Bombs on Aunt Dainty by Judith Kerr Page B

Her legs were brown from the endless fine weather and she suddenly wanted to run and jump. How awful to feel like this, she thought, when there had been an air raid and people had been killed – but another part of her didn’t care. The sky was blue and the sun was warm on her bare armsand there were sparrows hopping about in the gutter and cars hooting and people walking about and talking, and suddenly she could feel nothing but a huge happiness at still being alive. Those poor people who lost their house, she thought, but the thought had hardly time to emerge before it was swallowed up by her happiness.
    She took a deep breath – the air smelled of brickdust and plaster – and then she ran to the end of the street and down Tottenham Court Road and all the way to the secretarial school.

Chapter Nine
    After this there were air raids every night. The sirens went at dusk, to be followed a few minutes later by the drone of German bombers, and the All Clear did not go until first light. They were so regular you could almost set your watch by them.
    “Mama,” Anna would say, “can I go and buy some sweets for the air raid?”
    Mama would say, “All right, but be quick – they’ll be here in ten minutes.” And Anna would run through the warm, darkening streets to the sweet shop next to the tube station for two ounces of toffees which the woman in the shop would weigh out hastily, with one eye on the clock. Then she would race back to the hotel, arriving together with the first wail of the sirens.
    Each night she and Mama and Papa slept in the lounge. There was plenty of room, for a lot of people had left after the first big raid, and more went every day. It was unnerving just lying there in the dark and waiting for the Germans to drop their bombs. There seemed to be nothing at all to stop them. But after a few nights the din of the raidssuddenly increased with a series of bangs, like a great drum being blown full of air and exploding, and Frau Gruber, who had become an expert overnight, at once identified this as anti-aircraft fire. It made sleep even more difficult than before, but even so, everyone rejoiced in it.
    It was curious, thought Anna, how quickly one could get used to sleeping on the floor. It was really quite snug. There were plenty of blankets, and the heavy wooden shutters over the lounge windows not only muffled the noise but gave her a feeling of security. She never got enough sleep, but nor did anyone else, and this was another thing one got used to. Everywhere you went during the day there were people having little catnaps to catch up – in the parks, on the buses and tubes, in the corners of tea-shops. One girl even fell asleep over her shorthand machine at the secretarial school. When they talked to each other they would yawn hugely in the middle of a sentence and go straight on with what they were saying without even bothering to apologise.
    During the third week of the raids a bomb fell in Russell Square, making a crater in the soft earth and breaking most of the windows in Bedford Terrace. Anna was asleep at the time and fortunately for her, the blast sucked everything out into the street so that the glass and the shutters (which had not been so safe after all) landed on the pavement instead of on the people in the lounge.
    She leapt up from the floor, hardly awake and unable to understand what had happened. There was a curtainfluttering round her face and she could see straight into the street where an air-raid warden was blowing his whistle. All round her people were stumbling in the darkness and asking what had happened and above it all came Mama’s voice shouting, “Anna! Are you all right?”
    She shouted back, “Yes!” and then Frau Gruber arrived with a torch.
    Afterwards she found to her surprise that she was trembling.
    After this no one slept in the lounge any more. The man from the Council, who came to board up the gaps where the windows had been, told Frau Gruber that it