Chapter 11 - Joyce #3
‘An angel is like you, and you are like an angel.’
She breathed out. It was him.
He gazed back at her as if she’d thrown a bowl of stars into the heavens above, his silver eyes dancing.
Joyce lowered her lashes, overwhelmed and fast falling under the spell of this beautiful man.
She stood up and began walking around the curve of the whispering gallery, one hand tracing the cool stone balcony edge, only to find him walking towards her. They met in the middle.
Maybe it was the senseless loss, or some primal desire to seek comfort in the aftermath of violence, but her mouth sought his.
He responded instantly, crushing his lips to hers, and she felt her head swim at the intensity of his kiss.
It was all happening fast, but what did any of it matter?
It was wartime. Life had to be lived at the double.
Harry tangled his hands through her hair, scattering hairpins, and kissed slowly down her neck to her collarbone, as snow flurries danced outside the grand cathedral. Finally, they both pulled back, breathless. The darkness settled around them like a sigh.
They both spoke at once.
‘You are beautiful—’
‘I don’t usually—’
He grinned.
‘Kiss men you barely know in the whispering gallery?’
She nodded. This war was turning her into someone she barely recognised.
Back outside the cathedral, the snow had stopped falling, but it was still perishingly cold.
‘Quick, jump in,’ Harry grinned, opening the car door. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
Darkness had now fallen across London. An enormous glowing moon drenched the city. Hundreds of crooked rooftops and church spires slumbered in the silvered night.
Harry put the key in the ignition, but seemed reluctant to leave.
‘Thank you for this afternoon,’ Joyce breathed, shivering as her breath hung like smoke in the car’s interior. ‘I needed it.’
‘Sometimes we just need a different perspective on life,’ Harry said, taking off his coat and draping it around her shoulders.
Then he leaned over and kissed her again.
Wrapped in the warmth of his coat, his lips brushing hers, she wondered if she’d ever felt such a perfect, complete happiness.
He tasted sweet and smoky, and smelt like bonfires at autumn.
She wanted to scrunch up this feeling in her palm, hold it close for ever.
And then the siren started. Harry tensed and drew back.
‘Jerry couldn’t allow me one bleedin’ night . . .’
They watched as, in the distance, the Luftwaffe began appearing, filling the skies like angry darting wasps.
‘I ought to . . .’
Joyce clutched his arm.
‘It’s your night off. Please, Harry. I know I’m being selfish, but why don’t you come back to the shelter with me? Allow someone else to do the heavy lifting for a change . . .’ Her words turned to dust when she saw his expression.
Horror crept up her spine as she followed his gaze.
Planes. Hundreds upon hundreds of them crowding the skies over St Paul’s.
‘They’ve come mob-handed tonight,’ he muttered.
Puffs of pinkish-white smoke soon rose up.
Into the dark, shadowed spaces below them, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell, like apples from a shaken tree.
They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pinpoints of dazzling white.
Soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white centre.
‘The conditions are perfect,’ Harry growled. ‘Full moon. Strong westerly wind. Low ebb tide on the Thames; they’ll never fetch enough water to cope with the fires that lot’ll start.’
As he spoke, they watched a line of crimson bleed over the rooftops. All of the neighbourhood around St Paul’s was a conflagration of leaping flame. Smoke billowed upwards in an enormous mushrooming cloud, until all that was visible was the cathedral dome.
Joyce imagined Elfreda, Gerald and the rest of the Watch running for dear life along the narrow passageways, metal buckets clanking off stone walls, peering into every dark space to find the ticking time bombs that could reduce the cathedral to dust.
Joyce and Harry watched in horror as an enormous barrage balloon drifted overhead, engulfed in flames.
‘I’ve got to get you out of here,’ he rasped over the noise, gunning the engine.
He tore back across London in silence, his eyes fixed on the road. Joyce sensed a part of him had already left, his body bracing for whatever the long night ahead held.
Harry drove them back to Swiss Cottage, or rather tried to.
So many roads were closed off, with fire crews battling leaping sheets of fire.
The smoke was so impenetrable, it was hard to see where they were going.
They were just passing the docks when a figure leapt in front of the car. Harry slammed on the brakes.
He wound down the window. ‘I nearly killed you, you fool.’
‘Sorry, guv’. But we need help! There’s a school-load of women and children who need urgent evacuation.’
‘Where are we?’
‘South Hallsville School in Agate Street, Canning Town. It’s now a rest centre.’ He glanced back nervously. ‘Well, more of an impromptu shelter, actually.’
‘Wait here, Joyce,’ Harry ordered, turning off the engine.
‘No chance. I’m coming with you,’ she rasped, unbuckling her seatbelt.
‘Anyone tell you you’re a very determined lady?’ he muttered, gripping her hand.
Together they followed the man through a deserted school playground and into the school hall. The second the door opened, noise and heat rushed over them. It was bedlam.
‘Just stay here, Joyce, please. I’m going to see if I can find out who’s in charge.’
His broad shoulders were soon sucked into the seething crowd.
Joyce looked about, swallowing down her fear. WVS volunteers were doing what they could to provide tea and comfort, but they were horrendously overstretched. The large school hall, now operating as a rest centre, was packed to the rafters.
There wasn’t a spare patch of floor to be found in the hall, with what looked like huge family groups and neighbourhoods staking out territories.
Babies grizzling. Old folk weeping. Children quarrelling.
So many bombed-out families sitting in just their nightclothes, faces and arms cut to ribbons, blackened feet shoeless and bleeding.
One poor woman in nothing but a nightie was perched on a suitcase, caked in blood, attempting to nurse a tiny newborn baby.
‘Awful, isn’t it? It’s the same upstairs and in the basement too,’ remarked a WVS lady over the noise. ‘Canning Town’s been badly bombed. People have been arriving all evening.’
‘What’s going to happen to them?’ Joyce asked.
‘Hopefully coaches are on their way to take them to the safety zones in Kent,’ the WVS worker replied, before hurrying off.
Hopefully?
Next to Joyce, a baby was bawling at the top of his lungs. His poor mother was juggling him while attempting to calm a fractious toddler clinging to her ankles.
‘Here, let me help,’ Joyce said.
‘Would you? It means I can give the nipper a feed.’
Joyce bent down until she was eye level with the toddler. ‘Hello, my love. I’m Joyce.’
He stared at her suspiciously. She felt in her pocket and found a leftover piece of squashed bread pudding from the library clear-up.
‘Would you like this?’ He nodded and grasped the piece of stodgy cake in a chubby fist, settling down to eat.
‘Thanks. I thought my skull was gonna split in two,’ said his mother, leaning back against a wall while her baby breastfed.
‘S’pect you think I’m selfish, don’cha? Not sending my kiddies away to the countryside.’
Joyce shook her head. ‘No. I’m not a mother, so I’m in no position to judge you.’
‘You’re a rarity. I had a woman spit on me in the street last week when she saw my pram.’
Tears filled her exhausted eyes.
‘There ain’t a day goes by when I don’t wrestle with my decision, but in the finish, I just can’t be parted from them.’ She nuzzled the top of the baby’s head. ‘It’d be easier to scoop out my heart than give them over to a stranger.’
‘God bless you. What’s your name?’
‘Jean. Jean Farley.’
Harry appeared at her side. ‘We have to go, Joyce. Quickly now. I’ll explain in the car.’
‘Bye, Jean,’ Joyce said, standing up. ‘Hope you and your kiddies get to safety soon.’
As they walked back across the school playground, Joyce’s head spun.
Dore had confided in her that 1,360 children had been killed or wounded in October alone in the bombings, most of them in London.
But she had meant what she said. Who was she to sit in judgement of these women?
She wasn’t a mother. She would never presume to untangle the complicated ramifications of sending your child to live with a stranger.
For many of these women here, desperately soothing fractious children, holding your child close was just about the only thing that made sense in an insane world.
In the car, Harry turned to her, his face grave.
‘I’m going to drop you at the Tube then I have to get to the council offices in West Ham.
Apparently a messenger has been dispatched to request urgent evacuation for those poor folk, but I need to get down there and warn them how critical things are. ’
They drove in silence, Harry a tightly coiled spring. Outside Swiss Cottage Tube, he pulled over.
She reached over and framed his face in her hands, gazing into those impossibly silver eyes.
‘Stay safe, Harry.’
He smiled back wearily, his face softening.
‘You too. I’m falling for you, Joyce Kindred.’
And I you, she thought. She wanted to tell him how no one had ever read her poetry or kissed her like that, but there wasn’t time.
Instead, Joyce jumped out the car and watched as he gunned off down the road, in the direction of the eerie orange haze.
She walked down the out-of-use escalator into the darkness of her subterranean home, pondering on the peculiarity of the world. Her life was such a dichotomy. Romance and danger, all wrapped up in the same breathless heartbeat.
Dore was rushing up the other side of the escalator in a tin hat, with a bucket of sand and a stirrup pump.
‘Fire-watching on the station roof,’ he puffed, by way of explanation. ‘Joyce. You must get down the tunnels without delay.’
‘I shall, but please, Dore, I’ve just come from the most frightful scene. South Hallsville School in the docks is full to bursting with women and children. Many are injured and it’s desperate down there.’
‘I’ll make some calls, my dear, see what I can do. Now get to safety, please.’
At the bottom of the escalator, Adela was waiting for her. Joyce took one look at her face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘My sister and parents. They’ve been taken by the Nazis!’
‘What . . . How can you possibly know that?’
She thrust a piece of paper into Joyce’s hand.
‘It’s a Red Cross telegram from Dorotha’s boss at the library in ?ód?. Read it.’
As Joyce started to read, she felt like a balloon that had slipped from its string and was floating untethered.
‘Family moved. Address unknown.’ She swallowed.
‘But that doesn’t mean . . .’
‘L-library now in German hands,’ Adela stammered, jabbing a finger at the final line in the telegram. ‘He’s talking about my family.’