Let Him Lie
Page 23
Kate started to move on, but those urgent, touching words seemed to follow her, draw her back. Please Help! Please help! But how can one help? One could go and look for the child, I suppose... but the police will have been looking for him for three weeks.
A member of this force happened to pass at this moment, and on an impulse Kate asked him:
“Can you tell me where Tranchester Terrace is?”
“Tranchester Terrace?” He paused and cast about, for he was a reserve policeman, new to the beat, and not as yet an encyclopaedia of West London streets. “I think it runs between Westbourne Grove and Talbot Road—Notting Hill way. I should take a bus down Praed Street if I were you, and get out at Bradley’s.”
Above the sound of traffic stole a thin eerie streak of sound, mournful, uncertain, high-pitched, slowly gathering certainty and volume as new streaks of the same sound joined in from all round the sky over London.
“All clear,” remarked the policeman cheerfully, moving his gas-mask, which he had been wearing as a chest-protector, round to his back.
“Oh, was the warning still on?” said Kate, as was said by many at one time and another that morning, for it was one of those mild, blue autumn days of 1940 when the warbling and the sustained notes of the air-raid sirens were heard so frequently and at such short intervals that people going in and out of buses and shops and about their business in the streets were often surprised to hear a sustained note when they did not know there had been a warble, and a warble when they were happily anticipating a sustained note.
Kate walked back, and soon found herself in Praed Street waiting for a bus. She had all the day before her, and she might as well go and look at Tranchester Terrace. Of course, she wasn’t going to do more than just look at it. She might write and ask Aminta if Hastry was anywhere near her place, and whether she had heard about the disappearance of a boy billeted there. If she knew Hastry, Aminta might even know the people the boy had been billeted on. How terrible, to be responsible for someone else’s child, and to lose him, to have to write to his parents and say, your child is lost! Sidney Brentwood seemed to have no parents, though, only an aunt. Please Help! Please Help!
The bus swung round a diversion into Norfolk Square, for a bomb which had fallen at the entrance to a little barber’s shop opposite the Great Western Hotel had made empty shells of many little shops, piled the roadway with heaps of masonry, and turned that end of Praed Street into a one-way traffic alley.
Your Children Are Safer in the Country! ran an L.C.C. poster on one of the hoardings Kate’s bus passed in its cautious journey into unfamiliar streets. All except Sidney Brentwood. What had happened to Sidney Brentwood? I shall probably never know, said Kate to herself philosophically. But not so philosophically as she intended, for almost in the moment of formulating the words, her vague stirrings of curiosity in pity crystallised into a firm determination to find out.
Published by Dean Street Press 2016
Copyright © 1940 Ianthe Jerrold
Introduction copyright © 2016 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
The right of Ianthe Jerrold to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1940 by William Heinemann Ltd.
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 910570 98 2
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk