Read Online The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online

suburbs. To family.”
    â€œExcellent. We wouldn’t want to lose you just as we’ve met. Off you go. Au revoir.”
    In a moment he stood alone in the room. “I’ll be back,” he told it. “You’ll see.”
    Â 
    It took time to find his way out of the great grey place, at first down the crowded corridors lit only along the floor with blue lights, then across courtyards, into corridors lined with stretchers, running people, slamming swing doors muffled by hard asbestos sheets. He pushed on and into the inferno outdoors.
    But outside there was no inferno. All was quiet as the country at home. The sirens had stopped and the white moon shone down on empty streets.
    Where had everyone gone? The whole of London must be inside the hospital. The milky moonlit streets were white except for the arches behind the water tanks, which were black. Hardly a soul to see it. Hardly a soul except in the distance voices shouting about lights: “Turn that bloody light off!,” “... light off ...,” “... lights.” Shepherds across the meadows. The sky was scattered with stars.
    He found an Underground station. The ticket office was empty. The escalators were not working and were blocked, and he set off down metal stairs that corkscrewed into the dark. As he clattered down deeper, down a second fire-escape stair, and a third, a sharpness about him turned into a smell that lapped him from far below, and grew stronger and sourer. He became aware of a distant starling chatter from some pit in the dark. Light began to filter up from below. It spread and the noise grew louder.
    He stepped off the metal stair at last on to what must be an Underground platform; but none of it was to be seen for the confusion of bundles and bodies and blankets. Talk, talk. A shout or two. A crying child. Laughter. Away towards the blackness of the tunnel mouth someone was playing a squeeze-box. Jim Smith, after standing still a while, began to pick his way among the bundles and the shadows dotted with the red points of lighted cigarettes. Smoke from a thousand gaspers hit his throat. Black lips shining, red-black lips. Turbaned blonde heads with chunks of hair in boxy curlers, lumpy like Christmas stockings. Somebody knitting. A child desperately crying on and on. Tonight with all these unknown people might be the last of his life.
    The stench of the blanketed bodies was sweetish, smelling of sweat and fry. Jim Smith clattered around kerosene stoves and pans, knocking over a squat whistling kettle. Somebody squawked at him but nobody swore. Jumping the hippo bundles, he began to be afraid and a scrawny arm stretched up from a bed roll, like a feeler. “Lie here with me, boy.”
    He shook her away, leaned his back into the concave white wall and a warm blast of wind puffed out of the tunnel mouth followed by a roar and he was pinned against the slippery tiles. The squeeze-box stopped. Several people stood up and a lighted train sprang out of the tunnel like a dragon arriving in hell.
    When it stopped quite ordinary clean people stepped out, wide awake and carrying briefcases and gas masks on strings across their shoulders. All the men wore hats, the women gloves. There were no children. They stepped down among the permanent residents along the platform, like bathers into a shoal of fish, and nobody paid any attention until three airmen emerged, two with pilot’s wings. A cheer went up, at first faint, then vigorous, and drifted in waves about the platform, louder then softer, louder then softer, like the sirens. The airmen gave the V for Victory sign and tried looking jaunty. One had bandaged hands and Jim Smith wondered if he was on the way to his hospital.
    On the front of the train, miraculously, had been the word Wimbledon, and Wimbledon was Nell’s address. Jim Smith stepped in.
    Fore and aft he was pressed into a host of silent people pointedly looking away from each other and clinging to