Shute, Nevil (2 page)

So they had gone in to dinner and talked about their holiday, wondering if it would be nice to take the car to Scotland this year, for a change. And after dinner there had been a concert of chamber music on the wireless; they had listened to that until the news came on at nine o’clock when they switched off, having read the evening paper. Then they had played a game of cards together and had gone to bed a little after ten, to lie reading in their twin beds till half-past eleven. It was about that time that Murder in Miniature had slipped from his hand, and he had rolled over and put out his light.

The first bomb fell soon after that, about midnight.

The concussions were considerable-they must have been, because he could remember nothing from the time that he put out his light and settled down to sleep till he was standing at the window with Joan, his arm around her shoulders, peering out into the rainy night. The bursts, distant as they were, were rocking the house and setting things tinkling in the room.

‘Peter, what can it be?’ she had asked. ‘They wouldn’t be firing guns for practise at this time of night, would they?’

He had shaken his head. ‘Not on a night like this. There’s nothing for them to see. ‘

And suddenly she had cried: ‘Oh, Peter! Look!’

He had looked, and he had seen a sheet of yellow flame perhaps a quarter of a mile away, outlining the roof-tops in silhouette. With that there came a shattering concussion, and another, and another, nearer every time.

‘Oh, Peter!’ she had cried. ‘It hurts my ears!’

He had hurried her from the window; they crouched down on the floor beside the wardrobe at the far side of the room. ‘Keep your hands pressed tight over your ears,’ he had said. ‘I think this must be an air-raid.’

That salvo passed; as soon as it was over she had insisted upon going upstairs to quieten the children and the nurse.

There was a lull, but the concussions continued intermittently in other parts of the city. He had to do some quick thinking then. Like most Englishmen of that time, he had read something about Air Raid Precautions in the newspapers. He knew, vaguely, that he had been advised to make a gas-proof room, and he knew with certainty that he had done nothing about it. There had been something about buckets of sand for incendiary bombs, and something about oilskin suits for mustard gas. And there had been a great deal about gasmasks -in the newspapers, at any rate.

Quickly his mind passed in review the relative safety of the top room of the house, the cellar, and the garage. He did not think of staying on the stairs, as Littlejohn had done. It was more by instinct than by reasoning that he had decided on the garage, and hurried to the nursery to tell his wife.

The children had been terrified at the concussions. screaming at the top of their voices. In the turmoil he had given his orders to the woman in a firm, decisive manner, and had gone to carry rugs and bedding down the garden to the garage. A fresh salvo fell near at hand and set him cowering by the kitchen stove; in the middle of this all the lights in the street and the house went out. He heard, somewhere near at hand, the crash and rumble of falling masonry and the wailing of a siren on some ambulance or police car.

That salvo passed. In the lull that followed he went groping around in the pitch darkness, and got Joan and the nurse with the three children and all their bedding out of the nursery and down the garden in the rainy night to the garage. There he had made a bed for the two older children on the floor, protected by the garden, roller and the box of silver sand. Then he lay down upon the floor himself with the two women and the baby in the basket cot. He had brought a bottle of whisky from the house; he opened it and gave Joan and the nurse a drink. It made them feel a little better.

They had lain there all night on the damp, oily floor. The raid had gone on continuously till after three o’clock, the explosions sometimes distant, sometimes very near at hand. The children had been crying for much of the time; the nurse had cried softly to herself most of the night.

It was over now. Corbett put his empty glass down on the table and stretched himself erect in the morning light; he was feeling more himself.

It had been bad while it lasted. Now he must get the family indoors again and start cleaning up the mess, try and do something about the windows. After that, he must go down as soon as possible to see if everything was all right at the office. If he had time, it would be nice to find out if the country was at war and, if so, who the war was with.

He went first to the kitchen, to put on the kettle for a pot of tea before he brought them from the garage. The hot water boiler was alight, and the water was hot. That was a good first step; things weren’t so bad, after all. He raked the boiler out and filled it up with coke. Then he filled the electric kettle at the hot-water tap and switched it on to boil while he went out to fetch them from the garage.

The indicator showed that no current was flowing to the kettle.

He jerked the mains switch once or twice without result; his lips set to a thin line. This was very bad. He did the whole of his cooking on an electric range; there was no gas in the house. He tried a light switch and a radiator plug; then he went to the front door and tried the bell. He looked at the main fuse in the box, which was intact. Very soon he had proved that there was no electricity supply at all.

He went into the dining-room and tried the telephone, to ring up the supply company. Like Littlejohn, he found the line was dead.

He searched around the kitchen but could not find an ordinary kettle in the house, though there were three electric ones. He filled a saucepan with hot water, took off the cooking disc from the hot-water boiler, and put the saucepan on; it would boil slowly there. He stood then for a minute thinking hard; there was the breakfast to be cooked. Finally be shrugged his shoulders’ there were only two alternatives for cooking, the dining-room or drawing-room fire. The drawing-room was uninhabitable with no windows; he went into the dining-room, laid the fire with paper, wood, and coal, and lit it.

Then he went out to fetch his family indoors.

A quarter of an hour later they were all in the dining-room, the children dressing by the fire, Joan beginning to consider breakfast. She had made a quick trip through the shattered rooms with him, and had retired to wash her face in warm water. She came down to find him wrestling with the fire, which had gone out and filled the room with smoke.

Sophie, their nurse, went straight up to her room and came down half an hour later, glum and silent.

He was half through lighting the fire for the second time when the front door was pushed open, and Mr. Littlejohn came in. ‘Thought I’d just come in to see if you were quite all right,’ he said. ‘I did ring, but the bell’s out of order.’

Corbett stood up, wiping his coal-stained hands. ‘That’s very nice of you,’ he said. ‘The bell works off the main. I’ve got no current in the house at all.’

‘Neither have I,’ said the builder, ‘-nor gas, either. Is your telephone working?’

Corbett shook his head. “That’s off, too. I tried to ring them up about the electricity. We do all our cooking by electricity. That’s why I’m mucking about with this fire.’

The other nodded. ‘It’s the same with us. Got any water?’

The solicitor looked startled. ‘Oh, yes. It’s running at the tap all right.’

‘Ah, but is it coming into the tank from the main, up at the top? That’s what you want to watch.’

‘I don’t know. I never thought about that.’

The builder smiled. ‘First thing I thought about, the water. But then, I been in the trade, you see -all my life. Let me go up and have a look at the cistern, and I’ll soon tell you.’

‘Is yours off?’

‘Aye.’

They went up to the attic; Corbett watched anxiously as Mr. Littlejohn depressed the ball-valve. ‘Not a drop,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Just the same as mine. Dry as a bone-see?’

He got down from the cistern. ‘That’s what I came in about, really and truly,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be sure you knew about it, and not go lighting up the hot-water boiler, or having a hot bath, or anything of that. I been in the trade, and I know what to look for-see? So I thought I’d just pop in and see if things were all right. Hope you don’t mind.’

‘It’s awfully good of you,’ said Corbett. ‘As a matter of fact, the boiler’s going now. I keep it in all night. I’d better let it go out, hadn’t I?’

‘It’s all right so long as you don’t draw off any more hot water-or not very much. I wouldn’t make it up again-let it go out natural.’

They went downstairs, looking at bedrooms and the drawing-room as they went. ‘These windows are just terrible, of course,’ said Corbett. ‘I’ll have to try and do something about them. I wish this bloody rain would stop.’

The builder nodded. ‘I’m going down to my place, soon as I’ve had a bite to eat,’ he said, ‘to get a couple of my chaps up with some match boarding to put over them temporarily till I get some glass cut. Do yours the same, if you like-while they’re here.’

Corbett thanked him.

‘Well, I’ll be going along,’ said Mr. Littlejohn. He paused by the door. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘You haven’t had no trouble with the drains?’

‘Not that I know of. I haven’t looked.’

They went to look. The downstairs water-closet pan was about half-full of a black liquid that undulated and changed level as they watched.

‘That’s bad,’ said Mr. Littlejohn, regarding it, fascinated. ‘That’s very bad, that is.’

‘Isn’t yours like that?’ asked Corbett.

‘ It may be now. It wasn’t when I looked a quarter of an hour ago.’

‘What ought I to do about it?’

The builder scratched his head. ‘Don’t see that you can do anything about it, really and truly,’ he observed. ‘It’s flooding does that-pressure and flooding in the sewers; that didn’t ought to be there at all. But there-I suppose it’s all you can expect.’

He turned to Corbett. ‘I wouldn’t let any of them use this place,’ he said. ‘Not for an hour or two, till I find out how things are. You’ve got another one upstairs, haven’t you?’

They satisfied themselves that that one was all right.

Corbett walked with him to the door; the builder made him step outside into the rain. ‘Just between you and me, Mr. Corbett,’ he said: ‘there’s no sense in alarming people-ladies, and that. But what I mean is-the electricity and gas, they’re just an inconvenience, if you take my meaning. A bit of coal in the grate, and a good resourceful woman like my missus or Mrs. Corbett, and you’re right as rain. But the water-that’s different. You want to watch the water and not let them go wasting it, or flushing closets with it, or anything of that-not till we know where we are. You’ve got fifty gallons more or less in your cold cistern and another thirty in the hot water tank, and that’s plenty to be going on with. But it’s not enough for all the house to have a bath, or let run to waste. Not till we know how things are. I mean, when it’s going to start running again.’

Corbett nodded. ‘That’s true. Thanks very much for the tip.’

The builder said: ‘I just been a walk. You been down Salisbury Road yet?’

‘Not this morning.’

‘There’s a house down there-it’s terrible, Mr. Corbett. Really and truly. I never seen anything like it-not even in the war-not from one shell, that is. Still, what I meant to say was this. Two of them fell in the road, one at the far end and another a little bit this way. Well, the one at the far end, the water main’s bust for sure. There’s a regular fountain coming up, properly flooding the place. And it’s not running away, neither-like it should. That looks as if the surface drains is crushed.’

There was a momentary silence.

‘You see, Mr. Corbett, a lot of people, they forget about the water. It don’t give no trouble in the ordinary way, and you don’t think. But once the mains is cracked, they take a power of a lot of getting right again. Water ain’t like electricity, where you can string a bit of wire along on poles to the house and everything’s all right. Water’s water, and it takes a long time to get the mains in order once they’re cracked.’

‘And where one of them bombs has fallen,’ he said soberly, ‘it’ll all be cracked. Water and gas and sewers-all mixed up together.’

Corbett went back into his house and told Joan about the water. She wrinkled her brows. ‘We’ll have to get it put right before tonight,’ she objected.

‘There’s the children’s baths. Phyllis and John could go without perhaps, but baby must have hers.’

‘I should think you might take a little in a basin for baby. The other two will have to go dirty.’ He went on to tell her about the drains. ‘I’ll see if it’s possible to do anything about the water to-day,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime, we’ll just have to go slow on what we’ve got.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Seems funny, doesn’t it? Here, come and eat your breakfast.’ She leant over the smoking fire, and transferred a couple of rather smutty eggs from the frying-pan to a luke-warm plate.’

He asked: Where’s Annie?’ They had a daily maid who came in before breakfast.

‘She hasn’t turned up yet. I hope her rabbit dies.’

She busied herself about the grate; he sat down with the children to the meal. Phyllis asked him:

‘Daddy. Are we going to sleep in the garage again tonight?’

He was startled. The possibility had not occurred to him before. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not unless the bangs start coming again.’

His answer was digested in silence for a minute. Then: ‘Daddy, if the bangs come again, may I take Teddy to bed with me in the garage?’

‘May I take Horsey, Daddy?’ asked his son.

‘Why-yes,’ he said patiently. Joan came to his rescue.

‘Get on and eat your breakfasts,’ she said. ‘You’ve not eaten anything. If you don’t eat your breakfasts up, Daddy won’t let anybody sleep in the garage tonight.’

That finished them for the rest of the meal. Corbett got up from the table, lit a cigarette. He said:’ I must get down to the office right away. I want to see how things are there. If anything’s happened to our files and records -there’ll be awful trouble.’