Blackout

Dulwich-15 June 1944

AT 11:35, FOUR MINUTES AFTER IT WAS SUPPOSED TO-though it seemed much longer to Mary-the alert finally sounded. “What’s happening?” Fairchild asked, sitting up in bed.

“Nothing,” Talbot said. “Those horrid children have got at the siren again. Go back to sleep. It will stop in a bit.”

“Let’s hope so,” Grenville said, burying her head in her pillow. “And let’s hope the Major realizes what it is. I can’t bear to spend the night in that wretched cellar,” but the siren continued its up-and-down whine.

“What if it’s not a prank?” Maitland said, sitting up in bed and switching on her lamp. “What if Hitler’s surrendered and the war’s over?”

“I do hope not,” Talbot murmured, her eyes shut. “I need to win that pool.”

“It can’t be surrender,” Fairchild said. “They’d sound the all clear if it was the end of the war.”

Shh, Mary thought, listening for the V-1. It was supposed to hit at 11:43 on Croxted Road, near the cricket grounds, which were directly west of here, so she should be able to hear it before it hit.

The siren wound down. “Finally,” Talbot said. “If I get my hands on those brats-”

Maitland switched off her lamp and lay back down. Mary ducked back under the covers, switched on her torch, and looked at her watch. 11:41. Two more minutes. She listened intently for the engine’s sound, but she couldn’t hear anything. A minute. She should be able to hear the V-1 coming by now. Their stuttering jet engines made them audible for several minutes before they reached their targets, and it should pass directly over the post.

Thirty seconds, and still nothing. Oh, no, the V-1 isn’t going to hit Croxted Road, she thought. Which means I have the falsified times and locations, and my assignment has just become a ten.

There was a loud crash like thunder to the west, followed by a rumbling that shook the room. “Good Lord, what was that?” Maitland said, fumbling for the lamp.

Thank goodness, Mary thought, looking at her watch. 11:43. She hastily switched off her torch and emerged from under the covers.

“Did you hear that?” Reed asked.

“I did,” Maitland said. “It sounded like a plane. One of our boys must have crash-landed.”

“Alerts don’t sound for downed planes,” Reed said. “I’ll wager it’s a UXB.”

“It can’t have been a UXB,” Talbot said disdainfully. “How would they know in advance it was going to go off?”

“Well, whatever it was, it was in our sector,” Maitland said, and the phone in the despatch room rang.

A moment after, Camberley leaned her head in the door and said, “Plane down in West Dulwich.”

“I told you it was a plane,” Maitland said, yanking on her boots. “Civil Defence must have seen it was on fire and sounded the alert.”

“Where in West Dulwich?” Mary asked Camberley.

“Near the cricket grounds. Croxted Road. There are casualties.”

Thank God, Mary thought. Camberley disappeared. Maitland and Reed clapped their helmets on and hurried out. Camberley poked her head in again and said, “The Major says everyone not on duty’s to go down to the shelter.”

“How many planes does she expect will crash tonight?” Talbot grumbled.

A hundred and twenty, Mary thought, pulling on her robe. They trooped, grumbling, down to the cellar and then back up five minutes later when the all clear went, shrugged out of their robes, and got into bed. Mary did, too, even though she knew the siren would go again in another-she glanced at her watch-six minutes.

It did. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Fairchild said, exasperated. “What are they on about now?”

“It’s a Nazi plot to deprive us of our sleep,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said, flinging back her bedclothes, and there was a crump to the southeast. Croydon, Mary thought happily, and right on time.

So was the next one, and the next, though none of them were close enough for her to be able to hear their engines. She wished again that she’d listened to a recording of one. She needed to be able to recognize the sound if she heard one coming when she was in Bomb Alley, but at least she knew what the explosions were. None of the other FANYs seemed to grasp the situation at all, even when Maitland and Reed returned from their incident with tales of flattened houses and widespread destruction. “The pilot must have crashed with all his bombs still onboard,” Reed said, even though they’d heard four other explosions by then.

“Was it one of ours or theirs?” Sutcliffe-Hythe asked.

“There wasn’t enough left of it to tell,” Maitland said, “but it must have been a German plane. If it was one of our boys coming back, they’d have already dropped their load. The incident officer said he’d heard it come over, and it had sounded like it was having engine trouble.”

“Perhaps Hitler’s running out of petrol and is putting kerosene in their fuel tanks,” Reed said. “Coming back, we heard another one go over, stuttering and coughing.”

There was another rumbling boom to the east. “At this rate, Hitler won’t have an air force left by tomorrow,” Talbot said.

They’re not planes, Mary said silently, they’re unmanned rockets. And it was obvious she needn’t have worried about arriving too late to observe their pre-V-1 behavior-they were still exhibiting it.

They went back almost immediately to discussing the dance Talbot was going to the Saturday after next. “I need someone to go with me,” she said. “Will you, Reed? There’ll be heaps of Americans there.”

“Then, no, absolutely not. I hate Yanks. They’re all so conceited. And they step all over one’s feet,” and launched into a story about a dreadful American captain she’d met at the 400 Club. Even Camberley’s shouting down the cellar steps that there was another incident and Maitland and Reed’s hurrying off to it didn’t deter them. “Why would you want to go to a dance with a lot of Yanks, Talbot?” Parrish asked.

“She wants one of them to fall madly in love with her and buy her a pair of nylons,” Fairchild said.

“I think that’s disgraceful,” said Grenville, the one with the fiancй in Italy. “What about love?”

“I’d love to have a new pair of stockings,” Talbot said.

“I’ll go with you,” Parrish said, “but only if you’ll lend me your dotted swiss blouse to wear the next time I see Dickie.”

It had never occurred to Mary that the FANYs wouldn’t tumble to what was going on once the rockets started-especially since, according to historical records, there’d been rumors since 1942 that Hitler was developing a secret weapon. Then again, historical records had said the siren had gone at 11:31.

And they would realize soon enough. By the end of the week there’d be 250 V-1s coming over a day and nearly eight hundred dead. Let them enjoy their talk of men and frocks while they could. It wouldn’t last much longer. And it meant she was free to listen for the sirens and explosions and make certain they were on schedule.

They were, except for one that should have hit at 2:09 but didn’t, and the last all clear of the night, which went at 5:40 instead of 5:15.

“It hardly seems worthwhile to go to bed,” Fairchild said to Mary as they dragged back upstairs. “We go on duty at six.”

But the sirens won’t start up again till half past nine, Mary thought, and there won’t be a V-1 in our sector till 11:39. I hope.

She was worried about the one that hadn’t hit at 2:09. It was supposed to have fallen in Waring Lane, which was even nearer than the cricket grounds. They should have been able to hear it.

Which meant it must have landed somewhere else. That fit with British Intelligence’s deception plan. On the other hand, the 2:09 was the only one that hadn’t been at the right time and-as near as she could tell-in the right place, which meant it could also be only an error. Though a single error was all it would take to end her assignment abruptly. And permanently.

She was relieved when the 9:30 siren and the 11:39 V-1 were on schedule and even more when she saw the V-1 had hit the house it was supposed to-though when she saw the destruction, she felt guilty for having been so happy. Luckily, there were no casualties. “We’d only just left the house, me and the wife and our three girls,” the house’s owner told her, “to go to my aunt’s.”

“It’s her birthday, you see,” his wife said. “Wasn’t that lucky?”

Their house had been blown so completely apart it was impossible to tell if it had been made of wood or of brick, but Mary agreed with them that it was incredibly lucky.

“If the bomber’d crashed five minutes earlier, we’d all have been killed,” the husband said. “What was it? A Dornier?” Which meant they still thought all these explosions were caused by crashing planes.

But when they got back to the post, Reed greeted them with, “The general I drove to Biggin Hill this morning says the Germans have a new weapon. It’s a glider with bombs which go off automatically when it lands.”

“But a glider wouldn’t make any noise,” Parrish, who was on despatch duty, said. “And Croydon says they heard two come over this morning and they both had the same stuttering engines Maitland and Reed heard.”

“Well,” Talbot said, “whatever they are, I hope Hitler hasn’t got very many of them.”

Only fifty thousand, Mary thought.

“I drove a lieutenant commander last week,” Reed said, “who said the Germans were working on-” She stopped as the siren sounded and they all trooped down to the cellar. “-on a new weapon. An invisible plane. He said they’d invented a special paint which can’t be seen by our defenses.”

“If our defenses can’t see them, then why do the sirens sound?” Grenville asked, and Fairchild said, “If they can make them invisible, one would think they could make them silent as well, so we wouldn’t hear them coming.”

They have, Mary thought. It’s called the V-2. They’ll begin firing them in September, by which time surely it’ll have dawned on you that these are rockets and not gliders or invisible planes.

Or bombs shot from a giant catapult-a theory they discussed till the all clear went half an hour later. “Good,” Fairchild said, listening to its steady wail. “Let’s hope that’s the last one for tonight.”

It won’t be, Mary thought. The alert will sound again in… she glanced at her watch… eleven minutes, if it was on schedule, which she was beginning to be confident it would be. The explosions had been on time all day, and when she looked at the despatcher’s log, there was a 2:20 A.M. ambulance call to Waring Lane. Which only left Bethnal Green.

When the evening papers came out, she felt even more confident. Not only was the Evening Standard’s front page identical to the one she’d seen in the Bodleian, but the Daily Express said there’d been four V-1s on Tuesday night, though it didn’t say where they’d landed.

The newspapers also settled the issue of what the V-1s weren’t. The Evening Standard’s headline read, “Pilotless Planes Now Raid Britain,” and they all described them in detail. The Daily Mail even had a diagram of the propulsion system, and the conversation in the shelter turned to the best way to avoid being hit by one.

“When the sound of the engine stops, take cover promptly, using the most solid protection available and keeping well away from glass doors and windows,” the Times advised, and the Daily Express was even more blunt. “Lie face-down in the nearest gutter.”

“Keep watch on the flame in the tail,” the Evening Standard suggested. “When it goes out, you will have approximately fifteen seconds in which to take cover,” which made the Morning Herald’s advice to go to the nearest shelter utterly impractical. But in general the press had it right. Though they couldn’t agree on the sound the V-1s made and none of them mentioned a backfiring automobile. Descriptions varied from “a washing machine” to “the putt-putt of a motorbike” to “the buzz of a bee.”

“A bee?” Parrish, who had heard one on an ambulance run, said. “It’s not like any bee I ever heard. A hornet perhaps. An extremely large, extremely angry hornet,” and Mary was forced to take her word for it. By the end of the first week of attacks, she still hadn’t heard one nearby. That was the problem with being an ambulance driver. One went where the V-1 had already been, not where it was going.

But it wasn’t their sound that mattered. It was the sudden silence, the abrupt cutting off of the engine, and that would be easy to recognize. At any rate, she was bound to hear one soon. They were coming over now at the rate of ten an hour, and the FANYs were working double shifts, driving to incident after incident, administering first aid to the injured, loading them onto stretchers, transporting them to hospital, and-when they arrived at an incident ahead of Civil Defence, which often happened-digging victims, alive and dead, out of the rubble. And they were still ferrying patients from Dover to Orpington.

It was far more than they could handle, and the Major began lobbying HQ for more FANYs and an additional ambulance. “Which she’ll never get,” Talbot said.

That’s true, Mary thought. Every available ambulance was being sent to France.

“Not necessarily,” Reed said. “Remember, she got us Kent. And this is the Major,” and Camberley promptly started a betting pool on how long it would take her to obtain the ambulance.

The FANYs had shifted effortlessly from arguing over frocks to tying tourniquets and coping with grisly sights. “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand,” Fairchild told her, and as they waited with a stretcher while a rescue team dug a shaft down to a sobbing woman, Parrish said calmly, “They’ll never make it to her in time. Gas. Are you going to the dance with Talbot on Saturday?”

“I thought you were,” Mary managed to say, trying not to think about the gas. She could smell it growing stronger, and the woman’s cries seemed to be getting correspondingly weaker.

“I was, but Dickie telephoned. He has a forty-eight-hour pass, and I was wondering if I might borrow your blue organdy, if you’re not wearing it anywhere on-oh, look, they’ve got her out,” Parrish said and took off at a trot across the rubble with the medical kit, but it wasn’t the woman, it was a dog, dead from the gas, and by the time they got the woman out, she’d died, too.

“I’ll telephone for a mortuary van,” Parrish said. “You didn’t say whether you needed your organdy this weekend.”

“No, I don’t,” Mary said, appalled at Parrish’s callousness, and then remembered she was supposed to have driven an ambulance during the Blitz. “Of course you can borrow it.”

Away from the incidents they never discussed what had happened there or their lives before the war. They were like historians in that respect, focusing solely on their current assignment, their current identity. Mary had to piece together their backgrounds from clues they dropped in conversation and a copy of Debrett’s she found in the common room.

Sutcliffe-Hythe’s father was an earl, Maitland’s mother was sixteenth in line to the throne, and Reed was Lady Diana Brenfell Reed. Camberley’s first name was Cynthia and Talbot’s Louise, though they never called each other by anything but their last names. Or nicknames. As well as “Jitters” Parrish, there was a FANY at Croydon they referred to as “Man-Mad,” and they’d dubbed an officer several of them had gone out with “NST,” which Camberley explained meant “Not Safe in Taxis.”

Maitland had a twin who was serving in the Air Transport Service, Parrish had an elder brother who’d been captured by the Japanese in Singapore and a younger one who’d been killed on the HMS Hood, and Grenville’s father had been killed at Tobruk. But to listen to their conversations, one would never have known that. They gossiped, complained about Bela Lugosi (which was refusing to start), about the dampness of the cellar, about the Major’s habit of sending them after supplies when they were off-duty. “She sent me to Croydon last night in the blackout, to fetch three bottles of iodine,” Grenville said indignantly.

“Next time, tell me and I’ll go,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said from her cot. “I’m not sleeping anyway with these wretched alerts going off every ten minutes.”

“Then you can go to the dance with me on Saturday,” Talbot said.

“I thought Parrish was going with you,” Reed said.

“She has a date.”

“I’d only yawn the whole evening,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said. She turned over and pulled the blanket over her head. “Make Grenville go with you.”

“She won’t,” Reed said. “She’s finally had a letter from Tom in Italy. She plans to spend tomorrow writing him.”

“Can’t that wait till Sunday?” Talbot asked.

Reed gave her a withering look. “You’ve obviously never been in love, Talbot. And she wants to make certain it reaches him before he’s ordered somewhere else.”

“Well, then, it’s up to you to go with me, Kent,” Talbot said, sitting down on the end of Mary’s cot.

“I can’t. I’m on duty Saturday,” she said, glad she had an excuse. If the dance was in Bomb Alley or one of the other areas that weren’t in her implant-

“Fairchild will trade shifts with you,” Talbot said. “Won’t you, Fairchild?”

“Um-hmm,” Fairchild said without opening her eyes.

“But that’s not fair to her,” Mary said. “Perhaps she wants to go to the dance.”

“No, her heart belongs to the boy who used to pull her pigtails. Isn’t that right, Fairchild?”

“Yes,” she said defensively.

“He’s a pilot,” Parrish explained. “He’s stationed at Tangmere. He flies Spitfires.”

“He’s her childhood sweetheart,” Reed put in, “and she’s made up her mind to marry him, so she isn’t interested in other men.”

Fairchild sat up, looking indignant. “I didn’t say I was going to marry him. I said I was in love with him. I’ve loved him since I-”

“Since you were six and he was twelve,” Talbot said. “We know. And when he sees you all grown up he’s going to fall madly in love with you. But what if he doesn’t?”

“And how do you know you’ll still be in love with him when you see him again?” Reed said. “You haven’t seen him in nearly three years. It might have only been a schoolgirl crush.”

“It wasn’t,” Fairchild said firmly.

Talbot looked skeptical. “You can’t know that for certain unless you go out with other men, which is why you need to go to the dance with me. I’m only thinking of your welfare-”

“No, you’re not. Kent, I’d be delighted to switch shifts with you.” She punched her pillow into shape, lay down, and closed her eyes. “Good night all.”

“Then it’s settled. You’re going with me, Kent.”

“Oh, but I-”

“It’s your duty to go. After all, it’s your fault I lost the pool and haven’t any stockings.”

The siren went, making it impossible to talk. Good, Mary thought, it will give me a chance to think of an excuse, and when it wound down, she said, “I haven’t anything to wear. I lent both of my dancing frocks to Parrish and Maitland, and the Yellow Peril makes me look jaundiced.”

“The Yellow Peril makes everyone look jaundiced,” Talbot said. “You won’t need a dancing frock. This is a canteen dance. You can wear your uniform.”

“Where’s it being held?” she asked, thinking, If it’s in Bomb Alley, I’ll have to pretend I’m ill on Saturday.

“The American USO in Bethnal Green.”

Bethnal Green. So she could finally go look at the railway bridge and stop worrying over whether she could trust her implant. She should be able to sneak away from the dance easily-Talbot would be busy trying to wheedle nylons out of her Yanks-and it was perfect timing. The only V-1s that had fallen on Bethnal Green on Saturday were in the afternoon.

“Very well, I’ll go,” she said, congratulating herself on her cleverness and wondering if she could persuade one of the soldiers at the dance to take her to Grove Road in his Jeep, but at two Saturday afternoon Talbot said, “Aren’t you ready, Kent?”

“Ready? I thought the dance wasn’t till tonight.”

“No. Didn’t I tell you? It begins at four, and I want to be there before all the best Yanks are taken.”

“But-”

“No excuses. You promised. Now hurry, or we’ll miss our bus,” and dragged her off to the bus stop.

Mary spent the ride to Bethnal Green listening anxiously for the sound of a washing machine or an angry hornet and looking for nonexistent street signs. One of the V-1s had fallen at 3:50 in Darnley Lane and the other at 5:28 in King Edward’s Road. “What street is the USO canteen in?” she asked Talbot.

“I can’t remember,” Talbot said. “But I know the way,” which was no help.

“This is our stop,” Talbot said. They descended on a street lined with shops.

Good, Mary thought. This can’t be Darnley Lane. Darnley Lane was a residential street. She glanced at her watch. Five minutes to four. The 3:50 had already hit.

She looked up and down the street. She couldn’t see any sign of a railway bridge, so apparently this wasn’t Grove Road either. She hoped it wasn’t King Edward’s Road. And that the Darnley Lane one had already hit. She didn’t hear any ambulance bells, or an all clear.

“It’s a bit of a hike, I’m afraid,” Talbot said, setting off down the street.

Mary glanced up at the sky again, listening. She thought she could hear something to the southeast.

“What sort of men do you like?” Talbot asked.

“What?” The sound was a hum, rising to a steady wail. The all clear. And seconds later, she heard a fire engine.

“I don’t know why they even bother with an all clear,” Talbot said exasperatedly. “They’ll only have to sound the alert again five minutes from now.”

No, not for an hour and a quarter, and by then they’d be at the dance, and she’d have been able to ask one of the USO people the canteen’s address and make certain it wasn’t on King Edward’s Road. And she’d have been able to ask them how she could find Grove Road. “Sorry, what were you saying before?”

“I was asking you what sort of men you like,” Talbot said. “When we get there, I’ll introduce you to some of the chaps I know. Do you like them tall? Short? Younger men? Older?”

Every man at this dance will be at least a hundred years too old for me, Mary thought. “I’m not really interested in-”

“You’re not in love with someone, are you?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t approve of people being in love during a war. How can anyone plan for the future when we don’t know if we’ll have one? When I was posted to Bournemouth, one of the girls got engaged to a naval officer who was on a destroyer guarding convoys. She worried herself sick about him, spent all her time devouring the newspapers and listening to the wireless. And then she was the one killed, driving an officer back to Duxton Airfield. And now with these flying bombs, any one of us might be killed at any minute.”

She turned down a narrow lane lined with shops with boarded-up windows. “I tried to tell Fairchild that, the little goose. She’s not really in love, you know. Where’s my lipstick?” She fumbled in her bag for it as she walked. “Where is my compact? May I borrow yours?”

Mary obligingly dug in her bag. “Never mind,” Talbot said, walking over to the one shop window which still had glass in it. She took the cap off her lipstick and twisted the base. “It will never work. He’s years older than she is.” She leaned forward to apply the lipstick in the window’s reflection. “You know the sort of thing, older boy worshipped by younger girl…”

“Mmm,” Mary said, listening to the ragged putt-putt of an approaching motorcycle coming down the street they’d just left.

Talbot didn’t seem to notice, even though she had to raise her voice over its noise. “She has some fairy-tale notion that he’ll see her in her uniform, all grown up, and realize he’s always loved her, even though she still looks fifteen.” She was nearly shouting, the motorcycle was so loud. The sound echoed rattlingly off the shops in the narrow lane. “She’s determined to have her heart broken.” She pursed her lips as she applied the Crimson Caress. “He’s in the RAF, after all, not exactly the safest of jobs.”

The sound of the motorcycle grew deafeningly loud and then shut off abruptly. That’s not a motorcycle. That’s a V-1, Mary thought.

And then, It can’t be, it’s only a quarter past four.

And then, What if my implant data’s wrong after all?

And then, Oh, God, I’ve only got fifteen seconds.

“And what if he doesn’t fall into Fairchild’s arms as planned?” Talbot said, leaning toward the window to appraise the effect. “Or his aeroplane crashes?”

Oh, God, the glass! Mary thought. She’ll be cut to ribbons. “Talbot!” she shouted and made a running dive at her, tackling her, flinging her off the curb. The lipstick flew out of her hand.

“Ow! Kent, what do you think you’re-?” Talbot said.

“Stay down!” She pushed Talbot’s head down into the gutter, flattened herself on top of her, and closed her eyes, waiting for the flash.