London - Edward Rutherfurd [582]
As the rain slackened off she left the hotel and turned towards Hyde Park. Usually she liked to walk right across past the waters of the Serpentine, but today she decided to turn left and continue westward past the Albert Hall and into Kensington Gardens.
In many ways the park with its quiet avenues of trees and its wide open lawns retained its Stuart and eighteenth-century air. As she caught sight of the small brick palace of Kensington sitting so discreetly under the pale sun, with the lawns in front of it shining softly from the rain, Helen could almost imagine that at any moment a horse-drawn carriage might emerge from it and roll away into the trees. Yet looking around, the rude sights of twentieth-century war were all too evident. There were trenches everywhere. She passed an anti-aircraft gun. As she came on to the open ground by the Round Pond in the middle of the gardens, she could see barrage balloons by the dozen, tethered in the blue sky. Most incongruous of all, an entire section of the open lawn had been converted into an enormous cabbage patch. “Dig for Victory!” Londoners had been told. Food supplies would be ensured during the war, even if every inch of park had to be turned into a vegetable allotment.
It was time to turn back. Helen allowed her eye to run round the quiet scene, drinking it in for perhaps the last time. She sighed. She was sorry that she might not see it again.
EVENING
Though the huge glass palace itself had burned down four years before, the area was still called Crystal Palace. From Percy and Jenny’s little garden, you could see right over London. Now they stood with Herbert and Maisie, gazing across to the distant line of Hampstead.
The sky in the west was red, a presage of things to come. In the east, the dark shadow of night was spreading in from the estuary. As for the huge sprawl of the metropolis which filled the whole basin, the black-out was being rigidly enforced. The usual glimmering of a million tiny lights was absent. London was a vast blackness waiting to become invisible.
There were just the four of them. Herbert and Maisie had never had any children. Percy and Jenny’s son was in the army; their daughter married and living down in Kent. Although Maisie and Jenny had never been close, they had learned to get on together and that afternoon, to take their minds off the Blitz, the two women had gone to see Gone with the Wind. The previous night they had stood together in the garden, watching as the waves of planes droned over London again and again, and the red fires lit up, flickering here, bursting out there into great clouds of burning cinders that soared up into the blackness of the night sky. The East End had got it again last night. Where would the bombs land tonight?
“Will you be staying here?” Jenny asked.
“No, not tonight,” Maisie replied.
“Time to be off,” said Percy.
He and Herbert, now in their sixties, worked at nights down at the little Fire Brigade substation nearby, helping out. “I couldn’t just wait around and do nothing,” Percy had explained. Maisie felt that Herbert should have stayed with her. “But it’s good for them to be together,” Jenny had told her.
“Right then,” said Herbert. “Let’s be going.”
At six o’clock sharp, Charlie was off again. Before he went, though, there was an argument. The subject had always been the same ever since the three older children had been evacuated, and Ruth had refused to leave Charlie. Every night he worried about her and the baby.
“Where are you going to spend the night, then?”
There were three places where Ruth could go. The first was the shelter. In central London this would probably have meant the tube or some other place underground. But out at Battersea it simply meant a converted building, well sandbagged, where people could go and share the danger. A near miss and you were protected; a direct hit and