The Night Raid Read online

  ‘Are you Violet Smith?’ The voice came, inexplicably, from high up behind her right ear.

  Vi sighed. ‘Depends who’s asking.’ She looked up and saw a triangular face peering down, catlike, from the top bunk. Bunk beds – of course – how stupid of her to think she’d have a room to herself. That explained the wash kit and the hairbrush, then. Vi, you silly mare.

  ‘Matron said I’d be sharing with someone called Violet Smith,’ said the dark-haired girl. ‘You must be her.’

  ‘Oh, must I?’ said Vi, unbuttoning her coat. ‘And who are you? Gert or Daisy?’

  ‘Mary McLaughlin,’ said the girl, missing the joke. ‘I came this morning.’

  Funny accent, Vi thought. Irish? But she didn’t sound like the Irishmen who worked at the docks and used to come into the pub. ‘Come far?’ Vi said, heaving her suitcase onto the lower bunk and clicking it open.

  ‘It’s a long way from Crumlin to here, so it is,’ came the reply. The bedstead swayed and two bare feet swung down next to Vi’s face. ‘You’ll be wanting help unpacking.’ Mary thudded softly down next to her, reached into the old cardboard case and made a grab for her things. ‘Where d’you get these?’ She dangled Vi’s only pair of nylons in front of her face.

  ‘My fella,’ Vi replied (Frank said they’d fallen off the back of a lorry, when he’d slipped them into her gas-mask case). She watched as Mary opened the bottom drawer in the chest and chucked them in.

  ‘Is he a Yank?’ Mary said, plucking out Vi’s woollen vest and inspecting both sides before throwing it in with the stockings.

  ‘No. Not that it’s any business of yours,’ Vi said, shovelling up the remainder of her clothes in an armful, shoving them in the drawer and slamming it shut before Mary could ‘help’ any more. ‘Anyway, I’ve thrown him over,’ Vi said.

  She tipped up the case to empty her remaining things: comb, rollers, Vaseline, soap, flannel and the red-beaded rosary that Ma had insisted she take.

  ‘Funny that they should put you in here with me,’ Mary said, reaching down and prodding the rosary as if it were something slimy, ‘what with you being one of them.’

  ‘One of what?’

  ‘A Taig.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? You’d have thought they’d be worried about us being in the same room together.’ Mary straightened up. She was quite short. Vi noticed flecks of dandruff in the parting of her dark hair. ‘And I’m a Protestant,’ Mary said, narrowing her eyes and jutting her sharp little chin forward.

  Vi heard the flush of the toilet from the bathroom across the way, and the sound of someone starting to sing through the thin wall between their room and next door’s. Sweet Mary Mother of Jesus, am I really going to be spending the rest of the war in this glorified chicken coop? Vi dug in her coat pocket for her fags – a whole packet of Capstan, a leaving present from her old boss at the King’s Arms. ‘Smoke?’ she said, holding out the cigarettes.

  ‘Sure, why not?’ They sat down on the bottom bunk together. ‘I suppose I don’t need to tell Mammy I’m sharing with a Taig,’ Mary said, holding her fag between thumb and forefinger. Vi shrugged, and took another drag, looking at her new room-mate. For such a petite thing, Mary was a little plump, she thought, the way her belly pushed out the fabric at the front of her brown woollen frock, she almost looked . . . a bell rang, a tinny drilling sound, that pushed the thought from her head. ‘Time to draw the blackouts,’ said Mary.

  Later, in bed, Vi stared up at the slats of the bunk above her, and felt the bed creak and sway as Mary tossed in her sleep. It was strange to have a whole bed to herself, strange not to be annoyed with Rita’s elbows or May’s cold toes or the sound of John and David snoring on the floor. She wouldn’t have to do the pre-dawn stumble for the baby bottle, because there was no Baby Val here to worry about and no twins to bother her when she was trying to do her hair in the morning, and no Ma to yell at her for not getting the washing inside before the rain started. No angry landlord to deal with, no nagging bills to worry about, no tea to make, no front step to scrub, and no Frank Timpson in the alley, after dark.

  She clenched and unclenched her fists beneath the smooth, freshly laundered sheets, feeling empty. She missed them all so much it felt as if her heart were being wrung through the Monday morning mangle. But she’d be damned if she ever let on.

  Laura

  In the darkness the unsynchronised bomber engines sounded from either side of the Malvern Hills. Laura stood outside the hotel with some of the other guests, smoking and holding muttered conversations, as if they were waiting for a show to start. And in a sense they were, Laura thought. Harold had already made his excuses and gone upstairs. Laura imagined him, head hidden under the covers, long body a rigid lump, willing it all to stop.

  She inhaled smoke and cool night air, watching as the searchlights sprang up like wigwams. The lights wavered upwards and it felt as if they were under a huge black-and-white tent, like a monochrome circus top. She could make out the twinkle of a companion’s earring, the dark mauve of a loosened tie, as the searchlights played across the sky.

  Laura had things she needed to get on with: she had to write to K, for starters, accept the Nottingham job, think about packing. But not just yet – it could wait until morning. There was time to watch the night raid first.

  The German bombers’ engines were getting louder, now, but the guests continued their anodyne chatter. They were discussing cats: some admired their looks, the way they hunted vermin; others hated their arrogance, the killing of songbirds. Laura exhaled, spewing smoke across their silly words. Then, ‘I killed a man once,’ said Mr Peterson, standing next to her on the terrace. Laura turned towards him as he spoke. Behind him, in the distance, brilliant clusters of light hung and slowly dropped to reveal a target on the ground below. ‘The Dardanelles,’ he continued. ‘I was doing a recce for my unit, coming out of a hollow in some uneven ground, and I found myself staring into two very black eyes. Then the training kicked in, and I shot him. I remember he had a long black beard. I often wonder, did he have a family? I should like to have said sorry, told them I had no choice . . .’ His voice trailed off at the first thud-crash.

  The show had begun: the flare of flames, crackle of flack, splayed searchlights, boom of the anti-aircraft guns. Nobody spoke now, enraptured by the spectacle unfolding below. And Laura had a memory, of the upstairs room at Ethel Villas: Mother waking her up in the middle of the night, dragging her over to the window and lifting the heavy sash – she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old – Look, Laura, look! Look at the colours! Aren’t they glorious? – In the distance, orange flames licked the navy sky and smoke blanked out the starlight. Years later, when she mentioned it to Harold, he recalled a catastrophic factory fire at the time – he would have been about eleven or twelve, he said, and read about it in his father’s newspaper. It must have been the same one, Laura thought. Yet mother had never mentioned the ruination or the loss of life, just the colours, the beautiful fury of it.

  There was a gasp from the huddle of guests. The ack-ack guns had caught a plane. It came screaming, twisting down and down. Everyone clapped, some even cheered. Laura had had enough of it. She ran inside, storming upstairs, banging open the bedroom door, flicking on the light: everything a sudden white-yellow, Harold a hump under the eiderdown.

  ‘I’m not going, Harold,’ she said, slamming the door behind her. ‘It’s unbearable. I’m not going to paint anything more of these murder machines, or the business of war, no matter how much they offer me. I’m not going to Nottingham. I’m going to stay here with you. Harold – Harold?’

  Why didn’t he answer?

  She went over to the bed and pulled back the covers. He was lying on one side, sweat plastering his white hair oil-grey against his scalp, skin strangely pale, eyes wide and unseeing.

  ‘Harold?’

  Chapter 5

  Zelah

  ‘Tickets, please.’

/>   Zelah looks up, surprised she’s heard him. Ever since that night everything has been a muffled jumble – she’d wondered if she’d ever get her hearing back – but that part of her was recovering, at least. She takes her ticket from her coat pocket. There is nothing else in there, not even a hanky.

  The inspector’s black trousers make an ‘A’ shape, as he steadies his bulk against the sway of the railway carriage. The woman with the baby in the blue shawl can’t find her ticket. The inspector tuts and shakes his jowls, his scowling chops the same grey-red as the ploughed Devon fields that race past in the half-light outside the train windows. It is jam-packed already, and they’ve only just passed Newton Abbot. Luckily she got on at Plymouth, lucky to get a seat.

  Luck clings to me like a curse, she thinks.

  She can hear again, but everything is still overlaid with a metallic buzz, as if the sound comes through layers of wire mesh. The inspector turns his attention to the three sleeping sailors at the far end, who nudge each other into brief wakefulness and wave travel warrants, before lolling back against the plush. The man with the bandaged head lowers his copy of The Times long enough to hand over two tickets. His birdlike wife continues to worry at her knitting.

  The man raises The Times again: Hundreds feared dead in direct hit on Plymouth shelter, says the headline. One lucky survivor cheats death. Zelah shudders and looks away. The baby starts to mewl, and the mother’s face is pale and pinched as she rocks it against herself.

  The inspector holds out his hand for Zelah’s ticket, rolls his eyes down at her as he checks the destination, and clips it. He is saying something. To her damaged ears his words sound like wasps spitting from his fleshy lips. She strains to hear. He says she has to change at Derby, something about a UXB on the line near Birmingham.

  Zelah says thank you and he nods and lumbers out of the compartment. The baby’s foot kicks her side as it squirms against its mother. There is no room on the seat for Zelah to move away.

  At Teignmouth more people pour into the train. A troop of soldiers fill the corridor. An old woman with a checked shawl gets on last. The soldiers part like a khaki sea to let her through. Zelah pushes herself up from her seat and opens the carriage door. ‘There’s space in here,’ she says, her voice sounding muzzy and strange. The woman says something, but Zelah can’t hear, so she just gestures to her empty seat, and holds the door open. The woman’s face creases into a smile. As she enters the compartment she shakes her grey curls at the baby’s mother, and Zelah sees the mother hand her baby over to be dandled and cosseted.

  Zelah goes out into the corridor. The soldiers shift to give her space, and she wedges herself between two of them as the train pulls out of the station. Like them, she rests her exhausted face against the cool glass window, looking through the smutted pane across the sweep of estuary, smooth as pewter. She can’t see the sun, yet, but evidence of sunrise is all across the southern skies, towards the Dorset coast and beyond: orange-red rising up from the horizon into the grey-sopped morning clouds. Behind them, down the tracks to the west, the night still claws. It was blue-black and freezing when she waited on the platform at Plymouth. Whatever is left of the city would be coming to life now, she supposes. Whatever is left. She blinks, and lets Plymouth go, erased like yesterday’s sums on the blackboard.

  She can feel the heft of the soldiers’ torsos on either side of her. They sway and judder as one, caught in the motion of the train as it curves inland, away from the sea and northwards, towards her new life.

  ‘Tickets, please!’ Zelah blinked her eyes open. No, she wasn’t on the train from Plymouth. That was two years ago now. This was a different train – a different life. She must have drifted off, lulled by the warmth and rhythmic rattle of it. She fumbled in her coat pocket and pulled out the two tickets, for herself and the young woman opposite who was biting her lip and looking out through the smeared carriage window.

  ‘This’ll be you, m’duck.’ The skinny ticket inspector passed back the tickets and nodded out towards the dripping greyness. Zelah thanked her and put the tickets away as the train began to slow.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Zelah said to the young woman who frowned and pulled her coat across her body without doing up the buttons.

  ‘I don’t know why we’re here. The nurse said it was just my glands,’ the girl said, crossly.

  ‘Come on,’ Zelah said, flicking her head in the direction of the carriage door. ‘Or we’ll miss it.’

  The woman narrowed her eyes, but she got up as the train ground to a halt. Zelah opened the carriage window and leant out to grab the handle, her sleeve soaked in seconds from the downpour. She got out and held the door open for Mary McLaughlin. ‘But the nurse said it was just my glands,’ Mary repeated as she stepped off the train.

  ‘I’m afraid Dr Gibbs has another opinion and – well – here we are,’ Zelah said, slamming the train door behind them. ‘Attenborough’ said the sign above the platform. (‘I’ll get the girl booked into the one at Attenborough village,’ Dr Gibbs had said, frowning over her spectacles. ‘Of course they’re terrifically busy these days, what with the ATS girls stationed in Chetwynd Barracks . . .’ She raised knowing brows before continuing, ‘But it’s better than the alternatives.’) The guard blew his whistle and the train juddered noisily away towards Derby.

  So here they were. Dr Gibbs said Cloud House was in the middle of the village, just a couple of hundred yards up the road from the station. Zelah squinted into the rain and struggled to unfurl her umbrella. ‘Squash in with me, or you’ll be drenched,’ she said, and they began to walk up the road together, huddled under the flapping brolly, neither in a particular rush to reach their destination, despite the weather.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mary, accidentally splashing her with puddle water.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Zelah said.

  ‘No, it’s sodding well not!’ Mary suddenly stopped. ‘He said my hand would look prettier with a ring on my finger, and I thought he meant—’ She burst into huge, heaving sobs.

  Zelah struggled to get her arms round Mary and hold on to the slippery umbrella handle. ‘There, there,’ she said, patting ineffectually, as Mary shuddered against her raincoat. Bareheaded, the girl’s black curls barely reached Zelah’s chin. It was like hugging a child. Poor thing. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant. It was only when Zelah measured her for her overalls and discovered she was a size thirteen – rather large for a girl of her height – that she’d asked Nurse to take a look at her. Nurse said, with a snap of her fingers and a cursory glance, that it was nothing more than her glands. Whatever that meant. Luckily Dr Gibbs happened to have her weekly surgery that day, took one look at Mary and said she’d eat her hat if that little chit had any kind of a thyroid complaint. So now here they were, on the way to the Home for Unmarried Mothers, in the pouring rain.

  ‘You’ll feel better once we get there,’ Zelah said.

  ‘How?’ Mary’s voice snuffled against her chest. ‘How will I feel better?’

  ‘Well, at least you’ll be in the dry,’ Zelah said. Mary pulled herself away from Zelah and they began to walk again.

  Mary sniffed and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat. ‘Mammy will kill me,’ she said.

  ‘She doesn’t need to know,’ Zelah said.

  ‘But surely they’ll tell her.’

  ‘Not if I tell them not to.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘My job is your welfare,’ Zelah said.

  ‘But what about the money? If I’m not sending me wages home, she’ll know something, she’ll ask. Lord, the shame of it.’

  They’d reached the village now, a scattering of turn-of-the-century villas, and a grey church crouched like a giant toad behind the rowan trees. And here was Cloud House: a symmetrical three-storey red-brick edifice, with the square front garden turned over to vegetables and a paved pathway from the gate to the front door. There were net curtains at every window.

  Zelah paused at the gate. ‘You
haven’t said what your plan is, Mary.’

  ‘I don’t have a plan, Miss Fitzlord.’

  ‘You don’t intend to keep your baby? Your mother wouldn’t want to help?’

  Sometimes they did, Zelah knew. Some mothers would pass off the illegitimate baby as merely a younger sibling, brazen it out.

  ‘Mammy will kill me,’ Mary repeated.

  ‘So you will definitely be giving up your child for adoption?’ Zelah said. She had to be sure, before they went in. There would no doubt be paperwork, forms to sign and so forth. ‘Mary?’

  The girl just nodded, staring down at the puddled pavement.

  ‘And what are your plans for afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards?’ Mary said, looking up at her.

  ‘After they’ve found a home for the baby, what will you do?’

  ‘I can’t go home.’ Panic in her sharp little eyes. ‘Mammy will kill me.’

  ‘Do you – would you like to come back to work?’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Zelah stared past the girl to the blank façade of Cloud House in the sheeting rain, imagining how the well-meaning ladies inside would make Mary feel as if her life was over before it had even begun. The girl was one of the night shift. She hadn’t had to deal with the night-shift boss to date – although she’d heard all about him, of course. ‘I’ll ask Mr Handford to keep your job open, if you’d like.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Could she? She wasn’t sure, but she had to offer the poor girl some kind of hope. ‘I’ll write to your mother that Nurse thinks you have a problem with your glands, and that you’re going to be off work until it’s sorted out – that’s not really a lie, is it?’ Raindrops bounced off Mary’s curls as she shook her head. ‘Once the adoption is complete – and you feel well enough – you can come back to work.’

  ‘You can do that for me, Miss Fitzlord?’