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The evening sun was low on the horizon when Toby left his digs for the long walk to Whitehall. With little to amuse him in his cramped room, he preferred to stretch his legs and walk to the Home Office instead of waiting for the notoriously unreliable buses.
Whitehall was now working around the clock as the allied armies pushed toward Berlin. Toby was on the evening shift, and his office work would be followed by five hours of patrolling with the fire watch on the roof of the building.
His landlady’s house was the only home still standing on the northern side of Montague Road, although it had not escaped without damage. The chimney no longer functioned and tiles were missing from the roof, but Mrs. Larimor herself was indomitable. Wearing a pair of her husband’s trousers and with her hair tied up in an old headscarf, she was digging industriously in the front-garden vegetable bed.
“Back to work already?” she asked, taking a break from her labors and leaning on the garden fork.
“Hitler doesn’t give us any days off,” Toby said.
“No, he don’t,” she agreed. “Well, you be careful. He’s still chucking stuff at us.”
“No more bombers,” said Toby.
Mrs. Larimor wiped her hand across her forehead and left a muddy trail across her face. “I’d rather have a bomber than those blooming flying doodlebugs,” she said. “That’s spite, pure spite. He ain’t gonna win, not now, but he won’t give up. Evil, that’s what they are, pure evil. Nasty noisy little things, and no one knows where they’re going to land. South coast, Cornwall, Midlands, he don’t care. Just wants to kill people. Not even pretending he’s aiming them at anyone. He don’t care who he hits.”
She looked past Toby and down the street, where her four children were playing Germans and Americans in the ruins of the neighboring houses.
“I let them be evacuated,” she said, “when they was bombing London. Broke my heart to see them go, but it kept them safe. Then the Ministry says we can bring them back, and look what happens, blooming doodlebugs landing anywhere they please.”
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” Toby said. “I don’t think the V-1s are aimed at London. They’re just aimed across the Channel, and when they run out of fuel, they land and explode. It wouldn’t really matter where your children were. They’re as safe here as they would be anywhere else. They’re with you and that’s important.”
“Where are your parents, Mr. Whitby?”
“My mother’s in Scotland,” said Toby. “She went up at the beginning of the war. My father died when I was a boy.”
Mrs. Larimor smiled. “You’re still a boy, Mr. Whitby. I know you’re doing important work and all, but you’re still no more than a lad. They’re all boys; all the soldiers, just boys.”
Toby looked up as Mrs. Larimor’s oldest son jumped from a pile of rubble to land on his brother.
“The game’s up, German swine,” he shouted, in a passable American accent.
“I’m not a German,” responded his prisoner. “Why do I have to be a German?”
Toby shook his head. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Larimor, the war will be long over by the time they’re old enough to fight.”
“I should blooming well hope so,” the landlady agreed. “You be careful out there, Mr. Whitby.”
“You too, Mrs. Larimor.”
Toby closed the gate behind him and set off westward into the setting sun. The children raced ahead of him, two boys and two girls, dashing through the abandoned gardens of their long-vanished neighbors. Apparently, they were no longer Germans and Americans; now they were Battle of Britain pilots, with arms spread as they swooped down on their imaginary enemies.
Toby wished he could have given Mrs. Larimor a little more comfort. He would like to have said that the menace was over, but rumor in the War Office was that Hitler had something even nastier than the V-1 doodlebug up his sleeve. Rumor said that there would be a V-2, something even more deadly.
Toby sighed. He was exhausted. Everyone was exhausted. This new weapon of Hitler’s was not as deadly as the Blitz, but it was unpredictable. Without a pilot, and with only the most rudimentary of guidance systems and no particular target in mind, the V-1 could be launched anytime, night or day, and wherever it fell, it exploded. The sirens were now blasting in the daylight. No sooner had the all clear sounded than the guns would start up again and the alert siren would be wailing its message again and the ack-ack guns would return to action.
Slowly but surely, what fear Toby had of the missiles was being replaced by a weary fatalism, and he was no longer diving for cover when the sirens started. He would watch the sky and listen for the sound of the V-1’s engines buzzing and howling overhead. So long as the engine was running, he was in no danger. Danger was in the silence, in the moment when the missile ran out of fuel and tipped its nose downward.
As if in response to his thoughts, Toby heard an alert siren from somewhere nearby. The children barely glanced upward and continued their aerial warfare among the ruins. He looked back and saw Mrs. Larimor looking up into the sky. Her mouth was moving. She was calling her children, but they couldn’t hear her above the sound of the guns mounted on the roof of the police station. No, Toby thought, not just the sound of guns, the droning sound of a V-1 coming toward them out of the sunset.
He looked back at Mrs. Larimor. She had abandoned her work and was racing down the road toward him. He had thought of her as old, or at least middle-aged, but as she sprinted toward him, she ran like a young girl, head thrown back, arms pumping.
They’ll be all right, he thought. It’s going to pass right over us. Someone will get it, but not us. And then he thought, my God, how much of this can we stand? How long can the mothers live like this? He was too war weary to care about the German missiles, but Mrs. Larimor, poor soul, still had a mother’s instinct.
“Number 23,” Mrs. Larimor shouted. “The Morrison. Number 23.”
The children had stopped playing and turned toward the sound of their mother’s voice, and reality hit Toby. The children could hear their mother. The doodlebug was silent. It had run out of fuel. Its nose cone with one thousand kilos of explosive was tilted down toward the ground on a long dive into wanton destruction.
As he hesitated, Mrs. Larimor flew past him.
“Number 23.”
The children seemed to know what she meant. Her arms were reaching to gather them in and guide them through the gaping front door of the neighboring ruined house. Toby started to run. He glimpsed something inside, something green; a Morrison shelter, still intact.
They dove together through the doorway, Mrs. Larimor shoving the children ahead of her into the space under the reinforced table. Toby was hot on her heels, and he didn’t hesitate for even a moment to take hold of her trouser-clad backside and heave her into the space alongside her children. When the doodlebug exploded, only his head and shoulders were under cover, but the children were safe.