Life after life

September 1940

‘SEE WHERE CHRIST’S blood streams across the firmament,’ a voice nearby said. ‘In’ the firmament, Ursula thought, not ‘across’. The red glow of a false dawn indicated a massive fire in the east. The barrage in Hyde Park cracked and flared and the anti-aircraft guns closer to home were doing a good job of keeping up their own cacophony, shells whistling into the air like fireworks and crack-crack-cracking as they exploded high overhead. And beneath it all was the horrible throbbing drone of the bombers’ unsynchronized engines, a sound that always made her stomach feel pitchy.

A parachute mine floated down gracefully and a basket of incendiaries rattled their contents on to what was left of the road and burst into flowers of fire. A warden, Ursula couldn’t make out his face, ran across to the incendiaries with a stirrup pump. If there had been no noise it might have seemed a beautiful nightscape but there was noise, brutish dissonance that sounded as if someone had thrown open the gates of hell and let out the howling of the damned.

‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,’ the voice spoke again as if reading her thoughts. It was so dark that she could barely make out the owner of the voice although she knew without a doubt that it belonged to Mr Durkin, one of the wardens from her post. He was a retired English teacher, much inclined to quoting. And misquoting. The voice – or Mr Durkin – said something else, it may still have been Faustus but the words disappeared into the enormous whump of a bomb falling a couple of streets away.

The ground shook and another voice, that of someone working on the mound, yelled, ‘Watch out!’ She heard something shifting and a noise like displaced scree rattling and rolling down a mountain, the harbinger of an avalanche. Rubble, not scree. And a mound of it, not a mountain. The rubble that comprised the mound was all that was left of a house, or rather, several houses all ground and mashed into each other now. The rubble had been homes half an hour ago, now those same homes were just a hellish jumble of bricks, broken joists and floorboards, furniture, pictures, rugs, bedding, books, crockery, lino, glass. People. The crushed fragments of lives, never to be whole again.

The rumble slowed to a trickle and finally stopped, the avalanche averted, and the same voice shouted, ‘All right! Carry on!’ It was a moonless night, the only light coming from the masked torches of the heavy rescue squad, ghostly will-o’-the-wisps, moving on the mound. The other reason for the immense, treacherous dark was the thick cloud of smoke and dust that hung like a curtain of vile gossamer in the air. The stink, as usual, was awful. It wasn’t just the smell of coal gas and high explosive, it was the aberrant odour produced when a building was blown to smithereens. The smell of it wouldn’t leave her. She had tied an old silk scarf around her mouth and nose, bandit-style, but it did little to stop the dust and the stench getting into her lungs. Death and decay were on her skin, in her hair, in her nostrils, her lungs, beneath her fingernails, all the time. They had become part of her.

They had only recently been issued with overalls, navy blue and unflattering. Until now Ursula had been wearing her shelter suit, bought almost as a novelty item by Sylvie from Simpson’s soon after war was declared. She had added an old leather belt of Hugh’s from which she’d strung her ‘accessories’ – a torch, gas mask, a first-aid packet and a message pad. In one pocket she had a penknife and a handkerchief and in the other a pair of thick leather gloves and a lipstick. ‘Oh, what a good idea,’ Miss Woolf said, when she saw the penknife. Let’s face it, Ursula thought, despite a host of regulations, they were making it up as they went along.

Mr Durkin, for it was indeed he, resolved himself out of the gloom and foggy smoke. He shone his torch on to his notebook, the weak light barely illuminating the paper. ‘A lot of people live on this street,’ he said, peering at the list of names and house numbers which no longer bore any relation to the surrounding havoc. ‘The Wilsons are at number one,’ he said, as if beginning at the beginning would somehow help.

‘There is no number one any more,’ Ursula said. ‘There are no numbers at all.’ The street was unrecognizable, everything familiar annihilated. Even in broad daylight it would have been unrecognizable. It wasn’t a street any more, it was simply ‘the mound’. Twenty feet high, maybe more, with planks and ladders running up its sides to enable the heavy-rescue squad to crawl over it. There was something primitive about the human chain they had formed, passing debris in baskets from hand to hand, from the top of the mound to the bottom. They could have been slaves building the pyramids – or in this case, excavating them. Ursula thought suddenly of the leafcutter ants that used to be in Regent’s Park zoo, each one dutifully carrying its little burden. Had the ants been evacuated along with the other animals or had they simply set them free in the park? They were tropical insects, so perhaps they would not be able to survive the rigours of the climate of Regent’s Park. She had seen Millie there in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the summer of ’38.

‘Miss Todd?’

‘Yes, sorry, Mr Durkin, miles away.’ It happened a lot these days – she would be in the middle of these awful scenes and she would find that she had drifted off to pleasant moments in the past. Little slivers of light in the darkness.

They made their way warily towards the mound. Mr Durkin passed the list of the street’s residents to her and started giving a hand with the chain of baskets. No one was actually digging on the mound, instead they were clearing the rubble by hand, like careful archaeologists. ‘A bit delicate up there,’ one of the rescue squad near the bottom of the chain said to her. A shaft had been cleared, going down the middle of the mound (a volcano then, rather than a mound, Ursula thought). A lot of the men in the heavy rescue squad were from the building trade – bricklayers, labourers and so on – and Ursula wondered if it felt odd to them to be scrambling over these dismantled buildings, as if time had somehow gone backwards. But then they were pragmatic, resourceful men who were not much given to this kind of fantastical thinking.

Occasionally a voice would call for quiet – impossible when the raid was still going on overhead – but nonetheless everything would stop while the men at the top of the mound listened intently for signs of life within. It looked hopeless but if there was one thing that the Blitz had taught them it was that people lived (and died) in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Ursula searched in the gloom for the dim blue lights that marked out the incident officer’s post and instead caught sight of Miss Woolf, stumbling purposefully over broken bricks towards her. ‘It’s bad,’ she said matter-of-factly when she reached Ursula. ‘They need someone slight.’

‘Slight?’ Ursula repeated. The word, for some reason, was devoid of meaning.

She had joined the ARP as a warden after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March ’39, when it suddenly seemed horribly clear to her that Europe was doomed. (‘What a gloomy Cassandra you are,’ Sylvie said, but Ursula worked in the Air Raid Precautions department at the Home Office, she could see the future.) During the strange twilight of the phoney war the wardens had been something of a joke but now they were ‘the backbone of London’s defences’ – this from Maurice.

Her fellow wardens were a mixed bunch. Miss Woolf, a retired hospital matron, was the senior warden. Thin and straight as a poker, her iron-grey hair in a neat bun, she came with natural authority. Then there was her deputy, the aforesaid Mr Durkin, Mr Simms, who worked for the Ministry of Supply, and Mr Palmer, who was a bank manager. The latter two men had fought in the last war and were too old for this one (Mr Durkin had been ‘medically exempt’, he said defensively). Then there was Mr Armitage who was an opera singer and as there were no operas to sing in any more he kept them entertained with his renditions of ‘La donna è mobile’ and ‘Largo al factotum’. ‘Just the popular arias,’ he confided to Ursula. ‘Most people don’t like anything challenging.’

‘Give me old Al Bowlly any day,’ Mr Bullock said. The rather aptly named Mr Bullock (John) was in Miss Woolf’s words ‘a little questionable’. He certainly cut a strapping figure – he wrestled competitively and lifted weights in a local gym as well as being the denizen of several of the less salubrious nightclubs. He was also acquainted with some rather glamorous ‘dancers’. One or two had ‘dropped in’ on him in the shelter and been shooed away like chickens by Miss Woolf. (‘Dancers my eye,’ she said.)

Last but not least there was Herr Zimmerman (‘Gabi, please,’ he said, but no one did), who was an orchestra violinist from Berlin, ‘our refugee’ as they referred to him (Sylvie had evacuees, similarly denoted by their circumstances). He had ‘jumped ship’ in ’35 while on tour with his orchestra. Miss Woolf, who knew him through the Refugee Committee, had gone to great lengths to make sure that Herr Zimmerman and his violin were not interned, or worse, shipped across the lethal waters of the Atlantic. They all followed Miss Woolf’s lead and never addressed him as ‘Mister’, always as ‘Herr’. Ursula knew that Miss Woolf called him thus to make him feel at home but it only succeeded in making more of an alien of him.

Miss Woolf had come across Herr Zimmerman in the course of her work for the Central British Fund for German Jewry (‘Rather a mouthful, I’m afraid’). Ursula was never sure whether Miss Woolf was a woman of some influence or whether she simply refused to take no for an answer. Both, perhaps.

‘A cultured lot, aren’t we?’ Mr Bullock said sarcastically. ‘Why don’t we just put on shows instead of fighting a war.’ (‘Mr Bullock is a man of strong emotions,’ Miss Woolf said to Ursula. And strong drink too, Ursula thought. Strong everything in fact.)

A small hall belonging to the Methodists had been commandeered to be their post by Miss Woolf (herself a Methodist), and they had furnished it with a couple of camp beds, a small stove with tea-making equipment and an assortment of chairs, both hard and soft. Compared to some posts, compared to many, it was luxurious.

Mr Bullock turned up one night with a green baize card table and Miss Woolf declared herself rather fond of bridge. Mr Bullock, in the lull between the fall of France and the first raids at the beginning of September, had taught them all poker. ‘Quite the card sharp,’ Mr Simms said. Both he and Mr Palmer lost several shillings to Mr Bullock. Miss Woolf, on the other hand, was two pounds up by the time the Blitz started. An amused Mr Bullock expressed surprise that Methodists were allowed to gamble. Her winnings bought a dartboard so Mr Bullock had nothing to complain about, she said. One day when they were clearing a jumble of boxes in the corner of the hall they discovered that a piano had been hiding there all along and Miss Woolf – who was proving a woman of many talents – was a rather good player. Although her own tastes tended towards Chopin and Liszt, she was more than game to ‘bash out a few tunes’ – Mr Bullock’s words – for them all to sing along to.

They had fortified the post with sandbags although none of them believed that they would be of any use if they were hit. Apart from Ursula, who thought that taking precautions seemed an eminently sensible idea, they all tended to agree with Mr Bullock that ‘If it’s got your name on it, it’s got your name on it,’ a form of Buddhist detachment that Dr Kellet would have admired. There had been an obituary in The Times during the summer. Ursula was rather glad that Dr Kellet had missed another war. It would have reminded him of the futility of Guy losing everything at Arras.

They were all part-time volunteers, apart from Miss Woolf, who was paid and full-time and took her duties very seriously. She subjected them to rigorous drills and made sure they did their training – in anti-gas procedures, in extinguishing incendiaries, how to enter burning buildings, load stretchers, make splints, bandage limbs. She questioned them on the contents of the manuals that she made them read and she was very keen on them learning how to label bodies, both alive and dead, so that they could be sent off like parcels to the hospital or the mortuary with all the correct information attached. They had done several exercises out in the open where they had acted out a mock raid. (‘Play-acting,’ Mr Bullock scoffed, failing to get into the spirit of things.) Ursula played a casualty twice, once having to feign a broken leg and on another occasion complete unconsciousness. Another time she had been on the ‘other side’ and as a warden had had to deal with Mr Armitage simulating someone in hysterical shock. She supposed it was his experience on stage that enabled him to give such an unnervingly authentic performance. It was quite hard to persuade him out of character at the end of the exercise.

They had to know the occupants of every building in their sector, whether they had a shelter of their own or whether they went to a public one or whether they too were fatalists and didn’t bother at all. They had to know if anyone had gone away or moved, married, had a baby, died. They had to know where the hydrants were, cul-de-sacs, narrow alleyways, cellars, rest centres.

‘Patrol and watch’, that was Miss Woolf’s motto. They tended to patrol the streets in pairs until midnight when there was usually a lull, and then if there were no bombs in their sector they would have a polite argument over who should occupy the camp beds. Of course, if there was a raid in ‘their streets’ then it was ‘all hands to the pumps’ in Miss Woolf’s words. Sometimes they did the ‘watching’ from her flat, two storeys up with an excellent view from a big corner window.

Miss Woolf also did extra first-aid exercises with them. As well as having been a hospital matron, she had run a field hospital during the last war and explained to them (‘As you will appreciate, those of you gentlemen who saw active service in that dreadful conflict’) that casualties in war were very different from the routine accidents that one saw in peacetime. ‘Much nastier,’ she said. ‘We must be prepared for some distressing sights.’ Of course, even Miss Woolf had not imagined how distressing these sights would be when they involved civilians rather than battlefield soldiers, when they involved shovelling up unidentifiable lumps of flesh or picking out the heartbreakingly small limbs of a child from the rubble.

‘We cannot turn away,’ Miss Woolf told her, ‘we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.’ What did that mean, Ursula wondered. ‘It means,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.’

‘And if we are killed?’

‘Then others must remember us.’

The first serious incident they attended had been at a large house in the middle of a terrace that had received a direct hit. The rest of the terrace was undamaged, as though the Luftwaffe had personally targeted the occupants – two families including grandparents, several children, two babes-in-arms. They had all survived the blast, sheltering in the cellar, but both the mains water pipe and a large sewage pipe had fractured and before either could be turned off everyone in the cellar had drowned in the awful sludge.

One of the women had managed to claw her way up and cling on to one of the cellar walls, they could see her through a gap, and Miss Woolf and Mr Armitage had held on to Hugh’s leather belt while Ursula had dangled over the lip of what remained of the cellar. She reached out a hand to the woman, thought for a moment that she might actually manage to grasp hold of her, but then she simply disappeared beneath the feculent water as it rose to fill the cellar.

When the fire brigade finally arrived to pump out the place they recovered fifteen bodies, seven of them children, and laid them in front of the house, as if to dry. Miss Woolf ordered them shrouded as quickly as possible and stowed away behind a wall while they awaited the arrival of the mortuary wagon. ‘It doesn’t do morale any good to see sights like that,’ she said. Ursula had vomited up her supper long before then. She vomited after nearly every incident. Mr Armitage and Mr Palmer too, Mr Simms before. Only Miss Woolf and Mr Bullock seemed to have strong stomachs for death.

Afterwards, Ursula tried not to think about the babies or the look of terror on that poor woman’s face as she had grasped in vain for Ursula’s hand (and something else, disbelief perhaps that this could be happening). ‘Think of them being at peace now,’ Miss Woolf counselled stoutly afterwards, dispensing scalding-hot sugary tea. ‘They are out of all this, just gone a little sooner.’ And Mr Durkin said, ‘They have all gone into the world of light,’ and Ursula thought, they are all gone into the world of light. Ursula wasn’t convinced that the dead went anywhere, except into a void, black and infinite.

‘Well, I hope I don’t die covered in shit,’ Mr Bullock said, more prosaically.

She thought she would never get over that first terrible incident but the memory of it had already been overlaid by many others and now she barely thought about it.

‘It’s bad,’ Miss Woolf said matter-of-factly. ‘They need someone slight.’

‘Slight?’ Ursula repeated.

‘Slim,’ Miss Woolf said patiently.

‘To go in there?’ Ursula said, looking up in horror at the summit of the volcano. She wasn’t sure she had the gumption to be lowered into the very maw of hell.

‘No, no, not there,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Come with me.’ It had begun to rain, quite hard, and Ursula blundered with difficulty in Miss Woolf’s wake over the jagged and broken ground, littered with every kind of obstacle. Her torch was next to useless. She caught her foot in a bicycle wheel and wondered if anyone had been riding it when the bomb struck.

‘Here,’ Miss Woolf said. It was another mound, just as big as the last. Was it another street, or the same street? Ursula had lost all sense of direction. How many mounds were there? A nightmarish scenario flashed through her mind – the whole of London reduced to one gigantic mound.

This mound wasn’t a volcano, the rescue squad were going in through a horizontal shaft at the side. More robust this time, they were hacking at the rubble with picks and shovels.

‘There’s a kind of hole here,’ Miss Woolf said, taking Ursula’s hand firmly in hers, as if Ursula were a reluctant child, and leading her forward. Ursula could see no sign of a hole. ‘It’s safe, I think, you just need to wriggle through.’

‘A tunnel?’

‘No, it’s just a hole. There’s a bit of a drop on the other side, we think there’s someone down there. Not a long drop,’ she added encouragingly. ‘Not a tunnel,’ she said again. ‘Go head first.’ The rescue squad stopped hacking at the rubble and waited, rather impatiently, for Ursula.

She had to take her helmet off in order to wriggle into the hole, her torch held awkwardly in front of her. Despite what Miss Woolf said, she had been expecting a tunnel but was immediately confronted with a cavernous space. She might have been potholing. She was relieved when she felt two pairs of invisible hands attach themselves to Hugh’s old leather belt. She moved the torch around trying to see something, anything. ‘Hello?’ she shouted as she shone the torch into the drop. It was screened by a haphazard lattice of twisted gas pipes and wood, splintered like matchsticks. She concentrated on a gap in the chaotic mesh, trying to make out anything in the gloom beyond. An upturned face, a man’s, pale and ghostly, seemed to rise out of the darkness like a vision, a prisoner in an oubliette. There might be a body attached to the face, she couldn’t be sure.

‘Hello?’ she said, as if the man might reply, although now she could see that part of his head was missing.

‘Anyone?’ Miss Woolf said hopefully when she crawled backwards out of the hole.

‘One dead.’

‘Easy to recover?’

‘No.’

The rain made everything even more foul if that were possible, turning the wet brick dust into a kind of glutinous grit. A couple of hours of toiling in these conditions and they were all covered from head to toe in the stuff. It was too disgusting to give any thought to.

There was a shortage of ambulances, traffic had been snarled up by an incident on the Cromwell Road, as had the doctor and nurse who should have been there, and Miss Woolf’s extra first-aid training was put to good use. Ursula splinted a broken arm, bandaged a head wound, patched an eye and strapped up Mr Simms’s ankle – he had twisted it on the rough ground. She labelled two unconscious survivors (head injuries, broken femur, broken collarbone, broken ribs, what was probably a crushed pelvis) and several dead (who were easier, they were simply dead) and then double-checked them in case she had labelled them the wrong way round and had posted the dead to the hospital and the living to the mortuary. She also directed numerous survivors to the rest centre, and walking wounded to the first-aid post being manned by Miss Woolf.

‘Catch Anthony if you can, will you?’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘Get a mobile canteen down here.’ Ursula sent Tony off with this errand. Only Miss Woolf called him Anthony. He was thirteen, a Boy Scout and their civil defence messenger boy, hurtling around on the rubble-and-glass-strewn streets on his bike. If Tony were her child, Ursula thought, she would have sent him far away from the nightmare instead of plunging him into the depths of it. He loved it all, needless to say.

After she’d spoken to Tony, Ursula went back through the hole again because someone thought they had heard a sound, but the pale, dead man was as quiet as before. ‘Hello, again,’ she said to him. She thought it might be Mr McColl from the neighbouring street. Perhaps he was visiting someone. Unlucky. She was dog-tired, you could almost envy the dead their eternal rest.

When she emerged again from the hole the mobile canteen had arrived. She swilled her mouth out with tea and spat out brick dust. ‘I bet you used to be a real lady,’ Mr Palmer laughed. ‘I’m affronted,’ Ursula said and laughed. ‘I think I spit in a very ladylike way.’ The rescue on the mound was still going on with no sign of any result but the rest of the night was winding down and Miss Woolf told her to go back to the post and rest. Up on the mound a rope had been called for, to lower someone down, Ursula supposed, or pull someone up, or both. (‘A woman, they think,’ Mr Durkin said.)

She was all in, could barely put one foot in front of the other. Avoiding the debris as best she could, she had gone only ten yards or so when someone grabbed her by the arm and yanked her backwards so hard that she would have fallen over if the same person hadn’t kept his tight grip on her and kept her upright. ‘Watch it, Miss Todd,’ a voice growled.

‘Mr Bullock?’ In the confines of the post Mr Bullock alarmed her a little, he seemed so unassailable, but, curiously, out here in this benighted place he was harmless. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’

He shone his torch in front of them. ‘Can you see?’ he said.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘That’s because there’s nothing there.’ She looked harder. A crater – enormous – a bottomless pit. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty feet,’ Mr Bullock said. ‘And you nearly walked into it.’

He accompanied her back to the post. ‘You’re too tired,’ he said. He held her arm all the way, she could feel the strength of his muscles behind the grip.

At the post she dropped on to a camp bed and blacked out rather than fell asleep. She woke up when the all-clear sounded at six o’clock. She felt as if she’d slept for days but it had only been three hours.

Mr Palmer was also there, pottering about making tea. She could imagine him at home, slippers and a pipe, reading his newspaper. It seemed absurd that he should be here. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing her a mug. ‘You should go home, dear,’ he said, ‘the rain’s stopped,’ as though it were the rain that had spoilt her night rather than the Luftwaffe.

Instead of going straight home she returned to the mound to see how the rescue was proceeding. It seemed different in the daylight, the shape of it oddly familiar. It reminded her of something but for the life of her she couldn’t think what.

It was a scene of devastation, more or less the whole street gone, but the mound, the original mound, was still its own little hive of activity. It would have made a good subject for a war artist, she thought. The Diggers on the Mound would be a good title. Bea Shawcross had been at art school, graduating just as the war started. Ursula wondered if she was moved to depict the war or if she was trying to transcend it.

Very gingerly, she scaled its foothills. One of the rescue squad put out a hand to help her up. A new shift had come on but, from the look of them, the old rescue squad was the one still labouring. Ursula understood. It was hard to leave an incident when somehow you felt you ‘owned’ it.

There was a sudden buzz of excitement around the volcano’s crater as the fruits of the night’s delicate drudgery finally became apparent. A woman, a rope tied under her armpits (nothing delicate about this stage), was extricated by simply hauling her out of the narrow opening. She was passed by hand down the mound.

Ursula could see that she was almost black with dirt and drifting in and out of consciousness. Broken but alive, if only just. She was loaded into an ambulance waiting patiently at the bottom.

Ursula made her own way down. On the ground, a shrouded body lay waiting for a mortuary van. Ursula removed the cover from the face and found the pale-faced man from last night. In the light of day she could see that it was definitely Mr McColl from number ten. ‘Hello, you,’ she said. He would soon be an old friend. Miss Woolf would have told her to label him but when she looked for her message pad she discovered she had lost it and had nothing to write on. Searching in a pocket she found her lipstick. Needs must, she heard Sylvie’s voice say.

She thought about writing on Mr McColl’s forehead but that seemed undignified (more undignified than death, she wondered?) so instead she unshrouded his arm and then spat on a handkerchief and rubbed off some of the dirt, as if he were a little boy. She wrote his name and address on his arm with the lipstick. Blood red, which seemed fitting really.

‘Well, goodbye,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.’

Skirting the treacherous crater from last night, she discovered Miss Woolf sitting behind a dining table salvaged from the wreckage, as if she were in an office, telling people what they should do next – where to go for food and shelter, how to get clothes and ration cards and so on. Miss Woolf was still cheerful, yet heaven knows when she had last slept. The woman had iron in her soul, there was no doubt about that. Ursula had grown enormously fond of Miss Woolf, she respected her almost more than anyone else she knew, apart from Hugh perhaps.

The queue was made up of the occupants of a large shelter, many of whom were still emerging, blinking in the daylight like nocturnal animals, and discovering that they no longer had homes to go to. The shelter was in the wrong place, the wrong street, Ursula thought. It took her a few moments to re-orientate her brain and realize that all night she had thought herself in a different street.

‘They got that woman out,’ she told Miss Woolf.

‘Alive?’

‘More or less.’

When she finally got back to Phillimore Gardens she found Millie up and dressed. ‘Went the day well?’ she said. ‘There’s some tea in the pot,’ she added, pouring it and handing Ursula a cup.

‘Oh, you know,’ Ursula said, taking the cup. The tea was lukewarm. She shrugged. ‘Pretty awful. Is that the time? I have to go to work.’

The following day she was surprised to find one of Miss Woolf’s log entries, written in her clear matron’s hand. Sometimes a buff folder would prove to be a mysterious ragbag and Ursula was never clear how some of these things turned up on her desk. 05.00 Interim Incident Report. Situation Report. Casualties 55 to hospital, 30 dead, 3 unaccounted for. Seven houses completely demolished, approximately 120 homeless. 2 NFS crews, 2 AMB, 2 HRPs, 2 LRP, one dog still operating. Work continues.

Ursula hadn’t noticed any dog. It was just one of many incidents across London that night and she picked up a sheaf of them and said, ‘Miss Fawcett, can you log these.’ She could barely wait for the tea-trolley and elevenses.

They ate lunch outside on the terrace. A potato and egg salad, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, even a cucumber. ‘All grown by our mother’s own fair hand,’ Pamela said. It really was the nicest meal Ursula had eaten in a long time. ‘And to follow there’s an apple charlotte, I believe,’ Pamela said. They were alone at the table. Sylvie had gone to answer the doorbell and Hugh hadn’t returned from investigating an unexploded bomb that had, reportedly, fallen in a field on the other side of the village.

The boys were also dining al fresco – sprawled on the lawn, eating buffalo stew and succotash (or, in the real world, corned beef sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs). They had erected a fusty old wigwam that had been unearthed in the shed and had been engaged in a lawless game of cowboys and Indians until the arrival of the chuck wagon (or Bridget, bearing a tray).

Pamela’s boys were the cowboys and the evacuees were more than happy to be Apaches. ‘I think it suits their nature better,’ Pamela said. She had made them cardboard headbands with chicken feathers attached. The cowboys had to make do with Hugh’s handkerchiefs tied around their necks. The two Labradors were racing around in a state of canine frenzy at all this excitement, while Gerald, still only ten months old, slept obliviously on a blanket alongside Pamela’s dog, Heidi, too sedate for such antics.

‘He’s some kind of token squaw, apparently,’ Pamela said. ‘At least it keeps them quiet. It’s like a miracle. It goes rather well with the Indian summer we’re having.’

‘Six boys in one house,’ Pamela said. ‘Thank God the school term’s started. Boys never flag, you have to keep them busy all the time. I suppose this is a flying visit?’

‘’Fraid so.’

A precious Saturday to herself that she had sacrificed for the sake of seeing Pammy and the boys. She found Pamela drained whereas Sylvie seemed animated by the war. She had become an unlikely stalwart of the WVS.

‘I’m surprised. She doesn’t like other women much,’ Pamela said.

Sylvie now had a large flock of chickens and had stepped up egg production to wartime levels. ‘The poor things are forced to lay day and night,’ Pamela said, ‘you’d think Mother was running an armaments factory.’ Ursula wasn’t sure how you could make a chicken do overtime. ‘She talks them into it,’ Pamela laughed. ‘A regular henwife.’

Ursula didn’t mention that she had been called to an incident, a house that had been hit, where the occupants had chickens in a makeshift run in the back yard and that when they arrived they had found the chickens, nearly all of them alive, with their feathers blown off. ‘Ready-plucked,’ Mr Bullock had laughed callously. Ursula had seen people with their clothes blown off and trees in the middle of summer stripped of all their leaves, but she didn’t mention these things either. She didn’t mention wading in effluent from ruptured pipes, certainly didn’t mention drowning in that same effluent. Nor did she mention the gruesome sensation of putting your hand on a man’s chest and finding that your hand had somehow slipped inside that chest. (Dead – something to be thankful for, she supposed.)

Did Harold tell Pamela the things he had seen? Ursula didn’t ask, even introducing the topic seemed wrong on such a pleasant day. She thought of all those soldiers from the last war who had come home and never spoken of what they had witnessed in the trenches. Mr Simms, Mr Palmer, her own father too, of course.

Sylvie’s egg production seemed to be at the heart of some kind of rural black market. No one in the village was particularly short of anything. ‘It’s a barter economy around here,’ Pamela said. ‘And barter they do, believe me. That’s what she’ll be doing now, at the front door.’

‘At least you’re pretty safe here,’ Ursula said. Were they? She thought of the UXB Hugh had gone to look at. Or the previous week when a bomb had come down in a field belonging to the Hall farm and blown the cows in it to pieces. ‘A lot of people have been quietly eating beef around here,’ Pamela said. ‘Us included, I’m happy to say.’ Sylvie seemed to think this ‘terrible episode’ had put them on a par with London’s suffering. She had returned now and lit up a cigarette rather than finish her food. Ursula ate what she had left on her plate while Pamela took one of Sylvie’s cigarettes from the packet and lit up.

Bridget came out and started clearing plates and Ursula jumped up and said, ‘Oh, no, I’ll do that.’ Pamela and Sylvie remained at the table, smoking in silence, observing the defence of the wigwam from a raiding party of evacuees. Ursula felt rather badly done by. Both Sylvie and Pamela spoke as if they had it hard whereas she was working all day, out on patrol most nights, facing the most awful sights. Only yesterday they had been at an incident where they had worked to free someone while blood dripped on their heads from a body up in the bedroom they couldn’t reach because the staircase was knee-deep in broken glass from a huge skylight.

‘I’m thinking of going back to Ireland,’ Bridget said as they rinsed plates. ‘I have never felt at home in this country.’

‘Neither have I,’ Ursula said.

The apple charlotte turned out to be simply stewed apples as Sylvie refused to use precious stale bread on a pudding when it could be fed more usefully to the chickens. Nothing went to waste at Fox Corner. Scraps went to the chickens (‘She’s thinking of getting a pig,’ Hugh said in despair), after bones had made stock they were sent for salvage, as was every last tin and glass jar that wasn’t being filled with jam or chutney or beans or tomatoes. All the books in the house had been parcelled up and taken to the post office to be sent off to the services. ‘We’ve already read them,’ Sylvie said, ‘so what’s the point in keeping them?’

Hugh returned and Bridget grumbled back outside with a plate for him.

‘Oh,’ Sylvie said politely to him, ‘do you live here? I say, why don’t you join us?’

‘Really, Sylvie,’ Hugh said, more sharply than was his usual manner. ‘You can be such a child.’

‘If I am then it’s marriage that’s made me so,’ Sylvie said.

‘I remember that you once said there was no higher calling for a woman than marriage,’ Hugh said.

‘Did I? That must have been in our salad days.’

Pamela raised her eyebrows at Ursula and Ursula wondered when had their parents become so openly quarrelsome? Ursula was going to ask him about the bomb but then, ‘How’s Millie?’ Pamela asked brightly to change the subject.

‘She’s well,’ Ursula said. ‘She’s a very easy-going person to share digs with. Although I hardly ever see her in Phillimore Gardens. She’s joined ENSA. She’s in some kind of troupe that goes round factories, entertaining workers in their lunch hour.’

‘Poor blighters,’ Hugh laughed.

‘With Shakespeare?’ Sylvie asked doubtfully.

‘I think she turns her hand to anything these days. A bit of singing, comedy, you know.’ Sylvie didn’t look as if she did.

‘I have a young man,’ Ursula blurted out, catching them all unawares, including herself. It was more to lighten the conversation than anything. She should have known better really.

He was called Ralph. He lived in Holborn and he was a new friend, a ‘pal’, that she had met at her German class. He had been an architect before the war and Ursula supposed he would be an architect afterwards too. If anyone was still alive, of course. (Could London be erased, like Knossos or Pompeii? The Cretans and the Romans probably went around saying, ‘We can take it,’ in the heart of disaster.) Ralph was full of ideas for the rebuilding of the slums as modern towers. ‘A city for the people’, he said, one that would ‘rise from the ashes of the old like a phoenix, modernist to the core’.

‘What an iconoclast he sounds,’ Pamela said.

‘He’s not nostalgic in the way we are.’

‘Are we? Nostalgic?’

‘Yes,’ Ursula said. ‘Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed. We imagine an Arcadia in the past, Ralph sees it in the future. Both equally unreal, of course.’

‘Cloud-capped palaces?’

‘Something like that.’

‘But you like him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you … you know?’

‘Really! What kind of a question is that?’ Ursula laughed. (Sylvie was at the door again, Hugh was sitting cross-legged on the lawn pretending to be Big Chief Running Bull.)

‘It’s a very good question,’ Pamela said.

They hadn’t, as it happened. Perhaps if he were more ardent. She thought of Crighton. ‘And anyway there is so little time for …’

‘Sex?’ Pamela said.

‘Well, I was going to say courtship, but yes, sex.’ Sylvie had returned and was trying to separate the warring factions on the lawn. The evacuees made very unsportsmanlike enemies. Hugh was tied up now with an old washing line. ‘Help!’ he mouthed to Ursula but he was grinning like a schoolboy. It was nice to see him happy.

Before the war her wooing by Ralph (or his by her, perhaps) might have taken the form of dances, the cinema, cosy dinners à deux but now, more often than not, they had found themselves at bombsites, like sightseers viewing ancient ruins. The view from the top deck of the number eleven bus was particularly good for this, they had discovered.

It was perhaps due more to a kink in their respective characters than the war itself. After all, other couples managed to keep up the rituals.

They had ‘visited’ the Duveen Gallery at the British Museum, Hammonds next to the National Gallery, the huge crater at the Bank, so big that they had to build a temporary bridge across it. John Lewis, still smouldering when they arrived, the blackened mannequins from the shop windows strewn across the pavement, their clothes ripped off.

‘Do you think we’re like ghouls?’ Ralph asked and Ursula said, ‘No, we are witnesses.’ She supposed she would go to bed with him eventually. There was no great argument to be found against it.

Bridget came out with tea and cake and Pamela said, ‘I think I’d better untie Daddy.’

‘Have a drink,’ Hugh said, pouring her a tumbler of malt from the cut-glass decanter that he kept in the growlery. ‘I find myself in here more and more these days,’ he said. ‘It’s the only place I can get peace. Dogs and evacuees strictly barred. I worry about you, you know,’ he added.

‘I worry about me too.’

‘Is it bloody?’

‘Dreadfully. But I believe it’s the right thing. I think we are doing the right thing.’

‘A just war? You know the Coles still have most of their family in Europe. Mr Cole has told me some dreadful things, things that are happening to the Jews. I don’t think anyone here really wants to know. Anyway,’ he said, raising his glass and trying for a cheerful note, ‘down the hatch. Here’s to the end.’

It was dark when she left and Hugh walked her down the lane to the station.

‘No petrol, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘you should have gone earlier,’ he added ruefully. He had a stout torch and there was no one to yell at him to put the light out. ‘I hardly think I’m going to guide in a Heinkel,’ he said. Ursula told him how most rescue squads had an almost superstitious horror of lights even when they were in the middle of a raid, surrounded by burning buildings and incendiaries and flares. As if a small torch beam would make any difference.

‘Knew a chap in the trenches,’ Hugh said, ‘lit a match, and Bob’s your uncle, a German sniper shot his head clean off. Good chap,’ he added reflectively, ‘name of Rogerson, same as the bakers in the village. No relation.’

‘You never talk about it,’ Ursula said.

‘I’m talking about it now,’ Hugh said. ‘Let it be a lesson to you, keep your head below the parapet and your light beneath a bushel.’

‘I know you don’t mean that. Not really.’

‘I do. I’d rather you were a coward than dead, little bear. Teddy and Jimmy too.’

‘You don’t mean that either.’

‘I do. Here we are, it’s so dark you could walk right by the station and never see it. I doubt that your train will be on time, if there is a train at all. Oh, look, here’s Fred. Evening, Fred.’

‘Mr Todd, Miss Todd. So you know, this is the last train tonight,’ Fred Smith said. Fred had long since graduated from fireman to driver.

‘It’s not really a train,’ Ursula said, bemused. There was an engine but no carriages.

Fred looked back along the platform to where the carriages should have been, as if he’d forgotten their absence. ‘Ah, yes, well,’ he said, ‘last time they were seen they were hanging off Waterloo Bridge. It’s a long story,’ he added, clearly unwilling to elaborate. Ursula was puzzled as to why the engine should be here sans carriages but Fred looked rather grim.

‘I won’t get home tonight then,’ Ursula said.

‘Well,’ Fred said, ‘I’ve got to get this engine back up to town and I’ve got a head of steam up and I’ve got a fireman, old Willie here, so if you want to hop up on the footplate, Miss Todd, I think we can get you back.’

‘Really?’ Ursula said.

‘It won’t be as clean as riding on the cushions, but if you’re game?’

‘I certainly am.’

The engine was impatient to go so she gave Hugh a quick hug and said, ‘See you soon,’ and climbed the steps up to the footplate where she took up her perch on the fireman’s seat.

‘You will take care, little bear, won’t you?’ Hugh said. ‘In London?’ He had to raise his voice above the sound of hissing steam. ‘Promise me?’

‘I promise,’ she shouted. ‘See you later!’

She twisted round, trying to see him on the dark platform as the train chugged off. She felt a sudden stab of guilt, she had played a rowdy game of hide-and-seek with the boys after supper. Instead she should, as Hugh said, have left when it was still light. Now Hugh would have to walk back in the dark alone along the lane. (She thought suddenly of poor little Angela, all those years ago.) Hugh quickly disappeared into the dark and smoke.

‘Well, this is exciting,’ she said to Fred. It didn’t cross her mind that she would never see her father again.

Exciting, it was true, but also somewhat terrifying. The engine was a great metal beast roaring through the dark, the raw power of the machine come to life. It shook and rocked as if it were trying to dislodge her from its insides. Ursula had never previously thought about what went on in the cab of an engine. She had imagined, if she had imagined it at all, a relatively serene place – the driver alert to the track ahead, the fireman cheerfully shovelling coal. But instead there was non-stop activity, a continual conferring between fireman and driver over gradients and pressure, the frantic shovelling or the sudden closing down, the continual rackety noise, the almost unbearable heat of the furnace, the filthy soot from the tunnels that didn’t seem to be kept out by the metal plates that had been put up to prevent light escaping from the cab. It was so hot! ‘Hotter than hell,’ Fred said.

Despite the wartime speed restrictions they seemed to be travelling at least twice as fast as when she travelled in a carriage (‘on the cushions’, she thought, she must remember that for Teddy who, despite now being a pilot, still harboured his childhood desire to be a train driver).

As they approached London they could see fires in the east and hear the distant pealing of guns but as they neared the marshalling yards and engine sheds it became almost eerily quiet. They slowed to a halt and all was suddenly, thankfully, peaceful.

Fred helped her down from the cab. ‘There you go, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Home sweet home. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.’ He looked suddenly doubtful. ‘I would walk you home but we have to put this engine to bed. Will you be all right from here?’ They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, just tracks and points and the looming shadows of engines. ‘There’s a bomb at Marylebone. We’re at the back of King’s Cross,’ Fred said, reading her mind. ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’ He switched on the weakest of torches, it illuminated only a foot or so in front of them. ‘Have to be careful,’ he said, ‘we’re a prime target here.’

‘I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said, a little more gung-ho than she felt. ‘Don’t give me a second thought, and thank you. Good night, Fred.’ She set off resolutely and immediately tripped over a rail and gave a little cry of distress when she banged her knee hard on the sharp stones of the track.

‘Here, Miss Todd,’ Fred said, helping her up. ‘You’ll never find your way in the dark. Come on, I’ll walk you to the gates.’ He took her arm and set off, steering her as they went, for all the world as if they were on a Sunday stroll along the Embankment. She remembered how she had been rather sweet on Fred when she was younger. It would probably be quite easy to be sweet on him again, she reckoned.

They reached a big pair of wooden gates and he opened a small door set within them.

‘I think I know where I am,’ she said. She had no idea where she was but she didn’t want to inconvenience Fred any longer. ‘Well, thank you again, maybe I’ll see you next time I get down to Fox Corner.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I start in the AFS tomorrow. Plenty of old codgers like Willie can keep the trains running.’

‘Good for you,’ she said, although she was thinking how dangerous the fire service was.

It was the blackest blackout ever. She walked with a hand in front of her face and eventually bumped into a woman who told her where she was. They walked together for half a mile or so. After a few minutes on her own again she heard footsteps behind her and she said, ‘I’m here,’ so the owner of the feet didn’t walk into her. It was a man, no more than a figure in the dark who went with her as far as Hyde Park. Before the war you would never have dreamed of hooking arms with a complete stranger – particularly a man – but now the danger from the skies seemed so much greater than anything that could befall you from this odd intimacy.

She thought it must be nearly dawn when she got back to Phillimore Gardens but it was barely midnight. Millie, all dressed up, had just returned from an evening out. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘What happened to you? Did you get bombed?’

Ursula looked in the mirror and found that she was smudged all over with soot and coal dust. ‘What a fright,’ she said.

‘You look like a coalminer,’ Millie said.

‘More like an engine driver,’ she said, rapidly recounting the night’s adventures.

‘Oh,’ Millie said, ‘Fred Smith, the butcher’s boy. He was a bit of a dish.’

‘Still is, I suppose. I’ve got eggs from Fox Corner,’ she said, removing the cardboard box that Sylvie had given her from her bag. The eggs had been nestled in straw, but now they were cracked and broken from the jolting of the track or when she fell in the engine yard.

The next day they managed to make an omelette from the salvaged remains.

‘Lovely,’ Millie said. ‘You should get home more often.’