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

a moment she thought it untouched, and then she registered the slight shift in angle of the guttering, the hunched look of the roof gable, the strange clarity of rooms seen through empty frames. There was silence, utter silence inside her head, and then, one by one the sounds slid back – a tile skittering down the roof, the splatter of water from next door, dogs barking, a man shouting hysterically, a fire-engine bell, the bombers – the bombers still somewhere overhead, and then her own name being called, over and over again. Quite calmly, she stood up and walked round to the entrance to the Anderson shelter.
    They sat, knee to knee, in the near-darkness, a crack of light framing the ill-fitting door, and there were four more explosions, each further away than the last, and the gradual diminution of engine noise, and a long, inexplicable wait before the sounding of ‘Raiders Passed’. And, by then the conversation had become a sealed loop, rotating endlessly.
    â€˜Dear God,’ Mrs Sumpter would say. ‘Who’d have thought the Zeppelins would come again in my lifetime? Who’d have thought it?’
    Then Pamela – ‘They’re not Zeppelins, they’re aeroplanes’ – at which point Mrs Bailey would let out a low moan and take Pamela’s hand. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to you, I shouldn’t have let you come back home, I should have left you with the Collins sisters in Leighton Buzzard where you were safe,’ and Pamela would wrench her hand away and mutter, ‘I wasn’t staying with those old witches for anything, I’d rather stay in London and die. Anyway, it smelled of cat’s piddle.’
    â€˜You’re going back.’
    â€˜I’m not.’
    â€˜Is the house much damaged, dear?’ – Mrs Sumpter to Edith.
    â€˜No.’
    Mrs Bailey: ‘It must be. She’s shocked, you can see she’s not all there, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’ll be flattened, I know it will.’
    â€˜Dear God,’ (Mrs Sumpter). ‘Who’d have thought the Zeppelins would come again in my lifetime . . .’
    Round and round – aeroplanes, Leighton Buzzard, witches, cats, shock, Zeppelins, no not Zeppelins. And Edith sitting on a plank raised on loose blocks, because the shelter was too new to take any drilling, her hand-sewn felt slippers drinking up the damp from the earth floor. And inside her head, exhilaration, the most extraordinary exhilaration, her skull awash with light, her thoughts exultant, flying, singing with triumph. A bomb had lifted her up and cast her down and here she was without a scratch and nothing now could touch her. She was shaking with the thrill of it, she was skimming the ground with such speed that she might leave a trail of stars, and the climbing note of the All-Clear lifted her still higher, so that once again she was looking down at the gardens and roofs of west Wimbledon and watching as three women and a girl emerged into the white light of a cloudy August day.
    Mrs Sumpter staggered, and Mrs Bailey took her arm and screamed at Pamela who had run ahead to the back door, so that in the end it was Edith who entered through the crooked frame, and picked her way across a floor covered with glass and smashed plates – Edith who was still hovering, still somewhere beyond herself, able to watch dispassionately as the figure in the dressing-gown crossed the hall and passed the front door with its empty oval where, instead of a red glass ship on a blue glass ocean, a stretch of pavement was visible, and a gaggle of sight-starers, gaping at the damage. Then up the stairs, the ruined slippers leaving a trail of imprints in the dust, and under the section of plaster that swung from the ceiling like a flag, and over to the door that looked intact but which wouldn’t open, twist the handle as she might. It was the shove that did it, the unladylike shoulder