sides. I gathered her to me once again and lifted her up. She wept and thrashed in my arms as I took her over to one side of the hall, set her down on a huge unlit radiator. ‘What’s your other name, Pamela?’
‘Jane,’ she sobbed.
‘No, your family name.’ But she was crying too hard. I stood up straight. ‘Does anyone know this little girl?’ I called out. ‘Her name’s Pamela. Pamela Jane.’ Heads turned and shook, and I saw women gathering their children together, and a bustle in the doorway – people from the village, arriving to take them away. The tide was running out. ‘Pamela Jane! Did anyone travel with this child?’
At last. A woman was emerging from the throng, incongruously elegant in a fur coat and maroon toque, making her way to us. ‘I was with this little one,’ she said when she arrived at my side. ‘I helped her on board the bus.’
‘Didn’t you hear me call earlier?’ I spoke flatly, out of exasperation. If she thought I was rude, she made no sign.
‘I might have been in the lavs, dear.’ She pointed to another, large woman. ‘That lady said the little girl’s mother was on the bus before ours. So we took her on the next one, with us.’ The large woman was already approaching, buttoning her cardigan over her bust. ‘Isn’t that right?’ asked the lady wearing the toque. ‘You saw her ma on the first bus?’
‘That’s what the little one said.’ The second woman’s voice was a creaky whisper. ‘Pardon me. Smoke’s got my throat.’
Pamela gasped. ‘You said Mummy was on the other bus. But she wasn’t!’
‘No, you was saying it, sweetheart,’ the woman croaked, her eyes full of alarm.
‘No!’ Pamela was frantic. ‘I just thought she was!’
‘So I said, we’ll catch up with Mummy, sweetie, and I took her on board.’ The large woman put her hands to her cheeks. ‘Now I think about it, how could any woman get on a blooming bus without her little daughter? But the little one was insistent!’
‘I wasn’t ’sistent!’ Pamela continued her choleric weeping. ‘I saw her head but I didn’t know it was her head! You said!’
The elegant woman put her hand to her toque. ‘And we just got off the bus, leaving her there.’ She turned to me. ‘I’m so sorry. We was bombed, dear. I can’t find any other excuse.’
Now they were both crying. I heard Selwyn calling. ‘Ladies – ladies, please come and join this group.’
‘You both need to leave,’ I said. ‘I’ll find you if I have to.’
Just then Pamela vomited onto the floor. The height of the radiator she was standing on increased the radius greatly, and we sprang back. Pamela clutched at her head. ‘My forehead hurts, I banged it against the bus stop.’ She burst into a wail.
I lifted her down. ‘Where is the doctor?’ I called. ‘Dr Bell? You’re needed here!’ The women, I noticed, were obeying Selwyn and making for the door. Through the ebbing crowd, the doctor hastened towards us. His fur-collared overcoat gave him an oddly cosseted air. Neither Selwyn nor I had taken the time to dress warmly before hurrying out to the village hall.
‘Doctor, please could you look at this little girl? I must get a bucket.’
When I got back from the kitchen Pamela was lying on the floor while the doctor shone a small, narrow light into each of her eyes. ‘A mild concussion,’ he announced, as I started cleaning the mess. ‘There’s a bump under her hairline. She may be very sleepy. But I’m not uneasy.’
I took the bucket outside. Selwyn was seeing off a group bound for the village houses. ‘We’ll be sheltering seven souls,’ he told me. ‘And I’ve washed up the cups.’
I couldn’t help smiling at the expectation of praise latent in this last statement. ‘Well done.’ I emptied the bucket into the drain. ‘But it’s eight, not seven. The little girl. Her mother wasn’t on the bus.’
‘How on earth—?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
In a knot in the corner, our group waited, set-faced, to be led to our house. With the exception of a couple of tall, tear-stained girls of about seventeen, they were all women on the elderly side. Mrs Berrow, I saw, was among them. Her injured eye looked viciously dark now, and she was hanging her head in fatigue. I lifted Pamela up, and Selwyn took off his jacket and folded it around her.
‘Shall I take her?’ he asked.
‘No. She doesn’t seem so heavy now. I don’t know why.’ I followed Selwyn out of the hall, and behind me our people fell into step. Pamela leaned her head against my shoulder. I could hear the tiny chirp as she sucked her thumb.
Then she took her thumb out. ‘The ladies said they’d find Mummy. They said. So I think they will.’ She put the thumb back in and shut her eyes.
I CARRIED PAMELA down the lane. The sun was sinking into the bare hedgerows and the air was sharper. Our people moved as a single clumsy mass behind us.
‘She got on the bus by accident,’ I told Selwyn. ‘Two women took her on board, thinking her mother was on the previous bus. But it now seems the mother wasn’t on any bus at all. She must be still in Southampton. Distraught.’
‘Where were these women?’
‘In the village hall, of course.’
‘No, I mean, where in Southampton?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
He glanced back at our followers. ‘They’re not with us, are they?’
‘No. They left with that last big group.’ I wasn’t even sure of that, now. ‘How silly of me.’
His hand brushed my arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do about it today.’
We heard a soft clopping on the road behind us, a rumble and a rattle. Colonel Daventry was coming up with a cart full of slumped figures: women and some small children. The Colonel walked beside the head of his horse Beeston, a peaceful bay with feathered fetlocks, and the cart was followed by a handful of silent men. ‘Mr and Mrs Parr, we’re on our way to The Place.’ He named his large house in the middle of Upton. ‘We can take a few up to your turning.’
‘Go on, Ellen,’ Selwyn said. I scrambled up and he passed me Pamela. Mrs Berrow and our other ladies climbed aboard. The occupants shuffled to make room for us – all, that is, save one woman who sat motionless, shawled in a length of sacking, her face half-covered in brick dust, while the baby on her lap kicked its bare foot in the frosty air. We were about to move on when an old man standing by the tailgate of the cart took off his tweed cap in preparation, it transpired, to speak.
‘My father worked here, at the big house. Upton Hall. For Sir Michael Brock’s father,’ he told us. ‘Put the locks into the front and back doors,
