Free The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel Page A

and squatted down at the bottom of the bomb craters of London.’
     

    Rescue party at work, autumn 1940
     
    When Macaulay joined the workers at this particular incident, a rescue party was hacking away, trying to free the people trapped inside. Everyone was coughing, and people cried out from under the ruins, calling for help. The street was flooded with water where a main had burst. ‘Dust,’ Macaulay wrote in the Time and Tide report, ‘liquefies into slimy mud.’ Meanwhile the bombing went on noisily around her.
     
    Jerry zooms and drones about the sky, still pitching them down with long whistling whooshs and thundering crashes, while the guns bark like great dogs at his heels. The moonless sky, lanced with long, sliding, crossing shafts, is a-flare with golden oranges that pitch and burst and are lost among the stars.
     
    There was nothing Macaulay could do except to wait for the rescue workers to complete the excavation, hoping all the while that no new bomb would fall on the site. The men were busy sawing, hacking, drilling and heaving. She stood by, encouraging the people inside, assuring them that they would be out soon, although she had no idea if this was true or not. Here was her own burying phobia played out, and she was glad to be on her side of the rubble. The cry of ‘My baby. Oh, my poor baby. Oh, my baby. Get us out!’ was heard from underneath the ruins, and Macaulay passed milk to the baby and water to the mother. ‘All right, my dear. We’ll be with you in ten minutes now,’ the rescue workers called out at regular intervals throughout the night as they worked on, carefully dislodging one bit of rubble from another. But it was clear to Macaulay how much they still had to shift before they would reach the baby, who might well not make it through the night. The atmosphere remained convivial, despite the danger. Macaulay was impressed by the rescue workers who were, she reported to her sister the next day, ‘very nice and matey. I like their way of calling every one (including the ambulance women) “mate”.’
    The planes continued to drone over their heads. There was a crash as a bomb landed, a few streets away, which made Macaulay and the rescue workers duck their heads involuntarily. The air glowed with new flames. The next bomb could easily wipe them out. One of the workers swore up at the planes and then, alerted by his friend as to the presence of a lady, apologised to Macaulay. ‘Sorry Miss, excuse my language.’ She assured him that she felt the same way herself. Eventually, the first human form emerged from the ruins. It was a seventy-four-year-old woman, ‘gay and loquacious’. She was followed, half an hour later, by her married daughter, who had a grey, smeared, bruised face and vomited into the surrounding dust. ‘Oh my back, my legs, my head. Oh, dear God, my children.’ The woman was reluctant to leave her children and drive away in Macaulay’s ambulance. Macaulay promised her that they would be out soon as well. In fact, they turned out to be dead, their bodies crushed and maimed by the rubble. Two boys of eleven and twelve, two babies of three and one. ‘If only,’ the woman moaned, ‘they didn’t suffer much . . .’
    London was free of enemy aircraft by 4 a.m. but fifteen bomber planes returned an hour later, flying in from Dungeness. Then as dawn approached, the final bombers departed. Now the rescue party left, to be replaced by the next crew. ‘Only,’ Macaulay observed, ‘inside the ruins the personnel remains the same.’ It would be ten the next morning before the mother and baby were at last freed from the debris, though thankfully the baby was still alive. Now Macaulay stood on the pavement with a rescue worker, who was drinking a cup of cocoa provided by the mobile canteen. ‘It’s like this every night now,’ he observed. ‘This and fires. How long will people stick it? Where’ll it all end?’
    Macaulay helped her patients onto stretchers. The