The all-clear sounded at four-thirty, and Hilda shivered with relief.
“Thank god. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”
“Are we still going to the party?’ said Mary.
Hilda nodded, and checked her makeup. “Bloody Hitler. It’s one thing to keep a girl up all night, but it’s quite another to leave her looking it.”
“Look on the bright side. You didn’t kill a soul, and I didn’t put a scratch on the van.”
Clive was snoring in a corner so they left him to it and went upstairs with Huw. As they stood making their goodbyes, a flash lit the whole sky. The glare lingered in their eyes and the sound of an explosion came, huge and heavy, followed by a crashing of falling debris that lasted for half a minute.
“Wonderful,” said Huw, in the silence.
Hilda had jumped back inside the doorway. “What was it?”
“Delayed-action bomb. Big one.”
Hilda thought. “Mary, bring the van up front. I’ll go downstairs and get the address when it comes in. Huw, would you wake up Clive?”
Mary drove. The searchlights had all been extinguished and there was only a dull orange glow on the underside of the clouds, reflecting the fires in the east. The narrow slits of the headlights were not enough. Twice Mary almost crashed, pulling up hard a few feet from a wall, then reversing to make the turn she had missed. She felt disconnected from the reality of it. The war, the fires, the driving—one saw it all through slits.
At Billiter Street they understood straight away that it would be nothing like the first callout. A crowd was pressing, in various states of dress from pajamas to duffel coats, with a policeman struggling to keep them to one side of the street. With the raid over, people had been making their way home from the public shelters. And now this. Mary used the horn and nosed the ambulance through the crowd.
When they got to the center of the damage there were a dozen houses down in one terrace. The ones where the bomb had hit were simply gone, while those at the blast’s extremity gaped open. The scene was ten minutes old, and no one knew which houses had been occupied. People milled in the dark and yelled for their families. More police arrived and tried to push people back. An ARP patrol searched by torchlight in the shattered houses.
A woman was struggling with the police, demanding to look for her son. She was hysterical, hitting out.
Mary took her arm. “We can look for him. Tell me where he is.”
The woman pointed at a house. The front was gone, and inside Mary could see ARP men playing their torch beams over the interior walls. It was not a wallpaper she would have chosen.
The missing boy’s mother said that they had just got back from the shelter at the corner of the street, and that she had left her boy inside while she went to fetch a candle from a neighbor.
“Wait for us here,” said Mary.
She went into the house with Hilda. They climbed over the pile of brick that had been the front wall. They found the ARP men picking through the front room and the kitchen at the back.
“Anyone?” said Mary.
The men shook their heads.
“Upstairs then,” she said to Hilda.
They went up together. The banister was gone, fallen into the hallway below, and the stairs hung from the party wall they were keyed in to. The staircase swayed, but it held. There was a stair runner up the middle of the treads, patterned with a broad stripe up the center. At the head of the stairs was a bathroom, and by the flame of Mary’s lighter they could see there was no one in it. The ceiling was down, the contents of the attic poking through the joists in a muddle of albums and suitcases.
On the landing that ran back parallel with the stairs, there was a fecal smell in the air—a soil pipe must have cracked. The landing gave on to two bedrooms. Hilda took the first and Mary the second. They trod as softly as they could, since the floor was unsupported at the street end and the whole thing was bouncing nastily. She flicked on her lighter, looked for a moment, then snapped it off and knelt in the dark, forcing breath in and out of her body. In the snap of light she had seen a boy lying still, his face gray, his body covered in shreds of blue flannel pajamas and some foul-smelling mess that must have come from the broken waste pipe.
“Hilda,” she said. “Could you come as quick as you can?”
Outside, the mother was still shouting, the fear in her voice more awful now the crowd was quietening down. Mary made sure that the place she was kneeling couldn’t be seen from the street. She flicked her lighter back on, and set it on an upended toy box.
“Oh,” said Hilda when she came in.
They knelt beside the boy’s body. Hilda put her ear to his mouth.
“Anything?” said Mary.
Hilda shook her head. The mess was not from a broken pipe. The boy’s insides were out.
“Oughtn’t we to pump his chest?” said Mary.
“How should I know?” said Hilda in a small voice. “It might make it worse.”
“Worse how?”