Seven others would follow, whistling terror.
Early in the morning of the 15th of July, the Dornier 17 slipped in under the radar and circled the town.
Most lay clenched in their beds. Not us. Don’t get ideas. On your way now. Bugger off.
Imagine it.
You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that is, briefly, of hurricane force. You wake, unable to understand why heaps of gravel and brick dust are being shovelled over you at speed. When you finally look up, your mouth and nostrils are crammed with dust. The skin is flayed from your forearms where you raised your hands to protect your head. Your eardrums have burst, and the pain leaves you staggering as you climb free of the rubble that is your bed.
It’s not easy to get your bearings. The dividing walls have fallen. There is a hole of grey sky in the roof. The sense of space is dizzying, and your ears are bleeding. You have to take a running jump to get to the stairway, and downstairs, the floorboards in the hallway are up, as if someone has been shuffling them like a pack of cards.
You stumble outside for air, but even here the day is thick with dust, soot and – you can’t make sense of it – a blizzard of feathers. Throughout the neighbourhood, pillows, bolsters and mattresses have exploded.
There are puffs of smoke. You can’t see them, but from high above, they look only like those a child might draw.
You manage to avoid your front garden, which is not a garden at all but a crater. At the kerb, you turn to stare. Your home stands open to the world, a grim, oversized doll’s house. How is it possible? The front wall has disappeared. Your private life has been turned inside out. Your mother still smiles from the picture on the side table.
At the back of the house – for your view is brutally clear – the bedroom and kitchen curtains hang in shreds. A cheval mirror, broken on its axis, wobbles like a tooth. In the front room, the furniture lies buried beneath the tons of wet chalk that erupted from the garden. Later, the Regional Officer of the War Damage Commission will approve compensation for your domestic contents, clothing and personal effects to a maximum of £200. He will stamp your C1 form. Payments in most cases, he will note, won’t be issued until after the war.
On the pavement, there is blood by your feet. A stray dog is sniff-ing at it. Someone offers you bandages for your arms, a blanket, shoes, and a cup of tea with extra lumps of sugar. You can’t hold the cup for shaking.
Shrapnel still tinkles down the rooftops, though you hear nothing of course and won’t ever again. But you can smell the pounded brick dust. You see the lady’s corset that dangles from a branch in the tree above you. Glass crunches underfoot. As you make your slow progress, you almost trip over two of your neighbours who are resting on stretchers. Why has no one given them a blanket? ‘All right, Iris?’ you say. You hear your voice only as a vibration in your throat. ‘All right, Ernest?’ They don’t stir. Concussed, you tell yourself.
But no. In the blast wave of the bomb, in that sudden desert of oxygen, they suffocated.
Others have been thrown through the air. A seventeen-year-old boy wakes on a rooftop five streets away. A man finds his wife stuck rigid and lifeless to a neighbour’s shed door, her arms outstretched. Later, in the ruins of his house, on her kitchen worktop, he will stare, mute and bewildered, at the two eggs that sit unbroken in a china bowl.
A fire blazes in the middle of the street. A broken gas main, you are told. It has been reported. Remember, smoking is not permitted. You nod, as if you have actually heard him. Water streams past your feet. Bobbing in the current, you see all manner of things: a toilet seat, a leather comb case, a family photo album, a baby’s rattle, a vegetable peeler, a tin of boot polish, a smeared letter, a bicycle tyre and a woman’s muddied hand. It still wears a wedding band. The hand upsets you more than the bodies you have passed.
Later, at sunset, as foundations settle, fires burn out and the drains back up, boys from other parts of town will appear. You’ll see them searching the craters and the broken ground. They’ll dig under roof slates and beams. You’ll watch them whoop with joy when they find souvenir pieces of shrapnel, still hot to the touch.