The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames by Justine Cowan

Author:Justine Cowan [Cowan, Justine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

12

War and Isolation

I don’t remember if it was the siren or my mother’s piercing screams that woke me. I must have been four or five at the time, and that night remains my earliest recollection of my mother. I rushed to my parents’ bedroom and saw her hunched over in a white nightgown. Her hands were shielding her ears from the siren’s relentless pulses, and my father was beside her, his arms encircling her, murmuring in her ear. The siren stopped abruptly, and my mother’s howls became quiet whimpers.

“Go back to bed,” my father told me when he saw me in the doorway. “It’s all right. She just had a nightmare.”

He explained the next day that the loud sounds that had rung out into the night came from an air raid siren left over from World War II. We passed by it almost every day, a tall wooden pole topped with plain slate-gray speakers and indistinguishable from an everyday utility pole, but I hadn’t known what it was. The sirens had been installed after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, my father told me. There were fifty of them at the time, located in various places around San Francisco. They would warn of an attack if the Japanese air fleet made it to California. Of course, an attack hadn’t been the reason the alarm sounded that night. It was just a malfunction, a technical glitch, no cause for concern.

The sirens are still there, now used to alert San Franciscans of impending disasters—should an earthquake trigger a tsunami, for instance. There are more than a hundred sirens now, sitting atop their nondescript poles, scattered throughout the city. Most residents pass them by without noticing the utilitarian pieces of urban architecture. I only understood why they so terrified my mother after learning what had happened to her in the infirmary all those years ago.

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