‘“Nature triumphant over war,”’ one of the new friends declares, ‘in a wireless voice: for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio – the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of that – it had got terribly boring.’ It is as though one of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk. A sandbag splits, revealing its stuffing of earth, and bits of grass and flowers. The tea is grey, and probably made from chlorinated water the powdered milk is lumpy they nonetheless engage in ‘the usual women’s quarrel’ over who should pay. Two women sit drinking tea on a pile of sandbags on the Marylebone Road. Early springtime, London, 1944: the Little Blitz period of suddenly redoubled enemy air-raids after the comparative lull that followed the Blitz proper of 1940-41.
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