Chapter 12 - Joyce #2
‘There’s a rest shelter full of bombed-out mums and kiddies up in Canning Town. South Hallsville School in Agate Street. They’re waiting on transport out. Bet they could use a distraction.’
‘They’re still there?’ Joyce gasped.
‘You know this place?’ Adela asked.
‘Yes, Harry and I were there last night. They should have been long gone by now.’
Adela wasted no time and hit the accelerator in the direction of the East End. Twenty minutes later, they pulled up at the school-turned-rest-centre near the docks.
Joyce and Adela pushed open the door. Joyce scarcely believed it possible, but if anything, it was even busier than the previous evening.
The stench of so many hot, stale bodies crushed together was unholy.
Officials had set up a few latrine buckets, partitioned off behind a blanket.
The ground floor was now jammed solid, and a steady stream of people were attempting to pick their way down the heaving staircase to find shelter below, just adding to the stew of bodies in the basement.
‘What can we do?’ Joyce asked a harassed-looking WVS lady.
‘There’re a lot of mothers here at their wit’s end trying to keep kiddies distracted. You’re a mobile library, yes? I saw you pull up outside. So read!’
Joyce and Adela hurried back to the van and grabbed armfuls of children’s books.
Back inside, the WVS lady had manged to clear a small space and found two chairs.
Joyce suddenly felt horribly overwhelmed. How did she even start? This wasn’t the calm, organised sanctuary of Swiss Cottage Tube.
A group of angry women were haranguing a WVS woman nearby, clamouring for information.
When are the coaches arriving? They were supposed to come last night! It’s a disgrace is what it is! Their desperate voices reached a cacophony in her head.
‘I’m . . . I’m not sure this is going to work,’ she stammered. ‘I-I don’t think I can.’
Adela gripped her firmly on the arm.
‘This isn’t about you, Joyce. You are a shlingen bikher . . . a book lover, yes? Now, be a friend to these mothers.’
Adela was, as always, right. ‘Come on, Joyce,’ she chastised herself. ‘If people can’t get to the books, we take books to the people.’
She repeated their vow over and over, filling herself with courage. This was one of the very goals the Secret Society had set for themselves at the start of the war, and this hellish scene was the epitome of that need.
Adela, meanwhile, had taken a more practical approach. She hoisted herself up on the chair, put two fingers in her mouth and let rip with an ear-shredding whistle.
‘Story time’s starting!’
The women around them looked up curiously and gradually started pushing their children towards them.
‘That’s it, come closer,’ Adela called. ‘Plenty of room for the kiddies. Let them through.’
Before long a crowd of fifty-plus grubby-faced children were sitting round cross-legged.
Joyce spotted poor Jean Farley. She was attempting to change her baby on the floor, while her exhausted toddler son grizzled next to her.
Her mind spun at their predicament. How did one cope with one hour in this place, never mind a whole night!
She pointed her out to Adela. ‘See if you can persuade her son to come and listen.’
Adela wove her way through the crowds, while Joyce thought of what to read to transport these poor children away from the bomb-battered East End.
Think, Joyce. We need magic.
With boys and girls of all ages, she needed a book that spoke to everybody here.
She sifted nervously through the stack of books on her lap.
‘Who wishes they could fly?’ she asked finally.
‘Meeee,’ came back a chorus.
‘I actually can,’ said one small boy confidently, getting to his feet.
‘Sit down, Johnny,’ said his mother, clamping a hand on his shoulder.
‘Put your hand up if you want to go to a magical island called Neverland?’
‘I do!’ cried one girl, flinging her hand up so fast she was in danger of a dislocation.
‘Are we sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.’
From its first page, Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie had the group spellbound.
As Joyce read the author’s vivid descriptions of the boy who never grew up, of Caption Hook and his pirates and the Lost Boys, of mermaids and crocodiles and the magical world of Neverland, she saw their bodies still and their imaginations fire up.
She couldn’t physically remove them from the hell they found themselves in, but she could whisk them away through the pages of a book.
These children’s childhoods were being eroded in the most devastating way.
They deserved escape, fantasy, joy, and more than a little sprinkle of pixie dust.
She read and read, until her voice was hoarse and her bum went numb.
She read because she knew in that moment she was holding back the war for these children.
There were moments of pure joy for the girls.
‘Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys,’ caused an eruption amongst the girls, including one little red-head who jumped to her feet, with a triumphant whoop. ‘Told you so, Davey Bassington!’
And the boys’ delight in Peter Pan’s assertion that little boys should never be sent to bed prompted triumphant whoops. By the time the ticking crocodile slithered onto the scene, even Jean Farley’s grizzling toddler son had quietened and was listening, eyes wide, mouth open.
Eventually, four p.m. rolled around, and when the blackout blinds started going up at the window, Joyce reluctantly admitted defeat and closed the book. Still, the coaches hadn’t arrived to transport everyone to safety.
‘I’m sorry to end here, children, but I have lots more books you can borrow. Feel free to come up and choose one from our library van.’
Like the Pied Piper, Adela led a stream of excited children out to the library van.
Jean smiled when she spotted Joyce and wove her way through the crowd towards her. Her cheeks were waxy from exhaustion and her blouse soaked with sweat.
‘I can’t believe you came back! Mind you,’ she said, gesturing to her toddler, clinging to her skirt. ‘I’m awful glad you did.’
Jean jigged the baby at her shoulder with one hand and scrubbed her baggy eyes with the other. ‘This is . . .’ She looked around the rest centre as darkness fell. ‘It’s hell is what it is. I can’t stick it much longer!’
‘Surely they won’t let you spend another night here?’ Joyce exclaimed. ‘The coaches have to be on their way.’
‘Oh, they’ve been saying that for what feels like days now.’
A silence fell between them.
She felt a breath on her neck, the scent of Woodbines. She knew before she turned.
‘Harry,’ she breathed. ‘How long’ve you been here?’
‘About twenty minutes,’ he grinned. ‘Did you choose that because you knew it was my favourite book growing up?’
Had she?
‘How was your night?’ she asked, taking in the dust that seemed etched into his skin and the dark circles under his eyes.
‘Still going. I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels.
After I dropped you last night, I managed to make it to the council offices and warned them about this place, then I got called out to a heavy lifting job in Stepney.
Tenement block collapsed, trapping a family in the basement.
We finally got ’em out around an hour ago.
’ He stifled a yawn. ‘Thought I’d come and check this place had been evacuated .
. .’ He trailed off. ‘I can’t believe it. Where are those bleedin’ coaches?’
His face darkened. ‘They’d better get here before Jerry does. These people won’t stand for another night here. It’s a rest centre, for pity’s sake, not a proper shelter! They’re only here cause there’s nowhere else for ’em to go.’
Joyce grimaced. ‘Dore made some calls last night to pile pressure on West Ham Council, but it doesn’t seem to have worked, does it?’
They stared about them and Joyce felt a deep ripple of unease. They watched as a crowd gathered around an official.
‘The coaches were supposed to be here by now. Where the bloody hell are they?’ yelled a woman in a nightie, with two kids clinging to her legs. ‘We’re casualties, not casuals!’
‘This is inhumane,’ Harry muttered. ‘I’ve got to do something.’
‘But you’ve already been down to the council offices once!’ Joyce pointed out.
‘Well, I’m going back. I’ll knock down the door if I have to and requisition every bleedin’ vehicle I can find.’ His nostrils flared in disgust. ‘These good folks are all salt of the earth, beautiful people so they are. They deserve better.’
He turned to her and took her by the shoulders. ‘Joyce, this isn’t the place to be in. You need to leave now.’
‘But I was going to do another story-time session once I’ve fetched my torch . . .’
She broke off, her voice drowned out by the siren, its mournful wail rising up over the East End.
‘Leave now, Joyce, and get back to Swiss Cottage.’
Harry grabbed her hand and together they wove through the crowds and back outside, hurrying across what had once been the school playground.
As they moved away from the building, Harry stopped and looked back. His eyes traced up a jagged crack that sliced up two floors of brickwork to the reinforced concrete roof above.
‘The building’s already badly bomb-damaged,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s not safe!’
Joyce tugged him away, pulling him back in the direction of the library van again, where Adela was just stamping out the last book.
‘That’s it, sweetie,’ she said to a small girl, helping her out of the van as she did. ‘You go and find your mummy. Hurry now.’
The child ran back in the direction of the school, proudly clutching Black Beauty in her hand. The warden beckoned her in quickly before closing the door.
The three of them stared back at the school in silence.
Funny how the newspapers never showed this side of the Blitz, Joyce thought.
No mention of the woeful conditions of some of the filthy, overcrowded shelters, barely able to withstand the onslaught of high-explosive bombs, just stage-managed photos of ‘plucky Cockneys taking it’.
‘You’re right, Harry, this is inhumane,’ Joyce said quietly.
‘We need actions, not words,’ Harry growled.
He kissed Joyce’s cheek and she wanted to gather him in her arms, beg him to come with her to safety in the library van, but she’d have better luck talking the moon out of the sky.
‘Please stay safe,’ she whispered as he made sure she was buckled up tight, before shutting the van door.
Adela started the engine and they drove in silence, the siren boring through their thoughts. Back at Swiss Cottage, Adela eased the car into the van’s underground parking space and sat motionless, her hands on the steering wheel.
‘Adela?’ Joyce asked, confused. ‘Come on, my love, we need to shake a leg . . . Adela?’
To her surprise, she realised Adela was crying.
She made no effort to brush her tears away, just sat, fingers clamped round the wheel, as if she was trying to steady herself to say something.
‘I know,’ Joyce soothed. ‘It’s very upsetting seeing those poor mothers trapped there. Can you imagine having a baby in the Blitz?’
A strange noise erupted out of Adela, and her head rested on the wheel.
‘Adela, what on earth is wrong?’
Adela lifted her head and turned slowly to face Joyce.
‘I don’t have to imagine . . . Soon enough, I too will be a mother.’
Her face blanched in fear.
‘My family . . . the shame will kill them. They still see me as a baby!’