Looking in one misted window, I found myself staring into a baby-goods store. Its sole display was a wooden cot, painted bright pink for a girl and my eyes traced the delicate flowers etched up its sides. But then the migraine that I had felt brewing all morning seemed to worsen and I knew that I needed to sit down and let it pass. I thought of the little café around the corner where the coffee was ersatz but the staff were friendly and didn’t bother you if you ordered something small from time to time. The owner was a plump and matronly woman who seemed to treat customers like members of her family who had dropped by for a chat, and she served little scones for five new pence, which was good value. ‘All I can charge, love,’ she had told me, although I didn’t think that was true. They were edible too, unlike what was offered by some of the places around there. Or Nick’s surgery wasn’t far – I could go there instead and sit in one of the soft armchairs and he would tell me a silly joke he had heard that day, busying himself while I let the pain subside.
‘Are you just going to stand there?’
I looked around to see a cheaply dressed woman my own age staring at me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, my cheeks flushing red as I stepped aside to let her enter the shop. ‘Miles away.’
‘Hard enough as it is,’ she muttered. ‘Probably nothing in there anyhow.’
‘Oh, I’m sure there will be.’
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘And you would know all about it, would you?’
‘I mean–’
‘Don’t matter what you mean, do it?’
She pushed past me into the store and I blushed again, embarrassed, before hurriedly edging into the flow of muffled people descending the steps into Oxford Circus Tube Station.
The concourse wasn’t too bad, but when I got to the Oxaloo Line platform I found it so packed that I thought I would never get on the train, and the closeness of the coughing bodies and lack of air made my head worse. As the carriages came to a halt, we all shoved in, staring straight ahead, not speaking to each other, and I only just managed to get on. While we shuffled around, my eyes fell on a poster above the seats, warning of the threat of infiltration, showing tunnels burrowing from the DUK land – everything north of a line stretching from Bristol to Norfolk, plus the north-western quarter of London – into our Republic of Great Britain, covering southern England and the rest of the capital. Constant vigilance was needed, it said. Then a man pushed in front of me, blocking my view of the poster.
The train started up and rattled away from the now-deserted platform. They say that during the Blitz, the men and women who used the Underground as a shelter at night would just take themselves off to quiet corners without even knowing each other’s names. No doubt, thinking you might get blown apart as soon as you set foot above ground makes you realize that there are some things you don’t want to go to your grave never having tried. And I think it was seen as patriotic too if it were some young man being sent to the front who might never come back – to give him something to smile about when he was on the ship going over.
Not many did come back, of course, and I knew some of those who didn’t: boys I had grown up with and would never see again except in my mind’s eye. I had held those sickness-inducing photographs of the D-Day beaches, though – countless bodies with their heads or limbs missing. Tens of thousands of corpses floating in the water. The Germans had taken a lot of images to celebrate how victorious they had been over us. Then, after the Red Army had, in their turn, defeated the Germans, we had been shown those images to learn how lucky we had been that the Soviets had come to our aid. Either way, the photographs had left me feeling ill for a very long time.
After forcing my way out at Waterloo, I passed the broken remains of Westminster Bridge that invited you to step off the bricks and into the river. That’s if you could somehow scale the electrified wire and stay hidden from the guard towers and their searchlights, of course. Everyone had heard of someone who had managed it, but the stories were always second-hand, and there was a line of simple white crosses on the other side for those who had slipped silently into the black water at night and tried without success.
As I walked, the paving stones echoed to the sound of Comrade Blunt’s daily radio address leaking from a government building. He was speaking of the new day ahead of us: a day of peace and plenty. My footsteps rang in unison with his words as I passed the gloomy block, followed by sparsely stocked grocery shops, a pub or two, and little tobacconists.
And then, finally, Nick’s surgery shifted into view, at the top of one of the old Georgian blocks on the south side of the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament.
From his consulting room, you could see Big Ben – or what was left of it. The glass had been smashed out of the four clock faces, leaving ugly dark holes like blinded eyes. Apparently the Luftwaffe had shot them to pieces as they scented victory over us and there was no more RAF to stop them – it must have been nothing but sport to them then. Below the tower, most of the Palace of Westminster still stood, but the far end had been turned to rubble in the final battle and no one had rebuilt it. And, in front of it all, the American ‘protection troops’ stood along the river with their rifles pointing at us. It was that sight, more than any other, I think, that seemed to sum up for me what extremities our nation had been forced into.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Cawson,’ Mr Paine, the ageing porter, greeted me from his chair just inside the building entrance.
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Smog’s heavy today.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, doing my best to be friendly despite the thudding pain in my head. He touched his cap in salute and I smiled at his lovely old-fashioned manners. I hoped some things from the past would stay with us.
‘Would you like a cup of tea to warm the bones?’ He reached into a leather bag and took out a flask. ‘My sister sends me honey from her own bees. It’s nicer than the daily teaspoon of sugar. Better for you too.’
‘Yes it is,’ I said happily. ‘That would be very nice.’ I loved the taste of honey and you didn’t see it all that often.
‘Good.’ He pulled another chair over and poured warm nut-brown tea into a cup. The tip of his tongue pushed between his lips as he concentrated, spooning bright yellow mounds from a jar to the cup and stirring five times in each direction. He took such pains with it.
‘Thank you. And you must call me Jane.’ I tasted the brew. He was right, the rich honey made it taste far better than the few grains of sugar we were allotted each day.
‘And I’m Albert.’ He blew on his own cup. ‘My grand-daughter’s called Jane as it happens.’ He put his hand inside his jacket and drew out a wallet of photographs. There was one of a little girl playing the violin. She had the same tongue-between-the-lips expression of concentration.
‘She looks very good at that.’
‘She is. She’s going to one of the special music schools soon.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll love it there. I’m a teacher and someone I used to work with is at one of those schools now. She says they’re wonderful – the children really flourish. I rather wish I were that age again so I could keep up my clarinet practice; I was never conscientious enough.’
He chuckled. ‘Children. They never change.’