fire down that shaft, and then saw it wasn't a pump. It was, in fact, an automobile jack, and the man with the blue armband reached between us for it, lowered it down the hole, and scrambled in after it.
The rest of the rescue squad stood looking down into the blackness as if they could actually see something. After a while they began handing empty buckets down into the hole and pulling them out heaped full of broken bricks and pieces of splintered wood. None of them took any notice of us, even when Jack held out his hands to take one of the buckets.
'We're from Chelsea,' I shouted to the foreman over the din of the planes and bombs. 'What can we do to help?'
They went on bucket-brigading. A china teapot came up on the top of one load, covered with dust but not even chipped.
I tried again. 'Who is it down there?'
'Two of 'em,' the man nearest me said. He plucked the teapot off the heap and handed it to a man wearing a balaclava under his helmet. 'Man and a woman.'
'We're from Chelsea,' I shouted over a burst of anti-aircraft fire. 'What do you want us to do?'
He took the teapot away from the man with the balaclava and handed it to me. 'Take this down to the pavement with the other valuables.'
It took me a long while to get down the slope, holding the teapot in one hand and the lid on with the other and trying to keep my footing among the broken bricks, and even longer to find any pavement. The land-mine had heaved most of it up, and the street with it.
I finally found it, a square of unbroken pavement in front of a blown-out bakery, with the 'valuables' neatly lined up against it: a radio, a boot, two serving spoons like the one Colonel Godalming had threatened me with, a lady's beaded evening bag. A rescue worker was standing guard next to them.
'Halt!' he said, stepping in front of them as I came up, holding a pocket torch or a gun. 'No one's allowed inside the incident perimeter.'
'I'm ARP,' I said hastily. 'Jack Harker. Chelsea.' I held up the teapot. 'They sent me down with this.'
It was a torch. He flicked it on and off, an eyeblink. 'Sorry,' he said. 'We've had a good deal of looting recently.' He took the teapot and placed it at the end of the line next to the evening bag. 'Caught a man last week going through the pockets of the bodies laid out in the street waiting for the mortuary van. Terrible how some people will take advantage of something like this.'
I went back up to where the rescue workers were digging. Jack was at the mouth of the shaft, hauling buckets up and handing them back. I got in line behind him.
'Have they found them yet?' I asked him as soon as there was a lull in the bombing.
'Quiet!' a voice shouted from the hole, and the man in the balaclava repeated, 'Quiet, everyone! We must have absolute quiet!'
Everyone stopped working and listened. Jack had handed me a bucket full of bricks, and the handle cut into my hands. For a second there was absolute silence, and then the drone of a plane and the distant swish and crump of an HE.
'Don't worry,' the voice from the hole shouted, 'we're nearly there.' The buckets began coming up out of the hole again.
I hadn't heard anything, but apparently down in the shaft they had, a voice or the sound of tapping, and I felt relieved, both that one of them at least was still alive, and that the diggers were on course. I'd been on an incident in October where we'd had to stop halfway down and sink a new shaft because the rubble kept distorting and displacing the sound. Even if the shaft was directly above the victim, it tended to go crooked in working past obstacles, and the only way to keep it straight was with frequent soundings. I thought of Jack digging for Colonel Godalming with the banister. He hadn't taken any soundings at all. He had seemed to know exactly where he was going.
The men in the shaft called for the jack again, and Jack and I lowered it down to them. As the man below it reached up to take it, Jack stopped. He raised his head, as if he were listening.
'What is it?' I said. I couldn't hear anything but the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park. 'Did you hear someone calling?'
'Where's the bloody jack?' the foreman shouted.
'It's too late,' Jack said to me. 'They're dead.'
'Come along, get it down here,' the foreman shouted. 'We haven't got all day.'
He handed the jack down.
'Quiet,' the foreman shouted, and above us, like a ghostly echo, we could hear the balaclava call, 'Quiet, please, everyone.'
A church clock began to chime and I could hear the balaclava say irritatedly, 'We must have absolute quiet.'
The clock chimed four and stopped, and there was a skittering sound of dirt falling on metal. Then silence, and a faint sound.
'Quiet!' the foreman called again, and there was another silence, and the sound again. A whimper. Or a moan. 'We hear you,' he shouted. 'Don't be afraid.'
'One of them's still alive,' I said.
Jack didn't say anything.
'We just heard them,' I said angrily.
Jack shook his head.
