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mouthful off the spoon. ‘But it tastes nice.’
    ‘Good,’ the girl said. ‘Leave your tray outside the room when you’ve finished and I’ll come back and pick it up. And I hope your mouth feels better tomorrow.’
    ‘My mouth will feel better than Mr Henderson’s head, I bet,’ Marc said, and the girl laughed as she closed the door.
    The soup was tasty and as Marc sat on the lower bunk he broke off tiny pieces of bread and cheese, chewing them slowly and avoiding the front of his mouth.
    He’d been suffering with the fragment of broken tooth for four months and it was a relief to have the painful operation to remove it behind him. The combination of the warm room and piping soup gave him some comfort and he made a long warbling yawn before raising the bowl and extending his tongue to lick it clean.
    As Marc did this he heard a roar of, ‘Call it in,’ coming from the rooftop lookout post across the square. Marc flicked off the light and rushed towards the window. He couldn’t see anything, but there were aircraft near enough to cause gentle vibrations in the glass.
    Moments later came a thud, louder and sharper than any he’d heard before. The floor trembled, the wooden bunks flexed and the copper pipe that ran up behind the sink shuddered. Down in the square a warden began turning a handle, working a hand-cranked air-raid siren into a wavering drone.
    Out in the hallway guests emerged from their rooms and began making their way downstairs while the doorman shouted up from the ground floor. ‘Make for the shelter,’ he ordered, as he rang a large hand bell.
    Marc hurriedly pulled on his trousers. He’d taken his vest, shirt and jumper off in one go and after untangling the arms managed to pull them back on in the same fashion. As Marc’s head popped through the neck hole of his pullover the building shook from two explosions. The third explosion was so loud that he feared the next bomb would come crashing through the roof over his head.
    This explosion never came, but the lights flickered on and off before going out for good. Marc found his battered pigskin bag in the darkness, before heading into a blackened hallway where he walked straight into the path of the half-deaf army officer who’d berated him over the towel.
    ‘Careful, son,’ he said, his voice much warmer than before. ‘Why are you still up here? You’d better get down to the shelter.’
    ‘Had to get dressed,’ Marc explained, as he felt his way along the dark corridor towards the top of the stairs.
    Marc jumped as a cluster of small metallic objects hit the roof, smashing some of the slates before clattering down the tiles towards the gutters. One of these objects hit a window ledge on the landing between the third and fourth floors. It burned with a brilliant white light that pierced through the blackout curtain and cast long shadows up the wall.
    ‘Damned incendiaries,’ the officer yelled as he used the light to hurry into the bathroom and grab a shaggy-headed mop. ‘You get out of here, boy. I’ll take a stab at them.’
    German bombing raids had become more sophisticated as the Blitz progressed. The latest tactic was to equip the first nightly sorties with incendiary bombs. Each incendiary released dozens of fist-sized bomblets which burst into flames as they hit the ground. The resulting fires were not just destructive, but made enough light for later sorties carrying high-explosive bombs to identify targets more easily.
    Marc had seen a warning film about incendiaries at the cinema, which had explained that the best way to deal with them was to flick them away into a road or garden before things caught light and then to smother them with sand from a sandbag or fire bucket.
    As Marc vaulted past the first landing, the officer flung open the adjacent window and used the end of the mop to flick the incendiary off the window ledge. He then slammed the window shut and started running up the stairs to try and gain access to the