“Mister Nyet? Grim Grom?” Early trotted out the Soviet ambassador’s nicknames. “Well, you’ve given him something new to be grim about.”
“Good,” Truman said. “I’d sooner worry the other guy than let him worry me-every day of the week and twice on Sundays.”
–
Wilf Davies stuck his head into the Owl and Unicorn and stared in surprise at how empty it was. “Where’d all your Yanks go, Daisy?” he asked.
“Confined to base,” she answered morosely from behind the bar. “They’re on alert, and my trade’s in hospital because of it.”
Wilf stepped all the way in. His left hand was a hook; he’d lost the one he was born with on the Somme in 1916. Daisy Baxter had known him like that her whole life. She wouldn’t have had any idea what to make of him had he had two ordinary hands. She might not even have recognized him.
“I’ll buy me a pint of best bitter,” he said.
Daisy made as if to faint. “Catch me! Now I can holiday on the bloomin’ Riviera!”
“Well, if you don’t want my money, you don’t have to take it.” Wilf set a shilling and a smaller silver sixpence on the bar. The pint was one and three. When Daisy tried to give him his threepence change, he shook his head and slid the tiny coin back at her with the tip of the hook. A finger couldn’t have done it more neatly.
“You’re a gent, Wilf,” she said.
He snorted. “You need your head candled, to see if you’ve got any working parts in there. My missus knows better, she does. Daft old bugger, she calls me. Eh, it’s not as though she ain’t daft herself, mind. Would she have put up with me all these years if she weren’t?”
“Not likely,” Daisy answered. They smiled at each other. Wilf’s father had been the town blacksmith and farrier. Wilf still worked out of the same shop. He styled himself a blacksmith, though. People brought autos and lorries and tractors to Fakenham from as far away as Swaffham and Wells-next-to-the-sea, sometimes even from Norwich, to have him set them right.
He raised the pint in his good right hand. By the smile on his face, he started to give some kind of silly toast. But the smile slipped. What came out of his mouth was a simple, “Here’s to peace.”
Daisy drew herself half a pint. She lifted her little mug. “I have to drink that with you,” she said.
After a long pull at his bitter, Wilf said, “It’s a rum old world, ain’t it?”
“Too right, it is!” Daisy said.
“Last war not half a dozen years behind us, and here we’re staring another in the face,” he said. “So the Yanks are on alert, are they?”
“They are, and the RAF, too,” Daisy answered sadly. “So you can see why the snug’s not full to the brim.”
Wilf drank some more of his pint. “They fly the big bombers out of there,” he remarked. “If I was the Russians, that’s one of the places I’d want to knock flat, bugger me blind if it ain’t.”
“Bite your tongue!” Daisy told him. “If they do that, how much’d be left of Fakenham?”
“Probably not a lot, I reckon,” he said. “We were lucky the last go-round-not enough here to put the Luftwaffe’s wind up. But a bomb with them atom things inside…” He shook his head. “I don’t know much about that business, or want to. I’m thinking, though, the only question is whether there’d be enough left of us to bury.”
“You say the cheeriest things!” Daisy’d got to the bottom of her half-pint. She filled it again.
Wilf’s pint was empty, too. He slid it across the bar for his own refill. As Daisy worked the tap, he fished in his pocket for silver. He gave her another one and six, and again returned the change. “Sorry, ducks,” he said. “I’d like it better if I was talking moonshine, too. I wish I was. But that’s how it looks to me.”
Far overhead, a thin banshee whine resounded. That was a jet fighter high, high in the sky. In the last war, England and Russia had fought side by side. As soon as Hitler attacked Stalin, Churchill had declared that any foe of Hitler’s was a friend of his. That lasted till Hitler was beaten. No, a few months longer-till atomic fire blossomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the plane up there was watching out for enemies who’d been friends not so long before.
“They won’t come by day,” Wilf Davies predicted. “We’d spot ’em and shoot ’em down. No, they’ll sneak across the sea at night, the way the Jerries did after they saw they couldn’t knock us flat.”
“That’s how the Americans did it when they bombed China,” Daisy said. “That’s what the radio says, any road.”
“That’s how you’ve got to go about it nowadays. Even in the last war, didn’t the Yanks pay a beastly price for bombing Germany by day?” Wilf said. “And it’s worse now. The jets are so much faster than bombers, and that radar or whatever they call it lets you see in the nighttime almost like it’s noon.”
“You make me want to sleep down in the cellar tonight,” Daisy said. “Not that that’d do me half a farthing’s worth of good if the bomb came down on Fakenham, would it?”
“You could do worse,” Wilf said. “By all I hear, only way to live through one of them bombs is not to be there when it goes off. But if it blows a ways away, the cellar’s best chance you’ve got. Put some blankets on a bench and hope you see tomorrow morning. Pray, if you think it does any good. Me, I gave up on that rot a while ago.” He held out the hook. Catching a packet like that could easily put you off prayer for life.
Daisy wondered whether Tom had prayed, there inside his tank. If he had, it hadn’t done him any good. And if she prayed and a bomb came down on the little town here, that wouldn’t do her any good, either. She’d given up praying, anyhow, when her husband didn’t come back from the Continent. She hadn’t had much faith in prayer before the black day, and none was left now.
The flash of light and, four or five minutes later, the roar like the end of the world didn’t come from Sculthorpe. The runways and Nissen huts lay almost due west of Fakenham. The blast in the middle of the night was south and east of the hamlet.
Still in her nightgown, Daisy ran downstairs and out into the chilly darkness. She knew what a mushroom cloud looked like. Anyone who picked up magazines or watched newsreels at the cinema would. She’d never dreamt she would see one blazing in the night sky-a very black night in more ways than one, this February first-of East Anglia.
“Holy Mary Mother of God!” a neighbor choked out. “That’s Norwich, all gone to destruction!”
Sure enough, the direction was right. The bomb wouldn’t have come down anywhere else in this part of the country. Norwich was the only real city East Anglia boasted. If you needed a hospital, or treatment fancier than the local quack knew how to give, Norwich was where you went. If you needed to buy an auto, you went to Norwich. If you wanted a dress in last year’s style, Norwich was the place to get it. Local shops could be three or four years behind what they were wearing in London right now.
Norwich was…gone to destruction. Daisy’s Catholic neighbor had got that one spot on. What the countryside would do without the city, Daisy had no idea. She also had no idea whether other bombs were going off farther away than her senses reached, or whether the Russians would come back tomorrow or the next day to visit fire and destruction on Sculthorpe.
Another neighbor said, “This just turned into the exact middle of nowhere.”
Plenty of people already thought Fakenham was nowhere. They moved to Norwich or to London to have a better chance of making something of themselves. The ones who’d gone to Norwich made…part of that glowing, swelling cloud. Daisy burst into tears.
5
“Come on, you sorry turds! Get moving!” Sergeant Gergely shouted, sounding like any sergeant in the history of the world from the time of Julius Caesar.
Tibor Nagy shrugged without seeming to, trying to make the straps of his pack dig into his shoulders less. It was a losing effort. He’d known ahead of time it would be. He had an easy twenty-five kilos of stuff in there. Of course the straps would dig in.