by Janet Tanner
The Zeps, Ted thought—the German Zeppelins which were bombing London. He’d heard about it, but it hadn’t even crossed his mind to think it might make any difference to him, or even to wonder if Rebecca might be in any danger. The war was in France, not here in England.
“Where have they gone, then?” he asked. “And when will they be back?”
“Oh, they won’t be back till our boys put a stop to this air-raid nonsense, I shouldn’t think. And it’s Oxfordshire they’ve gone. They’ve got a place there that used to belong to her family—the lady’s. Very pretty, so they say. But I should miss London meself. I couldn’t abide all that fresh air and no decent shops.”
“Where in Oxfordshire?” Ted asked.
“Oh, I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” And then, as if suddenly annoyed with herself for allowing the chatterbox side of her nature to get the better of her, the woman hoisted her basket on to her hip. “ If you want to get on, my lad, you’ll learn not to ask so many questions,” she told him and she marched off along the street.
Dismayed, Ted watched her go. There was a hollow emptiness beginning to deepen inside him. He was not going to see Rebecca after all. He had come all this way for nothing. There was absolutely no chance of him finding the address of the country house. No, there was only one thing left to do—return home and try and glean some more information from Marjorie.
Taking one last look at the grand house, he walked slowly back along the street. Beneath his feet, the leaves that had already fallen from the trees rustled, and they seemed an ominous portent of the winter that lay ahead. He kicked at them, in helpless impatience, and wondered what to do. He might as well go back to Paddington and take an early train home, he thought. Yet still he hesitated, reluctant to leave the city where there was always the chance that he might still discover some clue as to Rebecca’s whereabouts. As yet he was at a loss to know what he could do, but he had not planned to go home until the last train, and he had even considered taking lodgings and staying until the following day, Sunday. Perhaps if he did that, some inspiration would come to him. He was grasping at straws, he knew, but his optimism was beginning to surface once more.
He turned out of Windsor Square and walked along aimlessly. The thought of losing his way did not occur to him, and he took no notice of where he was going until he found himself standing and staring at a large building behind an impressive forecourt, with armed sentries at the gates.
Buckingham Palace, he thought, recognizing it at once from the newspaper photographs he had seen, and a small stirring of patriotic pride swelled in him. Mam would like to be here now, that was for sure. She’d followed all the news about the Royals for as long as he could remember.
He stood for a moment, taking it all in so that he could relay it to her when he got home again. Then, his spirits lifted a little, and with a sense of adventure he walked on, down the tree-lined Mall, beside the park where uniformed nannies pushed their charges in impressively large baby carriages.
At the end of the broad, straight walk, he passed beneath a stone archway, and before he knew it he stood looking at a square where fountains bubbled and the proud figure of Nelson surveyed London from his lofty plinth.
Ted crossed the road and walked towards the fountains, his anxiety for Rebecca temporarily forgotten in the feeling of pleasure and surprise. This was a far cry from Hillsbridge, he thought, and deep inside an emotion stirred that was partly a thirst for the new and exciting and partly a wonder that he, Ted Hall, should be here in the heart of London.
For a while he stood there, watching the omnibuses and the taxi-cabs, the horse-drawn carriages and the bicycles that revolved around him, and time seemed to take on a new dimension. Then he walked around the Square himself, inspecting the buildings and the roads that led off, and wondering which one to explore next. For Ted suddenly had no intention of leaving without first extracting every new experience that offered itself.
An orange-seller was sitting on the steps of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and Ted stopped and purchased a piece of fruit from her. But as he bit into the orange, Ted remembered that he had only eaten a piece of bread and dripping that Charlotte had packed up all day. Suddenly he was starving. He looked around him, immediately becoming aware of the tempting aroma of food that wafted from the open doors and windows of the public houses that punctuated the Strand.
In the doorway of one, a child was sitting, dress pulled down over her knees, grubby face upturned to watch him pass.
“Evenin”, mister.” Her voice was pert, her eyes bright, and in spite of her grimy appearance and tangled hair, she reminded him of Amy as she had been five or six years ago. “ Spare a copper then, mister?”
“Haven’t you got a home to go to?” he asked.
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “I’m waitin’ for me Mam.”
“Where is she then?”
“Oh, in the pub, I think. Or she might be wiv a man …”
Ted took a coin from his pocket and tossed it to the child, and although she snatched at it greedily there was something so mischievous in her manner that he was forced to smile. He didn’t agree with women leaving their children on pub doorsteps while they drank away the money they should have spent on food, but there was nothing he could do about it, and this waif was a likeable little madam.
Putting her out of his mind, he went into the saloon bar and in the smoky, noisy atmosphere, he enjoyed a hearty meal of steak, kidney and oyster pudding, washed down with a pint of good strong beer.
It was as he scraped the last of the thick delicious gravy on to his knife that the murmur began to run around the bar, swelling until it was loud enough to drown all other conversation.
“The Zeps are coming, they say. That geyser over there was going by Marconi House when somebody came out and said so. Yeah, they’re on their way, the swine.”
Ted put down his knife and fork, and a shiver ran up his spine, not of fear, but of excitement. The Zeps coming—and he was here in the thick of it!
Remembering what the Cockney lady had said about an air-raid being a show well worth watching, he pushed back his chair and got to his feet.
The other customers in the bar seemed curiously unmoved at the prospect of a raid. They talked about it, then filled their glasses and went on drinking. As Ted left, he noticed that the child he had likened to Amy was still sitting on the doorstep, but now she was fast asleep, her head folded down into her pinafore, her knees splayed defencelessly. He took another coin from his pocket and tossed it into her lap. She did not stir, but he pictured her face when she awoke and found it there, and smiled to himself.
Outside, darkness had fallen. While he had been eating, dusk had turned to inky blackness, and as the lamps had been lit up and down the Strand, so the shutters had been put up, blotting out the shafts of brightness that would make a target for a Zeppelin.
Ted began walking, although he did not know in which direction he headed, and it was not long before he heard the first distant throb of engines in the sky. Slowly, remorselessly, they grew closer, filling the night with deep, rhythmic sound. Ted stopped to listen, taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one from a carefully shielded match. But before he could draw the smoke into his lungs, the quiet of the night erupted around him. Anti-aircraft fire crackled across the sky, sharp as the snapping of a twig under-foot, but a hundred times louder. The air vibrated with the throb of engines, and then, cutting across the other sounds came a mournful whine, screaming towards a high-pitched crescendo. Ted had never heard anything like it before, but he knew what it was. A bomb! And not far away—overhead, almost!
He stood, riveted by horror and fascination, as the whine grew louder and more piercing, and the bomb sliced through the air. Strangely detached, as if he was watching a picture at the Palace Picture House, Ted waited for the explosion, but when it came, a heavy, muffled thud that spread and grew into rippling echoes, it was close—much closer than he had dreamed it would be. The pavemen
t trembled beneath his feet, the buildings around him shook, and Ted felt the first stirring of alarm.
He turned, wondering where he could run for shelter, but before he could move, the whining sound came again, closer and more penetrating even than the throbbing of the Zeppelin’s engines. It was another bomb—and almost directly above him!
For one surprised second, he thought, as he had thought when the tub had dragged him down the incline: I’m going to die! Then the instinct of self-preservation galvanized his paralysed limbs into action and he hurled himself along the street away from the direction of the first explosion and away from the whining crescendo.
The second bomb hit the ground with a deafening sound, the impact flinging him against the wall of a building. For a moment he lay, dazed, yet oddly certain he was unhurt. His ears felt muffled as if they had been stuffed with cotton wool. But then, as his hearing cleared, he heard the sounds of pandemonium, the crash of falling masonry, the tinkle of raining glass, the screams, the cries; the distant thud of more bombs falling. Beside him, a man’s voice asked, “Are you all right, mate?” He raised his head and shoulders from the pavement, turning his heavy, numbed body with difficulty.
“Yes, I’m all right,” he said, but his voice seemed to come from a long way off, and his head had begun to ache with a dull, insistent thudding.
Feeling like a drunk, he struggled to his feet. Then, as he turned round, a feeling of utter horror swamped him. The pub where he had eaten had gone! There was nothing left of it but a pile of smoking rubble!
“Good God!” he said under his breath. And in the same shocked moment he thought of the little girl. She had been in the doorway —she could be buried alive.
As he tried to walk, one of his legs gave way. It was numb, and the other one was throbbing and sore. But he hardly noticed. Like a man possessed, he picked his way across the carpet of glittering glass.
There were arms and legs sticking out of the rubble, but Ted thought only of the child. He found what had been the doorway, and miraculously part of it was still standing, and the child was still there. In the midst of all the destruction, she looked almost untouched by the blast. Perhaps the doorpost had saved her from the worst of the blast, Ted thought, and she was only stunned as he had been. He bent over and picked her up gently. Her head lolled awkwardly against his shoulder, and he looked around, wondering what to do with her.
“Up to the Lyceum, anybody that’s hurt,” a man shouted to him. “It’s the only place left standing.”
Ted had never heard of the Lyceum, but he followed him along the street, stumbling over the rubble. There was a pool of light spilling brazenly on to the glittering pavements further along, and when they reached it, he realized it was a theatre. Or was supposed to be. Just now, it was more like a battleground, with the injured lying moaning and bleeding on billboards, and people screaming and crying as they looked for their missing relatives and friends.
Ted staggered in with the child, half-blinded by the sudden blaze of light. He walked up to the man who seemed to be issuing instructions.
“Help her, for God’s sake. She’s only a nipper!” he pleaded.
The man looked down at her, turning her face out of Ted’s shoulder and taking her limp wrist between his fingers. Then his face darkened, and he dropped her hand again.
“She’s dead,” he said shortly.
“No! She can’t be!” Ted argued foolishly.
He looked down at her again. Her face was unmarked, except for a small cut on the temple, and she looked more childish and innocent than she had when she was asking him for money. But it was true. She was dead all right. Here, in the brightly lit foyer, there was no mistaking it.
A sudden wave of nausea enveloped him. Gently he laid her down on the floor and stood looking down at her. She was so young, so young, and there had been something so infectious about her—cheeky, irrepressible, bubbling with life although she must have spent too many nights waiting outside pubs for her drunken whore of a mother. And now one bomb dropped by a Zep had snuffed all that out like a candle.
“The murdering bloody swine!” Ted muttered.
“Hey, mate, you’d better sit down.”
To Ted it seemed that the voice came from a long way off. Around him, the brightly lit foyer became a jumble of jarring sounds and disembodied faces—a magic lantern show with each facet reflecting a different, fragmented part of the whole.
Without knowing how he got there, Ted found himself lying on a bed of coats. The throbbing of his leg had increased, and when he glanced down he was surprised to see scarlet flesh beneath torn cloth.
“My best bloody suit!” he muttered foolishly.
Then the foyer seemed to go away from him, and darkness closed in from the edges of his consciousness.
FOR TWO WEEKS Ted was in hospital in London. His legs had been cut by shrapnel and flying glass, and he was suffering from delayed shock. But it was all they could do to keep him there. As he lay immobile, day after day, anger and frustration grew in him, and Jack, who came to London to visit him when the news of what happened was telegraphed to Hillsbridge, was shocked at the change in him.
“He’s so bitter,” he said to Charlotte when he got home. “As if he was suddenly all full of hate. And he kept going on and on about a little girl who was killed, as if he couldn’t get her off his mind.”
That just about summed it up. Ted’s anger had centred around the two main incidents of that day when the bomb had fallen on the Strand—losing Rebecca, and the death of the unknown child. Alfred Church and the Hun seemed like one and the same—The Enemy. And Rebecca and the child—both were helpless victims.
But what could he do about it?
After all his reasoning, the answer came in a flash. He would leave the pits and enlist, and it would be a way of killing two birds with one stone.
On the one hand he would be building a future for Rebecca and himself. He would be out of the mines and the life of bondage to which they sentenced men—and their wives. And when it was all over, there would surely be employers only too willing to give a chance to young men who had done their bit for king and country.
And at the same time he would be able to help avenge the deaths of the beggar child and the seventeen others who had been killed by that one bomb in the Strand. Seeing the war at first hand had made more impression on him than all the talk in the local pub in Hillsbridge, and he was so angry at the brutal waste that, next to finding Rebecca, he was determined to seek his revenge on the faceless Hun.
Fate was a strange thing, he thought. If the bomb had dropped ten minutes earlier, he would have been in the pub bar, and he would probably have died over the remains of his steak, kidney and oyster pudding. But he had not died. He was alive. And he was young and strong, and when his legs were healed, he’d be fit too.
And so, two weeks later, when he climbed out of the train at Bath, he went off to find a recruiting office and enlist with the Somersets. Perhaps he was no closer to finding Rebecca, but he believed, fervently, it was the best thing he could do.
Chapter Sixteen
Ted was not the only Hillsbridge boy to enlist that October. When he came home and the news spread along the rank, Redvers Brixey decided to do the same.
Mrs Brixey was as distraught as Charlotte.
“I’d go and fight the Kaiser myself if I thought I could keep him out of it!” she said.
But the boys had signed on, and that was it. Within a matter of days, they had left for Salisbury Plain, the camp where Fred had done his training, and there were two more empty places at the dinner tables in the rank.
“I can’t get used to having to do so few vegetables,” Charlotte said to James one morning as she peeled potatoes in the scullery. “I keep filling the saucepan up and then remembering it’s only you and me and Harry to eat them.”
“Well, I shan’t want many, anyway,” James told her.
November had arrived, dank and chill, with cold, gusting winds and rain t
hat washed rivers of coal-dust along the gutters. James had been obliged to stay off work for over a week now due to a bad chest cold.
Charlotte cast a quick, worried glance in his direction. He wasn’t eating as well as he used to, hadn’t for weeks now, but she supposed that was hardly to be wondered at.
She knew that, as well as being ill, he also missed the boys. He didn’t say much, that wasn’t his way, but they’d been with him in the pits for so long now it was bound to be strange without them. There was still Jim, of course, but he was a getter in his own right, and more often than not was working in a different seam. And when he’d finished his day’s shift, he was always in a hurry to get home to Sarah and the children.
“It was all over that girl, you know,” she suddenly said to James, as if stating a new fact. “From the first time I saw them together, I knew no good would come of it.”
James nodded, saying nothing, and she went on. “ He took it too serious, that’s the trouble. Now if only he could be a bit more like our Dolly …”
Dolly had another boyfriend, a nephew of Cook’s, who was in the Marines and had come to visit her while home on leave. But although he had been all for getting engaged before he went back to the war, Dolly had refused to be tied down.
“Amy said he begged and begged her,” Charlotte said. “ But you know our Dolly. She won’t be hurried. And I think she learned her lesson over that Evan Comer business, though she’s still got him on her mind, I know. She saw him in town the other day, on his crutches, and it quite upset her.”
“That girl will go all around the orchard and finish up picking a crab-apple,” James said sagely. “ Just see if I’m not right.”
“Crab-apple—that reminds me!” Charlotte carried the pot of potatoes into the kitchen and set it down on the hob. “ I promised Amy I’d get her some new ribbons to go on her petticoat.”