Tuppence To Spend by Lilian Harry

Author:Lilian Harry [Harry, Lilian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409130352
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The respite didn’t last long.

It was as if the Germans had spent Christmas loading their planes with the biggest cargo of bombs yet. The day after Boxing Day they were back, hurling destruction on London. The newspapers were filled again with pictures of burning buildings and shattered streets. Big Ben itself had been damaged, and there were countless reports of lucky escapes and unlucky encounters. A man escaped unhurt while his wife and friends were killed beside him. A cat was released from a crushed dustbin. A woman dug her baby and badly injured husband from the debris of their home. Others, buried under mounds of rubble, cried out for help until their desperate rescuers managed to dig them out, or until their cries faded and stopped.

The rescuers were still at work when the Germans struck again, with the worst raid yet. The bombing went on for three hours and fires raged through the streets until it seemed as if the entire city must be in flames.

‘Look at that, Tommy,’ Freda said, staring in horror at the pictures in the Sketch. ‘They say it was a deliberate attempt to set fire to the city. There’s been seven churches destroyed and God knows how many other buildings ruined. They’re calling it the Second Great Fire of London. It’s dreadful.’

‘It is, love, but look at this picture on the front of the Daily Mail.’ Tommy held out his paper. It was the most dramatic photograph of all – the dome of St Paul’s rising clear of a huge cloud of smoke and lit by the flames that burned all around. ‘It’s like one of those old paintings you see, with God looking down out of the clouds. I reckon he was looking after his own there, don’t you?’ He looked at the photograph again. ‘It sort of gives you heart, somehow, thinking that even with all that bombing a place like St Paul’s can get through without being damaged.’

‘He didn’t look after the other seven churches, though, did he?’ Freda said in a shaking voice. ‘Nor all those other buildings. It’s dreadful. It’s wicked. All those poor people … And it’ll be our turn next, Tommy, here in Portsmouth. We must have had getting on for thirty raids already, but we’ve not had anything as bad as that yet. But we will – they’ll do the same to us, see if they don’t. They won’t be satisfied until every town in England is flattened.’

Tommy put his arm round her. As he did so, they heard the slam of the front door of number 2 and looked at each other.

‘That’s Dan Hodges going up the pub again,’ Freda said. ‘I saw him coming home dinner time, he was so drunk he could hardly walk. And there’s people getting killed fighting to save the skin of men like him, Tommy. It’s not fair. It just isn’t fair.’

Dan wasn’t going to the pub. He had a couple of days off from Vosper’s in lieu of all the overtime he’d done up till Christmas and he was entitled to his relaxation.

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