It was the last Sunday in August when the Secret Society of Librarians were able to gather together on top of Primrose Hill to mark the end of the war. London was drenched in a golden sunshine and the streets and parks were full of military parades, bunting, bonfires and endless street parties, now that Japan had finally surrendered. The war was truly over.
But Joyce couldn’t quite find it in her heart to celebrate when the news filtering out of Europe was so catastrophic. Millions had been killed on the battlefields and in the Holocaust.
Whole communities wiped out. Families ruptured. A generation lost.
And so, so many wartime secrets yet to unravel... Joyce knew she had to break it to the group, she must, and yet... could she not protect them from the truth for just a little while longer? The news was so incongruous with the brightness of the day.
Perched on top of London’s prettiest park, the world seemed alive with sounds. Church bells rang, automobiles with their horns blaring, girls with red, white and blue ribbons in their hair shrieking with laughter, and the sweetest sound of all.
‘Mama . . . Mama . . . look at me!’
Virginia, as Joyce and Harry had decided to name her, was four now, and charging towards them on chubby little legs. Shehad a strawberry ice-cream cone in one hand and a fistful of buttercups in the other. Like her namesake, she was sharp and astute, funny yet fierce.
‘Oh, Joyce,’ Clara said, laughing as Virginia barrelled into Joyce, lacing her hands around the back of her neck and placing a wet strawberry kiss on her cheek. ‘She’s absolutely adorable.’
‘And absolutely filthy,’ Joyce laughed, untangling herself from her daughter’s sticky embrace.
‘Harry, would you mind . . .?’
‘Come on zingy Ginny,’ her husband laughed, scooping the delighted girl up and blowing a raspberry on her cheek.
‘I’ll go and get her cleaned up and leave you librarians to your business,’ he said, his eyes shining with pride and love.
He dropped a kiss on the top of Joyce’s head and hoisted Virginia high up on his shoulders. As he strode away, Joyce heard him murmuring lines of William Blake. She smiled as he stopped to let Virginia pick a leaf from a tree and use it to tickle his ears. There was no doubt that his love for that little girl had saved him. The trauma of pulling all those children from the rubble that dark day had cast a deep shadow that only being around Virginia lightened.
‘Do you realise this is the first time we’ve all been together for six years,’ Evelyn remarked. ‘Minus our dear Dorotha, of course.’
Joyce’s gaze flickered to the horizon. Fortunately, the group were too focused on Evelyn to notice her discomfort.
‘And to mark the occasion,’ Evelyn continued with a sly grin, ‘I mixed us a little heart-starter. I call this one Librarians’ Courage.’
The group groaned and laughed as Evelyn pulled out a cocktail shaker from her handbag with a flourish and poured out a drink that Joyce had no doubt would blow the roof of her mouth off. Evelyn handed around six teacups and one for herself.
‘To the Secret Society of Librarians, and all we achieved. A bloody good job well done.’
‘To the Secret Society,’ the group chorused back. ‘And a bloody good job.’
Joyce cast a look around the exhausted and arguably thinner and more lined faces of her friends.
Jo from Exeter Library. Grace from Jersey. Beth from Coventry. Evelyn from Plymouth. Clara from Bethnal Green. And Annie from Barnstaple.
Their singular vow at the outbreak of the war had been to deliver books to people, when people couldn’t get to the books. Well, they had certainly delivered on that front. It was just as well too, for every single one of their libraries, bar Barnstaple, had been bombed. They’d worked out that between them, they’d lost close to 1,295,000 books. Their bulletin name, ‘Libertatem per Lectio’, freedom through reading, had never felt so apt.
‘They’ll be pinning medals on all the servicemen and -women soon,’ Beth remarked. ‘Think we’ll get any?’
‘I doubt it,’ Evelyn scoffed. ‘Books were a key weapon in the fight for morale and we helped our patrons to escape, but they’ll only ever see us asjustlibrarians.’
‘At least we proved to ourselves what we can achieve,’ Clara pointed out.
‘Meanwhile, anyone got any bright ideas on how we go about restocking our poor empty shelves?’ Jo asked. Poor Jo. Out of them all, Exeter Library had suffered the worst losses, with one million books and historic documents incinerated in the raids.
‘I have one book left,’ she groaned, holding up a finger. ‘One!English Men of Letters: The Life of Thomas Grayby Edmund Gosse.’
‘Typical that a man has to have the last word,’ Evelyn scoffed, lighting a cigarette.
‘Begging helps,’ Grace said.
Grace was visiting from Jersey now that the Occupation was finally over, working on behalf of the Channel Islands Refugee Committee to restock vital supplies, including books, for Jersey, after the Nazis had plundered the island.
