'What post are you?' he barked.
'Forty-eight. Chelsea,' I said and wondered if he expected me to salute.
'Mrs Lucy is your warden,' he said disgustedly, and I expected his next question to be what I was doing at Civil Defence, but instead he said, 'I heard about Colonel God-aiming. Your post has been having good luck locating casualties these last few raids.'
'Yes, sir,' was obviously the wrong answer, and 'no, sir,' would make him suspicious. 'We found three people in an Anderson last night,' I said. 'One of the children had the wits to bang on the roof with a pair of pliers.'
'I've heard that the person finding them is a new man, Settle.' He sounded friendly, almost jovial. Like Hitler at Munich.
'Settle?' I said blankly. 'Mrs Lucy was the one who found the Anderson.'
Morris's son Quincy's surprise was the Victoria Cross. 'A medal,' he said over and over. 'Who'd have thought it, my Quincy with a medal? Fifteen planes he shot down.'
It had been presented at a special ceremony at Quincy's commanding officer's headquarters, and the Duchess of York herself had been there. Morris had pinned the medal on himself.
'I wore my suit,' he told us for the hundredth time. 'In case he was in trouble I wanted to make a good impression, and a good thing, too. What would the Duchess of York have thought if I'd gone looking like this?'
He looked pretty bad. We all did. We'd had two breadbaskets of incendiaries, one right after the other, and Vi had been on watch. We had had to save the butcher's again, and a baker's two blocks further down, and a thirteenth-century crucifix.
'I told him it went through the altar roof,' Vi had said disgustedly when she and I finally got it out. 'Your friend Jack couldn't find an incendiary if it fell on him.'
'You told Jack the incendiary came down on the church?' I said, looking up at the carved wooden figure. The bottom of the cross was blackened, and Christ's nailed feet, as if he had been burned at the stake instead of crucified.
'Yes,' she said. 'I even told him it was the altar.' She looked back up the nave. 'And he could have seen it as soon as he came into the church.'
'What did he say? That it wasn't there?'
Vi was looking speculatively up at the roof. 'It could have been caught in the rafters and come down after. It hardly matters, does it? We put it out. Come on, let's get back to the post,' she said, shivering. 'I'm freezing.'
I was freezing, too. We were both sopping wet. The AFS had stormed up after we had the fire under control and sprayed everything in sight with icy water.
'Pinned it on myself, I did,' Morris said. 'The Duchess of York kissed him on both cheeks and said he was the pride of England.' He had brought a bottle of wine to celebrate the cross. He got Renfrew up and brought him to the table, draped in his blankets, and ordered Twickenham to put his typewriter away. Petersby brought in extra chairs, and Mrs Lucy went upstairs to get her crystal.
'Only eight, I'm afraid,' she said, coming down with the stemmed goblets in her blackened hands. 'The Germans have broken the rest. Who's willing to make do with the tooth glass?'
'I don't care for any, thank you,' Jack said. 'I don't drink.'
'What's that?' Morris said jovially. He had taken off his tin helmet, and below the white line it left he looked like he was wearing blackface in a music-hall show. 'You've got to toast my boy at least. Just imagine. My Quincy with a medal.'
Mrs Lucy rinsed out the porcelain tooth glass and handed it to Vi, who was pouring out the wine. They passed the goblets round. Jack took the tooth glass.
'To my son Quincy, the best pilot in the RAF!' Morris said, raising his goblet.
'May he shoot down the entire Luftwaffe,' Swales shouted, 'and put an end to this bloody war!'
'So a man can get a decent night's sleep!' Renfrew said, and everyone laughed.
We drank. Jack raised his glass with the others but when Vi took the bottle round again, he put his hand over the mouth of it.
'Just think of it,' Morris said. 'My son Quincy with a medal. He had his troubles in school, in with a bad lot, problems with the police. I worried about him, I did, wondered what he'd come to, and then this war comes along and here he is a hero.'
'To heroes!' Petersby said.
We drank again, and Vi dribbled out the last of the wine into Morris's glass. 'That's the lot, I'm afraid.' She brightened. 'I've a bottle of cherry cordial Charlie gave me.'
Mrs Lucy made a face. 'Just a minute,' she said, disappeared into the pantry, and came back with two cobwebbed bottles of port, which she poured out generously and a little sloppily.
'The presence of intoxicating beverages on post is strictly forbidden,' she said. 'A fine of five shillings will be imposed for a first offence, one pound for subsequent offences.' She took out a pound note and laid it on the table. 'I wonder what Nelson was before the war?'
'A monster,' Vi said.
I looked across at Jack. He still had his hand over his glass.
'A headmaster,' Swales said. 'No, I've got it. An Inland Revenue collector!'
Everyone laughed.
'I was a horrid person before the war,' Mrs Lucy said.
