The Avenue Goes to War

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The Avenue Goes to War Page 57

by R. F Delderfield


  He missed the note of joviality that he had learned to expect from strangers recounting a bomb story.

  “Have the people round here really got the wind up about them?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes, they have,” said the woman, “and I’ll tell you why. It’s because you can see ’em coming!”

  That, Jim discovered was the general opinion along ‘Doodlebug Alley’ during the next few weeks. You could see them coming, and were therefore, presented with a choice of where to run. There was a kind of suspended horror about them after their engine had cut, for although one knew full well that they were going to dive one could never be sure whether they would land a mile away, or a few yards away. Sometimes they were as long as ten seconds in descending after their honk had ceased, and in that ten seconds it was possible to die half a dozen times.

  There was another aspect about them that worried Jim. They came at the end of nearly five years of war, at a time when Londoners had persuaded themselves that the worst was behind them. People were so tired, and so bored, and many, in spite of everything the papers said about food calories, were badly undernourished.

  Suppose, Jim asked himself, the V.1. was to be followed by V.2 and V.3. Suppose the inflow of missiles was stepped up until one was falling on London every few seconds? How long could an exhausted population stand up to that kind of attack?

  He was partly reassured, in July, after an unofficial visit to the coastal defence-belt.

  Delivering crude oil containers, to a depot near Winchelsea, he passed teams of sunburned R.A.F. men, camping beside their moored barrage balloons and he could see for himself the long line of balloons gleaming across the sky as far as the Kent horizon.

  A corporal told him that the barrage had already hooked down quite a number of bombs and would claim more as soon as it thickened.

  There was also, he learned, an ack-ack belt nearer the coast, and beyond that a Channel fighter patrol supplementing the one attacking V.1s from inland bases.

  Lying on his back, in a field near Rye marshes one morning Jim watched a Tempest assail one of the missiles, speeding up behind it and firing tracer into the tail, until the flying-bomb began to glow and falter, twisting and turning as though to shake off its pursuer, but ultimately blowing up with a roar as the fighter-plane zoomed into a victory roll and bore off towards the coast.

  “By God, but that was marvellous, marvellous!” Jim said to himself. “If only old Harold had been here to see it.”

  The visit to the coast improved his morale. For once, he told himself, the authorities appeared to be tackling an emergency with speed and imagination, and when he read in the papers that the first flying-bomb launching base had been captured in France he felt as elated as he had been by news of the German surrender at Stalingrad the previous year.

  His faith in the staying power of the Londoner received an additional boost one sunny afternoon in August, when he happened to be crossing Leicester Square, on his way home after a call at the company’s office.

  His attention was attracted, as always with Jim, by a crowd of people assembled in Great Newport Street, near the tube station.

  Assuming it to be another incident he hurried over to offer assistance, but when he joined the crowd he found that it was not the kind of incident he had imagined but merely a large group of pedestrians engaged in watching a window-cleaner rescue a trapped pigeon.

  The pigeon had wedged itself behind the wired-up window of a tall building and was resisting all efforts to be freed. Balanced on an extended ladder the man had already loosened the corner of the netting but the pigeon had flown into the top left-hand corner, where the rescuer was finding it difficult to reach.

  The crowd continued to grow, and so did its interest in the rescue. Men and women began to call out advice. “Come down and move the ladder further over!” “Rip that other corner away, chum!” until a man in authority, presumably he who occupied the offices behind the window, emerged from the building and called: “Hold on! I’ll nip up and help you from inside!”

  At this the crowd cheered and a policeman, smiling broadly, began to ascend the ladder.

  “I’ve got a pair of cutters here,” he shouted to the perched window-cleaner.

  The street was now jammed with people, but nobody appeared to heed the familiar honk-honk of an approaching V.1. Jim heard it clearly and marvelled, half-expecting the crowd to scatter, and dive for cover, but not one person moved. All remained gazing upwards towards the second-storey window and there was renewed cheering when the window opened and the man who had promised assistance reappeared, waving a rolled-up newspaper in an attempt to frighten the bird into the window-cleaner’s grasp.

  Overhead the honking suddenly ceased and a few people near Jim glanced up at the patch of open sky between the eaves.

  “Hey up!” said a Covent Garden carter, grimacing at Jim, “here comes another bloody doodlebug! Hold on to yer ’at, mate!”

  A shattering explosion came from the general direction of the Strand but the crowd hardly flinched, for at that moment the window-cleaner grabbed the pigeon by its legs and frenzied cheering broke out on all sides.

  The policeman reached up and took the bird, holding it close against him as he descended. The man in the office window beamed down on the crowd.

  “Is it okay?” asked the carter, shouldering his way to the foot of the ladder.

  “Looks so,” said the policeman and suddenly tossed the bird into the air.

  They watched its flight as it soared away towards St. Martin-in-the-Fields and then the policeman, suddenly recollecting his duty, shouted, “Now then everybody! Move along there, move along!”

  Jim walked thoughtfully into Charing Cross Road and down the incline towards the station. The incident had impressed him more favourably than anything he had witnessed since Dunkirk. Was this, he wondered, an unconscious demonstration of the spirit of the people who had survived so many desperate situations during the last ten centuries? Was this the secret of their survival, often against impossible odds, and in the face of all intelligent predictions?

  That bomb! It could have destroyed every one of them! It could have sent window-cleaner, pigeon, policeman and spectators into Covent Garden, and gouged a hole in Great Newport Street large enough to hold twenty double-decker buses! This, in fact, was what it was meant to do! For this it had been assembled in Germany, transported hundreds of miles to the coast, and launched across the Channel and the length and breadth of Kent.

  But no one had taken the slightest notice of it! They were all much too taken up with the rescue of a stray pigeon, trapped behind splinter-wire! Not even the trench-veterans of the First World War had faced a bombardment with this serenity, so what did it matter how many secret weapons were being assembled in the Reich factories, when each of them must take second-place to a trapped pigeon?

  He caught his train and read the war news all the way to Woodside. The German counter-attack at Mortain had been thwarted by rocket-firing Typhoons. The Ploesti oil-wells had been plastered by the Ninth U.S. Army Air Force. The Yanks were hammering away at the outer ring of Japanese conquests in the Pacific. The Russians were advancing on Warsaw. The Allies were in command of the whole of Southern Italy and were surging north to the Po. The war, surely, was practically won, and would have been, damn it, if the mutinous Junkers’ time-bomb had been more strategically placed in ‘that little maniac’s’ headquarters on the Eastern Front.

  The links were bathed in a golden light as he turned into Shirley Rise and strode up the incline towards the Avenue. Somebody called to him as he crossed the road and turning his head he saw that it was Edith Clegg, presumably returning home after the matinée at the Odeon.

  He waited for her to catch him up. “Hullo there, Miss Clegg! What a lovely afternoon.”

  He noticed then that her face was grey and that she was breathless. She looked indeed, as though she had just run the whole length of the Lower Road, and he wondered vaguely why she should be i
n such a prodigious hurry to get home for tea.

  “What’s the matter, Miss Clegg? Is your sister missing again?”

  Edith reached him, sobbing for breath and clutched his arm.

  “They ’phoned…it’s us…one of those awful doodlebugs…!”

  She was unable to say more but there was no need. Jim seized her by the hand and together they began to run along the pavement to the corner shop.

  When they reached it they stopped and stared blankly at one another. Where the shop had been was now a vast array of tumbled bricks and shattered paving stones, and the Avenue was full of people, scrambling here and there over mounds of rubble.

  Every house on the even side, from the corner shop to the bend in the crescent, was down, and beyond the wreckage a line of ambulances reached away out of sight towards the Rec’ gates.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  Edith Expands

  HAROLD HAD TAKEN an afternoon off that Friday. It was not his habit to take afternoons off but Mr. Stillman, the senior partner of the firm, had been insisting that Harold looked very peaky these days, and shortly after his own convalescence he took a good look at his clerk, complimented him on the way he had coped during the last few months, and told his partner, Vickars that “something should be done about that chap, Godbeer before he gets wise to himself, and demands a rise in salary on pain of resignation!”

  Vickars agreed. For a long time now he had appreciated Harold’s worth. It was not often, he reflected that one could buy so much loyalty for under five hundred a year.

  “We ought to send him off on a holiday,” he told Stillman.

  “Not that I think he’d ever leave us, but we don’t want him going sick, not with business as good as it is!”

  “Then we’ll not only make him take a holiday, we’ll give him a bonus,” said Stillman. “How about twenty-five?”

  “Make it fifty,” said Vickars, “he’ll never get over that!”

  So Harold was summoned to the senior partner’s office and offered a cheque for fifty pounds, on condition that he took a fortnight’s holiday, commencing that very day.

  “Have you got somewhere to go?” Stillman wanted to know.

  Harold, who was quite stunned by his employers’ generosity, mumbled something about Devonshire.

  “Nice hotel?”

  “My daughter-in-law’s got a farm down there, Mr. Stillman, and I daresay she’d have me, if I wrote to her.”

  “You’ve no time to write, ’phone!” said Stillman, “and when you get there take things easy, and don’t go volunteering for anything! I don’t want to see you here until a fortnight on Monday, understand?”

  Harold ’phoned Judy, who said that she would be delighted to put him up. She had good daily help now and ‘The Shillets’ was just about habitable. No, she wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble, and she wouldn’t put herself out for him. He could please himself what he did during the day and she would be very glad of his company in the evenings! Yes, he was to catch the 9.30 from Waterloo, change at Sidmouth Junction, change at Tipton St. John’s, and she would meet him there in the trap! No, she wasn’t an invalid simply because she was five months’ pregnant, and was perfectly strong enough to drive a trap along a few country by-roads!

  After this encouraging conversation Harold began to feel excited about his holiday. He was very fond of Judy and guessed how lonely she must be, since Esme had gone over to France, and was not able to write much on account of his mysterious comings and goings in recently-liberated territory.

  He caught the 12.50 from London Bridge and was back in the Avenue in time for a cold lunch. After lunch he changed into tweeds and completed his packing, not forgetting to turn out his fishing-rod, for Judy had told him there was trout in the pool opposite the farm.

  He had never done very much fishing, although he had owned the rod for more than twenty years. He had always fancied himself as a fisherman and had promised himself that on his retirement he would take up fishing seriously.

  He carried the rod down to the verandah and stood facing the double gardens, practising a few casts. The sun over the old Nursery was bright and warm, and the sounds of the suburb seemed to carry a long way in the stillness of the summer afternoon. He could hear children playing in Delhi Road and the familiar whirr of lawn-mowers higher up the Avenue. It reminded him of Saturday afternoons in peace-time, when the song of the suburb was always heard so clearly at weekends.

  Presently one of the Jarvis girls at Number Eight turned on a radio, and Harold recognised the music of one of his old favourites, ‘The Student Prince’.

  He put down his rod and eased himself into a deck-chair. He remembered having taken Eunice to see ‘The Student Prince’ when it was a hit show in the West End, and the songs always made him feel young but pleasantly sad, as though he too had once raised his tankard to Cathy, in Old Heidelburg.

  As he sat there listening Louise popped her head out of the kitchen door of Number Twenty.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Uncle Harold? I’m making some now, for Jack. He’s in the nursery, working.”

  Harold thanked her and said that he would like a cup of tea very much indeed. It was all he needed to make him feel that his holiday had really commenced.

  Louise called Jack, who came clumping along the gravelled alley dividing gardens and nursery, and lazily, Harold watched his slow, ponderous movements, as he cleaned his spade, and carefully scraped his boots. How lucky I am, mused Harold, to have such wonderful neighbours, and what fools we all were to be so stiff and formal with one another during all those years between the wars!

  At that moment, as Jack was about half-way up the path, they both heard the familiar honking, beyond the wood.

  “Hullo!I thought it was time we were due for one of those infernal things,” grumbled Harold.

  “Aw, giddon! Us don’t take no notice o’ they,” said Jack, shading his eyes and looking carelessly into the sky.

  “I’ll come and drink my tea in the kitchen,” said Harold, struggling up from his deck-chair.

  The bub-bub-bub of the flying-bomb suddenly ceased and was succeeded by a curious swishing sound, rising in key to a wild, screaming wail.

  “Good Lord…!” shouted Harold and saw fear in Jack’s eyes as, together, they leaped from the verandah towards the open back door of Number Twenty.

  Becky was also in her back garden when the flying-bomb landed.

  She was standing on a box placed against the nursery fence of Number Four and calling to her strays, ‘Mittens’ and ‘Mog’.

  In the years before the war, when her own cat, Lickapaw, had been alive, Becky Clegg had had no time at all for the nursery strays, and had actively discouraged Lickapaw from associating with them, but that was because they tempted Lickapaw to stay out all night and sometimes to remain away from home for nearly a week.

  Now that her own cat was dead, and his inscribed headboard stood under the loganberries, Becky had forgiven all the cats that lived in Delhi Road and used the nursery as a hunting-ground. ‘Mittens’ and ‘Mog’ were her favourites, for she had got it into her head that they had been orphaned by the 1940 bomb that demolished the corner block, and had since lived wild, subsisting on what they could catch, or on the bounty of Avenue housewives.

  This was not so, for both cats had good homes of their own, but Edith had never told her this, for she knew that Becky liked going down to the fish shop in the Lower Road each day, and buying them scraps. She liked to make sure that they actually got the fish, and it was part of her ritual to climb on the box at tea-time and call them by name. They were much more punctual to meals than Lickapaw had been and it was rare that they did not come running to her summons, or the smell of fish-heads.

  They came now, a black cat, with snow-white paws, and a lean, thickly-barred tabby, and as they ran they mewed with delight and Becky exclaimed.

  “Oh, you dears! Oh, you loves! Aren’t you good things to come so quickly? You were waiting for me, now weren’t you?”<
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  She heard the honk of the V.1 and remembered Edith’s instructions. Whenever she heard one of those nasty things she was to stop whatever she was doing and run under the stairs. So many had passed over just lately, however, and it was very tiresome to have to jump down, before she had time to give Mittens and Mog their rations. They would be so disappointed, she thought, if she snatched the fish away just as they were reaching up for it, and they would surely never trust her again! So she decided to ignore the horrid noise and finish what she was doing. She leaned over the fence and called: “Never mind the old Doodlebug dears, never mind, then!”

  Suddenly everything around her seemed to rise up and turn different colours, orange, purple and silvery grey. For some reason the box on which she was standing slid away from her feet, leaving her clinging to the tall fence, which her weight must be pulling down, for the air around her was filled with a rending, crackling sound.

  She thought, as she fell: “Oh, dear, Edith will be angry, she will be terribly angry about breaking the fence…!”

  The bomb came in slantwise from the extreme southwestern corner of Manor Wood, striking the Avenue obliquely at Number Thirty-Eight, after skimming over the chimneys of the odd numbers, opposite.

  It exploded on the upper storeys of the block and its fin was later found as far away as the hawthorn hedge that bordered the links in Shirley Rise.

  It had no business to approach from this angle and should have come in from the south-east, or at any rate from due south, but its mechanism had been slightly damaged by an ack-ack splinter, and it had been behaving eccentrically all the way from the coast, widening its line of approach, and losing height far more rapidly than its despatches had planned.

  It demolished every house between Number Thirty-Eight and the corner shop, nineteen in all, besides shattering parts of the even numbers opposite, and sending a solid chunk of Mr. Saunders’ yard wall right through the front of Number One. It killed twenty-one of the residents at that end of the crescent and it injured another eighteen.

 

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