It paid off immediately. The boat was full, but not to military personnel. He produced the travel voucher they had given him in Berlin. The booking clerk hardly looked at it, took in the major’s uniform, the ribbon for the Military Cross and the clergyman’s dog collar and booked him on board immediately.
It was the same at Stranraer where, in spite of the incredible number of people being carried by the train, he was allocated a seat in a first-class carriage.
171
Stranraer to Glasgow, Glasgow down to Birmingham and then to London arriving at King’s Cross at three o’clock the following morning. When he walked from the train, one face amongst the crowd, the first thing he heard was an air-raid siren.
The beginning of 1944 became known to Londoners as the Little Blitz as the Luftwaffe, the performance of its planes greatly improved, turned attention to night raids on London again. The siren Devlin heard heralded the approach of JUS 8 pathfinders from Chartres in France. The heavy bombers came later but by then he was, like thousands of others, far below ground, sitting out a hard night in the comparative safety of a London tube station.
Mary Ryan was a girl that people remarked on, not because she was particularly beautiful, but because there was a strange, almost ethereal look to her. The truth was her health had never been good and the pressures of wartime didn’t help. Her face was always pale, with dark smudges beneath her eyes, and she had a heavy limp which had been a fact of life for her since birth. She was only nineteen and looked old beyond her years.
Her father, an IRA activist, had died of a heart attack in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin just before the
172 war, her mother of cancer in 1940 leaving her with only one relative, her uncle Michael, her father’s younger brother who had lived in London for years, on his own since the death of his wife in 1938. She had moved from Dublin to London and now kept house for him and worked as an assistant in a large grocery store in Wapping High Street.
No more though for when she reported for work at eight o’clock that morning, the shop and a sizeable section of the street was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble. She stayed, watching the ambulances, the firemen dousing things down, the men of the heavy rescue unit sifting through the foundations for those who might still be alive.
After doing what she could to help, she turned and walked away, a strange figure in her black beret and the old raincoat, limping rapidly along the pavement. She stopped at a back-street shop, purchased milk and a loaf of bread, some cigarettes for her uncle, then went out again. It started to rain as she turned into Cable Wharf.
There had originally been twenty houses backing on to the river. Fifteen had been demolished by a bomb during the Blitz. Four more were boarded up. She and her uncle lived in the end one. The kitchen door was at the side and reached by an iron terrace, the waters of the Thames below. She paused at the rail, looking down towards Tower Bridge and the Tower of London in the near distance. She loved the river, never tired of it. The large ships from the London docks passing to and fro, the constant barge traffic. There was a wooden stairway at the end of the terrace dropping down to a small private jetty. Her uncle kept two boats moored there. A rowing skiff and a larger craft, a small motor boat with a cabin. As she looked over she saw a man smoking a cigarette and sheltering from the rain. He wore a black hat and raincoat and a suitcase was on the jetty beside him.
‘Who are you?’ she called sharply. ‘It’s private property down there.’
‘Good day to you, a colleen,’ he called cheerfully, lifted the case and came up the stairs.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
Devlin smiled. ‘It’s Michael Ryan I’m after. Would you be knowing him? I tried the door, but there was no answer.’