Life After Life

Ursula watches as bombs drop from planes and fires blaze. Ursula is part of an Air Raid Precautions team searching the rubble of a recent bombing for victims and survivors. One thing the Blitz has taught her, Ursula thinks, is that “people lived (and died) in the most unlikely of circumstances” (386).

Her team includes retired hospital matron Miss Woolf, an opera singer, a wrestler, other men too old for military service, and a Jewish violinist who left his orchestra while on tour. Her team asks Ursula to tunnel into the mound of rubble, where she finds the body of a man. In the morning, a woman, barely alive, is hauled out of the mound. Ursula doesn’t have a pen to tag the body of the dead man, so writes his name on his arm in lipstick and tells him goodbye. In her daily life, Ursula shares a flat with Millie and works in an office where she organizes incident reports of casualties into buff-colored folders.

Ursula visits Fox Corner to lunch with Pamela. Sylvie is raising chickens and has become rather tart in her manner. Ursula doesn’t speak of what she sees during her work, though she does mention that she is seeing Ralph from her German class.