LITMIR.BIZ

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Two of ’em on one flamin’ parachute!”

      “Come on—let’s give ’em wot for!”

      Within seconds they were surrounded by men in Home Guard uniforms and helmets, rifle butts raised, heavy boots poised for kicking. Half-unconscious already, Schirmer tensed for the blows to fall.

      When he opened his eyes the next time, the guardian angel responsible for saving his life had vanished. Around him lay Home Guard men in strangely stiff postures: arms still raised as though to pummel, legs outstretched to kick.

      Then one of them stirred, moaned. Another sat up slowly, cursing. Herman edged away from them, but at that moment he saw the dim, cowled lights of a vehicle bearing down, jolting on the rubble-strewn street. It screeched to a halt, and in the brief glare of light from a distant explosion he saw the red cross on its side.

      Two women ran out of the cab. One examined and questioned the rapidly recovering Home Guard men. The other bent over Schirmer. He saw the look of distaste which flickered across her homely face as she took in his Luftwaffe flying suit and harness, but she quickly became professional and turned her attention to his bleeding leg. Minutes later he was being thrust on a stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

      Herman Schirmer knew that now he had at least a chance of surviving the war and seeing his family again. If only his fellow airmen would allow it, he thought wryly, as yet another wave of bombers thundered overhead.

      Already, his mysterious savior was being dismissed by the Home Guard stalwarts—and by himself—as a combination of shock, hallucination, imagination, and optical illusion.

      * * * *

      Old Annie Wimbush didn’t hold with air raid shelters, and she told the warden so, vociferously.

      “I’ve ’ad a good life, and I’ve lived in this ’ouse for the last fifty years. So did my Fred, till he died in ’is bed, Gawd bless ’im. ’Ere I’ve lived, and ’ere I’ll die, and if some Jerry bomb’s goin’ to blow me ’ouse up it can take me with it, and that’s that.”

      Seeing that she was not to be persuaded, Warden Bill Bramley pulled the blackout curtains closer together, then went outside to ensure that the chink of light that had first attracted his attention no longer showed.

      “Good night, then,” he called round the door, and he meant it sincerely.

      Camberwell was peaceful so far, but further north, beyond the Thames, the skyline was an angry, shifting red glow. From time to time a vortex of hot air and smoke would boil up to meet the lowering cloud, which gave back the ruddy glare. With luck, he thought, the raid would not come any further south tonight.

      Even as he completed the thought, he heard a high-pitched whine...which rapidly became a rushing roar. Then everything went black.

      Warden Bill Bramley’s war was over.

      * * * *

      The house adjoining Mrs. Wimbush’s semi seemed to burst apart, yet hers was left standing, incongruously tall and narrow, apparently intact.

      The appearance was deceptive. The connecting wall had fallen in upon the widow, leaving her half-buried. Both her legs were broken, and she had suffered smashed ribs and many other internal injuries.

      Yet she remained conscious and alert; in shock and not yet aware of the pain.

      She pushed weakly at the bricks all around her.

      “Throwin’ ruddy bricks now, they are. Joey?—are you all right, Joey?”

      A domed cage lay on its side in the rubble, its bars bent and its door sprung open. There was a fluttering of tiny wings and a green shape landed on her shoulder. The budgerigar started nibbling at her ear.

      “Oh, Joey, love, there you are! I’d rather they got me than you.”

      A spasm of further pain creased Annie’s lined face, and again she scrabbled feebly at the bricks.

      A new sound made her turn her head. She winced again. Had it just been more falling rubble?

      “Help!” she cried. “Is anybody there?”

      Then, with a flash of the humor for which she had been known in the neighborhood for many years, she muttered, “It’s a pity you ain’t a pigeon, Joey. Then you could carry a message for me.... Oooh, I wish somebody’d take this pain away.”

      A pale, insubstantial figure drifted into her field of view. All the lights had gone out when the bomb struck, but a broken gas main next door burnt with a harsh hiss, its yellow-white pillar of fire casting fugitive shadows. The glare limned the figure with gold, and for a moment she thought of an angel.

      “Is that you, Mr. Bramley? Can you give me an ’and? I’m stuck!”

      The flames that had been licking tentatively at the rafters protruding from the open roof-space suddenly blossomed into a roaring, crackling ball of fire. Beams shifted and, with a groaning creak, began to topple.

      The stranger placed a hand gently on the old lady’s temple, then slipped away quickly. There was nothing more he could do here, and his time was short.

      As her house began to collapse around her, Annie Wimbush’s wish of a few minutes before was granted.

      There was no more pain.

      * * * *

      “Go to sleep, my baby...,” crooned Dorothy Petrie drowsily, regretting for the thousandth time that she had ever let her husband, Rory, persuade her to leave Scotland for London when he was offered a better-paid job. Now he was away in the trenches, Lord knew where, up to his eyes in mud or worse, while she, instead of being safely asleep in their old, stone-built cottage tucked snugly into the hillside, tried to doze on a horse-hair sofa while her eight-year-old son Stephen waved his toy guns, assiduously shooting down the airplanes droning endlessly overhead, and her baby daughter, Aurora, tossed restlessly in her cot, whimpering, about to cry again.

      Aurora. The imaginative name had been Dorothy’s idea. The Northern Lights had been draping their ethereal multicolored banners above the cottage on the night Dorothy and the kids had left for the south, for London.

      Stephen had been dangerously ill with pneumonia—she put it down to his having to be taken through the cold air night after night to the shelters—but was now well on the mend. He had qualified for a Morrison indoor shelter: chocolate-brown metal plates bolted to a girder frame, with metal-grid sides. The Morrison was supposed to double as a table during the day, but the boy played inside it almost constantly, sticking cut-out models of Hurricanes, Spitfires, Lancasters, Messerschmitts, and Heinkels to its “sky” with black cotton and Plasticine, spotlighting them with battery-powered searchlights and aiming wooden shells at them from model guns, complaining because caps were no longer available to supply sound effects.

      The house shook as the crump! of a nearby explosion seemed to flatten the air.

      That was too close for comfort!

      Darting across the room, Dorothy grabbed the baby up from the cot and dived for the Morrison,

      An eerie whistling sound grew louder, louder, louder. A cloud of soot burst from the fireplace. There was clatter from the roof.

      For a moment there was silence, apart from a spattering rain of plaster.

      Then the ceiling fell in.

      “Stevie! Get back!” she cried in horror, lying on her side with a leg twisted beneath her, trapped under a heavy joist. The baby lay on the ground, just beyond her reach, but was bawling lustily, apparently more frightened than hurt. Through the clouds of choking dust she watched as her son, as though in slow motion, tried to crawl towards her from the shelter, wailing, terrified. Above her the roof gaped open to the sky. She could see showers of sparks streaming upwards from a burning building nearby. Water gushed out the end of a lead pipe that protruded from the hole, spreading in a dark stain down the wallpaper.

      But these horrors

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