Elsie ran in.  She placed herself opposite Nellie at the kitchen table.  ‘Buggering bastards,’ were her first words.

            ‘You what?’

            ‘They’ve done that place with the daft name – Bootle, is it?  It’s not there any more.  And all the shops in Liverpool and libraries and museums and art galleries and docks and-‘

            ‘Slow down,’ was Nellie’s order.

            ‘Toffee factory, Bootle Town Hall, Scott’s Bakeries and twelve WVS dead with a direct hit.  Oh, and some hospital called Mill Road Infirmary-‘

            ‘Elsie!’

            ‘What?’

            ‘You’ll be having a stroke.  Begin at the start.’

            Elsie inhaled deeply.  ‘Right.  You know her with the funny legs lower down?’

            ‘You mean her ankles?’

            Elsie groaned.  ‘Lower down the road.  You know who I mean.  Her pins don’t seem to like each other; they stay apart.  The lads could use her as goalposts at a football match.  Frizzy hair, blue mac with a hood, had to get her wedding ring cut off with roomy-tied arthuritis.’

            ‘She’s Alice.’

            ‘Right.  Well her husband’s high up in the Home Guard, and he came home skriking his eyes out.  That big bang were a ship blowing up.  It took Hodgkinson’s Dock with it.’

            ‘Huskisson.’

            ‘Aye well, I were near enough.  He’s come back with all these tales.  There’s nowt left, Nellie.  We have to get Eileen and the babies home.  Telephone them and . . . oh yes, I forgot.  No phones.’

            Nellie stood up.  ‘It’s too far for either of us to walk, and I can’t get hold of Keith to ask him to come and get us.  No.  We just have to wait.’

            ‘She’s got bunions and all.’

            ‘Who has?’

            ‘Her with the legs lower down . . .’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She walked home.  Soon, all windows would be blacked out, all doors closed.  This wasn’t living; it was an existence, no more.  Many children had never seen a banana, an orange, a pineapple.  Food was so scarce that hunger was a constant companion.  Hemlines had ascended to knee level in a bid save cloth.  The cotton mills were concentrating on calico for shrouds, a thought that made Gloria shiver. 

She wasn’t to know yet that this was the day on which all levels of The Divine Comedy would be visible.  The descending circles of Dante’s Inferno would be displayed, all the way from its seething rim down into the deepest realms of torment.  But Wabbit would have a hutch, a surrogate mother, some greens, and a carrot.  For now, that was Gloria’s sole concern.