Eve’s progress slowed as she neared the city, bumping over fire hoses, dodging piles of rubble in the streets, detouring around craters that devoured the road. At last she turned on to Durning Road. ARP wardens and AFS volunteers who’d cleared a path for the ambulances waved her forward. Eve’s heart stopped when she saw the enormous pile of rubble that once had been the technical college, recognizable only by a dangling sign on a fragment of wall. Swarms of workers frantically tunneled into the debris. Eve parked her vehicle as close as she dared and climbed out. Audrey pulled up behind her as a civil defense worker hurried forward.
“We think there are close to three hundred people trapped inside,” he said. “See those two trams?” He pointed to what was left of them, half-buried beneath the collapsed building. “When the alert sounded, they stopped here so the passengers could get to the public shelter in the basement.”
“Dear God . . . ,” Eve whispered. Buried alive. Her greatest fear.
The orderlies unloaded stretchers from the ambulances. “Where have they put the casualties?” one of them asked.
The worker shook his head. “We haven’t found any yet. Any living ones, that is. We’re still digging.”
“Got an extra shovel?” the orderly asked.
“Follow me.”
Eve grabbed her first aid kit, and she and Audrey waded into the melee. Above them, Nazi planes continued their attack, splitting the air with the screams of falling bombs, shaking the ground with the thunderous roar of explosions. Searchlights crisscrossed the skies along with the deafening reply of antiaircraft guns. Eve had experienced the horror of battle in London’s East End, but Audrey hadn’t. She startled and flinched with every blast, instinctively ducking and covering her ears, but she bravely continued forward to where rescuers had tunneled into the basement bomb shelter, and workers and civilian volunteers pulled bloodied, mangled bodies from the wreckage. Hundreds of bodies. Some mere children. Crushed beyond recognition. None of them alive.
The grisliness halted Eve in her tracks. Her first aid kit fell to the ground as it slipped from her grasp. She was going to be sick. She couldn’t do this. But then Audrey was beside her, leaning against her, trembling and weeping with her as they held each other up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Audrey sobbed. “I didn’t want to fall apart. . . . I wanted to be strong . . .”
Eve hugged her tightly. “Go ahead and cry, Audrey. You’ve always had a heart as big as the ocean.”
“But Mother hated it when I blubbered. People in our class never do. One must control oneself, you see.”
“Do you really want to be like your mother?” Eve asked.
Audrey pulled back to stare at her for a moment, then fell into her arms again. “Oh no, Eve! This is how they suffered and died, isn’t it? Our mothers . . . like these poor people.”
A dam inside Eve burst and she began to sob, too, weeping for her mum, for these dying, suffering people, for all that her country had endured and would continue to endure. She wept for the never-ending nightmare that she and Audrey lived through and for the future she still couldn’t see or imagine. The din of battle raged around them, uncaring. Unceasing.
Suddenly a shout came from inside the wreckage. “This one’s alive! Bring a stretcher!”
Eve and Audrey parted, wiping their eyes. They had a job to do. What neither of them could do alone, they would do together.
16
USA, 1950
“Bobby and I are not going anywhere, Eve. We’re staying right here.” Audrey didn’t know how she had summoned the courage to say it, but she meant it. She could tell by Eve’s expression that she had surprised her. Yet Eve was the one who had taught Audrey to be courageous.
She turned away from Eve’s angry glare, rocking Bobby gently as she gazed through the wide living room window at the neighborhood where Eve lived. It was an alien world to Audrey, just coming to life on this warm summer morning. Dogs were barking; children were tossing balls and riding bicycles and scooters. The houses were painted different colors but were otherwise identical, built on tidy squares of green grass. The shutters on their windows didn’t seem to do much except serve as decoration. Audrey remembered the shuttered cottages on England’s seacoast where she and Alfie had sailed every summer, their breezy shabbiness and random sizes and shapes. Back home, London had still been rebuilding when Audrey left, even though the war ended five years ago. One didn’t have to venture far to see signs of destruction. There were still shortages of food and clothing in many places.