But Gladys didn’t finish her sentence. Sirens suddenly pierced the air. The sirens never sounded during the day and so the two stood there dumbfounded for a moment, as if they had no idea what the strange keening meant. The Luftwaffe didn’t fly during the day when antiaircraft guns could pick the planes off. The Luftwaffe flew at night, using darkness as a cover. Yet the sirens wailed.
“What the devil—” But Gladys’s words were cut short by a series of loud booms that punched the air somewhere in the distance. Both women turned toward the sound. And then there were more thundering wallops. Smoke began to rise from the direction of the Thames, south and east of where they stood.
Several seconds passed before Emmy realized the sounds she was hearing were bombs. Dropped in daylight.
As she processed this knowledge, more bombs fell. Gladys reached for her. “Come inside, dear! We’ve a cellar!”
Emmy instinctively stepped back from her grasp. “Ihave to get home.” Emmy turned from her even as Gladys yelled for her to come back.
“You can’t leave now!” the woman shouted.
But Emmy was already off the doorstep, out the gate, and then running back the way she had come. And all the while the sirens kept wailing, the horizon ahead kept filling with smoke, and a cacophony of explosions kept rocking the air in the distance.
She could no longer hear Gladys bellowing for her to return. She was only barely aware of the other people on the sidewalk who, like her, were rushing to be somewhere. Emmy’s sole focus was getting on a train headed southeast toward home.
Emmy rounded a corner and nearly ran into a man coming from the opposite direction. They skipped the courtesies due each other and kept charging ahead. Emmy could see the steps to the Underground.
As she closed the distance, she heard herself saying aloud, “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”
Thank God Mum had left early. A few moments earlier, Emmy had been perturbed that Mum wasn’t at Mrs. Billingsley’s, and now she was nearly crying with relief that she had gone home at four.
That meant Julia wasn’t alone.
Thank God Julia wasn’t alone.
People were cramming themselves onto the steps of the station to get belowground. Emmy pushed her way forward down the stairs to get on a train. Surely one or two were still running. The sirens had been wailing for only ten minutes. She pressed her way to the tracks, surrounded on all sides by women with shopping bags, men with briefcases, grocers and bus drivers, wardens and waitresses, bankers and beggars.
She could feel the incoming rush of air as a trainapproached and the people moved forward as one, crushing her to the wall so that she could not take a step toward it. As soon as the train slowed to a stop, the people inside the station were at its doors. When they slid open, a few of the people on the train attempted to disembark.
“What’s happened?” one of them yelled.
“There’s an air raid!” someone in the crowd shouted back. “The Luftwaffe is attacking the East End. The whole bloody sky is filling with smoke!”
Some got off the train; some stayed on; others boarded until there was no more room. Emmy could not make her way forward to be among those who got on. It didn’t matter, though, because the train didn’t move after that.
She turned around and pressed through the crowd to get back to the stairs, but there was no way to ease or push her way through. The station was full of people, elbow to elbow, and outside she could still hear the wail of the sirens, the thunder of explosives, the crackling of antiaircraft guns, and even the buzzing hum of planes.
“What’s your name?” a woman said. She was clutching a little dog to her chest. Her hair had worked itself free of its pins and spilled about her shoulders in a wacky, unkempt tumble.
“Emmeline.”
“I’m Mrs. Grote. Do you live around here?”
“Whitechapel.”
A muted boom punctured the sheltered air inside and Mrs. Grote jumped, knocking herself into Emmy. “So sorry,” she said as she righted herself. “I am not good with loud noises. Percy doesn’t like them, either. Do you, Percy? Oh, I’m so glad I was walking my dog when the sirens started,” she said, now sniffling into the scruff of the dog’s neck. “I’m so glad. He’d be home alone if I had gone to the market instead. Can you imagine?”
Emmy wanted to get away from Mrs. Grote and her dog and her chatty demeanor, but there was nowhere to go.
There was nowhere for any of them to go. The people in the station could only lean against one another and wait for the thrashing outside to stop and the sirens to fall silent.
For more than an hour Emmy hunkered in the station, listening to the muffled sounds of a battle raging above. Finally, a few minutes after six, the world outside grew quiet compared to what it had been before. The crowd of people waited expectantly for the all-clear signal but did not hear it. After several minutes, a few people began to venture out anyway, despite a warning by a civil defense official who had dashed inside with them that no one should leave until the all-clear signal. Following those who pushed past, Emmy emerged back onto the street. The sky to the east was a bright blaze of gold and gray. The barrage balloons that hovered in the distance looked pink in the strange light of smoke and fire.
Emmy didn’t want anyone asking her any more questions about who she was or where she lived. She didn’t care if the all-clear hadn’t sounded and the Germans were merely circling to come back and have at them again. All she knew was the flat was in the direction of the fires and smoke. She had to get home to Mum and Julia.
She took off on foot as at last the all-clear sounded. She wasn’t sure where she was until she saw a landmark sign for Saint Paul’s two miles away. If she could find Saint Paul’s, she could find her way home.
Others who had been sheltered and wished to be home or at least somewhere else were also on the streets. Emmy could hear snippets of their conversations. Someone had been listening to a radio. Fires at the docks were raging. Warehouses were engulfed in flames. Stores,houses, churches, and schools all across the East End were demolished, damaged, or burning.
