Homing (23 page)

“That’s enough,” said Dinah, rising again. “They really must come down here.”

Gregson, the butler, veteran of the old war, worked at a
First-Aid
Post around the corner. His elderly wife and the parlourmaid insisted they felt most comfortable in the kitchen during a raid, where with their feet on the fender and knitting in their hands and a pot of tea alongside, they kept each other company in the best of humours till the All Clear came. Tonight Dinah went up and exercised her authority. Mrs. Gregson and Foster the
parlourmaid
descended to the shelter, bringing their knitting and a fresh pot of tea, and soon four pairs of needles were clicking
companionably
while the gramophone played Gilbert and Sullivan with impromptu twentieth-century off-stage effects.

At intervals during the night they groped up to the street door and looked out, marvelling that the fire seemed to come no nearer though it burned higher and brighter as dawn broke, and the air was full of ash and fumes. Their warden caught them there and admonished them, and said the Fire Service was a marvel, and he thought they had tried for Waterloo Bridge, but nothing had landed in this sector so far.

“Can’t tell it from daybreak,” he said, ruefully staring
city-wards
. “What’s left, I wonder? What’s down there? Well, this is the way we thought it would be. He’s a bit late starting, but,” he concluded with the cheerful cockneyism, “we can’t complain!”

Fleet Street, where Bracken was—and the Temple, where Nigel lived—what was left, down there….

The All Clear went before five, and the sun rose on a smoky, stolid city which nevertheless still stood, except for dreadful pockets of disaster. Near the river there were areas of
smouldering
ruin, and groups of dazed, homeless people who carried in their hands all they had left. There were the dead and injured.
And there were exhausted, blackened, singed, and undefeated fire-fighters, wardens, rescue squads, and the white-faced,
self-controlled
ambulance girls, their dark blue sweaters and slacks grey with ash and plaster, their hands scraped and gritty, from crawling about trying to reach something which still moved.

The sun was well up when Bracken returned home. Having found a willing taxi man he had checked up on Evadne and Mona on his way. Both had hailed his arrival jauntily, with drawn, determined smiles. Mona had had the worst of it this time, while Evadne’s sector nearby was without incidents. Stephen, she was thankful to say, was out on tour with a concert party, and had had a lively time in Liverpool a few nights previously, although he maintained he had been much worse scared on first nights.

Bracken was black as a fireman himself, and his grey suit was pocked with little brown holes where cinders had fallen, and smudged dark with mud from around a firehose, and on top of that streaked with white plaster dust. Tired as he was, there was a kind of exhilaration about him.

“He can’t do it,” he said, drinking cup after cup of tea in the dining room before he went up to bathe and change. “He threw down everything he had tonight, for hours on end, and these people are not stampeded. It’s the same everywhere you go—in the shelters, in the rest centres, in the Services—these people will not give in.”

“But if it goes on and on like
this
—” said Sylvia.

“They’ll sit out worse,” said Bracken with conviction. “I’ve always said so—and now I’m surer than ever. I saw an old lady out sweeping up glass in the street this morning—I thought she’d come unhinged for sure—and she explained that horses came that way every day and the glass would be bad for their feet! Some of the glass had come out of her own windows. I saw women carrying jugs of water and mugs of tea out to the firemen around the target fires, and standing by
joking
while they drank it. I helped pull a girl-child out of a cave-in and she wouldn’t budge even for First Aid till we dug out her mother—dead. I talked to some bombed-out people in a queue waiting for a bus to take them somewhere—they had no idea where. Nobody was having hysterics. Nobody had any idea of asking for mercy. ‘This won’t do him any good,’ they said. I tell you Hitler is licked!” said Bracken, thumping the table. “It may take a while, but London can do it!”

He went away to take a bath. He said Jeff was travelling by car, and would have the sense to stay the other side of the river till things cooled off. He said not to worry, Jeff would turn up.

Which Jeff did, about eight o’clock, when the sirens had just let off again. He was much cleaner than Bracken, but showed the effects of a sleepless night which he had spent with Denis Arnold and another American correspondent between a ditch and a hilltop beyond Gravesend, trying to count the planes as they streamed towards London—picking out the sound of
i
nterceptors,
and the chatter of machine guns and ack-ack, and the thunder of bombs as they landed—watching the flames and the fireworks as they mounted the sky over London, and the occasional fiery comet of a falling plane or barrage balloon.

Within sight of the unexpected holocaust, they had got very cold and frightened, Jeff said, waiting for daylight on the roads. Common sense told them that the petroleum tanks on the docks had caught—imagination insisted that they would find the whole of London a burnt-out shell.

In the clear, sunny dawn of that Sunday morning they had driven back through the East End, past the fires which still burned, and the homeless, and the rescue workers. Gradually they perceived that London was still there. Incredulously they beheld the calm, untouched dome of St. Paul’s. And the bridges, all intact. And the Tower. And Fleet Street. And Trafalgar Square. And with a solemn elation they had become convinced that London would always be there.

“But you
know
a fire always looks worse than it is,” said Bracken, the old-timer, to Jeff, who had been weaned, they said, on printer’s ink.

“Sure I know,” said Jeff. “That’s so we can look forward to hell.”

That Saturday had begun early at Farthingale, with a lone German plane crashing in a field near the house. In the
remarkably
short time before the Home Guard arrived on the scene the pilot had extricated himself and was found lying a few feet clear of the wreckage, cursing in German and bleeding freely.

They pulled him further from a possible explosion and were at once relieved of any obligation to probe the remnants for other survivors by the whole thing bursting into flames. His sidearms
were confiscated, First Aid was applied and he was half carried to the terrace at Farthingale, while the local policeman took over from Captain Westley of the Home Guard and telephoned for the local ambulance.

While they awaited it the pilot sat, surrounded by his captors, with his back against the balustrade and his knees drawn up, sullen, silent, and obviously suffering.

“We oughtn’t to stare at him,” Virginia murmured to Mab as they went out through the french doors to the terrace. “Perhaps you should bring him inside and let him lie down?” she suggested to the policeman, who said better not move him again, thanks, which was doubtless more wise than callous.

The man raised his head to look at them, seeming still incredulous that this thing had happened to him. Then he looked carefully around him, as though memorizing his
surroundings
—and back to the woman and the girl. He appeared puzzled and somehow disgusted. It did not occur to any of them that what most occupied his thoughts was the total absence of excitement or confusion. These people had not been at all
panic-stricken
by his arrival, and now that he was at their mercy they were not angry or threatening. He understood that an ambulance was coming for him. Where was the terror? Where was the revenge? Did they not know that their cities were in ruins? Another thing they did not know was that his navigator, who could still walk though his right shoulder was smashed, had gained the shelter of the hedgerow before anyone reached the scene of the crash.

The ambulance came. He was helped on to a stretcher and driven away. That girl, he was thinking with nothing but indignation—on her face there was only pity. No fear.

The German plane burnt itself out, and the cows in the field soon forgot about it and began to graze again. People drove round to look at it, and some of them came into the house for a cup of tea and a gossip. And sometimes one of them would say, “Is this the beginning?”

It was a question which had crossed Mab’s mind too, as she was returning home from Overcreech House later that morning. Virginia believed firmly in doing everything just as usual until the Germans actually landed, and so Mab had continued to work on her backhand with instruction from the ex-games-mistress at the infant school. She had come back by bus as far as the village and then, accompanied of course by Noel the spaniel and
carrying
her racquet and wearing her tennis shoes, she had taken the footpath through the wood by the stream where she and Jeff had walked together last Christmas.

She often came here with the dog, to sit on a fallen log and think about Jeff, who always seemed very near if she stayed quiet and listened for him. And this was the most dangerous of all the Williamsburg games she played—that there existed in the little wood a certain place where she and Jeff were always together as they had been on the Christmas walk, when she had heedlessly thrown her arms around him and heard his heart beating underneath his coat. Standing where they had stood that day, she would shut her eyes and wait—and somehow it would come again, that secret inner upheaval which had happened when he said with such compassion—“Like what, my darling?”

Unconsciously today she had paused again in the path waiting for Jeff—and then Noel was barking and scuffling somewhere on the left and she turned, always dreading that he would really manage to catch a rabbit and she would have to rescue it from his jaws. As she ran towards the sound it changed abruptly to a snarling growl, and there was a thrashing in the thicket—and she saw a blur of grey-green cloth on the ground and a snarling, kicking flurry of black dog beside it. A powerful hand had Noel by the collar and was trying to choke him into silence.

For a single incredulous second Mab felt ice water in her veins, felt rooted, turned to stone. The German lay full length on the ground with the dog struggling in his grasp, but struggling less effectively, gagging and gasping, growing limp—

“Drop
him!”
cried Mab, and ran in swinging the tennis racquet. “Let my dog alone—
let
him
go!
”

The racquet bounced harmlessly once, on the strings, and she swung again with the edge of it forward—hard—and again with the edge downwards,
hard.
Noel wriggled free and scrambled away, choking, sneezing, growling, turning at once to face the enemy, groggy but game, coming in again with his teeth showing. But the man lay still on the ground, with a bleeding red welt across his forehead where the edge
of the racquet had hit. He was not unconscious. He stirred at once, and raised a hand to his head, and muttered. Mab dropped the racquet, scooped up Noel in her arms, and ran.

In a very few minutes she emerged from the wood into open ground at the edge of the field where the burnt-out plane lay,
and saw people running towards her—people who had heard a dog barking in the wood. She dropped to her knees on the ground then, still holding Noel and trying to get her breath, a stitch in her side, a pain in her chest, feeling sick, wanting to scream, wanting to cry….

The first man reached her, panting.

“What happened? What did you see?”

“He’s by the stream—he tried to kill my dog—I hit him—look out, he’s not dead—”

The man ran on, Others came up and passed her without pausing for questions, racing into the wood. She sat still on the ground while the pain in her chest receded, making sure that Noel was not damaged. He was too heavy for her to carry except in desperate necessity, and she wondered how she had got him as far as she did.

They were still sitting there, congratulating themselves, when the search party returned, leading the man in the German uniform, who still held one hand dazedly to his head while the other arm dangled uselessly at his side.

“My God, girl, you might have been killed!” cried Captain Westley, who had appeared again from somewhere and was carrying her tennis racquet in his hand. “Mean to say you sloshed him with
this
?”

“He was lying down,” she explained faintly.

More people were arriving, there were questions, exclamations, even some laughter—“He might have shot her at sight—wrong arm, very awkward for him—lying on his gun when she went for him—in bad shape to start with, lucky for her—doesn’t mean she didn’t do a job on him—dog all right, my dear?—good for him—could have been worse—”

“Come along up,” said Captain Westley hastily, raising her to her feet as though she might be made of glass. “Get you out of this now, or your grandmother will have me court-martialled.”

Walking on knees that still shook at every step, supported by his efficient grip on her upper arm, with Noel trotting confidently ahead, Mab reached the terrace at Farthingale where Virginia met them, heard the story with incredulity which became amusement, and sent for drinks all round.

He who would be known henceforth as Mab’s German was carted off to the hospital, where he informed them all in perfect English that but for the damned dog he would have been able to evade capture until the arrival of the Fuehrer, who was due
in England any day now. And when a nurse bent over him during the dressing of his wound he spat up into her face.

There were no alerts at dusk that night, and the household at Farthingale went to bed as usual, except that Mab had an eggnog with a drop of brandy in it to ward off nightmares about Germans in the wood. So now I know what happens when she encounters a German, Virginia thought, closing the door of her own room at last on the excitements of the day. She deals with it, far better than I could have done. She doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, but she was able to save her dog.