Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin

Author:Nigel Balchin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-09T23:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

I FELT a bit used up the next morning, but so did everybody else, so it didn’t matter. There was a general feeling that it had been a roughish night and that you were entitled to be tired. I walked from the Palace to the office to see if I could wake myself up. There was a hell of a lot of mess about. It seemed to me that the raid had done more damage in the West End than all the previous ones put together. They hadn’t had time to clear the glass up, and that always made things a bit desolate. Quite a number of places were still burning or smouldering, and there were a lot of fire-engines about doing their stuff. But it was all quite well under control. My balloon was down again looking more like a disgruntled elephant than ever. There were a lot of traffic diversions.

As I got near the office I suddenly wondered what would happen if they’d written the place off in the night. I thought it might be quite a good thing if they had. Then we could start again. But they’d need to do it in daylight, so as to get most of the staff, if it was going to be any good.

They hadn’t hit the Ministry, but they’d dropped a big one beside the next block and blown most of its front in. All our remaining windows had gone. Apart from that only a few queer things had happened. Some of the partitions between offices had shifted or cracked. Lawrence found that his office had got three feet shorter and his assistant’s three feet longer. The partition between them had simply moved three feet, perfectly upright. They just left it like that.

Nothing much had happened to my office. The partition was leaning in at the top a bit, and some of the doors wouldn’t shut. But then hardly a door in the place would. Apart from that I was quite all right. I even had one little pane of glass left. The messengers said it was the only one in the whole building. The messengers also told me that our bomb blew a chunk of stone nearly a foot square in through the Secretary’s window on the fifth floor, breaking the steel frame, and landing in one of his armchairs.

There was an internal envelope on my desk marked ‘Immediate’. I opened it. It said, ‘The first meeting of the Committee on the Area Unit Scheme will be held in Room 247 at 2.30 PM today. Agenda follows. J.L. Lawrence, Secretary.’

This seemed a bit sudden. I rang Lawrence up and said, ‘Is that J.L. Lawrence, Secretary?’ He chuckled and said, ‘In person.’

‘Listen, John,’ I said, ‘What is this?’

He said, ‘You mean this Area Scheme Committee?’

‘Yes.’

‘Search me, old boy. You know as much about it as I do.’

‘Well, who’s on it? Am I?’

‘Of course. Haven’t you had the notice?’

‘What notice?’

‘Oh, there’s been a notice round. Perhaps yours hasn’t turned up yet.’

‘What

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