Past Remembering Read Free

haunted him since his bus had been held up next to a cordoned-off bomb site yesterday afternoon. Only three houses had been left standing in a sea of rubble that had been a heavily populated street a couple of months ago. While he’d sat on the top deck and idly watched ARP wardens and Home Guard veterans comb the wreckage for salvageable objects, a tin-hatted warden had emerged from the hole he’d been digging in, to blow his whistle. Just before the bus had moved off a pathetically small, dust-coated corpse had been lifted out of the crater. A body that had suddenly, unaccountably, become Anne’s in Haydn’s mind’s eye.
    The child must have lain there, forgotten and unmourned since the last bombing raid weeks ago. Haydn couldn’t help wondering about the parents. Had they been killed in the same raid, or was there a father fighting somewhere who carried a photograph of a wife and child he didn’t even know were dead? Had the child died instantly, or had it lived for hours, days even, trapped, frightened and alone, all the while slowly dying of thirst …
    He clutched Anne closer, shivering despite the sunshine. The nights had been quiet for so long they were almost getting used to the peace, but that didn’t mean the bombing had stopped. Now that the winter storms had died in the Channel, everyone was waiting for Hitler to invade. The precursor to the Nazis’ spring campaign would undoubtedly be a resumption of the blitz, and next time Anne might be the one buried beneath the ruins. It was a horrific scenario he hated himself for even daring to imagine, because Anne, like Jane, had become too precious to contemplate losing. He crossed his fingers superstitiously lest even the thought of such tragedy precipitate it.
    ‘The bombing could start again, and I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Anne, or you,’ he murmured, softening his voice in the hope it would atone for his outburst.
    ‘Nothing is going to happen to either of us.’
    ‘How can you say that?’
    ‘Do you really think we’d be any safer in Pontypridd with Cardiff docks just down the road?’
    ‘They’re twelve miles away.’
    ‘And the munitions factories in Treforest?’ she whispered, after checking no fifth columnist was close enough to overhear their conversation. ‘And don’t bring up America again,’ she warned. ‘Not after that last ship of refugees was sunk by a V-boat.’
    ‘I wasn’t going to, but can’t you see you’d be safer in Pontypridd? No matter what, it has to be less of a target than London. Please, love, if you won’t go for your own sake, then go for Anne’s.’
    She moved closer to him, lifting the shawl from the baby’s face. ‘Do you think I’d ever put Anne at risk? I always go down the cellar the minute the siren sounds, and the walls are as thick as anything you’ll find in the underground, at least that’s what Mrs Allen says, and she should know. She’s lived in the place for over seventy years. We are better off down there than we would be in any Anderson or Morrison shelter.’
    ‘And if there’s a direct hit?’
    ‘Do you know the odds against that happening?’
    ‘It happens,’ he reiterated stubbornly.
    ‘If I’d gone to Wales when you’d wanted me to, Anne would have been born there. I doubt you’d have even been given leave to come down and see us.’
    ‘Of course I would have.’
    ‘A day or two at most, if anything. Your radio show is popular, you’re doing wonders for the morale of the troops. The powers that be won’t let you go until the war’s over, and by then Anne could be old enough to be married. Don’t you want to see your daughter grow up?’ she pleaded.
    ‘Her safety has to come first.’
    ‘Safe is with us. I want every advantage for our child that I never had, especially a family. And that means a father as well as a mother.’
    ‘Do you think I like the idea of you leaving?’ He wrapped his arm around Jane’s shoulders as he dropped a kiss on