Chapter 14 #2
The old year passed and the new year crept in on a bank of freezing fog.
Joyce and Adela both woke early on the first day of 1941, but with one thought.
At five a.m., the station lights were still dimmed.
Mitsy lay gently snoring in her bunk, Library Cat and Missy curled up at her feet, but Joyce could tell from Adela’s breathing that they were both as wide awake as each other.
‘Shall we go back to South Hallsville School and see if those mothers and children were evacuated?’ Adela said quietly, so as not to wake the other shelterers.
Joyce hesitated. ‘I don’t think in your condition . . .’
‘Don’t you dare. I’m fighting fit,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘I want to make myself as useful as I can, while I can.’
Joyce was desperate to see if the people in the school had been transported to safety, too, and a selfish part of her wanted to see if Harry was all right.
‘Come on then.’
They dressed quickly, then splashed their faces with cold water in the station loos, before heading to the garage.
As they drove to Canning Town, the question slipped out of Joyce’s mouth, settling like powder on the dashboard.
‘Who’s the father?’
Adela’s hand tightened over the gearstick.
‘I can’t talk about it.’
They both stared ahead at the road and fell back into silence.
The closer they got to the docks, the worse visibility grew. Their headlights were dimmed to comply with the blackout. Dawn was breaking, but the fog and the smoke made it feel as if they were driving through a snowstorm.
Adela slowed as they drove up Agate Street, and the police cordon seemed to loom up out of nowhere. She only just managed to slam her foot on the brake in time.
‘That’s strange. That wasn’t here yesterday,’ Joyce mused.
Adela parked the library van as close to the cordon as they could get, and the pair got out.
Shivering, they wrapped their coats tightly around themselves and headed in the direction of the school.
The glare of the burning docks rose from behind a shattered skyline, a desolate landscape filled with strange, shrouded shapes.
As they drew closer, they saw the silhouettes of many figures hurrying about in the gloom. Glass crunched underfoot. The smell of burning brick dust caught in Joyce’s throat, making her cough, but still she couldn’t make out the outline of the school. She whirled around, trying to get her bearings.
‘The school,’ Adela suddenly stopped, grabbing Joyce’s hand. ‘Where’s it gone?’
The school building was gone. The playground was gone. All that could be seen through the fog was a giant smoking pit.
‘No, no, no . . .’ She gagged.
It looked as if the school had imploded; a vast crater had opened up in the middle where the school roof had clearly crashed down two floors into the basement. She and Adela stared down into the hole, at least forty feet across and twenty feet deep. It was the very pit of hell.
Waxy limbs and matted hair strewn together in a soup of bodies. Monstrous. Forcing herself to breathe, Joyce pulled a torch from her bag and tried to gather her wits.
She remembered how many people had been here when they had read to the children yesterday afternoon. She dreaded to think how many people were entombed beneath the ground.
All about them, rescue workers, wearing masks against plaster dust and smell, were frantically digging under piles of bricks and shifting giant slabs of concrete, rubble and steel girders.
Joyce and Adela watched, transfixed, as a rescue worker abseiled perilously into the crater with a rope wrapped round his middle. He swung round 360 degrees, the light from his head torch scattering beams of light.
An awful thought seized Joyce. The children who had died here, waiting for transport out – the last story they had heard, would ever hear, had been Peter Pan. Now they too would be the children who never grew up. Joyce felt a scream gathering in her throat. What diabolical world was this?
A rescue worker touched Joyce on the shoulder. ‘Please clear the way for search and rescue.’
She snapped back to herself. ‘Yes, sorry, of course. Can we do anything to help?’
‘Makeshift rest centre on the other side of the road, they need all the hands they can get.’
Joyce and Adela carefully picked their way over the rubble towards a WVS van with a huddle of people. Medics were treating those who – by some miracle – had survived. Blank-eyed people in slings and bandages clutched cups of tea.
Joyce approached an ARP worker.
‘We run a mobile library and have a vehicle that can hold about twenty people. Can you use us?’
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, those who have only minor injuries urgently need transporting away from here. The roads are too blocked for larger vehicles to get through and there are coaches leaving West Ham Council offices for the safety zones. Are you up to it?’
Joyce glanced at Adela, but she was already running towards the mobile library.
‘I’ll pull up as close as I can,’ she yelled over her shoulder.
For the next six hours, the pair worked flat out, ferrying the walking wounded to hospitals, and those with only minor injuries to West Ham Council offices and onto coaches.
The whole day took on a surreal air. There was no time to talk, to question whether it was right that they were using what was left of their precious fuel allowance.
From the survivors, they were able to assemble fragments of what had happened, piecing together a larger story of a wartime travesty. The ‘incident’, as the authorities had taken to calling them, was just another bleak brushstroke of death in a picture of absolute carnage.
Hundreds of East Enders had been stuck in that school, some into their third night, when the bomb had hit, shortly after Joyce and Adela had left, crashing through the school roof. God alone knew how many poor souls had perished, but Joyce estimated it must’ve been at least 400, probably many more.
Joyce’s anger was the only thing pushing back the tsunami of sadness, and it propelled her on.
On their tenth, or maybe eleventh run, Joyce spotted a face she recognised. A mother and her two children, blankets draped round their shoulders, picked their way through the rubble towards them.
‘I heard you were giving lifts to the council offices. Room for three more?’
‘Jean?’ she gasped. ‘Jean Farley?’
The woman nodded; she looked as though she was about to buckle. Adela gently took her baby from her, and she crumpled into Joyce’s arms like a deflated paper bag. Joyce held her tight, feeling the trauma coming off her in waves.
Eventually, they drew away from each other.
‘I need to get my children out of here,’ she rasped.
‘Of course,’ Joyce replied.
The woman and her children rode up front with Joyce, and she stared out of the van window.
‘They’ll cover this up,’ Jean said eventually. ‘But I’ll never forget the sights I saw.’
When they pulled up at the council offices, she turned to Joyce. ‘It’s you I have to thank for being alive.’
‘How so?’ Joyce asked.
‘After you left, my son started crying again. I came looking for you, I wanted to see if I could borrow Peter Pan to read to him, so we were outside by the gates when the bomb hit.’
Joyce breathed out slowly and squeezed her arm. ‘You go and get your little ’uns to safety.’
She hopped down and opened up the library doors, grabbing a book from inside.
‘Here, take it for the journey.’ She placed the book in Jean’s hands. The woman looked at the dog-eared copy of Peter Pan. ‘But it’s a library book. I can’t guarantee when I’ll get it back to you.’
‘It’s a gift,’ she replied.
The woman looked close to tears at the gesture.
And then she was gone, hurrying her children towards a large coach waiting outside the council offices.
The encounter had been like looking into the abyss and seeing a small, beautiful glimmer of hope.
They had survived where hundreds of others hadn’t.
Joyce turned to Adela. ‘That’s enough for one day for you,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m taking you back to Swiss Cottage to rest. I’ll drive.’
For once, Adela didn’t put up an argument, and allowed Joyce to drive her slowly back to Swiss Cottage underground station. She clambered out, instinctively clutching her belly. This was a secret that couldn’t be hushed up for all that much longer.
‘Aren’t you coming?’ Adela asked.
‘Not yet; there’s someone I need to see.’
Joyce drove back to the bombsite as fast as she dared, ruminating on the woman she’d become this past four months.
She’d never broken a single rule in her life; now here she was, misappropriating council vehicles, giving away library books.
In a stroke, the Blitz was stripping away all the old formalities and societal codes that governed life.
She parked and jumped down, brushing off the brick dust that smeared her rumpled old clothing.
Her second life was beginning right here; now she truly realised the fragility of the one life she’d been blessed with.
She spotted him in the thick of things, helping to heave a giant steel girder. She watched him work with a pang of love and admiration.
Twenty minutes later, he turned and spotted her.
There were no words. They crashed into one another, gripping each other tight. He held her so close, she felt his tears soak her hair.
‘I tried, Joyce. I tried . . .’ he wept. ‘But I failed ’em.’
She pulled back and gripped his face.
‘Now, you listen here, Harry Harding. No one works harder than you. This atrocity is not of your doing. You tried. Dore tried.’
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and looked back at her, eyes hooded with regret.
‘I did try. I went up the council offices four times in total, told ’em there was hundreds of folk who urgently needed transporting out.
On the last occasion, they told me the coaches had already left.
By the time I got back it was too late .
. .’ His voice turned to dust as tears slid silently down his cheeks. ‘Too late.’
‘But what happened to the coaches?’
‘They went to Camden Town instead of Canning Town. By mistake.’
The dreadful truth hung between them.
‘All those children, Joyce.’
She closed her eyes, and in the darkness she saw their little faces gathered around her at the story time, which for many had been their last.
He began to sway, and she suddenly realised he couldn’t have slept in days.
Wordlessly, she led him in the direction of the library van and opened the back doors. Pulling as many blankets as she could from behind the counter, she made a bed of them.
‘Lie down,’ she ordered. ‘I’m going to fetch you a cup of tea.’
By the time she got back, he was fast asleep. She set down the tea and lay down next to him. Cocooned in the safety of the library van, nestled in a forest of books, she wished she could hold real life at bay.
‘I think I love you, Harry,’ she whispered into the space between them.
He stirred and moaned, his arms reaching out to catch at something unseen.
There and then she vowed, she would always be there for the people who needed her.
Adela. Dorotha. The Secret Society. Harry.
Because love . . . Well, love was the only damn thing that made any sense right now.
Being careful not to wake Harry, she reached for her notebook and pen.
‘Dear Dorotha . . .’ And then she trailed off as the sobering reality hit once more.
Like the rest of her letters, she couldn’t post it.
After all, she had not the slightest clue where to send it.
Where were they taking Jewish people in Poland? And to what end?
But was that a reason to stop writing? Because surely if she did that, it would be like admitting that her friend no longer existed, that she no longer mattered, and then Hitler had won. His regime may have taken her, swallowed her into a black hole, but she was out there somewhere.
‘I am writing this letter to you in the knowledge it can’t be sent yet, and I will have to give it to you in person when this war is over.
That, my friend, is all I cling to in this madness: the knowledge that one day you and I will meet again.
We’ll stuff ourselves silly on cake, drink gin and argue over books, and laugh at your attempts to make me bolder and more forthright.
But you know, Dorotha, I think you’d be proud of me.
I’m a different person to the woman you last met. ’
Next to her, Harry cried out in his sleep and she reached out to stroke his hair before resuming her letter.
‘So much has happened, Dorotha. I have never needed you more than I do now. I need my best friend.’
But when, if, they were reunited, how was she supposed to keep such a monumental secret from her best friend, without betraying her promise to Adela?
Never had she felt so utterly powerless.
Joyce looked around the walls of her magical little mobile library, created with so much care and love.
In just a few short months these shelves would be stripped of books and the keys returned, unless she could find a way to fight for its reprieve.
In the midst of such atrocities, surely the need for this library was even more urgent. But time was running out.