After a while, she began to walk in the same direction as the ambulance.
Barts Hospital was in the City of London – she knew that much. If she couldn’t see Mike, she might at least stand outside on the pavement. She hadn’t really thought it through.
A little over four miles to the south-east, in New Cross Road in Deptford, the Woolworths department store had received a consignment of saucepans – a scarce item in wartime Britain. Word had spread and a long queue of housewives had formed. This particular branch of Woolworths occupied a large building of four storeys. Saturday was its busiest day, lunchtime its busiest hour. A lot of the women had brought their children; many were at the confectionery counter. One young mother, with a two-month-old baby in her left arm, walking up New Cross Road on her way to the fabled saucepan bonanza, recalled forty years later ‘a sudden airless quiet, which seemed to stop one’s breath’.
When an object breaks the sound barrier and continues to travel at a velocity in excess of Mach 1 – 767 miles per hour – it carries the noise of its sonic boom with it, the way a speedboat pushes out waves from its prow in a constant wash. At 12.25 p.m. – she only knew the exact time because she saw it in the official report afterwards – Kay heard what sounded like a particularly noisy firework exploding in the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud but distant bang, as if a heavy door had slammed. Then came the rush of the rocket. Everyone around her stopped and looked up.
The V2 hit Woolworths dead centre and ploughed through every floor before detonating to form a crater thirty feet deep. Most of the victims died instantly, either in Woolworths itself, or in the Co-operative store next door, or in the draper’s across the street, or on the number 53 bus, where the corpses remained upright in their seats, their internal organs traumatised by the blast wave. One hundred and sixty people were killed.
Banfill, Brian John, aged 3; Banfill, Florence Ethel, 42 …
Brown, Ivy, 31; Brown, Joyce, 18 months; Brown, Sylvia Rosina, 12 …
Glover, Julia Elizabeth, 28; Glover, Michael Thomas, 1 month; Glover, Sheila, 7 …
In front of Kay, a thin smudgy column of brown smoke began to rise above the roofs.
There was a debate both during and after the war about which was the more frightening: the V1, the pilotless drone bomb, which you could see and hear, and which would only start to fall once its fuel ran out, potentially giving you time in the silence to try to find cover; or the V2, which struck without warning. Most said the V2. It preyed on one’s nerves just as much as the V1 but offered not even a chance of escape. And it was also eerily futuristic – the harbinger of a new era, produced by an enemy who was supposed to be beaten. It made you wonder what else Hitler might have up his sleeve.
Kay contemplated the smear of smoke for a few more seconds, took a couple of steps backwards, then turned and began walking rapidly in the opposite direction, threading her way between the onlookers gawping at the sky, heedless of who she knocked into and the curses they shouted after her.
The distinctive double bangs had reverberated across London. The Saturday shoppers she passed had their heads down; their faces tense, their voices muted. When the V2s had first started landing in September, the authorities had put out a story that the huge blasts were caused by exploding gas mains. Nobody believed it. (‘Have you heard about the Germans’ new secret weapon – the flying gas main?’) It was only in the last two weeks that Churchill had announced the truth in Parliament. A thin film of anxiety had settled over the city.
Kay hurried westwards, past Holborn station, Tottenham Court Road … There was a relief in the simple mechanical activity of putting one foot in front of the other. She knew a lot about the V2 – size, range, fuel, payload, launch sites; she had watched it grow before her eyes over the past eighteen months as a laboratory technician might watch cancerous cells multiply under a microscope. Her mental state was three parts panic to one part cool professional evaluation: if the Germans could land a pair of rockets on London in the space of little more than an hour, it suggested they might have increased their deployment and a whole new phase of the offensive was under way.
In Oxford Circus, a car backfired. She ducked instinctively, like everyone else. When they straightened, they exchanged rueful looks and resumed their separate journeys.
In the end, she walked nearly four miles, all the way to Paddington station. The next train to Marlow was in thirty minutes. She went into the ladies’ and studied her face in the wide communal mirror. No wonder people had been looking at her oddly. She had white plaster in her auburn hair and on her face like a powdered Regency tart, streaks of soot on her cheeks, a smoke smut on her nose, a trickle of dried blood from the cut on her temple. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and filthy. A dirty weekend, she thought, and laughed out loud – it was exactly the sort of stupid joke that Mike would make – then gripped the edge of the sink and started to cry.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ A middle-aged woman in a headscarf at the next basin was looking at her in the mirror with concern.
‘Yes, fine, sorry.’ She turned on the tap, ducked and splashed her face with cold water, watched it turn black and swirl away, keeping her head down until she had recovered. She found an empty cubicle and locked the door, put her suitcase on the toilet seat, pulled her dress over her head and took out a pale blue shirt and black tie. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons. She did them up wrongly and had to start again. She tugged the heavy blue skirt over her hips and fastened it, shook out the matching blue jacket with its single braided band on the sleeves and tried to smooth away the creases. She buttoned it up and tightened the belt.
Back at the sink, hairgrips in her mouth, she put up her hair. Her fingers came away covered in dust. There was nothing she could do. Her cap would cover the worst of it. She applied the make-up she had bought for the weekend, as advertised by Merle Oberon in that month’s Vogue (‘Just a few seconds with Max Factor “Pan-Cake” and you’re glamorous!’), dabbing it thickly over the cut. It stung like hell. She added some lipstick, adjusted her cap and tucked away a few stray hairs. She stuck out her chin and peered into the mirror, and a formidable woman who seemed a complete stranger – Section Officer A. V. Caton-Walsh of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – stared back. Only her startled eyes, red-rimmed and raw, betrayed her. She picked up her case and went out onto the station concourse.
In the café, she took her usual seat, where she could keep an eye on the clock, cradling a cup of tea between her hands. She let her gaze wander over the crowds at the platform gates: the profusion of different uniforms – dark blue, light blue, khaki – a lot of Americans, their kitbags piled on a trolley, a party of noisy schoolchildren meeting their parents. High above their heads, the smoke-stained glass and wrought-iron roof was filled like an aviary with fluttering pigeons. Her eyes kept going back up to it. She pictured a missile crashing through it, then reproached herself. Absurd to imagine she could witness a third V2 in the same day. Nevertheless, she finished her tea and went in search of her train, and the needle whine of anxiety in the back of her mind was only quietened when her carriage began to pull out of Paddington, carrying her beyond the range of the V2.
The journey from London to Marlow took an hour – a pretty route along the Thames Valley, via Maidenhead, Cookham and Bourne End. She sat by the window and brooded on the green water meadows, the placid brown cows, the rivers and duck ponds and small grey stone churches. As part of her duties, she sometimes went to an RAF hangar in rural Oxfordshire to debrief pilots immediately on their return from reconnaissance missions over Germany. Young men, barely out of school, flirtatious, still in their flying jackets, dismissive of the dangers they had just faced – ‘Piece of cake, ma’am’ – with only the occasional shaking hand as they lit a cigarette to indicate their jauntiness was an act. Occasionally a plane failed to appear. The hours would pass, she would wait around, then it would be discreetly suggested she leave. She had often wondered whether she would have the courage to do what they did. Now she had her answer. For the first time in the war, she had faced death, and her instinct had been to get out of London as fast as possible.