Bridget always said it was bad luck to look at the moon through glass and Ursula let the blind fall back into place and closed the curtains tightly.
Ralph was casual with his safety. After Dunkirk, he said, he felt proofed against sudden violent death. It seemed to Ursula that in a time of war, when one was surrounded by an immense amount of sudden violent death, the odds were quite changed and it was impossible to be protected from anything.
As she knew it would, the caterwauling commenced, followed swiftly by the guns in Hyde Park starting up and the noise of the first bombs, over the docks again by the sound of it. She was galvanized into action, snatching her torch from the hook beside the front door where it lived like a holy relic, picking up her book, also kept by the door. It was her ‘shelter book’ – Du côté de chez Swann. Now that the war looked as if it were going to last for ever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.
The planes whined overhead and then she heard the fearsome swish of a bomb descending and then a walloping thump! as it landed somewhere nearby. Sometimes an explosion sounded much closer than it actually was. (How quickly one acquired new knowledge in the most unlikely subjects.) She looked for her shelter suit. She was wearing a rather flimsy dress considering the season and it was horribly cold and damp in the cellar. The shelter suit had been bought by Sylvie, up in town for the day not long before the bombing started. They had gone for a stroll along Piccadilly and Sylvie had spotted an advertisement in Simpson’s window for ‘tailored shelter suits’ and insisted that they go in and try them on. Ursula couldn’t imagine her mother in a shelter, let alone a shelter suit, but it was clearly a garment, a uniform even, that attracted Sylvie. ‘It’ll be rather good for mucking out hens,’ she said and bought them one each.
The next massive bang had an urgency to it and Ursula abandoned her search for the dratted suit and instead she grabbed the blanket of woollen squares crocheted by Bridget. (‘I was going to parcel it up and send it off to the Red Cross,’ Bridget had written in her round schoolgirl’s hand, ‘but then I thought you might need it more.’
‘You see, even within my own family I have the status of a refugee,’ Ursula wrote to Pamela.)
She passed the Nesbit sisters on the stairs. ‘Ooh, bad luck, Miss Todd,’ Lavinia giggled. ‘Crossing on the stairs, you know.’
Ursula was going down, the sisters were coming up. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said, rather pointlessly.
‘I forgot my knitting,’ Lavinia said. She was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. ‘She’s knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s so cold in their flat.’ Ursula wondered how many more knitted garments could be applied to the poor child before it resembled a sheep. Not a lamb. Nothing lamb-like about the Appleyard infant. Emil, she reminded herself.
‘Well, do hurry, won’t you?’ she said.
‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,’ Mr Miller said as they trooped, one by one, into the cellar. A ragtag assortment of chairs and temporary bedding filled the dank space. There were two ancient army camp beds that Mr Miller had scrounged from somewhere and on which the Nesbits were persuaded to rest their elderly bones. In the current absence of either sister, Billy the dog had installed himself on one of them. There was also a small spirit stove and an Aladdin paraffin stove, both of which seemed to Ursula extraordinarily dangerous items to be in such proximity when people were dropping bombs on you. (The Millers were effortlessly sanguine in the face of jeopardy.)
The roll-call was almost complete – Mrs Appleyard and Emil, the queer fish Mr Bentley, Miss Hartnell and the full complement of Millers. Mrs Miller voiced her concern for the whereabouts of the Nesbits and Mr Miller volunteered to go and hurry them up (‘ruddy knitting and all’) but just then a tremendous explosion rocked the cellar. Ursula felt the foundations trembling as the blast moved through the earth beneath her. Obedient to Hugh’s directive, she dropped to the floor with her hands over her head, grabbing the nearest of the smaller Miller boys (‘Oi, get your hands off me!’) on the way down. She crouched awkwardly over him but he wriggled away from her.
All went quiet.
‘That wasn’t our house,’ the boy said dismissively, swaggering a little to restore his wounded male dignity.
Mrs Appleyard had also thrown herself to the floor, the baby soft-shelled beneath her. Mrs Miller had clutched not one of her brood but the old Farrah’s Harrogate toffee tin that contained her savings and insurance policies.
Mr Bentley, his voice sounding a quaver higher than normal, asked, ‘Was that us?’ No, thought Ursula, we would be dead if it had been. She sat down again on one of the rickety bentwood chairs provided by Mr Miller. She could feel her heart, too loud. She began to shiver and wrapped herself in Bridget’s crochet.
‘Nah, the boy’s right,’ Mr Miller said, ‘that sounded like Essex Villas.’ Mr Miller always professed to know where the bombs were dropping. Surprisingly, he was often correct. All of the Millers were adept at wartime language as well as wartime spirit. They could all take it. (‘And we can give it out too, can’t we?’ Pamela wrote. ‘You would think we had no blood on our hands.’)
‘The backbone of England, no doubt,’ Sylvie said to Ursula on first (and last) acquaintance with them. Mrs Miller had invited Sylvie down to her kitchen for a cup of tea but Sylvie was still cross at the state of Ursula’s curtains and rugs, for which she blamed Mrs Miller, under the apprehension that she was the landlady and not merely another renter. (She was deaf to Ursula’s explanations.) Sylvie behaved as though she were a duchess visiting the cottage of one of her rustic tenants. Ursula imagined Mrs Miller later saying to Mr Miller, ‘Hoity-toity, that one.’
Up above, the racket of a steady bombardment was now under way, they could hear the timpani of the big bombs, the whistling of shells and the thunder of a nearby mobile artillery unit. Every now and then the foundations of the cellar shook with a crump and thump and bump as the bombs hammered down on the city. Emil howled, Billy the dog howled, a couple of the smallest Millers howled. All in discord with each other, an unwelcome counterpoint to the Donner und Blitzen of the Luftwaffe. A terrible, endless storm. Despair behind, and death before.
‘Crikey, old Fritz is really trying to put the wind up us tonight,’ Mr Miller said, calmly adjusting a lamp for all the world as if they were on a camping trip. He was responsible for morale in the cellar. Like Hugh, he had lived through the trenches and claimed that he was impervious to threats from Jerry. There was a whole club of them, Crighton, Ralph, Mr Miller, even Hugh, who had undergone their ordeal by fire and mud and water and who presumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
‘What’s old Fritz up to, eh?’ he said soothingly to one of the smaller, more frightened children. ‘Trying to stop me getting my beauty sleep?’ The Germans always came singularly for Mr Miller in the person of Fritz and Jerry, Otto, Hermann, Hans, sometimes Adolf himself was four miles up dropping his high explosive.
Mrs Miller (Dolly), an embodiment of the triumph of experience over hope (unlike her spouse), was doling out ‘refreshments’ of tea, cocoa, biscuits and bread and margarine. The Millers, a family of generous morals, were never short of rations thanks to Renee, their eldest daughter, who had ‘connections’. Renee was eighteen and fully formed in every way and seemed to be a girl of most easy virtue. Miss Hartnell made it clear that she found Renee very wanting indeed although she was not averse to sharing in the provender that she brought home. Ursula got the impression that one of the smaller Miller children was actually Renee’s rather than Mrs Miller’s and had, in a pragmatic way, simply been absorbed into the family pool.