London Pride (51 page)

‘Have you asked the neighbours?' Peggy said taking off her tin hat.

‘No. I came straight home as soon as they let us out. We had to stay in the cellar for ages. There were firebombs in the road and Mr Jones said …'

‘Put the potatoes on,' Peggy said, wearily, ‘and I'll go and find her.' She was dog-tired and riven with pity, the face of that injured woman still filling her mind, but family was family. They had to be cared for too.

Mrs Geary was in the kitchen at number four, she and Polly and Mr Cooper, and she was so drunk she couldn't stand up.

‘Lil', drink,' she explained, trying to focus her eyes. ‘Keep ‘a pecker up.'

‘The Chief Warden says there'll be another raid tonight,' Peggy told Mr Cooper. ‘Will you take her to the shelter?'

‘Can't go to the shelter no more,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Won't take me parrot, so bugger 'em. That's what I say.'

‘We'll stay here, won't we mate?' Mr Cooper said, patting Mrs Geary's limp hand.

Peggy was too tired to argue with them. ‘Well go under the stairs then,' she advised. ‘It's going to be a rough night.'

It was rougher than any of them could possibly have imagined.

As soon as she'd eaten Baby's badly-cooked chop, Peggy fell asleep in her chair with her poor cat purring
with relief on her lap, but tired though she was she went back to the wardens' post when they sounded the siren. She wasn't supposed to be on duty until the morning but she felt she ought to help. And besides, she wanted to be out in the open air, up and out and with something to do, not cramped in a shelter, waiting and not knowing.

The docks were still burning, dear God, and the smoke cloud was now thousands of feet high, more black than grey and full of red sparks. But far far worse than the smoke was the sight and sound of the fire beneath it, which roared into the sky in a massive wall of flames, red, lurid, seething and infinitely terrible, and stretching as far as she could see. All that fuss about black-out, she thought, and now London itself had become one great burning torch to guide the bombers to their target. How could they miss? She could hear timber crackling and roaring over in the Surrey Docks as she cycled down to the post, and she could smell it too, like some overpowering bonfire. There were so many smells, burning rubber, burning leather, burning paper and mixed among them, a sweet treacly smell that was probably burning sugar. What a wicked waste!

‘It's all the way from Beckton gasworks to Bermondsey,' Mr Goodall told her when she arrived at the post. ‘Ten miles long. There's ships on fire in the Millwall Docks. Never seen nothing like it. They've got fire engines from all over London. Ten miles from end to end.'

Then it must be in Deptford too, Peggy thought, her heart shrinking, it must be where Joan and the kids are. But there wasn't time to think any further because the ack-ack started up and they could hear the bombers approaching in the darkness beyond the fire and presently one of the wardens came running in to the post with news of a clutch of incendiaries down by the river.

‘Stirrup pumps,' Mr Goodall said. And they were off.

It felt horribly exposed out there in the streets with no sandbags to protect them and only their tin hats between them and the shrapnel that was now falling in white-hot fragments into the road. If a bomb falls what shall we do? she wondered. There was nowhere to take cover except doorways and precious few of them, for as she now realized,
most of the houses in their area had no front gardens and no porches.

And as if to show her what they would do, she heard the descending swoosh of a falling bomb at that moment. They were all flat on their faces in the road in an instant and they stayed there until the explosion had roared into the air around them and the shock waves had rippled the road beneath them and the debris had finished falling.

‘Where was it?' Mr MacFarlane said as they got up again, dusting themselves down and adjusting their helmets.

It had been quite a long way away. And yet it had sounded so close. ‘You stay here and deal with those,' Mr Goodall said. ‘I'll go and see what's what.'

There were six small blue fires burning like fireworks in the middle of the road just ahead of them.

‘Sandbag 'em,' Mr Goodall said, jerking his head towards the usual pile of sandbags sagging in front of the entrance to a street shelter. Then he ran off in the direction of the bomb.

It was quick and easy to douse the fires, to Peggy's relief, because the cobbles hadn't allowed them to take hold and the bags smothered them completely, but the next part of the operation wasn't easy at all. An incendiary had fallen through the roof of an empty three-storey house nearby. They could see yellow flames licking out between the roof tiles, and by the time they'd broken in and run up six flights of stairs, the attic was well alight, the flames raw and alarming in the cramped darkness of that little sloping room. Peggy was filled with panic at the sight. They must put it out, and quickly too, before the Germans saw it and used it as a target for another bomb.

‘I'll work the pump,' she said to Mr MacFarlane, ‘you get the water. Only hurry.' In their slopping run up the stairs more than half the water in her bucket had been spilled.

It was very hard work. The plunger in the stirrup pump had to be pushed up and down at an exhausting speed. After the fourth bucket Peggy's arms were aching and she was completely out of breath, and what was worse, the fire seemed as strong as ever despite all the water they'd
thrown on it. Fortunately two more pumps arrived just as she and Mr MacFarlane were giving up hope and between them they finally managed to get their ‘incident' under control. There was a gaping hole in the roof, the timbers were burnt black, they were all soaking wet and covered in smuts, but the fire was beaten.

Now that the flames were gone there was no light in the attic except for the red glow from the patch of sky they could see through the roof and the small white beams of their inadequate torches.

‘Och, Peggy Furnivall,' Mr MacFarlane said swinging his torch towards her, ‘you look like a nigger minstrel.'

Peggy took off her tin helmet and wiped the dirt and sweat from her forehead. Her face felt as though it had been covered in hot oil. ‘Now what?' she said.

‘Back to the post, mebbe?'

It was quite a relief to be inside in the familiar order of their familiar headquarters, back to where life was normal, or as near normal as it could be with the noise of the raid still going on above them.

‘I wonder where Mr Goodall got to,' Peggy said. And where
that
bomb fell. And who was hurt.

They had time for a quick wash, a mug of tea and a cigarette before Mr Goodall came back and settled down to write his report of their two incidents. But he had no time to tell them about
his
incident because even before he'd started his mug of tea there was a rattling clatter like somebody dropping a tray full of tins out of the sky. It turned out to be another basket of incendiary bombs, scattered over an even wider area and with even more fires. But this time they knew what they were doing. They were beginning to learn how to tackle a fire, working in from the edges, dampening steadily. There was less panic and more order. And in a peculiar way they were even getting used to the raid itself. Having so much to do kept your mind off the horrors.

Even when they were called to a fire in a tenement crowded with people, they managed to cope, working in two teams, one to evacuate the tenants to a nearby church hall, the others to fight the fire until the AFS arrived. But as they ran from the tenement to the church hall shepherding
half a dozen terrified children before them, ‘Quick! Quick! Never mind your shoe. Leave it', Peggy heard a new sound that made the hair rise on the nape of her neck.

Gunfire? Surely not. And yet the rattle was unmistakable. Had they come up the river with their damned invasion barges?

‘It's the Royal Arsenal,' one of the firemen told her, shouting above the din. ‘Terrible it is. Out a' control they reckon. We been there hours. I never seen nothing like it. They got fireboats out on the river with shells all bursting round 'em. Like a battle.'

It isn't
like
a battle, Peggy thought grimly. It
is
a battle. And we're the troops. The citizen army, that's who we are. And if Hitler thinks he can grind us down he's got another think coming. Anger against the wanton destruction of her city had been rising in her all day and all night. Now she recognized it for what it was and welcomed it, because it was strong and passionate and damped down her fear. Damn him, she thought furiously. He needn't think he can beat us.

On that first awful night of the blitz the bombers stayed overhead until dawn. When the all-clear finally sounded Peggy was so tired she hardly knew what she was doing. She walked home to Paradise Row through the smoke and dust like an old woman, her back bent, her eyes bloodshot, covered in filth from her tin hat to her boots, and fearful of what she would find. And there was Paradise Row, still dark because there was so little daylight filtering through the smoke, but miraculously intact, not a door off its hinges, not a window broken, not a brick out of place. She stumbled in through the door limp with fatigue and relief.

Flossie was sprawled in her chair beside the kitchen fire wearing the martyred expression that showed she was in the middle of an attack of nerves. But when she opened her eyes and saw the state that Peggy was in, she was so shocked she sat up at once, nerves forgotten.

‘Good God alive, girl,' she said. ‘What
have
you been doing?'

Peggy was too tired to tell her. She flopped into the nearest chair and closed her eyes.

‘Put the kettle on,' Flossie said to Baby. ‘We'll make a cup of tea and then we'll get that boiler lit. You need a bath.'

‘Where's my poor Tom?' Peggy said.

‘Under the stairs,' Baby told her, filling the kettle as well as she could with such a limited flow of water coming from the tap. ‘Hiding. He's been there all night. Wouldn't
come out for us. He might if you called him.'

But it wasn't until the tin bath had been carried in from the garden and set before the fire with a clothes-horse draped with towels to serve as a screen, and Flossie had washed her daughter as if she was a little girl and helped her into a clean nightgown, that the terrified cat answered her call.

‘Take him up to bed with you,' Flossie said. ‘He'll be company. We'll have dinner late today. I'll give you a shout when it's ready.'

So Peggy and Tom went to bed, and Peggy was asleep before her head was settled on the pillow.

‘I'm tired too,' Baby pouted, when Flossie came downstairs again.

‘Not like that you're not,' her mother said, quite sternly. ‘I don't know what they think they've been doing to her. You get and peel those potatoes.'

The dinner was nearly cooked when Joan and the children arrived in Paradise Row. They'd walked best part of the way because the roads were in such a mess.

‘There's all bricks and planks and bits of houses everywhere,' Yvonne told her grandmother. ‘We had to climb over it.'

Norman was clutching his trophy from the night, a large jagged piece of shrapnel. ‘There's bits all over everywhere,' he said importantly, ‘an' you have to watch your step for broken glass.' He'd learnt that from his trek, if nothing else. ‘I brought my gingerbread man.'

‘What a night!' Joan said. ‘It was terrible up our way. The printing ink factory burned right down. You know, Gilbey's printing ink. You should ha' smelled it. There's nothing left of it this morning. And the Delta Metal works is still smouldering and they got the Royal Arsenal. It's a wonder we weren't all killed. I dread to think what Sid would say if he knew. He still thinks they're in the country.'

‘Ain't you told him yet?' Baby said.

‘What the eye don't see the heart can't grieve over,' Flossie said. ‘Much better not to tell him. Where's the good upsetting the poor man? He's got enough to contend with in a prison camp.'

‘Where's Peggy?' Joan asked.

‘Sleeping it off,' Flossie said, making a warning grimace to show that she shouldn't be disturbed. ‘She was up all night. Come home like a ghost at eight o'clock. I've put her straight to bed.'

‘Did you go to the shelter?' Joan asked.

‘Yes, we did,' Baby said, ‘and I wish we hadn't. It was absolutely foul. The hurricane lamp kept going out. You can't imagine how foul it is listening to bombs falling on you in the pitch dark.'

‘The bombs didn't fall on
you
though, did they?' Joan said. ‘You ain't even lost any windows. You should see ours.'

‘We stayed downstairs in the bakery office all night,' Yvonne told them, full of the importance of it. ‘We stayed in the office while they baked the bread. All night. Mr Rudney said he was buggered if he was going to let Hitler stop the bread.' She was delighted to be able to report such open swearing.

‘Language,' Joan rebuked mildly.

‘That's what he said, Mum. I heard him.'

‘Well maybe you did, but
you
mustn't say it. Where's Mrs Geary?'

‘Upstairs,' Flossie said, making her most disapproving face. ‘She's got a hangover. And serve her jolly well right.'

‘Good heavens!' Joan said, preparing herself to enjoy a scandalous tale.

And someone rang at the doorbell.

‘It's open!' Flossie called, expecting one of the neighbours. ‘Push.'

But the woman at the door was a stranger wearing the green uniform of a member of the WVS.

‘You don't happen to know where I could find the warden, do you?' she asked. She spoke in the plummy tones of the upper class although her face looked pleasant enough.