recognize what she was looking at. It took her a minute to even understand where she was standing in relation to her home because in front of her were just piles upon piles of bricks and rubble.
Moving tentatively down the street, Julia stumbled over vast chunks of stone, tripping on her neighbour’s belongings. As the wind picked up, the remnants of a singed, flowery apron blew towards her and wrapped itself around her ankle, and what looked as if it had been a glossy film magazine with charcoaled pages fluttered in the wind. She continued to stride through the bomb wreckage, feeling sick as she noticed all people’s beloved belongings: a chair, a candlestick, a birdcage, a smashed vase.
Julia tried to hurry to get closer to her home, which was much further down the street, her heart in her throat. But as it came into view, she could see her house was still standing, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
However, sadly, she could see across the street that the home of the couple who had moved in not long ago was a hollowed-out wreck. Not only destroyed by the direct hit of a bomb, but it was also in the final stages of burning to the ground. Firefighters had already arrived and stood stolidly getting it under control. The air was filled with the smell of burning, smouldering wood.
As she continued to wade through the debris that was now her road, Julia noticed that all the windows in the phone box on the corner were smashed, and with a sinking heart, she saw as she approached her own home that her windows too were all gone. Blowing about in the street were many of her belongings, along with everyone else’s. As she got to what would have been her gate, there was now a pile of rubble from the house across the street. One of Maggie’s blouses had wrapped itself around the gatepost and was rippling in the wind like a flag. She spotted her own kitchen equipment, books, her mother’s tablecloth, her whole life seemed to be out here in the street. For some odd reason, maybe the shock, Julia unhooked Maggie’s blouse, even though Maggie hardly wore it any more, and held it to her chest as she tried to suppress the sob that was just hovering in her throat.
Suddenly, an awful thought struck her.
Agnes, John’s mother. She glanced at the house next door. Its windows, too, were blown out. Agnes had a real fear of the shelters and so hardly went anywhere. Surely, she would still be in there.
‘Agnes!’ Julia shouted out. ‘Agnes!’ She stepped over another remnant of what looked as if it had once been one of her neighbours’ dining tables and made her way round to Agnes’s front door. The door had been blown open with the blast, and she could get in there easily. The hallway was strewn with dust, clutter and bricks, but she was relieved to see, as she went from room to room, that Agnes wasn’t there.
Climbing over the mountain of rubble as she made her way carefully back to her own house, Julia coughed, choking on the clouds of brick dust being swirled about by the wind, the smell of the smoke in the air clinging to her hair and her clothes. Pushing open her front door, it was as though it had been ransacked. Lots of her furniture was gathered towards the back of her house, obviously with the force of the blast. Carefully, she started to pick her way in; glass was everywhere. As the wind ripped through the broken panes, it continued to whip letters, documents, and newspapers into a spiral that cavorted around the room – book pages whipping and snapping their disgruntled displeasure on the floor where they had fallen from the bookcase. She didn’t even know where to start.
All at once she heard a noise coming from inside the kitchen. It was tiny but unmistakable. Her heart started to thump. Abigail? Could Abigail be here? Surely she’d still be at school. Julia waded down the hallway, noticing broken pictures, the photograph of her and John, and the one with the children smashed on the living-room floor.
When she got into the kitchen, the table was turned on its side. The noise was coming from behind it. ‘Abigail,’ she called out. She could see someone stirring with dust-filled hair, a tiny person. Oh God, don’t let Abigail be hurt.