The Golden Virgin (58 page)

*

One of those streets had been opened out, and thither policemen and special constables, nurses, and ambulance men who had been waiting at police stations came hurrying; while in Randiswell fire station firemen were sliding down the polished steel pole through the holes in the floors of their quarters leading direct to their engine on the ground below. Brass helmets on heads, bell dashing its chimes into the flaming night, the engine roared down the High Street, to where men and women in nightshirts and nightgowns covered by coats, wearing slippers or bare-foot, were hurrying out of houses.

*

Special-Sergeant Richard Maddison was sitting in the gutter of Nightingale Grove, dazed. He had been walking down the road, looking for light-glints in one house after another, when he heard a high-pitched scream coming down aslant the High Street. The aerial torpedo struck a house and passed through it and continued on through the party wall of the next house and burst in a third house, blowing out the walls and causing the collapse of five houses altogether. Richard was caught in the blast which blew out windows and turned glass to dust, so that when he was helped to his feet he was white as with frost. When some people tried to help him away to hospital, he said, “Thank you, but it is my duty to attend to the injured,” for screams and cries for help were coming from the chaos of rubble and rafters and other things shattered and heaped
together. But he fell over, and was unable to get up for some minutes; his sight was dazed, the stench of powdered brick and mortar sickened him, he felt weak and thin. Then the fire-engine clanged up the road, and the firemen, together with others, began to pull and lift away the masses of broken masonry. Richard got upon his feet and helped.

From the first house was withdrawn a bed, doubled up by the explosion. In it lay a woman also doubled up, with a grey face; she appeared to be sleeping. She had been killed, it was said, instantly by shock. They they found the body of a young girl. Seeing her face in the light of a torch, Dr. Dashwood, who had hurried up the road from the Conservative Club, immediately knelt beside her, to listen through his stethoscope. When the onlookers saw him take off his bowler hat, they knew that Lily Cornford was dead. At least, they said, she had gone with her mother. It was then that Richard was seen to stumble and fall. He was taken, with the other cases of shock, to the Military Hospital.

When Phillip and Desmond arrived at Nightingale Grove they saw Dr. Dashwood standing alone, tears streaming down his face, as he looked at the ruin that had been the home of Lily. They set to work with others, to help get clear those whose voices were crying for help under the bricks.

The ambulance returned. Stretcher cases were taken away.

Soon afterwards a squad of elderly civilians, with G.R. armbands—known locally as the Gorgeous Wrecks, a punning reference to Georgius Rex—arrived, and a cordon was put round the damaged buildings. Phillip and Desmond went home.

They did not speak until Phillip called out good-night to Desmond as he put his key in the door. Then, hearing Mrs. Neville’s voice in the downstairs flat, he went in. Mrs. Neville was sitting with old Mrs. Tinkey and her daughter, by a table on which stood a candle and the bottle of brandy kept for an emergency. The bottle was open, and seeing his condition, dishevelled and covered with dust, Mrs. Neville said very quietly, “Thank God you are both all right. You’ve been doing rescue work, I can see that. Help yourself to some brandy. Even if Gran’pa does write you another letter, Phillip!”

When he had finished his tot she said, “Now, dear, I won’t ask you any questions, because your mother is expecting you. Doris came to ask if you were here, saying that Mavis has fallen unconscious, so I think you ought to go home at once.”

Mrs. Neville’s big face was calm, she felt herself to be all queenly dignity, as befitted the tragic circumstances of the night.

“You’ll let Desmond and me know if we can be of any help, won’t you, Phillip? I suppose you haven’t seen Father?”

“No, Mrs. Neville. Good night, Desmond.”

Doris came to the door. She said that when the sky had turned red, lighting up everything so terribly, Mavis had screamed “Mother! Mother!” and then given a kind of wail. Doris had leapt out of bed and run to her sister’s help. As she was hurrying down the passage she heard bumping sounds in the end bedroom. Then, said Doris, Mother came.

“In the light coming through the window we saw Mavis jerking about on the floor. Her eyes were glazed, and there was blood on her lips. She had bitten her tongue.” They had lifted Mavis on to her bed; she had awakened a moment, said, “Don’t leave me, Phillip,” then fallen into a deep sleep.

“She asked
me
not to leave her?”

“Yes. I heard it distinctly. She said, ‘Don’t leave me, Phillip’. Ask mother if you don’t believe me.”

Phillip was sitting in the kitchen when there was a ring of the front door bell. Mr. Jenkins had come to say the sergeant had been taken to hospital, suffering from concussion.

Phillip took charge. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Jenkins. Now don’t worry, Mother, I will look after Father. The raid is over. Have some hot milk ready to heat the moment I return, for Father. And water for a bottle, for his feet. And keep calm. No fuss, please.”

He ran most of the way to the hospital, and arrived as Father was about to leave. Father seemed surprised to see him, and said it was very good of him to have come down. He was all right, except for being deaf in one ear, and his head was still ringing with the explosion. His spectacles had saved him from flying glass; he had only just put them on, he explained, to look the more carefully for any light escaping past a blind, which might very well betray to the raiders that there was a target for their campaign of frightfulness.

“It was
awful,
Phillip!”

“Yes, Father, I quite understand. Don’t worry any more.”

“No, oh no. Of course this is all new to me. I suppose,” he said, “you have many times experienced the effects of bursting shells? Well, this one was an eye-opener to me, I can assure you! They tell me that a splinter no bigger than an acorn went right through a pillar box, and out the other side. However, retribution
has come, as no doubt you know, to one of the raiders, at least. Let us hope it is Mathy. You look very pale, Phillip. Are you sure you are all right?”

“Yes thank you, Father.”

Richard went to thank the matron. They walked through the yews of St. Mary’s churchyard.

“Well, this is a night we shall remember for the rest of our lives, Phillip!”

“Yes, Father.”

Mavis was in a deep sleep when they returned.

“She had some tripe for supper, at Nina’s, and it did not agree with her, Dickie. She was ill once before, after eating tripe. It was very foolish of her, but she won’t do it again.”

Richard remembered the time, nearly twenty-two years before, when his wife had had a similar collapse, after being knocked down by her father, when she was
enceinte
with Phillip, and the old man had found out about the secret marriage. That old tyrant next door had much to answer for, in his opinion.

“Well, I suppose she had better see Dr. Cave-Browne tomorrow. But why does she eat tripe, if it disagrees with her? It is beastly stuff, anyway.”

The doctor, in frock coat and silk hat, drove up Hillside Road in the morning, and advised rest, and a tonic. “It is purely functional,” he said. “She is highly strung, and should eat plenty of fresh vegetables. Cabbage is the stuff, but don’t throw away the so-called greens-water. And no more excitement, young woman. Learn to take life calmly. You’re always hurrying somewhere whenever I see you.” His hands were stained dark brown. He had been called out the night before, to help the bomb victims, and had used many handfuls of potassium permanganate on shattered flesh, to stop bleeding and infection. “Rough and ready treatment,” he said.

When the doctor had driven away, Hetty said to her son, in the privacy of the front room: “Try and be kind to Mavis, won’t you. She is your sister, after all. I wonder why you never liked her, from the earliest days you would not be reconciled. I remember when she was a tiny baby, in my arms, you tried to get her away from me. Then you once pushed her in the fire.”

“Did I? I don’t remember it, Mum. What a little swine I must have been.” He went up to his sister’s bedroom. “I’m sorry I have been so beastly to you, Mavis,” he said, and kissed her.

Afterwards he walked down to the High Street, to the Roman
Catholic Church. When the service was over he bought a candle to place on the iron ring before the image of the Virgin. On the way back he called at Wetherley’s, to hire the Humberette, thinking to go that afternoon to see the fallen airship; then he went into Freddy’s bar.

The landlord leaned over the counter and said quietly, “The wrong ones were took last night over there,” as he jerked his head in the direction of Nightingale Grove. “It would have saved a lot of trouble if it’d been our friend who we all admire so much. But Keechey’s got a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs coming to him all right.”

Phillip could not help thinking about his wife and small children. As he was drinking a glass of beer Dr. Dashwood came in, and taking him aside, gave him the signet ring which, he said, he had seen on the finger of someone in the mortuary.

“I recognised it, Middleton. God bless you, God bless you,” he whispered, and then he went away without having a drink.

“I must go too,” said Phillip. “God bless you, Freddy.”

Again Desmond and Phillip were driving through the Blackwall Tunnel, out past riverside docks of the East End to fields of stubble and roots, along narrow lanes through the villages with names like Little Warley, Childerditch Street, and Herongate, passing hundreds, thousands of men and women on foot, clad in their Sunday best, farmers in dog-carts and traps, bicyclists and bands of boys, all hurrying east as they made their way to Snail's Hall Farm, where the Zeppelin's empty frame lay glittering like part of the Crystal Palace in the bright sunlight of the hot day as it straddled two burnt fields across a scorched hedge, broken in the middle where it had sunk down upon an oak tree. It was seven hundred feet long.

Outside the cordon of sentries with fixed bayonets stalls had been set up. The vendors offered cakes and mineral waters, cockles and oysters, even picture postcards and Sunday newspapers. Many people were moving towards the webbed broken frame rising above the fields.

Phillip led the way direct to the line of bayonets.

“Sapper Neville, I think Intelligence demands that we both make a closer inspection.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Walk just behind me, with a confident air.”

“Very good, sir.”

Phillip, booted and spurred, his badges of rank hidden by a British Warm, walked towards the wreckage. A sergeant came forward, but before he could speak, Phillip said, “Have you seen the General Commanding the London District, Sir Francis Lloyd, sergeant?”

“No, sir,” replied the sergeant.

“In the circumstances the General will not expect a General Salute when he does come.”

“Very good, sir.”

Approaching the buckled frame, they saw the white corrosion of fire on the aluminium girders and cross members, and the oak tree, forty feet high, with all its branches crushed around the trunk. Many R.F.C. officers were peering at equipment from one of the gondolas laid out by mechanics. A smell of burning hung in the air.

Phillip overheard a major talking about the crew in the barn, and soon found his way there, without asking questions.

At the door of the barn he said to the sergeant of the guard, “Have you seen Colonel West of the Gaultshires?”

“I don't know the officer, sir!”

“You can't mistake him, sergeant. He's got a black patch over his left eye, and a hand missing. If you do, tell him that I've arrived, will you? He'll know who I am.”

“Very good, sir,” replied the sergeant, as he sprang aside.

Two rows of bodies lay on straw. Their faces looked to have been tarred, and the tar to have cracked, revealing old red paint beneath. Their thick greatcoats were frizzled, their long felt boots grew black lichen. The arms and legs were those of dummies, ready to dangle loose about skulled faces with stubbed ears and noses, and flat eyes. He counted twenty-one. The twenty-second corpse, lying apart, was not burned. Grass stuck to the Iron Cross in the button-hole of the reefer jacket.

“He's the commander, sir,” said the sergeant. “He was picked up in the field, some way off of the airship. There's the impression, six inches deep in the ground, where he plonked down. He was lying on his back, with his hands still clasped behind his head, as though to protect his skull. Pity it wasn't Mathy, sir.”

“His turn next, sergeant.”

Prophetic words: within a week Mathy was to perish with his
crew in the flames of
L
31
, shot down by Tom Cundall, whom Phillip met again on this Sunday afternoon.

“When are these chaps to be buried, d'you know?”

“I did hear in Great Burstead churchyard, on yonder hill, next Wednesday, my beamish boy. Not even lead-lined coffins. War-time economy.”

“They'll need some chloride of lime before Wednesday.”

As they walked to the runabout, Phillip said to Desmond, “How about coming to see the funeral?”

“Not me. I've had enough. Besides, I'm going on Wednesday to be interviewed for a commission in the gunners, at Woolwich. I've got a lift back in a tender to London, so I won't be returning with you.”

“Well, goodbye, Desmond. And the very best of luck.”

But Desmond was already walking away.

“Lily?” said Cundall.

Phillip nodded. Cundal squeezed his hand.

*

Great Burstead church stood on high ground beyond the town of Billericay. It had a square tower, from which arose a pointed shingled spire. Phillip arrived at Snail's Hall Farm three days later just as the procession was starting along the narrow lane winding up to the graveyard.

On a lorry, covered by a black pall, lay twenty-one coffins.

Behind them was a trailer pulled by a second lorry, bearing the coffin of the commander. It had a brass plate on it.
Commander
Brodruck,
killed
on
Service
Sept.
24,
1916.

This was a mistake. Later, it was known to be Petersen.

Following the coffin was an open Crossley in which sat officers of the R.F.C. No Cundall's face. At the tail of the procession was a squad of airmen, and then a few sightseers.

Last of all walked Phillip, feeling lost, wondering if the spirits of the dead men were lingering in the autumn air, looking down, faintly curious, at the poor little bodies below. Was Lily there, too? He felt that the dead would not be angry, nor would they know any more fear. If only he could write poetry in which his feelings, and the scenes he had known, would live forever, like Julian Grenfell's poem.

The leaves of the elms were turning yellow. Gossamers glinted across the stubbles, the drift-lines of hundreds of thousands of unseen little spiders come to earth, each a thread of hope. The threads made vast tunnels to the sun, like fragile formless airship
frames. What happened to the myriads of tiny travellers, floating in the warm air, all going—whither? For what purpose? To flee the frosts, to reach the haven of the golden sun, each to return its gift of life, like the hundreds of thousands marching into the sunrise of July the First? Male spiders, thin and nervous, died for love: did each one have a speck of soul, of love, within its frame?

The mass grave was in one corner of the churchyard, beside a small pit for the commander. He hoped no one had taken his Iron Cross, for a souvenir. It should be kept, and returned after the war to his wife, for his son; but perhaps he had not been married. Then for his mother.

The blue sky was as gentle as the eyes of Lily. She and her mother were being buried that afternoon. She would understand why he had come to this funeral of the unloved. Surely thoughts had their own existence, like gossamers.

The six R.F.C. officers carried the coffin of the commander to the pit beside the other coffins around the mass grave. Was God, during the service, looking down sadly upon the scene? Now the Vicar was saying, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life', but when he came to the ‘our dear departed brothers' he changed it to ‘these men here departed'. Dear departed brothers, thought Phillip, while it seemed that the eyes of Lily were regarding him steadfastly.

Soon, too soon, it was over, and bugles were sounding the Last Post. Goodbye, brothers: your mortal envelopes lie here in Mother Earth, your spirits drift as gossamers across the sea, to where thoughts of love will help you on your journey to the sun.

*

He went to Tollemere Park, but Mrs. Kingsman was away. Dust sheets covered the furniture. He learned from the butler that Father Aloysius had died of wounds. The butler asked him if he might offer him luncheon, but Phillip declined, and after a drink said goodbye, returning by way of Horndon-on-the-Hill, to see the church where, a year before, Kingsman, Cox, Wigg, and he had stopped on their way to Southend. Goodbye, Jasper Kingsman: will there be a wall-memorial for you, in due course, with your son? In quiet autumn sunshine he drove on down to the marshes of the Thames, and boarded the ferry for Gravesend, to cross the estuary with its smoking steamships and brown-sailed barges borne upon the tarnished waters rushing to the sea. Standing by the rail, he was beset by anguish so
piercing that he felt he must go to the other passengers, and beg to be allowed to speak to them. But he stood still. The anguish passed, with his tears.

When he got home, what would there be to do?

For it seemed that the old life was now gone for evermore. The next day he would be going back to Grantham, to rejoin the Training Centre. This time he would work hard, and do his job properly. What “Spectre” West could do, he could do. When the time came to take over a section he would live for the horses and mules and grooms and drivers which would be in his care. He would be part of one of the many new Companies which were going out every week, to the Battle of the Somme.

Devon—Suffolk.
January 1956—January 1957.