The Postmistress Read Online Free PDF

heaviest ones roaring like an express train through a tunnel. Worst of all were the parachute bombs that floated gently, silently down to kill. Frankie turned off Oxford Circus onto the Wilmot Road and began the walk home. Two fire trucks streamed through the emptied streets, racing with their shrouded headlights like blind sirens to the fires. There was heaven, there were the shelters underground, and then here on the street—between the gunners and the gunned—was Middle Earth. In Middle Earth at night, everything was turned upside down in a brilliant kaleidoscope of dizzy bright death set against the black silhouette of London.
    A month ago, before the bombs had begun in earnest, Murrow had pulled off a broadcast from five points around London, bringing home the sounds of the bombarded city at night. Frankie had stood with him, watching him poised at the mouth of the bomb shelter down in the crypt of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, moving the microphone cable out of the way of the Londoners as they descended, a courteous escort underground. There had been no way to know whether the Germans would bomb that night, but Murrow concentrated on the steady beat of the people walking in the dark, walking home or down into the shelter, their footsteps sounding like ghosts shod with steel shoes, he said. And when the air raid started, the long swooning climb up the octave in the sky, Murrow’s tense, excited voice narrated the incoming drone of the Luftwaffe, here they come, you can hear them now, and Frankie had felt untouchable then, immortal, holding the microphone up to the night. Here and now. Do you hear this? She wanted to add her voice to Murrow’s, wanted her voice to find the ear of the listeners on the other end of the cable. In that moment, through the air, the Germans plowed straight into an American living room and Frankie was holding the curtain back so they could hear it better, and it was a dare. I dare you, she thought now, to look away.

2.
    A ND WHERE WERE WE LOOKING? Over there. As September passed into October and the bombs worsened, the children of London had been put on buses and trains, and thousands more on ships across the Atlantic. The songs that broke your heart warbled on the airwaves before and after the nighttime news.
    My sister and I recall the day
We left our friends and we sailed away
And we think of the ones who had to stay—
But we don’t talk about that
    We listened to Murrow and Shirer and Sevareid. This is London, Murrow paused before launching into last night’s broadcast. “ Tonight, having been thrown against the wall by blasts—which feels like nothing so much as being hit with a feather-covered board—and having lost our third office—which looks like some crazy giant had been operating an eggbeater in its interior—I naturally conclude that the bombing has been heavy.”
    Frankie smiled remembering his grin, the weird exhilaration of danger seen and passed by. Not all of them had Murrow’s calm. Though he had covered the fall of France and was no stranger to the war, after three months of the Blitz, Eric Sevareid was heading back to the States. Trying to walk to Broadcasting House to make the night’s broadcast, he’d whispered, “I can’t stand it—when the shrieking starts no matter how sternly I lecture myself, I do the last fifty yards at a dead run.”
    “Come on then.” A man ahead of Frankie on the street leaned against the high brick wall behind him, pulling his girl into his lips.
    Easy and laughing, the girl wrapped her arms around the man’s neck and pressed herself on him as though they had all the time in the world and were completely alone , Frankie began to write in her head. The light was going in the autumn afternoon and the twilight sounds, the endings, lowered all around her in the dark and chill. Across the street in the tiny public garden, a child roared in outrage, “That’s mine, Charlie!” It is regular life with the lid pried off —she