Chapter 7 Joyce #2
Joyce didn’t really feel in a position to argue. They swapped places. ‘Very well, but if you get scared I can always . . .’ Her voice trailed off as Adela eased the van into gear and slid effortlessly off the kerb and twice round the library car park.
‘I learnt to drive on my uncle’s farm in Zduńska Wola when I was fourteen,’ she said as they waved goodbye to Annie and pulled out onto the road. ‘Farm machinery mainly, for bringing the crops in at harvest time, then I moved to lorries.’
‘Oh right,’ Joyce replied, feeling foolish. And to think she had imagined the girl would be a hindrance.
‘I’m so cross with myself,’ she muttered as Adela confidently steered the van along narrow country roads. ‘I read a manual on this from the library and have been preparing for weeks.’
Adela burst into laughter. ‘Der mentsch trakht un Gott lakht. Man plans, God laughs.’
Joyce looked at her blue eyes sparkling with amusement and felt a ripple of happiness. There she is, the real Adela Berkowicz.
‘Come on, clever clogs. Let’s get back to London.’
Joyce must have dozed off because she woke with a start as they approached the outskirts of London.
It was easy to navigate oneself. A slice of fiery crimson sky lit up the horizon.
A floating army of anti-aircraft barrage balloons hovered silently, their silhouettes stark against the fires that raged.
She stretched and glanced at Adela. Both her knuckles gripped the steering wheel and her jaw was clenched as she put her foot down and the mobile library gunned over Hammersmith Bridge. The river Thames flowed beneath them, quick and silvery as a snake.
‘Are you ready for Jerry?’ Joyce asked, nervously scanning the skies. ‘He’s nothing if not punctual.’
Adela nodded, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.
‘Library Cat!’ Joyce gasped. ‘Did we leave her food?’
‘I took her to Mitsy Bouvoir’s,’ Adela replied calmly.
Adela and that cat were inseparable, and Joyce sensed that they each relied on one another.
Once in the heart of London, a deep blanket of dark fell over them. The narrow, cobbled streets of West London were deserted, with most sensible folk already inside the safety of their shelter.
A bombers’ moon stole over the streets, a slice of silver light illuminating the mobile library as it bumped along the street in the direction of Camden. The silence was unnerving, and Joyce heard her pulse thudding in her ears.
‘Just hold off, Jerry, until we get home,’ Joyce murmured. ‘Just twenty more minutes. This silence is giving me the willies. Shall we sing a song?’
They swung under an archway, and a large building appeared at the end of the street.
‘It’s Buckingham Palace,’ Joyce exclaimed. ‘We’re on the Mall.’
The beauty of the palace, so dignified and solid, felt reassuring, as it did to know the king and queen were in there somewhere, refusing to leave London.
‘I like that their windows are taped up too,’ Adela remarked.
‘No greater leveller than war,’ Joyce remarked. ‘How about “God Save the King”?’ Adela giggled. ‘You’re, what is it you British say, barmy?’
‘Maybe.’
Joyce gave it both barrels as the library van wove its way past the Victoria Memorial, and Adela joined in.
Fuelled by the kind of foggy grey exhaustion that comes from a couple of hours’ sleep a night, both librarians lost themselves in uninhibited laughter.
They had made it past Holborn when they heard the unmistakable staccato throb of an aircraft overhead. The siren started up.
‘Here goes,’ Joyce said, her mood sobering.
The first bomb hit in the next street. They didn’t see it, but they felt the reverberations.
The whole road seemed to shudder and sigh.
A second later, a plate-glass window blew out of a grocer’s shop.
Adela slammed on the van breaks. Ten yards ahead, an ARP warden, distinctive in his wellington boots and steel helmet, turned as if in slow motion and put his hands out.
The plate glass sliced right through him. For a second, he remained upright, but as he fell, the two halves of his body separated. A scream caught in Joyce’s throat, and she turned away, her mind unable to reconcile the abject horror.
‘Pull over,’ she whimpered. ‘We have to get to a shelter.’
Adela muttered something in Polish and parked the van.
Her heart hammering, Joyce scanned the street ahead and spotted a white S painted on the side of a low brick building.
‘Street surface shelter. Let’s make for that.’
The pair flung open the library van doors and leapt out, the height of the drop no longer important.
And it was then that a most peculiar thing happened. Joyce couldn’t move. She’d heard the phrase ‘frozen in fear’, but never imagined it could actually happen.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the warden’s round face. Then a fleshy thud. And blood seeping over his wellington boots. She whimpered, holding on to the van door, as all the life seemed to drain from her body.
Adela, already running to the shelter, turned, her eyes widening in horror. First at Joyce, then at the shadow moving quickly and stealthily up the road behind her.
A Messerschmitt was flying low up the street, machine-gunning the cobbles.
‘Joyce,’ she screamed. ‘Run!’
Joyce tried to talk, to articulate whatever strange primal response had stolen her ability to move.
Everything felt foggy and slow. Distantly, she watched Adela’s skinny white legs pumping up the smoky street, her dark hair flowing wildly behind her.
Glass exploded all around Joyce. Shrapnel whizzed over her head, shattering the van’s side mirrors.
But then her hand was in Adela’s, and the young woman was dragging her to the shelter.
They ran, stumbling, the engine’s drone behind them growing closer.
Adela wrenched open the door to the shelter, and they flung themselves in, panting.
‘Ja pierdol?. That was close,’ Adela muttered.
‘Oh my goodness,’ Joyce cried, crashing back against the shelter door, her heart going like the clappers. ‘What’s wrong with me? I could have got us both killed.’
‘It’s shock,’ Adela replied. ‘But you’re safe now.’
Tumbling out of her thoughts was the realisation that the tables had well and truly been turned.
One month on from Adela’s panic at the start of the Blitz, now it was she keeping her calm.
There was, it seemed, a secret untapped well of strength inside that young woman. Mind you, wasn’t there in most women?
Their eyes adjusted to their surroundings.
Dusty, frightened faces stared out of the gloom.
Every resident within a square-mile radius seemed to be crammed in here, seated on the narrow wooden benches that lined the damp brick walls.
The street shelter was dark. Hurricane lamps threw out dim lighting, and Joyce could just make out an Elsan chemical closet, screened off by a canvas door in the corner. It stank of urine and fear.
‘Come on, shift up,’ chided a voice next to them. ‘There’s room for them to sit down if we all budge up.’
Joyce doubted that, but somehow, with much wriggling, the shelterers cleared a small space for them on the bench.
‘Thank you,’ Joyce whispered into the darkness.
‘Think nothing of it, ducks. Welcome to Hotel Bedlam.’
Joyce appreciated the woman’s attempt at levity and tried to join in with the shelterers’ laughter. ‘What’s that noise?’ she gasped.
The laughter stopped abruptly, and the shelter fell eerily silent. At first, all Joyce could hear was the sound of the shelterers breathing, but then there was an unearthly roaring and the benches began to shake.
The faces of her fellow shelterers seemed frozen, a ghostly white tableau of fear against the dirty brick wall.
The noise rose and fell. Wave after wave of enemy aircraft droned relentlessly overhead.
Explosion followed explosion. A high-pitched whistling, followed by an ominous silence, and then an almighty juddering whoosh that made Joyce feel as if her eyeballs might just be sucked clean out of their sockets.
‘How can they think this is a suitable place to shelter?’ raged a deep male voice. ‘This place ain’t fit for a dog, much less human habitation.’
Another male voice, loaded with vitriol, speared the darkness.
‘It’s all right for them, the establishment, holed up in their steel-lined dugouts or their country retreats.
I’m a labourer by trade, and rumour has it these street surface shelters are dodgy.
Penny-pinching authorities have substituted sand for concrete.
If we cop it, the roof’s gonna come down in one solid piece.
They’re all as bent as a dog’s hind leg! ’
‘Oi. Oi. Enough of this talk,’ chided the woman next to Joyce. ‘It’s not helping anyone. Let’s try a singsong, shall we? How about “Roll out the Barrel”?’
Her words were drowned out by a high-pitched whistling. The shelterers collectively held their breath, and Joyce buried herself close into Adela’s side. The bomb did not have their name on it . . . but the colossal boom seemed to lift the brick walls from their very foundations.
The febrile atmosphere was almost more than Joyce could bear. As much as she hated to sound unpatriotic, the man did have a point. Joyce was hard-pressed to see what protection the shelter actually offered, other than illusionary.
‘What about a story?’ she ventured. ‘Oh no, wait. The mobile library’s still empty.’
Adela’s mouth curled into a smile and she picked up her satchel from the floor.
‘I have a book.’ She pulled out The Secret Garden.
Joyce glanced at her, stunned. ‘Have you had that book—’
‘In my bag since the first night of the Blitz?’ she interrupted.
‘Yes, I never go anywhere without it.’ She smoothed her fingers lovingly over the cover before handing it to Joyce.
‘I told you, I never got to finish it before the Nazis invaded Poland. I won’t be parted from it now. It’s my talisman.’
‘Sounds like a pretty special book,’ the woman on the bench next to them remarked. ‘Would you read it?’