Bombs on Aunt Dainty (8 page)

Mama, too, seemed almost afraid to open it, but finally ripped at it so clumsily that a corner of the letter tore off with the envelope. Then she read it and burst into tears.

Papa took it from her and he and Anna read it together.

It was from the editor of the paper. He said that his paper had long protested against the government’s policy which had caused some of the most brilliant and dedicated anti-Nazis to be put into internment camps. He had been much moved by Mama’s and Papa’s letter and had passed it on to the Home Secretary who had promised to look into Max’s case himself, immediately.

“Does that mean they’ll release him?” asked Anna.

“Yes,” said Papa. “Yes, it does.”

They sat in the cramped breakfast room and looked at each other. Suddenly everything was different. There had been bombs in the night, a new air-raid warning had already sounded, the headline in the morning paper said “Invasion Barges Massing In Channel Ports” – but none of it mattered because Max was going to be released.

At last Papa said slowly, “The English really are extraordinary. Here they are, threatened with invasion at any moment, and yet the Home Secretary can find time to right an injustice to an unknown boy who wasn’t even born here.”

Mama blew her nose.

“But of course,” she said, “Max is a very remarkable boy!”

Max arrived home about a week later, unannounced, in the middle of an air raid. It was in the late afternoon. Mama was not yet back from work, Papa had walked to Russell Square to meet her, and Anna had just washed her hair in the bathroom at the end of the passage. She came back to her room with a towel wrapped round her head, and there he was standing in the corridor.

“Max!” she cried and was about to throw her arms round him, but then she stopped, in case he might not like it, in case it was too sudden.

“Hullo, little man,” said Max. It was a nickname he had had for her since they were both quite small. “I’m glad to see you’re keeping clean.”

“Oh, Max,” cried Anna, throwing her arms around him after all, “you haven’t changed!”

“What did you think?” said Max. “That I’d be hard and embittered? Never smile again? I don’t change.” He followed her into her room. “But I learn from experience,” he said. “And I’m going to make sure that nothing like the last four months ever happens to me again.”

“How can you?” asked Anna.

Max moved some clothes off the only chair and sat down. “I’m going to teach for a year,” he said. “Old Chetwin wants me to, and I owe it him after all he tried to do. Then I’m going into the Forces.”

“But Max,” said Anna, “do they take Germans in the British Forces?”

Max’s mouth tightened. “We’ll see,” he said.

Then the door flew open and there was Mama, with Papa behind her.

“Max!” she cried, and at the same time there was a thud and a rumble and Max looked startled and said, “Was that a bomb?”

“Yes,” said Anna apologetically, “but it was a long way off.”

“Good God,” said Max, and as Mama rushed to embrace him he added reproachfully, “Really, Mama – so this is what you’ve brought me back to!”

At supper they drank a bottle of wine that someone had given Papa months before and which he had kept specially. It did not taste quite right – perhaps, said Papa, the bottom of the clothes cupboard had not been the best place to store it – but they drank to Max, to Mr Chetwin and to the Home Secretary, and at the end of it all Anna felt pleasantly muzzy.

Mama could hardly take her eyes off Max. She heaped his plate with food and hung on his every word, but he did not talk much. Mostly he was worried about Otto who, he said, would be lost without him and who was thinking of
going on a transport to Canada. “His professor is going,” he said, “but what’s he going to do in Canada? And anyway, the last transport that went got sunk by a U-boat.”

The All Clear had sounded shortly after Max’s arrival, but there was another air-raid warning a little while later and the sound of planes and distant bombs continued throughout the evening. After dark it got worse rather than better and Mama said, “I don’t know what they’re up to,” quite crossly to Max, like a hostess whose arrangements for the evening had broken down.

“Is there anything to see?” asked Max. “I’ll just take a look.” And in spite of Mama’s and Papa’s warnings about shrapnel, he and Anna edged aside the heavy black-out material round the door and went out into the street.

It was not dark at all outside and the sky was bright pink, so that for a moment Anna thought stupidly that she had made a mistake about the time. Then there was a whistling, tearing sound and a crash as a bomb fell, not so very far away, and a man in a tin hat shouted at them “Get inside!”

“Where’s the fire?” asked Max.

Of course, thought Anna, it must be a fire, that was why the sky was so bright.

The man backed against a wall as another bomb came down, but farther away. “In the docks,” he said. “And Jerry’s dropping everything and the kitchen sink into it. Now stop messing about and get in!” And he pushed them back into the hotel.

Max looked bemused. “Is it always like this?” he asked.

“No,” said Anna. “This is the worst we’ve had.” She thought of the pink sky and added, “It must be a very big fire.”

By bedtime there was no sign of the raid abating and Frau Gruber, the manageress, said that anyone who wished could sleep in the lounge. She bustled about with rugs, and everyone helped to move the tables so as to make more room, and soon the lounge looked like a camp. There were people curled up with pillows in the brown leatherette chairs and people stretched out on blankets on the floor. Some had changed into pyjamas and dressing gowns, but others had kept on their ordinary clothes and covered themselves with their coats, in case a bomb dropped and they might suddenly have to rush out into the street. The author of the book on the nature of humour wore striped pyjamas, a tweed jacket and his hat.

When everyone was more or less settled, Frau Gruber appeared in her dressing gown with cups and a jug of cocoa on a tray, as though they were having some kind of dormitory feast. At last the lights were put out, all except one small one in a corner, and Frau Gruber who had become astonishingly cheerful as a result of all this activity, said, “I hope you all have a very good night,” which Anna thought funny in the circumstances.

She was lying on the floor with her head under one of the tables, next to Max – Mama and Papa were in two chairs the other side of the lounge – and as soon as the
room darkened, the thumps and bangs outside became impossible to ignore. She could hear the sound of the planes, a quivering hum like having a mosquito in the room with you only many octaves lower, and every so often the thud of a bomb. The bombs were mostly some distance away, but even so the explosions were quite loud. Some people, she knew, could tell the difference between German planes and British ones, but they all sounded the same to her. They all sounded German.

All round her she could sense people moving and whispering – no one was finding it easy to go to sleep.

“Max?” she said very quietly.

He turned towards her, wide awake. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Are you?”

He nodded.

Suddenly she remembered how, when she was quite small and frightened of thunderstorms, Max had kept her heart up by pretending that they were caused by God having indigestion.

“Do you remember …” she said, and Max said, “Yes, I was just thinking – God’s indigestion. He’s really got himself upset this time.”

She laughed and then they both stopped talking to listen to the buzzing of a plane, as it seemed right above their heads.

“To think I could be peacefully in bed on the Isle of Man with Otto reading Wodehouse,” said Max.

The sound of the plane grew fainter, then louder again – 
it must be circling, thought Anna – and finally faded away in the distance.

“Max,” she said, “was it very bad in the camp?”

“No,” said Max. “Not once we’d got settled. I mean, nobody was beastly or anything like that. The thing that got me was simply the fact of being there at all. I didn’t belong there.”

Anna wondered where she belonged. Here, in the hotel, among the other refugees? Probably as much as anywhere, she thought.

“You see,” said Max, “I know it sounds arrogant to say so, but I know I belong in this country. I’ve known it ever since my first year at school – a feeling of everything being suddenly absolutely right. And it wasn’t only me. Other people like George and Bill thought so too.”

“Yes,” said Anna.

“All I want,” said Max, “is just to be allowed to do the same things as everyone else. Do you know, there were some people in the camp who thought they were lucky to be there because it was safe. Well, I’m not a particularly warlike person and God knows I don’t want to be killed – but I’d a thousand times rather be in the Army with George or in the Air Force with Bill. I’m sick to death of always having to be different!”

There was a crash, closer than the rest, which shook the building and as Anna felt the floor move a little beneath her the word “bombardment” came into her mind. I’m in a bombardment, she thought. I’m lying on the floor of the
Hotel Continental in my pink pyjamas in the middle of a bombardment.

“Max,” she said, “are you frightened?”

“Not really,” he said.

“Nor me.”

“I suppose,” said Max, “it’s a relief just for once to have the same worries as everyone else!”

The raid lasted all through the night. Anna slept fitfully, lulled to sleep by the drone of the planes and startled awake again by distant thuds and crashes, until the All Clear went at half-past five in the morning and Frau Gruber, who seemed to see this new development in Hitler’s air warfare as a personal challenge, appeared with cups of tea. She had pulled the blackout curtains aside and Anna saw, somehow to her surprise, that Bedford Terrace looked just as usual. The street was empty and the shabby houses stood silent under the pale sky, as though it had been a night like any other. While she watched, a door opened opposite and a woman dressed in trousers and a pyjama top appeared. She looked up searchingly at the sky, as Anna had done before. Then she yawned, stretched and went back inside to go back to bed or to start cooking breakfast.

Max was anxious to get off to his new job as soon as possible. He had managed with difficulty to get through to Euston Station on the telephone, and had been told that due to enemy action there would be long delays on all lines. So
Anna and Mama said goodbye to him as he packed his suitcase, with Papa sitting on the bed to keep him company, and went to work as usual.

It was a beautiful clear morning and as Anna walked through the back streets to Tottenham Court Road she was again amazed at how ordinary everything looked. Only there were more cars and taxis about than usual, often with luggage piled high on roof-racks – more people leaving London. While she was waiting to cross a road, a man just opening up his greengrocer’s shop smiled at her and called out, “Noisy last night!” and she answered, “Yes,” and smiled back.

She hurried past the back of the British Museum – this was the dullest part of her daily journey – and turned into a more interesting street with shops. There was some glass on the pavement in front of her – someone must have broken a window, she thought. And then she looked up and saw the rest of the street.

There was glass everywhere, doors hanging on their hinges, bits of rubble all over the road. And in the terrace opposite where there should have been a house there was a gap. The entire top floor had gone, and so had most of the front wall. They had subsided into a pile of bricks and stone which filled the road, and some men in overalls were shovelling them into the back of a lorry.

You could see right inside what remained of the house. It had had green wallpaper and the bathroom had been painted yellow. You could tell it was the bathroom because,
even though most of the floor had gone, the part supporting the bath tub appeared to be suspended in space. Immediately above it was a hook with a flannel still hanging from it and a toothmug in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

“Horrible, isn’t it?” said an old man next to Anna. “Lucky there was no one in it – she’d taken the kids to her sister’s. I’d like to give that Hitler a piece of my mind!”

Then he went back to sweeping up the glass outside his shop.

Anna walked slowly down the street. The part closest to the bombed house had been cordoned off, in case any more of it fell down, and on one side of it a man and a woman were already nailing up sheets of cardboard in place of their broken windows. She was glad there had been nobody in the house when the bomb fell. One of the men shovelling rubble shouted to her to keep away and she turned down a side street.

There was only little damage here – broken windows and some dust and plaster underfoot – and, as she picked her way among the fragments of glass scattered on the pavement, she noticed how the sun sparkled on them. A little breeze blew the dust into swirls round her feet. Her legs were brown from the endless fine weather and she suddenly wanted to run and jump. How awful to feel like this, she thought, when there had been an air raid and people had been killed – but another part of her didn’t care. The sky was blue and the sun was warm on her bare arms
and there were sparrows hopping about in the gutter and cars hooting and people walking about and talking, and suddenly she could feel nothing but a huge happiness at still being alive. Those poor people who lost their house, she thought, but the thought had hardly time to emerge before it was swallowed up by her happiness.

She took a deep breath – the air smelled of brickdust and plaster – and then she ran to the end of the street and down Tottenham Court Road and all the way to the secretarial school.

After this there were air raids every night. The sirens went at dusk, to be followed a few minutes later by the drone of German bombers, and the All Clear did not go until first light. They were so regular you could almost set your watch by them.

“Mama,” Anna would say, “can I go and buy some sweets for the air raid?”

Mama would say, “All right, but be quick – they’ll be here in ten minutes.” And Anna would run through the warm, darkening streets to the sweet shop next to the tube station for two ounces of toffees which the woman in the shop would weigh out hastily, with one eye on the clock. Then she would race back to the hotel, arriving together with the first wail of the sirens.

Each night she and Mama and Papa slept in the lounge. There was plenty of room, for a lot of people had left after the first big raid, and more went every day. It was unnerving just lying there in the dark and waiting for the Germans to drop their bombs. There seemed to be nothing at all to stop them. But after a few nights the din of the raids
suddenly increased with a series of bangs, like a great drum being blown full of air and exploding, and Frau Gruber, who had become an expert overnight, at once identified this as anti-aircraft fire. It made sleep even more difficult than before, but even so, everyone rejoiced in it.

It was curious, thought Anna, how quickly one could get used to sleeping on the floor. It was really quite snug. There were plenty of blankets, and the heavy wooden shutters over the lounge windows not only muffled the noise but gave her a feeling of security. She never got enough sleep, but nor did anyone else, and this was another thing one got used to. Everywhere you went during the day there were people having little catnaps to catch up – in the parks, on the buses and tubes, in the corners of tea-shops. One girl even fell asleep over her shorthand machine at the secretarial school. When they talked to each other they would yawn hugely in the middle of a sentence and go straight on with what they were saying without even bothering to apologise.

During the third week of the raids a bomb fell in Russell Square, making a crater in the soft earth and breaking most of the windows in Bedford Terrace. Anna was asleep at the time and fortunately for her, the blast sucked everything out into the street so that the glass and the shutters (which had not been so safe after all) landed on the pavement instead of on the people in the lounge.

She leapt up from the floor, hardly awake and unable to understand what had happened. There was a curtain
fluttering round her face and she could see straight into the street where an air-raid warden was blowing his whistle. All round her people were stumbling in the darkness and asking what had happened and above it all came Mama’s voice shouting, “Anna! Are you all right?”

She shouted back, “Yes!” and then Frau Gruber arrived with a torch.

Afterwards she found to her surprise that she was trembling.

After this no one slept in the lounge any more. The man from the Council, who came to board up the gaps where the windows had been, told Frau Gruber that it was not safe and that it would be better, in future, to use the basement.

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.