London Pride (52 page)

‘The warden,' Flossie said, irritated by the woman's voice and protecting her young with determination, ‘is upstairs asleep. She's been up twenty-four hours and twenty-four hours is enough.'

‘Quite,' the woman said. ‘I wouldn't worry her only they
told me at the post that she would be the one to know.'

‘Know what?' Flossie said, still belligerent.

‘Where I could find the key to number seven. There is no record of the tenants leaving the property but it does appear to be empty.'

Flossie walked out of the door into the street. ‘It'll be on the string I dare say,' she said. ‘That's where they always left it and they went off so quick I'll bet it's still there. Why do you want it?'

‘I have seventeen bombed-out families to house before nightfall,' the woman said. ‘That is an empty house, I believe. It is all quite in order, I assure you. I have authority from the owner.'

Flossie pulled the key through the letter box of number seven. ‘There you are,' she said. ‘What did I tell you? They went all of a sudden you see. Number three's empty too. It's for short lets. We have people in and out all the time but there's no one in it now. Have you got that on your list?'

‘Very good of you,' the woman said. ‘This is a terrible business. We all have to pull together in times like these.'

‘Who's that?' Mrs Geary said hobbling down the stairs as the woman walked down to number three.

‘She's a sort of housing officer, I think,' Flossie said. ‘'T any rate, we're to have a bombed-out family next door.'

‘Well I hope they don't bring any bugs with 'em, that's all,' Mrs Geary said. ‘We had a charity family put in when I was a nipper. Crawling alive they was. Hello, Joanie.'

The family moved in while Mrs Geary and the Furnivalls were eating their dinner, two dishevelled sisters and their seven children and a very old man who was called Gramps.

They'd come from the East End and they were still stunned from the horrors of the night they'd just endured. ‘There's nothink left of our street,' one of the women told Flossie. ‘One bleedin' bomb an' the ‘ole bleedin' lot fell over. Like a pack a' bleedin' cards they was. Jerry built see. No substance to 'em.'

‘Well you're all right here,' Flossie said. ‘Nothing fell on us.'

‘Like a pack a' bleedin' cards,' the woman said. ‘We got
nothink but the clothes on our backs. That an' the beddin' the WVS give us.'

‘Never mind,' Flossie said. ‘People'll rally round. You'll see. I got a couple a' chairs an' a spare teapot you could have. That'ud be something.'

Peggy was sitting by the fire with the cat on her lap, writing a letter to Jim, just to assure him that she was safe and well. Later she would write at length and tell him everything about the raid but for the moment a short note would have to suffice. ‘What are they like?' she asked when her mother came in for the teapot.

Flossie decided to be charitable. ‘All right I suppose,' she said. ‘I'm lending them a teapot and some chairs. They've lost everything. They're in ever such a mess, but I dare say they'll look better when they've had a wash. Only I hope they'll do it before they come in our shelter. It was smelly enough in there last night. Perhaps I ought to lend them a basin.'

‘We shan't have any more raids, shall we?' Baby asked, aghast at the idea.

‘Yes,' Peggy said shortly. ‘We shall.'

‘How many?'

‘I don't know. Ask Hitler.'

‘You're telling me lies,' Baby pouted. ‘I don't think he'll bomb us again. He couldn't be so beastly.'

But of course she was wrong. From then on the bombers arrived every single night, week after week, month after month. For the first fortnight there were short daylight raids too, but it was the blitz by night that did the most damage.

Nevertheless in the days after that first long raid, Londoners began to settle to their new existence. Fire watchers were appointed to keep a look-out for incendiaries, because they knew now that you had to douse those vicious little bombs as soon as you could after they fell. Rescue teams were organized, using unemployed building workers whose knowledge of the construction of their local houses gave them the edge when it came to estimating where survivors might be found. And after the rescue teams, gangs of salvage workers to remove what they could from the shops and stores that were damaged beyond
repair. And after the salvage workers, demolition teams to pull down walls that were standing but dangerous and to clear the roads.

Shops that had only had their windows blown out, boarded up the holes, hung defiant messages on the boards and opened the next day. The first ones merely said ‘Business as usual' but as the days and the raids passed the messages grew more witty. ‘More open than usual' some shops said, and the wrecked police station hung a sign on its now remaining door which said, ‘Be good – we're still open!' A barber wrote a long message to his customers ‘We've had our close shave – come in and get yours' and in one dress shop where there was no glass left in the window at all and the models stood tipsily askew in dresses that had been ripped to shreds, the owner expressed his feelings in a single word, written in letters three feet tall. ‘BLAST'.

There was a crazy gaiety about the place, a reckless determination. Life went on regardless of the mess and the lack of sleep. The trams ran as soon as the roads were cleared and their rails had been unbuckled, newspapers came out every morning no matter what sort of battering Fleet Street had taken the night before, Parliament sat, the Courts were at work, the police directed the traffic round wreckage that was being cleared and past streets that were closed because of unexploded bombs, typists sat in the streets in tin hats and typed their letters al fresco when their offices were mere piles of bricks.

One reason for the new mood was that those who had no stomach for the fight and the money to rent a house away from it, had packed up at once and left. ‘And good riddance to 'em,' Mrs Geary growled. ‘We don't want their sort here.' Many had their cats and dogs destroyed before they went. On Monday there were queues outside all the RSPCA clinics. ‘What a callous thing to do,' Peggy said, stroking Tom. ‘You'll take your chance with me, won't you, Tomkins?'

But the Londoners who remained were a different breed. The raids had begun, officialdom had been caught napping, so now they would make their own arrangements and look after themselves. Some went trekking every night
to sleep in the nearest piece of open country and return in time for work every morning. Greenwich Park was soon full of trekkers and so was Hampstead Heath. In the East End they stormed the tube stations and despite official disapproval forced an entrance to an obvious underground shelter. For many it was the only real home they would know all through the blitz, cold, damp, poorly-ventilated and without any sanitary arrangements at all except for a bucket or the tunnel, it was still better than facing the bombs above ground. And among the families that camped out in the underground were Flossie's next-door neighbours.

‘Can't stay 'ere, love,' the elder of the two sisters explained to Flossie, when she handed back the teapot and the chairs. ‘It's not we ain't grateful, because we are. You've been ever so good to us, all of yer, giving us a lend a' things an' everything. It's just it don't seem nat'ral down 'ere. It's too much in the open if you know what I mean. An' that shelter a' yours is bleedin' chronic'.

That was Mrs Geary's opinion too. She'd left her poor parrot at home and sat out the second night among her neighbours, but what with the noise of the raid and lack of sleep and anxiety about the bird, next morning she decided she'd had enough.

‘I shall sleep downstairs while this goes on,' she announced. ‘In the front room. We'll get a shutter ter go over the window to stop the glass. Polly can go in the cupboard under the stairs. He'll be safe enough there. Look how your cat goes under the stairs. Instinct, y' see. They always know the best sort a' places, animals.'

Flossie was none too pleased to have her front room requisitioned in this high handed way and for a few days relations between the two women were decidedly cool. But then the local papers let drop a little item of news about a street shelter sustaining a ‘direct hit, with many casualties.' Paradise Row was horribly alarmed.

‘Many casualties,' Mr Cooper said sitting outside his house in the September sunshine with the newspaper across his knees. ‘That means they were all killed, poor buggers.'

‘Stands ter reason they'd be killed,' Mrs Allnutt agreed.
‘If that roof was ter come down on yer, you'd all be squashed flat. Wouldn't stand an earthly.'

‘Well that's it!' Baby said when she brought the news back to number six. ‘If that's what's going to happen I'd rather be in my own bed when it does. At least I could get a bit a' sleep on me own bed. I can't stand much more of this sitting up all night. It's giving me bags under me eyes. Why don't we sleep downstairs like Mrs Geary?'

So they turned both the downstairs rooms into dormitories, and Mrs Geary got Mr Allnutt to make two wooden shutters for the windows, which were a surprisingly good fit, and although it was cramped and uncomfortable at least there was a lavvy out the back and they could make tea when they felt like it and the long vigil of the night raids seemed less scary in the comfort of the kitchen.

To Peggy out on the streets in the thick of it all, the raids were always full of danger and horror. No matter how many times she saw an injured person eased from the wreckage she never grew accustomed to it. And death was worse. She learned various tricks to allay her fear, keeping busy being quite the best of them, but the sight and smell of sudden death, particularly this sudden undeserved awful death, tore her to pieces every time.

Sometimes when the raid was over in the early morning and they were still technically on duty she and Mr MacFarlane would climb up to the top floor of the flats and look out over the city just to reassure themselves that it was still there. There was a vibrant quality about those early mornings, an extraordinary exhilaration, a sense of pure joy to be alive. Because they
were
still alive despite everything, and the bombers had gone, and the barrage balloons were shining pink and silver in the sunrise, and there was white frost sparkling on the pavements below them, and London, dear old dependable London, was still there, spread out before them like some huge patient prehistoric beast, tattered and wounded but still alive and much much too big to kill.

But there were other times when she felt so low after a long night among the injured that she had to retreat to the empty bedroom upstairs as soon as she got home and sit in her old chair by the window to weep out her distress,
usually into Tom's tabby fur, because whenever she was home the little cat followed her about all over the house.

‘It's a nightmare,' she wrote to Jim. ‘So many people killed. So many dreadful injuries. There was a kid last night with both legs gone. Couldn't have been more than thirteen. What sort of a life will he have now? He'll be like poor Mr Cooper. And a man with half his face cut away by flying glass. And a woman with her chest caved in and blood pouring out of her mouth. Oh dear, I'm sorry to burden you with all this when you've got enough on your plate, but I can't talk to Mum or Baby about it. They're both so nervy these days. Mum's drinking Sanatogen by the bucket load.'

‘Much good may it do her,' Jim wrote back. ‘Personally I've always thought it was pretty poisonous muck but there's no accounting for taste. Burden all you like, my lovely Tabby eyes. I wish I could get home to see you but you know what it's like. Last chance for Hitler to invade is around the end of the month. If he misses the tide, and he can't beat Fighter Command (and he
can't
beat Fighter Command, we're much too good for him) we shall be safe till the spring and perhaps they'll give me a spot of leave, and about time too!'

But there was no leave and no respite for any of them yet. The battle in the air continued with increasing ferocity as the Luftwaffe redoubled their efforts to ground the British planes and leave the skies clear for the invasion. And the newspapers reported the scores day by day, ‘Luftwaffe 62 – RAF 13', ‘Germans lose 73 planes – 28 of our aircraft are missing – 14 pilots safe', until the long daylight raid on 15 September.

It was a misty dawn, the grass sharp with dew, the trees shrouded and silent like the waiting planes, the light in the eastern sky echoing the colour of the smoke ribboning from a hundred early morning cigarettes as the airfield yawned to life. Breakfast was cooking. Ground crews were called. Pilots woke in their uncomfortable huts beside dispersal sheds all round the perimeter. A misty dawn.

Jim woke immediately as he always did, and got up immediately too, walking out of the grumbling fug of the hut into the freshness of open air, observing automatically that it bid fair to be a fine clear day and good flying weather. The mist was just beginning to clear, lifting like a stage gauze to reveal the rich peaceful colours of wet grass and autumn leaves, and as it rose the birds began to sing. It was so quiet outside the hut he could hear every single note of the chorus. Extraordinary to be listening to such joyful sounds on a day when there was bound to be a battle in the air. Extraordinary to be standing there, miles from home, miles from Peggy, waiting for the battle to begin.

Still, he thought, grinding out his cigarette against the wall, at least we're ready for 'em now. The squadron was at full strength, his flight was in tip-top condition, it was better odds.

Two of his oppos came yawning out of the hut, with their hair standing on end and their eyes still narrowed with sleep.