‘Nothing’s so bad if you can have a cuppa, eh?’
‘Not half.’
Yes, it would be nice to have hot tea, Linda thought. The vacuum flask was a wonderful invention and very expensive, but Patty had come home with one a few weeks before, bought from someone at work with contacts.
‘Take all that lot down the shelter, Linda,’ Patty said, handing her the flask as well. ‘Then come back and give me a hand with the babbies.’
‘You’d better turn the gas off under the stew, too,’ Linda said, and hoped the raid wouldn’t last long because her stomach was growling with hunger. It was as she was returning to the house that she saw a fleet of bombers heading their way. ‘Hurry, Mom,’ she said as she ran in.
‘I’m coming,’ Patty said. ‘I’ve got Harry’s bottle ready and a packet of biscuits I put by in case this might happen. Get your coat on. I’ll do Harry, you see to George.’
She went into the pantry and could hear the drones of the planes get louder and she looked at Linda in sudden fear. There sounded like hundreds over their heads. Both boys picked up the tension of their mother and sister, and Harry started to grizzle as Patty struggled to fasten him into his suit. But she took no notice and then she picked him up and handed him to Linda. ‘Take him down,’ she said. George trailed after his mother, dragging his beloved teddy bear Tolly behind him, his coat flapping open because Linda hadn’t had time to fasten it.
A resounding crash, terrifyingly close, startled Patty. Her hand closed around the biscuits on the top shelf of the pantry. The sooner they were under cover the better, she thought, and she turned with such suddenness, she almost tripped over George who was clinging to her skirt. The intensity of the raid had unnerved her totally and she screamed, ‘Let go, George, let go! Come on, let’s get to the shelter quick.’
George was too scared to loose his mother’s skirt and, as another bomb landed too close for comfort, he gave a yelp of terror. Patty bent to pick him up with a suddenness that took him by surprise and Tolly fell from his arms on to the pantry floor.
‘Tolly,’ he cried, but Patty wasn’t stopping for no threadbare teddy. She dashed after Linda out of the back door and into the comfortless shelter in the back garden.
Warmed by the hot-water bottles and wrapped in the blankets, they sat huddled on the bench. It was bitterly cold. Patty doled out biscuits by the light of the hurricane lamp she’d hung from a protruding screw on the shelter wall. ‘We can’t eat them all now,’ she told George as he clamoured for more. ‘We might be here some time.’
‘Can we have a cup of tea? I’m gagging,’ Linda asked.
‘Not yet,’ Patty said. ‘This could go on for hours and it would be daft to have drunk it all then.’
Linda said nothing, but her stomach continued to rumble; the biscuits had done little to fill her up and a cup of hot tea would have been comforting. The crashes and explosions all around them were frightening the boys and Linda began to rock Harry to and fro as she and her mom started to sing to the boys as they’d done before to calm them down. They started on all the nursery rhymes they’d ever known to encourage George to join in, and then all the rousing war songs to counteract the explosions and the tremors they felt even through the shelter. In time the lateness of the hour, Linda’s rocking motion and the sucking of the warm milk caused little Harry’s sobs to ease and his eyelids to droop. But George suddenly sat up straight, all sleepiness forgotten as he said, ‘I want Tolly.’
Linda raised her eyes questioningly to her mother, who said, ‘He dropped it on the pantry floor when I picked him up to run in here.’
Linda knew of George’s devotion to Tolly. ‘He’ll be all right, George,’ she told him. ‘He’s looking after the house.’
George lifted a tear-streaked face and said, ‘No he ain’t, ’itler will bomb him.’
‘No, he won’t, George.’
‘Yes, he will. Else why we in ’ere?’
Linda couldn’t answer that and as George began to cry again, she said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.’
Patty unscrewed the flask and poured out a half-cup for George. ‘Here,’ she said to Linda, ‘see if this will shut him up.’
Patty took Harry from Linda and tucked him in the bunk with a hot-water bottle and a blanket, and left him sucking the last of his warm milk while Linda was blowing the hot tea until it was cool enough to give George.
‘Beattie’s well out of this tonight,’ Patty remarked.
‘Oh yes, didn’t she say Sutton Coldfield’s too posh to bomb?’
‘Got no industry, that’s why,’ Patty said.
‘She’d better stay there then,’ Linda said, ‘than put up with this. This isn’t a place I’d like to spend much time in.’
Patty’s chest was hurting her again but she tried to control her coughing so as not to worry Linda. ‘I agree with you,’ she said at last. ‘These shelters are not the healthiest places in the world, but we must be safer in here than out there. Our Beattie won’t stay longer than she can help at her Vera’s. She always says she can’t stand her, nor the place where she lives. Apparently they never got on, even as kids. But there you are, blood’s thicker than water when all’s said and done.’
‘Well, she’s lucky to be there tonight at any rate, ain’t she?’ Linda said. ‘If she was here, she’d be sharing our shelter and probably our biscuits too.’
Patty opened her mouth, but before she could say anything George handed Linda back the empty cup, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said, ‘Can we go and get Tolly now?’
‘God, child, I’ll brain you in a minute,’ Patty cried.
‘It’s stopped,’ George said flatly.
The raid hadn’t stopped exactly, but the explosions were further away, certainly. ‘I’ll run back to the house and fetch Tolly for you,’ Linda said.
‘You’ll do no such thing.’
‘It’s eased a bit. Listen.’
‘Any minute they could be back.’
‘I’ll only be a tick,’ Linda said. ‘You know our George won’t settle without that flipping bear.’
George began to whimper and cry again. ‘I want Tolly, I do. Get me Tolly, Linda.’
‘Honest, Mom, it won’t take me a minute,’ Linda said. ‘Pour me a cup of tea and I’ll be back to drink it.’
She was out of the shelter before Patty could stop her, glad for a moment of the blast of cold air after the stale damp mugginess of the shelter. The air smelt smoky and the night sky was lit up by searchlights; there was an orange glow everywhere. Her ears were filled with the loud tattoo of anti-aircraft guns, the drone of aeroplanes and the sirens of the emergency services.
She’d almost reached the house when she saw the formation of planes that seemed to have come from nowhere and were heading straight towards her like menacing black beetles.
