Fireweed Page 6

  The woman beside us put the light bulb into her shopping bag, and quick as a flash Julie was round behind Bert’s stall, saying, ‘That’ll be a tanner, please, Mum. Can’t let her get away with it,’ she muttered to me.

  Some men came and fished the bomb out of the tank, and put it on a lorry, and drove it away. We kept the two Berts’ stall all day, while they celebrated somewhere. We had even half packed-up for them by the time they came back. They invited us to supper with them.

  Mrs Big Bert opened the door, and they pushed us in ahead of them, saying, ‘Guess what happened to our Bert, Ma!’

  Ma listened, unwrapping fish and chips, and tipping it onto plates as she did so, saying, ‘Gawd. Oh Gawd,’ every now and then as the story unfolded. She sent her small girl down the road to get more fish and chips for us, and we had a good time with them that evening.

  In fact we had a good time all the time, all through those days. Julie made me laugh a lot, and I kept making her laugh too, without quite meaning to; it just happened. Laughter seemed suddenly to blow up around us, like the swirling wind-borne leaves. It caught other people too; they smiled at us, suddenly, when they saw us, for no reason at all. Yet all around us death and ruin rained out of the sky. We saw it everywhere, and we were afraid like everybody else, and yet it cast no shadow in our hearts.

  Every autumn takes me back to it now. Every year, when the light softens, and the mists come blurring the edges, and the colours glow and fade, I am back there again, walking the London streets. When the wind lifts the leaves along the Embankment I can even imagine I see her, in an old brown mackintosh seven sizes too big, which we got from the Salvation Army Mission.

  ‘Ugh! Ugh, Bill, it stinks here! Why does it stink?’

  The roadsweeper looked up, and said, ‘Bomb broke the outfall from the main sewer, that’s why.’

  The next day, I remember, it stank of disinfectant.

  We got so used to seeing houses collapsed in piles of rubble halfway across the street we took no more notice of them than of lamp-posts. Yet many of the sights we walked past without a second glance stand out clearly now in my mind’s eye. When the roofs were blown off the houses one could see daylight falling through into the upstairs rooms; one could see the pattern of the wallpaper on the inside walls up there. Shrapnel made shallow, conical holes in the pavement and walls, with cracks running outwards from them. Often the whole of a street, from side to side, would be covered with a light layer of broken bits and pieces, as though it had fallen like hailstones from a great height. And once we walked down a street with shops on either side, and there was a big window broken, knocked inwards most of it, but a little glass across the street. And then a little way further down, there was another, on the other side, and all the windows between were all right. Then on our own side again, another window gone, about fifteen yards further down, and then on the other side, and so on like that all down the street. At the bottom of the street was a great yawning bomb crater; the blast had ricocheted, zigzag down the road.

  I suppose we must have known, somewhere down inside, that we ourselves might get hurt. We can’t really have believed that it could go on for ever, all that freedom, that we could go drifting through the city for ever, like birds. We must have known there would be trouble coming. But I don’t remember knowing. I remember running, playing hide-and-seek in St James’s Park, eating at Marco’s and other places, sleeping in shelters, selling oranges, and laughing.

  And when trouble came, I hardly recognized it at first, and wasn’t on my guard at all.

  It came with a young man in a brown tweed jacket, who came and sat beside us at the foot of the escalator at the Strand, when we were settling down for the night. Of course, I should have known it was odd; there were not many new faces down there, and almost no young men at all. He kept looking sideways at us, as we got rolled into our blankets, and got more or less comfortable. I picked up my copy of Kidnapped, to read while I fell asleep.

  ‘You’re nice and cosy for the night,’ said the young man to us, suddenly. ‘But what do you do all day?’

  ‘We manage,’ said Julie, curtly.

  ‘Not bored at all?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘No,’ she said, and turning her back on him, lay down, and pulled the blanket over her head.

  ‘What school were you at, before the war?’ he said to me.

  I told him.

  ‘Grammar school?’ he said. ‘And you look almost a young man. You must have been in the sixth form.’

  ‘I would have been, by now,’ I told him. ‘I was going to try for a scholarship to university.’

  ‘That’s too good a chance to miss,’ he said eagerly. ‘Look, I’m a schoolmaster …’ (I should have known. One look at that tweedy jacket should have told me.) ‘… and I and some others are back in London, looking for boys to teach. You shouldn’t be running wild on the streets. We have a cellar, and some desks. We’ll keep you going, and find someone to coach you for those exams. Your sister can come along too, till the girls’ school gets going again. Now just give me your names, and your address, and I’ll go and see your parents about it.’

  Julie sat up, wide-eyed.

  ‘No,’ I said, reaching for the rucksack with one hand. The worst of it was, I liked the snooping rotter in a sort of way, and he was reminding me about that scholarship …

  ‘Come on now, old chap,’ he said, ‘be reasonable.’

  ‘I’m over fourteen,’ I said. ‘You can’t make me go back to school.’

  ‘If you were at a Grammar school, your father signed you up for longer, I’m sure,’ he said, getting curt and angry now. ‘And your sister is under leaving age. Come on now, your name and address.’

  By this time we had got our hands on all our possessions, and we just dashed for the escalator, and made a run for it.

  ‘Come BACK!’ he bellowed, making everyone look around at us, and he started after us, yelling all the way. ‘It’s no good running! You can’t go out with a raid on! We’ve got someone in every shelter for miles, do you hear?’ He began to get short of breath, and his shouting had gaps in it. ‘We … are … looking … every night … in all the shelters … one of us … will find you … and on the streets … You’ll have to tell someone, sometime …’ We gained on him, being younger and lighter, and faster at sprinting up stairs. As we reached the open air his voice came up at us from the depths beneath, crying, ‘Damn it, I only want to he … elp!’

  The street was dark. It was a cold night. And as we stood hesitating on the pavement, the siren began its sickening wailing, warning of danger.

  5

  Out of the dark sky a noise was coming, a droning sound. The streets were empty, there was no light. Leaves blown across the pavement brushed our ankles, and moved on, fleeing along the wind.

  ‘Charing Cross Underground. Let’s go there,’ I said, urgently. Grasping our blankets we stumbled across the forecourt of Charing Cross Station, and down the side street. Suddenly our path was brilliantly lit, bathed in icy white light. I saw her face, a frozen mask, with pools of black fear for eyes, framed in her dark hair, crossed by long wind-blown strands. I reached out to her, and at arm’s length, brushed the loose hair back from her face. Looking up we saw great globes of white flame floating in the sky, descending. Then a burst of loud gunfire from nearby, and darkness again, sudden and solid, like falling into a black pit.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she cried to me.

  ‘Those are enemy flares, parachute flares, shot out by our gunners. They are trying to get light to bomb by. Come on, come quickly now!’

  Far off we could hear dull thuds, followed a few seconds later by a slight shudder in the air around us, a light rattle of window panes and doors. We could not see to run; we stumbled. Then at last we were there, staggering through the doorway into the familiar warmth and stench of safety. It was full there, crowded with people even on the District Line platforms and approaches, which weren’t really deep enough to be safe. Still they
gave at least a safety to the mind, keeping us from seeing and hearing, putting around us, like safety, the roofs and walls from whose weight we would die if the place were hit.

  I put down the rucksack. And then we saw them. Three young men, and a shelter warden, and a grey-haired woman, paper and pencils in their hands, moving along the rows of families, talking, writing.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Julie.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said softly.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked her. ‘Do you want to risk it?’

  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ she said.

  ‘No, let’s give them phoney names and addresses,’ I said. I was unwilling to go.

  She shook her head. ‘Not this time. I know one of them. That woman knows me quite well. It’s Canada for me if she sees us.’

  ‘Come on then,’ I said, thrusting a blanket into the rucksack, stooping to pick up the other one.

  ‘Bill,’ she said in a quavering sort of voice, ‘you could stay … It’s me she knows …’

  ‘Don’t talk tripe!’ I retorted. ‘Get moving.’

  Then we were out in it again. We stood in the doorway arch of the station, and she put the rucksack on my shoulders.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Waterloo is the nearest place, I think.’

  ‘But it’s the other side of the river!’

  ‘Hungerford Bridge,’ I said briefly. ‘Come on.’

  ‘That’s a railway bridge,’ she said.

  ‘It has a footbridge,’ I said. ‘Who was the old dame, by the way?’

  ‘Her? Oh. A teacher. My piano-teacher when I stayed with my aunt.’

  We moved out again into the night. We clambered up the steps at the side of the bridge where it crosses above the Tube station, and while we climbed the night was quiet; only distant thumps and distant flares disturbed it.

  At the top of the flight of steps there are some tall archways, looking out towards the east, with the footpath running along inside them. At the back of my mind I had thought we might shelter there; but they didn’t feel safe at all, being high up and open. By the swiftly-passing light of a flare we could see posters on the walls, telling us it wasn’t safe there; telling us where the nearest shelters were. Even when the flare was quenched we could see the poster; it just didn’t seem to be dark. Ahead of us the path reached out in the open, hanging on the side of the bridge outside the girders of the upper work. Inside the cage of girders ran the railway. The path was narrow except where it had small bays on top of the columns over which the bridge was laid.

  Slowly we edged out along the path, over the tops of the Embankment trees, out over the water. We went crouched down, so that the parapet shielded us. The parapet cast a deep shadow over us as we went – really it wasn’t dark. The edges of the girders were traced in faint reflected light, and when a train rumbled by, shaking the ground we stood on, all the windows blacked out, we could see the criss-cross shadows of the girders moving across it.

  We had nearly reached the second bay on the bridge when there was a tremendous bang on our left somewhere. Seconds later the air hardened into a wall, struck us, and lifted us, threw us against the fencing on the girders, and held us there. Somehow in the same split second, reacting to pain in my ears, remembering something I knew, I thrust the fingers of my left hand between my own lips, and those of my right hand into Julie’s mouth. Turning her head, she tried to drag my hand away. I held on to her, fingers hooked over her teeth, while the air pressed down on us, held us spreadeagled, and crushed the breath out of us. Then we were being showered with specks of grit, which scratched our faces, and forced their way into our closed eyes; then the blast wave passed by, and the air dropped us, let us go, so that we slithered to the ground. On hands and knees we dragged ourselves into the lee of the parapet where it curved away from the line of the railway, making a small balcony over the river. And there we stayed. I was terrified. Not quaking with fear, but tingling with it – it was a prickling sensation on the skin, like having a high temperature. And although it was a cold night, with frost in the air, I was sweating. Yet I remember working it out quite coolly in my head; it was dangerous to stay where we were, but on balance more dangerous to move on.

  Julie wriggled herself up close to the foot of the wall, and lay quite still, face turned skywards. We didn’t say anything at all for a long time. We could hear a lot of noise: explosions, gunfire, and nearer to us, shrapnel winding down from the sky, making a funny sound like a gurgle with a whistle in it. After a little she said, ‘You hurt my mouth.’

  ‘If you don’t keep your mouth open, the blast bursts your ears, I think,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember something about keeping a cork between one’s teeth. Thanks, then.’ Then, a lot later, ‘Bill, are you all right?’

  ‘Fine. Just a bit shaken. How about you?’

  ‘All right. Bill, why isn’t it dark? I wish it were dark!’

  Very cautiously, I got up, and put my head over the parapet. I remember hearing my own voice, saying very slowly and clearly, ‘God … in heaven … look at that!’

  She moved. She looked too. Below us the water of the river was a sheet of orange and gold. The eastern sky, as in a monstrous sunrise, was an expanse of limpid golden light, as though the sky itself was a wall of fire. Against it we could see the slender spires of Wren’s churches, and the great dome of St Paul’s. They were not quite mere silhouettes; the corners, the columns, the curve of the dome had been traced in lines of reflected light, as though they had been drawn with a pencil of flame. London was burning. It was all on fire. The immensity of it quenched my own fear in a wave of awe; it seemed like the end of the world.

  Our danger was only, after all, a small thing, seen in that light. I got right up, stood up, and pulled her to her feet too. Leading her by the hand I went on over the bridge, walking steadily. At the other end of the bridge was a little hut, a fire-watcher’s post. In front of it a man was sitting, on a pile of sandbags. Round his neck hung a pair of binoculars, and a field telephone dangled in his drooped hand. His head was thrown back, so that the light of the burning city drew a circle of gold round his face, on the under side of the rim of his helmet. As we passed him I saw that his eyes were open, and the fire glinted in them too. They were still shining, still moist; he was very newly dead.

  When we climbed down from the bridge we were in a warren of unfamiliar streets. I don’t very well remember how long we wandered around there, but in the end we were found by a warden, who took us to a rest-centre; a grim sort of school building. It was like a very overcrowded shelter inside, or so it seemed at first glance. Then I saw that everyone there was filthy, covered with dirt and plaster, clothes tom and thick with dirt. A woman sitting at a table by the door said to us, ‘Bombed out?’

  Looking sideways at Julie, I saw that she was covered in sooty grime from crawling around on the bridge, and I supposed I was in the same state myself. ‘Over there,’ the woman said, without waiting for an answer. We went over there, and sat down. After a while someone brought strong black tea in chipped enamel mugs, and bread and jam. There was nowhere to wash. The people around us looked vacant, stunned. Children cried, and could not be quieted. We slept, almost at once, since sleep seemed the only good place to go.

  We walked for hours the next morning. We didn’t want to cross Hungerford Bridge back into the part of London we knew. There were lots of poor little streets over there, all knocked to blazes. Clouds of thick dust hung over the crushed buildings, and made a haze in the air everywhere. And it was all horrifying. The houses weren’t abandoned, and boarded up, there were people everywhere. They scrambled around on piles of rubble, or came in and out of battered houses, carrying things. There were piles of furniture on the pavements; women sat on doorsteps, dabbing swollen eyes with the hems of their aprons. Puzzled and frightened children clung to them. We saw two women come staggering out of their house through a great hole in the wall, one carrying
a dusty aspidistra in a pot, the other carrying a mantelpiece clock. They were smiling.

  A little further down that street a woman was scrubbing her doorstep. Every window in the house was blown in, and the door hung crazily, blasted nearly off its hinges. But she was busily scrubbing her whitestoned doorstep, As we passed she called to someone across the street, ‘ ’Ave you seen the flaming milkman?’ People, like trees, planted in their ways, persist absurdly in the same routines when everything is changed. Just beyond her two neighbours were talking.

  ‘You go and shelter last night, ducks?’

  ‘No I did not. ’Itler ain’t goin’ ter get me outer bed!’

  ‘Whatser use? If it’s got your number on it, it’ll getcher anywhere. Rather die comfy in my bed, meself.’

  On we went. On the next corner a dark blue lorry was parked, pulled up onto the pavement where it was wider in front of a pub. Two men were busy putting up boards, making cubby holes. The lorry was connected to a standpipe in a water hydrant in the road, and steam was drifting out of a little ventilator in its roof. It had LEVER BROS. SUNLIGHT SOAP painted on the side. A woman came out of the van. She was wearing a blue overall, and cap. Seeing us standing staring at it, she called out, ‘You can have a bath in five minutes, dearie!’

  A bath! The very thought of it! We waited. She went off down the road, and knocked on doors there. Soon more people were waiting, and women came up with buckets, and were given hot water from a tap. When the cubicles were ready they gave us towels and soap, and we had showers to bathe under. It felt marvellous to be clean again. I put on my last clean shirt, but it was horrible putting back the other clothes, all gritty with dirt. Julie emerged with her hair damp and sleek, hanging down like rats’ tails round her shoulders. And somehow the night had washed away. We felt ourselves again, and we went back to the North Bank, looking for Marco’s, though by now it would be lunch rather than breakfast, and we went by Westminster Bridge.