The excavation was as wide as a motor-car, now, and almost as deep, and at the bottom, surrounded by rescue workers, was an object like a long, shallow wooden tent. She stared at it, saw a pump handle sticking out of one side, and realized that she was looking at the bar, knocked horizontal so that underneath it was a potential space: a life-saver. Two jacks had been inserted under one side and were being slowly cranked up.

‘Nearly with you,’ said one of the Heavy Rescue, crouching so that he could speak under the widening crack, and even from her position several feet above, Winnie could hear a voice in reply, hoarse and blasphemous.

‘That’s Smiler,’ she said, but the first out of the darkness was Alice, the barmaid, her face and shirt soaked with blood from a long head wound. ‘I can’t see,’ she kept saying, as she was lifted up to street-level, ‘I can’t open my eyes,’ and then Addy was eased out into the lamplight, shouting with pain from a broken leg, the knee bending the wrong way, the foot flopping like a piece of wash-leather, the stretcher party handling him with infinite gentleness, and then Smiler, crawling out, talking the whole way: ‘… didn’t hear nothing until the ceiling came down, and then I dived under the bar like a bleeding goalie … Hi ho, Shorty!’ he said, spotting her, clambering up the slope under his own steam, the smell of stale beer and blood and urine preceding him, his eyes feverish with the euphoria she’d seen before, in those who’d miraculously escaped. ‘Basset was over by the Gents. Did you find him?’

‘Yes.’

He caught her expression. ‘Gone, is he? Those bastards. Those bastards flicking a fucking switch somewhere, and never mind who gets it. There was two old chaps in here as well,’ he said, looking round towards Hubbard. ‘They was sitting at a table by the window.’

‘We’ll keep looking,’ said Hubbard.

Smiler refused to see the first-aid team, or even have a cup of tea, and went stumping off home to his wife and mother-in-law, insisting, too, that he should be the one to tell Mrs Basset (‘I was at their bleeding wedding, wasn’t I?’), and Winnie went on working until Larwood turned up from Borough Control, and told her that he was taking over and she should hop it. It was nearly eight o’clock, the sky a dirty white and the air full of dust; a bulldozer was beginning to shovel spoil into the bomb crater. On Longford Row, a lorry belonging to the Pioneer Corps had arrived, piled high with tarpaulins for the denuded roofs, and the greengrocer on the corner was arranging a pyramid of cabbages in his glassless shop-window.

Winnie went to Post 9 to lock up, and it wasn’t until she noticed the blanketed lump on the camp-bed that she realized that it was hours since she’d last seen Avril.

‘Oh,’ said her sister, sitting up. ‘Is it all over? Sorry, I lasted till around four and then I simply couldn’t stay upright any longer. Did they find your wardens?’