The Safest Place in London Read Free Page B

when you opened the door and turned on the gaslight on a summer’s evening.
    Where were they to go? They could not stand here, and already people behind them were jostling. For a moment Diana resisted, standing her ground—for where was she to go?—but the crash of bodies behind was too great and she was propelled forward, right to the platform’s edge where, beyond, lay the electrified tracks.
    ‘Wait! Stop! Please stop!’ she cried, but they did not wait, they did not stop, and she gasped and flung out a hand to stop herself falling. For an agonising moment she teetered on the brink of the platform, closed her eyes, and Abigail, in her arms, stared over her shoulder into the abyss and screamed. Then Diana opened her eyes and saw that the tracks could not be seen for all the people sheltering down there.
    But the electrified tracks? Even as she thought this she saw that there were no tracks, that this stretch of line was not yet completed, that the people sheltering down on the lines, and further into the tunnel, were perfectly safe. There was even a crate placed just here so that one could step down. Diana availed herself of the crate, she stepped down, and as she did so saw the Underground sign on the tunnel wall: they were at Bethnal Green, and though sudden tears threatened to overcome her she did not give in to them.
    They had made it. They were safe.

CHAPTER THREE
    The station swirled in a thickening cloud of cheap Woodbine and Craven A cigarette smoke mingled with the cloying odour of damp bedding and too many unwashed bodies in close proximity. Diana, holding her dismay tightly in check, wondered: How long are we to remain here? One of her gloves had lost its button during their headlong flight and both stockings were now laddered. For a moment she did not quite believe this double catastrophe, laying a finger on the laddered stocking, gazing dumbly at the spoiled glove.
    The raid could not last all night.
    But they did last all night, she knew that. And even if a miracle should happen and they got the all-clear before midnight they could not possibly make it home; the last train would have long gone. They would be stranded. They would have to find a hotel at Liverpool Street. Yes, she resolved, if they could make it as far as Liverpool Street they would get a hotel. It helped, making this decision, gave one a sense ofhaving some control over events. In the morning they would return home, they would tell Mrs Probart about their adventure, they would write a letter to Gerald, and in a month or so Abigail would forget.
    In the meantime, it was simply a question of sitting it out.
    She had found a position not far from the entrance to the tunnel. It was strange to see the tunnel, the Underground station, from the angle at which a train driver must see it, or a mouse down on the tracks scurrying away into the darkness. She closed her eyes, pushing down thoughts of mice. Of rats. And yet people were sheltering there, right inside the tunnel, almost swallowed up in its blackness. For it stretched away into oblivion, into East London, and when she tried to think what station would be next heading eastwards she could not. There was nothing: her knowledge of London stopped dead at Liverpool Street.
    The place she had found for herself and Abigail allowed just enough space for her to sit on the hard compacted earth (the tweed Liberty coat!) her legs beneath her, her handbag clutched tightly in her hand, the little travelling case at her side and Abigail on her lap. Abigail stared about, wide-eyed and silent, at the sprawling, shifting spread of humanity, at the gaping mouth of the tunnel.
    ‘Mummy, Teddy doesn’t like it!’
    Diana stroked her hair. She had brushed Abigail’s hair this morning and placed a hairband on it and Abigail had sat squirming, waiting for the ordeal to be over, impatient to return to her dolls, to her bricks, to her world. She had not wanted to come out for the day. She had not wanted to come