“ARE YOU HURT, madam?” Selina realized gradually that the shouts were meant for her. The darkness was worse than the staircase had been, and she found herself kneeling on a mattress, clasping an enormous pillow. “No!” The word sounded like a scratchy whisper, though she was yelling. “No, I don’t think so.” A memory came back of being forced to stand as a small child almost underneath a waterfall, and of fearing that it would choke her.
The guns had not stopped, but there were whistles everywhere. “Stay where you are, don’t move and we’ll have you out in no time!” With infinite relief, she recognized Dobbie’s voice. Then the paralysis lifted. “Angelina!”—this time she really screamed—“Angelina, where are you, are you safe?”
“Yes, dear, but thanks to myself, not the nation. The cork has been blown out of Miss Hill’s thermos and the soup has scalded her leg. If we had had deep shelters this would never have happened. I shall write to the Times about it!” Somebody kicked against a fallen chair and …was he injured?… Horatio was whimpering in a corner.
“There, that’s better!” Ferguson, who had been thrown to the ground with an old lady wriggling in his arms, managed to disentangle himself and flash on his torch. Part of a wall had come down but the beams above the shelter had held, and though the occupants and their Lido of beds and chairs had been flung like a trampled ant heap onto the floor, there had been no serious damage. “We’re all right, Dobbie,” he shouted up, “we can manage if you’re wanted elsewhere.”
A fog of dust, smoke, and unknown smells enveloped the room. People coughed and laughed. Plaster fragments slithered from the walls to plop on the ground like hailstones. “If only I could find my bag,” Lilian wailed. “It’s got my ration book in it!” There was a great central silence, Selina noticed, in a multiplicity of little noises. The guns broke into an even more savage barking, and they could hear the buzzing of enemy planes. “I wish they would not remind me of a mosquito,” Ferguson grumbled, shaking his overcoat.
“Has anybody got a torch? I’ve lost my bag and it’s got my ration book.”
“My dear, this thermos is all right. We can have some tea.”
“Pull yourself together!” Angelina was slapping Cook’s back violently. “What do you want to cry for? We’re safe!”
The zipper had caught again, of course, and Eve tore at her bag to get out of it. Lilian’s papers and a camp stool were all over her legs. It was like a Goya drawing, she thought, frantic black shapes in an underworld lit by one faint beam. Horatio was muttering between his sobs and somebody suddenly screamed. The sensation of having her legs tied up was definitely unpleasant, but the blanket gave at last and she scrambled to her feet, still holding a strip of it in her hand.
“Now then!” Dobbie came carefully down the staircase with his big, shaded torch. “The sooner you get to your cups of tea the better. These steps seem all right, but come up one at a time. We can’t have old folks like yourselves sitting around in a draught.”
Nobody moved. They were choked with dust, but there was a strange unwillingness to leave the remains of the shelter and go into the open street. “Come along, Miss Tippett!” The voice was stern. “You know where our Rest Centre is, so suppose you lead the way.”
Oh, dear, Selina thought, I really can’t endure any more darkness. I want to lie down and sleep. If she had to move there ought to be a flying carpet to transport her, or she should be able to shut her eyes and wish herself there. Mechanically she flung her blanket over her shoulders and picked up the smaller of her suitcases. The handle was gritty and she bumped into a dazed figure still kneeling on a mattress. No, I can’t be first, she wanted to say, but at that moment a low, terrifying moan came from the corner: “They’ve got me, my head, save me …” then the words blended into a meaningless cry.
“Get them out of here as soon as you can,” Dobbie ordered, hurrying towards Horatio. “And tell them we want a stretcher.” Somebody else found another torch, and the procession, once it had begun to move, crawled up to the pavement. The door had been blown in, but workers had dragged it away.
Selina’s first instinct was to rush towards the Warming Pan, but a complete wall of smoke as thick as a hill advanced towards her, and before she had time to think, Ferguson grasped her arm and hurried her round the corner. The side street had been untouched, and was not too dark, for there were several fires now in the neighbourhood; the flashes and flares reminded her ironically of bright moonlight. There ought to be another expression for such light, but she could not remember one; all she could do was to relate new terrors to old experience. “I wonder what happened to the house,” she said, but Ferguson only walked along more quickly. “Oh, I expect it is all right. Do you know where the Rest Centre is? I don’t.”
“Keep that torch down!” somebody yelled in a very irritable voice. The shelter group had been dazed and motionless until as they began to use their limbs the hurry of flight possessed them. They streamed after Miss Tippett, shepherded by a warden, except for a few of the younger ones who dodged into the smoke at the heels of the rescue party. I wonder if it is like the Great Fire of London, Eve thought, as she tried to find the Warming Pan. It was and it wasn’t, she decided. It was true that the dark shapes grouped themselves into the forms of some old canvas and the colours were less black and purple than a patina of oil, age, and dust. Yet there was a new element of violence that was beyond apprehension and rational emotion. It had scooped out, somehow, a part of her own being.
“Keep back, keep back,” people shouted. Gradually the fog lifted and they could see flames. A bomb had hit the corner next to the restaurant, and as a result the Warming Pan was simply not there. The staircase that Eve had run up and down so many times had disappeared except for the bottom flight of steps. Her room was air. All that remained was a table, upright, with two plates on it and Beowulf standing quietly under the mantelpiece.
“I can’t believe it,” Eve kept saying; it must be untrue. Something must happen, and then everything would be in order again, the window that rattled and the patch in the linoleum. “Now then, Miss, you’re only in the way without a tin hat, get along to the Centre,” a fireman grumbled; but Dobbie slapped her on the shoulder; he had a list in his hand. “Was anybody there, do you know?” he inquired.
“No.” Eve ran over the names in her mind. “No, I don’t think so. Mr. Rashleigh didn’t always come to the shelter, but tonight Miss Tippett fetched him.” She had seen Angelina and Cook, Ruby of course went home to sleep, and there was Mary just in front of her. “It’s a mercy it didn’t hit your place,” somebody said to Dobbie, and he nodded gravely.
The house that was on fire had been evacuated some weeks previously. There were a couple of minor casualties from neighbouring buildings, but nobody had been buried, and the incident, on the whole, could be considered slight. “No good looking at it, miss.” Dobbie stuck the list back in his pocket. “Did you lose much?”
“No,” Eve heard herself say. “Oh, no, I had sent a lot of things to my sisters in the country.” That was not the point, of course; she had lost everything, but Dobbie would not understand if she tried to explain; his mind thought in items of clothes and armchairs. Nothing could ever make up to her for this robbery. The Warming Pan was a symbol of eternal freedom. She had never liked the things others loved, to find the first primrose on a freezing day or to bring back late roses to a company that would be garrulous about them year after year in exactly the same words. What she wanted was the anonymous liberty of thought that her room and old Selina’s cheerfulness had given her. It was less a question of atmosphere than of balance, of belief. Broad as the broadest Thames, she kept saying to herself, that was how she had seen the flowing of the years. Now all life narrowed as the bricks fell and the corner shrivelled to a point of flame and she saw herself in uniform, back in the centre of a family and a routine rigidly monotonous as school. “Better go to the Centre, miss,” Dobbie tapped her shoulder again. “It will be a blow for the poor lady, she was so proud of the place. And paid her bills regular, too.” Hoses were playing on the gap to try to keep the flames from spreading, and men were trampling over the bit of floor that was left. “You might tell her,” Dobbie added, “that we saved the dog.” And there was Beowulf, being carried up the road, his short, painted tail looking more ridiculous than ever as the flashlights caught it.
The all-clear went as Eve got to the Rest Centre door. The sky was quiet, but the streets were noisier as ambulances moved away and fresh fire engines arrived. Angelina was just in front of her, her old scarf hanging from the pocket of her leather jacket, which was now covered with thick powder from the ruins. The group from Dobbie’s shelter were all in one corner of the large room, sipping mugs of tea. Lilian (really, she should be called the undaunted Lilian, Eve felt) had saved her letter case and was showing a lilac piece of paper covered with sooty fingerprints to a large audience. “Won’t my niece be thrilled when she gets this, straight, as you might say, from the jaws of death!”
“They have deep shelters in Moscow,” Angelina proclaimed, in a loud, accusing voice. Nobody took any notice; they were still busy trying to shake the top layer of dust from their clothes.
“I have drafted a letter to the Times by the light of the flares. If we had been killed in that shallow rabbit warren, the Government would have been at fault, equally with the enemy.”
“Yes, dear, but would it have mattered much? To us, I mean, if we had been killed?”
“Selina, my lamb! Have you no feeling for the future? Think of posterity!”
She could not bother about anyone at the moment except herself, Miss Tippett thought, unless it were poor Mr. Rashleigh. Ferguson had gone up the road again to discover how badly the old gentleman had been hurt. The Warming Pan had gone; nobody had told her, but she felt it. It had ended its life in a blaze of glory, but she didn’t want to have to look at the remains. She only wanted to sleep. “Sit down, Angelina,” she suggested, “you must be tired.”
“No, thank you, dear; while you have been resting—of course, I am glad that you could rest, for as far as I am concerned I shall not have a wink for a week—but while you have been resting I have made out a list of the necessary steps to take. I shall go to the Town Hall in the morning …”
“I believe you go first to Citizens’ Advice,” Lilian broke in, “one of my clients was bombed and that was where she went.”
“I shall go, doubtless, to both. We are entitled to every assistance. After all,” Angelina forgot her theories for the moment, “the enemy has destroyed our means of livelihood.”
“It has gone, then—the house?”
“I’m afraid so.” Ferguson tried to speak as gently as possible. He had just returned and stood, sorrowfully, in the doorway.
“Quite gone,” Selina asked in a dazed voice, “or is it … just blitzed?” Now they had told her she could not imagine the street with no Warming Pan there.
“There was a direct hit next door and a fire. You will get compensation, you know, after the war.”
“All of it has gone?” Selina remembered irrationally that square board in the top room that had always creaked. Everything had seemed so solid, so heavy.
“Absolutely, madam,” Dobbie assured her in a hearty voice, his tin helmet wedged buck-fashion on his head, “but don’t you fret now, it’s all right, we’ve saved the dog.”
“The dog!”
“Oh, Selina, it’s a good omen, they’ve saved Beowulf!” Squealing joyfully, Angelina tore out into the street.
People were silent; some knew their homes were safe, others would have to wait till the morning. “Better get her a cup of tea,” Dobbie whispered loudly. It was hard on an old lady like that, he thought, as he hurried back to his work outside. Selina tried to realize what it meant, but all she could see were the thick walls of the restaurant, the heavy blackout curtains. Yesterday rushed over her as if she were actually alive in it, and she started suddenly to laugh. The landlord could not send them a demand for the rent! He could never send them a demand for the rent. He could never give them notice! She laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks. She need never be frightened of the postman any more. She would not have to give Timothy or Ruby notice. The group round her looked embarrassed, and a helper tapped Ferguson on the shoulder. “Loony bin,” she muttered, “but it takes some of them that way, she’ll get over it. Though you’d be surprised (try one of the buns, sir, they’re really quite good), some people are quite cheerful, they never say a word.”
“Angelina!” Miss Tippett got up, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief and choking: “Angelina! It’s burnt! They can’t send us any more bills!”
“Yes, dear, now try to be calm. They have found a Union Jack for Beowulf’s collar and set him up by the big crater outside. Would you like to come and see him?”
“No,” she could hardly get the words out, “no, I think I’ll stay where I am.” Several fellow shelterers moved round to comfort her. “Do let me wrap you up in my rug, your hands are frozen. Lilian dear, get Miss Tippett another cup of tea!” Then as she stopped laughing, they drifted away to exclaim over Beowulf. He seemed to be popular.
Ferguson sat down beside her. “I don’t mind them having the bulldog or the flag,” he said, looking round cautiously to see that Angelina was out of earshot, “but why both?”
“Yes, it does seem, well … the tiniest bit vulgar….” They smiled. “Still, I suppose our sense of humour is a protection. You can’t imagine the Germans taking a nasty dog seriously, can you? It would shock them.”
It was comfortable to have the big blanket over her shoulders. The room was warm and, apart from the voices, quiet. Some of her neighbours had settled on the floor and were trying to sleep. “Did you find out what had happened to Rashleigh?” Selina asked.
“The poor old man! The doctor told me he feared there wasn’t much hope. He asked me, in fact, if I had the address of any relative. He wasn’t much hurt, you know, it was merely a scratch, but his mind had gone. He kept rambling on about Indians and being scalped. Shock, I suppose.”
“Yes, he was talking like that to me only … this evening.” It seemed further away, Selina thought, than her days with Miss Humphries. “Of course, I’m not superstitious, but do you know, I had the oddest feelings getting him downstairs. The whole place smelled of death.”
“Well, we hadn’t been at Dobbie’s ten minutes before the stuff came down. It’s an exciting world.” If people had listened to his warnings, Ferguson thought, none of it need have happened. “Have you anyone who will take you in tomorrow morning?”
“Yes. Mrs. Spenser will help us, I expect. My partner has been longing to take a more active part in the war than catering for ages. I am sure she will be all right. I’m not worried either about Ruby or Mary or Cook. They will soon find jobs. It’s just Timothy … and myself,” Selina said, smiling. “We’re rather too old, for war.”
“I know,” Ferguson said, “and yet we have been part of the world. What I am trying to say is, each generation belongs in evolution; without us, there would have been something missing.” Selina looked so puzzled that he hastened to add: “What people have done should be remembered as well as what they do.”
“Oh, I haven’t done much, I suppose; I never had the chances some of these young things get.” Selina glanced at Eve, who was standing near the doorway. “But one thing I will say, I have always been willing. Oh, dear, I’ll find work I know, but I shall miss my little shop. I tried to make it a home from home and to give people value for their money.”
“You did, Miss Tippett, you did. You will get compensation, you know, when the war is over.”
“I shall be too old then to make a fresh start.”
Each looked down, away from each other, at the worn linoleum. It was true, they were not wanted. This is what came of appeasement, Ferguson thought; it was not a question of peace or war, but of good and evil. In a positive world, initiative and character counted; there was a place for everyone, but the routine that people now worshipped was a sticky trap, almost as bad as bombs. “I really believe,” he said, after a long pause, “we would die rather than think.”
“It was hard to realize that the Germans would be so wicked.”
“People are evil, Miss Tippett, as well as unbelievably good.” Had it been any other moment he would have asked her if she had ever read about the concentration camps, but tonight it would be unfair, and fortunately Dobbie came in at that moment, trying to walk quietly in his heavy rubber boots, for most of the lights had been turned out and people looked asleep, at least, under their blankets. “I wonder if you could tell me Mr. Rashleigh’s next of kin? They have phoned from the hospital to say that the poor fellow died on the trip, and they want particulars.”
It was inevitable, Selina supposed, but it sounded as if he were a parcel. “He had a cousin in Richmond; he made me write down the address once, in case anything happened. Would you like me to notify her?”
“It would be kind, madam, if you would drop her a note, you being the last person, as you might say, to speak with the gentleman. But I’ll have to give the hospital the address, too; they need it for the records.”
“A lively night, Dobbie,” Ferguson said, offering him a cigarette.
“Yes, incidents as thick as currants in a plum duff. Still, we might have had it worse here, only three fires and all under control.”
“Oh, it’s burnt!” Selina gave a little embarrassed giggle.
“What’s burnt?”
“My address book. I remember the woman’s name was Agatha, but that is not much help.”
“I expect the police will trace her.”
“She can’t have cared much, she never came to see him.”
“Well, you never know.” Dobbie tried to wipe his face with an oily rag that had once been a handkerchief. “She might have felt he would be a burden, he was such a chatterer.”
“I’m glad Rashleigh didn’t have to suffer.” It was a pity that they could not all claim a quiet, painless death when the world got tired of them. He would go on existing, Ferguson supposed; the body was tough, and would put up a doomed but desperate resistance, though the spirit was dead. He leaned forward to pick up the blanket that had slid from his knees.
“Cup of tea, sir?” One of the Rest Centre helpers came round with a tray full of mugs. It was a shock for these old men, she thought, popping an extra bit of sugar into the Colonel’s tea; they ought to be in their beds, not buffeted about like this. She liked it, naturally, the easy atmosphere and the sense that every night was a picnic, but the old clung so to their possessions. “I should lie down then if I were you; everything will seem so different in the morning.”
The door clattered open again and several voices said “Hush” as Angelina stumbled in, half carrying Beowulf and half bumping him on the stairs.
“Oh, dear, whatever are you doing with that plaster dog?”
“We are all made of plaster,” Angelina said reprovingly.
“I’m sure I’m not!” Selina felt a good old-fashioned ague at work in her joints. “Couldn’t you have left it on the pavement?”
“An idiot of a warden said somebody might trip over him and fall into the crater.” She straightened the flag that was stuck in his collar. “The darling, he has brought us good luck!”
“Angelina! I am glad if that … object gives you pleasure, but as soon as you brought it into the Pan we were bombed. And now”—the realization rushed back to her—“what are we going to do with that horrible egg powder?”
“Sell it, darling, sell it at a profit in cakes. All we want is a teeny weeny oven somewhere. Leave it to me and Beowulf. If I can get wheels fitted to his dear little paws and a basket to his back, people will be tumbling over themselves to buy from me. And remember, partner, here we are alive. Why mope about the past? I’m stepping into the future….” And she slapped Beowulf so hard on the tail that a woman in the corner moaned, “Listen, they’re here again, they’re overhead.”
“I might even get a soapbox and let him draw it.”
“It’s her nerves,” Selina whispered; “the strain must be telling on her.”
“I expect I shall have to get a hawker’s licence! Won’t that be fun?”
“So much depends upon one’s temperament.”
“Cheer up, partner, let’s have a little community sing-along and we shall all feel better.”
“Silence,” somebody roared from the far end of the room, “lights out, no talking!”
Angelina shrugged her shoulders. She pushed the dog up against the wall, sat down on a mattress, and began to unlace her shoes. “As if one could sleep, at such a moment,” she grumbled. Nobody wanted to be free. Stuffy fools, they wanted to sit with their silver dishes for crumpets and—why, it rhymed—their ear trumpets. She was going to tramp England, marshes, moors, heather, and gorse, she said over and over to herself; perhaps she could get a donkey as well as Beowulf. I’ve always wanted to be a vagabond, and I wouldn’t mind, I really wouldn’t mind being a weeny bit of a rogue. But she said this to herself, for Selina was being as difficult and uncooperative as possible. Taking it all tragically. But she had always been a bit of a crumpet.
Dobbie swallowed the last of his tea noisily. “See you in the morning, and don’t you worry, Miss Tippett. Jerry’s going to be mighty sorry for himself one day, and I hope I’m here to see it. And you did save your dog.”
“Could you try to rest?” Selina looked up; she had never realized before that the Colonel was so old. He was arranging her shawl about her shoulders, and she did not mind that the shell-pink lining was covered with black smudges. “If you cared to use my flat until you can make other arrangements I should be delighted. They tell me my street is intact.”
“It is really very kind of you.”
“Not at all, it is a help to me to feel that I am of use.”
She would never have to wake up again and worry about the rent. Only it was so strange; it wasn’t two hours since she had dragged Horatio down those solid, century-old stairs. She seemed to feel the Warming Pan in her fingers, hear its creaks and noises, but it had gone, and in a little while she would be the only person to remember it. “You’re wonderful,” Eve said, “wonderful, but you must get out of London. Would you like to go to my sisters in the country?”
Selina shook her head. “It’s silly, I suppose, but I have got to stay on here in my own village.” She smiled at them both and at the nice child with the fair hair that had come round again with yet another tray.
“Have a cup of tea,” her neighbour suggested, and he patted her arm.
“No, thank you, Colonel Ferguson; people are so kind, I seem to have been drinking tea all the evening. There is a war on, you know!” It was one of the stock Warming Pan jokes, and she looked up for approval. They stared back at her so seriously that she felt quite puzzled. “Oh, dear,” she said, for she felt suddenly quite helpless, “I do think it is very embarrassing to be bombed.”