Jimmy couldn’t help smiling at his father’s coy term. ‘Yes, Dad. A lady friend.’
‘Someone special?’
‘Very.’
‘You’ll have to bring her home one of these days.’ His father’s eyes held a hint of their old cleverness and mischief and Jimmy ached suddenly for how things used to be, back when he was the child and his dad did the looking after. He was immediately ashamed, he was twenty-two now for Christ’s sake, and far too old to be longing for childish things. His shame was only increased when his father smiled, eager but uncertain, and said, ‘Bring your young lady home one evening, Jimmy? Let your mother and me see she’s good enough for our boy.’
Jimmy leaned to kiss his father on the head. He didn’t bother explaining about his mother any more, that she was gone, that she’d left the pair of them over a decade ago to be with a new fellow with a smart car and a big house. To what end? It made the old man happy to think she’d just popped out to stand in line for rationed groceries, and who was Jimmy to remind him how things really were? Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse. ‘You take care now, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lock the door after me but Mrs Hamblin next door has the key and she’ll help you down to the shelter when the raids start.’
‘Never know, Jimmy. Six o’clock already and still no sign of Jerry. He might’ve given himself a night off.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. There’s a moon out there like a robber’s lantern. Mrs Hamblin will come for you all right, soon as the alert sounds.’
His father was playing with the edge of Finchie’s cage.
‘All right, Dad?’
‘Yes, yes. All right, Jimmy. You have a good time now and stop worrying so much. Your old man’s not going anywhere. Didn’t get me in the last lot, ain’t going to get me in this.’
Jimmy smiled and swallowed the lump that was always in his throat these days, of love balled together with a sadness he couldn’t articulate, a sadness that was about so much more than just his ailing father. ‘That’s the way, Dad. Now you enjoy your tea and have a good listen to the wireless, I’ll be back be-fore you know it.’
Dolly was hurrying through a moonlit street in Bayswater. There’d been a bomb two nights ago, an art gallery with an attic full of paints and varnishes and an absentee landlord who’d made no provisions, and the place was still in disarray: bricks and charred pieces of wood, dislodged doors and windows, mountains of broken glass everywhere. Dolly had seen the fire burning from where she liked to sit sometimes on the roof of number 7, a great blaze in the distance, fierce and spectacular flames sending plumes of smoke into the lit-up sky.
She pointed her shaded torch at the ground, skirted around a sandbag, almost lost her heel in a blast hole, and had to hide from an over- zealous warden when he blew his whistle and told her she ought to be a sensible girl and get herself inside—couldn’t she see there was a bomber’s moon on the rise?
In the beginning Dolly had been afraid of the bombs like everybody else, but lately she found she rather liked being out in the Blitz. Jimmy, when she mentioned it to him, had been worried that after what happened to her family she was looking to be hit herself, but it wasn’t that at all. There was just something utterly invigorating about it and Dolly experienced a curious lightness of heart, a feeling very like elation, as she scurried along the night-time streets. She wouldn’t have been anywhere but London; this was life, this Blitz, nothing like it had ever happened before, and likely it never would again. No, Dolly wasn’t one bit frightened any more, not of being hit by the bombers—it was difficult to explain, but somehow she just knew it wasn’t her fate.
To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling. Dolly was aglow, and she wasn’t alone either; a special atmosphere had gripped the city and it sometimes felt that everybody in London was in love. Tonight, though, it was something above and beyond the usual excitement that had her hurrying through the rubble. Strictly speaking, she needn’t have been racing at all—she’d left in good time, having