Weaver

XX

Mary prepared to leave George's house before nine o'clock, this Sunday morning.

She sorted out her belongings. She slung her handbag under her coat, so it was less likely to be grabbed off her. She hesitated a bit about taking the research papers from the briefcase. The strange allo-historical questions she had been following since meeting Ben Kamen didn't seem to matter now, didn't even seem real, compared to the vast violence all around her. And yet not to have taken the papers would have felt like a defeat, as if she was giving up something of herself, a bit of her identity. So she stuffed the papers into her rucksack, along with her knickers and stockings.

Then she stepped out of the house, and once more locked the door carefully. Aircraft screamed overhead, making her flinch, but at least the town wasn't coming under attack this morning. She walked out of the Old Town, down the narrow, sloping streets to the coast road, and then headed west beneath the imposing West Hill, with its Norman castle and anti-aircraft gun emplacement. She meant to cut up past the rail station and then make for Bohemia Road, which would lead to the main road out to Battle.

The heavy-lift crews had been out clearing the streets of rubble, just shoving it aside and piling it up in bomb sites and any open spaces available. But most of the shops were shut up. Some had been left with their doors open, with signs saying 'Help Yourself'. There was no food or milk, nothing she could see that would be useful now.

She heard detonations coming from the direction of the harbour. It wasn't much of a harbour, just a fishermen's port, the sea walls built by the Victorians after centuries of struggle against geography, and now mostly silted up. But George had told her of plans to defend it with guns and torpedo tubes, and in the end to wreck it. Functioning ports were key for the Germans; without harbours it was going to be hard for them to land their heavy equipment, supplies and reinforcements. Yesterday at the start of the invasion they had launched a paratroop raid on Dover, which seemed to have failed, but today there was said to be a major battle going on around Folkestone.

When she got to Bohemia Road she came upon the main flow of refugees, heading out of town, slogging it on foot with their carts and wheelbarrows and prams. They were a river of people.

There was a good bit of traffic, private cars and buses and lorries and ambulances, but at least everybody was driving the same way, to the north and out of Hastings, and there were police and ARP wardens to shepherd the pedestrians off the road to keep the traffic moving. A few bicycles threaded through the crowd; that was a sensible way to go, if you could manage it. Mary saw one lad on a bicycle hanging onto the back of a lorry, pulled along as the vehicle ploughed forward.

The police and wardens were keeping the right hand lane clear, the lane heading back to town, but there was little traffic on it. George had said that the authorities had plans to avoid what had happened on the continent, when refugee flows had snarled up attempts to move military assets into place for a counterattack, and the police had been given maps with some routes marked in yellow for the use of civilians, others red for the military. It might have worked better, George said drily, if the maps had been printed in the right coloured ink.

Mary felt reluctant to join the shuffling throng, as if it would mean sacrificing her individuality. But there was no choice. She stepped forward, and found a place behind a boy pushing a barrow, before a mother with two kids in a pram, beside an old man leaning on a sturdy woman who might have been his wife. And then she could do nothing but walk with the rest.

They passed abandoned vehicles, broken down or out of petrol, briskly shoved off the road. She didn't see many military vehicles. Mostly it was just people, walking. They trudged along with their children on their backs and their wheelbarrows and prams laden with luggage and pots and pans. They seemed stoical enough. Maybe the national myths of the bulldog breed helped them hold it together. Churchill's rhetoric, still working its magic. But there were many with drawn faces and strange absent looks – plenty of trauma, even as this dreadful day got going. How strange it was, Mary thought, that only a couple of days ago she had woken up with all these people in a town where the milk was delivered and the post and papers arrived, and you could expect the shops to be open sharp in the mornings. Now all that was stripped away, and these British subjects were refugees, as simple as that, with no dignity and precious little hope. It was a scene of a population in flight, right out of H.G. Wells.

On the outskirts of town she passed a factory. Contained within a tall wire fence, it had once manufactured components for gas cookers, but had been turned over to munitions manufacture at the outbreak of war. Now it was being systematically vandalised. A handful of women dragged equipment out of the buildings and went at it with sledgehammers and iron bars. Every factory was supposed to have a plan to disable its equipment lest it fall into enemy hands. The women, in overalls and headscarves, drafted in to replace men lost to the forces, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Perhaps it felt like a holiday, an end to the dull and dangerous work that had occupied them for the year of the war.

Once they got out of town towards the open country there seemed to be nobody in charge, no more police or ARP wardens, except a few who had joined the flight themselves. And still they walked, limping terribly slowly through these few miles to Battle. By now Mary was dirty, hot, thirsty, hungry, tired, and her feet ached; she felt dizzy from the lack of sleep.

A plane came looming out of the sky, following the line of the road, heading straight toward the column. The people slowed. Mary watched in disbelief.

'I think it's one of ours,' said one old man.

The plane howled as it descended.

'That's a bloody Stuka!' somebody yelled.

When the machine guns opened up people screamed and scattered. Mary threw herself off the road, into a field of stubble. Bullets sang off the road surface as the plane roared low overhead. Then a bomb fell with a devastating crash, making a kind of bloody splash in the crowd.