Bleeding London

BLITZ

After midnight now, the second year of the war. The soldiers have all gone back to their barracks. Earlier that evening they went to Madame Tussaud’s, to the half-empty cinema, to the restaurant where they ate five-bob dinners and the band played from seven till ten.

It was a melancholy place. The waxwork halls contained more dummies than visitors, but a few of the men wanted to come and look their enemies in the face, to see the figures of Hitler and Goering and Mussolini; pale, stiff, immobile figures in the deserted Grand Hall.

London itself feels deserted. The children have been sent away. The young men are at the war. The city is blacked out and the remaining population is burrowed away in air raid shelters and tube stations. This is how they fight the Battle of Britain.

Through the black September night come the planes, ours and theirs, the Luftwaffe and the Few. The sky shakes with metal, a primitive, focused vibration, a death rattle. And on the roof of Madame Tussaud’s in the Euston Road stands a timid fifteen-year-old fire watcher. Jim London, Stuart’s father, a lone and all too slight figure, looking for bombs that don’t have his name on them, doing his bit before the inevitable call up. Better here than in some cramped Anderson shelter, dug into the earth, corrugated iron above his head. Much better here than sleeping in the underground like one of an army of rats.

The night sky is full of litter, not only the aircraft but the beams from searchlights, barrage balloons, the anti-aircraft fire, and, of course, the bombs, invisible as they fall. It is more than the cool autumn night that makes him shiver. Powerless, weaponless he just stands and watches and waits for whatever the cluttered night can throw down at him.

And yet the city has a beauty about it tonight. Scrolls of smoke twirl slow stepless dances around its edges, the bright fire from the incendiary bombs turns the outlines of buildings into noble, fragile silhouettes. London seems so big, so diffuse, such a sitting duck. The turrets and spires, the dome of St Paul’s, the tower of Big Ben are like targets, chess pieces waiting to be picked off. There is no way of missing. Every stray bomb will score a hit, will destroy something precious, some landmark or piece of the city’s past; if not the docks and the munitions factories, then a Wren church, a row of Georgian houses, a fragment of Roman wall.

Jim London has never felt so alert and open-eyed. Fear has given him an almost hallucinatory sensitivity. His eyes seem to see more clearly than ever before, his very skin is alive to the attack on the city. His reactions feel spring-loaded, hair-triggered. And yet he doesn’t see the bomb that does the damage, not that seeing it would have helped.

When it comes it doesn’t even feel like an external force that hits the building. It feels more as though half the structure, the west part, the part containing the cinema, has simply erupted, spasmed and thrown itself into pieces. The air around him seems to bend. There is furious, bone-splitting thunder, and he is hit by a shock wave. Then debris engulfs him like a solid cloud of brick and tile and plaster. He is knocked sideways on the parapet where he was standing and he stays there, stays down, his arms cushioning his head, waiting for either stillness or the next explosion. He feels as though he is there for an age, time enough to know he has no injuries, time enough to realize that if he stays down too long others will come in search and see what a spineless coward he really is.

When nothing worse happens, he scrambles to his feet and nans to the end of the building to see where the bomb hit. The cinema has simply gone, disappeared as though a heavy, precise child had stamped its fist on a balsa wood model. He can still see the proscenium but nothing else is recognizable, just rubble and rising dust and a deep bomb crater. He scurries down open metal staircases carrying a torch and a fire extinguisher until he reaches street level. He is the first to arrive and warily he approaches the new-made mound of architectural scrap. The air is still thick with motion, dust particles, pulverized cement, wood splinters, but now he sees fragments that make sense, slashed strips of carpets, wooden mouldings, burst cinema seats, and beyond them a deep, dark hole which the bomb has excavated.

He climbs up on the shaky hillock of ruins and peers over into the depths of the hole. At first he sees only edgeless darkness which he tries to tame with his torch. He is not sure what he is looking for. There could surely be no survivors down there, and in any case he knows the cinema was empty. And yet there is definitely something lurking in the void, something that the wan beam from his torch slowly begins to define.

He sees a man’s face, still, lurid pink, incomprehensibly serene. Then he sees another, a second pale, motionless face turned up to the blitzed sky. And then another, and another. And then he realizes there are no bodies belonging to these heads. They are detached and unfettered, all lying together in the crater like so many footballs. Some of the faces are smashed, some are curled into horrible, melting expressions, and yet they are bloodless and do not look as though they have recently been in pain. And as he moves his torch he sees more and more of them, hundreds of these thronging, severed heads, all staring up at him, blank but infinitely knowing. He realizes he has come upon something vile and inconceivable, a plague pit, a murderer’s horde of corpses…and he promptly faints.

In a more terrifying story he might have pitched forward into the crater full of heads, but instead he falls backwards to safety, where, a few seconds later, one of the other fire watchers, an old man who lost a leg and an eye in Ypres, finds him. Relieved to discover that the fifteen-year-old is not dead, he brings the lad round, gives him some water and explains that the severed heads are wax moulds that have fallen into the crater from the now demolished storeroom of Madame Tussaud’s.

“This’ll be a story to tell your kids,” the old man says. Then adds, “If you live long enough to have any.”