It was after eight o’clock before Basil showed up.
Susan had been at her desk for almost an hour trying to make sense of a schedule that had been revised to death and cope with telephone exchanges that had been bombed to blazes. Basil’s trim appearance made her feel all the more grubby and that, added to lack of sleep, rendered her irritable.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Basil said breezily.
‘Where else did you think I’d be,’ Susan snapped. ‘And where the bleedin’ hell have you been?’
‘Now, now, Susan,’ Basil admonished, ‘please remember who you’re talking to.’
Susan tried to sound contrite. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been an awful morning. For one thing, I can’t get through to the Air Ministry, not for love nor money.’
Basil took his place behind his desk and lit a cigarette.
‘Lines down, I expect,’ he said. ‘You may not have heard but the City took a pasting last night.’ He paused, then went on, ‘Are you worried about your people?’
‘My people?’
‘Your relatives.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Of course. Of course, I am.’
Basil pulled a wire tray to the centre of his desk and began leafing through his correspondence.
‘At least,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to worry about your husband. He’ll be safe enough in Evesham.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Susan.
‘After all, the BBC knows how to take care of its own.’ Basil balanced his cigarette carefully in the ashtray. ‘I’ve just been speaking with Rupert Talbot. He tells me the News Department is suffering problems of under-staffing. Lots of their young tigers have gone off and enlisted, it seems. If I planted a word in the right ear—’
‘Danny isn’t the type.’
‘The type? He’s an experienced editor, isn’t he?’ Basil said. ‘You might at least have the decency to let me finish.’
‘Yes, sorry. It’s just I know he wouldn’t fit in here.’
‘You mean you don’t want him back in London to queer your pitch.’
‘My pitch?’
‘Your – ah – friendship with Robert Gaines.’
‘Danny’s happy where he is,’ Susan said. ‘He has a girlfriend in Evesham.’
‘Does he, indeed? Well,’ Basil said, ‘one can hardly blame him for that. Nevertheless, there’s a vacancy for an editor in News and, in spite of your reservations, perhaps it might be better to let your husband decide for himself.’
‘Is this an offer,’ Susan said, ‘or is he being seconded?’
‘Contrary to popular perception,’ Basil said, ‘the BBC is not the Gestapo. He will have a choice.’
‘He won’t come.’
‘Wishful thinking, Mrs Cahill?’
‘Call it what you like,’ Susan said desperately. ‘I know he won’t come. He won’t leave this – this person in the lurch.’
‘It’s a serious affair, is it?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And your affair with Robert Gaines,’ Basil said, ‘is that absolutely serious too?’
She couldn’t give him an answer because she didn’t know the answer. Biting her lip, she sat motionless behind her desk.
‘No matter.’ Basil lifted his cigarette and inhaled. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, as if he had read her mind. ‘It is none of my business.’
‘What,’ Susan said, ‘about my husband?’
‘Yes,’ Basil said, ‘what about your husband?’
‘Will you …’ Susan began, then, startled, glanced up as Bob Gaines loped into the office waving a script and grinning all over his stupid face.
‘Well, speak of the devil,’ Basil said and, stubbing out his cigarette, hastily cleared space on his desk to receive the result of Bob’s labours.
25
It was fortunate that the high-explosive bomb that ripped apart the terrace houses in Pitt Street did not wipe out the Wardens’ Post in nearby Grover Road.
Ignoring the risks, the wardens came running out to investigate. Peering through a thick pall of dust, they swiftly assessed the extent of the damage, dispatched a messenger to the Control Centre to summon ambulances, stretcher parties and rescue equipment then headed into the wreckage to aid the injured and search for survivors.
It took two wardens and a strapping young policeman to drag Breda away from her frenzied digging but they were unable to persuade her to accompany them to a first-aid post and didn’t have the heart to insist.
Supported by a WVS volunteer, she waited for news while rescue workers, a dozen or more, moved in with picks and crowbars to tunnel into the shifting mass of broken brick and splintered woodwork on the off-chance that the cry Breda claimed to have heard was not just wishful thinking.
Phantom figures clambered over the wreckage lit at first by the spouting gas flare and, after it had been capped, by shaded torches. Medical and rescue squads removed the injured and the dead while Breda, shivering, watched, until her legs finally gave way and the WVS woman lowered her into a sitting position on the ground.
Shortly thereafter, a warden arrived to question her. He squatted before her, notebook in hand.
‘Are your ears okay? Can you hear me?’ he asked.
‘Have you found them?’ Breda said.
‘Not just yet, Mrs …’
‘Hooper.’
The warden made a note of her name. ‘How many were in the house with you?’
‘Two. My mother an’ Billy.’
‘Billy’s your son?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Six.’
‘Your husband, Mrs Hooper? Where is he?’
‘He’s a fireman.’
‘Which station?’
‘Oxmoor Road.’
‘Now, think carefully, Mrs Hooper; where were you when the explosion occurred? What part of the house?’
They had given her water from a bottle but her mouth was dry again, her tongue as thick as old leather.
‘Shelter,’ she said. ‘Shelter under the stairs.’
The woman said, ‘Good, that’s good.’
‘How did you get out?’ the warden asked.
‘I wasn’t – I wasn’t with them.’ Breda tried to turn her head but her neck was so stiff that she couldn’t. ‘I was in the outhouse. In the toilet.’
‘The toilet!’ The warden glanced up at the woman. ‘You’re a lucky girl, I’d say, a lucky, lucky girl.’
Only then did it dawn on Breda that she was in her own back yard, that walls as well as houses had been blown down which was why everything seemed so unfamiliar.
‘I ’ad to pee,’ she said. ‘I really ’ad to.’
The warden inched closer. ‘When you came out of the lavatory and saw what had happened, what did you do?’
‘I heard ’im,’ Breda said. ‘Heard ’im cryin’ through the ’ole.’
‘What hole? The hole you dug?’
‘The hole Ronnie dug,’ Breda said. ‘The hole – a pipe, a vent for air. Got it off an old car. Bashed it into shape. I heard Billy cryin’ through the pipe.’
‘Are the men digging in the right place?’
‘I – I think so.’
She watched a man in oilskin leggings and a white-painted helmet pick his way over the debris. For an instant she thought it might be Ron, but he was too small to be Ron and when he spoke, spoke posh. The warden scrambled to his feet.
‘Anything, sir?’ he said. ‘Any sign?’
‘There is someone alive down there,’ the officer said. ‘No doubt about it. Is this the woman?’
‘Mrs Hooper, sir. Two in the shelter. Woman and child,’ the warden reported. ‘The shelter’s under the stairs. There’s an air vent – the husband put it in – where the lady heard the noise.’
‘Have you found them?’ Breda said again.
‘Rest assured we won’t give up until we do,’ the officer said. ‘Now, if you’re up to it, Mrs Hooper, I’d like you to come with me and poi
nt out the exact position of this air vent. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes,’ Breda said, ‘I can.’
The Princess Hospital in Glamis Road, north of the Highway, smelled of cooking, disinfectant and smoke from the smouldering warehouses that flanked the Shadwell basins. The building, which had so far escaped damage, had recently been brought into service as an emergency clinic, a way-station for children with serious injuries and a place of safety for one or two poor little beggars who had been found wandering amid the wreckage with no one to lay claim to them.
Superficial flesh wounds were dealt with by trained first-aiders, broken limbs by doctors and experienced nurses. Burns, head injuries, punctured eardrums, collapsed lungs, damaged organs and mute trauma required specialist attention and temporary wards on the first and second floors were crowded with beds filled with children who, as soon as transport could be found, would be whisked away to other hospitals.
The ground-floor receiving hall was awash with social workers, council officers and women from the voluntary agencies all endeavouring to wring names from children too young, too sick or too shocked to speak coherently and with distraught relatives ready to pounce on anyone who looked as if they might know what had become of Johnny, or Ernie or little Violet-Rose.
In the wards upstairs mothers, sisters and aunts squeezed into the narrow spaces between the beds, to the dismay of the nurses, and wept at the sight of their offspring wrapped in bandages or lying there, a tiny head on a huge pillow, unresponsive to everyone or anything.
On her release from the emergency room Breda had no difficulty in locating her son. During the short drive to Glamis Road in the WVS woman’s motorcar she had cradled him in her arms, a salvaged towel pressed to the wound on his head, and, on arrival at the Princess, had had enough sense to ensure that he had a nurse to take care of him before she’d allowed herself to be led away to have her hands dressed.
‘Gloves?’ Billy said as soon as he saw her. ‘You got gloves on, Mummy.’
The fiery pain had yielded to the cream with which the doctor had coated her torn fingers, aided by the tablets he’d given her before he began his examination. She felt woozy, as if she might fall asleep, but nagging anxiety about Billy had kept her alert. She was overwhelmingly relieved to find him sitting up in bed, dressed in a clean nightshirt three sizes too big for him and with a turban of bandages on his head.
The child in the next bed, a girl, had a huge pad of gauze plastered over one eye and whimpered incessantly while her mother, a broad-hipped woman much older than Breda, tried to distract her with a Pontefract cake. There was no visible sign of the occupant of the bed on the other side save a lump in the blankets and a sinister-looking tube attached to a rubber bag that hung between the cots like a polyp.
Breda edged carefully past the rubber bag and balanced an elbow against the metal bed head. She didn’t dare sit down in case she dozed off and didn’t dare take Billy in her arms for fear that the pain in her hands would flare up again.
‘Sore hands,’ she said. ‘What ’appened to you?’
‘I got stitches.’
‘How many?’
‘Lots. They cut all my ’air off.’
‘Never mind,’ said Breda. ‘It’ll soon grow in again.’
He too looked sleepy, more sleepy than surly. She was sure he had been crying but there was no sign of tears now. She had no intention of quizzing him about his ordeal, wedged under his grandma in the dark for several hours until the rescue squad broke through the muck and fished them both out.
She said, ‘Have you ’ad somethin’ to eat?’
‘Soup.’
‘Was it good?’
‘Yus. Rice an’ prunes for afters.’
‘You’d enjoy that,’ Breda said.
‘Yar, I did.’
‘Are you thirsty?’
‘Nah.’
Clinging to her broad-hipped mother, the little girl in the adjacent bed was wailing now. Billy did not look at her: Breda rather wished he would. He stared straight ahead at the commotion on the other side of the ward where two doctors in bloodstained coats were hauling a screen around the bed of a young boy whose mother, weeping, was being escorted towards the stairs.
‘It’s all right, darlin’. It’s all right,’ said Breda softly.
‘Where’s Daddy? I want Daddy.’
‘He’s at the fire station. He’ll be ’ere soon as ’e can.’
‘Where’s Grandma?’
‘Grandma’s fine. She’s gone ’ome.’
‘I want to go ’ome,’ Billy said.
Which, Breda realised, might be easier said than done.
With No. 12 Pitt Street destroyed and Stratton’s declared unsafe she had no notion where she would take Billy when he was released. Everything was gone, clothes, shoes, furniture, ration books – everything. Ronnie would sort it out, she told herself: Ronnie would find a place where they could all be together and sort it all out.
She had no idea where her ma was right now.
Last she’d seen of Nora she’d been drinking tea on the step of a first-aid post, scratched and bruised but all in one piece, which, a warden had told her, was a small miracle in itself. Where her father-in-law had spent the night didn’t concern her. Matt Hooper was an expert at taking caring of himself and would turn up when it suited him.
‘Mrs Hooper, is it?’
The doctor was a small, moon-faced chap in his sixties. He wore a soiled three-piece suit and looked, Breda thought, as if he hadn’t slept in a week.
‘Yes,’ Breda said. ‘Can I take ’im home?’
‘Not just yet,’ the doctor said. ‘How are you – Billy?’
‘Fine,’ Billy answered, scowling.
The doctor slipped into the slot by the bed and, dipping a hand into his coat pocket, produced a little pencil torch. He placed a hand lightly on Billy’s chest and shone the beam of the torch into Billy’s eyes.
‘Do you like sweets, Billy?’ the doctor said.
‘Yus.’
‘Have one on me, then,’ the doctor said and, fishing in his pocket again, brought out a large paper bag. ‘Just one now. No, make that two.’
Billy plucked two wine gums, one red and one black, from the bag. He put them both into his mouth. Breda was on the point of reminding him that manners make the man, or words to that effect, when Billy, a gum in each cheek, said, very clearly, ‘Fank you.’
‘Polish those off,’ the doctor said. ‘Then, if I were you, young man, I’d catch forty winks before supper time.’
Billy dipped the turban obediently. ‘Forty winks.’
The doctor slid out from the bedside and, motioning Breda to join him, stood facing her at the bed end. He spoke in a quiet, unhurried voice, as if he had all the time in the world to devote to her concerns.
‘He has a deep scalp wound, as you probably know, Mrs Hooper. Sixteen stitches. But the skull is intact; no fractures. He’s sedated right now but he’s going to have a whale of a headache for a day or two. We can give you something to ease the pain. However …’
‘However – what?’
‘He may have a touch of concussion.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A little bit of brain swelling. We’ve some patients waiting to transfer to our place in Sussex for recuperation. I can arrange for Billy to go with them, if you like.’
‘No,’ Breda said. ‘He stays with me.’
‘Do you have a place to stay?’ the doctor asked.
‘Yeah,’ Breda said without hesitation. ‘We can stay with my mother. Is Billy going to recover?’
‘Of course, he is,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll keep him here overnight and, assuming his condition doesn’t deteriorate, you can collect him tomorrow morning.’
‘What if there’s another air raid?’
‘We have a basement shelter here.’
Still sucking on the wine gums, Billy closed his eyes and appeared to be drifting off to sleep.
‘All right,’
Breda said. ‘I’ll leave ’im with you but you gotta promise me you won’t take ’im to Sussex.’
The doctor smiled. ‘No, Mrs Hooper. I promise.’
‘An’ if there’s another air raid …’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the doctor, suddenly losing patience, ‘if there’s an air raid we’ll see he’s safe. Now, if you’ve no other questions, may I suggest you say goodbye to your son and make way for the nurses get on with their jobs.’
She barely had time to thank him before he stepped across the aisle to the next bed and, stooping, peeped in under the blankets at the invisible patient.
Breda kissed Billy on the cheek and wiped a dribble of sticky saliva from his mouth with her bandaged hand.
He opened his eyes and scowled, drowsily.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Breda said. ‘Be a good boy now.’
‘Yus,’ Billy murmured, and closed his eyes again.
He had survived a German bomb and several hours buried underground and she would have him back with her tomorrow. She should have felt better than she did. Before she’d reached the head of the stairs, though, a million other things she had to do crowded in on her: find Nora, find Matt, find Ronnie and, first and foremost, rummage through the wreckage of No. 12 to see if she could find the cashbox.
She picked her way down the staircase, bandaged hands tucked into her armpits.
Light spilled across the floor of the reception hall like a great pool of milk. The front doors opened and closed. The shapes of the folk who milled about in the hall were like shadows against the light.
‘Breda,’ said a small voice in her ear. ‘Breda, dear.’
There, standing to one side of the door, was her mother, or some remnant of her mother, stooped and shrivelled, her face drawn into a thousand folds and creases, her eyes sunk back into her head.
Behind Nora, looming, was a man in uniform, a warden, Breda thought, or a copper who, stepping forward and taking off his helmet said, ‘Mrs Hooper? Mrs Ronald Hooper?’
‘Yeah,’ said Breda warily.
‘I’m afraid I have some very bad news.’
The Wayward Wife Page 21
