Free The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardam Page B

“Oh, I couldn’t. They’d never forgive me. I hate quarrels,” and shut the door.
    He followed the whiteness of the woman and her child up the hill until the houses stopped and darkness spread before them like the sea. They stepped into it and came to a door with a sloping back standing all by itself like a cupboard on the grass, and inside a steep cement stair disappearing into the earth. On the stair the smell of earth and grass gave way to the smell of urine. At the foot of the steps they batted against a blast curtain and a double brick passage, and inside were row upon row of people sitting quietly, one or two reading, one or two busy with a rosary, many sleeping for they’d been here for hours to get a good place.
    Mac was greeted, space was made, the child was taken and embraced. The bed rolls were spread.
    â€œStay here,” said Mac to Jim Smith. “Soon you will be warm. Here, take her,” and she lifted the child into his arms. Her hair was sweet and clean and soft, and she leaned against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
    â€œHere,” said the goddess again and passed him a flask with brandy in it. Then she drank some herself. “The raid will be a long one tonight.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI know.”
    It grew quiet. Only a few grunts and mumblings from the sleepers. “Listen,” she said and, even so, very far below he heard the heavy, steady drone of planes.
    â€œI’m cold,” said the child and the three lay down close together. The droning went on and on, a sickening lulling. Then, far, far above along the elected flight path the bombs began to fall—and fall—upon the suburban streets, along the railway, along the bending river, upon the palaces and slums and churches and hospitals and prisons of the city. Even down here, buried beneath the coarse green grass, the muffled juddering shook the humped and mostly brave backs of the people waiting.
    â€œLie here with us,” said Mac and drew the boy close to her with her child, and in the end, long, long after, morning came.
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    But there was no morning for those at Hilly Mead.
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THE MILLY MING

I hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Mrs. Stott (we talked like this then: it was the sixties, in the suburbs and Mrs. Stott was a Churches’ Parish Visitor), “but we have to make sure. This is a tricky little job. You aren’t pregnant, are you, Mrs. Ainsley?”
    â€œYou flatter me,” I said. “I’m forty-five.”
    â€œGood. And why are you volunteering?”
    â€œI heard you needed drivers.”
    â€œAnd you are a good driver?”
    â€œI am. I drove my children to school for years.”
    â€œAnd other people’s children?”
    â€œYes. It was called the School Run.”
    I was beginning to get annoyed. There had been a pencil on a string in the church porch and a notice saying “Volunteers wanted for Amelia Menzies Babies. Occasional drivers needed. Sign here.”
    Amelia Menzies had been a Victorian spinster living in a large house on the Common and looking after her father, a retired clergyman. When he died she went travelling abroad for a time and came home only to die shortly afterwards herself. She had left the house and its enormous grounds and a lot of money to set up a Home for unmarried mothers. It had been a sensational idea at the time.
    At first the girls were the ones who wanted to hide away or whose parents wanted them hidden away. They came to the Home only for the last months of their pregnancy. They were well fed and cared for, went to the local hospital for the birth, came back to the Home briefly afterwards. All was free and the Amelia Menzies Trust saw to it that they had funds to start a new life. The Amelia Menzies (we all called it the Milly Ming) was amazingly liberal. There was nothing said about penitence, only a recommendation that the girls attend church with the matron on