A rush of stale air preceded the train. Eve pushed her way on board, gripping a strap for the rattling ride home. Weary Londoners stared straight ahead or perused the daily newspapers. She wished she could read their thoughts.
Twenty minutes later, Eve exited at the station near her flat. She slept down here with her roommates when she wasn’t on duty with the fire service. They’d become a community of sorts, laying their bedding in their customary places, mothers reading bedtime stories to their children, elderly women knitting socks for the soldiers. The long night always began with sirens. Always. How Eve hated that sound! On some nights, the thud and crump of bombs sounded very close, shaking the ground. No one knew what the landscape would look like at dawn.
Eve climbed the steps to her flat and found her mates eating a quick supper before gathering their things for the shelter. “Are you coming with us?” asked her new roommate, a girl named Mabel, who’d replaced Iris.
“I’m on fire duty tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.” She fixed beans and toast, then changed into her Auxiliary Fire Service uniform, slipping the strap of her gas mask over her head and donning her steel helmet. Audrey had begged her to come to the safety of Wellingford Hall, but Eve wouldn’t flee London. She felt a solidarity with the other volunteers who fought back against the enemy. She worked every other night from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m., manning four emergency telephones with another volunteer; then she would return to her flat to change clothes, eat breakfast, and go to work.
Tonight, the other volunteer was a middle-aged housewife named Edith who had settled her children and her mother on the Underground platform for the night before coming to volunteer. “I see the telephone lines are back up,” Edith said. “They were knocked out by the bombing the last time I worked here.”
“I guess the fire lines are always a priority. My flat hasn’t had telephone service all week.”
They talked in between emergency calls, sirens wailing in the darkness above them along with the roar of enemy planes, the rattle of British antiaircraft fire, the hail of shrapnel. Whenever a call came in that an incendiary bomb had ignited a fire, they found out how many fire engines were needed and dispatched equipment from various fire stations.
“You can go to sleep,” Eve said when Edith began to yawn. “It’s slow tonight and I’m wide-awake for some reason.” They would take turns sleeping on bunk beds, waking whenever the telephones rang.
The night wore on. The sound of distant booms continued overhead, accompanied by Edith’s soft snores. Eve was good at judging how far away the bombs were and which areas of London were hit.
She was beginning to feel sleepy when the telephone startled her. Eve listened with growing horror as the caller described a direct bomb hit in a London neighborhood, civilian injuries, a spreading fire. The Clarksons’ town house was in that neighborhood.
Mum!
Eve’s voice trembled as she grabbed a telephone and called for multiple fire engines. Emergency vehicles.
Not Mum! Please, God, not my mum!
Once help was on the way, she woke Edith. “I—I need to go. You’ll have to take over.”
“You can’t leave! We’re both supposed to stay here until the next shift arrives.”
“The street where my mum lives was bombed!” Eve donned her jacket, slung the straps of her purse and gas mask over her head, and bolted up the stairs.
It was too far to walk. She grabbed one of the yellow bicycles that AFS messengers used. Eve longed to race as fast as she could, but it wasn’t safe in the pitch-darkness of the blackout. She usually took the Underground to the town house, so the overland route was unfamiliar to her. And London’s street signs had been removed to confuse enemy spies. Sirens blared all around her. Antiaircraft guns hammered the sky. Searchlights probed for airplanes. Whistling bombs fell with thuds and explosions. Eve pedaled as fast as she dared through it all, begging God to spare her mum.
She neared the neighborhood at last. The glow of flames lit up the night from several blocks away. She got off her bike and walked with it, picking her way through rubble-filled streets and snaking fire hoses. Firefighters blocked off the area, but her AFS uniform and bicycle allowed her inside the barricades. Her chest ached as she labored to breathe. Her heart pounded with fear and fatigue as she rounded the corner.
The sight that greeted Eve made her cry out in horror. The entire block of town houses was a flaming pile of rubble. No one inside could possibly have survived. The bicycle fell from her grip and clattered to the pavement. Her knees gave way and she dropped to the pavement in shock. No! Oh, God, no! Mum!