Strangers in Time

by David Baldacci

Genres: Historical Thrillers; Thrillers

Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Calamity of Souls comes David Baldacci’s newest novel set in London in 1944, about a bereaved book shop owner and two teenagers scarred by the second world war, and the healing and hope they find in one another.

Fourteen-year-old Charlie Matters is up to no good, but for a very good reason. Without parents, peerage, or merit, ducking school but barred from actual work, he steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he’s old enough to enlist to fight the Germans. After barely surviving the Blitz, Charlie knows there’s no telling when a falling bomb might end his life.
 
Fifteen-year-old Molly Wakefield has just returned to a nearly unrecognizable London. One of millions of people to have been evacuated to the countryside via “Operation Pied Piper,” Molly has been away from her parents—from her home—for nearly five years. Her return, however, is not the homecoming she’d hoped for as she’s confronted by a devastating reality: both her parents are gone.
 
Without guardians and stability, Charlie and Molly find an unexpected ally and protector in Ignatius Oliver, and solace at his book shop, The Book Keep, where A book a day keeps the bombs away. Mourning the recent loss of his wife, Ignatius forms a kinship with both children, and in each other—over the course of the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen—they rediscover the spirit of family each has lost.
 
But Charlie’s escapades in the city have not gone unnoticed, and someone’s been following Molly since she returned to London. And Ignatius is still reeling from a secret Imogen long kept from him while she was alive—something so shocking it resulted in her death, and his life being turned upside down.

As bombs continue to bear down on the city, Charlie, Molly, and Ignatius learn that while the perils of war rage on, their coming together and trusting one another may be the only way for them to survive.
 

Release date: April 15, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

IT WAS WELL PAST the midway point of 1944 when Charlie Matters clambered over the piled-up debris that littered much of London, while doing his best to fade into the lingering edges of the nighttime. Charlie would be fourteen on his next birthday, and years had passed since his parents had been alive. Eighteen thousand souls had died violently in the eight months of the Blitz alone, and one in six Londoners had been left homeless at one time or another. Sometimes there seemed to be more fallen buildings than ones left standing. A person could easily become desensitized to such profound loss. Yet while the war years had tried their best to rob him of it, Charlie was still resolutely in possession of a heart.

He hurried along streets lit mostly by hazy moonlight. The blackouts were still in full effect, and the electricity that was permitted was reliably unreliable. It was the same for the bluish plumes of gas, while plump fists of contraband coal were but a distant memory for most, especially folks like Charlie. They were all still steeped in the hostilities that had engulfed the world and struck particularly fiercely at the city of Charlie’s birth. Yet he didn’t mind the darkness; it was actually an aid to him right now.

He continued to skitter over bricks heaved up like stilled waves, and weaved around the stark warning signs of possible unexploded ordnance. Charlie had seen a defused bomb once. The crude lettering on the device was written in a language he couldn’t actually read, but he still knew exactly what it said:

GOTT VERDAMMT DIE ENGLISCHE

Well, God would choose which people to damn, and it certainly wouldn’t be the English, he believed. Things were actually appearing far more hopeful than a year ago, at least according to the snippets coming through on the wireless, and conversations Charlie overheard on the streets, and the bits of newspaper headlines he managed to glimpse.

He tugged up the waistband of his tattered pants with the cuffs turned up three times. Until last week they had resided in a bin shop that gave out worn castoffs for a few shillings in return. The queue had flowed out the door and snaked down the pavement, as desperate East Enders sought to augment their meager piles of necessaries. His grandmother, her ration book allotment for clothing nearly exhausted, had dutifully waited for hours on tiring pavement to get her grandson a proper pair of trousers that he could at least grow into over the next year or so.

At the bottoms of Charlie’s long, knock-kneed legs were shoes that were too small and caused him to step gingerly even in haste, which was often how he was compelled to move.

As the wailing wind—which darted through wide, ominous gaps where buildings had once stood—quieted for a few moments, Charlie heard the sputtering belch of a motorcar approaching. He quickly scooted behind a dustbin filled with the bombed-out wreckage of the building it fronted. When Charlie saw who was coming, he was glad he had hidden.

The pair of bleary-eyed constables puttered by in their rickety Morris. They were looking for people like Charlie. People up to no good, with the West End’s accusatory finger pointed doggedly toward the likes of Bethnal Green, Stepney, and East Ham.

I am up to no good, but for a very good reason, thought Charlie.

The poor cherished their possessions, because they could invariably see all of them at the same time. The rich did not miss that for which they had four spares. Thus, Charlie had no compunction relieving from affluent folks a bit of their surplus.

The Morris receded into the night as Charlie stepped clear of the dustbin. He passed by one bombed shop with no windows and no door and eyed the sign out front, which read MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.

Charlie’s goal tonight was straightforward: shoes. Footwear for boys his age were in unusually short supply in London. But for those with enough money, they could be had. Well, he didn’t have the money, so Charlie’s process was a smidge different, though on a legal scale it was rather more significant than that.

St. Saviour’s, a prominent school, was his destination. The majority of the students were enrolled there because of the influence of money and peerage. The remaining few had gained access based on actual merit.

Charlie lacked the money, the peerage, and the merit. He wasn’t traveling to this school for a privileged education or for future glory, but simply for reasonable footwear. He would have preferred a steady job to outright theft, yet he was apparently too young, too uneducated, too common-looking—a term he’d heard more than once—for gainful employment as, say, an assistant shop clerk or a butcher’s boy. And even with the odd job he occasionally found, it seemed that when it came time to pay the wage, folks conjured all sorts of reasons why they couldn’t part with their shillings.

The rain fell and embellished what appeared to be shiny layers of frost lying everywhere. It was actually powdered glass from windows shattered and then fused by the heat of the bombs. In the heavy drizzle, this coating gleamed like the metal wreckage of a plane, something Charlie had also seen. Aircraft had been in abundance in the skies over London, and not all had remained there.

Night after night Charlie, his gas mask on, had huddled with his body clenched like a fist, while steel, explosives, and detonators collided with laid brick, mortared stone, and, more than occasionally, fragile flesh. One never knew when something dropped from above would strike and that would be the end of you. So far he had survived all that.

He licked his thin lips and took a deep breath.

I’m not a boy.

I’m a man.

Act like it, Charlie.

This had been his mantra for a while now. It might be so for the rest of his life, however long or short that actually turned out to be.

AS THE RAIN PICKED up, Charlie felt drops of it creep inside his threadbare coat, which was missing half the material and associated warmth it had started out with. He passed by a building where the façade was gone, revealing a twisting staircase leading to an upper floor that was no longer there. He glanced at a sodden newspaper lying on the street. There was a blurry photo of a stocky, balding man with burned bits of coal for eyes and a pugnacious jaw. He was holding a fat cigar, his waistcoat fronted by a stout timepiece on a chain.

Charlie knew that this man was the prime minister. He had told his people to be strong, and calm and patient, while the world fell apart all around them. And they had, for years, mostly done just as he asked. Yet there were limits to people’s willingness and ability to sacrifice, and for Charlie and many like him, these limits were growing steadily nearer.

For tonight’s task Charlie had reliable information that St. Saviour’s rear door had a lock that could be defeated with the right tool and skill, both of which Charlie possessed. Just inside this door was a till with the money students paid for their meals. Maybe a few quid. Maybe many pounds. Certainly it would be enough to purchase secondhand bin shoes.

He calculated the timing of his operation. His grandmother would not be up until five. Each morning she left him his school lunch tin, and the food in the icebox for his breakfast. Then she went to work at the bakery shop. She believed that Charlie awoke, ate his breakfast, and then hurried off to school with his lunch tin and a heart eager to learn.

Instead, over a year ago, he had forged a letter in her hand, informing his teacher that his grandmother and he had moved to the country. The woman had freely accepted this because many people had traded dirty rubble and wretched loss for trees and open green fields, along with a centuries-old drafty stone church in which to pray for something better than what was currently available in London. He had been afraid that he might run into his former teacher at some point, which would reveal his lie. However, Charlie had learned that she had died in a bombing a month later. It was emblematic of the world they lived in now that Charlie had not been devastated by the woman’s violent passing. There were simply too many people dying all around him, from bombs and even more from sickness, to dwell long on any one of them.

Yet it was not the same experience for everyone. Rich people’s shelters weren’t in coal cellars, tube stations, an Andy bomb shelter, or under-the-stairs cupboards. They went to the Ritz or the Dorchester or the Savoy for pampering and full English breakfasts before being whisked off to country estates in chauffeured motorcars. At least that was what Charlie had often heard, including from his gran, and therefore fully believed.

He nimbly clambered over the school’s low gate and dropped quietly inside the darkened grounds.

St. Saviour’s was two stories tall and built of only the finest forged brick and quarried stone. For some inexplicable reason, as with St. Paul’s, no bomb had ever scored its hardened, noble hide.

Imperious white columns fronted the entrance. Dramatic moldings soared horizontally overhead. An elegant fanlight topped the pair of imposing solid oak front doors. A statue of a solemn-looking gent clad in a frock coat and gripping a walking stick and a book stood as weathered guard outside. Whether this chap was St. Saviour, Charlie didn’t know. He did manage a smile at the thought of a hallowed saint in a ridiculous coat destined to stand in the rain and muck for all of eternity.

Charlie would not be going in the front door. For East End blokes like him, the tradesman’s entrance would be the expected one for all their natural lives.

Unfortunately, he found the rear portal had two locks fronting it, stacked one on top of the other. This was an unexpected dilemma.

Charlie took out a sturdy piece of metal with a precise bend at the end and a protruding bit of blackened iron on its top side shaped in the form of a rectangle. He had been given the tool by his mate Eddie Gray. Eddie said his father had claimed it could defeat 90 percent of the locks in all of England. One like it had passed to Eddie when, years before, his father had died during a botched armed robbery. Eddie, who was good at making things, had fashioned a second lockpick and given it to Charlie. Eddie had also patiently instructed him on how to overcome a lock with it.

Charlie worked away intently, twisting the metal this way and that, while feeling through his fingers the guts of the lock moving around. It would be easier and simpler to pinch things from the open stalls of Brick or Petticoat Lanes back in the East End. Yet he didn’t like stealing from his own kind, and they had no spare boots there anyway.

He finally heard a soft click. Charlie turned the knob and it rotated freely. However, when he tried his instrument and skill on the top lock, Charlie could make no progress. After a few minutes of concentrated effort, he withdrew the pick in despair. This must be one of the 10 percent of the locks his tool couldn’t conquer.

Bloody well figures.

The high-set windows on the sides of the building were iron-barred. There was no iron left in the East End; it had all been stripped and melted down for the war effort. But this wasn’t the East End. One ventured “up” to the West End, but “down” to the East End, and those terms were literal in all possible senses. He had been told by one constable that in Charlie’s world you had your costermongers, fish curers, and thieves, with the latter adding up to about nine in ten of the population, the bobby reckoned. And he had included Charlie in that criminal group, although the lack of hard evidence at the time had sent Charlie on his way with only a stiff caution instead of the darbies put on with a swift ride to the clink to follow.

Charlie clutched the bars, hoisting himself up and peering through the glass. Looking in instead of out was his lot in life, it seemed.

Then he let go and fell to the damp earth.

He’d been lied to. There was probably no money in the till here. There was probably no till. The two boys who had told him about this opportunity didn’t have parents and had stayed with a hodgepodge of distant relatives, friends, fosters, and child minders. Recently, they had been sent to an orphanage just outside of London, but had broken out, they had informed Charlie, after telling him how awful it had been.

“You ain’t even got a name in there, Charlie, just a number,” said Lonzo Rossi. “I was bloody T207 or some such, but I always just been Lonzo.”

Eddie Gray, Lonzo’s best mate, had said nothing, but had looked off into the distance with an expression that spoke to Charlie of traumatic experience.

Charlie jogged back to the east and soon found himself in the heart of Covent Garden. A minute later the rain was bucketing down so hard that he could barely see; his sore feet felt encased in stone. And he still had a four-mile trek ahead of him to Bethnal Green. He stumbled along until he saw a bit of light coming from an alley. He peered down its mouth, conscious of the silence all around him, except for the drum-drum of the falling rain. In the drench, he saw a glimmer of light from a shop. At this hour that was truly remarkable. And it drew Charlie like metal to a magnet.

CHARLIE CREPT DOWN THE alley until he reached the soft glow of feeble light. Darting under the green awning and out of the rain, he looked at the neat, gilt-lettered sign on the dirt-streaked plate glass window:

THE BOOK KEEP

I. OLIVER, PROPRIETRESS

Below that were adverts that looked hand-stenciled.

A book a day keeps the bombs away.

And:

Reading books is far better than burning them.

Scrim tape had been applied to sections of the window to prevent the glass from shattering and becoming a weapon itself during a bombing. Triple-layered black curtains fairly covered most light from inside. However, the owner hadn’t pulled them all the way closed. There was a gap through which Charlie could see into the space. If an air warden came by, the shop’s owner might be given a tongue-lashing and even a caution. Yet Charlie also knew folks had gotten lax about such things.

When he peered through the gap the first things Charlie saw were books. He had been in a library before. Most recently to get out of the rain and avoid the accompanying chill and pneumonia that often followed. There, every single volume had been properly shouldered next to its neighbor.

Charlie had actually resented the clean, regimented lines of these books. Nothing in the world should be that uncluttered, he had thought. It simply did not seem right when the world itself was all sixes and sevens. Yet here teetering book stacks were haphazardly placed on the floor. In crevices and corners balls of dust rode alongside feathery cobwebs. A rickety ladder with brass rollers ran along a slender, cylindrical tube attached to shelves which bulged and flinched under the weight of leather tomes that were stitched to their wooden-framed hides, wordy ships yawing in storms on dry land. The overhead naked bulbs popped and wavered and seemed indifferent to their intended purpose.

It was then that Charlie saw the two men, who were a study in remarkable contrasts.

The first one was in his forties, tall and too thin, and harried looking, like everyone these days. His longish full hair was brown; his skin was pale, and, like Charlie’s, it had the odd freckle strewn here and there. The man wore an old, rumpled gray woolen vest, and a white shirt stained with a long day’s grime. The rolled-up sleeves revealed bony forearms spotted with thickish moles like the eraser bump on a pencil. There were also some deep burns on his skin that looked quite painful. His pants were as worn out as his vest, his shoes shabby, the heels uneven from constant wear over rumpled pavements. Rimless specs covered hazel eyes.

This gent must be the shop’s owner, I. Oliver, thought Charlie.

The other man was short and squat and had on a slouch hat, pulled low. He wore an expensive black waterproof, and new-looking stout wellies against the foul weather. He was jowly, with a bit of stubble on his weak chin. He handed the shop’s owner a packet of papers bound with black ribbon, and said something that Charlie could not hear.

The other man took the papers and put them away in a drawer that he then locked.

When the shorter man turned and headed to the door, Charlie hid behind a handy dustbin overflowing with bomb debris, of which there were thousands in the city. The man opened the door, which caused the tinkling of a bell, and stepped out. He gave a searching look right and left, making Charlie shrink down farther. Then the gent turned up his waterproof’s collar and hurried off.

Charlie waited a few moments to make certain the squat man was not coming back. He stole up to the window once more to see the shop owner bent over a fat ledger behind the counter and right next to the till. His long finger moved down the columned page as he made small tics on the paper with a pencil. After a minute or so he put the pencil down and drank from a chipped porcelain cup set next to his elbow. Beside that rested a plate holding a few slender biscuits.

Charlie eyed the biscuits as his empty belly commenced speaking to him in the form of bold protest.

Next the man picked up a curious cylindrical-looking device. Parts of the contraption seemed to rotate, because he was moving things around on it. He continued manipulating it for a few moments before returning to his pencil and ledger.

A minute later, the man lifted up a box labeled Simpkin & Marshall Book Wholesalers and disappeared through a curtain into a backroom. Charlie instantly seized the doorknob. Fortunately, it was unlocked. Unfortunately, the little bell tinkled when Charlie wrenched open the door; he had forgotten about that.

He quieted the bell, scurried behind a tower of books in one corner, and waited. Momentarily, the man appeared and looked around, his eyebrows touching in confusion, his spectacled gaze bouncing around the small space. He rushed over to the drawer where he had placed the packet of papers and unlocked it. He took out the sheaf of documents and examined them. Satisfied, he locked them back up, used the lift gate on the counter to pass through, strode across the floor, turned the door latch, and then retreated the same way, disappearing back through the curtain.

Quick as a ferret, Charlie came out of hiding, grabbed the biscuits, and thrust them into his pocket. He examined the odd device that lay on the counter. The thing was wood and metal with little rotating disks on which letters were imprinted. Setting it down, he rushed over to the ancient till. He pushed one of the metal-dipped keys, pulled back the large lever, and the wooden drawer popped open like a cuckoo from a clock. Paper and coins disappeared into one of his other pockets. He also grabbed a book off the counter, figuring it might be worth something.

Charlie thought his escape had been unseen. However, as he looked back, he saw the man bracketed in the curtained doorway, his mouth open perhaps in disbelief or dismay, or both. The next instant Charlie had unlocked and flung open the door, and was sprinting down the rain-slickened alley.

He had just turned wretched defeat into splendid triumph.

It was about time.

CHARLIE FOLLOWED THE CURBS, trees, and lampposts that had been painted white to help folks navigate the city at night. There were no exterior lights permitted on buildings, and vehicle lights had to be concealed, except for a small crack in the covering. The traffic lights were also shrouded, again save for a small slit so drivers could view the necessary colors. All streets other than the main thoroughfares were dark, and these roadways only possessed a small starlight filtering downward so as to give no aid to the Luftwaffe above.

The buses had signs that read LOOK OUT IN THE BLACKOUT. Yet even with these aids, people were still regularly struck and killed by cars, taxis, lorries, and double-decker buses lurching out of the darkness at them like leaping predators on the prowl. Charlie had had more than his share of close calls. Thousands of others had not been so fortunate and currently lay six feet under the earth for their effrontery at taking a walk in the city.

The blackout had been difficult for many Londoners, who had been used to a city brilliantly lighted at night. Charlie could still recall when the blackout had been instituted. He had watched with his grandfather from atop a building as, sector by sector—including the mighty Big Ben—the great city went dark. And with the absence of light came a deluge of fear for many, because everyone knew that terrible things always tended to happen in the dark.

Along the way home, the sore-footed Charlie was still nimble enough to latch on to the rear end of a full bus that was shepherding folks engaged in the round-the-clock war efforts to either their homes or places of work. He had been taught how to expertly perch on the outside of buses by Lonzo. It required strong fingers and exceptional balance, with the bottoms of your feet pressed against the vehicle’s metal hide, as well as the ability and courage to safely jump off a moving bus if the ticket conductor spied you and angrily came for the freeloader with his club.

At his ramshackle building in Bethnal Green, Charlie entered his tiny flat the way he always did after one of these nighttime forays. The overturned dustbin in the alley led to the bottom of the frayed rope attached to the lowest rung of the fire escape ladder. A tug on the rope brought the ladder down. After a quick clamber up the steps to the landing above and resetting the ladder, he was in through the window that, unlike the back door to St. Saviour’s School, had never latched properly.

Charlie slid into the wooden crate that represented his bed inside the space that had once been a small storage cupboard. When they had first moved here, it had been cozy. Now, with his quickly lengthening limbs and torso, it felt akin to a coffin. Yet at least he had a room of his own. He had many mates who did not.

Charlie had learned that his crib had once been an egg box, where as a wee thing he’d spent much time lying in nappies. As he’d grown, his digs had been replaced with an orange crate. He didn’t know what his current box had once been, but at least it was larger, because so was he.

Despite the cramped quarters, Charlie knew he and Gran had it better than most around here. Many East Enders lived multiple families to a few rooms with exterior toilets and no kitchens, with the fronting streets barely ten feet wide. And being jettisoned into those same streets was, for many folks, only an illness or death of a husband and father away.

His grandmother had once told him in front of a meager fire and lukewarm tea, “There was a workhouse in Whitechapel, Charlie.” She had shivered at the memory. “Bloody awful place. Nearly a thousand helpless souls. And the whole family had to go and share in the shame of being destitute. Shaved your head to keep off the lice. Fed you but not really with what I would call food. And they separated husbands and wives, and their children too. It was hard labor every day, and the law said the living conditions had to be worse than that of the working poor. And that’s saying something, Charlie, because we’re working poor, aren’t we? And look at us! And if you were old and your family couldn’t take you in, you went there, too. Bread and soup, and one day out so you could do your begging on the streets.” She had paused, lips quivering with emotion. “You hear anyone ever speak of the workhouse howl, luv?” she said in a fearful tone.

Charlie had shaken his head. “What’s that?” he’d said, with dread in his voice.

She had settled her despondent gaze on him. “Well, Charlie, it’s hard to describe. It’s… it’s when folks have been so beaten down by life and all the hardships that go with it, least for our kind, that… that all that sadness and, well, anger too, just comes out of your mouth and you howl away, like some poor, suffering beast. Because that’s what folks can become who haven’t ever had a decent turn in life. You still see it often round here,” she’d added bitterly.

“Have… have you ever had to howl like that, Gran?” he’d asked.

She had hurriedly changed the subject and didn’t answer him.

Charlie knew he never wanted to go to the workhouse. And he never wanted to be so sad that he howled, though some days he could see it happening.

He tugged a single tattered sheet over his wet self, felt in his pocket for the biscuits, and broke off a piece. He pushed it into his mouth and quickly chewed. He wanted to eat slowly, but he was too ravenous for that.

With his other hand, he felt for the paper money and coins. Food and proper money, instead of a shilling or mere pence. His prospects had gone up quite nicely with a single night’s larcenous labor.

He lit a candle stub, angled it into the crevice between the wooden box and several old pillows that constituted his mattress, and pulled the money out. His soiled fingers rubbed over the countenances of the august royal images imprinted on the notes and then touched the coolness of the coins. On the penny farthing was the image of Britannia on one side and George the Sixth on the obverse.

In total there was thirty-eight pounds in paper, plus an assortment of coins adding up to around another four quid. He had never held such a fortune. He slowly put it all back in his pocket and turned his contented attention to the book. In the dim light Charlie noticed for the first time that there was nothing printed on the cover or the spine. When he turned to the first page his hopes of more bounty from this stolen article fell. He quickly flipped through all the pages; every single one was blank.

“Bloody useless,” he commented to the darkness. He hid it under the pillows, snuffed out the candle with moistened fingers, and listened to the quiet outside. It was interrupted only by the occasional passing of a sputtering car belching dodgy petrol, or the sharp strike of regulation boots on pavement, heralding a weary constable or an air warden performing their important rounds.

As time passed, there came the frail echoes of a wireless from the flat next door. Charlie and his gran had once had an Ekco brand radio, but it had gone to pay bills. Charlie missed listening to the BBC. The radio broadcasts reported the war-related news, certainly. But there were also programs that made him laugh, and Children’s Hour, one of his favorites, which came on every day. Sometimes, he would sit out in the hallway at night and listen to the wirelesses of other people, hoping to hear well enough to chuckle at something—anything, really, to take him away for even a few moments from the desperation of his daily life.

At three in the morning he heard the gong of a tower clock. A minute later this was followed by a bullhorn blast from a ship, either navigating up or down the long, winding thread of the mud-coated Thames. The 215-mile-long river essentially defined Charlie’s world, becoming tidal at Teddington, and sliding into Greater London at Thames Ditton. It fanned wider and ever more winding as it headed east. All the fine bridges were to the west because of that. The unmistakable loop around the Isle of Dogs made the East End and the all-important docks easily visible from the sky for German bombers, especially on moonlit nights. And the Luftwaffe had taken advantage of that unique topographical quirk, with devastating results.

A moment later the sharp cry of a train whistle cut right through him. Charlie tried to think of which station it could be but then gave up. And when would he ever be on a train? He had been born in this city and he felt quite certain that he would perish here as well without ever once traveling anywhere else; the only unknown was how many years from now. Or days. And whether his end would be natural or violent. These thoughts were not the result of an overactive imagination. Charlie had seen much that was unthinkable and terrible in every conceivable way.

Yet nothing, for him, could ever take away the horror of that late summer’s day.

BLACK SATURDAY, CHARLIE HAD often heard it called afterward. Before that, sirens had sounded for many months with few German planes accompanying the warnings. Because of that folks had started calling it the “Bore,” or “Phony War.” But that had not been the case on that first Saturday in September 1940.

It was a lovely warm, sunny day, fairly rare in England.

At 4 p.m. British radar stations picked up a fleet rendezvous between German bombers and fighters above the French coast. About fifteen minutes later the frontal edge of the twenty-mile-wide Luftwaffe armada, which rode over ten thousand feet in the sky, crossed the English coast and was spotted by an Observer Corps post. The RAF was then scrambled.

By then, it was far too late.

It was around five when the city’s bomb warnings went off, building in volume. The sirens sounded to Charlie like high-pitched screams from the sky. Charlie and his gran, and his mother and his grandfather, for they had been alive back then, had hurried to their agreed-upon shelter, a cupboard in the windowless back room of their old flat. Folks with rear yards often fled to their hardy Andy bomb shelters, half dug into the ground with their thin hides of corrugated arched aluminum set next to flower beds that had been turned into Digging for Victory gardens. However, many poor folks without yards went to publ