Adela nodded, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.
‘Library Cat!’ Joyce gasped. ‘Did we leave her food?’
‘I took her to Mitsy Bouvoir’s,’ Adela replied calmly.
Adela and that cat were inseparable, and Joyce sensed that they each relied on one another.
Once in the heart of London, a deep blanket of dark fell over them. The narrow, cobbled streets of West London were deserted, with most sensible folk already inside the safety of their shelter.
A bombers’ moon stole over the streets, a slice of silver light illuminating the mobile library as it bumped along the street inthe direction of Camden. The silence was unnerving, and Joyce heard her pulse thudding in her ears.
‘Just hold off, Jerry, until we get home,’ Joyce murmured. ‘Just twenty more minutes. This silence is giving me the willies. Shall we sing a song?’
They swung under an archway, and a large building appeared at the end of the street.
‘It’s Buckingham Palace,’ Joyce exclaimed. ‘We’re on the Mall.’
The beauty of the palace, so dignified and solid, felt reassuring, as it did to know the king and queen were in there somewhere, refusing to leave London.
‘I like that their windows are taped up too,’ Adela remarked.
‘No greater leveller than war,’ Joyce remarked. ‘How about “God Save the King”?’ Adela giggled. ‘You’re, what is it you British say, barmy?’
‘Maybe.’
Joyce gave it both barrels as the library van wove its way past the Victoria Memorial, and Adela joined in.
Fuelled by the kind of foggy grey exhaustion that comes from a couple of hours’ sleep a night, both librarians lost themselves in uninhibited laughter.
They had made it past Holborn when they heard the unmistakable staccato throb of an aircraft overhead. The siren started up.
‘Here goes,’ Joyce said, her mood sobering.
The first bomb hit in the next street. They didn’t see it, but they felt the reverberations. The whole road seemed to shudder and sigh. A second later, a plate-glass window blew out of a grocer’s shop. Adela slammed on the van breaks. Ten yards ahead, an ARP warden, distinctive in his wellington boots and steel helmet, turned as if in slow motion and put his hands out.
The plate glass sliced right through him. For a second, he remained upright, but as he fell, the two halves of his bodyseparated. A scream caught in Joyce’s throat, and she turned away, her mind unable to reconcile the abject horror.
‘Pull over,’ she whimpered. ‘We have to get to a shelter.’
Adela muttered something in Polish and parked the van.
Her heart hammering, Joyce scanned the street ahead and spotted a white S painted on the side of a low brick building.
‘Street surface shelter. Let’s make for that.’
The pair flung open the library van doors and leapt out, the height of the drop no longer important.
And it was then that a most peculiar thing happened. Joyce couldn’t move. She’d heard the phrase ‘frozen in fear’, but never imagined it could actually happen.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the warden’s round face. Then a fleshy thud. And blood seeping over his wellington boots. She whimpered, holding on to the van door, as all the life seemed to drain from her body.
Adela, already running to the shelter, turned, her eyes widening in horror. First at Joyce, then at the shadow moving quickly and stealthily up the road behind her.
A Messerschmitt was flying low up the street, machine-gunning the cobbles.
‘Joyce,’ she screamed. ‘Run!’
Joyce tried to talk, to articulate whatever strange primal response had stolen her ability to move.
