‘Fighting talk, my dear. That’s the spirit...’ he trailed off to cough as a cloud of lung-filling dust spiralled over them, followed by the stench of something hot and marshy.
Not ten yards from them, a young man was vigorously shaking his bedding out over the platform.
‘Good grief, man,’ Dore wheezed. ‘The spreading of dust and germs over people, many of whom already suffer shelter throat, is little short of criminal. Take your bedding home and do the shaking in your own back yard please, sir.’
He grabbed a passing volunteer. ‘Please make sure to spray antiseptic over there. We’ll end up as grubby as Piccadilly Circus Station shelter at this rate.’
Adela and Joyce exchanged a glance. If even Dore was rattled, it didn’t bode well. He stalked off muttering about ‘bloody officialdom’ under his breath.
Outside, the freezing December morning was a beast with teeth. The air was swollen with the smell of saturated burnttimber and brick dust. Joyce and Adela walked to the garage and clambered into the mobile library.
Adela muttered something in Polish under her breath as she hauled herself into the driver’s seat. The revelation about Dorotha and her parents fell like a blade between them, and Joyce knew better than to push her.
‘Where to first?’ Adela asked.
Joyce glanced down at the list of their usual stops, but today, nothing was normal.
‘Let’s just drive and see who needs us.’
Nan started up with a throaty rattle and Adela swung the old girl out of the garage and up Camden High Street, in the direction of the City. As they drove, Joyce felt disbelief clamp her heart. So many buildings were now roofless, their interior walls stretching like skeletal fingers into the fog. Exhausted firemen were still battling fires, bodies were still being pulled out of the rubble. Abandoned fire engines lay smouldering in the road, their rubber tyres melted into the pavement.
Harry’s been working in this firestorm. Please dear God let him still be safe.Joyce shook her head, as if to dislodge the toxic thoughts taking hold.
‘It’s like a tragic replay of the Great Fire of London,’ Joyce murmured, the words from Pepys’s diary still fresh in her mind from where she had been reading it to the underground community.
In the smoky early morning light, the veil between past and present became mutable. Joyce’s imagination raced. She half expected Samuel Pepys to rush forth from the smoke, on his way to Seething Lane to record the day’s events in his diary.
‘Paternoster Row,’ Joyce gasped as they drew level with the home of the book trade. ‘Stop.’
Adela slammed on the breaks. The long street filled with second-hand bookshops, where before the war Joyce had whiledaway many a long and happy afternoon, was now a smoking, sulphurous wasteland. Here and there, charred timbers still burnt and, out of the smoke, she picked out the figure of a solitary man.
Joyce wound down the window. ‘I say, are you all right? Do you need help?’
‘There’s nothing anyone can do,’ he said, unable to tear his gaze from a waterlogged building. ‘I’ve lost everything. Millions of books. It’s irreplaceable. I’ll never recover.’ He wandered off into the smoke without a backwards glance, and Joyce’s heart twisted. Her library was at least still intact. She looked at the façade of the nearest building. The name Hodder & Stoughton stood proudly over the door-frame. Unfortunately, the frame was about all that was left of the building. The once-grand publishing offices were now a cavernous glowing hole. She shivered at the apocalyptic scene. How many millions of books must have been lost in this firestorm? How much poorer would society be for the loss of all those stories?
‘Come on,’ Joyce sighed. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Adela reversed up the street, crying out in pain when they hit the edge of a crater.
‘Adela! Are you hurt?’
‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, looking anything but.
As they approached the City at Gresham Street, their way was completely blocked by a collapsed building.
An ARP man whose face was more soot than skin flagged them down.
‘Hell gave London a run for her money last night. You’re a mobile library, yes?’
Joyce nodded. ‘What can we do to help?
‘There’s a rest shelter full of bombed-out mums and kiddies up in Canning Town. South Hallsville School in Agate Street.They’re waiting on transport out. Bet they could use a distraction.’
‘They’re still there?’ Joyce gasped.
‘You know this place?’ Adela asked.
‘Yes, Harry and I were there last night. They should have been long gone by now.’
