V for Victory

Lissa Evans

V FOR VICTORY

Contents

About the Author

Lissa Evans has written six novels, including the bestselling Old Baggage, Crooked Heart (longlisted for the Baileys Prize) and Their Finest Hour and a Half, which was filmed as Their Finest. Two of her books for children, Small Change for Stuart and Wed Wabbit, were shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Also by Lissa Evans

NOVELS

Spencer’s List

Odd One Out

Their Finest Hour and a Half

(motion picture released as Their Finest)

Crooked Heart

Old Baggage

NOVELS FOR CHILDREN

Small Change for Stuart

Big Change for Stuart

Wed Wabbit

For my friends Georgia Garrett and Bill Scott-Kerr

Autumn

1944

Where T. Allerdyce, Textbooks & Stationery should have been, there was nothing but a flight of stairs, silhouetted against a white sky. The air was full of grit, the rubble seeded with ruined books, their pages snapping back and forth in the cold wind. Noel flipped open a cover with his foot, and saw an illustration of the human digestive system, its cross-sectioned owner breezily eating an apple, apparently unconcerned that his innards were exposed to the world.

The whole street had gone, a roped-off crater showing where the V-2 had actually landed, the shops and houses marked only by the odd truncated wall or empty door frame. The staircases alone had survived, some still with remnants of carpet, some spoked with broken bannisters. Noel was tempted to climb the nearest, and see the destruction from a height, but half the treads were missing.

The V-2 rockets had been dropping out of the sky for a couple of months now, though ‘dropping’ implied that you could see them descend, whereas they fell at such speed that no warnings were possible; a crack and a boom, and then death. ‘Like God clapping his hands,’ Vee had suggested, fancifully. Each one knocked the roofs off a quarter of a square mile of houses, and flattened those at the centre; ‘more like God stamping his foot,’ Noel had said.

They’d been lucky so far this year, at home in Hampstead; nothing but the occasional Heinkel unloading H.E.s, and a single doodlebug which had landed in a pond on the Heath and hurled a flood of green water over the bank and down the road, marbling the tarmac with waterweed and sending a dead duck surfing through the chemist’s door.

Noel let the book-cover fall. Last time he’d visited the shop, Mr Allerdyce had given him a cup of tea, and talked eloquently about his years as a teacher in Tonga. ‘The young ladies there – how can I describe them? They have flesh as firm as a Michelangelo marble, but when they dance, every part of them vibrates …’ Noel had thought about this image quite a few times over the succeeding months and had rather been looking forward to continuing the conversation.