At Commercial Street, she was supposed to change buses, but with every street barricaded she decided it would be faster to walk the half-mile to Gargery Lane. It was already three o’clock. But even walking was difficult. Entire streets had been reduced to rubble, and the tenements which still stood had their sides smashed in or their fronts torn away, the furniture inside exposed to the street. In one, a kitchen table set for breakfast stood on a now-slanting floor, food still on the plates. In another, a staircase climbed up into empty space. And in between, everything was smashed flat, including the corrugated iron roof of an Anderson shelter exactly like the one she and Theodore had spent so many nights in.

In more than one place, rubble covered the street, too, and Eileen had to backtrack and go around, getting thoroughly lost in the process. She had to ask directions and then ask again—first of an elderly man pushing a pram full of household belongings and then of a middle-aged woman sitting on the curb with her head in her hands. “Gargery Lane? It’s down that way,” the woman said, pointing toward a line of gutted buildings. “If it’s still there. They were hit hard last night.”

I should definitely have given Mrs. Hodbin that letter, Eileen thought guiltily. Alf and Binnie would have been safer on the torpedoed City of Benares than in this dreadful place. She hurried past the blackened shell of a tenement. What if Gargery Lane was a burnt-out ruin or a heap of plaster and bricks? What if Alf and Binnie had been killed, and it was her fault?

But miraculously it was there, and fairly intact. The windows had been taped over and covered with bits of cardboard, but the row of houses still stood, and they were proudly flying Union Jacks. The tenement the Hodbins lived in had “Weel Gett Our Own Bak, Adolff!” written across its brown wooden front in red paint—no doubt Alf’s handiwork, since most of the words were misspelled. Its windows were boarded up, too, all except for one, which must have been just blown out. Shards of glass lay on the pavement in front of it.

The door stood ajar. Good, Eileen thought. She could hopefully avoid the alarming woman with the red hands this time. She stepped over the broken glass and squeezed into the tiny front vestibule past a bicycle, a stirrup pump, and two buckets with ARP stenciled on them, one of which was full of soaking rags and the other of potato peelings.

The door on her right shot open, and the woman with the red hands came charging out at her, brandishing a rag mop. “Thought you could sneak past me, did you?” she shouted, raising the mop above her head with both hands like an axe. “Not this time, you little bastard!”

Eileen shrank back against the wall, her hand up to ward off the mop. “I’m Eileen O’Reilly. I was here before,” she said, and the woman lowered the mop and held it out in front of her like a bayonet. “I’m looking for Mrs. Hodbin.”