London - Edward Rutherfurd [577]
Up on the roof of one oil tank last night, Charlie had not heard the warning cries of the men below. The first he saw of the Messerschmitt was when it was about five hundred yards away and coming straight for him. More from instinct than anything else, he did the only thing he could and pointed the hose at the pilot as he came. No one was sure how it was that Charlie was still there three seconds later as the fighter wheeled up into the air again.
“That’s funny! I thought being a fireman was supposed to be safer than going in the bleeding army,” he remarked cheerfully as he came down. But as they made their way back to Battersea that morning the thought did occur to his friends that a man can only have just so much luck, and Charlie seemed to have used up rather a lot of his last night.
AFTERNOON
“Something wrong?”
Normally Helen slept another hour into the afternoon, so when she appeared in the drawing room at Eaton Terrace at only two o’clock, her mother looked up sharply. “Rest some more,” she continued.
“I can’t sleep.” There were rings under her eyes.
“Ah.” Violet said nothing for a moment, then gently enquired: “Same trouble as the other day?”
Driving an ambulance in the midst of so much horror and death, it was not surprising that Helen should occasionally be haunted by premonitions of death. Most of the time, she told her mother, she was too busy to think about it, but sometimes such thoughts visited her and she would give her mother’s arm an extra little squeeze of affection as she went off.
“You’ve had these feelings before,” Violet said softly. “And here you still are.”
“I know. I think I might go for a walk. Would you mind?”
“Of course not. Off you go.” A moment later, hearing the door bang, Violet was left alone with the silence. Only after a long pause, during which she heard nothing but the quiet ticking of the clock, did she allow herself to sigh.
She had lost one child already. Must she lose another?
Henry. Henry who had never forgiven her for the campaigning which had made him suffer at school, Henry who had supported old Edward against her when, in the eighteen months that she had been in and out of prison, the old man had Helen with him at Bocton. “He’s given the family a home,” he had said to her bitterly. “You haven’t.” Yet despite that, it had been Henry who had come to visit her in prison. No one else from the family had.
Over a quarter-century had passed since that time, yet to Violet now, at the age of seventy, it seemed only too painfully close. She had been imprisoned three times. A sort of fever gripped many in the movement at that time. Enraged by the cynical contempt shown by even the Liberals, some of the movement had turned increasingly to acts of carefully calculated outrage. Several houses, including Lloyd George’s, had been burned down. Emily Wilding Davison had even thrown herself in front of the king’s horse during a race and been killed. With her father implacable at Bocton and her sons against her, she remembered telling a colleague: “I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” A week later at a demonstration she had been arrested again. Three months in prison that time, but in company with a dozen other women she knew. What a camaraderie they had felt! Soon after they were released, they had all been put in gaol again – six pale, determined women, shamefully