‘I can see the house,’ I said. His gasps were pumping warm breath into my neck. ‘Arthur’s all right. It’s still there, Bernard, the house. Look – look for yourself.’ But he wouldn’t lift his head up, he just clung to me for safe-keeping like a toddler. And there I was, protecting my husband against those big bad incendiaries, that nasty flying shrapnel, and the horrid, horrid bombs from the naughty, naughty German planes. And the funny thing was I felt so peaceful being embraced by him and gently whispering, ‘There there, Bernard, there there.’

It was quieter outside by the time I felt his grip slowly release me. He shuffled away like he had shuffled towards me – sitting on his backside, his knees up. He didn’t look at me. Wiped his nose. Gathered up the paper from the floor, folded it and placed it on the table. He righted the toppled chair. Coughed, cleared his throat, smoothed his hair and sat down. And all the while I was watching him. There was a bitter smell of burning and whiffs of smoke were foggy inside the shelter. From outside there was shouting, feet running, crunching along on broken glass. And water was trickling somewhere. Bernard at last looked at me and I nodded to say, Hello, so you’re back. But his eyes didn’t hold my gaze for long. He looked to his hands, to his slowly intertwining fingers, and he licked his lips twice before murmuring, ‘I want you to know, Queenie, I do love you.’

Number thirty looked like a blinking skull. The bomb had come in through the roof of the house, down through the floors to explode on the inside. All the windows were gone, so was the front door. Which just left the shell, an empty head in the middle of a terrace. This skull was crowned with the crumbling jagged walls of what was left of the attic rooms. Open to the sky with the green wallpaper of one room and the brown paint of the other, the skull looked to be wearing a gaudy Christmas hat. Everything that was on the inside was now on the outside – the smashed wreckage of this home spilling over the pavements in great mountains of rubble, blocking the road and crunching underfoot. ‘You’ll be safe as houses,’ Auntie Dorothy had been very fond of saying. Anything solid she thought to be safe. Even Bernard. I was glad she wasn’t alive to have to face the fact that even solid can crumble.

Everyone was out to stare. Enraged at the devastation but relieved it wasn’t them and theirs. ‘Lucky they were in the shelter . . . Lucky no one was at home . . . Lucky no one’s buried alive in there.’ Mrs Newman, whose house it was, was left uncharacteristically speechless. Shock, the warden said, as someone took her away. It was only number thirty, nowhere else was touched. What the hell did that house have to do with this war? Was Hitler sleeping easier now he’d turned it into a heap of junk? Like all the other houses either side, we’d lost a few windows and some little bits of number thirty’s chimney went through our roof. But that was it.

‘That bomb had their name on it,’ Mr Todd decided.

We were all being kept back by a tin-hatted warden shouting, ‘It’s not safe to come too close. That lot could come down at any minute.’ While firemen with black faces and dreadfully tired eyes were gingerly peering inside, pushing at walls, looking up, looking down, looking around.

‘Oh, fucking ’ell!’ That’s what the Rotherhithe woman said when she came home to see her tiny attic room now open to the sky.

‘There’s no need for language like that,’ Mr Todd said.

‘It’s understandable,’ I told him. ‘She’s just lost her house.’

‘It was not her house, Mrs Bligh.’

‘Oh, how would you like it?’

‘Could be me tomorrow and, let me assure you, I won’t be using language like that.’

The woman took no notice, slumping down to sit on a wall saying, ‘Has anyone got a fag?’ After more silent, disdainful rolling of eyes she was given one. She only had the two little mites with her, the others were still down in the Underground. And these two kids, scuttling like rats, disappeared over the rubble and into the house with the warden chasing them, shouting, ‘Get out of there, it’s not safe.’ The next minute the little boy, still in his overlong trousers, was being dragged out of the house by the warden who had him by the ear. His feet were nearly off the ground. And the warden was telling him, ‘Give that back. I saw that. That’s not yours.’

The mother was on her feet, ‘Oi, put ’im down.’

‘He’s got something, saw him pick it up. He’s put it in his mouth.’

‘Get off ’im.’

‘Not until I know what he’s got in his mouth. You shouldn’t be round here.’

‘They live here,’ I told him.

‘Here? They live here? You sure?’ the warden asked, while the mother was still shouting at him, ‘Let ’im go or I swear I’ll land you one. I’ve had enough – all right? Jus’ let ’im go.’ The little boy puffed out his cheeks then spat something on to the ground. It was a brooch.

‘There – little thief,’ the warden said, triumphantly.

‘He ain’t a thief!’ the mother shouted. She picked up the brooch.

‘Oi, leave that. That belongs to this house.’

‘It’s mine,’ she said.

‘Give me that. I’ll keep it until we’ve cleared this lot up.’

‘It’s mine – it belongs to me,’ the woman was shouting. It was just a little brooch, no better than one you’d find in a Lucky Bag. The woman was pitifully pleading now – a kid clinging to each of her legs. ‘It’s mine. I swear, honest. It’s mine.’

‘Give it to her,’ I said to the warden.

‘Not until I have ascertained whose property it is,’ he said.

‘What does it matter? It’s just a little tuppenny-ha’penny brooch,’ I whispered to him.

‘It is my job to make sure . . .’ he began, for all to hear.

‘She’s just lost everything. And this is not her first time. Can’t you just give her the benefit of the doubt?’

‘It is my responsibility to see no looting takes place in this . . .’

So I said to him, ‘Oh, fuck off.’

Bernard didn’t say, ‘Over my dead body,’ because we’d all become a little superstitious during the past year. Instead he said, ‘Under no circumstances . . . it’s out of the question . . . Queenie, have you gone quite mad?’

‘They’re people,’ I said. ‘They’ve got nowhere to go.’

‘They’re not our sort.’

‘But they need helping.’

‘They can’t stay here. There are places that will take care of them.’

‘They’ll be no bother.’

I wished the little mites were being quieter at this point. But they weren’t. They were running round our living room, jumping off furniture, playing planes and bombs and making the appropriate racket. Their mother, feet up on a chair, sipped tea and smoked Bernard’s cigarettes.

‘Just for a few days.’

‘I’ve made myself perfectly clear.’

‘Oh, come on, Bernard. Have you no pity?’

‘They’re filthy, Queenie,’ he whispered. He had a point. Their heads were infested. If I turned the little boy Albert on his head the lice would have carried him away.

‘We’ve got all this room. How can we when so many have nowhere?’

‘The authorities will deal with them. You can’t help everybody. There’s a war on.’

‘I know – that’s what I mean.’

I took that poor bombed-out family to a rest centre. We collected the other two kids and the baby from the Underground. And when I came back to our house later, I walked in to tell a thunderstruck Bernard that I didn’t care what he said, I didn’t care what he thought – I had got myself a job. So there!

Twenty-seven

Queenie

Sometimes they were still smouldering like a burnt pie pulled from an oven. The pungent stench of smoke, the dust from rubble steaming off them. Shuffling in or being carried. Some wrapped in blankets, their clothes having gone flying off with the blast. Blackened, sooty faces, red-rimmed, sunken eyes with whites that suddenly flashed, startled, to look around them agog like they’d stumbled on to another planet. And shivering, there was so much shivering.