A short distance away another mother and daughter were hurrying towards the same shelter.
Mrs Diana Meadows of The Larches, Milton Crescent, Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire had got on the wrong bus. She had thought they were heading west. Instead their bus, in the blackout and displaying no route number, had carried them east, and by the time they had realised it they were halfway to Shoreditch. They had swept up their belongings and leaped from the bus and now found themselves on an unknown street in the disorientating confusion of the blackout with no possibility of getting home that night.
Then the air-raid siren had gone off.
Diana Meadows let out a little gasp of dismay. The eerie wail of the siren—a sound utterly unknown in the pleasant and leafy environs of Buckinghamshire—shattered the darkness and filled her with terror. She could not move. Let it be a false alarm, she prayed. All around her people had begun to emerge out of the dark. Faceless and fleeting, they passed and were gone, like ghosts, but she could not move. She could not join them.
She was thirty-nine years old and she wore a tweed coat from Liberty that had beaver at the collar and cuffs. It was prewar, of course, but everything was—everything of quality anyhow. She had had her hair set at the hairdresser in Amersham only the day before and the stiff new curls sat unwillingly beneath the smart little hat she had placed on her head on leaving the house. She had powdered her nose. She had studied her profile in the hallway mirror, and had registered with a disappointment that had become habit a small, almost snub nose and a chin a little too long, lips a little too thin, eyes a colour that could never quite be pinned down. An English face, plain and serviceable, but never beautiful. But her hair was set. And her hat was smart. Her gloves too—slender and fawn-coloured and fastened with little buttons at the wrist. But no one who passed her on this dark street wore gloves. No one wore smart little hats. Her coat—a tweed coat from Liberty—had become invisible. Or she had become invisible inside it.
Why could she not move?
‘Mummy!’
Beside her, three-and-a-half-year-old Abigail stared up at her wide-eyed, clutching Teddy tightly in both hands and in her distress—though only dimly comprehending their predicament—holding him upside down. The child was a facsimile of her mother (the flat little nose, the funny little chin, the thin little lips, the pale features and the dark hair), though when Diana looked at her child she saw only Gerald—the sticking-out ears, the thick dark brows, the unshakable belief in right over wrong—and saw nothing of herself, and was glad.
‘MUMMY!’
Let it be a false alarm. Frozen, Diana clutched Abigail’s hand, clutched Teddy’s paw. No one paused to help them. No one seemed to notice them. One woman swore at them when they did not move out of her way. And the darkness, it seethed and thickened about them, its tentacles slithering deep inside Diana’s clothes and she remembered as a child being so afraid of the dark that she had screamed in terror night after night.
The all-clear did not sound.
But she was not helpless. She may be alone and a long way from home and a little frightened but she was at least as good as these shapeless and faceless figures who pushed past her without a thought. And she had her daughter to protect. Diana grabbed the arm of a passing man and demanded in a voice that served her well at the tennis matches she had adjudicated at her local club: ‘Please tell me where the nearest shelter is. We are lost. We went to a pantomime and we got on the wrong bus and—’
She made herself stop. The man did not need to know they had been to a pantomime yet the urge to explain their presence in what was, one must assume, London’s East End was paramount. She knew she could not possibly blend in and nor, quite frankly, would she wish to.
‘The station—go to the tube station!’ the man shouted as he pulled his arm free.
Of course: the tube station. That was where people in London sheltered.
‘Thank you so much—’ But he was gone. ‘We shall go and shelter in the tube station,’ Diana said to Abigail. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you, darling? It will be a grand adventure.’
They set off at once and it was a relief to be moving swiftly, if not at a run—no one else was running—then certainly at a brisk pace. Abigail, who was flagging even before the adventure had begun, made heavy weather of it, and Diana had to half drag, half carry her.
But now Abigail stopped, jerking her mother to a halt too.
‘Mummy, we didn’t go to a pantomime.’
Diana could only dimly make out her child’s form in the blackout, her face was quite invisible, but her voice was full of indignant consternation and it seemed extraordinary to Diana that this was what Abigail was pondering as they hurried together through the strange and frightening darkness.
‘Don’t be silly, Abigail. We must hurry. Oh, do come on!’
And though she clearly did not think this a satisfactory reply to her observation, Abigail allowed herself to be led onwards. They passed shops, boarded up or derelict, and row after row of bombed-out terraces, gaping black holes in the black night. But ahead the busy street on which they found themselves reached a junction with a much larger thoroughfare. They passed beneath an archway beside a pub that was shuttered and dark, and on the corner was, unmistakably, the entrance to a tube station. They saw the comforting red and blue and white of the Underground sign and the stream of people disappearing into its depths. Which tube station it was hardly seemed to matter: Whitechapel, Shoreditch (was there a station at Shoreditch?) . . . Stepney, perhaps?
‘Here we are—almost safe now!’ Diana shouted above the rising noise of the siren, for they had made it, the two of them; in this hostile environment, they had triumphed!
But Abigail promptly sat down and refused to move. At this display of defeatism when they were so close to their salvation, Diana felt a moment of despair. She kneeled down, and pleaded with her child to get up, but Abigail closed her eyes and shook her head resolutely. ‘Teddy doesn’t want to go down there!’
From where Diana was standing Teddy looked extremely keen indeed to get down into the safety of the tube station, but sadly he was in no position to say so. ‘Very well, then. I’m going to leave you both here on your own to fend for yourselves.’
At this, Abigail scrambled to her feet and flung herself at her mother’s legs. This hampered their progress, especially as Diana was carrying her best handbag and a small travelling case containing sundry other items she had thought it necessary to bring with them on this day trip into London, along with some that she had procured during the course of the day, but they were at least moving in the right direction and, once they joined the flow, the sheer mass of urgent and frightened people behind swept them along so that really all one had to do was to keep on one’s feet and not trip.
In this manner they were carried down a short flight of steps and across a concourse, they squeezed through the open turnstiles (one did feel a little conspicuous not purchasing a ticket, even under such unusual circumstances) and found themselves at the top of the escalator.
The crush of people was suddenly much denser as they were funnelled onto the stationary escalator and Diana grasped the handrail with one hand and her child’s hand in a fierce grip with the other, not caring at this moment if she hurt her, concerned only with keeping both eyes on the lip of the stairwell just ahead. An old woman wrapped in a grubby blanket blocked their way. Another woman, much younger with a determined expression and a small child in tow, grabbed the old woman’s arm and practically pushed her down the escalator. But now the crush of bodies behind them intensified and almost at once Diana lost her grip on the handrail and was swept away down the escalator, her feet barely touching the ground, and she scooped Abigail into her arms in the nick of time.
Phee-oow! Phee-oow!
Unseen enemy bombers flew overhead dropping incendiaries, or perhaps landmines—it was hard to tell, especially if you were more used to reading about the raids in The Times than experiencing them firsthand. But there was no need to look up for they were safely inside the station and all Diana could see above them was the enormous curvature of the enamel-tiled ceiling that led down to the platforms and the streams of people on all sides. The bottom of the escalator was in sight and with one final leap into the unknown they were at the bottom, carried by the sea of people onto the eastbound platform.
They had made it, they were safe, and she held Abigail tightly to her. All they had to do now was find a spot where they could sit tight and wait it out.
But there was no spot.
Every inch of space was taken. Diana stood in the entranceway in silent dismay as around her the platform dissolved into a sea of bodies all trying to find a place on the hard concrete with whatever blankets and bedding they had brought with them, seething and wriggling like the glistening black cockroaches that had frequented the cellar of her dad’s old shop in Pinner before the First War and that scuttled away to the corners when you opened the door and turned on the gaslight on a summer’s evening.
Where were they to go? They could not stand here, and already people behind them were jostling. For a moment Diana resisted, standing her ground—for where was she to go?—but the crash of bodies behind was too great and she was propelled forward, right to the platform’s edge where, beyond, lay the electrified tracks.
‘Wait! Stop! Please stop!’ she cried, but they did not wait, they did not stop, and she gasped and flung out a hand to stop herself falling. For an agonising moment she teetered on the brink of the platform, closed her eyes, and Abigail, in her arms, stared over her shoulder into the abyss and screamed. Then Diana opened her eyes and saw that the tracks could not be seen for all the people sheltering down there.
But the electrified tracks? Even as she thought this she saw that there were no tracks, that this stretch of line was not yet completed, that the people sheltering down on the lines, and further into the tunnel, were perfectly safe. There was even a crate placed just here so that one could step down. Diana availed herself of the crate, she stepped down, and as she did so saw the Underground sign on the tunnel wall: they were at Bethnal Green, and though sudden tears threatened to overcome her she did not give in to them.
They had made it. They were safe.