Free Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans Page A

a tiny, clean bolt of lightning that zipped through her skull. She smiled for the first time that day, recorked the bottle, switched off the light and lay down on the bed again.
    She dreamed of Red Indians. They were dancing in a circle on the lawn, chanting menacingly and waving their tomahawks, while Pamela sat on the back wall and swung her legs in a provocative manner. Edith herself was carrying a tray of cups, and wondering how to explain to the visitors that Mrs Bailey had imposed a household limit of no more than two spoonfuls of tea per pot, regardless of the number of takers. And then she was awake, and the war-chant was still audible, a low-pitched chorus, sinister and uneven, emanating not from the garden but from the sky above. The siren came late, as if triggered by her own fumbling realization, and in its wake came Mrs Bailey, rushing up the stairs and throwing open the door.
    â€˜They’re coming, they’re coming,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve switched off the gas’ and then she was gone again and Edith was groping for her slippers, and all the time the swoop of the siren continued, and beneath it the stammering throb of the engines. And she couldn’t believe (her mind still bleared with sleep), she simply couldn’t believe that after a year of waiting, of endless false alerts, of lectures and leaflets and fortnightly air-raid drills at work, of month after month of dreary preparation and dire warnings during which the frightening and the immediate had gradually flattened into the mundane, that now, today, really, actually now , the bombers were here. She sat up and smoothed her hair. She put on her dressing-gown, and tied the belt into a bow, and then re-tied it so that the tasselled ends were exactly the same length. She straightened the bedclothes and took a further second or two to remove a loose thread from the rug, and yet another to tip the dressing-table mirror forward so that the frame wasn’t touching the wall; and then a great whistling roar outside drowned even the siren, and the stomach-shaking crash that followed was a starting-gun that propelled her through the door. And what if I die, she thought, running down the stairs, across the hall, through the kitchen, what if today is my last day on earth? What if I have only a minute left to live, half a minute, ten seconds? For a moment she seemed to see the pilot’s viewpoint, a vast patchwork of lawn and tile and tarmacadam, splashed with the pink and blue of hydrangeas, the flapping white of drying sheets and the scarlet of her own dressing-gown as she ran out of the back door and across the grass towards the shelter, newly built, its roof a curl of shining metal. And then there was a tearing noise, as if the sky had been ripped in two and the air seemed to slide sideways and drop away like a cut necklace and she was lying on her face in the flowerbed, clinging to the ground as the wind dragged at her, while behind her a giant sledgehammer laid waste to a wall.
    And then the buffeting eased and stopped, and she released her grip.
    Her hands were full of broken stems, the palms lightly scored with cuts. Her mouth was stuffed with earth, and, kneeling, she hawked and spat on the lawn, and wiped mud from her lips. The sky above was empty, faintly traced with vapour, but from the Raleighs’ garden, three doors down, a plume of dust was rising, and there was no roof on their house, and no wall on the first floor so that the Raleighs’ bathroom was shamelessly displayed, a used towel abandoned on the lino, the wallpaper blotched with damp, while in the next room a pink-quilted double bed protruded over the broken floorboards like a vulgar tongue. The house beside it was windowless and oddly bowed, as if sagging at the knees, and the next along had coughed its back door clear across the garden, while a severed pipe burped water through the gap. Edith wiped her mouth again and looked at Mrs Sumpter’s house. For