‘Oh, that’s Jimmy, don’t mind him.’
‘Jimmy?’ Joyce asked, feeling as if she was in a surreal dream.
‘Jimmy is Rosie’s pet tortoise. I hadn’t the heart to turn him away. Goodness,’ he breathed, glancing at Library Cat and Missy, ‘it’s turning into quite the menagerie down here.
‘Now, I’d best be off, but I’ll leave you to settle into your new home. I sleep in my office off the booking hall, if you need me at all. Good day, ladies.’ He tipped his hat to each of them in turn. ‘And welcome to Swiss Cottage underground. Oh, and how could I forget?’ He turned and dashed his palm against his cheek. ‘At nine p.m., a food and beverage train stops on the platform for thirty minutes. Serves the whole Bakerloo line. Bedtime beverages can be purchased. It’s only cocoa, Bovril, that kind of thing, but it’s just the ticket before you turn in.’ He smiled with satisfaction. ‘From chaos comes order. Cheery-bye.’ And then Dore was off, striding briskly up the platform.
The three women stared at each other, lost for words.
‘Oh look,’ Mitsy said, pointing at a poster advertising a steamship company on the other side of the tracks. ‘When I lie in my bunk, I have only to look at that poster, and I can imagine I’m cruising on the high seas.’
Her eyes gleamed. ‘I’ll save a fortune on laundry and, best of all, I won’t have to fix up those wretched blackouts. Plenty of handsome men to brighten up the place too. What more could a girl want?’
She pulled the blanket over herself and Missy the dog and the pair were asleep and snoring in moments.
A Tube train rushed in again, teasing Joyce and Adela’s hair and sending it billowing around their faces, followed by a waft of dust from the bowels of London. Joyce’s head swam. In the last twelve hours, she had narrowly avoided being machine-gunned and blown up, and crushed by a London bus, and nowshe was about to move underground. And to think, she had once imagined her life dull!
8
Joyce
London, December 1940
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Bulletin No. 17
Well, friends, we did it. If people can’t get to the books, we take books to the people!
Myself and my library assistant Ruby have opened Britain’s first underground shelter library. Libraries in converted shops, in village halls, are common enough. But libraries in Tube shelters are something new under the sun. When Londoners defied all laws and rules by taking possession of the Tube platforms, it was quickly evident that a new social situation was in being. Our underground library is tiny, a mere sentry box, but we are inordinately proud. I’m even thinking of starting an underground book club. Stay safe, friends. I love you all. Clara xx PS a thousand thanks for your lovely letters received after the funeral.
‘An underground book club,’ Adela marvelled, reading Clara’s bulletin out loud. ‘We should do that in our shelter. Mitsy, Lilley and Rosie would love that. Should I suggest it to Dore?’
‘Pardon me?’ Joyce looked up from the books she was shelving, barely paying attention to Adela.
‘Are you all right?’ Adela questioned.
‘Yes, yes, sorry, nervous is all. Do you think anyone will come?’ Joyce asked, feeling her heart slug in her chest.
Two months on from being bombed out and moving underground to Swiss Cottage Tube, events were moving sorapidly, Joyce could hardly remember the person she was before the war. True to his word, Dore had given her full autonomy within the library, and she had implemented many of her ideas with great success, including longer opening hours, stocking a wider array of romance novels, and granting one extra reader’s ticket per week just for fiction. Wherever possible, she worked as hard as she could to obtainany bookticket-holders asked for, not just books that Mrs March had previously referred to as ‘civilising’. If her patrons wanted to read nothing but murders or bodice-rippers, who was she to judge?
The icy veil of winter had done little to suppress the fires that raged nightly. These were dark times for civilisation. Innocent people were being bombed in their homes. Children sent to live with strangers. Beautiful human lives stolen away by the Blitzkrieg. She and Adela had returned to Unwin Terrace to see what they could salvage, only to find themselves staring at an icy hole in the ground, filled with charred wood and masonry.
Strangely, when she’d looked at the mangled remains of the ‘good room’, she’d felt nothing. Just numbness, as if the Blitz had blown away her old self and a new woman was emerging from the shell. Joyce had written to her mother in Wokingham to break the news. She had written back, furious about the loss of her ‘good china’.
Joyce now lived underground, sleeping in a triple bunk bed on the Bakerloo line, and that was a fact that still surprised her every morning when she woke just before six a.m. to find herself staring at a Tube tunnel. It was always a rush to get changed before the morning commuters descended. It was, admittedly, a strange existence. Most people slept in their clothes and managed a quick wash and brush-up in the station toilets. Breakfast was a buttered roll and a cup of tea purchased for a couple of pennies from the station café. She, Mitsy and Adelastored their clothes for tuppence in a local bundle shop, to be collected again in the evening and washed at a local launderette.
Every few days, a Lifebuoy shower van came round, offering free soap and showers. A half-decent meal could be had from a local school that had been converted into a rest shelter, serving up to a thousand meals a day, each costing a shilling.
Everything took a little longer, as Mitsy was unsteady on her feet and needed careful guiding and support up and down the escalators, but Joyce didn’t mind. She, like the rest of society, was adapting to the reality of their new existence, overcoming, developing a deep resilience. Politicians were talking about the creation of a new welfare state, but underground, they were already quietly creating their own state of welfare. And that included a duty of care to their new neighbours, the elderly and the vulnerable.
The only thing that really irked Joyce was the lack of privacy. Trying to read in her bunk by torchlight, with half the station coughing and snoring, and the scorching smell from the chemical toilets wafting over her, was a bind. But it was better than being bombed, Joyce supposed, and so she resolved to dig deep and keep going.
And now, today, she and Adela were about to launch their mobile library, and that felt as exposing as walking up the Bakerloo line in nothing but her undies.
‘What if no one wants a mobile library and I’ve wasted council money?’ she worried.
‘They’ll come,’ Adela insisted. ‘You’re tired and overworked. It is natural to feel like this. Besides, you can’t back out now, otherwise my fingers are blue for no reason.’ She held up her fingers, ink-stained from where the printers’ ink on their posters had rubbed off, and smiled, her impish face lighting up.
