The English Wife. Adrienne Chinn

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       Chapter 10

       Norwich, England – 30 July 1940

      The bombs woke her. She didn’t know they were bombs at the time, of course. But what she remembers is that she was so solidly asleep, she was in that place of blackness between dreams and wakefulness. Then her eyes opened, and, for a moment, the blackness of unconsciousness and the blackness of the lightless room melded together so that she wasn’t sure whether she was dreaming.

      A thrumming. Outside the window. Growing louder.

      Ellie kneels up in her bed, glancing over to Dottie who is still asleep under her covers. She peeks behind the blackout curtain. The sky is clear blue, with a few puffs of clouds hovering around the early morning sun. Then she sees it. A flash of sunlight on a metal wing as it banks and heads back towards the city centre. Growing larger as it approaches. The bomb falling through the blueness, past the oak trees on Victoria Terrace. An enormous crash. A cloud blowing up skywards, pink with brick dust. The black cross on the bottom of the wing as the Heinkel powers over the house.

      Dottie bolts upright in her bed. ‘What’s that?’

      ‘Get out of bed, Dottie. Hurry. They’re bombing. We’ve got to get to the cellar.’

      Throwing back the covers, Dottie jumps out of bed. Ellie tosses her the dressing gown her sister had left in a heap on the old Persian rug and shrugs into her own. She grabs Dottie’s hand and pulls her sister towards the bedroom door.

      ‘Ellie, wait! I can’t find one of my slippers.’

      Another crash, near the city centre.

      ‘It doesn’t matter. Come on.’

      Ellie flings open the bedroom door. Their father is on the landing, his thin brown hair dishevelled, his round glasses sitting crookedly on his face. He has pulled on his white cricket jumper over his striped pyjamas and stuffed his feet into green wellies.

      ‘Hurry up, girls, hup hup.’

      Dottie runs over and clings to her father. ‘Poppy. We didn’t hear a siren.’

      ‘No, dove. There wasn’t one.’

      Ellie hurries down the stairs after her father and sister. ‘I saw a bomb come down. It looked like it was near Ruthie’s house.’

      ‘Don’t worry, Ellie Mae. They’ve got the Anderson shelter. They’ll be fine.’

      ***

      Ellie runs past the red-brick church at the bottom of the road and rushes around the thick hornbeam hedge into Victoria Terrace. The cobbled street and neat rows of terraced Victorian cottages she knows so well are coated in a thick sheet of grey dust. A smoking mountain of rafters, smashed roofing slates and charred furniture sits in the space where Numbers 43 to 51 once stood. The once proud oak trees behind the cottages are nothing but skeletons, their leaves blasted off by the force of the bomb. The acrid smell of burning sap seeps up her nose and scrapes against her throat as she swallows.

      She hurries towards the empty space where Ruthie’s cottage should have been, her feet crunching on broken glass hidden by the dust. She coughs as the brick dust settles in her throat. A team of men in the tin helmets and navy overalls of the Auxiliary Fire Service sift through the debris, pulling at pieces of rubble as they lean into the pile, listening. A frazzled-looking young woman in a navy AFS uniform is unloading a tea urn from the back of a staff car by the kerb.

      Ellie stumbles over to her, leaving a trail in the grey dust. ‘Excuse me. Do you know where the people living here are? I’m looking for my friend Ruthie. She lives here with her brother and her parents. They have an Anderson shelter.’

      The young woman’s pale blue eyes sweep over Ellie. She has a round, friendly face under her tin helmet. She shifts her gaze back to the tea urn and shakes her head. ‘They didn’t find anyone in the shelter.’

      ‘But if they weren’t in the shelter …’

      The young woman looks back at Ellie. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She reaches out and squeezes Ellie’s arm. ‘They wouldn’t have known what was happening.’

      Ellie’s heart jumps in her chest. ‘What do you mean by that?’ She can hear her voice rise. ‘What do you mean? Maybe they went to a neighbour’s—’

      ‘There wasn’t any siren. There was only one plane. It took everyone off guard. They would have been sleeping. I’m so very sorry.’