Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [38]
A policeman stopped him and asked for his identity card; another two minutes wasted. An ambulance passed him, similar to the one Christine drove; a requisitioned fruit truck, painted grey.
He began to get nervous as he approached home. The explosions were sounding closer, and he could hear the aircraft clearly. The East End was in for another bruising tonight; he would sleep in the Morrison shelter. There was a big one, terribly close, and he quickened his step. He would eat his supper in the shelter, too.
He turned into his own street, saw the ambulances and the fire engines, and broke into a run.
The bomb had landed on his side of the street, around the middle. It must be close to his own home. Jesus in heaven, not us, no—
There had been a direct hit on the roof, and the house was literally flattened. He raced up to the crowd of people, neighbors and firemen and volunteers. “Is my wife all right? Is she out? Is she in there?”
A fireman looked at him. “Nobody’s come out of there, mate.”
Rescuers were picking over the rubble. Suddenly one of them shouted, “Over here!” Then he said, “Jesus, it’s Fearless Bloggs!”
Frederick dashed to where the man stood. Christine was underneath a huge chunk of brickwork. Her face was visible; the eyes were closed.
The rescuer called, “Lifting gear, boys, sharp’s the word.”
Christine moaned and stirred.
“She’s alive!” Bloggs said. He knelt down beside her and got his hand under the edge of the lump of rubble.
The rescuer said, “You won’t shift that, son.”
The brickwork lifted.
“God, you’ll kill yourself,” the rescuer said, and bent down to help.
When it was two feet off the ground they got their shoulders under it. The weight was off Christine now. A third man joined in, and a fourth. They all straightened up together.
Bloggs said, “I’ll lift her out.”
He crawled under the sloping roof of brick and cradled his wife in his arms.
“Fuck me it’s slipping!” someone shouted.
Bloggs scurried out from under with Christine held tightly to his chest. As soon as he was clear the rescuers let go of the rubble and jumped away. It fell back to earth with a sickening thud, and when Bloggs realized that that had landed on Christine, he knew she was going to die.
He carried her to the ambulance, and it took off immediately. She opened her eyes again once, before she died, and said, “You’ll have to win the war without me, kiddo.”
More than a year later, as he walked downhill from High-gate into the bowl of London, with the rain on his face mingling with the tears again, he thought the woman in the spy’s house had said a mighty truth: It makes you hate.
In war boys become men and men become soldiers and soldiers get promoted; and this is why Bill Parkin, aged eighteen, late of a boarding house in High-gate, who should have been an apprentice in his father’s tannery at Scarborough, was believed by the Army to be twenty-one, promoted to sergeant, and given the job of leading his advance squad through a hot, dry forest toward a dusty, whitewashed Italian village.
The Italians had surrendered but the Germans had not, and it was the Germans who were defending Italy against the combined British-American invasion. The Allies were going to Rome, and for Sergeant Parkin’s squad it was a long walk.
They came out of the forest at the top of a hill, and lay flat on their bellies to look down on the village. Parkin got out his binoculars and said, “What wouldn’t I fookin’ give for a fookin’ cup of fookin’ tea.” He had taken to drinking and cigarettes and women, and his language was like that of soldiers everywhere. He no longer went to prayer meetings.
Some of these villages were defended and some were not, Parkin recognized that as sound tactics—you didn’t know which were undefended, so you approached them all cautiously, and caution cost time.
The downside of the hill held little cover—just a few bushes—and the village began at its foot. There were a few white houses, a river with a wooden bridge, then more houses around a little