BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): Jessica wakes

[Monte Davis]

This section (early December 20, the longest night of the year) begins and
ends with V-2 explosions: one that brings Jessica awake, "up to watch
herself watching the night" as Roger sleeps in their evacuation-zone
hideaway, and one remembered from some earlier time together in the same
place. There are interpolated scenes of Roger at The White Visitation,
talking with Pointsman and with Rev. Paul de la Nuit ("of the Night," heh).
These cannot be known to Jessica, but mesh with her own memories of
conversation(s) with Roger about the statistics of V-2 strikes.

Page 53: The opening paragraphs echo the beginning of GR: an urban
nightmare (see London among others in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Smoke), waking, a cigarette and a survey
of the scene outside. This time, instead of the impersonal fated
Evacuation, the nightmare is an implied King-Kongish monster (J's "Fay Wray
look" coming up on p. 57) gathering up girls who are also dolls, their
open-and-shut counterweighted eyes becoming Jessica's own as the blast
jolts her awake. Pointsman's midnight stalking and predatory tenderness
toward children are in the nightmare mix too, of course -- again, not known
to daylight Jessica but sensed through the creepiness she glimpses in
person and hears about via Roger.

<goog_1386453923>
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03167/kingkong_3167370b.jpg

The dolls, Jessica's "blind little hand," her stuffed panda, cast her as
childlike -- but very soon she is mother too, smoking as she tidies up
Roger's strewn clothes. This switching of relational ages runs through
everything we see of them together (e.g. how she she sees him in the
passage beginning "Roger really wants other people to know what he's
talking about" at 56.37).

"...blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago... being frisked for cameras
and binoculars" The last significant German bombing effort in the UK had
been the "Baby Blitz" (Operation Steinbock) of Jan-May 1944, but as the
name suggests, that -- and most Luftwaffe bombing since summer 1941 -- had
been small and ineffectual compared to the original Blitz. Still, blackout
orders remained in effect for some months, not that the V-weapons cared
about telltale lights from the ground. And even with Allied armies in
France since early June 1944, precautions against spies continued on
transport routes between London and the crucial Channel ports.
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