Chapter 12 - Joyce
Joyce
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
War has wiped out the north–south divide. Hitler didn’t forget us. Now gone: Coventry cathedral, our sixteenth-century Palace Yard, hundreds of shops, homes, and my library. Joyce, Clara and Jo, I can look you in the eye and say, ‘I understand’.
I’ve lost so much, but not my status as a librarian.
Now it’s my turn to fulfil our promise.
When people can’t get to the books, we deliver books to the people!
Tomorrow, I start delivering books from the smaller regional libraries on my bike.
Be of stout heart, SSL.
Your Beth
The evening of the twenty-ninth and early hours of the thirtieth of December 1940 raged on in a firestorm of blood, smoke and chaos.
News of the unparalleled destruction had filtered down to the bowels of the Earth.
Jerry hadn’t just hit the docks, but also the square mile of the City of London, with barbaric ferocity.
In just three hours, tons of high explosives and thousands upon thousands of incendiaries had been dropped on the City, many of which had landed on or around St Paul’s Cathedral.
Thanks to the efforts of the Watch, who’d extinguished the incendiaries before they’d erupted into fires, the mighty cathedral and its iconic dome lived to see another day.
Joyce woke to find Adela already dressed and cleaning her teeth in an enamel mug. She touched her gently and Adela winced as if scalded.
‘Be of stout heart . . .’ she said, echoing Beth’s recent sentiments.
‘Don’t . . .’ she snapped. ‘My family are in the hands of the Nazis and I am here, so please . . . Just don’t.’
She threw her toothbrush down onto her bunk and stalked off up the platform. Joyce went to follow, but felt a small hand rest on her shoulder.
‘Leave her, darling. She needs her space,’ Mitsy said.
Joyce felt her tears rush her like a wave. ‘Oh, Mitsy, it’s you. What am I to do? What if she’s right and the Nazis have Dorotha and her family and they’re imprisoned in some . . . some awful ghetto . . .?’
‘There’s nothing you can do but keep going,’ Mitsy said simply. ‘When a woman faces yet another challenge, she squares her shoulders, sticks out her chin and says to herself, “Come on then.” ’
Joyce stared at the diminutive lady in front of her, nudging eighty, bombed-out and yet endlessly defiant. She must have risen early to paint on her trademark red lips and set her hair in curlers.
‘How do you do it, Mitsy? Always stay so upbeat?’
Mitsy glanced upwards.
‘Every day I wake up is a gift from God. I’m alive this morning when millions around the world don’t have that privilege. The day stretches ahead like a blank page. A story yet to be written.’
‘But don’t you fear death?’ Joyce ventured.
‘Not a bit, dear heart.’ She smiled softly and held on to the bunk to steady herself. ‘Death is not the extinguishing of the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.’
‘That’s beautiful,’ Joyce breathed.
‘Not my words, alas. They were written by the Indian poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore. My late husband and I met him on our travels in Bengal. Wonderful man.’
Joyce shook her head in amazement at the many lives of Mitsy Bouvoir, before dropping a kiss on her forehead. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. And now I must be off. Lilley and Rosie have talked me into helping out at a rest centre in Camden.
Then we’re heading to Hampstead Tube for a shower.
’ She winked. ‘Terrible snobs at that shelter but the facilities are a cut above!’ She rummaged in her bag.
‘Oh, by the way, dear, was this you?’ Mitsy pulled out a copy of The Swiss Cottager and pointed to the Lonely Hearts column.
Mitsy Bouvoir. I fell in love with you when I watched you alongside Lillian Gish in the 1916 silent movie Daphne and the Pirate. You are still every bit as luminescent. Yours admiringly. A fan.
Joyce grinned. ‘A little before my time, Mitsy.’ She winked. ‘Why, you have an anonymous underground admirer.’
‘Get away with you,’ Mitsy said, shrieking with laughter.
But Joyce saw the little spring in her step as she sought out Lilley and Rosie and linked her arm through theirs.
The three redoubtable women walked up the platform, trailing laughter like ribbons.
It was a welcome glimmer of light in the darkness.
Joyce went in search of Adela and found her deep in conversation with Dore. By the look on her face, her mood hadn’t much improved, and Dore looked pretty gloomy too.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him.
‘That obvious? I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Joyce, but they’ve cut our funding.’
‘Who?’
‘The powers that be. The insurance for the library roof doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of repairs, and with the whole council already under enormous strain, they’ve told us the mobile library will have to close. They’ll be withdrawing the fuel allowance.’
‘When?’ Joyce asked.
‘Two, three months tops.’
‘This is, how you Brits say? Codswallop!’ Adela exploded. ‘What was all that claptrap at the opening about the travelling library being an essential service?’
‘The council is a many-layered bureaucratic beast,’ Dore lamented. ‘Red-tape officialdom should come with a public health warning. I’ll try my hardest to get a stay of execution but the powers that be play a masterful game of “It’s the other man’s job”.’
Joyce felt a charge of defiance run through her and squared her shoulders. ‘Well, we will just have to make sure that we offer the best service we possibly can over the next couple of months, and fight for a stay of execution.’
‘Fighting talk, my dear. That’s the spirit . . .’ he trailed off to cough as a cloud of lung-filling dust spiralled over them, followed by the stench of something hot and marshy.
Not ten yards from them, a young man was vigorously shaking his bedding out over the platform.
‘Good grief, man,’ Dore wheezed. ‘The spreading of dust and germs over people, many of whom already suffer shelter throat, is little short of criminal. Take your bedding home and do the shaking in your own back yard please, sir.’
He grabbed a passing volunteer. ‘Please make sure to spray antiseptic over there. We’ll end up as grubby as Piccadilly Circus Station shelter at this rate.’
Adela and Joyce exchanged a glance. If even Dore was rattled, it didn’t bode well. He stalked off muttering about ‘bloody officialdom’ under his breath.
Outside, the freezing December morning was a beast with teeth. The air was swollen with the smell of saturated burnt timber and brick dust. Joyce and Adela walked to the garage and clambered into the mobile library.
Adela muttered something in Polish under her breath as she hauled herself into the driver’s seat. The revelation about Dorotha and her parents fell like a blade between them, and Joyce knew better than to push her.
‘Where to first?’ Adela asked.
Joyce glanced down at the list of their usual stops, but today, nothing was normal.
‘Let’s just drive and see who needs us.’
Nan started up with a throaty rattle and Adela swung the old girl out of the garage and up Camden High Street, in the direction of the City.
As they drove, Joyce felt disbelief clamp her heart.
So many buildings were now roofless, their interior walls stretching like skeletal fingers into the fog.
Exhausted firemen were still battling fires, bodies were still being pulled out of the rubble.
Abandoned fire engines lay smouldering in the road, their rubber tyres melted into the pavement.
Harry’s been working in this firestorm. Please dear God let him still be safe. Joyce shook her head, as if to dislodge the toxic thoughts taking hold.
‘It’s like a tragic replay of the Great Fire of London,’ Joyce murmured, the words from Pepys’s diary still fresh in her mind from where she had been reading it to the underground community.
In the smoky early morning light, the veil between past and present became mutable. Joyce’s imagination raced. She half expected Samuel Pepys to rush forth from the smoke, on his way to Seething Lane to record the day’s events in his diary.
‘Paternoster Row,’ Joyce gasped as they drew level with the home of the book trade. ‘Stop.’
Adela slammed on the breaks. The long street filled with second-hand bookshops, where before the war Joyce had whiled away many a long and happy afternoon, was now a smoking, sulphurous wasteland.
Here and there, charred timbers still burnt and, out of the smoke, she picked out the figure of a solitary man.
Joyce wound down the window. ‘I say, are you all right? Do you need help?’
‘There’s nothing anyone can do,’ he said, unable to tear his gaze from a waterlogged building.
‘I’ve lost everything. Millions of books.
It’s irreplaceable. I’ll never recover.’ He wandered off into the smoke without a backwards glance, and Joyce’s heart twisted.
Her library was at least still intact. She looked at the facade of the nearest building.
The name Hodder & Stoughton stood proudly over the door-frame.
Unfortunately, the frame was about all that was left of the building.
The once-grand publishing offices were now a cavernous glowing hole.
She shivered at the apocalyptic scene. How many millions of books must have been lost in this firestorm?
How much poorer would society be for the loss of all those stories?
‘Come on,’ Joyce sighed. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Adela reversed up the street, crying out in pain when they hit the edge of a crater.
‘Adela! Are you hurt?’
‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, looking anything but.
As they approached the City at Gresham Street, their way was completely blocked by a collapsed building.
An ARP man whose face was more soot than skin flagged them down.
‘Hell gave London a run for her money last night. You’re a mobile library, yes?’
Joyce nodded. ‘What can we do to help?