Free The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel Page A

if he was still angry, if he was still violent. Perhaps he would sleep in the kitchen, perhaps he would pack his things and leave and she would find him gone in the morning—
    He came into their room, got into their bed and lay there, breathing loudly and quickly as though he had been running. The minutes stretched out between them interminably, a kind of torture, the two of them lying side by side in the bed, and she could not think what to say and she could not touch him. Eventually he turned to her, still angry, still wishing to hurt her, she could sense it in him, but instead he flung aside the bedclothes and her nightgown and they did it, right then and there, as loud and angry and frenzied as two animals.
    And that—that was the moment! She knew it now, nearly three months later. Another baby, made in war, but this one was a baby created in a moment of utter, complete and angry harmony.
    She wanted this baby.

    It was quiet now, surely long after midnight. The Rosenthals’ baby had fallen into an exhausted sleep, his tiny fist curled tightly around Emily’s thumb, and Emily, having concluded her nursery rhyme, sat quite still though her eyes blinked sleepily and her head lolled, aware that the slightest movement would wake him, as though there wasn’t an air raid going on above them.
    Eventually Billy returned, his face stern with concentration as he stepped carefully, stern with the seriousness of the task he had been set, though his life was one such task after another.
    Nancy handed back the baby. ‘He was good as gold,’ she whispered, as though whispering in an air raid made any sense.
    ‘Mum says fanks.’ And Billy was gone.
    Beside her Emily stirred restlessly, a hunger in her eyes thatwas only partly due to lack of food. ‘Mummy, we could keep the baby.’
    ‘It ain’t our baby.’
    ‘But if we took him then we could keep him.’
    She had not told Emily about the new baby. She knew she should, should prepare her, but she had not. Some part of her wanted to keep the secret all to herself.
    A yard or two away sat the posh woman, still awake, clutching her child and her belongings and rocking back and forth, murmuring to herself or to her child, a curious, terrified expression on her face. Everyone else slept. Someone should sit and talk with her, thought Nancy, for the woman was clearly frightened, clearly alone. But Joe had left that morning and the pain of his departure was too fresh. She did not think she could talk to a stranger when the memory of his leaving was so new, so keen. She preferred to keep it to herself, to nurse it until it dulled.
    As she thought this her eye was caught by a man up on the platform, a stocky figure, dishevelled and hatless and wearing civilian clothes, who was making his way across the sleeping bodies, picking his way, searching each face, and a shadow crept over her when she ought to have cried with joy, for Nancy had seen that it was Joe.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The world had gone mad. And it was her own government, it was red tape and regulations that had brought Diana to her knees.
    The increasingly stringent, increasingly petty regulations issued by the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Food, the Home Office in relentless and successive waves were every bit as terrifying, in their way, as the waves of Messerschmitts that nightly flew over London. It was simply not possible to keep up with them. Something that had been perfectly legal in peacetime, that had been perfectly legal last week , was now illegal, was punishable by fine or imprisonment, was reported in the newspaper to the open-mouthed glee of family members and neighbours and to the utter, undying shame of the poor, horrified, often unwitting defendant. Why, in Chalfont St Giles, no less (!), a young mother had been had up in front of the magistrate for turning on a light in a room before closing the blackout curtains! That was it—that was her crime. Her defence—that her baby had been crying—had been thrown