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 exactly where he was going, though none of us heard anything in those brief intervals of silence and Jack seemed scarcely to listen.

The banister he was using broke off in the iron-hard clay, and he took mine and kept digging. A broken clock came up, and an egg cup. Morris arrived. He had been evacuating people from two streets over where a bomb had buried itself in the middle of the street without exploding. Swales told him the story of Nelson and the spotty young officer and then went off to see what he could find out about the inhabitants of the house.

Jack came up out of the hole. “I need braces,” he said. “The sides are collapsing.”

I found some unbroken bed slats at the base of the mound. One of the slats was too long for the shaft. Jack sawed it halfway through and then broke it off.

Swales came back. “Nobody in the house,” he shouted down the hole. “The Colonel and Mrs Godalming went to Surrey this morning.” The all-clear sounded, drowning out his words.