She was now the girl home alone while bombs rained down all around.
Julia!
Emmy called for her sister. She called for Mum.
She could do nothing but cover herself with the blanket and clutch the hammer as the bombs fell. Emmy would learn that this second night was worse than the first. Four hundred people would be killed, and more than seven hundred injured.
Warehouses along the Thames were again easy targets, and buildings that had been afire on Saturday night were burning again. Hundreds of fires would join together to become one.
And all the while, Emmy huddled in Thea’s bomb shelter, alone and afraid.
She didn’t know when she fell asleep. She only knew that when she awoke, she heard the far-off sounds of emergency vehicles. She emerged from the shelter to a fog of smoke and ash and mist. Her row of flats was still standing but the unit on the end was now minus a roof and a second story. Emmy picked her way back to the flat, calling for Mum, calling for Julia. But the street, the flat, all that she knew, were empty of people and silent. Inside, she used the toilet, its water soured and stinking since it had been used but not flushed in two days. The food in the fridge, the little there was, stank as well. She found a swallow of brandy in the cupboard above the fridge, which she drank because there was nothing else. Then she opened a tin of beans and ate them cold with a spoon.
Sometime later Emmy saw through a slit in the plywood a man approaching the flat. The warden perhaps? Emmy could not let him see her. He would insist she leave and that was something Emmy could not do. She had not locked the front door. Before she could turn thelatch, she heard him knock. Emmy sprang to the kitchen and let herself out the back door into the debris-littered garden where she concealed herself as best she could along the wall. She still held the hammer.
Emmy heard the man inside the house.
“Anyone here? Annie? Are you here?”
Emmy stood still against the wall. The voice didn’t belong to Mr. Findley. She didn’t recognize the voice at all. Still, he would only be able to see her if he came into the garden. And surely there was no reason for him to do that.
He called for Mum again. And again.
And then he left.
Emmy waited until she could see him over the garden wall, walking away. He wore a nice hat and a wool coat.
Should she have revealed herself? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know him. What did he want with her mother?
Emmy watched the man until he was no longer in sight.
Then she went back inside and waited.
Mum did not come back.
Emmy read Julia’s book of fairy tales. She slept. She ate another can of cold beans. She watched the fires burning across town from the back garden.
When darkness began to fall, Emmy realized it was Monday. Mr. Dabney had expected her at his town house at four o’clock that afternoon with her mother and the brides box in tow.
He and his sweet wife were leaving for Edinburgh tomorrow. And she was to go with them, she and her brides box, because she was going to be Graham Dabney’s apprentice.
It was now after seven.
And the sirens began to wail.
Once again, Emmy grabbed the hammer and her blanket and ran to Thea’s Anderson shelter.
In that hellish cocoon Emmy did not know that fires were burning all around Saint Paul’s and buildings were ablaze on both sides of Ludgate Hill. A women’s hospital was hit as was a school being used to shelter homeless families. More than four hundred people were killed and more than a thousand injured on the second night that she huddled in Thea’s shelter, the third night of the Blitz. There were a few tins of canned milk inside the shelter, which she drank, and a package of digestive biscuits, which she ate.
She fell asleep when exhaustion overcame her, to the rumblings of explosions that filled her dreams with terror.
In the morning, as the East End continued to burn, Emmy let herself back inside Thea’s flat, hardly noticing the dead cats as she stepped over them.
She needed food and water.
Thea had emptied her kitchen of food in preparation for evacuating with her mother to Wales, but Emmy found a few jars of preserves, canned meat, and other items that would not spoil in their absence. She grabbed a market basket from Thea’s kitchen and filled it with all the food she had left, even the cats’ food.
She took the basket and her hammer back to the flat to wait for Mum.
