Read Online Coventry by Helen Humphreys - Free Book Online

unlucky ones were sheltering under their furniture, or crouched in their cellars, when the whole house dropped to its knees, drowning them in bricks and beams, burying them under everything they once held dear.
     
     
    The singing has subsided and a melancholy gloom has descended over the inhabitants of the bomb cellar in The Coachman. Maeve prefers the melancholy to the singing. At least it’s quieter. She is worrying about Jeremy as she listens to the rhythm of the bombs falling overhead, trying to decide if there has been any break in the action.
    “Sounds like it’s intensifying,” says the publican, and Maeve has to agree that it is getting worse.
    They have been instructed by the government to seek shelter during an air raid, but there has never been any mention of what to do if the air raid doesn’t end. What if the city is destroyed? Is it the best choice to remain entombed in the basement of a pub? Maeve’s house is literally around the corner. Surely she has a good chance of getting back there, and once she is there she can shelter under her massive oak dining table. Perhaps Jeremy has returned to the house while she’s been in the pub basement.
    She stands up.
    “What are you doing?” says the sparrow man.
    “I’m leaving.”
    “You can’t do that. It’s too dangerous.”
    “I live close by, and I need to get back home to my son,” says Maeve.
    “I can’t let you go,” says the publican. “We need to stay in the cellar until the all-clear.”
    “Are you going to stop me?” asks Maeve.
    There is a silence, and in the silence, while the publican ponders whether he should physically restrain her, Maeve nimbly steps over the people in her way and bolts up the cellar staircase.
    The pub is as it was when they left it to stumble down the cellar stairs. The tables still hold the pint glasses, each one containing its measure of beer. The fire still burns, casting wires of light out into the room. The front window is still intact. Everything looks the same, but when Maeve passes the table where she had been sitting, she puts a hand down on the wood, and when she lifts it up it is covered in dust. She briefly considers finishing her pint, but the dust dissuades her from this.
    Outside, the world blooms and fades, flaring bright and then subsiding. The ground trembles and the noise of the exploding bombs is deep and guttural, something felt as well as heard, something that resounds through Maeve’s body like a heartbeat. There is the cough of the ack-ack guns and the drone of the bombers. They’re flying so low over the city that when Maeve looks up she can actually see, in one bomber, the outline of the German pilot in the cockpit.
    The street is still passable. Only one house is down, on the corner, and the debris is confined to the radius of the building. But beyond, toward the centre of the city where Jeremy is, things must be much worse.
    What seems strange to Maeve is not the downed house but the deserted street. She has never been on it when it has been empty of people and traffic. Maeve runs down the centre of the street. She gets to the corner, tries not to look at the destroyed house because she is afraid of seeing a body, and turns onto her street.
    Nothing has been hit. All of the houses are intact. Maeve runs the rest of the way home, pushing open the iron gate and racing up the path to the front door. It is absurd to think that Jeremy would have been able to make it back from the middle of town so quickly, but she barges into the house calling his name and rushing up the stairs to check his room.
    He is not there. She sits down on his sloppily made bed. The room is mostly in darkness, but the moon outside the window lights the row of tin soldiers that Jeremy keeps on his window ledge. He saved up his pocket money to buy them when he was a boy. They are turned to face one another, rifles raised, bayonets attached. There’s a Gatling gun in the midst of them that shoots real matchsticks.