Fireweed (10 page)

I went up into the hallway, and brought down a handful of banisters, and sprinkled them with paraffin. We made a fire in the front room grate, and it drew beautifully, and the warmth and light it made were as welcome as summer. There was even a scuttle of dusty coal still standing beside the grate, with which we kept it going while we boiled a kettle on it. Then we pulled the armchairs up close to the warmth, and ate chunks of corned beef from a rusty tin, and drank cocoa made with hot water and dried milk, and lump-sugar, thick and comforting, and we drowsed there in blissful comfort.

When the fire began to die down, I got up and covered her with her blanket, and then curled up tightly in my chair under my own.

There was nothing to wake us the next morning; no light save a crack or two filtered round the shutters, and there were none of the disturbances as other sleepers woke and left. Julie woke me at last, pulling my blanket off me and letting the cold air sting me to life.

‘Help me make a fire, Bill, and I'll get you something to eat!

I rose and stretched. She lit the lamp and we looked around. It all looked dirty and cold.

‘I'll get some more wood,' I said.

In a little while we had a new fire going in the grate, and the kettle warming on it. I pulled a stool up to the windows, pushed down the top pane of the sash, and pulled away a broken slat in the shutter. The first one I tried let in a shower of pinkish dust, and I hastily jammed it back again; but higher up I managed to make a couple of slits which let in daylight. Then I went to the back room, opened the free shutter there, and opened the door between the two rooms.

The more light we had, the worse it all looked. It was incredibly filthy, with heavy deposits of white dust everywhere. The back room, where there was a usable window, looked pretty uninhabitable in every other way. I opened the door of the stove that warmed the oven, and the grate was choked with fallen brick and plaster. Not much hope of getting that going. And an icy draught blew under the broken back door. There was a huge damp patch on the ceiling, with the cracked plaster coming away, and dark wet marks on the floor beneath showed that the rain was coming through there heavily.

‘This doesn't look much use,' I said to Julie.

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm going to move all the things that are any use out of here into the other room, as soon as we've had some grub. Help me find something we can eat.'

We found a tin of dried eggs, and some biscuits in a tin. There was a green mould on the biscuits, but it brushed off, more or less. The dried eggs were pretty nasty, but then they always are. We made more cocoa without milk. The kettle got so hot on the fire that we had to lift it off with fire-tongs, and it scorched the cloth we put over the handle to lift it and pour it out, but the water inside wasn't really quite hot enough, and so lumps floated on the cocoa.

‘How far from here is Marco's?' I said, looking miserably at my plate. Still, however awful food tastes, it makes one feel stronger when it is safely tucked away.

‘Look, Julie,' I said, pushing my plate away. ‘It's two days since we did any work. We've got to keep earning money. I'm going back to the market. You coming too?'

‘There's a lot to do here,' she said. ‘Why have we got to keep on earning? Haven't we got any left?'

‘Yes, we've got lots left. But even lots won't last for ever. We ought to keep it for special things, and try to earn every day what we spend on food. Then it won't get less so fast. After all, when it's gone …' I left the thought unspoken.

‘All right, you go and earn some. You'd better leave me the rucksack money, because I'm going to need a primus stove. When shall I expect you back?'

I was disconcerted at being pushed off like this: I had wanted her to come too.

‘Will you be all right here by yourself?' I asked, hopefully.

‘Of course I will. I'll be too busy to worry. See you later.'

So off I went. As I went out through the shattered hallway, I saw the smoke from our fire, coming out of the first floor fireplace on the side wall, and drifting upwards. I wondered if it showed from the square enough to give us away. I crossed the square and looked back. But the smoke was so spread out by the time it rose above the façade of the house, that I thought one would only see it if one knew it was there, especially in the soft hazy weather of autumn. All the houses on our side of the square were gutted, and abandoned. We didn't have any neighbours. I was glad of that; I thought we had better try not to be seen.

It was a horrible day. A cutting north wind was blowing, and the stall keepers stamped their feet, and whistled into their upturned collars to keep warm. Money was short too, because nobody was shopping who didn't have to. I had a bit of trouble finding work, but Big Ben and Little Bert took me on for a couple of hours, mainly out of kindness, I think,

‘How's the girlfriend?' asked Little Bert.

‘Who? Oh, she's all right, thank you.'

‘Bit of all right. Wouldn't mind myself, if I weren't too old for her,' said Little Bert, winking at me.

When my couple of hours with them were up, I went off looking for something else. The stalls were no good; they weren't taking enough money to be ready to payout any. But in a side street I found a frail old boy trying to put bits of furniture from a bombed-out house onto a handcart, standing in the gutter.

‘A bob to do it for you, Guv,' I said. He looked at me thoughtfully, and sniffed. Then he painfully reached into his pocket, and brought out a handful of change, and turned it over, and muttered to himself, counting it. At last he said, ‘Done.' By that time I felt a real swine for taking anything, and so when he got his things loaded up, I trundled the handcart round into the next street for him, and helped him unload it into a neighbour's garden shed.

By this time I was famished, as well as cold, and I bought myself a twopenny-worth of chips from the fish and chip shop, just chips, to save money. After that I found a cold-looking newspaper vendor at the entrance to an Underground station, and I offered to mind his stall while he went off to lunch. It was a pretty late sort of lunch, but he said he'd be glad of it.

Newspapers were selling all right; the war was good for that sort of trade. There was an air-raid warning while I stood there, but people didn't take much notice of it. And when he came back it was nearly four o'clock, and I thought I'd call it a day.

I was dead tired when I scrambled down the stairs to our den, and opened the door to the front room. And after all this time I can still see in my mind's eye what I saw then when I opened the door, and remember the astonished pleasure it gave me. A fire was burning brightly in the grate, and the paraffin lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling. Everything was clean and neat. The table from the other room had been pulled through, and put in one corner, and spread with a green-and-white cloth. There were plates, and knives, and forks set out there, and a loaf of bread. Beside the fire, on the tiles inside the fender, stood a little primus stove, with a pan simmering on it. The warmth of the room reached out and embraced me, laced with a slight smell of methylated spirit from the stove.

Julie looked up from a book, and smiled as I came in. ‘Hullo, Bill,' she said. ‘I'll just put some more coal on the fire, and then I'll serve up your tea.' I don't think in my whole life till then I remember being made to feel welcome, coming home.

The coal scuttle was full, and she piled a generous shovelful onto the flames. Then she picked up that pan, and brought it to the table, and took off the lid. A delicious meaty smell filled the room. She poured out thick ladlefuls of stew, and set the plate before me.

Then she began to serve herself.

‘Julie, where did you get it all from?' I asked.

‘All what?' she said, defensively.

‘The meat. Meat is rationed. And the coal.'

‘The coal is all right. It's from the cellar. There's a door that goes under the front steps, and through into a cellar under the pavements. It was a bit blocked up, but not too much for me to clear, and there's quite a bit of coal there!

‘And what about the meat?'

She flushed. She picked up the pan, and turned away from me, taking it back to stand in the warm. ‘I found a ration book in one of the drawers there. They were all kept there, but one had slipped over the top of the drawer and fallen into the cupboard below. It must have got left when the others were taken. It's the cook's one. It's registered with a shop near here.'

‘Well, but …' I protested.

‘Well, we have to eat, don't we?' she said, tossing her hair back. ‘And it isn't stealing. I paid for it!'

‘It's someone else's ration.'

‘But we aren't eating ours. Someone has got our books.'

‘Oh, I suppose so,' I said, eating it readily enough. I didn't want to tell her what was really worrying me about it, which was that someone might check up. Perhaps the cook had got a new ration book, and someone might notice that she seemed to be drawing two rations. And if someone checked up … I hadn't a clue what would happen to us if we got found out. I supposed we must have broken a lot of regulations. I pushed the unwelcome thought away. But after all, it was for this, for her, that I had turned my back on Dad; and to lose it for a ration book …

When we had eaten we had to stand shivering in the kitchen to wash up, with a kettleful of hot water. And then we went back to our warm armchairs. There was a card-table, with cards in a little drawer over under the window, and we pulled it up by the fire, and raced each other at clock patience. Then we found a jigsaw, and did that. Cook seemed to have had a passion for them, for there were about a dozen of them in her cupboard. I remember the picture we were making was of Trafalgar Square. Pigeons flew through it everywhere, and all the pieces were covered in feathers, and were hard to get in the right places. That was a good evening. It was wonderful just to be warm; just to have a real chair to sit in, and to be somewhere quiet, somewhere private, by ourselves.

Really, it amazes me to remember how comfortable we made ourselves there. I can see it as a pool of warmth and safety, I suppose because the paraffin lamp made such a glowing, friendly sort of light. It glinted on the china when we ate, and made our faces look smooth and soft. For a little while the burden of worry lifted from my mind, and rolled away, and I realized just how oppressed and anxious I had been. We had now no need to fear the onset of winter; we had no need to stay out in all weathers. And I was learning a good deal about the markets; I had a plan to mend the axle of a broken cart I had seen lying in a derelict place, and set up in business on my own. Like all the other streetmongers I could buy from Covent Garden market in the morning, and sell at a profit in the street. Then I would really be paying our way, and we could cease to fear the ending of her money, and the disaster that would bring.

I was planning it in my mind as I sat and warmed my toes by the fire.

And it worked out fairly well. There were drawbacks to the den, of course. There was a risk that someone living on the other side of the square might see us, coming and going, or spot our smoke, and might report us in some way to the faceless ‘Them' of whom we were afraid. If I had known about street warden patrols I would have worried about them too. And food wasn't easy. We had to have lunch in a café, to save coupons, but there wasn't anywhere near enough to buy breakfast. Nearly everything was rationed, and one book wasn't enough for us. We ate a lot of bread, but we had pitifully little butter and marge to put on it. I remember breakfasts of one rasher of bacon, sizzled in a pan and shared between us, and five slices of bread apiece, wiped round the pan in chunks until the last smear of bacon fat had been eaten.

Another drawback was the raids. We could hear them much better on the surface. Instead of a distant thump or two, we could hear the crashing rumble of houses falling after the bangs. There was a warden's post just beyond the other side of the square, round the corner from the houses opposite, and we could hear motor bikes roar by, carrying messages, and hear the alarm bells of fire-engines and ambulances, hear people running and shouting outside.

But after the days we had just lived through, all drawbacks, all brief stabs of fear, were outweighed by a row of chestnuts roasting on the bars of our fire, and the feeling of wealth that having things that wouldn't go in a rucksack gave us. It was absurd, really, when the house above us was in such complete ruin, that all the things for cleaning and house-keeping in it were still safely stored away downstairs, but we found everything we needed. Julie washed our filthy clothes, and ironed them, and hung them on a clothes-horse round the fire to dry. We couldn't bathe there, but we found the Sunlight Soap van quite near us one morning, when the raids had been very near, and we got another bath from them.

I don't suppose it lasted much more than a week; at this distance of time I can only remember three evenings there. There was the jigsaw evening, and an evening when Julie had gone to Boot's Circulating Library, with Cook's ticket, and brought home books for us. She had chosen
The Master of Ballantrae
for me, because she knew I had brought
Kidnapped
away from home. Now I come to think of it, it must have taken me longer than one evening to read
The Master of Ballantrae
; but the bit I remember reading, with tingles of fear running down my spine, is the scene where they dig up his body in the moonlight, expecting him, hoping against hope for him to be still alive, and the Indian servant tried in vain to rouse him. I got to that bit late at night, when Julie was already asleep, and the fire had died right down to a mere smoulder, and the description of the pallor of death on the moonlit face gave me the creeps so badly that I found the sound of a raid outside almost a relief, since it took me out of the book and gave me something else to think about.