Prologue

WE walked slowly, almost reluctantly from the warm and stifling waiting room across to Platform 7, to where the puffing engine had just dragged its train of carriages into the Paddington terminus from the countryside. The air was damp with mist, a thin fog that smelled strongly of ash and deposited a greasy, smoky film over everything the fine mist touched.

We stood waiting out of everyone’s way as the train disgorged its sardine-packed cargo of mostly grey pinstriped-suited passengers onto the paved platform, and we watched them as they hurried further away from their relatively safe houses in the capital city’s distant suburbs, each carrying their cardboard boxes of gas masks over their shoulders into the terrified city. Towards their darkened workplaces the herd of daily visitors went, to join its native inhabitants who were only now beginning to wake and wearily emerge from the underground shelters after another disturbed night of intensive German bombing.

The beautiful lady standing next to me tucked her arm into mine and pulled herself close, as if to assuage the cold, grey fog seeping into our bones after the steamy hothouse of the railway station café, where we had sat awhile as we awaited the arrival of the first train.

The timetables, so reliable before the war I assured her, now ran as a consequence of either the Luftwaffe or the whim of the War Office and their priority use for troop movements.

She clutched a small handbag in one hand, also holding taut the shoulder strap of her gas mask. All the rest of her luggage, consisting of two matching leather suitcases and a large trunk, had already been surrendered to the guardianship of the Great Western Railway porters and was no doubt being loaded into the baggage car under the care of the guard, while we waited for the wave of incoming passengers to wash away like a tidal surge into the city.

Bouyed by her touch, I felt little of the usual constant imaginary ache in my missing right foot as we walked slowly together towards the First Class carriage where she would recline for the first part of her long journey homeward, from Paddington to the Welsh ferry, that would take her across the Irish Sea, regularly swept for mines and U-boats, to the safety of neutral Ireland, one of the few European countries not yet drawn into conflict with Hitler’s all-conquering Nazi Germany and its aim of world domination.

From western Ireland she would fly by Flying Boat back over Greenland, landing at Newfoundland and Canada before landing back home in the United States, a country still at peace in this world torn apart with hate, violence and irrational racial intolerance.

I was sure that, in the seclusion of her carriage, her mind would be full of the events of the past two weeks, as would mine as I returned through the Underground train and London red double-decker bus to my modest lodgings in Mile End, in the East of London, my town for a quarter century, ever since being released from hospital in 1916.