Connie Willis - Blackout

“It hardly seems worthwhile to go to bed,” Fairchild said to Mary as they dragged back upstairs. “We go on duty at six.”

But the sirens won’t start up again till half past nine, Mary thought, and there won’t be a V-1 in our sector till 11:39. I hope.

She was worried about the one that hadn’t hit at 2:09. It was supposed to have fallen in Waring Lane, which was even nearer than the cricket grounds. They should have been able to hear it.

Which meant it must have landed somewhere else. That fit with British Intelligence’s deception plan. On the other hand, the 2:09 was the only one that hadn’t been at the right time and-as near as she could tell-in the right place, which meant it could also be only an error. Though a single error was all it would take to end her assignment abruptly. And permanently.

She was relieved when the 9:30 siren and the 11:39 V-1 were on schedule and even more when she saw the V-1 had hit the house it was supposed to-though when she saw the destruction, she felt guilty for having been so happy. Luckily, there were no casualties. “We’d only just left the house, me and the wife and our three girls,” the house’s owner told her, “to go to my aunt’s.”

“It’s her birthday, you see,” his wife said. “Wasn’t that lucky?”

Their house had been blown so completely apart it was impossible to tell if it had been made of wood or of brick, but Mary agreed with them that it was incredibly lucky.

“If the bomber’d crashed five minutes earlier, we’d all have been killed,” the husband said. “What was it? A Dornier?” Which meant they still thought all these explosions were caused by crashing planes.

But when they got back to the post, Reed greeted them with, “The general I drove to Biggin Hill this morning says the Germans have a new weapon. It’s a glider with bombs which go off automatically when it lands.”

“But a glider wouldn’t make any noise,” Parrish, who was on despatch duty, said. “And Croydon says they heard two come over this morning and they both had the same stuttering engines Maitland and Reed heard.”

“Well,” Talbot said, “whatever they are, I hope Hitler hasn’t got very many of them.”

Only fifty thousand, Mary thought.

“I drove a lieutenant commander last week,” Reed said, “who said the Germans were working on-” She stopped as the siren sounded and they all trooped down to the cellar. “-on a new weapon. An invisible plane. He said they’d invented a special paint which can’t be seen by our defenses.”

“If our defenses can’t see them, then why do the sirens sound?” Grenville asked, and Fairchild said, “If they can make them invisible, one would think they could make them silent as well, so we wouldn’t hear them coming.”

They have, Mary thought. It’s called the V-2. They’ll begin firing them in September, by which time surely it’ll have dawned on you that these are rockets and not gliders or invisible planes.

Or bombs shot from a giant catapult-a theory they discussed till the all clear went half an hour later. “Good,” Fairchild said, listening to its steady wail. “Let’s hope that’s the last one for tonight.”

It won’t be, Mary thought. The alert will sound again in… she glanced at her watch… eleven minutes, if it was on schedule, which she was beginning to be confident it would be. The explosions had been on time all day, and when she looked at the despatcher’s log, there was a 2:20 A.M. ambulance call to Waring Lane. Which only left Bethnal Green.

When the evening papers came out, she felt even more confident. Not only was the Evening Standard’s front page identical to the one she’d seen in the Bodleian, but the Daily Express said there’d been four V-1s on Tuesday night, though it didn’t say where they’d landed.

The newspapers also settled the issue of what the V-1s weren’t. The Evening Standard’s headline read, “Pilotless Planes Now Raid Britain,” and they all described them in detail. The Daily Mail even had a diagram of the propulsion system, and the conversation in the shelter turned to the best way to avoid being hit by one.

“When the sound of the engine stops, take cover promptly, using the most solid protection available and keeping well away from glass doors and windows,” the Times advised, and the Daily Express was even more blunt. “Lie face-down in the nearest gutter.”

“Keep watch on the flame in the tail,” the Evening Standard suggested. “When it goes out, you will have approximately fifteen seconds in which to take cover,” which made the Morning Herald’s advice to go to the nearest shelter utterly impractical. But in general the press had it right. Though they couldn’t agree on the sound the V-1s made and none of them mentioned a backfiring automobile. Descriptions varied from “a washing machine” to “the putt-putt of a motorbike” to “the buzz of a bee.”

“A bee?” Parrish, who had heard one on an ambulance run, said. “It’s not like any bee I ever heard. A hornet perhaps. An extremely large, extremely angry hornet,” and Mary was forced to take her word for it. By the end of the first week of attacks, she still hadn’t heard one nearby. That was the problem with being an ambulance driver. One went where the V-1 had already been, not where it was going.

But it wasn’t their sound that mattered. It was the sudden silence, the abrupt cutting off of the engine, and that would be easy to recognize. At any rate, she was bound to hear one soon. They were coming over now at the rate of ten an hour, and the FANYs were working double shifts, driving to incident after incident, administering first aid to the injured, loading them onto stretchers, transporting them to hospital, and-when they arrived at an incident ahead of Civil Defence, which often happened-digging victims, alive and dead, out of the rubble. And they were still ferrying patients from Dover to Orpington.

It was far more than they could handle, and the Major began lobbying HQ for more FANYs and an additional ambulance. “Which she’ll never get,” Talbot said.

That’s true, Mary thought. Every available ambulance was being sent to France.

“Not necessarily,” Reed said. “Remember, she got us Kent. And this is the Major,” and Camberley promptly started a betting pool on how long it would take her to obtain the ambulance.

The FANYs had shifted effortlessly from arguing over frocks to tying tourniquets and coping with grisly sights. “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand,” Fairchild told her, and as they waited with a stretcher while a rescue team dug a shaft down to a sobbing woman, Parrish said calmly, “They’ll never make it to her in time. Gas. Are you going to the dance with Talbot on Saturday?”

“I thought you were,” Mary managed to say, trying not to think about the gas. She could smell it growing stronger, and the woman’s cries seemed to be getting correspondingly weaker.

“I was, but Dickie telephoned. He has a forty-eight-hour pass, and I was wondering if I might borrow your blue organdy, if you’re not wearing it anywhere on-oh, look, they’ve got her out,” Parrish said and took off at a trot across the rubble with the medical kit, but it wasn’t the woman, it was a dog, dead from the gas, and by the time they got the woman out, she’d died, too.

“I’ll telephone for a mortuary van,” Parrish said. “You didn’t say whether you needed your organdy this weekend.”

“No, I don’t,” Mary said, appalled at Parrish’s callousness, and then remembered she was supposed to have driven an ambulance during the Blitz. “Of course you can borrow it.”

Away from the incidents they never discussed what had happened there or their lives before the war. They were like historians in that respect, focusing solely on their current assignment, their current identity. Mary had to piece together their backgrounds from clues they dropped in conversation and a copy of Debrett’s she found in the common room.

Sutcliffe-Hythe’s father was an earl, Maitland’s mother was sixteenth in line to the throne, and Reed was Lady Diana Brenfell Reed. Camberley’s first name was Cynthia and Talbot’s Louise, though they never called each other by anything but their last names. Or nicknames. As well as “Jitters” Parrish, there was a FANY at Croydon they referred to as “Man-Mad,” and they’d dubbed an officer several of them had gone out with “NST,” which Camberley explained meant “Not Safe in Taxis.”

Maitland had a twin who was serving in the Air Transport Service, Parrish had an elder brother who’d been captured by the Japanese in Singapore and a younger one who’d been killed on the HMS Hood, and Grenville’s father had been killed at Tobruk. But to listen to their conversations, one would never have known that. They gossiped, complained about Bela Lugosi (which was refusing to start), about the dampness of the cellar, about the Major’s habit of sending them after supplies when they were off-duty. “She sent me to Croydon last night in the blackout, to fetch three bottles of iodine,” Grenville said indignantly.

“Next time, tell me and I’ll go,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said from her cot. “I’m not sleeping anyway with these wretched alerts going off every ten minutes.”

“Then you can go to the dance with me on Saturday,” Talbot said.

“I thought Parrish was going with you,” Reed said.

“She has a date.”

“I’d only yawn the whole evening,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said. She turned over and pulled the blanket over her head. “Make Grenville go with you.”

“She won’t,” Reed said. “She’s finally had a letter from Tom in Italy. She plans to spend tomorrow writing him.”

“Can’t that wait till Sunday?” Talbot asked.

Reed gave her a withering look. “You’ve obviously never been in love, Talbot. And she wants to make certain it reaches him before he’s ordered somewhere else.”

“Well, then, it’s up to you to go with me, Kent,” Talbot said, sitting down on the end of Mary’s cot.

“I can’t. I’m on duty Saturday,” she said, glad she had an excuse. If the dance was in Bomb Alley or one of the other areas that weren’t in her implant-

“Fairchild will trade shifts with you,” Talbot said. “Won’t you, Fairchild?”

“Um-hmm,” Fairchild said without opening her eyes.

“But that’s not fair to her,” Mary said. “Perhaps she wants to go to the dance.”

“No, her heart belongs to the boy who used to pull her pigtails. Isn’t that right, Fairchild?”

“Yes,” she said defensively.

“He’s a pilot,” Parrish explained. “He’s stationed at Tangmere. He flies Spitfires.”

“He’s her childhood sweetheart,” Reed put in, “and she’s made up her mind to marry him, so she isn’t interested in other men.”

Fairchild sat up, looking indignant. “I didn’t say I was going to marry him. I said I was in love with him. I’ve loved him since I-”

“Since you were six and he was twelve,” Talbot said. “We know. And when he sees you all grown up he’s going to fall madly in love with you. But what if he doesn’t?”

“And how do you know you’ll still be in love with him when you see him again?” Reed said. “You haven’t seen him in nearly three years. It might have only been a schoolgirl crush.”

“It wasn’t,” Fairchild said firmly.

Talbot looked skeptical. “You can’t know that for certain unless you go out with other men, which is why you need to go to the dance with me. I’m only thinking of your welfare-”

“No, you’re not. Kent, I’d be delighted to switch shifts with you.” She punched her pillow into shape, lay down, and closed her eyes. “Good night all.”