Life after life

November 1940

ON THE OTHER side of the wall she could hear Emil complaining and Mrs Appleyard’s soothing remonstrance. She began to sing a lullaby in her own language, the mother tongue, Ursula thought. It was an extraordinarily sad song and Ursula vowed that if she ever had a child (difficult when you had decided to live as a nun) she would sing to it nothing but jolly jigs and ditties.

She felt alone. She would have liked a warm body for comfort, a dog would be better than being on her own on nights like this. A living, breathing presence.

She moved the blackout aside. No sign of bombers yet, just the long finger of a solitary searchlight poking into the blackness. A new moon hung in the sky. Pale for weariness, according to Shelley but Queen and huntress, chaste and fair for Ben Jonson. To Ursula it betrayed an indifference that made her suddenly shiver.

There was always a second before the siren started when she was aware of a sound as yet unheard. It was like an echo, or rather the opposite of an echo. An echo came afterwards, but was there a word for what came before?

She heard the whine of a plane overhead and the bang-bang-bang-bang-bang of the first bombs dropping and she was about to replace the blackout and make a run for the cellar when she noticed a dog cowering in a doorway opposite – almost as if she’d wished it into existence. Even from where she was, she could sense its terror. She hesitated for a second and then thought, oh, damn, and raced down the stairs.

She passed the Nesbit sisters. ‘Ooh, bad luck, Miss Todd,’ Ruth giggled. ‘Crossing on the stairs, you know.’

Ursula was going down, the sisters were coming up. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said, rather pointlessly.

‘I forgot my knitting,’ Lavinia said. She was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. ‘She’s knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s so cold in her flat.’

It was incredibly noisy on the street. She could hear incendiaries clattering down on a roof nearby, sounding like a giant coal scuttle being emptied. The sky was alight. A chandelier flare fell, as graceful as fireworks, illuminating everything below.

A stream of bombers was roaring overhead as she dashed across the street to the dog. It was a nondescript terrier, whimpering and shaking all over. Just as she grabbed hold of it she heard a terrific swish and knew she was for it, that they were both for it. A colossal growling noise was followed by the loudest bang she’d heard so far in the Blitz. This is it, she thought, this is how I die.

She took a blow to the forehead, a brick or something, but didn’t lose consciousness. A blast of air, like a hurricane, knocked her off her feet. There was a horrendous pain in her ears and all she could hear was a high-pitched whistling, singing noise and she knew that her eardrums must have gone. Debris was showering down on her, cutting her and digging into her. The blast seemed to come in successive waves and she could feel a grumbling, grinding vibration in the ground beneath her.

From a distance an explosion seemed to be over almost immediately but when you were in the middle of it it seemed to go on for ever, to have a character that changed and developed as it went along so that you had no idea how it was going to end up, how you were going to end up. She was half sitting, half lying on the ground and tried to hang on to something but she couldn’t let go of the dog (this thought uppermost in her mind for some reason) and she found herself being blown slowly along the ground.

The pressure began to decrease a little but the dirt and dust were still raining down and the blast had life in it yet. Then something else hit her on the head and everything went dark.

She was woken by the dog licking her face. It was very hard to understand what had happened but after a while she realized that the doorway where she had grabbed the dog didn’t exist any more. The door had been blown inwards, the pair of them with it, and now they were lying among debris in the passage of a house. The staircase of the house behind them, choked with broken bricks and splintered wood, now led nowhere as the upper floors had gone.

Still stunned, she struggled to a sitting position. Her head felt thick and stupid but nothing seemed to be broken and she couldn’t find any bleeding, although she supposed she must be covered in cuts and bruises. The dog too, although very quiet, seemed to be uninjured. ‘Your name must be Lucky,’ she said to it but her voice hardly came out at all, there was so much choking dust in the air. Cautiously, she got to her feet and walked down the passage to the street.

Her house had also gone, everywhere she looked there were great heaps of smoking rubble and skeletal walls. The pared fingernail of the moon was bright enough, even through the veil of dust, to cast light on the horror. If she hadn’t run to save the dog she would be cinders in the Millers’ cellar now. Was everyone dead? The Nesbits, Mrs Appleyard and Emil? Mr Bentley? All the Millers?

She stumbled into the street where two firemen were unreeling a hose. While they were attaching it to the hydrant one of them spotted her and shouted, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ It was funny but he looked exactly like Fred Smith. And then the other fireman yelled, ‘Watch out, the wall’s coming down!’

It was. Slowly, incredibly slowly, as if in a dream, the whole wall tilted on an invisible axis and without a single brick detaching itself it inclined towards them, as if taking a graceful bow, and fell in one piece, bringing the darkness down with it.