Free Blitz by Claire Rayner Page A

to do? The fact that Bernie had behaved disgracefully didn’t alter the fact that he was her son, and a much beloved one at that. It was inevitable that Jessie would try to protect him.
    As long as he didn’t go near Chloe again, Poppy thought and then stopped spreading fish paste to stare sightlessly ahead. Chloe was hardly her problem any more. Since her marriage and that dreadful, indeed positively disgraceful and all too public divorce, she had lived in her own flat, a very handsome if rather small place, in Bryanston Square. She was her own woman now, for good or ill. How could it be otherwise? She was thirty-two, well beyond her stepmother’s control. But for all that Poppy felt a responsibility for her. When she had married Chloe’s father, in those dark and painful days during the last war, she had taken on Chloe too, like it or not. She had been a dreadfully spoiled child and remained so, whatever Poppy had tried to do for her, and though her affair with Bernie and the miserable outcome of it had brought her a little closer to her stepmother, still she had gone her own headstrong way; and Poppy sighed and bent her head again to her sandwiches.
    Maybe it wouldn’t all start up again, she told herself then, trying to be optimistic. Chloe’s no longer the silly girl she had been a dozen or so years ago. What with her job at the War Office (what was it? wondered Poppy – something vaguely secretarial was all she knew, and that it seemed to give her an amazing amount of free time) and her special friends there, she had become a decidedly snobbish young woman. She went out and about only with senior officers, and rarely deigned to gobelow the rank of major, though she would sometimes be seen with a captain. Lieutenants were certainly of no interest unless they happened also to be rich in their own right, or titled (and there had been one or two of those, Poppy remembered) so perhaps she would scorn a civilian like Bernie, even if he did try to make contact. Poppy cheered up then even more as another thought bubbled up; because he hadn’t attempted to do so yet and he’d been back from America for two years, maybe that boded well?
    The sirens began their closer clamour then, and she lifted her head and waited fearfully and then almost at once the other noise began; the roar of guns from the ack-ack batteries that had been set up well to the north, in Hackney’s Victoria Park, and which were loud even at this distance. She sometimes doubted that they did any good; she had never heard of a plane being brought down by one of them around here, but it was like the searchlight that sprang up as the planes came over. They made people on the ground feel that at least someone somewhere was trying to fight back. The worst thing about the raids was the feeling of being so utterly helpless, crouching in shelters like terrified rabbits in burrows, while the Germans overhead sat there like scornful winged demons, raining down death and horror.
    Heavens, she thought, I must be low to be thinking such morbid thoughts, and pulled back her shoulders and took a few deep breaths to restore her to her usual state of common sense. The aspirin had started to have an effect so that her knee just throbbed heavily now, but her mood had lifted a little; and it was just as well it had. There were more crumps as bombs fell somewhere fairly near and then she heard the shriek of the bells as the fire engines came thudding through the streets overhead.
    They’ll start coming in soon, she thought, the walking casualties and the people caught outside the shelters and the workers and drivers – and she sighed, and checked that both the urns were full and bubbling and that she had the milk ready in the cups. Preparation, she always told her staff, was the key to fast service, and she had to be sure not to forget it herself, now she was working on her own. And for one brief moment she even regretted the absence of the egregious Mrs Crighton.
    But