Connie Willis- Jack

VIP免费
2024-12-24 0 0 223.09KB 41 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Jack
Connie Willis
The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still
hadn't gone by eight o'clock.
"Perhaps our Violet's tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters," Morris
said, "and they're so taken by her charms they've forgotten to wind the sirens."
"You'd best watch out then," Swales said, taking off his tin warden's hat. He'd
just come back from patrol. We made room for him at the linoleum-covered table,
moving our teacups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham
shuffled his paper into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.
Swales sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. "She'll set her cap for the ARP
next," he said, reaching for the milk. Morris pushed it towards him. "And none of us
will be safe." He grinned at me. "Especially the young ones, Jack."
"I'm safe," I said. "I'm being called up soon. Twickenham's the one who should
be worrying."
Twickenham looked up from his typing at the sound of his name. "Worrying
about what?" he asked, his hands poised over the keyboard.
"Our Violet setting her cap for you," Swales said. "Girls always go for poets."
"I'm a journalist, not a poet. What about Renfrew?" He nodded his head towards
the cots in the other room.
"Renfrew!" Swales boomed, pushing his chair back and starting into the room.
"Shh," I said. "Don't wake him. He hasn't slept all week."
"You're right. It wouldn't be fair in his weakened condition." He sat back down.
"And Morris is married. What about your son, Morris? He's a pilot, isn't he?
Stationed in London?"
Morris shook his head. "Quincy's up at North Weald."
"Lucky, that," Swales said. "Looks as if that leaves you, Twickenham."
"Sorry," Twickenham said, typing. "She's not my type."
"She's not anyone's type, is she?" Swales said.
"The RAF's," Morris said, and we all fell silent, thinking of Vi and her bewildering
popularity with the RAF pilots in and around London. She had pale eyelashes and
colourless brown hair she put up in flat little pincurls while she was on duty, which
was against regulations, though Mrs Lucy didn't say anything to her about them. Vi
was dumpy and rather stupid, and yet she was out constantly with one pilot after
another, going to dances and parties.
"I still say she makes it all up," Swales said. "She buys all those things she says
they give her herself, all those oranges and chocolate. She buys them on the black
market."
"On a full-time's salary?" I said. We only made two pounds a week, and the
things she brought home to the post — sweets and sherry and cigarettes — couldn't
be bought on that. Vi shared them round freely, though liquor and cigarettes were
against regulations as well. Mrs Lucy didn't say anything about them either.
She never reprimanded her wardens about anything, except being malicious about
Vi, and we never gossiped in her presence. I wondered where she was. I hadn't seen
her since I came in.
"Where's Mrs Lucy?" I asked. "She's not late as well, is she?"
Morris nodded towards the pantry door. "She's in her office. Olmwood's
replacement is here. She's filling him in."
Olmwood had been our best part-timer, a huge out-of-work collier who could lift
a house beam by himself, which was why Nelson, using his authority as district
warden, had had him transferred to his own post.
"I hope the new man's not any good," Swales said. "Or Nelson will steal him."
"I saw Olmwood yesterday," Morris said. "He looked like Renfrew, only worse.
He told me Nelson keeps them out the whole night patrolling and looking for
incendiaries."
There was no point in that. You couldn't see where the incendiaries were falling
from the street, and if there was an incident, nobody was anywhere to be found. Mrs
Lucy had assigned patrols at the beginning of the Blitz, but within a week she'd
stopped them at midnight so we could get some sleep. Mrs Lucy said she saw no
point in our getting killed when everyone was already in bed anyway.
"Olmwood says Nelson makes them wear their gas masks the entire time they're
on duty and holds stirrup-pump drills twice a shift," Morris said.
"Stirrup-pump drills!" Swales exploded. "How difficult does he think it is to learn
to use one? Nelson's not getting me on his post, I don't care if Churchill himself
signs the transfer papers."
The pantry door opened. Mrs Lucy poked her head out. "It's half past eight. The
spotter'd better go upstairs even if the sirens haven't gone," she said. "Who's on
duty tonight?"
"Vi," I said, "but she hasn't come in yet."
"Oh, dear," she said. "Perhaps someone had better go look for her."
"I'll go," I said, and started pulling on my boots.
"Thank you, Jack," she said. She shut the door.
I stood up and tucked my pocket torch into my belt. I picked up my gas mask
and slung it over my arm in case I ran into Nelson. The regulations said they were to
be worn while patrolling, but Mrs Lucy had realized early on that you couldn't see
anything with them on. Which is why, I thought, she has the best post in the district,
including Admiral Nelson's.
Mrs Lucy opened the door again and leaned out for a moment. "She usually
comes by underground. Sloarie Square," she said. "Take care."
"Right," Swales said. "Vi might be lurking outside in the dark, waiting to pounce!"
He grabbed Twickenham round the neck and hugged him to his chest.
"I'll be careful," I said and went up the basement stairs and out on to the street.
I went the way Vi usually came from Sloane Square Station, but there was no one
in the blacked-out streets except a girl hurrying to the underground station, carrying a
blanket, a pillow, and a dress on a hanger.
I walked the rest of the way to the tube station with her to make sure she found
her way, though it wasn't that dark. The nearly full moon was up, and there was a fire
still burning down by the docks from the raid of the night before.
"Thanks awfully," the girl said, switching the hanger to her other hand so she
could shake hands with me. She was much nicer-looking than Vi, with blonde, very
curly hair. "I work for this old stewpot at John Lewis's, and she won't let me leave
even a minute before closing, will she, even if the sirens have gone."
I waited outside the station for a few minutes and then walked up to the Brompton
Road, thinking Vi might have come in at South Kensington instead, but I didn't see
her, and she still wasn't at the post when I got back.
"We've a new theory for why the sirens haven't gone," Swales said. "We've
decided our Vi's set her cap at the Luftwaffe, and they've surrendered."
"Where's Mrs Lucy?" I asked.
"Still in with the new man," Twickenham said.
"I'd better tell Mrs Lucy I couldn't find her," I said and started for the pantry.
Halfway there the door opened, and Mrs Lucy and the new man came out. He
was scarcely a replacement for the burly Olmwood. He was not much older than I
was, slightly built, hardly the sort to lift house beams. His face was thin and rather
pale, and I wondered if he was a student.
"This is our new part-timer, Mr Settle," Mrs Lucy said. She pointed to each of us
in turn. "Mr Morris, Mr Twickenham, Mr Swales, Mr Harker." She smiled at the
part-timer and then at me. "Mr Harker's name is Jack, too," she said. "I shall have to
work at keeping you straight."
"A pair of jacks," Swales said. "Not a bad hand."
The part-timer smiled.
"Cots are in there if you'd like to have a lie-down," Mrs Lucy said, "and if the
raids are close, the coal cellar's reinforced. I'm afraid the rest of the basement isn't,
but I'm attempting to rectify that." She waved the papers in her hand. "I've applied to
the district warden for reinforcing beams. Gas masks are in there," she said, pointing
at a wooden chest, "batteries for the torches are in here" — she pulled a drawer
open — "and the duty roster's posted on this wall." She pointed at the neat columns.
"Patrols here and watches here. As you can see, Miss Western has the first watch
for tonight."
"She's still not here," Twickenham said, not even pausing in his typing.
"I couldn't find her," I said.
"Oh, dear," she said. "I do hope she's all right. Mr Twickenham, would you mind
terribly taking Vi's watch?"
"I'll take it," Jack said. "Where do I go?"
"I'll show him," I said, starting for the stairs.
"No, wait," Mrs Lucy said. "Mr Settle, I hate to put you to work before you've
even had a chance to become acquainted with everyone, and there really isn't any
need to go up till after the sirens have gone. Come and sit down, both of you." She
took the flowered cozy off the teapot. "Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Settle?"
"No, thank you," he said.
She put the cozy back on and smiled at him. "You're from Yorkshire, Mr Settle,"
she said as if we were all at a tea party. "Whereabouts?"
"Whitby," he said politely.
"What brings you to London?" Morris said.
"The war," he said, still politely.
"Wanted to do your bit, eh?"
"Yes."
"That's what my son Quincy said. 'Dad,' he says. 'I want to do my bit for
England. I'm going to be a pilot.' Downed twenty-one planes, he has, my Quincy,"
Morris told Jack, "and been shot down twice himself. Oh, he's had some scrapes, I
could tell you, but it's all top secret."
Jack nodded.
There were times I wondered whether Morris, like Violet with her RAF pilots, had
invented his son's exploits. Sometimes I even wondered if he had invented the son,
though if that were the case he might surely have made up a better name than
Quincy.
" 'Dad,' he says to me out of the blue, 'I've got to do my bit,' and he shows me
his enlistment papers. You could've knocked me over with a feather. Not that he's
not patriotic, you understand, but he'd had his little difficulties at school, sowed his
wild oats, so to speak, and here he was, saying, 'Dad, I want to do my bit.'"
The sirens went, taking up one after the other. Mrs Lucy said, "Ah, well, here they
are now," as if the last guest had finally arrived at her tea party, and Jack stood up.
"If you'll just show me where the spotter's post is, Mr Harker," he said.
"Jack," I said. "It's a name that should be easy for you to remember."
I took him upstairs to what had been Mrs Lucy's cook's garret bedroom, unlike
the street a perfect place to watch for incendiaries. It was on the fourth floor, higher
than most of the buildings on the street so one could see anything that fell on the
roofs around. One could see the Thames, too, between the chimneypots, and in the
other direction the searchlights in Hyde Park.
Mrs Lucy had set a wing-backed chair by the window, from which the glass had
been removed, and the narrow landing at the head of the stairs had been reinforced
with heavy oak beams that even Olmwood couldn't have lifted.
"One ducks out here when the bombs get close," I said, shining the torch on the
beams. "It'll be a swish and then a sort of rising whine." I led him into the bedroom.
"If you see incendiaries, call out and try to mark exactly where they fall on the
roofs." I showed him how to use the gunsight mounted on a wooden base that we
used for a sextant and handed him the binoculars. "Anything else you need?" I
asked.
"No," he said soberly. "Thank you."
I left him and went back downstairs. They were still discussing Violet.
"I'm really becoming worried about her," Mrs Lucy said. One of the ack-ack guns
started up, and there was the dull crump of bombs far away, and we all stopped to
listen.
"ME 109s," Morris said. "They're coming in from the south again."
"I do hope she has the sense to get to a shelter." Mrs Lucy said, and Vi burst in
the door.
"Sorry I'm late," she said, setting a box tied with string on the table next to
Twickenham's typewriter. She was out of breath and her face was suffused with
blood. "I know I'm supposed to be on watch, but Harry took me out to see his
plane this afternoon, and I had a horrid time getting back." She heaved herself out of
her coat and hung it over the back of Jack's chair. "You'll never believe what he's
named it! The Sweet Violet!" She untied the string on the box. "We were so late we
hadn't time for tea, and he said, 'You take this to your post and have a good tea, and
I'll keep the jerries busy till you've finished.' " She reached in the box and lifted out a
torte with sugar icing. "He's painted the name on the nose and put little violets in
purple all round it," she said, setting it on the table. "One for every jerry he's shot
down."
We stared at the cake. Eggs and sugar had been rationed since the beginning of
the year and they'd been in short supply even before that. I hadn't seen a fancy torte
like this in over a year.
"It's raspberry filling," she said, slicing through the cake with a knife. "They
hadn't any chocolate." She held the knife up, dripping jam. "Now, who wants some
then?"
"I do," I said. I had been hungry since the beginning of the war and ravenous
since I'd joined the ARP, especially for sweets, and I had my piece eaten before
she'd finished setting slices on Mrs Lucy's Wedgwood plates and passing them
round.
There was still a quarter left. "Who's upstairs taking my watch?" she said, sucking
a bit of raspberry jam off her finger.
"The new part-timer," I said. "I'll take it up to him."
She cut a slice and eased it off the knife and on to the plate. "What's he like?" she
asked.
"He's from Yorkshire," Twickenham said, looking at Mrs Lucy. "What did he do
up there before the war?"
Mrs Lucy looked at her cake, as if surprised that it was nearly eaten. "He didn't
say," she said.
"I meant, is he handsome?" Vi said, putting a fork on the plate with the slice of
cake. "Perhaps I should take it up to him myself."
"He's puny. Pale," Swales said, his mouth full of cake. "Looks as if he's got
consumption."
"Nelson won't steal him any time soon, that's certain," Morris said.
"Oh, well, then," Vi said, and handed the plate to me.
I took it and went upstairs, stopping on the second floor landing to shift it to my
left hand and switch on my pocket torch.
Jack was standing by the window, the binoculars dangling from his neck, looking
out past the rooftops towards the river. The moon was up, reflecting whitely off the
water like one of the German flares, lighting the bombers' way.
"Anything in our sector yet?" I said.
"No," he said, without turning round. "They're still to the east."
"I've brought you some raspberry cake," I said.
He turned and looked at me.
I held the cake out. "Violet's young man in the RAF sent it."
"No, thank you," he said. "I'm not fond of cake."
I looked at him with the same disbelief I had felt for Violet's name emblazoned on
a Spitfire. "There's plenty," I said. "She brought a whole torte."
"I'm not hungry, thanks. You eat it."
"Are you sure? One can't get this sort of thing these days."
"I'm certain," he said and turned back to the window.
I looked hesitantly at the slice of cake, guilty about my greed but hating to see it
go to waste and still hungry. At the least I should stay up and keep him company.
"Violet's the warden whose watch you took, the one who was late," I said. I sat
down on the floor, my back to the painted baseboard, and started to eat. "She's
full-time. We've got five full-timers. Violet and me and Renfrew — you haven't met
him yet, he was asleep. He's had rather a bad time. Can't sleep in the day — and
Morris and Twickenham. And then there's Petersby. He's part-time like you."
He didn't turn around while I was talking or say anything, only continued looking
out the window. A scattering of flares drifted down, lighting the room.
"They're a nice lot," I said, cutting a bite of cake with my fork. In the odd light
from the flares the jam filling looked black. "Swales can be rather a nuisance with his
teasing sometimes, and Twickenham will ask you all sorts of questions, but they're
good men on an incident."
He turned around. "Questions?"
"For the post newspaper. Notice sheet, really, information on new sorts of
bombs, ARP regulations, that sort of thing. All Twickenham's supposed to do is
type it and send it round to the other posts, but I think he's always fancied himself an
author, and now he's got his chance. He's named the notice sheet Twickenham's
Twitterings, and he adds all sorts of things — drawings, news, gossip, interviews."
While I had been talking, the drone of engines overhead had been growing
steadily louder. It passed, there was a sighing whoosh and then a whistle that turned
into a whine.
"Stairs," I said, dropping my plate. I grabbed his arm, and yanked him into the
shelter of the landing. We crouched against the blast, my hands over my head, but
nothing happened. The whine became a scream and then sounded suddenly further
off. I peeked round the reinforcing beam at the open window. Light flashed and then
the crump came, at least three sectors away. "Lees," I said, going over to the
window to see if I could tell exactly where it was. "High explosive bomb." Jack
focused the binoculars where I was pointing.
I went out to the landing, cupped my hands, and shouted down the stairs, "HE.
Lees." The planes were still too close to bother sitting down again. "Twickenham's
done interviews with all the wardens," I said, leaning against the wall. "He'll want to
know what you did before the war, why you became a warden, that sort of thing. He
wrote up a piece on Vi last week."
Jack had lowered the binoculars and was watching where I had pointed. The fires
didn't start right away with a high-explosive bomb. It took a bit for the ruptured gas
mains and scattered coal fires to catch. "What was she before the war?" he asked.
"Vi? A stenographer," I said. "And something of a wallflower, I should think. The
war's been rather a blessing for our Vi."
"A blessing," Jack said, looking out at the high explosive in Lees. From where I
was sitting, I couldn't see his face except in silhouette, and I couldn't tell whether he
disapproved of the word or was merely bemused by it.
"I didn't mean a blessing exactly. One can scarcely call something as dreadful as
this a blessing. But the war's given Vi a chance she wouldn't have had otherwise.
Morris says without it she'd have died an old maid, and now she's got all sorts of
beaux." A flare drifted down, white and then red. "Morris says the war's the best
thing that ever happened to her."
"Morris," he said, as if he didn't know which one that was.
"Sandy hair, toothbrush moustache," I said. "His son's a pilot."
"Doing his bit," he said, and I could see his face clearly in the reddish light, but I
still couldn't read his expression.
A stick of incendiaries came down over the river, glittering like sparklers, and fires
sprang up everywhere.
The next night there was a bad incident off Old Church Street, two HEs. Mrs
Lucy sent Jack and me over to see if we could help. It was completely overcast,
which was supposed to stop the Luftwaffe but obviously hadn't, and very dark. By
the time we reached King's Road I had completely lost my bearings.
I knew the incident had to be close, though, because I could smell it. It wasn't
truly a smell: it was a painful sharpness in the nose from the plaster dust and smoke
and whatever explosive the Germans put in their bombs. It always made Vi sneeze.
I tried to make out landmarks, but all I could see was the slightly darker outline of
a hill on my left. I thought blankly, We must be lost. There aren't any hills in Chelsea,
and then realized it must be the incident.
"The first thing we do is find the incident officer," I told Jack. I looked round for
the officer's blue light, but I couldn't see it. It must be behind the hill.
I scrabbled up it with Jack behind me, trying not to slip on the uncertain slope.
The light was on the far side of another, lower hill, a ghostly bluish blur off to the
left. "It's over there," I said. "We must report in. Nelson's likely to be the incident
officer, and he's a stickler for procedure."
I started down, skidding on the broken bricks and plaster. "Be careful," I called
back to Jack. "There are all sorts of jagged pieces of wood and glass."
"Jack," he said.
I turned around. He had stopped halfway down the hill and was looking up, as if
he had heard something. I glanced up, afraid the bombers were coming back, but
couldn't hear anything over the anti-aircraft guns. Jack stood motionless, his head
down now, looking at the rubble.
"What is it?" I said.
He didn't answer. He snatched his torch out of his pocket and swung it wildly
round.
"You can't do that!" I shouted. "There's a blackout on!"
He snapped it off. "Go and find something to dig with," he said and dropped to
his knees. "There's someone alive under here."
He wrenched the banister free and began stabbing into the rubble with its broken
end.
I looked stupidly at him. "How do you know?"
He jabbed viciously at the mess. "Get a pickaxe. This stuff's hard as rock." He
looked up at me impatiently. "Hurry!"
The incident officer was someone I didn't know. I was glad. Nelson would have
refused to give me a pickaxe without the necessary authorization and lectured me
instead on departmentalization of duties. This officer, who was younger than me and
broken out in spots under his powdering of brick dust, didn't have a pickaxe, but he
gave me two shovels without any argument.
The dust and smoke were clearing a bit by the time I started back across the
mounds, and a shower of flares drifted down over by the river, lighting everything in
a fuzzy, over-bright light like headlights in a fog. I could see Jack on his hands and
knees halfway down the mound, stabbing with the banister. He looked like he was
murdering someone with a knife, plunging it in again and again.
Another shower of flares came down, much closer. I ducked and hurried across
to Jack, offering him one of the shovels.
"That's no good," he said, waving it away.
"What's wrong? Can't you hear the voice any more?"
He went on jabbing with the banister. "What?" he said, and looked in the flare's
dazzling light like he had no idea what I was talking about.
"The voice you heard," I said. "Has it stopped calling?"
"It's this stuff," he said. "There's no way to get a shovel into it. Did you bring any
baskets?"
I hadn't, but further down the mound I had seen a large tin saucepan. I fetched it
for him and began digging. He was right, of course. I got one good shovelful and
then struck an end of a floor joist and bent the blade of the shovel. I tried to get it
under the joist so I could pry it upward, but it was wedged under a large section of
beam further on. I gave it up, broke off another of the banisters, and got down
beside Jack.
The beam was not the only thing holding the joist down. The rubble looked loose
— bricks and chunks of plaster and pieces of wood — but it was as solid as
cement. Swales, who showed up out of nowhere when we were 3 feet down, said,
"It's the clay. All London's built on it. Hard as statues." He had brought two buckets
with him and the news that Nelson had shown up and had had a fight with the spotty
officer over whose incident it was.
" 'It's my incident,' Nelson says, and gets out the map to show him how this side
of King's Road is in his district," Swales said gleefully, "and the incident officer
says, 'Your incident? Who wants the bloody thing, I say,' he says."
Even with Swales helping, the going was so slow whoever was under there would
probably have suffocated or bled to death before we could get to him. Jack didn't
stop at all, even when the bombs were directly overhead. He seemed to know
摘要：

JackConnieWillisThenightJackjoinedourpost,Viwaslate.SowastheLuftwaffe.Thesirensstillhadn'tgonebyeighto'clock."PerhapsourViolet'stiredoftheRAFandbegunontheaircraftspotters,"Morrissaid,"andthey'resotakenbyhercharmsthey'veforgottentowindthesirens.""You'dbestwatchoutthen,"Swalessaid,takingoffhistinwarde...

展开>> 收起<<
Connie Willis- Jack.pdf

共41页,预览9页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：41 页 大小：223.09KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-24

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 41
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注