Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans Page A

in.
    â€˜Call for you in scenarios,’ he said, disappearing again.
    There was a telephone on her own desk, but it wasn’t connected to anything. The words ‘her own desk’ were similarly redundant since she shared it with one of the office messengers, a man in his sixties who had generously come out of retirement in order to contribute to the war effort. Personnel had decided to utilize his forty years in industry by giving him the job of occasionally taking pieces of paper from one floor to another, and he spent most of his time sleeping with his head next to Catrin’s typewriter. He opened an eye as she stood up. ‘Any jobs?’ he asked, plaintively.
    â€˜Sorry, Clive. Bad night?’
    â€˜Incendiaries,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind incendiaries, you can do something about them. Feel useful.’ He closed his eyes again, and Catrin took her notepad and left the office. There had been incendiaries in her own street, too, a clatter at midnight like a shower of tin cans, and she’d pulled on a coat and grabbed the bucket of sand, and hurried up the steps from the basement to find that one of the silver cylinders had lodged in the guttering above the porch and was burning fiercely. The boy from the first-floor flat had leaned out of the window with a mop handle and flipped the canister on to the pavement, and Catrin had doused the flame with the sand, and in the sudden darkness she had seen a dozen other hurrying silhouettes, a dozen other small, bright fires.
    There had been, in addition, the usual disturbances of what she was coming to regard as an average night: the near-continuous drone of the raiders, the distant crumps that would suddenly move nearer, as if a Titan were striding across London, and the thunderous, reassuring noise of the guns firing from the park half a mile away, each rolling discharge followed by the crack of the shell-burst, the plink of shrapnel on pavement and road. The all-clear had sounded at a quarter to four and Catrin had slept after that, but Ellis had snored through the lot, curled like a comma on their mattress under the stairs. He was spending three nights a week now on duty at the ARP post beside Baker Street, and another two sharing a fire-watching rota on the roof of the Paddington studio, and on the evenings that he spent at home he ate hugely, and fell asleep at the table.
    Catrin had made him a cup of tea before she left for work, and had kissed him between the eyebrows, the only area of skin visible above the quilt. Outside the flat, she’d paused, yawning, to watch an auxiliary fireman collecting the spent incendiaries in a sack, and the fireman had yawned too, and almost everyone on the bus had been dozing. Sleep, in London, was no longer a nightly staple but a sporadic snack, to be snatched at and savoured during any spare moment.
    In the scenario office, the boys were swarming around a desk at one end; at the other, a telephone receiver lay on top of a pile of scripts.
    â€˜Is this for me?’ called Catrin. One of the heads looked around and nodded impatiently. She lifted the phone and heard nothing but a low roaring sound, like a distant sea. ‘Catrin Cole,’ she said. ‘Hello?’ There was no answer. After a moment or two she replaced the receiver on the cradle.
    â€˜Who was it from?’ she asked, wandering over to the group. Greville, a boy of twenty with spectacles and an unpleasantly vigorous moustache, looked round at her and shook his head.
    â€˜Haven’t the foggiest. Gone dead, has it?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜There was a landmine on Tottenham Court Road last night, hole the size of a bus outside Heal’s. Probably nixed half the cables in the area.’ He was already turning back to the object of general interest (not to mention hilarity): a small sheet of paper with a block of typing on it.
    â€˜What are you looking at?’ asked Catrin, hovering behind them. ‘May I