The closer they got to the docks, the worse visibility grew. Their headlights were dimmed to comply with the blackout.Dawn was breaking, but the fog and the smoke made it feel as if they were driving through a snowstorm.
Adela slowed as they drove up Agate Street, and the police cordon seemed to loom up out of nowhere. She only just managed to slam her foot on the brake in time.
‘That’s strange. That wasn’t here yesterday,’ Joyce mused.
Adela parked the library van as close to the cordon as they could get, and the pair got out. Shivering, they wrapped their coats tightly around themselves and headed in the direction of the school. The glare of the burning docks rose from behind a shattered skyline, a desolate landscape filled with strange, shrouded shapes.
As they drew closer, they saw the silhouettes of many figures hurrying about in the gloom. Glass crunched underfoot. The smell of burning brick dust caught in Joyce’s throat, making her cough, but still she couldn’t make out the outline of the school. She whirled around, trying to get her bearings.
‘The school,’ Adela suddenly stopped, grabbing Joyce’s hand. ‘Where’s it gone?’
The school building was gone. The playground was gone. All that could be seen through the fog was a giant smoking pit.
‘No, no, no . . .’ She gagged.
It looked as if the school had imploded; a vast crater had opened up in the middle where the school roof had clearly crashed down two floors into the basement. She and Adela stared down into the hole, at least forty feet across and twenty feet deep. It was the very pit of hell.
Waxy limbs and matted hair strewn together in a soup of bodies. Monstrous. Forcing herself to breathe, Joyce pulled a torch from her bag and tried to gather her wits.
She remembered how many people had been here when they had read to the children yesterday afternoon. She dreaded to think how many people were entombed beneath the ground.
All about them, rescue workers, wearing masks against plaster dust and smell, were frantically digging under piles of bricks and shifting giant slabs of concrete, rubble and steel girders.
Joyce and Adela watched, transfixed, as a rescue worker abseiled perilously into the crater with a rope wrapped round his middle. He swung round 360 degrees, the light from his head torch scattering beams of light.
An awful thought seized Joyce. The children who had died here, waiting for transport out – the last story they had heard, would ever hear, had beenPeter Pan. Now they too would be the children who never grew up. Joyce felt a scream gathering in her throat. What diabolical world was this?
A rescue worker touched Joyce on the shoulder. ‘Please clear the way for search and rescue.’
She snapped back to herself. ‘Yes, sorry, of course. Can we do anything to help?’
‘Makeshift rest centre on the other side of the road, they need all the hands they can get.’
Joyce and Adela carefully picked their way over the rubble towards a WVS van with a huddle of people. Medics were treating those who – by some miracle – had survived. Blank-eyed people in slings and bandages clutched cups of tea.
Joyce approached an ARP worker.
‘We run a mobile library and have a vehicle that can hold about twenty people. Can you use us?’
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, those who have only minor injuries urgently need transporting away from here. The roads are too blocked for larger vehicles to get through and there are coaches leaving West Ham Council offices for the safety zones. Are you up to it?’
Joyce glanced at Adela, but she was already running towards the mobile library.
‘I’ll pull up as close as I can,’ she yelled over her shoulder.
For the next six hours, the pair worked flat out, ferrying the walking wounded to hospitals, and those with only minor injuries to West Ham Council offices and onto coaches. The whole day took on a surreal air. There was no time to talk, to question whether it was right that they were using what was left of their precious fuel allowance.
From the survivors, they were able to assemble fragments of what had happened, piecing together a larger story of a wartime travesty. The ‘incident’, as the authorities had taken to calling them, was just another bleak brushstroke of death in a picture of absolute carnage.
Hundreds of East Enders had been stuck in that school, some into their third night, when the bomb had hit, shortly after Joyce and Adela had left, crashing through the school roof. God alone knew how many poor souls had perished, but Joyce estimated it must’ve been at least 400, probably many more.
Joyce’s anger was the only thing pushing back the tsunami of sadness, and it propelled her on.
On their tenth, or maybe eleventh run, Joyce spotted a face she recognised. A mother and her two children, blankets draped round their shoulders, picked their way through the rubble towards them.
‘I heard you were giving lifts to the council offices. Room for three more?’
‘Jean?’ she gasped. ‘Jean Farley?’
