From that house onwards there were many similar sights. The direct hits were mainly on the side streets, whole terraces knocked down and white dust still swirling around in the breeze. Huge lumps of masonry blocked the gouged and pitted roads.
But it was the people who affected Honour the most, many with sticking plaster or dressings on stricken faces, staring at their former homes in bewilderment. One woman she saw with tears running down her face was pointlessly trying to sweep the street.
A group of Civil Defence men were clearing rubble from the Mile End Road, and Honour asked them what would become of these homeless people.
‘They’s letting ’em sleep in church halls and schools,’ one burly yet ashen-faced man replied. ‘But what you’ve seen ’ere, love, ain’t nothin’ to what went on down at Silvertown. They’re still digging out folk trapped under the rubble. We’ll be going on there soon as we’ve got this road cleared so more rescue trucks and mortuary vans can get through.’
‘Is the London Hospital still standing?’ Honour ventured.
‘Yeah, that’s okay. You got someone in there?’
‘My granddaughter’s a nurse there,’ Honour said, her voice faltering. ‘I was just going to check on her.’
‘They’ve bin angels in there,’ he said, giving Honour a comforting pat on the shoulder. ‘I was in and out there half the night taking injured folk. It were like Bedlam, but they did us all proud.’
*
It was still like Bedlam in the hospital. Honour hadn’t seen anything like it since the first war when she went to the hospital in Dover to find Frank. But then it was all wounded men, and mostly cleaned up and patched up ones at that, glad to be back in England for some respite from the hell they’d been through. Here there were women and children too, some with such shocking injuries she had to avert her eyes. Nurses with bloodstained aprons, fatigue showing in their young faces. Doctors in equally bloodstained jackets looking as if they were close to collapse, heads bent over their patients.
Honour stopped a nurse as she passed her. ‘Can you tell me if Nurse Adele Talbot is here please?’ she asked.
‘She was until an hour ago,’ the nurse replied. ‘A few of them were sent off for a rest for a couple of hours.’
‘Does that mean she’ll be back later?’
‘Oh yes, to relieve some of us. Are you a relative of hers?’
Honour nodded. ‘She’s my granddaughter. I just wanted to know she was all right.’
‘She’ll be fine after a bit of a rest.’ The nurse smiled sympathetically. ‘We all will be. You go on home. I’ll tell her you asked after her.’
Honour left the hospital and began to walk back up the road towards Aldgate. But as she walked she felt she couldn’t just get on the Tube, collect Towzer and go home. There had to be someone around here dealing with all the distraught homeless who could do with a helping hand for a few hours.
Seeing the Civil Defence man she’d spoken to earlier about to get back in his truck and drive away, she marched purposefully up to him.
‘Find your granddaughter, did you?’ he asked.
Honour explained that Adele had gone for a rest and that she thought perhaps she could make herself useful in the meantime.
‘Hop in,’ he said, opening the truck door. ‘I know the very place.’
Honour could hardly believe what she was seeing as she was driven towards Silvertown, swerving round potholes and over debris. Whole streets were gone, rescue workers toiling away at the dust-covered rubble looking for both buried survivors and bodies. Beside the road lay bodies waiting for collection, some covered in sacks, others by blankets and old curtains. There were men and women digging desperately into the rubble with their bare hands, clearly searching for a family member who was missing. Honour saw what she thought was a mannequin from a shop window lying at the top of a staircase which was still intact but had come adrift from the wall which had once supported it. All at once she realized it was a dead woman.
The air was choking too, a mixture of powdered mortar and fumes from the fires still raging down in the docks.
The Civil Defence man, who said his name was Dan, tried to cheer her a little by telling her that a few hours earlier at first light they’d found both a baby and an old man still alive and unharmed.
‘The wardrobe door had open and the whole thing fell over the old codger as the ’ouse come down. ’E thought he was in a coffin buried alive. The baby was still in its pram, under a door. ’E was yelling fit to bust, that’s why we found ’im so quick.’
Dan and the other men with him had worked right through the night, helping out with anything they could. He said he was taking Honour to a church they were using as a rest centre. ‘They’ll be right glad of another pair of ’ands,’ he said. ‘That is, if you don’t mind making sandwiches and tea, and ’elping take down folk’s details to get them somewhere else to live.’
*
At four that afternoon Honour was as exhausted as most of the other people she’d been helping. Most of the day had been spent taking down homeless people’s particulars, and the details of family members that still weren’t accounted for, because it was soon noted by the other helpers that she was better educated and less emotionally involved than they were.
But as Honour heard one heartbreaking story after another, even her emotions began to get the better of her. She guessed these people had had very little before the raid, and now they had nothing and had lost family members too. She would never have imagined that she could take a dirty, hungry baby with a soiled nappy from its distraught mother, strip it and wash and feed it. The only baby she’d ever taken care of was Rose. But her sympathy proved much greater than revulsion, and she found herself doing it several times. She had cuddled and fed bigger children whose mother was not yet found, she had comforted old ladies and men, and questioned what seemed like hundreds of people and filed their particulars in alphabetical order, so their claims for temporary housing could be dealt with.
Even the people who still had a home had no gas or electricity, and they were all fearful of another raid. All day she’d heard that there weren’t enough air-raid shelters for everyone, and many people complained that the Government weren’t going to allow people down into the Underground stations.
But at five-thirty, despite so many people still needing help, Honour knew she must go, to see Adele and get back to Rose and Towzer. She no longer cared about going home to her cottage, she was determined to come to Silvertown again the following day to help out.
Her best dress was filthy, her eyes stung and her scalp itched from all the mortar dust, even her lungs seemed congested. Yet as she begged a lift in a truck going back in the direction of Whitechapel to see Adele, she thought how fortunate she was in comparison to the people she’d met that day.
The hospital was a little more orderly than it had been in the morning, and Honour found Adele very quickly.
She looked tired, her eyes red-rimmed, but when she saw her grandmother hovering nervously at the ward door, she rushed to her looking astonished.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she scolded. ‘There could be another air raid any minute.’
Honour explained as quickly as she could that she had visited Rose, and how after the raid she’d felt compelled to come and see that Adele was all in one piece.
Adele’s face had registered great shock at hearing about Rose. She flushed with anger and said Honour must be losing her grip leaving the safety of Winchelsea for someone so worthless. But when her grandmother reproved her for being so uncharitable, she shrugged, and began scolding her for risking her own life by coming to Whitechapel.
‘Look, Granny,’ she said, tutting over her filthy dress and shaking her head in disapproval, ‘I really appreciate you thinking of me, but I’m quite safe, and doing what I’ve been trained for. Now, you get going right now. Collect Towzer and go home. Don’t you dare stay a moment longer with Rose. London is no place for you.’
‘I disagree,’ Honour said defiantly, telling her what she had been doing all day. ‘And I’m coming back tomorrow if Rose will mind Towzer. I can be of use here, more use than I am down by the coast.’
Adele looked really worried then. ‘Granny, it’s dangerous,’ she said, edging her back to the door. ‘Please, if you love me at all, just go home and stay safe. Now, before I get cross with you.’
Honour chuckled at the sudden reversal of roles. She had no intention of going back to Sussex, but she thought perhaps it was wisest not to tell Adele that now, not when she had so much else on her plate. She kissed her granddaughter and told her to get back to her patients.
The air-raid warning went off when Honour was halfway to Aldgate Station. She looked at all the people around her, but was confused as they were scattering in every direction. Someone had said during the day that they reckoned the Underground stations were the safest place to go, so breaking into a trot she went on.
She didn’t look round when she heard the drone of the bombers, nor did she falter at the first whine of a bomb and the earth-shaking thud that followed it. She heard a man shout to her and the people running with her, but assumed he was only warning them to hurry.
Another whine, this time seemingly very close, and a woman screamed close by, Honour felt what seemed like a blast of hot air in her face, and all at once she was blinded by choking dust and something bowled into her, knocking her down.
Her last thought as a red-hot pain engulfed her was that she hadn’t told Adele where Rose lived.
Chapter Twenty-two
‘Don’t you look at me like that! I don’t know where she is,’ Rose snapped at Towzer. When the air-raid siren had gone off half an hour earlier he’d become quite demented, barking furiously and running from room to room looking for Honour. He wouldn’t come into the cellar with her, and Rose had been forced to drag him in by his collar.
Now as bombs were dropping he had his front paws on her lap, and the pleading eyes and sad whining noises were getting on her nerves.
‘We’ll be all right,’ she said, relenting and stroking his head, guessing that he was picking up on her terror, for he’d been fine before the siren went off. They’d been down to Ravenscourt Park at midday for a walk, and then stopped in the pub at the end of the road for a drink on the way back, and everyone had made a fuss of him. Bob the landlord had even given him some scraps.
Everyone had been talking about the previous night’s bombing in the East End and it was rumoured that hundreds of people had been killed. The general view was that the bombers had been targeting the docks and it was just an unfortunate mistake that civilians had been killed. Yet everyone was very jumpy. Most intended to go to a shelter that night, and several men said they were going to send their wives and children out of London.
Rose only stayed for a couple of drinks as she was expecting Honour back, but as the afternoon progressed and her mother didn’t turn up, she began to feel cross and put upon that she’d been left with Towzer.
But now, listening to bombs dropping, with only him for company, Rose couldn’t help but think the worst had happened to Honour and possibly Adele too. She couldn’t imagine her mother hanging around one minute longer than she needed to in Whitechapel. The only thing that would prevent her coming back for Towzer was not being able to find Adele.
As another thought popped into her head, a chill ran down her spine. What if Myles had told Adele the truth?
Rose had no recollection of either writing or posting the letter to her mother, so she’d obviously done it while she was drunk. She was absolutely stunned when Honour turned up, and her first thought was that she’d come to lay into Rose about the business of Myles and Adele.
Yet within minutes she realized this wasn’t so, for Honour certainly wasn’t angry with her. Rose relaxed then, believing Myles had found some other way to induce Adele to make the break with Michael, and hadn’t admitted he was her father. Maybe he’d even offered her money, and that was why she hadn’t told her grandmother.
Later in the evening, when Honour eventually told her Adele had come to London to get over Michael, Rose even smiled mentally. That’s what she would have done herself, pocketed the money and disappeared off to the city. It seemed Adele wasn’t the goody-two-shoes Honour liked to make out, but a chip off the old block.
But now, as Rose waited impatiently for Honour to return, she couldn’t help but have a nagging feeling she might have misjudged Adele. What if Myles had told her the truth, and the girl had kept it from Honour to spare her feelings?
If that was the case, and Honour turned up at the hospital with the story she’d been with Rose, Adele might very well be furious. And if the two of them put their heads together, it wouldn’t be long before they worked out how she got the money to buy the house.
Rose felt sick at the very thought of it. Was that why Honour hadn’t come back? Because she couldn’t bear to spend another night in the company of a Judas who took the proverbial thirty pieces of silver?
The whining shriek of a bomb, and then a thud, this time so close it made the light flicker, made Rose shake with fear. If the house was hit she could be buried under tons of bricks. She had never liked being alone – that was one of the reasons she’d wanted to have lodgers. But none of them were home tonight.
Margery and Sonia, the two young girls who shared the big front room on the first floor, had come back fleetingly this morning to get some clean clothes. They’d gone up West yesterday to do some shopping, and ended up spending the night in a public shelter. They said it was grim and they’d been scared out of their wits, and so they were going off to stay with Margery’s parents just in case there was another raid.
Rose got out of the deckchair and lay down on the mattress, pulling a blanket over her and burying her head beneath the pillow in an effort to shut out the noise of the bombing. But the bombs, like her thoughts, couldn’t be shut out.
In the pub she’d heard many of the people she drank with and classed as friends making arrangements to meet up in the local shelter if there was another air raid tonight. Yet no one had asked her to join them. Margery and Sonia hadn’t asked if she’d be all right either.