here?” Sister Carmody asked, draping a wool blanket around his shoulders and another one over his knees. “It’s dreadfully cold.”
“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, but she still hesitated.
“I don’t know. If you were to catch cold—”
“I won’t. I’ll be fine.” Go.
She went, after extracting a promise that he would “ring for Matron” if he felt the slightest chill, and he scrawled in the crossword answers he’d worked out the night before—4 across: divebomber, 28 down: cathedral, 31 across: escape—pushed the blankets aside, listened a moment to make sure she wasn’t coming back, and started his circuit.
Bookcase, window—his foot had stiffened up over the last three days. He had to force himself to put his weight on it. Clock, potted palm, high-backed chair.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” a voice said from the depths of the chair. “I thought you were supposed to keep your weight off that foot, Davis.”
There are no civilians.
—ENGLISHWOMAN, ON BEING ASKED ABOUT CIVILIAN MORALE IN LONDON DURING THE BLITZ
London—September 1940
EILEEN REFUSED TO TAKE ALF BACK INTO THE HOUSE TO use the loo. “They’re dropping bombs out there,” she said. “You’ll simply have to wait till it’s over.” And when he predictably declared he couldn’t, she felt about in the water under the bunks to see if the Anderson shelter was provided with a chamber pot.
It was, but Alf refused to use it. “In front of you ’n’ Binnie?” he said, at which point Binnie said she had to go, too, and Theodore said, his teeth chattering, that he was cold. Eileen was shivering, too, and her wet feet felt like ice.
I was wrong, she thought. We won’t be blown to bits, we’ll freeze to death, and as soon as there was a lull in the bombing, darted back into the house with the children. She took the torch, but they didn’t need it. The garden was bright from the fires around them. Even inside the house there was more than enough light to find their way.
How could Polly have wanted to observe this? Eileen wondered, rummaging for blankets and attempting to hurry the children along. “The bombers will be back soon,” she said, hustling them down the stairs, but the planes were already here. A bomb whistled down, shaking the house, as they hurried through the kitchen to the back door.
“I’m scared,” Theodore said.
So am I, Eileen thought, handing the blankets to Binnie and scooping Theodore up and running with him to the Anderson and into the shock of the icy water. “Binnie, hold the blankets up so they don’t get wet—where’s Alf?”
“Outside.”
Eileen dumped Theodore on the upper bunk and ran back outside. Alf was standing in the middle of the grass, gazing up at the red sky. “What are you doing?” she shouted over the drone of the bombers.
“Tryin’ to see what sort of planes they are,” he said, and there was a shuddering boom up the street and a flickering red glow. “A fire!” he shouted and started to run toward it.
Eileen grabbed him by the shirttail, shoved him through the door, and yanked it shut as another thunderous boom shook the shelter. “That’s it,” she said. “Now go to sleep,” and amazingly, they did.
But not before Binnie complained about her blanket being scratchy and Alf argued, “It’s a spotter’s job to find out whether they’re Dorniers or Stukas.” But once they were wrapped in the dry blankets, they—and Eileen—slept till another siren went.
This one had an even, high-pitched tone which she was afraid signaled a poison gas attack. She shook Binnie awake to ask her. “That’s the all clear,” Binnie said. “Don’t you know nuthin’?” and there was a loud, reverberating knock on the door.
“I’ll wager it’s the warden, come to arrest you now the raid’s over,” Alf said, emerging from his blanket. “I told you you ain’t s’posed to shine a torch in the blackout.”
But it wasn’t a warden. It was Theodore’s mother, overjoyed to see Theodore and oblivious to the water, though when they’d all trooped back inside, she insisted Eileen take off her wet stockings and put on a pair of her own slippers. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for bringing my dear boy all this way to me,” she said, making Horlick’s for all of them. “Do you live in London, then?”
Eileen told her her cousin had just come to London to work in an Oxford Street department store. “But she didn’t say which one. I wrote to ask her, but her answer hadn’t arrived when we