A week later we took her to Liverpool Street Station

to be evacuated with Dora and her pupils to the country.

Leslie and I couldn’t look at each other in case

our pain shot out like a burst water pipe. It wouldn’t do.

I feared we’d become an early childhood memory to Ellen,

like a forgotten doll she’d fondly recall as an adult.

I told her to be good, tidy and that we both loved her

even more than jelly, jam sponge, mince pies and toffee.

Her grey eyes looked so lovely when I kissed her little nose.

Please. Please. I prayed, Keep my dearest safe and happy.

Outside the station, London was a city of swarming bees,

children were being swept, carried and dragged inside.

I told Leslie to pray to God that we would all survive.

We caught the train home and waited for the bombs.

I WAS in the kitchen slicing ham for afternoon tea

when the Blitz finally hit us in early September.

I dashed down to our Anderson shelter in the garden,

that ugly monstrosity of corrugated iron slap bang

in the corner where my rhododendrons used to grow.

Leslie and I sat impatiently, waiting for the all-clear,

but for the first time in a year it never came. Oh Lordy!

I prayed so hard I was a muttering twit clasping

my rosary for the twelve hours we spent in that dankness.

Thunderous explosions outside made Guy Fawkes Night

sound like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and I felt as if

my bones were cracking into pieces like broken crockery.

When the all-clear went I dreaded that No 31 would be

a pile of bricks, torn wallpaper, bed springs and smoke.

That’s how it went on for the fifty-six nights following.

I felt buried alive like an Egyptian slave in a tomb.

Come morning I’d air our bedding in front of the fire,

and more steam would pour out than in a Chinese laundry.

It was like that off and on for nine months and by then

over twenty thousand of us had gone under.

Necton, Norfolk, 1939 –

DEW shivers on wild grass blades – tremulous tears.

The fields are crying as they climb upwards

in boundaries of hedges away from the bumpy road

ambling downwards, a thin veneer of rain like a still stream.

Mist blurs this rural vista, the grey of a painter’s brush

sweeps over trees clustered tightly into woods,

the tiny thatched village of Necton, sloping at the forked

bend by the silent church, where a mud-ridged lane

wends up to Necton Hall, obscured by clouds, its fairy

tale cupolas, turrets, gables ornate as a crown.

Morning’s lukewarm sun peers over low-lying hills

onto the octagonal cottage on the estate – the folly.

Its pagoda chimneys, stable door and church windows

are home to Auntie Dora and Ellen, their war-time billet,

the child now playing hopscotch on the flagstone floor.