Furniture
As a girl she’d volunteered for the hardest paper round just so she could get up before dawn and stand on a pile of weed-grown rubble to watch the sun rise over St Paul’s. You couldn’t do that any more, now that they’d built those big, brutal barbicans.
What kind of happy childhood was it, she wondered, which made you so nostalgic for ruins? Ruins were all she’d really known. And there were so few records of them. Lots of pictures of Brookgate before the war, when all the old buildings were still standing. Lots of stuff afterwards, with the big cranes and the permanent scaffolding. By then she was working at the old cigarette factory and the big changes all went on behind hoardings. Then they closed the factory and turned it into executive offices. She got a job at Mullards, Clerkenwell, until that went, too, under that computer tower.
Her childhood had been wonderful. They never really left London. After staying in Wales for a week, they’d all come home. Mum said she’d rather die of an air-raid than die of boredom. The peace and quiet got on your nerves. Made you think about things too much. Better to be in it and doing something than out of it and worrying all the time. She’d wanted to be near dad.
Vi’s hands were numb. She wished she could get up and move around. She turned on the wireless.
Radio Five. Some chat about sports then, abruptly, the news. It was five in the morning. Rescue workers still had hopes of finding her alive. A real drama.
Her chair shook and the table overhead, scraped a bit lower. She could feel its pressure on her left shoulder. Like the weight of the earth.
A long moment. It seemed like an hour.
Something fell towards her and seemed to land at her feet. There was a rushing sound, a human yell. Then a surprising gap in the darkness. Lights. Dogs barking. Distant voices. She drew a deep breath of the cool air and shouted. “Here. I’m here.” Her voice was too hoarse. “Here!”
Exclamations. More scrabbling. The sound of a motor. Urgent tones. Instructions. Something moved. The table shifted again, but this time the pressure eased.
The patch of pale grey widened. It was the outside. Shadows. Torch beams. Something flashed in her eyes.
“Are you okay, love?”
“Well, I could do with a cup of tea.”
“We’re just bracing all this rubbish up so we can get you out properly.” The face in the torchlight was heavily bearded, wearing a turban. Was it Doctor Singh?
He smiled. “And I’ll tell Tom to put the kettle on.”
Suddenly she was freezing. The morning air. She was only wearing a pair of light slacks and a cotton sweater.
