The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  She did not think of Lance Beckwith at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nancy had believed, absolutely, in Joe’s escape, in his nocturnal flight across the city, his clandestine meeting with a man who could get him the right papers, his flight across the country and finally across the sea. She had believed, unquestioningly, in Joe’s eventual and ultimate success. But Milly Fenwick had vowed to denounce him—the man she had once agreed to marry—and all at once Joe’s escape seemed perilous, his eventual success no longer assured, his capture and incarceration a distinct possibility.

  She must think. For she wasn’t helpless, she could help Joe. There were things she could do, actions she could take. She must think.

  But in the meantime it was foolish to be blundering about the station on her own, leaving Emily alone and unprotected. This thought struck her horribly and Nancy began to make her way back, hurrying, though her way was blocked at every turn and she slipped and stumbled and her panic rose again just when she had got it under control. She had left Emily on her own. She often left Emily on her own and nothing bad ever happened, of course it didn’t, she was always good as gold, but now all the certainties, all the risks she took daily and without a thought, seemed breathtakingly foolish and a thousand horrific consequences crowded into her head.

  She craned her neck to locate Emily through the sea of bodies, but identifying one small child amid so many proved impossible when surely a mum ought to be able to pick out her own kid in a crowd at once. But she was too far away, her line of sight was blocked by a dozen, two dozen people.

  The bombers were back. She was aware of an increase in her heart rate, a flutter against her ribs that made her breathless, and the need to reach Emily became urgent, for a terrible, almost unthinkable dismay had descended on her: what if Emily had been taken? There was no logical reason to think this, yet you heard about such things: kids being snatched, babies taken from their prams right outside their own front doors and never heard of again. A girl had been raped in the tunnels just a few months ago. If something happened to Emily she would never forgive herself. And she would never be able to face Joe, who had done everything, risked everything, for them both. She would kill herself if anything happened to their little girl.

  But nothing had happened, for there she was! Safe and sound and sitting up with the blanket wrapped about her skinny shoulders, looking for her mother with a frightened, anxious face, and Nancy laughed aloud in her relief, and the need to hurl herself beneath the wheels of a train rather than face her husband’s grief and recriminations vanished. She had allowed her fears to get the better of her. She was in control: she would protect Emily and she would protect Joe, too, if she had to.

  Before she had gone even a few steps she saw the two men coming towards her. One was the man she had seen in the shadows standing outside her house so many hours ago when the air-raid siren had first gone off and had seen again much later in the entranceway to the platform and had convinced herself was a policeman: a tallish, slender young man in a long, shabby raincoat and a soft felt hat, damp from the rain and pulled low over his brow, a face shadowy with stubble. She had convinced herself he was a policeman and now her guess appeared to be spot on, for right behind him was a police constable with an ugly enlarged nose, red-faced and out of breath in a uniform that was stretched tightly over a swollen belly. Two policemen coming towards her. A long way off but they spotted her in the same instant that she saw them.

  They had arrested Joe. For a moment she could not breathe. Some spark of life died away.

  But the two policeman started forward and so she ran. There was nowhere to run. She was on a platform packed with sleeping people, there was only one way in or out, aside from the tunnels at each end. She could hide down there in the tunnel, but could she could make it along the tracks, in the darkness, to the next station, to Liverpool Street? And there was Emily, she could not abandon Emily. Each possibility for escape was dashed the instant it presented itself. She needed some luck, on this night when it had all come crashing down about her; she deserved something, surely?

  When it came, salvation was delivered by the Luftwaffe. Not a direct hit—not that, God forbid—but a near miss, a strike so close it caused the whole structure of the station to rumble and shake, for dust to stream from the ceiling and cracks to appear in the walls. It caused heads to lift and muffled screams and shouts to ripple the length of the platform. It caused all eyes—just for that moment—to gaze upwards. How could it not? You were not human if you did not, in that instant, gaze upwards. It lasted a few seconds, no longer, but in that time Nancy stopped running and threw herself to the ground, not to avoid the bombs but because some ingenious, quite unknown part of herself had worked out that there were hundreds of people lying on the ground and that, lying on the ground with their coats over them and their faces covered, it was all but impossible to tell one person from another. In the moment that all eyes were gazing upwards she threw herself to the ground, pulling her coat over her head, and was gone.

  She hoped she was gone. If she had got it wrong, if the two policemen had not been distracted like everyone else by the explosion, if she were not in fact invisible, then she was trapped. They would find her and arrest her and there was precious little she could do to prevent it.

  Until that happened she would wait, when already her heart was bursting and her breathing so rapid she couldn’t quite think. She would wait. How long? She could not risk lifting her head. She would count. She would make herself wait a full ten minutes. So she counted, one to sixty slowly and steadily, ten times. As she counted and one part of her brain maintained a steady and calming rhythm, the other part imagined the bodies all around her dissolving away to leave her lying alone and naked and horribly exposed. Every instinct told her to leap up and run but she made herself lie perfectly still.

  Ten minutes, or thereabouts. The bombing had gone quiet again, but everyone was talking, moving about, frightened. She lifted her head an inch, two inches, from the ground. The back and shoulders of an elderly man were almost touching her. The old man smelled of stale beer and stale piss, of unwashed clothes. She could see the worn, loose threads of his coat, a darned patch already undoing, a collar half torn off. She could hear his ragged, phlegmy breathing. Every sensation seemed heightened and extreme and terrible. She raised her head to look over the old man and saw another old man, a sea of old men, the same and different and endless.

  Of the policemen there was no sign. No sign at all. She had evaded them! For a moment she revelled in her good fortune, in her ingenuity. She sat up, and now that she could afford the luxury of thinking things through and not simply reacting in a blind panic it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Joe had not been arrested. For if he had, surely the policemen would be interrogating him, would be charging him right now. They would not be wasting their time chasing Joe’s wife in an overcrowded tube station during a raid. No, it was far more likely Joe had evaded them too, was even now making his way, stealthily in the blackout, to the man who would provide the right papers, to the railway station to catch the first train north in the morning, to the ship that would take him across the sea to freedom.

  Cautiously she got to her feet and her limbs felt curiously light and difficult to control and her head spun dizzyingly. It was all for Joe, she realised; if she believed in him she could go on, and she did believe in him now. She crouched low and stayed low as she began to make her way back, keeping to the shadowy overhang just below the platform’s edge. She would leave at once, go with Joe this very night, all her hesitations and fears, all her doubts had gone.

  But there was Emily and the fact of Emily made it impossible.

  There was still no sign of the two policemen who seemed to have vanished into thin air. Dawn was still an hour or two away but all around folk were awake and restless after the near miss. A steady stream of elderly people and small children got up and stretched and shuffled off to the latrines, rearranged themselves on t
he ground, squabbled in angry whispers with their families and with the strangers around them, and all of this gave her cover. This time she saw Emily at once, picking her out instantly in the crowd of people, and though only a short time ago Emily had been anxious and frightened, now she appeared to have accepted her abandonment and the near miss and was sitting patiently with the blanket wrapped around her, waiting. A child born during a war in the downstairs room of a house in Odessa Street had realistic expectations about her life and the options that were available. This evidence of her child’s stoicism—or perhaps it was merely Emily’s acceptance of her lot in life—brought tears to her mother’s eyes. She would not abandon her again, no matter what happened. This was her pledge to her waiting child.

  Nancy was still too far off to pick her up, to hold her, still she could see Emily’s patiently waiting form and she could make her pledge. It was a moment of joyful reunion with her child even if it was only in her mind.

  In the next instant the policeman in the raincoat (who had not, in fact, vanished into thin air but had instead worked his way methodically along the platform, shaking and waking one sleeping figure after another in his quest to find her) did now find her—indeed, she walked straight into him—and for a second, two seconds, they faced each other. Nancy saw a much younger man than she had expected, his narrow face and hollow cheeks not so very different from those of the hungry and exhausted people around them, his dark eyes blurred by the dark shadows beneath them, the ghost of a beard along his jawline proof of the many hours that had passed since he had shaved that morning. She did not see triumph in his dark eyes, merely a sort of tired inevitability.

  It made no difference. Another bomb landed and this one was not a near miss, it was not a miss at all, and Nancy saw the policeman who had pursued her and then she saw nothing.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Diana heard a loud bang that sent a wave ripping through her body with a force that seemed to blast apart every molecule and simultaneously suck the air out of her and she screamed, though her scream was heard by no one, not even herself. Then came a terrifying whoosh as a cloud of smoke and dust and debris plummeted from the ceiling in such a rush the world must surely have ended.

  And then nothing. Silence.

  Diana lay face down on the ground. She waited to die and the shaking of the ground and the roar of the world ending made her wonder if she had, in fact, already died, if this was death. In that instant she could not be sure. The difference between life and death seemed arbitrary.

  And then it stopped, for the most part. The roaring in her ears continued but the world was no longer ending. There was a stillness, there was a silence—aside from the roaring in her ears; an eerie silence of many people listening, waiting, or many people dead. Diana became aware of herself lying face down on the ground, could taste dust in her mouth. She could not be dead, she reasoned, if she could taste dust in her mouth, and she lifted her head. Others lifted their heads. For they were still here, the station was still here. The world had not ended. And those who had done it all before and knew how these things were stood up on wobbly legs and brushed themselves off and said it was not a direct hit, for had it been a direct hit they would none of them be here, or not in one piece at any rate, and the station itself would be a large crater filled with molten, smoking rubble and body parts. But it had seemed, at the time, to be a direct hit.

  All that had happened was that the roof had partially fallen in.

  Diana Meadows had seen it fall in as it had fallen directly onto the woman with the headscarf who had been returning to her child and the tired policeman who had at just that moment approached her. Diana had had a perfect view of the two of them standing only a few yards away from one another and in another moment they had vanished in the whoosh of smoke and dust and debris that had plummeted from the ceiling. Afterwards, Diana lifted her head, others lifted their heads, but these two did not. The woman and the young policeman had gone and Diana, in the moments that she realised she had not died, that she tasted dust in her mouth, knew with a strange clarity that they were both dead.

  She had survived when others had died. And her child was still cradled in her arms. She hugged her, she talked to her, she reassured her, though her words made no sound and Abigail offered no reply.

  Ghostly figures began to move about in the choking dust, making no sound at all, their faces covered by handkerchiefs, but moving silently, talking to each other silently, and that was odd, before it occurred to her she could hear nothing but the roaring in her ears. But I am not frightened, thought Diana. She did not know why she was not frightened. It was inexplicable. She had survived when others had died. And her child was still cradled in her arms. She sat on the ground and held Abigail tightly to her breast and rocked her back and forth, talking to her as all around them the ghostly figures moved silently and futilely. A short distance away was Teddy, whom they had thought lost, turned quite white by a coating of the thick, choking dust and just out of reach. But Teddy had survived too.

  The woman and the policeman were dead. But the woman’s child was alive, she saw. The child had not died. The little girl stood a little distance away, her mouth open. She was clearly screaming but she made no sound, or none that Diana could hear. And no one came to her. Diana closed her eyes and stroked Abigail’s hair and for once Abigail did not object.

  Time passed. She didn’t know how much time. And sometimes she saw herself from very high up, which was odd, and she had a sensation almost of vertigo as she gazed down at herself, very small and insignificant a long way below. And other times she felt a great crushing weight pressing against her chest so that she could not get enough breath, though there was no weight that she could see. But still it pressed. And the people around her emerged then melted away though they did not move, it was simply her ability to sense them that came and went.

  The station was to be evacuated. It was no longer safe. She wondered how she knew this when no one spoke. She could see rescue workers and firemen newly arrived from the surface appearing out of the cloud of thick dust in their uniforms and helmets, their faces covered, clambering over the debris. She could see an ambulance crew with stretchers. They were up above her on the platform. No one had made it down here below the platform yet. She studied the people all around her, the people she had shared this night with, and saw that many were trapped, and others were milling about dazedly, bleeding from cuts and abrasions, nursing injured limbs. But she herself was not trapped, Diana saw, her legs were perfectly free, she had no cuts or abrasions, or none that she could see, none that she could feel. There was just this pressing weight. She could not see her own face so she put up a hand and touched her cheek, her nose. It felt quite as it should. She had survived when others had died. She studied Abigail’s face which was perfect, flawless, untouched.

  And meanwhile the poor wretched child, motherless now, had made its way to the place her mother had last been and began to pick at the pile of rubble and debris. It was pitiful. Someone would help her, surely, sooner or later. They would not leave the child, someone would come and claim it. The man in the seaman’s duffle coat would come for her.

  But the man did not come.

  Instead two firemen reached them and jumped down, faceless and anonymous men who gently moved the little girl aside and set about removing what debris they could. They moved methodically, expertly, gloved hands pulling piece by piece until a body emerged. They stopped at one point and waved then started moving the debris with more haste and a stretcher was called for. There was a long moment of frenzied activity when Diana became aware that one of them was alive, or might be alive. A body was pulled out and put on the stretcher and wrapped in a blanket and taken away, a body with a pulse, alive, or not yet dead at any rate. The firemen continued their work and a second body was found and this one too was placed on a stretcher and covered with a blanket but this time the head was covered and there was less haste and no one came to take the second stretcher away in the
ambulance; instead it was laid out on a clear space on the platform, a human form covered with a grey blanket, and the two firemen were called away to search for other bodies elsewhere.

  One dead, one not quite dead. Diana had seen the shadowy stubble and the short brown hair of the policeman on the first stretcher. And from beneath the blanket on the second stretcher a single foot protruded, a foot bare of stocking or shoe but still recognisably a woman’s foot, perfect and unblemished and very white, very still. Diana stared at the foot.

  No one had remembered about the little girl. She had crept over to the lifeless form on the stretcher and now she lay down beside it, beside her dead mother. The horror of this image struck Diana but at some remote level. She pulled Abigail closer to her as though this might shield her from the appalling sight.

  A rescue crew began pulling people up onto the platform and leading them away. But still Diana did not move. Really, they were quite safe, she and Abigail, right here in their little spot near the tunnel entrance. They would stay here. The debris had fallen all around them but had not touched them. They had survived.

  ‘Come on, luv.’

  Diana looked up into the blackened face of a fireman, his eyes red-rimmed and very white in his smoke-blackened face, his helmet and boots and waterproof suit massive beside her. ‘Time to go,’ he said, and it was odd that she knew that this was what he had said when she couldn’t hear his voice. Perhaps he had in fact said something completely different; perhaps he had said, ‘Sorry, missus, you’re sitting on a mine and if you get up it will go off.’ But that didn’t seem likely for his face was gentle, his eyes were gentle, odd for such a hulking brute of a man in boots and a fireman’s helmet. Water coursed in rivers off his shoulders and dripped from the rim of his helmet. He held out a grimy hand to help her. He seemed to want to take Abigail from her.