Life After Life (42 page)

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.