Life after life

October 1940

‘IT’S CERTAINLY BUSY tonight,’ Miss Woolf said. A glorious understatement. There was a full-scale raid in progress, bombers droning overhead, glinting occasionally when they caught a searchlight. HE bombs flashed and roared and the large batteries banged and whuffed and cracked – all the usual racket. Shells whistled or screamed on their way up, a mile a second until they winked and twinkled like stars before extinguishing themselves. Fragments came clattering down. (A few days ago Mr Simms’s cousin had been killed by shrapnel from the ack-acks in Hyde Park. ‘Shame to be killed by your own,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘Sort of pointless.’) A red glow over Holborn indicated an oil bomb. Ralph lived in Holborn but Ursula supposed on a night like this he would be in St Paul’s.

‘It’s almost like a painting, isn’t it?’ Miss Woolf said.

‘Of the Apocalypse maybe,’ Ursula said. Against the backdrop of black night the fires that had been started burnt in a huge variety of colours – scarlet and gold and orange, indigo and a sickly lemon. Occasionally vivid greens and blues would shoot up where something chemical had caught fire. Orange flames and thick black smoke roiled out of a warehouse. ‘It gives one a quite different perspective, doesn’t it?’ Miss Woolf mused. It did. It seemed both grand and terrible compared to their own grubby little labours. ‘It makes me proud,’ Mr Simms said quietly. ‘Our battling on like this, I mean. All alone.’

‘And against all odds,’ Miss Woolf sighed.

They could see all the way along the Thames. Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element. They were on the roof of Shell-Mex House. The building was now occupied by the Ministry of Supply, for which Mr Simms worked, and he had invited Ursula and Miss Woolf to come and ‘see the view from the top’.

‘It’s spectacular, isn’t it? Savage and yet strangely magnificent,’ Mr Simms said, as though they were at the summit of one of the Lakeland fells rather than a building on the Strand in the middle of a raid.

‘Well, I don’t know about magnificent, exactly,’ Miss Woolf said.

‘Churchill was up here the other night,’ Mr Simms said. ‘Such a good vantage point. He was fascinated.’

Later, when Ursula and Miss Woolf were alone, Miss Woolf said, ‘You know, I rather had the impression that Mr Simms was a lowly clerk in the ministry, he’s quite a meek soul, but he must be quite senior to have been up on the roof with Churchill.’ (One of the firewatchers on duty on the roof had said, ‘Evening, Mr Simms,’ with the kind of respect people felt obliged to afford to Maurice, although in the case of Mr Simms it was less grudgingly given.) ‘He’s unassuming,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘I like that in a man.’ Whereas I prefer assuming, Ursula thought.

‘It really is quite a show,’ Miss Woolf said.

‘Isn’t it, though?’ Mr Simms said enthusiastically. Ursula supposed that they were all aware how odd it was to be admiring the ‘show’ when they were so painfully conscious of what it meant on the ground.

‘It’s as if the gods are throwing a particularly noisy party,’ Mr Simms said.

‘One I would rather not be invited to,’ Miss Woolf said.

A familiar fearful swishing sound made them all duck for cover but the bombs exploded some way away and although they heard the explosions bang-bang-bang-bang they couldn’t see what had been hit. Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men. Although she would make an exception for Hitler. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I think the man is quite, quite mad.’

At that moment, to their surprise, a basket of incendiaries came swooping down and crashed its noisy load right on the ministry’s roof. The incendiaries cracked and sparked and the two firewatchers ran towards them with a stirrup pump. Miss Woolf grabbed a bucket of sand and beat them to it. (‘Fast for an old bird’ was Mr Bullock’s estimation of Miss Woolf under pressure.)

‘What if this were the world’s last night?’ a familiar voice said.

‘Ah, Mr Durkin, you managed to join us,’ Mr Simms said affably. ‘You didn’t have any trouble with the man on the door?’

‘No, no, he knew I was expected,’ Mr Durkin said, as if feeling his own importance.

‘Is anyone left at the post?’ Miss Woolf murmured to no one in particular.

Ursula felt suddenly compelled to correct Mr Durkin. ‘What if this present were the world’s last night,’ she said. ‘The word “present” makes all the difference, don’t you think? It makes it seem as if one’s somehow in the thick of it, which we are, rather than simply contemplating a theoretical concept. This is it, the end right now, no more shilly-shallying.’

‘Goodness, so much fuss over one little word,’ Mr Durkin said, sounding put out. ‘However, I obviously stand corrected.’ Ursula thought that one word could mean a great deal. If any poet was scrupulous with words then it was surely Donne. Donne, himself once the dean of St Paul’s, had been moved down to an ignominious berth in the basement of the cathedral. In death he had survived the Great Fire of London, would he survive this one too? Wellington’s tomb was too hefty to move and had simply been bricked up. Ralph had given her a tour – he was on the night watch there. He knew everything there was to know about the cathedral. Not quite the iconoclast that Pamela had presumed.

When they emerged into the bright afternoon, he said, ‘Shall we try and get a cup of tea somewhere?’ and Ursula said, ‘No, let’s go back to your place in Holborn and go to bed with each other.’ So they had and she had felt rotten because she couldn’t help thinking about Crighton while Ralph was politely accommodating his body to hers. Afterwards, he had seemed abashed as if he no longer knew how to be with her. She said, ‘I’m just the same person as I was before we did this,’ and he said, ‘I’m not sure I am.’ And she thought, oh dear God, he’s a virgin, but he laughed and said, no, no, that wasn’t it – he wasn’t – it was just that he was so very much in love with her ‘and now I feel, I don’t know … sublimated’.

‘Sublimated?’ Millie said. ‘Sounds like sentimental twaddle to me. He has you on a pedestal, heaven help him when he discovers that you have feet of clay.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Is that a mixed metaphor or is it a rather clever image?’ Millie, of course had always—

‘Miss Todd?’

‘Sorry. Miles away.’

‘We should get back to our sector,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘It’s strange, but one feels rather safe up here.’

‘I’m sure we’re not,’ Ursula said. She was right, for a few days later Shell-Mex House was badly hit by a bomb.

She was keeping watch with Miss Woolf in her flat. Sitting at her big corner window they drank tea and ate biscuits and could have been any two women spending the evening together if it hadn’t been for the tolling thunder of the barrage. Ursula learned that Miss Woolf’s name was Dorcas (which she had never liked) and that her fiancé (Richard) had died in the Great War. ‘I still call it that,’ she said, ‘and yet this one is the greater. At least this time we have right on our side, I hope.’ Miss Woolf believed in the war but her religious faith had begun to ‘crumble’ since the start of the bombing. ‘Yet we must hold fast to what is good and true. But it all seems so random. One wonders about the divine plan and so on.’

‘More of a shambles than a plan,’ Ursula agreed.

‘And the poor Germans, I doubt many of them are in favour of the war – of course one mustn’t say that in the hearing of people like Mr Bullock. But if we had lost the Great War and been burdened with great debt just as the world’s economy collapsed then perhaps we too would have been a tinderbox awaiting the strike of a flint – a Mosley or some such awful person. More tea, dear?’

‘I know,’ Ursula said, ‘but they are trying to kill us, you know,’ and as if to demonstrate this fact they heard the swish and wheee that heralded a bomb heading in their direction and flung themselves with remarkable speed behind the sofa. It seemed unlikely that it would be enough to save them and yet only two nights ago they had pulled a woman out, almost unscathed, from beneath an upturned settee in a house that was otherwise more or less destroyed.

The bomb shook the Staffordshire cow-creamers on Miss Woolf’s dresser but they agreed it had landed outside their section. They were both finely tuned to the bombs these days.

They were also both terribly down in spirits as Mr Palmer, the bank manager, had been killed when a delayed action bomb had detonated at an incident they were attending. The DA had blown him some distance and they found him half buried beneath an iron bedstead. He had lost his spectacles but looked relatively unharmed. ‘Can you feel a pulse,’ Miss Woolf said and Ursula puzzled as to why she was asking when Miss Woolf was much more capable of finding a pulse than she was, but then she realized that Miss Woolf was very upset. ‘It’s different when you know someone,’ she said, gently stroking Mr Palmer’s forehead. ‘I wonder where his spectacles are? He doesn’t look right without them, does he?’

Ursula couldn’t find a pulse. ‘Shall we move him?’ she said. She took his shoulders and Miss Woolf his ankles and Mr Palmer’s body came apart like a Christmas cracker.

‘I can put more hot water in the pot,’ Miss Woolf offered. To cheer her up Ursula told her stories about Jimmy and Teddy when they were boys. She didn’t bother with Maurice. Miss Woolf was very fond of children, her only regret in life was not having had any. ‘If Richard had lived, perhaps … but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One cannot step in the same river twice?’

‘More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be “You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”’

‘You’re such a bright young woman,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Don’t waste your life, will you? If you’re spared.’

Ursula had seen Jimmy a few weeks ago. He’d been on two days’ leave in London and had bedded down on their sofa in Kensington. ‘Your baby brother’s grown up all handsome,’ Millie said. Millie was inclined to think all men were handsome, one way or another. She suggested a night on the town and Jimmy readily agreed. He’d been shut up long enough, he said, ‘Time for some fun.’ Jimmy had always been good at fun. The night almost didn’t get started as there was a UXB on the Strand and they took refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel.

‘What?’ Millie said to Ursula when they had sat down.

‘What what?’

‘You’ve got that funny look on your face, the one you get when you’re trying to remember something.’

‘Or forget something,’ Jimmy offered.

‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ Ursula said. It had been nothing, just something fluttering and tugging at a memory. A silly thing – it always was – a kipper on a pantry shelf, a room with green linoleum, an old-fashioned hoop bowling silently along. Vaporous moments, impossible to hold on to.

Ursula repaired to the Ladies where she found a girl crying noisily and rather messily. She was heavily made up and her mascara was in runnels down her cheeks. Ursula had noticed her earlier having a drink with an older man – ‘rather slimy’ had been Millie’s verdict on him. The girl looked much younger close up. Ursula helped her to repair her make-up and mop up her tears but didn’t like to pry into the cause of them. ‘It’s Nicky,’ the girl offered up voluntarily, ‘he’s a bastard. Your young man looks lovely, fancy a foursome? I can get us in the Ritz, into the Rivoli Bar, I know a man on the door.’

‘Well,’ Ursula said doubtfully. ‘The young man’s my brother actually, and I don’t suppose—’

The girl gave her a rather sharp jab in the ribs and laughed. ‘Only joking. You two girls make the most of him, eh?’ She offered Ursula a cigarette which she declined. The girl had a gold cigarette case that looked valuable. ‘A gift,’ she said, catching Ursula looking at it. She snapped it shut and held it out for inspection. There was a fine engraving of a battleship on the front with the single word ‘Jutland’ beneath. If she were to open it up again she knew she would find the initials ‘A’ and ‘C’ intertwined on the inside of the lid, for ‘Alexander’ and ‘Crighton’. Instinctively, Ursula reached out a hand for it and the girl snatched it back, saying, ‘Anyway, must be getting back. I’m as right as rain now. You seem a good sort,’ she added, as if there had been a question over Ursula’s character. She stuck out her hand. ‘My name’s Renee by the way, in case we ever bump into each other again, although I doubt we inhabit the same endroits, as they say.’ Her French pronunciation was spot-on, how odd, Ursula thought. She took the proffered hand – hard and warm as if the girl were running a temperature – and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Ursula.’

The girl – Renee – gave herself one last look of approval in the mirror and said, ‘Au revoir then,’ and was off.

When Ursula went back into the coffee lounge Renee ignored her completely. ‘What a strange girl,’ she said to Millie.

‘Been making eyes at me all evening,’ Jimmy said.

‘Well, she’s barking up the wrong street there, darling, isn’t she?’ Millie said, batting her eyelashes at him, ridiculously theatrical.

‘Tree,’ Ursula said. ‘Barking up the wrong tree.’

They went drinking, a merry trio, in all kinds of strange haunts that Jimmy seemed to know about. Even Millie, a seasoned regular of the nightclub scene, professed surprise at some of the places they found themselves in.

‘Gosh,’ Millie said as they left a club in Orange Street to totter homeward, ‘that was different.’

‘A strange endroit,’ Ursula laughed. She was rather drunk. It was such an Izzie word that it was bizarre to hear it from the lips of the Renee girl.

‘Promise you won’t die,’ Ursula said to Jimmy as they groped blindly home.

‘Do my best,’ Jimmy said.