Kissed a Sad Goodbye

on, it became evident that the debris was not strictly mechanical—the postmistress fainted dead away upon finding a severed leg in her garden, and other grisly bits of human remains continued to turn up for days afterwards. The younger children hunted for souvenirs with great enthusiasm, but for Lewis and William the war had abruptly ceased to be a game.
    As the hot days of August wore on, the raids into London became more frequent. And although life went on much as before, Lewis woke often in the night from dreams of fire that left him heartsick with fear.
    On Saturday, the 7th of September, a few minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, the boys were bicycling up Holmbury Hill when they heard the drone of engines overhead. Both stopped and glanced up—checking almost automatically now to see whether they were fighters or bombers—to find the sky filled with German planes. Hundreds of them — heavy, pregnant bombers surrounded by squads of smaller fighters—swept in majestic, inexorable order across the sky towards London.
    When the last plane had disappeared into the distance, they turned and cycled back to the Hall as if the winds of hell were behind them. They found everyone, even Edwina, gathered round the kitchen wireless, and there they waited for news. The reports were garbled, inconclusive, but as the hours passed, Lewis’s dread grew into a terrible sense of certainty.
    Towards evening, Cook brewed them another pot of tea, and making up some bread to go with it, she insisted that they must eat something. But that week the cat had got into the ration of butter, reducing them to putting drippings on their bread, and for Lewis what had been meant as a comfort was an unbearably sharp reminder of home. Pushing his plate aside, he ran blindly out of the kitchen.
    He sought refuge in the barn. Over the months he had come to find the sounds and scents of the animals comforting, and eventually he settled down on one of the bales of hay near Zeus’s stall and drifted into an exhausted sleep.
    He woke in darkness, disoriented, to the sound of William’s voice and a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.
    “Lewis, wake up. It’s the East End. They’ve said on the wireless. The Germans have bombed the Docks.”
    “What?” He sat up, his mouth dry.
    “John’s been up Leith Hill. You can see it from there, now it’s dark.”
    “See what?” Lewis said again, stupidly, his brain refusing to take in the words.
    “The fires. The East End is on fire, Lewis. London’s burning.”
     

CHAPTER 12
     
The Docks were easily identifiable from the air and were attacked more than any other civilian target.
Nearly 1,000 high explosive bombs and thousands of incendiaries were dropped.... At the same time large areas of residential Dockland were devastated. During the whole of the blitz, 30,000 people were killed.
Slightly more than half of these casualties were in London and a high proportion of these were in Dockland.
Paul Calvocoressi, from Dockland
     
     
     
    “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” Teresa Robbins asked as she moved to the table set up against the back wall of her office. The long trestle had been placed under the windows, and held cups, teapot, and electric kettle, as well as the bowls and tins Gemma had begun to associate with the paraphernalia of tea-tasting. “I’ll just make us a cuppa, shall I?” she added, glancing at Gemma over her shoulder.
    “Just a few routine questions,” Gemma answered, nodding assent to the tea. She watched Teresa fill the kettle from a bottle of spring water; it seemed to her that the woman’s fingers trembled slightly, belying the composure of her face.
    Having seen Kincaid off on his way to Cambridge at Limehouse Police Station, Gemma had arrived at Hammond’s shortly after opening time, intent on interviewing Teresa again.
    Unlike Mortimer’s, the office Teresa and Annabelle had shared was large enough to accommodate two desks facing one another yet still leave a comfortable aisle down the center of the room. Nor did it suffer from the executive pretensions that gave Reg’s office such an odd air of incongruity. The desks were of workmanlike oak and looked both comfortable and well-used—except that Annabelle’s had been cleared of everything except blotter and generic office accouterments.
    Wooden tea chests stamped in either red or black ink were stacked about, and a simple bookcase held a collection of novelty teapots. The room