‘They’re under there,’ he said, his gaze twitching past her towards the pub. ‘I’d changed my mind, decided to go home instead. They’re all under there.’

Winnie gripped his arm, trying to orientate herself. The pub had been part of a long, curved terrace which faced an identical terrace across an eye-shaped communal garden. And now there was no garden, just a vast crater at least forty feet wide, a water main playing like a fountain at the far end, a faint smell of gas, the terrace on one side an arc of humped rubble, while on the other, four storeys had been reduced to two and a woman was screaming, a shrill, unwavering noise, like a railway whistle. Smoke was rising from a couple of the ruined houses, a shimmy of flame just visible.

She dragged her gaze back to Polesworth. ‘Do you think you can get to the Post and phone Control?’ He nodded, his eyes clear, though his face was bleeding from a dozen tiny nicks. ‘My sister’s still there – send her back with the field telephone and the incident flags and lamps. And the census cards for the sector. Do you want me to come back with you?’

He shook his head and left, and Winnie ran across to the gaping wall of the pub. The upper floors had collapsed into the bar-room, which had itself collapsed into the cellar, and she was confronted with a choppy floor of brick and plaster, spiked with broken laths, half a table sticking vertically out of the rubble. On the opposite wall, a tin plaque bearing the Guinness toucan glinted in the last of the light. Two men were already making an attempt to dig.

‘How many people were in here?’ she asked, castigating herself for not having checked with Polesworth.

‘Five or six,’ said one of the men. ‘They’d only just opened. Three of them were your lads, and then a couple of old boys. And Alice at the bar.’ He pulled at one of the larger pieces, causing a small avalanche of plaster dust, and the creak of bending boards.

‘Stay off it and wait for Heavy Rescue,’ said Winnie, sharply. The chances were that no one was alive under there, but you never knew, you never knew: there was luck of all kinds in every raid. Addy had survived a blast that had killed the man next to him, Smiler had been blown into a cellar and come up cursing. She could already hear a fire-engine bell approaching.

‘Win, you in charge?’ It was Constable Orr, and with him were two of the Boy Scouts who acted as messengers during incidents.

‘I think I must be. There’s a fire mid-terrace on the west side of Ashington Gardens – the engine’ll never get round the front. Can you head them off before they get stuck and direct them up the back alley?’ She groped for the name of the taller scout. Toby. Terry. ‘Terry, I need a working telephone – could you knock on doors until you find one and then fetch me straight away. And I need someone to run to Post 8. It’s not their sector, but tell them we’re down to two at Post 9 and we can do with all the help we can get.’ As she spoke she was mentally listing the immediate requirements: Heavy and Light Rescue, fire brigade, gas board, water board, searchlights – there were maybe another twenty minutes of daylight left. The fact that the V-2 had fallen in the afternoon was a partial blessing – there were fewer people at home and those who were there were downstairs, protected from the scalping force of the wider explosion, though more liable, of course, to be buried.