HE little lady who needed to be loved, but did not know it, discovered me quite by accident. This story is a series of accidents; if it had not been for the ifs and the perhaps's and the possibilities there wouldn't have been any story to tell.     

       I was empty when she found me, for my late tenants had grown frightened and had moved into the country on account of airraids. They said that I was too near the giant searchlights and anti-aircraft guns of Hyde Park Corner to be healthy. If they weren't killed by bombs, sooner or later they would be struck by our own expended shell-cases that came toppling from two miles out of the clouds. So they had made their exit hurriedly in November, taking all their furniture and leaving me to spend my one-hundred-and-ninety-eighth Christmas in the company of a caretaker.     

       It was shortly before Christmas when I first saw her. Night had settled peacefully down; it was about nine o'clock when the maroons and sirens began to give warning that the enemy was approaching. In an instant, like a lamp extinguished, the lights of London flickered and sank. Down the forests of streets innumerable doors swiftly opened and people came pattering out. Dragging half-clad children by the hand and carrying babies snatched up from their warm beds, they commenced to run hither and thither, seeking the faint red lights of shelters, where cellars and overhead protection might be found. Policemen, mounted on bicycles, rode up and down the thoroughfares, blowing whistles. Ambulances dashed by, tooting horns and clanging bells. From far and near out of the swamp of darkness rose a medley of panic and sound. Prodding the sky, like detectives with lanterns, searchlights hunted and turned back the edges of the clouds. Then ominously, with solemn anger, the guns opened up and in fierce defiance the first bomb fell. The pattering of feet ceased suddenly. Streets grew forlorn and empty. The commotion of living and the terror of dying were transferred from the earth to the air.     

       I was standing deserted with my door wide open, for at the first signs of clamour the old woman, who was supposed to take care of me, had hobbled up from her basement and out on to the pavement in search of the nearest Tube Station. In her fear for her safety, she had forgotten to close my door, so there I stood with the damp air drifting into my hall, at the mercy of any chance vagrant.     

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