the stairs.
‘The bicycle better be all right, Kitty!’ he called down to her before slamming his bedroom door.
May 1941
It had been a cloudless night in London and the moon was full when the Danby family went to the Anderson shelter in the garden. After the all-clear in the morning they emerged
into a haze. Charlie only once described to Kitty what happened to him that day.
The news that there were direct hits down the street was yelled across garden hedges, and Charlie was desperate to go and see for himself and look for shrapnel for his collection. As soon as
they got back into the house, Charlie ran upstairs saying that they should start breakfast without him. He banged the toilet door and slid the bolt noisily. Then he held his breath as he pushed
against the door and silently released the bolt.
Charlie crept down the first few steps of the staircase and leaned over the banister rail. He could hear his mum talking and he could see Kitty’s legs as she moved backwards and forwards. Good, he thought. They were busy in the kitchen. He raced down the stairs and had the front door open and was halfway through it before he called back, ‘Just nipping out, Mum, back in
a jiffy!’
Charlie slammed the door as his mum’s voice chased him into the front garden.
‘Charlie! Don’t you . . .’
But Charlie put the door between his ears and the voice and he didn’t get to hear the end of the sentence. You’re not really doing anything wrong if you’ve not quite heard
what it is you’re not supposed to do , he thought cheerfully, and felt a thrilling little skip in his stomach.
Charlie was out of the gate at a run and hurtling round to Derrick Painter’s house. He had heard his mum say earlier that number seventeen had been hit during the night raid. That was
where Derrick’s nana and grandad lived – they normally slept in a Morrison shelter in the front room, but they had been having their tea at Derrick’s house when the siren sounded
and had spent the night in Derrick’s Anderson shelter. Kitty had said how lucky they were not to be at home when the bomb struck. But their mum had said, ‘It’s come to something
when you’re lucky you’ve had your house flattened.’
As Charlie turned the corner, he saw Derrick running up the road towards him.
‘Me grandad’s meeting the ARP man at the house in fifteen minutes – they’re gonna board up the downstairs windows. We’ve gotta be quick, Charlie. I’ll cop it
if Grandad sees us there.’
Puffing and red-faced, Derrick collided with Charlie and began pushing him back round the corner. Charlie wriggled free.
‘I was going to say we should go round the block and come up from the bottom of Hope Street. If me mum or Kitty sees us heading that way they’ll stop us.’
But Derrick shrugged him off and kept going. ‘There’s no time to go all the way round – come on!’
The two boys slowed down when they reached Charlie’s house and crossed the road. Once they were past it, they ran as fast as they could until they were opposite number seventeen before
crossing back.
Derrick’s grandparents’ house was an end of terrace and the bomb had hit the gable end. The front of the house was still standing, but the roof was gone and there was a gaping hole
in the side. The rubble beneath the hole was smoking. Despite this chaos, the front gate was latched and most of the garden was neat and tidy. The two boys peered over the fence. Derrick was the
first to speak.
‘Look at that.’ Derrick pointed at a pile of clothes that lay strewn across the path by the front door. ‘That’s my grandad’s best suit, that is.’
Glancing up and down the street, Charlie unlatched the gate and went into the front garden and walked towards the smouldering pile of bricks. He picked his way down the side passage into the
back garden. Here, there was a much bigger mound of bricks and rubble where the back of the house had taken the impact of the blast.