The Nurse's War by Merryn Allingham Read Free Book Online Page A

as he had so many others in the past,though what a poverty-stricken old man could do, he didn’t know. But when he’d rounded the corner of the street—the address had been at the top of the letter his father had sent, begging for money his son couldn’t spare—he’d been appalled. There was nothing, literally nothing. A whole street had disappeared.
    After two years of war, he thought, London smelt of death and destruction. Everywhere shattered windows, roofs caved in, water pipes, gas pipes, all fractured, telephone wires waving in the breeze. The people he passed were every bit as shabby as their city since new clothes were a rarity. Shabbier still in the East End where, for a pittance, he’d managed to rent a room. Street after street of mean little houses with open doors and broken windows; filthy alleys in which ragged children played, their pale, pinched faces speaking of years of deprivation before ever the German bombers arrived. And everywhere stank—of waste, of unwashed bodies, of stale beer.
    He was walking through the City now, past one ruined church after another, their steeples scorched and dis-coloured by fire. There was something heroic in their tragic silhouettes, he thought, heroic yet futile. They belonged to a past that no longer had meaning. It was the New World that promised, the New World that offered a future. In front of the Royal Exchange, an enormous hole in the road had still not been completely filled after the Bank station had been hit in January. So huge was it that the Royal Engineers had had to build a bridge across for people to get from oneside of the street to the other. The East End had fared even worse, of course. Whole terraces mown down and streets almost entirely rubble. Grotesquely, the building on the corner of Leman Street, he noticed, still had a side wall intact and a framed view of a Cornish landscape hanging from the picture hook. He crunched his way along the pavement, littered with shards of glass and cracked roofing tiles. The breeze had begun to blow strongly again and pillows of white dust swirled around him. For a moment he had to stand still, his eyes closed against it.
    Turning into Ellen Street, he saw the lodging house ahead, black roof and sightless windows, hovering against the clear blue sky. It loomed discordantly over the dribble of smaller houses, as though it had risen from the pages of a Nordic fairy tale and found itself out of time and out of place. Several of the surrounding properties had been hit on successive nights and had crumbled at one blow. That didn’t surprise him, knowing how shoddily they were built, but at least the debris was light enough for more survivors to be pulled free. Alive but dispossessed. The house adjoining his had had its front cut away as though it were a doll’s house. Skyed high in the air was a dented bath and a lavatory, with a sad little roll of toilet paper still attached to the door. A staircase led to an upper floor that no longer existed. But the house where he lodged had survived all attacks—so far.
    He trod up the stairs as delicately as he could. The ground floor of the house was occupied by an old woman, ninetyif she were a day, half mad he was sure. He glimpsed her sometimes through her open door crooning quietly to a cat or slumped in a fireside chair, staring blankly at the bare wall in front of her. Sometimes she would stir herself to fling random curses at whoever was unlucky enough to catch her glance but she rarely noticed his comings and goings, being so deaf that a bomb could have fallen outside her window and she’d not have flinched. It was when he approached the first floor that he steeled himself to tread more softly still. He tried to shut his mind to the ill will he imagined lay beyond that door.
    His years in the army had given him a nose for danger and he was sure the men who lived there were up to no good. It wasn’t just that they’d ended their conversation the minute they realised