THE H-BOMB GIRL Read online

  Table of Contents

  Note on Currency

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterword

  THE H-BOMB GIRL

  Stephen Baxter

  Note on Currency

  Modern “decimalised” money, pounds and pence, wasn’t introduced in Britain until 1971. In 1962 the money system was pounds, shillings and pence. You got 240 “old” pennies to the pound, so an old penny, a “copper,” was worth a bit less than half a new penny. You had 12 pennies to the “shilling,” called a “bob,” worth 5p in new money. There were 20 shillings to the pound.

  In your change you had halfpenny coins and farthings (a quarter of a penny), threepenny bits and sixpences (“tanners”) and half-crowns (two shillings and sixpence, or 12.5p).

  A pound was a pound, but it would buy you a lot more in those days than it would now. The average wage was around twelve pounds a week. A Saturday job might earn you thirty bob (£1.50). A pound would buy you a good night out.

  Chapter 1

  Laura’s first day in a new school, in a new city, at the wrong end of the country, was always going to be tough.

  Even though she didn’t know, yet, that the world was due to end in two weeks.

  And a bad day got off to a worse start. She wrote in her diary:

  Friday 12th October 1962, 8 a.m.

  Got out of bed.

  Found an eight-foot-tall American soldier on the landing.

  She had been woken up by her father calling from downstairs. “Laura. Get a move on. We leave for school in fifteen minutes.”

  Dad was an officer in the Royal Air Force, and when he said fifteen minutes he meant it. She got up, pulled on her shapeless old dressing gown, a hand-me-down from Mum, and opened her bedroom door.

  And there was the stranger staring back at her.

  He was a pillar of muscle in brown slacks and a crisp white shirt. He was in his socks, no shoes. He might have been forty, about Dad’s age. He was standing outside the bathroom’s closed door with a towel around his neck, so he couldn’t have washed yet, but somehow he smelled of aftershave.

  “Well, hi, little missy.”

  Laura was horribly aware of every stray strand of hair that hadn’t been brushed yet, and of the crust of sleep-time dribble she probably had around her mouth. “Who the hell are you?”

  The American gave her a mock-salute. “Giuseppe Mortinelli the Third, Lieutenant-Colonel, US Air Force, at your service, missy. Just call me ‘Mort’, like everybody else.”

  Little missy. She’d never met an American in the flesh before. He sounded a bit like the colonel from Sergeant Bilko on the telly. His head was square, his jaw a slab of bone, his hair shaved to a frosty stubble. His nose was so flat it looked as if his face had been worn away with sandpaper. And his eyes were so deep she could hardly see them.

  “Mort,” she said reluctantly. “I’m sorry I said ‘hell.’”

  He just laughed. “I hear worse in the barracks.” There was something cold about him.

  She turned to go back into her room. “I’ll let you go first, once Mum’s out.”

  “Oh, no. I heard your fifteen-minute warning. I’ll go get breakfast.” He headed for the stairs. “You know, at home we have two bathrooms. I kind of thought you English folks wouldn’t have inside bathrooms at all…”

  Mum came bustling out of the bathroom, a towel around her wet hair. Freshly washed, free of make-up, her oval face looked younger than her years. Laura looked a bit like her, but Mum had always been prettier than Laura would ever be.

  Now, though, Mum’s pale-blue eyes were sharp with fury. “Mort is a colleague of your father’s, and an old friend of mine from the war. Don’t you ever speak to him like that again.”

  Laura knew the tone. She was supposed to be a good little piece of furniture, just fitting her own life around whatever scheme her parents came up with next, like the Separation, and selling their home in High Wycombe, and coming to Liverpool, and now letting some American loser stay in this rubbish little house.

  “So can I use the bathroom now? Or have you got another lodger in there?”

  Mum got angrier.

  Dad called up the stairs, his voice flat, controlling. “Twelve minutes.”

  Laura pushed into the bathroom. It was steamed up, and all the towels were wet.

  Her new school uniform was black tights and skirt, a blouse that was too big, and a blazer too small. The blazer was a hideous purple colour.

  On the way out of the house she glimpsed the American, Mort, in the parlour. The little room was full of bedding. The house only had two bedrooms, one for Mum and one for Laura. Presumably both Mort and Dad had slept on the chairs down here.

  Mort was sitting in front of the telly, chewing his way through a mound of toast. The telly was a polished wooden box with a small screen of thick glass. It had come with the house, which had belonged to an old lady who had died. Mort was turning the channel-selector knob, a heavy dial that turned with a clunk. All he got was test cards. Neither of the two channels, BBC or ITV, put out programmes at this time of the day. You would think he’d know that, Laura thought. But maybe they did things differently in America.

  Mort didn’t look round as Laura left.

  Outside, the morning was sunny, warm for October. Dad was standing beside the car, his new Ford Cortina. Mum was already in the passenger seat.

  Dad usually kept his cars spotless, but the Cortina was still grimy from the long, unhappy journey from High Wycombe they had made on Wednesday. He was supposed to drive back at the weekend, and today was Friday. Maybe he didn’t think it was worth cleaning it in the meantime.

  Holding her new satchel, Laura hung back.

  “Get in the car, Laura.”

  “Why don’t I get the bus? I know the way.” Dad had driven her to the school yesterday, to show her around. She had met the headmistress, and her form teacher, a cold woman called Miss Wells. The school was only a mile away. It was early. She could even walk.

  But Dad said, “Get in the car.” Even in shirt and slacks, what he called “civvies,” Dad was just as military as Mort, just as upright, his hair cropped just as close, although he was shorter, thinner, more refined looking.

  Laura felt like a fight. “If you drive me in they’ll all think I’m some stupid kid.”

  “Get in the car.”

  “I’m fourteen years old.”

  “I know how old you are. Get in the car.”

  Mum looked around. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry, you can’t talk to her as if she’s one of the soldiers you order about.”

  “Airmen,” he said without emotion. “I order airmen about, not soldiers. Laura, get in the car.”

  Laura knew he could keep up this repeating game all day. She got in the car.

  Dad slammed the door behind her and got in the driver’s seat. But he didn’t start the car. “Laura. Are you wearing your Key?”

  “What Key?”

  “You know what Key. Don’t be childish. Are
you wearing it?”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  Mum shouted, “Oogh! Will you two stop this? You’ll drive me into a home, I swear you will.”

  “Laura, are you wearing your Key?”

  “Yes!” Dad had given it to her. The Key was a heavy piece of cold metal, like a door key but with a more complicated shape, that Laura was supposed to wear around her neck on a chain. She pulled it out of her blouse and held it up. “See? Are you happy?”

  Dad didn’t rise to that. “Just wear it. And don’t tell anybody about it at school.”

  “Why not? What if I do?”

  But Dad just started the car and pulled away.

  Dad turned the wireless on. A news programme on the BBC Home Service droned on about the Russians and the Americans, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, and tension in a place called Cuba.

  They were in a suburb of Liverpool called West Derby, a few miles east of the city centre. Laura’s school was nearby. But Dad surprised her by driving south a little way, to the main West Derby Road, and then west towards the city. She didn’t know why Dad was coming this way, and she knew better than to ask.

  The car quickly filled up with the sweet, stale smell of their cigarettes. Laura looked at the back of their heads, Dad’s stiff shaven neck, Mum’s soft, slightly old-fashioned hairstyle with the loose bob at the back. She could almost imagine she was little again, that they were driving off into the Chilterns on a family day out.

  But those days were gone for good. This was the Separation, the fag-end of her parents’ marriage. Sitting here all she saw was their differences. They didn’t even speak the same way, Mum with her soft, slightly Liverpudlian brogue, Dad with his clipped RAF lingo.

  West Derby was quite leafy, with some good houses, a lot of them bigger and smarter than Laura’s new home. But as they headed towards the city centre the houses got smaller, packed into rows of grimy terraces, where washing flapped in back gardens and smoke curled up from chimneys. Everything looked mucky to Laura, black from soot. And here and there she saw gaps, like missing teeth, holes made by Hitler’s bombs and not yet fixed.

  Liverpool was Mum’s home town. That was why she had brought Laura back here. Now she pointed out a few sights. “I used to go swimming in those baths. I used to play in that park. Before the war you could buy an ice cream for a penny.” But neither Dad nor Laura responded, and she soon shut up.

  They drove around the centre of the city. There was a lot of traffic, Morris Minors and Austin Sevens, a few Minis. They passed some big stores, their windows stocked with washing machines and posh frocks. Right at the centre, near the main train station at Lime Street, they drove past some grand old buildings like Greek temples, jet-black from the soot. Laura stared. High Wycombe was only a small town in Buckinghamshire, with nothing on this scale.

  They got through the centre in minutes, and, still heading west, drove through an area crowded with grubby warehouses. Soon they were going to reach the river, Laura realised.

  She spoke up at last. “Dad, where are we going? This isn’t the way to school.”

  “We’ve got a bit of time. I wanted to show you Liverpool.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is where you’re going to live now.” He drove the car steadily, not looking around. “I spoke to your headmistress yesterday, and that form teacher.”

  “Miss Wells.”

  “She said you looked sullen. That very word.”

  “I only just met her!”

  Mum said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Harry.”

  “The only jobs here are on the docks, and they’re running down.” He slowed and pointed at a Woolworths. “If you don’t buckle down p.d.q. you’ll end up working in Woolies for a few quid a week, and don’t expect me to bail you out.”

  Mum said bitterly, “Oh, listen to yourself, Harry. ‘Bail you out’? ‘P.d.q.’? And I’m a Liverpool girl. You’re saying you don’t want her to end up like me, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged, the smallest movement. “Not you. Some of your family, maybe. Doreen. Marjorie.”

  “I’m not going to listen to you any more.”

  “Eileen, with her four kids by three fathers, and still living over the brush.”

  “You never did like my sisters.”

  They bickered on. Laura stared out of the window.

  As they neared the river the roads funnelled towards a place called the Pier Head. Big blocky buildings lined the waterfront. On one of them, two exotic metal birds perched on twin clock towers. That was the Liver Building.

  Beyond the shoulders of the buildings Laura glimpsed the water, and huge ships passing like clouds. She knew that Liverpool, on the west coast of England facing America and Ireland, had once been a great port of the British Empire. Its docks were seven miles long. And millions of people had drained through here, heading for new lives overseas.

  The Pier Head itself, where all the buses started and finished, was a major meeting place for Liverpudlians. It was just a big, empty, windy square. But people swarmed here, white, black, Asian, Chinese, all busy, all on their way somewhere. An awful lot of them were young.

  All the way up the motorway Laura had been determined to hate Liverpool. But, surrounded by all this bustle, she felt excited. There was a jammed-together, mixed-up energy here that you would never find in a little town like Wycombe.

  At last Dad turned the car back the way they had come, and drove her out to school.

  Once there he got out of the car and hugged her. It was an old wartime pilot’s habit, he’d once told her. You said goodbye every morning, because you never knew if you would come home that night.

  They left her at the gate and drove off.

  Chapter 2

  Saint Agnes’s Roman Catholic Secondary Modern School was a blocky brick pile, murky and old. It looked more like a hospital than a school. Laura heard the kids calling the school “Aggie’s.”

  It was a quarter to nine. All the kids were outside. The older kids hung around by the gate or on the pavement. The younger ones messed about in the playground.

  There were workmen here, unloading vans and carrying ladders and planks and boxes of tools into the school. Laura’s school in Wycombe was always being rebuilt too, classrooms shuffled around or extensions added, to cope with an ever larger population of kids. The workmen eyed up the older girls, and some of the girls played up to their whistles.

  Laura waited by the gate. Nobody spoke to her. Anyhow their accents were so thick she couldn’t understand a word anybody said.

  Miss Wells, Laura’s form teacher, came walking through the crowd. She was carrying a handbell. The kids got out of her way. Evidently she wasn’t somebody you messed with.

  Miss Wells peered closely at Laura. “Miss Mann. Welcome to Saint Agnes’s.”

  Miss Wells was about Laura’s height, and she was bundled up in a thick overcoat and scarf, even though the morning was warm. She might have been sixty. Her steel-grey hair was pulled back from her forehead, and her face was a leathery mask of wrinkles. But it was an oval face, her mouth small, her nose regular, her blue eyes bright blue.

  Laura suddenly saw that this teacher, who Laura had only met briefly yesterday, looked like her own mother, or one of her aunties. That threw Laura, and she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  “No, Miss.”

  “ ‘No, Miss.’” Miss Wells laughed. She stared at Laura, as if deeply interested in her. “A big day for you to write about in your diary, Miss Mann.”

  Laura frowned. “How do you know about my diary?”

  “Oh, just a hunch. Lots of people keep diaries.” Miss Wells leaned closer. “Here’s a date to make a note of. Saturday the 27th of October.”

  That was two weeks tomorrow. “Why? What’s happening then?”

  Miss Wells winked. “Fireworks. One day they’ll call it ‘Black Saturday.’ You’ll see. Nice talking to you, Miss Mann. Time to round up the flock.
”

  She strode off through the playground, ringing her bell.

  Something was very odd about that woman, Laura thought. But she couldn’t work out what.

  The kids funnelled into the school like sheep to be sheared.

  The classrooms were grim boxes with floors of worn wooden blocks. The radiators were lumps of iron. The whole place was gloomy and cold, with high, grimy windows.

  There was an assembly, eight hundred pupils singing a hymn in a hall like a cave, with gym equipment folded against the walls. The school seemed packed to the brim with kids.

  Then came registration, with Miss Wells in her form room. Thirty-five fourteen-year-olds crammed into desks that were too small and covered with ink stains. There was one black kid in the class, a skinny boy called Joel. He sat down at the front. As the others filed in some of them made soft jungle noises at Joel, but he ignored them.

  Miss Wells stuck Laura in an empty desk right at the back, next to an older-looking girl called Bernadette. Laura heard whispering, a bit of scandal. The desk was empty because the previous girl was “in the pudding club.”

  Bernadette didn’t say a word to Laura. She didn’t even look at her.

  Miss Wells handed Laura a timetable. There was going to be a lot of religion, a couple of periods a day, and Mass on Wednesday morning. Laura had been brought up in the Church by Mum, but her old school in Wycombe hadn’t been Catholic. Well, she would be getting to know God a lot better.

  The first lesson was French. The teacher was a small elderly lady they had to call Madame Minet. Surrounded by a cloud of perfume and make-up, “Minnie Mouse” seemed kind, and told Laura not to worry.

  Laura had been doing all right at school. But her old school in Wycombe had been smaller than Aggie’s, and a lot less like a huge zoo. And Laura was stuck right at the back, where everybody smelled of cigarette smoke.

  The back-of-the-class crew weren’t interested in French or maths. They were interested in Laura. In the second lesson, the maths teacher picked her out for an answer: “Forty-two.” Bernadette and the others took the mick: “Oh, foor-ty-tooo, ee-oh, ain’t I prop-ah, Lai-dee Muck of Muck Hall. Who was at your last school, Prince Charles?”