Chapter One

      A little before seven o’clock on the evening of 19 January 1917, Nellie Greenwood was just about to close up the laundry when all the windows blew in.

      Just before it happened the lamps had flickered for a couple of seconds, causing her to look up with the heavy iron poised just above the sheet she was pressing. There was a brilliant flash, a second for the breath to catch in her throat, then a whump, a deafening roar, a blizzard of shards and a screeching ring in her ears. She clamped her eyes closed and, as the ringing diminished, other sounds began to emerge from the white noise: a metal lid spinning to a halt on the floor nearby, the Christmas tinkle of the last slivers of falling glass, the bang of a window frame flapping open, all as if it were a very long way away.

      Then silence, and the chill seeping into her cheek that told her she was lying on the stone floor.

      Tendrils of cold began to seep through the broken windows and open door and settle around her. Silvertown was never silent, not ever, which despite the screaming noise inside her own head made the sudden absence of the clanking of dock cranes and the distant shrieking of the sawmill even more curious. As Nellie slowly began to regain her senses she realised there was something else nagging at her; something about the silence inside 15 Constance Street was wrong.

      A week earlier her husband Harry had wheeled her around this very floor, dancing to a hummed tune of his own devising to mark her thirty-ninth birthday. He’d managed to coax her out to Cundy’s, the pub at the end of the street, for a couple of hours in the evening, leaving their eldest child Winifred in charge of her five younger sisters, and when Nell insisted on checking whether she’d left the float in the till when they’d returned from the pub, he’d pushed his cap back on his head, grabbed her waist with one hand and her hand with the other and whisked her in circles.

      ‘Forty next year, doll,’ he said between hums, his breath sharp with the tang of alcohol. ‘Who’d have thought we’d live so long, eh? And you not looking a day older than the first time I clapped eyes on you.’

      She told him to get away with himself. In the mirror that morning she’d noticed more grey streaks in her brown hair as well as the lines spreading from the corners of her eyes and heading due south from the corners of her mouth to her jaw line. She’d run her fingertip down them, her hands permanently pink and shiny from years of washing and scrubbing, from domestic laundry as a girl to running her own laundry today.

      Thirty-nine, she’d thought, and I’m looking and feeling every day of it. And me with a four-month-old baby, too.

      A four-month-old baby.

      Nell scrambled to her feet, kicking away the drying frame that had fallen across her legs, and stood bolt upright, blinking, glass falling from her pinafore and her green floral dress. She ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. The door to the back bedroom had slammed shut: Nellie shouldered it open and half stumbled, half fell into the room. There was broken glass everywhere, the washstand had blown over, the basin was smashed, the little framed pictures were off the walls, and in the corner was the crib, tipped onto its side and sprinkled with sharp slivers that twinkled in the twilight like birthday icing. Next to the upturned crib, face down and sprawled motionless on the floor among the daggers of glass, four-month-old Rose.

      Fighting back a sudden surge of cold nausea, Nellie took two long paces forward, each seeming as if there were suddenly miles between her and her child. She reached down with her raw, laundress’s hands and carefully picked the baby off the ground. She was limp. She turned the child around and held her face to face. Rose stirred, stretched her arms, fanned her fingers, yawned and half opened an eye.

      Nellie pulled the baby into her shoulder and allowed a tear of relief to fall. She brushed a couple of glass fragments from the back of Rose’s nightdress and finally allowed herself to exhale, bouncing the child back to sleep on her shoulder. Into the room ran two of her daughters, Annie and Ivy. Their eyes were wide with shock, they were blinking back tears and mouthing words at her, but she could hear nothing except the tuneless high-pitched music inside her head, like the constant jostling tinkle of a thousand needles. It was only when she noticed how their shadows on the wall were a sharp silhouette against an eerie, glowing orange did Nellie begin to speculate about what might have just happened. She turned to face the window and saw the horizon fiery red over West Silvertown. The sun had set more than an hour ago, yet the sky burned orange as if it was rising again in the west.

      She made a rapid mental roll-call of daughters. Annie, Ivy and Rose were here. Kit was with Win, delivering some laundry to North Woolwich. That was farther east, they’d probably be all right. Harry was at the docks collecting some table linen from one of the liners. It was the Albert Dock, so again, farther away from here, he’d be all right too, she reasoned with herself. That left Norah; she had been helping with something at the school a couple of streets away. Drew Road School was a big, solid building. Norah was probably all right. Please, she thought, let all of them be all right.

      Through the jangling needles she began to hear crying – Ivy and Annie, 10 and 11 respectively, were at her side, tears streaming down their cheeks. She longed to embrace them but she was still carrying Rose. She nodded at the crib and Annie went over and set it upright. Ivy took the blanket to the broken window and flicked it out a few times before examining it closely for stray shards while Annie ran her hands around the inside of the crib. There didn’t seem to be any glass inside it and, once satisfied it was safe, Nell laid Rose, still sleeping, in the crib, tucked the blankets around her, dropped to her haunches and pulled her older daughters to her, their faces at her breast, and kissed the tops of their heads. The scene was still lit