Cook was a tall man, and he had to duck under the lintel. Once inside, his hat scraped against the underside of the rough concrete slab that formed the roof.
The shelter wasn’t the worst Cook had ever seen, but that wasn’t a fair comparison. On the Western Front, this shelter would have won awards. But this wasn’t the Western Front. This shelter had been designed by men who had the advantage of every insight gained from the last war. The effects of blast waves on structures. The likelihood of being hit in a sustained bombing campaign. The features and conveniences people needed if they were forced to spend any amount of time huddling for their lives.
With all that knowledge, a design had been commissioned, no doubt. That design had been through committees, attended by experts. Engineers would have weighed in. Former soldiers, veterans who’d spent years huddling in ditches, up to their eyes in mud. Accountants weighed pluses and minuses when it came to costs. Then the tender had gone out. Builders selected. Inspections made, to ensure the government got its money’s worth.
Unfortunately, Cook reflected, as he studied the shelter with his expert eye, the accountants had done too fine a job. Costs had been weighed against benefits, and all the benefits had been found unnecessary. Perhaps an element of retribution. A generation of men who’d survived the worst, couldn’t bring themselves to make conditions better for the next lot.
The shelter was entirely lacking in creature comforts. The ground was mud. No chairs. No benches. No bunks. Worse, no sanitary provisions. Forty people were to spend the night, but the only concession to bodily functions was a galvanised steel bucket in the corner. All in all, a badly designed building, thrown up with the minimum amount of effort and money. A token, meant to give people the feeling that the government had done something for their protection, with precious little protection being provided.
‘Don’t stand there,’ he said to Frankie, who was near the door. ‘Something goes off outside, that door’ll squash you flat against the wall.’
Frankie took a quick step away from the door.
Cook looked up into the darkness, to where the wall met the roof. He pushed his fingers up into the corner.
‘What?’ Gracie asked.
‘This roof slab’s not fastened to the walls,’ Cook said. ‘If anything shifts, it’ll flatten us. Like a house of cards.’
The wall was no better. Cook ran his finger along a seam of mortar between the bricks and a trail of sand came away at his touch.
‘Who built this?’ Cook asked.
‘ARP,’ someone said, from the corner. ‘Beaumont and that lot. They’ve been putting them up all over the borough.’
Beaumont, Cook thought. The smartly dressed gent who’d brought the cricket ball. Great minds, and all that. He looked around to see if he was here.
‘He scarpered,’ the voice from the corner said. ‘Like a frightened rabbit. Disappears at the slightest hint of danger, our Mr Beaumont.’
Gracie set her basket down on the driest patch of ground. She took out a bottle of whisky, cracked the seal, and took a drink. She passed it to Cook. He took a sip, and handed the bottle on.
‘Where’s that sister of yours got to?’ Gracie said, in the direction of Frankie.
‘Where’s she coming from?’ Cook asked.
‘Green Park,’ Gracie said. ‘She works in the Lyons.’
‘Do they run the buses during a raid?’ Cook asked.
‘They have to,’ Gracie said. ‘People have to get home, raid or no raid. Besides, there’s been alarms every night.If all of London ground to a halt every time a plane flew over ... But even if they did, she’d walk if she had to.’
The ground shook as a bomb landed nearby. There was a shower of dust from the concrete roof.
‘Let’s see if we can find her,’ Cook said. ‘Could use a walk.’
15
They cut through the docks, a guard giving them a nod and letting them in through a wrought-iron gate. Inside the walls of the vast compound, Gracie gave a running commentary of each wharf and warehouse they passed. She had all of Frankie’s enthusiasm for the docks and the island. Cook saw where the boy had got it from.
In the old days, Gracie said, a ship would come in and it would be loaded with a bit of everything. Dockers would be carrying tea one minute, spices the next, even gold. But that was history. Nowadays it was efficiency itself – each ship specialised in one product. Each warehouse likewise. Gracie listed them off with each looming building they hurried past – cacao, sugar, cotton, spices, fresh-cut pine from the vast Canadian forests. The largest warehouse on the long southern side of the basin held enough wheat for the whole country for several months, assuming enough got through the U-boat blockades in the Atlantic. Cook knew a bit about the wheat trade, it had decimated domestic prices in the decades between the wars. A lot of good men had lost their farms, waiting for things to turn around.
The steel drawbridge at the far end was up. Cook assumed Gracie would get it lowered. A favour for a local, or perhaps a bribe. An old friend with a long history of mutual assistance. But Gracie hurried past the bridge, the rusting metal roadway left pointing towards the sky.
They followed the water’s edge to the Thames, just visible between a row of smaller, older warehouses. The original docks, Gracie said, before the modern ones replaced them. Another wrought-iron gate, this one unattended, opened with a screech, and Cook followed her down a narrow alley, both his shoulders brushing against walls black with mould. At the end of the alley, a wooden staircase led down to the foreshore, and a floating dock where small boats bobbed in the waves.
Gracie stepped expertly into the nearest boat, a small craft, grey wood planks for seats and an outboard motor on the back. Cook followed suit, tried not to let the side down. Gracie had made it look easy. The boat hadn’t even wobbled as she’d stepped on board. Cook found it wasn’t as simple as he’d hoped. He must have put his foot an inch too far to the side, because the whole thing tilted as if it was going to capsize, but Gracie shifted her weight to counterbalance Cook, a glint in her eye.
Cook sat, gingerly, on a plank that spanned the boat, conscious that he was raising the centre of gravity with his mere presence.
