The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [183]
Wouldn’t be safe to go west, towards the railway yards, because they was likely being bombed too, and so I began walking down Drove Road as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast at all, my body one big ache and my knees like jelly. I thought of Pee at the hospital, waiting for the Bristol casualties, now finding he had to sew arms and legs back on Swindon factory girls too. As I came to the end of the road, an ambulance tore past me and stopped by the house that was gone, but anyone who’d seen that hole would’ve known it was far too late.
I tottered in a daze through the Old Town. My hearing started to come back and I heard a clock strike. Four bongs, that was all. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I’d lost all track of time and it was so dark I thought for a second it must be four in the morning, but the light in the sky was to the west, not the east. The All Clear hadn’t sounded and the side streets were empty. The rain started to come down in sheets. When I reached a junction I saw more ambulances clipping along the main road but they couldn’t have seen me. I limped on with my bloodied bundle towards the countryside.
A car stopped for me before I’d gone as far as Wroughton village. I was drenched by then, hair in rats’ tails, and the bundle in my arms was so small and soaked that the airman behind the wheel could’ve had no idea what I carried. The rain had washed us clean, Charlie and me.
The airman wound down the window, his face a white blur intersected by the line of a neat blond moustache, and told me to hop in, the buses weren’t running because of the raid, he was on his way to Yatesbury and where was I headed? I told him, voice still muffled in my ears, that he could drop me on the main road between Avebury and Winterbourne Monkton. Not if it’s raining, he said, what do you take me for, an army oik? I’ll deliver you to the door, my darling.
I asked him if I could lie down on the back seat, I was sorry I was so wet, but I was wicked tired with walking in the rain. He turned off the engine and went out into the downpour to find a blanket from the boot for me to lie on, and a coat to put over me, and he held the car door open with the rain turning his blue-grey uniform black on the shoulders.
I fell asleep in the car, Charlie in his towelling shroud on my lap under the RAF greatcoat.
In the end, I persuaded the airman to drop me on the main road after all: told him my mam didn’t like me taking lifts, she’d give me what for if she saw me climb out of a strange car. Only a short step home, I said, look, the rain’s stopped. But after the airman had driven away, as I struggled up the chalk track to Windmill Hill, Charlie in my arms, the rain started coming down heavy again, the trees tossing. It was one of those storms that prowl round the horizon like a bad-tempered dog, still growling and baring its teeth when you hoped it had backed off. Lightning snapped every now and then, but far away. Couldn’t have been later than six, but the clouds pressed down and drowned the light. Rivers of chalky water flooded the path.
By the time I reached the flattened crest of the hill, I was soaked to the skin again, face burning up, a sickly ache in my back and legs, and terrible tired. There were never ceremonies for a stillborn at the hospital. Scraps of flesh like him counted for nothing, waste; they were burned in the incinerator. But I could do something for him, like the first Charlie’s mam had done for her child. He’d been laid in the earth with his face turned for the sunrise in the ditch at the top of Windmill Hill. It was near fifteen years since the hill had been excavated, and the archaeologists had hidden the scars of the digging under a skin of turf. The humps of the round barrows pushed out of it like gurt pimples. Charlie and me, we weren’t anyone special. We didn’t belong