of tea, regarding the basket sadly, and thinking of the circumstances in which he had acquired Strike, back in the week of the General Strike, in 1926.
“He must be about fifteen and a half,” he mused. “He was only a pup, when I fished him out of that ’bus, at the Elephant and Castle. I often wondered how he came to be there in the first place. He saved me a month or so in clink, I reckon, for if I hadn’t picked him up, and pushed a way out of the mob, the bobbies would have run us all in for industrial sabotage!”
“He had a good life, Dad,” said Louise.
“That’s so,” he replied, “better than most people, and I don’t suppose he felt anything. I’ll bury him in the garden later on. I’ve got to get back over the road right now.”
He came in again at dusk, and carried Strike, wrapped in his own shredded blanket, down to the Nursery fence, where he dug a hole in the soft soil, where the loganberries grew.
As he laid the dog in the hole an odd thought crossed his mind. He thought of all the cats and dogs in German homes, and how some of them must have been driven mad by the retaliative bombing of the R.A.F. The day’s work had
saddened him.
“What’s the point of it all?” he asked himself. “Where the hell is it getting any of us, any one of us? That’s what the politicians never tell anyone!”
Some of Jim’s complacency disappeared after this incident, and he no longer wondered why the Luftwaffe had slackened its attack. Houses on each side of the gap took stock of their own scars. Miss Baker of Number One, asked Jack Strawbridge to fit a new frame and glass to her dining-room window, and Elaine Fraser, who had been out when the bomb fell, asked Archie to find her a man to renew the rear windows of Number Forty-Three, and cover them over with adhesive paper.
Glaziers, carpenters, and bricklayers were busy all down the odd side of the Avenue that week, but almost at once the incident was obscured by a fresh sensation. An early morning news bulletin was issued about Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who had puzzled everybody, including his Fuehrer it seemed, by stealing a fighter aircraft and parachuting into Scotland, supposedly to pay a social call on a duke.
This was news indeed, for surely it meant that Germany was putting out a peace feeler! Otherwise why should Nazi Number Two do such an extraordinary thing in the middle of a war?
One ex-member of the Avenue rump did not find it so easy to forget the bomb. This was Edgar Frith, antique dealer, the divorced husband of Esther, and father of Flight Lieutenant Frith.
Edgar hurried down from Llandudno to attend the double funeral, and later in the day he called on his daughter, Elaine, at Number Forty-Three, with the intention of scolding her for failing to attend at the graveside of her mother and brother.
Edgar had not seen Elaine since her wedding, in 1938, and he was a little shocked at the change in her appearance, and general demeanour. She was disposed to be friendly, however, and seated him in the front room, brewing him tea, after he had refused what she called a ‘glass-of-buck-you-up-o’.
Edgar eyed his attractive daughter uneasily, as she sat poised on the piano stool, facing him, and sipped what seemed to him, a very generous measure of gin and vermouth. Her voice was huskier than he remembered, and she seemed to be much slimmer, as though she was no longer bothering to prepare proper meals for herself.
She was as frank, and as down-to-earth as ever, in her conversation, and he wondered, not for the first time, how a nervous little man like himself, and a frigid, circumspect woman, like poor Esther, had managed, between them, to beget a handsome extrovert like Elaine. In her presence he did not feel like a father at all, but more like a shy adolescent, trying to ingratiate himself with a pretty and sophisticated aunt.
“We’re all alone now, Elaine,” he said, as he addressed himself to a vigorous stirring of tea. “Perhaps we ought to try and see a bit more of each other in the future?”
“We’ve always been alone, Father,” she told him, very condescendingly he thought, “for neither one of them were anything to us! Why do we have to pretend, just because they’re dead?”
He was profoundly shocked, the more so because he had never quite rid himself of a feeling of guilt about his desertion of Esther. She had behaved intolerably towards him, of course, but that was certainly no excuse to speak of her with contempt
“Now, now, Elaine, you shouldn’t talk like that, really you shouldn’t,” he protested.
She laughed, finished her gin, and leaned back against the piano, shooting her long, elegant legs towards him, and looking, he thought, like a lithe, and freshly groomed cat, stretching itself in the sun.
“Why oughn’t I? I’m all sorts of things, but I’ve never been a hypocrite! You aren’t really, you couldn’t be, or you’d never have run off with Frances, the way you did! But you’re talking like a hypocrite right now, and beginning to act like one too, Daddy, and what’s more you know it! What point is there in pretending to feel grieved over Mother and Sydney? I couldn’t stand the sight of either one of them when they were alive and living a few doors up the road, and nothing has happened since to make me alter the way I felt about them. ‘Ah, but they’re dead,’ you say! Well, and so what? It might have been us, mightn’t it? It might still be us, any time, and would it do us any good if the people round here thought more of us simply because we’d been killed in an air-raid?”
He made a series of deprecating clicking noises with his tongue, but she ignored them. “Think back, to the time when we were all living together, in that awful house! Mother treated you like an elderly lodger, and me—she got a hell of a kick out of thrashing me every time I put a foot wrong. I don’t say it was altogether her fault, I always thought there was something a bit queer about her, something that they put people away for, if it gets too bad! You were perfectly right to leave her, and go off with a nice normal woman, like Frances. And me? I was perfectly right to leave, too, the minute I was old enough to fend for myself. Why should we spend any more of our lives than we need with a person like that, someone who finds pleasure in being miserable? And how does her being killed in an air-raid make her a good mother, or a good wife? Then there’s Sydney…what was he, but a spiteful, sneaky, smarmy little devil, from the time he was old enough to spy on us? I can see him now, with his piggy little eyes, looking us over before he scampered off to Mother, to earn me a welt or two with the cane. Of the two of them I must say I preferred Mother, but I’m not shedding tears over either of them. I’m sorry they were killed, in the way a person is sorry about strangers killed in a rail accident, or something of that sort, but I don’t feel sorry inside, and it’s no use asking me to pretend that I do, for the benefit of the neighbours!”
He was silent for a moment, considering her explanation with the same deliberation he employed assessing the genuineness of a piece of china, or a set of Georgian spoons. Finally his honesty won through.
“I daresay you’re right, Elaine,” he said, with a sigh. “We all make an attempt to register conventional emotions at a time like this, but I suppose it’s only because we’re afraid people will think less of us if we don’t.” He changed the subject abruptly.
“Are you and Esme really breaking up?”
“It looks like it,” she told him, again without a trace of concern in her voice, “we weren’t really much good for each other. It was wrong of me to marry him, I suppose, but nobody could have convinced him of that at the time, could they?”
Edgar remembered an earnest young man, calling on him at Llandudno in the first year of his second marriage, and asking, pitifully he thought at the time, if he had received any news of Elaine. He remembered the same young man’s shining eyes, when he had seen him and Elaine off as a honeymoon couple. Finally he recalled Esme’s tired face not long ago, when he had brought the baby up to Llandudno, to be cared for by Frances, and her daughter, Pippa.
“No,” he said, “it’s no use pretending about that either, Elaine. I’m sorry about little Barbara, though. She’s a lovely little kid, and no trouble at all. Frances and Pippa are spoiling her quite shamelessly, and she’ll make us all suffer for it I daresay, but she’s going to be very pretty, very pretty indeed! She reminds me of you, when you were her age.”
“She won’t be much like me,” said Elaine, and for the first time he thought he detected a trace of wistfulness in her voice. “She’s half Esme’s, and she’ll put on his rose-coloured spectacles the moment he offers them to her!”
“Are you going to…to marry this other chap, the grocer over the road?” asked Edgar, tentatively.
“God knows,” said Elaine, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it! He hasn’t asked me yet, though I’ve got a feeling that he will before long. He’s coming over directly, would you like to meet him?”
“No…no…I…er…don’t think that would be very wise,” said Edgar, “not with a divorce pending…I mean…! Besides, meeting me would embarrass him, wouldn’t it?”
Elaine laughed. “It might embarrass you, but it wouldn’t embarrass Archie! However, suit yourself, and thanks for looking in, Daddy, I’ll keep in touch.”
He got up, gladly enough, and she hand
ed him his bowler hat, and dark, woollen gloves. He followed her into the hall, hesitating a moment as she opened the front door.
“Well…good-bye Elaine…if you want to talk you can always ring…I’m in the shop now, most of the time,” and he bobbed forward, kissing her lightly on her cheek and hurried out in the Avenue.
He turned right at the gate, averting his eyes as he passed the ragged gap where Number Seventeen had stood. What a mess they were making of everything! And what a mess most people made of their lives! Surely, at a time like this, the only sane thing to do was to snatch at every dandelion clock of happiness as it drifted by, to live by the hour, and let the rest of the world go hang!
He was grateful to be going back to Frances, Pippa, and the baby, and to be leaving the Avenue, with all its memories, behind him. They were not very pleasant memories and he would never come here again, not if he could avoid it.
CHAPTER XI
Harold Talks Sense
ONE SUNDAY MORNING in late June Harold brought a cup of tea into Jim’s room and Jim, who had been on duty until the small hours, continued to sleep after Harold had rattled the cup. He reached out, and gently shook his friend by the shoulder.
Jim sat up instantly. He had never lost his trench habit of shaking off sleep in a matter of seconds, and he noticed that Harold was excited about something.
“He’s gone into Russia,” said Harold, sitting on the end of the bed, and beaming at Jim through his thick-lensed spectacles. “I heard the tail-end of the news, but it didn’t seem to make sense, so I popped out and stopped somebody who had heard the beginning. He said it was quite right! He’s gone into Russia!”
Jim was wide awake at once, for this was news indeed! The Germans had moved east, turning their backs on an unsubdued West, and this in spite of the Hitler-Stalin pact that had thrown the Left into such hopeless confusion two years ago, in spite of the cynical partition of Poland and the Fascist-like invasion of Finland, in 1940. The uneasy partnership of extreme Left and extreme Right had cracked, as he had always hoped and prayed that it would, and now Germany was facing Bismarck’s old nightmare, the war on two fronts.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 15