To Daisy Baxter, Norwich had always been the city. It was the one she could easily get to. It was her window on a wider, brighter, more cosmopolitan life than the one she lived in her hamlet near the sea.
Or rather, it had been. These days, Norwich was a synonym for hell on earth, in the most literal sense of the words. No one knew how many had died there, not to the closest ten thousand. No one knew how many were hurt: burned by fire from the skies, poisoned by radiation, or simply crushed or mangled as they would have been in an ordinary explosion. The word the BBC most often used about the devastation was unimaginable.
Daisy didn’t want to imagine it. She wanted to see for herself what the Russians had visited on Norwich. She wanted to see what the enormous American bombers at Sculthorpe might visit on Russia. It was morbid curiosity. She understood that.
She also understood seeing any more than they showed in the newspaper pictures wouldn’t be easy. Never mind that she’d lose business, because she was sure getting there and back would take all day. She was willing to sacrifice the day’s trade. An atom bomb didn’t go off in your neighborhood every day-and a bloody good thing it didn’t, too.
But she feared she might not be able to see what she wanted to see any which way. The Army and Scotland Yard had thrown a cordon around Norwich. That was partly to help them deal with the devastation in the sealed-off area. And it was partly to keep away would-be sightseers like Daisy.
Since the bomb fell, the bus ran only half as often. No wonder: now the route ended at Bawdeswell. Far fewer people cared about going there than had wanted or needed to go to Norwich. Bawdeswell had nothing you couldn’t find in any other hamlet. And, no doubt, the road from Bawdeswell to Norwich would be blocked.
But there was more than one way to kill a cat. Instead of climbing on the bus, Daisy got on her bicycle and pedaled out of Fakenham early in the morning. It was chilly but not freezing, and drizzling but not really raining. If she waited for better weather, she might still be waiting months from now. Some of the grass was greening up. Spring still lay three weeks ahead, but you could tell it was coming.
Before long, she left the main road. A spiderweb of lesser ways still bound the countryside together. She went down one-lane paved roads that saw an auto or two a week, down graveled tracks, and down dirt paths that might have been shaped by flocks of sheep when the Romans still ruled Britain.
A carrion crow scolded her from an oak still bare-branched. “Hush, you,” she told it. “Haven’t you had your fill of dead meat and then some farther east?” Instead of answering, the big-beaked black bird took wing.
Hamlets that made Bawdeswell seem like London by comparison dotted the countryside: places with names like Stibbard and Themelthorpe and Salle. Salle was as close to Norwich as Bawdeswell was. She didn’t see any soldiers when she rode past it.
A rabbit darted across the road. A split second later, so did a fox, red as a flame. The rabbit dove into some bushes. The fox went right after it. Daisy didn’t wait to see whether the fox came out with its jaws clamped on the rabbit.
When she got within eight or nine miles of Norwich, she saw that the farmhouses she rode past stood empty. The bomb couldn’t have killed from so far away…could it? She hoped it was only-only! — that the soldiers and police had made everyone so close to the blast evacuate. But the breeze blew from the east, and it carried an odor-a faint odor, but unmistakable-of meat left out too long.
A black-and-white cat trotted toward her when she stopped to look at one of the abandoned houses. It meowed and flopped down and rolled over and did everything but hold up a PLEASE TAKE ME WITH YOU! sign. It didn’t know anything about bombs or why its people had gone away. Tears stung at her eyes as she started riding again.
She hadn’t got too much farther before she started seeing damage: broken windows, things knocked helter-skelter, scorched paint on the Norwich-facing sides of buildings, cattle and sheep dead and bloated in the fields. Then she came round a corner-and there were two soldiers getting out of an American-made jeep.
Whether she was more startled or they were wasn’t easy to guess. One of them started to point his Sten gun at her, then decided she wasn’t dangerous and lowered it. “What are you doing here?” he growled. By his accent, he was a Geordie, from Sunderland or Newcastle or one of the smaller towns up in the northeast.
“I’m out for a ride, of course,” she said, which was true enough but didn’t say how far she’d come.
The other soldier had a captain’s pips on his shoulder straps. “They’re supposed to have cleared everybody out of this part of the country,” he said.
“Nobody told me to leave,” Daisy said. That was also true, although, again, it didn’t address why.
“Well, ma’am, I’m telling you right now,” the captain said. That ma’am put Daisy’s back up. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than the officer. Uncaring, he went on, “You need to get back beyond Bawdeswell. If I tell you to go there, will you?”
“Of course.” Daisy lied through her teeth then.
“Hrmm.” The pause for thought meant the captain knew she was lying. Damn! she thought. He turned to the soldier with the submachine gun. “Simpkins!”
“Sir!”
“Why don’t you throw the lady’s bicycle in the back of the jeep and take her over to Bawdeswell? I can poke about here till you get back.”
“Yes, sir!” Simpkins replied. When an officer said Why don’t you…? he was giving an order. He was just being polite about it. Simpkins nodded to Daisy. “Come along with me, then.”
She did, however little she wanted to. After she got off the bicycle, the soldier lifted it into the jeep with effortless strength. Then he gestured invitingly for her to climb aboard. That was when she really noticed the passenger’s seat was on the right side. “It’s got left-hand drive,” she said in surprise.
“Aye, it does,” the Geordie answered. “The Yanks build ’em that way, on account of they drive on t’wrong side o’ t’road.”
“How do you like it?” Daisy asked.
Simpkins shrugged broad shoulders. “Took a bit o’ gettin’ used to-you see things from funny angles. But it’s all right now.” As if to prove as much, he put the jeep in gear and made for the main road from Norwich to Bawdeswell.
As he turned on to that wider-not wide, but wider-road, Daisy asked, “How close have you gone to the center of Norwich? How bad are things there?”
“Not good, and that’s for certain.” With his accent, the last word came out sartin. Shaking his head, he went on, “Some o’ the ground right under where it blew, it’s all fused to glass, like. Not much left in the way o’ buildin’s. A few, you can see where they used to be and even some o’ what they used to be, but most of ’em’s just…gone. Kaput. You know what kaput is?”
“Oh, yes,” Daisy answered. “My husband was a tankman. He picked that up from Jerry prisoners.”
“Was?” Simpkins heard the past tense.
“Was,” Daisy repeated. “Not long before the war ended, his tank got hit, and that-was the end of that, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry,” the soldier said. “A cousin o’ mine, he didn’t come home, neither. I wasn’t old enough to take the King’s shilling, or it could’ve been me. If your luck’s out, it’s out, that’s all.”
“Too right, it is,” Daisy said bleakly. They didn’t say much more till he stopped the jeep in Bawdeswell. He gave her the bicycle. She got on and started back to Fakenham. It was well past noon by then. B-29s rumbled by low overhead, eastbound out of Sculthorpe. Daisy wondered where they’d be by the time darkness fell.
–
Harry Truman studied the situation map thumbtacked to a bulletin board in a White House conference room. Red pins in western Germany, in Austria, and in northeastern Italy made the map look as if it had come down with a bad case of the measles. The more he looked, the worse things seemed.