Read Online Weaver by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

gave her a bit of bandage. Doris said nothing about the injury to her own foot, and Mary didn’t prompt her.
    Doris found a bit of wall where they were able to sit, their backs to the brickwork. She fetched Mary a cup of tea, and set her helmet down on the floor between her crossed legs. They were surrounded by people, a warm fug of wriggling bodies, a stale smell of woollen clothing, a murmur of conversation. Mothers tucked in their children, three or four to a bed. A lot of people were reading, papers and Penguin paperbacks. One old man who looked like a rabbi was reading a leather-backed holy book. It was all quite cosy, and few people seemed afraid; it had all become a routine, Mary supposed. But she could hear the deep rumble of aircraft engines, the distant slam of bombs, and the hammering shudder of the ack-ack fire. There was nothing gentle about the night.
    ‘I needed a break,’ Doris said, sipping her own tea. ‘It’s been a long night already.’
    ‘It’s all very organised,’ Mary observed.
    ‘Wasn’t like this in the beginning. My word, after a night down here you could have sliced the air up and carried it out.’
    ‘But, you know, speaking as an outsider I’m impressed by the way the Brits have adapted. Coping the way you do.’ All this achieved by a nation, repelled by the industrialised slaughter of the Great War, that had never wanted this conflict.

    Doris sniffed. ‘Well, a bit of common sense and an ounce of courage get you a long way in my experience. Actually we haven’t been hit so hard, not yet.’
    ‘No. Not like the coastal towns. I’ve been staying in Hastings. The people there shelter in caves.’
    ‘Really? Well, the coast’s been getting it, they say, and the airfields and the like. Softening us up before old Hitler invades. So they say.’
    ‘I don’t think they’ll invade.’
    ‘No. They don’t need to - that’s what’s said. They can just starve us out, can’t they, with their U-boats in the Atlantic?’
    ‘Do you have family? A husband?’
    Doris eyed her; she’d evidently asked an awkward question. ‘Well, my husband was with the BEF. He didn’t come back from France.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I got a Red Cross postcard. He was in a POW camp outside Paris. They say they’re now being shipped further east, off into Germany, to be used for labour.’ She laughed. ‘I suppose it takes even the Germans a bit of time to move a whole captive army, four hundred thousand men.’
    Mary told her about her son. ‘I suppose I was lucky. Gary came back in one piece, more or less. He’ll recover soon.’
    ‘And he wants to fight again?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’
    ‘It’s all a frightful mess, isn’t it? I miss my Bob, of course, and so does Jennifer. I don’t suppose we’ll see him before this beastly war is done.’
    ‘Jennifer?’
    ‘My little girl.’ She opened her coat and dug out a photo, of a sunny pre-war day, showing Doris herself, a smiling, prematurely bald young man, and a little girl of five or six.
    ‘She’s pretty. Where is she now?’
    ‘Well, I have that aunt in America. Somewhere called Kentucky, she lives. We had a bit of money saved up before the war, and we decided we didn’t want Jenny off in the country somewhere, but with family. So we bought her passage. She’s up in Liverpool at the moment, but she’s supposed to sail next month on the City of Benares. She’ll be safe in America, won’t she? I’m afraid I don’t know anything about your country, nothing but what’s in the movies.’
    ‘People are kind. Just like here. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
    ‘Well, after she went off I thought I may as well do something useful, and I joined the ARP. But I miss her ever so much.’ She was absent for a moment, and then she deliberately brightened, as if remembering to do her job. ‘So what are you doing here in England?’
    ‘Actually I was here before the war. I’m a historian; I was researching aspects of the late medieval. When the