The Safest Place in London (2 page)

A bucket of sand resided permanently on the doorstep of number 42 for use in case of a fire, though nowadays it was so full of cigarette ends its use as a fire retardant was questionable. Nancy sidestepped it, fumbling in the darkness to locate the
mains tap to turn off the water just as the anti-aircraft gun in Victoria Park started up, abruptly drowning out the siren.

Behind her, Emily let out a horrified gasp and turned to push her way back inside the house, ramming her tiny body against the locked door.

‘Em! What you playing at?'

Nancy shot out a hand to grab her and Emily struggled to free herself, twisting and squirming and lashing out a foot that struck her mother in the shin. For the briefest moment Nancy imagined herself patient, sympathetic, loving. That was the kind of mother she wanted to be, the kind of mother she imagined her own mother had been. But the reality of it, motherhood during an air raid, was somehow quite different.

‘We ain't got time for this!' And she smartly slapped the back of Emily's legs.

‘
My blanket!
' Emily wailed, and in the moonlight her face was white and stricken.

Cursing, Nancy unlocked the door and ran back into the house. After a brief but frantic search she located the filthy scrap of scratchy brown blanket that Emily had not slept with since she was a baby but that now, inexplicably, she would not be parted with, and returned with it to her distraught child.

‘Next time we go without it. Next time I go without
you
!'

Emily rammed the piece of blanket to her cheek, a fierce look on her face, and made no reply.

But at last they were ready and Nancy grabbed her child's hand. ‘Come on,' she said, swinging their arms as though as they were going down the shops because she felt guilty about the slap. ‘Herr Hitler wants to bomb us but he won't catch us, will he?'

‘Mum, he might,' Emily replied, for she was a realistic sort of child. And she was still smarting about the slap and the near disaster with the blanket.

And in this vein they set off at a grim pace down Odessa Street in the blackout, trying to remember where the worst of the debris and craters and potholes were. Nancy had a torch but the blackout shield she was obliged to cover it with meant she could see almost to the end of her toes but no further. The few remaining residents of Odessa Street could occasionally be seen, shadowy figures overladen with belongings and children, dodging the craters and the debris of a house that had been bombed the night before. The Auxiliary Fire Service and the salvage crews and decontamination squads still worked to contain the damage and the air was thick with smoke that rose in vast plumes hundreds of feet into the night sky. Earlier in the day they had been ankle deep in water from all the fire hoses and a family of ducks had sailed down the street, oblivious to the chaos all around.

Their pace quickened as they reached the destroyed house but once past they slowed.

‘Mummy, what about our tea?' said Emily, who had been preoccupied and silent for a time.

‘It'll get cold.'

‘Will somebody steal it?'

‘They might. And if they don't, well then we'll have it for our breakfast.'

Emily considered this. ‘I hope no one steals it.'

‘So do I,' said her mother, and thus finding something they could agree on they hurried on their way in silence.

The anti-aircraft gun had stopped and around them the street itself now fell silent as though the last building in London had collapsed. A single searchlight silently swept across the night sky and mother and daughter paused to gaze about them. As the searchlight moved to another part of the sky and the street fell into darkness once more, Nancy took a firmer hold of her child's hand and set off again, not wishing to linger. There were other sorts of people out after blackout as well as air-raid wardens and salvage crews. As she thought this she saw a solitary figure on the other side of the street—unmistakably a man—standing perfectly still as though there was no raid, as though he was watching them. Nancy swung her torch so that it was pointing directly at him and the figure merged into the shadows, as silently and swiftly as a rat, and was gone. Yet the sense that he had been watching them—watching her—persisted. The distant droning of enemy aircraft sounded on the wind and a moment later the AA gun burst into life again. Their pace quickened as they hurried beneath the arches of the disused railway and turned the corner, and soon they could see the entrance to the tube station ahead. The shriek of a falling explosive sounded in another street and was followed by a muffled thud. This was the signal to abandon any pretence of not running. Nancy felt her heart crashing against her ribs. She could be quite calm, she had discovered, scrambling over bomb debris in her own street, but when the station was in sight, when she could see the flight of steps disappearing underground and they had begun to think about being safe but they were not quite safe yet, that was when it was hard to breathe, that was when her heart crashed painfully. It only lasted a minute, maybe two, and no one else needed to
know. Emily did not need to know—or perhaps Emily did know; perhaps Emily always knew when her mother was frightened.

They passed the Salmon and Ball public house, closed and shuttered up in the darkness, and there was a stream of people all around now, pushing and slipping in icy sludge that was already turning to frost. No one spoke. A large woman wrapped in a dirty grey blanket blocked their way and to stop the panic that was bubbling up inside her Nancy squeezed Emily's hand. ‘Not far now,' she said. ‘Nearly there.' But her words were lost in the drone of aircraft above and the ack-ack-ack of the AA gun followed by another explosion somewhere off to the west, Shoreditch perhaps, or the City.

Emily pulled urgently on her hand, impatient with the shuffling old woman, but there was nothing to be done about it. The station entrance was a bottleneck, made worse because Bethnal Green had never been an operational station, was still under construction at the start of the war, unfinished and never opened, the tracks not laid yet, the escalators not functioning. The crowd surged forward and they plunged down the short flight of steps. Nancy propelled Emily through the turnstiles and onto the escalator.

The escalator was very long and very steep, reaching down into the depths of the station, offering safety if you concentrated and kept your footing, a horrible death by suffocation in a crush if you did not. Nancy reached out, feeling with the toe of her foot in the dimly lit cavern for the edge of the next step.

Once they were down and inside the station they would be safe.

CHAPTER TWO

A short distance away another mother and daughter were hurrying towards the same shelter.

Mrs Diana Meadows of The Larches, Milton Crescent, Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire had got on the wrong bus. She had thought they were heading west. Instead their bus, in the blackout and displaying no route number, had carried them east, and by the time they had realised it they were halfway to Shoreditch. They had swept up their belongings and leaped from the bus and now found themselves on an unknown street in the disorientating confusion of the blackout with no possibility of getting home that night.

Then the air-raid siren had gone off.

Diana Meadows let out a little gasp of dismay. The eerie wail of the siren—a sound utterly unknown in the pleasant and leafy environs of Buckinghamshire—shattered the darkness and filled her with terror. She could not move. Let it be a false alarm, she prayed. All around her people had begun to emerge out of the
dark. Faceless and fleeting, they passed and were gone, like ghosts, but she could not move. She could not join them.

She was thirty-nine years old and she wore a tweed coat from Liberty that had beaver at the collar and cuffs. It was prewar, of course, but everything was—everything of quality anyhow. She had had her hair set at the hairdresser in Amersham only the day before and the stiff new curls sat unwillingly beneath the smart little hat she had placed on her head on leaving the house. She had powdered her nose. She had studied her profile in the hallway mirror, and had registered with a disappointment that had become habit a small, almost snub nose and a chin a little too long, lips a little too thin, eyes a colour that could never quite be pinned down. An English face, plain and serviceable, but never beautiful. But her hair was set. And her hat was smart. Her gloves too—slender and fawn-coloured and fastened with little buttons at the wrist. But no one who passed her on this dark street wore gloves. No one wore smart little hats. Her coat—a tweed coat from Liberty—had become invisible. Or she had become invisible inside it.

Why could she not move?

‘
Mummy!
'

Beside her, three-and-a-half-year-old Abigail stared up at her wide-eyed, clutching Teddy tightly in both hands and in her distress—though only dimly comprehending their predicament—holding him upside down. The child was a facsimile of her mother (the flat little nose, the funny little chin, the thin little lips, the pale features and the dark hair), though when Diana looked at her child she saw only Gerald—the sticking-out ears, the thick dark brows, the unshakable belief in right over wrong—and saw nothing of herself, and was glad.

‘
MUMMY!
'

Let it be a false alarm. Frozen, Diana clutched Abigail's hand, clutched Teddy's paw. No one paused to help them. No one seemed to notice them. One woman swore at them when they did not move out of her way. And the darkness, it seethed and thickened about them, its tentacles slithering deep inside Diana's clothes and she remembered as a child being so afraid of the dark that she had screamed in terror night after night.

The all-clear did not sound.

But she was not helpless. She may be alone and a long way from home and a little frightened but she was at least as good as these shapeless and faceless figures who pushed past her without a thought. And she had her daughter to protect. Diana grabbed the arm of a passing man and demanded in a voice that served her well at the tennis matches she had adjudicated at her local club: ‘Please tell me where the nearest shelter is. We are lost. We went to a pantomime and we got on the wrong bus and—'

She made herself stop. The man did not need to know they had been to a pantomime yet the urge to explain their presence in what was, one must assume, London's East End was paramount. She knew she could not possibly blend in and nor, quite frankly, would she wish to.

‘The station—go to the tube station!' the man shouted as he pulled his arm free.

Of course: the tube station. That was where people in London sheltered.

‘Thank you so much—' But he was gone. ‘We shall go and shelter in the tube station,' Diana said to Abigail. ‘You'll like that, won't you, darling? It will be a grand adventure.'

They set off at once and it was a relief to be moving swiftly, if not at a run—no one else was running—then certainly at a brisk pace. Abigail, who was flagging even before the adventure had begun, made heavy weather of it, and Diana had to half drag, half carry her.

But now Abigail stopped, jerking her mother to a halt too.

‘Mummy, we
didn't
go to a pantomime.'

Diana could only dimly make out her child's form in the blackout, her face was quite invisible, but her voice was full of indignant consternation and it seemed extraordinary to Diana that this was what Abigail was pondering as they hurried together through the strange and frightening darkness.

‘Don't be silly, Abigail. We must hurry. Oh, do come
on
!'

And though she clearly did not think this a satisfactory reply to her observation, Abigail allowed herself to be led onwards. They passed shops, boarded up or derelict, and row after row of bombed-out terraces, gaping black holes in the black night. But ahead the busy street on which they found themselves reached a junction with a much larger thoroughfare. They passed beneath an archway beside a pub that was shuttered and dark, and on the corner was, unmistakably, the entrance to a tube station. They saw the comforting red and blue and white of the Underground sign and the stream of people disappearing into its depths. Which tube station it was hardly seemed to matter: Whitechapel, Shoreditch (
was
there a station at Shoreditch?) . . . Stepney, perhaps?

‘Here we are—almost safe now!' Diana shouted above the rising noise of the siren, for they had made it, the two of them; in this hostile environment, they had triumphed!

But Abigail promptly sat down and refused to move. At this display of defeatism when they were so close to their salvation, Diana felt a moment of despair. She kneeled down, and pleaded with her child to get up, but Abigail closed her eyes and shook her head resolutely. ‘Teddy doesn't want to go down there!'

From where Diana was standing Teddy looked extremely keen indeed to get down into the safety of the tube station, but sadly he was in no position to say so. ‘Very well, then. I'm going to leave you both here on your own to fend for yourselves.'

At this, Abigail scrambled to her feet and flung herself at her mother's legs. This hampered their progress, especially as Diana was carrying her best handbag and a small travelling case containing sundry other items she had thought it necessary to bring with them on this day trip into London, along with some that she had procured during the course of the day, but they were at least moving in the right direction and, once they joined the flow, the sheer mass of urgent and frightened people behind swept them along so that really all one had to do was to keep on one's feet and not trip.

In this manner they were carried down a short flight of steps and across a concourse, they squeezed through the open turnstiles (one did feel a little conspicuous not purchasing a ticket, even under such unusual circumstances) and found themselves at the top of the escalator.

The crush of people was suddenly much denser as they were funnelled onto the stationary escalator and Diana grasped the handrail with one hand and her child's hand in a fierce grip with the other, not caring at this moment if she hurt her, concerned only with keeping both eyes on the lip of the stairwell just ahead.
An old woman wrapped in a grubby blanket blocked their way. Another woman, much younger with a determined expression and a small child in tow, grabbed the old woman's arm and practically pushed her down the escalator. But now the crush of bodies behind them intensified and almost at once Diana lost her grip on the handrail and was swept away down the escalator, her feet barely touching the ground, and she scooped Abigail into her arms in the nick of time.