London - Edward Rutherfurd [586]
The ground floor of the next door house was a liquor store; the fumes were from the broken bottles. They could be heard popping and exploding above and soon the same thing would start down in the cellar where the crates were stored.
“No way we can save this lot,” his companion whispered.
“No,” said Charlie, “but look at that.” On the floor, not twenty feet away, was an open crate full of miniature bottles. Neither man spoke as they moved towards it.
A fireman’s boot stretched well up his leg and had a large top. It was amazing how many miniatures would fit in there. A bit of floor fell in near them, but they took no notice until they had finished.
“Charlie,” the other whispered, “you have all the luck!”
Helen drove through Moorgate. It seemed astonishing that even when there was an inferno in one street, the next could be pitch dark. Twice they had to stop to negotiate around a bomb crater. On the second occasion, they had only just seen it in time. There were just two of them in the ambulance – a sturdy old van with faint markings on its sides. It might have seemed a little primitive, but it carried a stretcher and a full complement of first aid materials, which was a great improvement on the situation some months before when she had been asked to drive her own little Morris and to find scissors and bandages for herself.
There was a lull in the bombing. Though a few searchlights stalked the sky, the drone of the bombers had died away. The quiet would certainly not last. Although the Spitfires were out there searching for prey, most of the bombers were not only getting through but were returning to base, reloading and coming back for a second run.
The tenement block came into sight. A single fire appliance was hosing down the corner where a bomb had neatly taken down a section of wall, leaving the interior exposed like a child’s dolls’ house. The firemen had brought an old lady out and laid her on a blanket to await the ambulance. It only took Helen a moment to ascertain that one of her legs was badly broken. The pain must have been considerable. But the old woman’s response to it all was not unusual.
“I’m sorry, dear, to give you all this trouble.” She tried to smile. “Should have gone to the shelter, shouldn’t I?”
Helen strapped the old woman’s leg to a splint and was just moving her on to the stretcher when she saw a fireman look up and heard the drone of the next wave of bombers approaching.
“Better hurry, Miss,” he said.
She bent down to pick up one end of the stretcher and then realized that the old woman was trying urgently to say something to her. Patiently she leaned over her.
“Please, dear, if I’m going to hospital,” the old woman pleaded, “I just realized. Could you help me? I forgot. . . .”
Helen did not need to let her finish.
“Your teeth.”
It was always the same. They always wanted their false teeth. They had nearly always been left on the mantelpiece. The blast had always blown them somewhere else. And, if she possibly could, she always went in to look for them. Keeping their teeth was the one little bit of dignity they still had. “Besides, with the war on, you never know when you’ll get some more,” an old man had once pointed out to her.
“What floor?” she sighed.
“Raid’s beginning,” the fireman called.
“A bomb never hits the same place twice,” she said calmly, though she knew there was no reason why it shouldn’t.
As the drone turned into a roar, and the barrage erupted above her, Helen walked through the door into the tenement building.
The premonition that had been troubling Violet was not of