Fireweed Page 5

  A red-haired conductress leant over us to look out of the window. ‘Gawd. I ’ope they’re getting it back!’ she said.

  ‘Do we do that too?’ Julie asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, shuddering.

  St Paul’s was still there. The hole in the pavement was there too, but it was just roped off, and the bomb had gone, for there were no notices, and the bus went right by the hole. We got off at the first stop on Ludgate Hill, and went to have a look.

  ‘It must have been an out-of-date Picture Post, of course,’ said Julie.

  We stood at the foot of the steps, and looked at the façade.

  ‘I still don’t know, really, that I like it all that much,’ she said.

  ‘Well, but I know what they mean about it,’ I told her. ‘When you just remember what it looks like, you see it all columns, and a dome, and it seems very ordinary, and reminds you of the Odeon Cinema, and the town hall somewhere; but as soon as you see it again it’s just a bit different, and you can see that it’s right, and the people who built the town hall were just copy-cats, and got it wrong.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  ‘It’s so exact; all the shapes, and all the distances from here to there, all over it, are so exactly right.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, staring hard, ‘I shall just have to remember what it’s like as hard as I can, so that I can change my mind about it later, even if it’s gone.’

  Suddenly a voice came from behind us. ‘Now, don’t go saying that, young lady. It may never happen. Never. And what does happen is quite enough to worry about. Sufficient unto the day, you know. Or perhaps you don’t. Young people today don’t know their Bibles as we did.’

  It was an elderly stooped old gentleman, with a stick. Very vague and benign, like all the world’s grandfather.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof,’ I said. I never could bear not to show off, when I knew something.

  ‘Quite right, quite right,’ he said. ‘And if I may say so, it is time you young people were getting home to safety. There are raids at any time of the day, now, you know. And really the young lady looks quite tired.’ He was peering at Julie now, through steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘If you will allow me, I will call a taxi, and put you on it for home. Now what is your address, young man?’

  I didn’t see the danger till he got that far. Then I saw it, in a flash. But not quicker than Julie, who took to her heels at once, and dashed across the road, and into a narrow lane between tall buildings. I followed her, the rucksack bouncing up and down, and slapping me on the back as I ran. He waved his stick, and called after us, and just before I turned the corner, I saw him talking to a policeman and pointing his stick towards me.

  Weaving through narrow streets, we ran and ran. We found ourselves in Blackfriars Bridge Road, and so on the Embankment again. Once there, we wandered along under the plane trees, saying nothing for a while.

  ‘What would happen if we got found out?’ she said at last.

  ‘If that old geezer had reported us to someone? I suppose you would be sent to Canada, and I would be sent back to Wales.’

  ‘Without asking us what we wanted at all?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t ask us the first time, did they?’

  ‘We mustn’t get found out,’ she said fiercely. ‘We mustn’t let it happen.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We won’t.’

  She didn’t say why we mustn’t. I didn’t ask.

  It was getting dark as we walked. The lamp-posts’ empty extinguished cages were outlined against the purple sky. A tug going up-river, a dim smudge of dark on the shiny water, hooted softly. The cars along the Embankment drove slowly, with deeply-hooded lights. The white lines painted along their running boards were all that we could see; they looked like white worms passing us. A tram clattered by, lurching along its faintly-shining rails. Somewhere on the South Bank search-lights opened up, long sweeping fingers groping in the sky. We turned from the river, and went up to the Strand – itself like a river, with two churches for islands – to take cover once more in the Aldwych Underground Station. From all the streets around, in all directions, processions of people were coming too, carrying their bedding, trailing tired children by the hand.

  We looked upwards for a last glance at the sky. The stars were all there, shining in a mercilessly clear darkness, and soon the moon would be up, with no clouds to quench her, pouring clear silver on river, on domes, on spires, lighting every target in the city. We went down into the depths.

  I remember how good it felt not to be on my own. To have someone to talk to, instead of lying as a lonely island outside all the circles of talk around me. We were lucky that night, and got a place on the platform. We lay down with the rucksack acting as a shared pillow, each rolled up in a new soft blanket. Other people came and lay all around us, till we were packed like sardines in a tin. On the curving tiles above us a poster exhorted the men to leave the space for women and children. ‘The trains must run’, it said. But they had stopped all trains on the Aldwych extension now. As the platform filled up people got down between the rails, and spread out their sleeping things there. Then a shelter warden appeared. He had a bundle of hammocks. He looked around, and caught my eye.

  ‘Give us a hand, son?’ I got up. Julie sat up too.

  ‘These here ’ammocks is for the kids,’ he said. ‘We gotta string ’em up along there,’ and he pointed to the rails. Down we went, moving people up to make some space. Grumbling a little, they edged along, far into the tunnel at the end of the platform. We tied one end of the short hammocks to the rail nearest the platform, and the other to the high-power rail. The warden and I tied them up, and Julie and a few others lifted kids out of the crush on the platform and tucked them up, swinging between the rails. At last all the hammocks were occupied, and we scrambled back, stepping over prostrate bodies, to our own places.

  Somewhere on the down platform a sing-song had started up. Gusts of laughter boomed down the tunnel at us. Nearby a baby cried, until its mother lifted herself up wearily to sit leaning against the wall, giving it the breast. Beside us a large fat woman in a tight shiny black dress was handing out doughnuts from a paper bag to all her kids. She handed them to us too, without a word.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Julie. ‘But …’

  ‘Go on, love, treat yourself,’ said the woman. We did. I remembered I had a book in the rucksack, but by now Julie was asleep on it. I needed the lavatory. There was a row of empty fire buckets at the end of the platform, but I remembered that there were real lavatories in the ticket hall upstairs. Carefully, quietly, I got up, and moved along the sleeping rows towards the exit. All the corridors leading to the platform were as thickly crowded as the platform itself. People who had found no room to stretch out were sitting on their bundles, swaying with sleepiness. A slumped form occupied nearly every step of the frozen escalators, and my trek up to the top would wake at least a hundred sleepers. Groaning, I went back to the fire buckets.

  When I got back to my place, Julie was awake, looking round. ‘It’s O.K. I’m here,’ I said. She laid her head back on the rucksack. When I rested my own head beside her I could feel the patch of warmth she bad made on the canvas. And something in my back trouser pocket jabbed into me. It was the Spitfire.

  ‘Julie,’ I whispered.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I’ve got a present for you. Here.’ As she reached out for it in its twist of tissue paper, I saw that she was wearing a silver chain bracelet, with a disc on it, like the ones you see on dog-collars.

  ‘For me?’ she said.

  ‘What sort is it?’ I asked her. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘A Spitfire,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Bill.’

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, taking the disc on her bracelet into my fingers.

  ‘My identity disc, with my number on. Haven’t you got one?’

  ‘I’ve got a number, but I keep it in my head.’ And yet, now, after all these years I can only remem
ber my number with an effort, but I remember hers easily. It was ZKDN/74/8. She slipped off to sleep again with the little plane held in her hand.

  Some while later there was a dull thump. I felt the ground beneath me tremble for a second, and the exit sign, hanging over our heads, rattled briefly on its wires. All around us heads were raised from the platform.

  ‘Other side of the river,’ said someone.

  ‘By the Shot Tower,’ another voice agreed. Two more bumps came quickly, one after another. ‘Nearer,’ people murmured, ‘much nearer.’

  ‘Safe here, though, ducks,’ said the doughnut woman, ‘Not to worry.’ Heads were lowered to rest again.

  Then I too fell asleep.

  In the morning we bought tea from a trolley brought round by the shelter wardens; we waited for the people nearer the exits to go so that the crowd was not too pressing, and then we packed our rucksack, Julie lifted it onto my back, and we made our way up to the open air, and went to have breakfast at Marco’s.

  And that’s how we managed together.

  We decided straight away that we would go on working the street markets, in spite of the wad of notes rolled up in the bottom of the rucksack. After all, when that was gone there would be nothing we could do but go and give ourselves up to some adult authority. And working gave us something with which to fill our days. When we weren’t working we walked a lot, endlessly round and round, covering London from the Tower to Hyde Park, over and over as the days went by. I still know London like the back of my hand, better than a taxi-driver sometimes; I’ll bet she does too. When it rained we rode about on buses.

  We weren’t the only ones. There were hordes of other children, playing around in the streets. As before, a lot of parents had brought their children home after a week or two, and the schools were all closed so they roamed the streets. We played football, and even tag and hopscotch with them in the side streets, when we got tired of the costermongers’ stalls. Some of them sold black-market sweets to us, too.

  We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn’t all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold, and fell off, while Hitler’s bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone’s life was changed, and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.

  People were different then, too. They were tired, nearly all of them, from having so little sleep, from being woken every night, from being frightened. But they were friendly. They talked to each other on buses, in the streets, in the shelters. At first we were alarmed when people spoke to us; we thought they were all going to jump on us, and report us to someone (Heaven knows whom), for being on our own. But we soon stopped feeling like that. They weren’t in that mood, somehow.

  ‘Where’s your mum ’n dad?’ someone asked us one night, in a big street shelter near Hyde Park.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Cheer up, son,’ she said. ‘Things happen. Perhaps they’ll turn up.’

  I realized she thought I meant they were bombed. I felt a bit ashamed then, as though I had told a mean sort of lie.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she was asking. ‘Got food and money? Know where to go?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But yes, thanks, we’re all right.’

  ‘That’s plucky,’ she said. ‘As long as we’ve got enough like you.’

  In some of the shelters people had sing-songs, drank beer, even danced. An old man played the accordion, and everyone sang, ‘Oh, Johnnie, oh Johnnie, how you can love!’ and ‘We’ll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye!’ That was fun, but it went on so late we felt very limp the next day, so the following night we went somewhere else, to get some sleep.

  Then there were always some people who told endless jokes, raising a laugh somehow. After all this time I can still remember a toothless old man saying, ‘Talk about laugh! She paid into the insurance for years to be buried proper, and it took them three days to dig her out!’ They did laugh, too.

  We saw men digging. They had black tin hats, with R painted on them for rescue. They were always dirty, covered with powdered plaster and mud. We would see them scrambling on piles of debris, or from the top of the bus glimpse them down a hole in the rubble, and always there would be a stretcher party standing by, and an ambulance parked somewhere near.

  I remember us working a stall once, selling oranges. It had been trundled onto a pile of rubble at a street corner, and it boasted a huge notice saying, OUR ORANGES HAVE COME THROUGH MUSSO’S LAKE! They sold well, too. There was an air-raid going on, but we weren’t taking much notice, and neither was anyone else near us. They happened too often. They lasted too long. One just got tired of it, just couldn’t react for every one. So there we were selling oranges, brought past Mussolini’s destroyers, and eaten under Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Suddenly there was a terrible racket a little way off; sirens, and fire-bells, and a roar of flame so fierce we could hear it where we stood. The sky over towards St Paul’s filled with billowing smoke, and then the underside of the black smoke-cloud lit up a lurid yellow. Cinders the size of saucers fell around us. And out of the doorway of the Paradise Buildings, opposite our stall, a bloke came running like a maniac. He had a helmet on, and an Auxiliary Fire Service jacket, which he was still buttoning as he ran, and he was wearing his pyjama trousers. Poor devil must have been snatching a bit of sleep. He was stout, I remember, and a large triangle of hairy belly showed through where the pyjamas tied. Panting for breath he ran off towards the fire.

  ‘Go on Charlie!’ cried a delighted crowd of onlookers.

  ‘Had enough shut-eye?’

  Cupping his hands to his mouth the barrow boy beside us bellowed after him, ‘Where’s your trousers?’

  He disappeared into the foul-smelling wall of smoke at the far end of the street. Fire-fighting must take guts at the best of times, but the fires caused by incendiary bombs were like acres of hell itself. And he was such an ordinary sort of bloke, fat and hairy, and a bit red in the face …

  ‘You know what, Bill,’ said Julie beside me. ‘His pyjamas are like the Lionheart’s sword.’

  Then there was Little Bert. Big Bert and Little Bert kept a stall in Leather Lane market. Big Bert wasn’t very big, but he was Little Bert’s dad. He was too old to go into the army, and Little Bert was too young. They had a stall that sold bits and pieces, plugs, coils of wire, things for making crystal sets, simple wireless receivers, light bulbs, all that sort of thing.

  ‘Wireless. That’s a larf,’ Big Bert used to say, showing us the back of one. We often worked beside them, taking a turn at selling fruit and veg for an enormous woman called Ma Johnson, so that she could ‘Go and ’ava cuppa’.

  ‘You know, Bill,’ said Julie. ‘I’m awfully ignorant. Really. I never knew they sold tea in pubs.’ I laughed at her till I could hardly stand straight, I got such a stitch.

  ‘Oh, yes, Julie, you are!’ I told her.

  ‘Well, no need to rub it in!’ she said, crossly.

  Anyway, one day when we were keeping Ma Johnson’s stall a bomb fell right in front of us. Just like that. No siren had sounded, and what with the traffic down in Holborn I hadn’t even heard the plane. It was an incendiary, and it came with a swish and a thump, and immediately a loud hissing noise, and flame began to come out of a nozzle on the top. There was a lot of noise, people diving into doorways, running, women screaming … and then Little Bert walked right up to it, and picked it up. It was quite a weight, so he had to hold it tight to his chest, and duck his head sideways a bit, out of the way of the jet of flame. The jet of flame was acting like a firework, getting taller and louder, working up to something.

&
nbsp; ‘Oh, Bert!’ cried Julie, and she flung herself into my arms, and buried her face in my jacket. Bert looked around, and his eye caught a great big water tank that stood on the street corner. It was a reserve supply for fire-fighting. They kept it topped up, using a hydrant from the pavement in case the mains supply got cut off in a raid. Bert walked over to it, staggering a bit under the weight of the thing, and people shrank away on either side as he carried it past them. He just heaved it over the top, into the water tank. There was a big splash, soaking him from top to toe, and a brief sizzle … and that was it.

  We all stood there, dazed, staring at him. There was so little sign of what had just happened that some newly-arrived shoppers began to get angry and shout at us because we weren’t jumping to serve them.

  ‘Cor lumme, son!’ yelled Big Bert. ‘Do us a favour, will yer? Gimme time to look away next time!’

  Little Bert was looking a bit blank, and vaguely brushing at his clothes, to get rid of the wet. A very angry woman was yelling, ‘You gonna sell me this bulb, or ain’t yer?’ at Big Bert.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Big Bert. ‘Come and have a snifter, son, and get yerself dry.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do with it, then?’ bawled the woman, waving her thirty-watter under Big Bert’s nose.

  ‘Stuff it up yer jumper!’ he said, going off down the road with his arm round Little Bert’s damp shoulder. Someone started singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’ and the whole lane joined in, stamping their feet and clapping. Little Bert went very red. Then, as soon as they rounded the corner everyone was talking at once, ‘Did you see that? Nasty great thing … Could have killed someone … Cool as cucumber, ’e was …’