Whatever it was Jack had used to find Colonel Godalming, it didn’t work on incendiaries. He searched as haphazardly for them as the rest of us, Vi, who had been on spotter duty, shouting directions: “No, further down Fulham Road. In the grocer’s.”

She had apparently been daydreaming about her pilots, instead of spotting. The incendiary was not in the grocer’s but in the butcher’s three doors down, and by the time Jack and I got to it, the meat locker was on fire. It wasn’t hard to put out, there were no furniture or curtains to catch and the cold kept the wooden shelves from catching, but the butcher was extravagantly grateful. He insisted on wrapping up five pounds of lamb chops in white paper and thrusting them into Jack’s arms.

“Did you really have to be at your day job so early or were you only trying to escape the colonel?” I asked Jack on the way back to the post.

“Was he that bad?” he said, handing me the parcel of lamb chops.

“He nearly took my head off when I said you’d heard him shouting. Said he didn’t call for help. Said he was digging himself out.” The white butcher’s paper was so bright the Luftwaffe would think it was a searchlight. I tucked the parcel inside my overalls so it wouldn’t show. “What sort of work is it, your day job?” I asked.

“War work,” he said.

“Did they transfer you? Is that why you came to London?”

“No,” he said. “I wanted to come.” We turned into Mrs Lucy’s street. “Why did you join the ARP?”

“I’m waiting to be called up,” I said, “so no one would hire me.”

“And you wanted to do your bit.”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I could see his face.

“What about Mrs Lucy? Why did she become a warden?”

“Mrs Lucy?” I said blankly. The question had never even occurred to me. She was the best warden in London. It was her natural calling, and I’d thought of her as always having been one. “I’ve no idea,” I said. “It’s her house, she’s a widow. Perhaps the Civil Defence commandeered it, and she had to become one. It’s the tallest in the street.” I treid to remember what Twickenham had written about her in his interview. “Before the war she was something to do with a church.”