I put my hand on it to keep him from closing it. “War work,” I said bitterly. “What do you do, make sure you’re alone in the tunnel with them or go to see them in hospital afterwards?”
He let go of the door.
“Brilliant stroke, volunteering for the ARP,” I said. “Nobody’s going to suspect the noble air-raid warden, especially when he’s so good at locating casualties. And if some of those casualties die later, if somebody’s found dead on the street after a raid, well, it’s only to be expected. There’s a war on.”
The drone overhead got suddenly louder, and a whole shower of flares came down. The searchlights wheeled, trying to find the planes. Jack took hold of my arm.
“Get down,” he said, and tried to drag me into the doorway.
I shook his arm off. “I’d kill you if I could,” I said. “But I can’t, can I?” I waved my hand at the sky. “And neither can they. Your sort don’t die, do they?”
There was a long swish, and the rising scream. “I will kill you, though,” I shouted over it. “If you touch Vi or Mrs Lucy.”
“Mrs Lucy,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he said it with astonishment or contempt.
“Or Vi or any of the rest of them. I’ll drive a stake through your heart or whatever it takes,” I said, and the air fell apart.
There was a long sound like an enormous monster growling. It seemed to go on and on. I tried to put my hands over my ears, but I had to hang on to the road to keep from falling. The roar became a scream, and the pavement shook itself sharply, and I fell off.
“Are you all right?” Jack said.
I was sitting next to the lorry, which was on its side. The beams had spilled out the back. “Were we hit?” I said.
“No,” he said, but I already knew that, and before he had finished pulling me to my feet, I was running towards the post that we couldn’t see for the dust.
Mrs Lucy had told Nelson having everyone out on patrol would mean no one could be found in an emergency, but that was not true. They were all there within minutes, Swales and Morris and Violet, clattering up in her high heels, and Petersby. They ran up, one after the other, and then stopped and looked stupidly at the space that had been Mrs Lucy’s house, as if they couldn’t make out what it was.
“Where’s Renfrew?” Jack said.
“In Birmingham,” Vi said.
“He wasn’t here,” I explained. “He’s on sick leave.” I peered through the smoke and dust, trying to see their faces. “Where’s Twickenham?”
“Here,” he said.
“Where’s Mrs Lucy?” I said.
“Over here,” Jack said, and pointed down into the rubble.
We dug all night. Two different rescue squads came to help. They called down every half-hour, but there was no answer. Vi borrowed a light from somewhere, draped a blue headscarf over it, and set up as incident officer. An ambulance came, sat a while, left to go to another incident, came back. Nelson took over as incident officer, and Vi came back up to help. “Is she alive?” she asked.
“She’d better be,” I said, looking at Jack.
It began to mist. The planes came over again, dropping flares and incendiaries, but no one stopped work. Twickenham’s typewriter came up in the baskets, and one of Mrs Lucy’s wine glasses. It began to get light. Jack looked vaguely up at the sky.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.”
At around three Morris thought he heard something, and we stopped and called down, but there was no answer. The mist turned into a drizzle. At a half past four I shouted to Mrs Lucy, and she called back, from far underground, “I’m here.”
“Are you all right?” I shouted.
“My leg’s hurt. I think it’s broken,” she shouted, her voice calm. “I seem to be under the table.”
“Don’t worry,” I shouted. “We’re nearly there.”
The drizzle turned the plaster dust into a slippery, disgusting mess. We had to brace the tunnel repeatedly and cover it with a tarpaulin, and then it was too dark to see to dig. Swales lay above us, holding a pocket torch over our heads so we could see. The all-clear went.
“Jack!” Mrs Lucy called up.
“Yes!” I shouted.
“Was that the all-clear?”
“Yes,” I shouted. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you out soon now.”
“What time is it?”
It was too dark in the tunnel to see my watch. I made a guess. “A little after five.”
“Is Jack there?”
“Yes.”
“He mustn’t stay,” she said. “Tell him to go home.”
The rain stopped. We ran into one and then another of the oak beams that had reinforced the landing on the fourth floor and had to saw through them. Swales reported that Morris had called Nelson “a bloody murderer”. Vi brought us paper cups of tea.
We called down to Mrs Lucy, but there wasn’t any answer. “She’s probably dozed off,” Twickenham said, and the others nodded as if they believed him.
We could smell the gas long before we got to her, but Jack kept on digging, and like the others, I told myself that she was all right, that we would get to her in time.
She was not under the table after all, but under part of the pantry door. We had to call for a jack to get it off her. It took Morris a long time to come back with it, but it didn’t matter. She was lying perfectly straight, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Her left leg had been taken off at the knee. Jack knelt beside her and cradled her head.
“Keep your hands off her,” I said.
I made Swales come down and help get her out. Vi and Twickenham put her on the stretcher. Petersby went for the ambulance. “She was never a horrid person, you know,” Morris said. “Never.”
It began to rain again, the sky so dark it was impossible to tell whether the sun had come up yet or not. Swales brought a tarp to cover Mrs Lucy.
Petersby came back. “The ambulance has gone off again,” he said. “I’ve sent for the mortuary van, but they said they doubt they can be here before half past eight.”
I looked at Jack. He was standing over the tarp, his hands slackly at his sides. He looked worse than Renfrew ever had, impossibly tired, his face grey with wet plaster dust. “We’ll wait,” I said.
“There’s no point in all of us standing here in the rain for two hours,” Morris said. “I’ll wait here with the… I’ll wait here. Jack,” he turned to him, “go and report to Nelson.”
“I’ll do it,” Vi said. “Jack needs to get to his day job.”
“Is she up?” Nelson said. He clambered over the fourth-floor beams to where we were standing. “Is she dead?” He glared at Morris and then at my hat, and I wondered if he were going to reprimand me for the condition of my uniform.
“Which of you found her?” he demanded.
I looked at Jack. “Settle did,” I said. “He’s a regular wonder. He’s found six this week alone.”
Two days after Mrs Lucy’s funeral, a memo came through from Civil Defence transferring Jack to Nelson’s post, and I got my official notice to report for duty. I was sent to basic training and then on to Portsmouth. Vi sent me food packets, and Twickenham posted me copies of his Twitterings.
The post had relocated across the street from the butcher’s in a house belonging to a Miss Arthur, who had subsequently joined the post. “Miss Arthur loves knitting and flower arranging and will make a valuable addition to our brave little band,” Twickenham had written. Vi had got engaged to a pilot in the RAF. Hitler had bombed Birmingham. Jack, in Nelson’s post now, had saved sixteen people in one week, a record for the ARP.
After two weeks I was shipped to North Africa, out of the reach of the mails. When I finally got Morris’s letter, it was three months old. Jack had been killed while rescuing a child at an incident. A delayed-action bomb had fallen nearby, but “that bloody murderer Nelson” had refused to allow the rescue squad to evacuate. The DA had gone off, the tunnel Jack was working in had collapsed, and he’d been killed. They had got the child out, though, and she was unhurt except for a few cuts.