The Homecoming (26 page)
The receptionist looked at Patrick and smiled. “Take your time. We’ll be fine.”
Katherine gave Patrick a big hug. “Now don’t go anywhere with anyone until I get back. Unless it’s your dad.”
“I won’t,” Patrick promised, then gave her another hug. “Thank you so much,” he said.
She hurried out the door and got back in the cab. They drove back toward London after explaining things to the MP. Katherine said a quick prayer and tried to extinguish the frightening thoughts that kept finding their way to the surface.
I’ll just be there a few minutes.
Katherine rode back to London mostly in silence. The cab driver seemed like the quiet type, and she was glad. She looked out the window, trying to take in the scenery along the way. While she was glad to be leaving all this danger, she was sad she’d never get to tour all the beautiful places she’d read about in her books. Then she had a thought. Maybe she should contact Captain Al. He’d probably jump at the chance of spending an afternoon with her touring the English countryside. And it would be the polite thing to let him know she was heading back to the States.
Quickly, an image of Mrs. Fortini extinguished Al’s happy face. She could almost hear her. “Now, Katherine . . . is that really fair to Captain Al? Aren’t you just using him? What message would that send, you calling him for something like this?”
Mrs. Fortini was right.
“Uh, looks like a bit ’a trouble up ahead, miss,” the cabbie said. “Guess them Jerries are sending them doodlebugs further out these days.”
Katherine looked through the windshield. They were coming to the outskirts of Notting Hill. The road up ahead was closed off with fire engines and emergency trucks. Dozens of people were crowding around. A section of row homes on the right had collapsed onto the street.
“I’ll go the long way ’round, ’ave you ’ome in a jiff.” He turned left, following the slow parade of cars being detoured around the rubble and smoke. “Guess our boys can’t find them rocket bases. Sommut doesn’t ’appen soon, all ’a London’ll be a shambles. The Blitz all over again. Lost me best mate and two coozins then.”
Katherine sighed, turning in her seat to watch the scene as they passed. Those poor people. She’d walked that very block a dozen times in the last month. She felt a little guilty. She would be getting away from all this horror, leave all this fear and danger behind. A few minutes later they came to her street. There was Mrs. Cooper’s house up ahead.
“’Ere we are, miss. You need ’elp wiv anything?”
She opened the door. “No, I should just be a min—” She looked at the cabbie’s face. He’d heard it too. Several people on the street all stopped in their tracks, heads looking up toward the southeast, toward the sound.
“Be quick, miss,” the cabbie said, his face beginning to panic. He looked up through the windshield, searching.
Katherine ran up the steps to the door. It was locked. That’s right, she’d already given her key back to Mrs. Cooper. She banged on the door. The deep, buzzing sound grew louder. “Mrs. Cooper, are you in there?” Now the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park began to fire. The V-1 was definitely heading this way.
The cabbie got out of his cab, staring in the same direction as everyone on the street. “Can still ’ere it,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
No one answered. “I’ll just run around the back,” said Katherine. “She usually leaves the back door unlocked.”
The cabbie nodded, trying to look calm. He tapped his fingers on the fender. The droning sound grew louder.
It felt like the rocket was chasing Katherine down the narrow alley. She tried not to trip on a bucket and mop. Thankfully, the back door was unlocked. She raced through the dark hallway. Shawn and Patrick’s room was the first one on the left. She ran around the bed and reached under. The pouch and cross were right where Patrick had said they’d be. As she came out the back door, she jumped down the steps, barely holding the rail. Then she froze.
The rocket engine cut out.
People out front began to scream. “Oh Lord, no,” she cried.
Then silence.
She had what, maybe thirty seconds? Should she go back in the house? Should she hide in the alley? Seconds ticked away. She decided she’d never make it to the street; it promised no more safety than the alley. She looked back, remembering a small, makeshift shelter Mrs. Cooper had dug out in her tiny backyard during the Blitz. Nothing more than a shallow hole with a corrugated metal sheet for a roof. But it was something.
Katherine turned around and ran back toward it. The little door was blocked by some vegetable crates and old containers. Katherine frantically tossed them over her shoulder. She pulled hard at the door. She heard someone in the street yell, “God help us!”
A noise louder than anything she’d ever heard.
Someone or something tackling her from behind.
Her face in the wet mud and darkness.
Rock crunching metal.
She could hardly breathe.
Darkness.
“She did what?” Shawn asked.
“She went back to the apartment, just for a minute she said, to get something for your son.” The receptionist sat up straight in her chair, obviously taken aback by Shawn’s angry attitude.
“It’s my fault,” said Patrick, getting up from his chair. “I forgot Grandpa’s tool pouch . . . and something else.”
Shawn walked to the front door of the reception area, looked out toward the guard gate, then down at his watch.
“She should be back in thirty or forty minutes,” the receptionist said, looking at the clock on the wall.
Just then another officer, a lieutenant, stepped into the room. He noticed Shawn’s son standing by the front desk. “Is that Patrick, Major?”
Shawn nodded. “It is, Lieutenant.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Why?”
“Just heard a radio report. Two V-1s just detonated in the Notting Hill area, about an hour apart. That’s where he was staying, isn’t it?”
A look of horror flashed across the receptionist’s face. Shawn walked over to Patrick and drew him near, covering his ears with the palms of his hands.
Oh God
, he prayed.
Please no, not Katherine.
“What’s the matter?” asked the lieutenant.
Shawn had the receptionist call Mrs. Cooper’s number three times, letting it ring forever each time. But there was no answer.
He’d left Patrick with the receptionist, offering him some hasty excuse. He could tell Patrick was upset as he fled out the door of Wycombe Abbey, but there was no time to comfort him. He’d quickly grabbed a car from the car pool, refused the help of a driver, and took off. The MPs at the gate offered no resistance when he told them what had happened. He raced down the old London Road in the direction of Notting Hill.
He made the thirty-minute ride in twenty. The longest twenty minutes of his life. Twice he’d almost been run off the road, forgetting for a moment which side of the street he should be on.
Even from five blocks away, he could see the smoke rising from the area surrounding Mrs. Cooper’s flat. As he came within two blocks, the scene was chaos and confusion. Fire trucks and Red Cross vehicles were parked at odd angles all over the street. The air was filled with voices, mostly orders being shouted and cries of grief or pain. Dozens of MPs and police tried to restrain the crowds. A fire raged through a collapsed pub, the apartment above it now in chunks and pieces on the street. Two old men carried the limp body of a small boy, no older than Patrick, toward an ambulance. A middle-aged woman, her hair and face covered with soot and dust, sat on the curb, staring into a puddle.
“Yer gonna ’afta keep movin’, officer,” a man with a pie-pan hat yelled to Shawn. “We need to keep the streets clear.”
Shawn turned left with the traffic, which had slowed to a crawl. Forget this, he thought and pulled over. He grabbed the keys and hopped out of the car. He began to run and jump over the debris in the direction of Mrs. Cooper’s street. There was so much damage, the area was almost unrecognizable. All the while, he kept repeating as he coughed,
Please let her
be okay, please let her be alive
.
He carefully stepped over a small hill of bricks, stones, and broken furniture, then through a doorway, which somehow had been left untouched. As he came out onto a clear section of sidewalk, he looked left up a slight hill that led up the street and instantly got his bearings. There on the right were four familiar row homes completely intact, followed by three others completely demolished.
That could only mean one thing . . . directly across the street from the destroyed homes he saw an empty space where Mrs. Cooper’s apartment had stood. The home next to it, across the small alley, was also gone. He ran as carefully as he could. There, parked just outside, he recognized the cabbie’s car, completely buried under rubble and debris. Sticking out from a pile of stones on what used to be the sidewalk were the pants and shoes of a man’s leg.
“Katherine!” he yelled, then rushed to the scene. The emergency workers hadn’t made it this far back. A handful of neighbors who’d survived the attack—people he recognized but never got to know—were slowly removing rocks and stones and calling out loved ones’ names. “Can somebody help me?” he yelled. “Katherine!”
A few people looked his way, but no one responded, their faces blank stares. He kept yelling out her name as he tossed stone after stone over his shoulder, but she didn’t reply. He yanked a piece of torn upholstery out from under a large wooden beam. It was part of the chair he’d just sat in a few nights before, listening to the radio.
“Katherine!” he yelled. “Can you hear me?”
No answer. “Oh God, this can’t be happening.”
“I’ll ’elp you, mister.” Shawn looked down into the face of pre-teen boy. “My flat got spared, the least I can do.”
Together they worked over the next two hours, rummaging through the tattered mess that had once been such a cozy little home. At some point, they had been joined by a middle-aged man. Shawn’s heart sank lower with every new section they uncovered. No sign of Katherine. So far they had only been able to get down through the first few feet of debris. He hadn’t seen a speck of floor or carpet.
Finally, they made their way to the back wall of the apartment, which had collapsed outward onto Mrs. Cooper’s backyard. It was all twisted and torn. Shawn saw traces of wallpaper attached to pieces of plaster and stone. He felt so hopeless. Katherine had to be in here somewhere, but if she was, how could she have survived? What would he do now? How could he tell Patrick?
“So who’s this Katherine, mate?” the middle-aged man asked. “The lady you keep callin’. She your wife?”
“No,” Shawn said. But he immediately felt the same hollow ache inside that he’d felt for Elizabeth. A pain that had just recently begun to subside. Now it seemed he must start grieving all over again.
Why, God? What point could this
possibly serve?
He picked up one half of a large beam lying across a big piece of corrugated metal. “She was my son’s nanny.”
“Hey, look there,” the man said. “That a foot? There beside it, a lady’s shoe, I think.”
Shawn shoved the beam behind him and looked down. He instantly recognized the shoe. “Katherine!” he yelled. “Help me. That’s her.”
The man rushed over and helped him lift the biggest objects off the piece of scrap metal. In a few minutes they’d cleared most of it away. “Katherine!” he yelled again. “Can you hear me?” Shawn recognized the metal now. It was the little roof of that Anderson shelter Mrs. Cooper had put in her backyard. He reached down and felt Katherine’s leg.
It was warm.
“She’s alive!” Shawn shouted. “I think she’s alive.”
The man ducked down. “Looks like a little cave in there, just a foot or two, but it might ’ave been just enough.”
The boy came over just as they got the last few bricks off the metal roof. “Let’s lift it very carefully,” said Shawn. “Don’t want the sides to fall in on her.”
“Don’t cut yourself,” the man said to the boy. “Use yer sleeve as a glove.”
Together they lifted the roof.
There was Katherine, half-buried in a mixture of mud, brick, and dry goods. Shawn jumped down and pulled her up. He felt her pulse. It was weak, but it was there. He brushed the wet dirt that covered her face and cradled her in his arms. “Katherine,” he said. “Katherine, it’s me, Shawn.”
He heard her moan. He stroked her hair and forehead. “Katherine, can you hear me?”
Her eyelids fluttered, then she opened her eyes halfway.
Tears formed in Shawn’s eyes. “Thank you, God,” he said under his breath. “Katherine, it’s me, Shawn. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Shawn?” she said faintly, almost seeing him. Then her eyes closed.
“Katherine?” Shawn shouted. He patted her face gently. She didn’t respond. She seemed to be slipping away. He patted her face again, a little harder. “Katherine, we can’t lose you now . . . I can’t lose you.” He felt her pulse then sighed with relief; it actually seemed a little stronger than before.
“It’s that nasty bump on ’er ’ead,” the man said. “Seen this before, call it a concussion. Medics said it’s best to keep ’em awake if we can.”
Shawn tried waking her again. Her eyes fluttered a few times but wouldn’t open. He picked her up to carry her toward the street. “Katherine, I’ve got you, you’re going to be okay. I’ve got to get her to an ambulance.”
“Saw some round the block on my way ’ere,” the boy said. “I’ll show you.”
“Thanks,” Shawn said. He looked down and saw his father’s leather pouch and the cross Patrick had carved for him lying in the mud. “Could you grab that pouch and cross for me, and put them in my pocket?” The boy nodded. Shawn turned to the older man. “I can never thank you enough for your help. I don’t even know your name.”
“Not important. You’d do the same fer me,” he said. “Now go help yer lady there, lad.” As Shawn hurried off, he heard the man mutter to himself, “Seems a bit more than a nanny to ’im, you ask me.”
September 30, 1944
Philadelphia area
(9 weeks later)