by Pat Barker
At last they reached the school. After twenty minutes’ hanging about, they were guided down into the basement. They found a place by the wall and Paul was finally able to relinquish the suitcase and chafe his hands to get the blood flowing again. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on.”
Pushing his way through the crowd, he saw how packed the basement was. The smell of hot human bodies mingled with the fumes from oil lamps snagged in his throat. Wardens were setting up latrine buckets behind a screen of blankets, men one end of the corridor, women the other, though how people were supposed to get to them through the crush…He spoke to one of the wardens, who said buses were coming to take everybody away that afternoon. “Where to?” The man didn’t know; nobody knew. But it was some consolation to know they weren’t going to have to endure these conditions for more than a couple of hours.
When he got back Kenny’s mother was sitting on the suitcase feeding the baby, a tiny, wizened little mite with a bright orange face and a shock of straight black hair. Two weeks old, apparently, and he hadn’t been due till mid-October. Looking away to give her some privacy, Paul caught the expression on Kenny’s face. Love? Yes, that certainly. But also the pain of exclusion. A gap of twelve years or more between him and these children, and that sallow-skinned, silent man was very obviously not his father. Had they sent him to the country for his own safety, or because the family worked better without him there?
All around them people were settling down, arranging bags and coats, staking out small territories, though as more and more people pushed down the stairs these fragile boundaries were being continually breached. “Where are we going?” was the question on everybody’s lips. “Where are they taking us?” But there were no answers from the wardens or anyone else, only offers of more tea. Nobody knew. People were guessing Kent, the hop fields, where there was accommodation for migrant workers. “I’ve had some good holidays there,” Kenny’s mother said. The thought of the hop fields seemed to cheer her up. She really didn’t look at all well.
More and more people crammed themselves into the airless space. Many people had lit cigarettes and a bluish pall of smoke hung on the stagnant air. The wardens shouted at them to put them out, but only a few did. Along with sweat, cigarette smoke, dirty nappies and latrine buckets were all the smells they’d brought with them on their clothes: burnt brick, charred wood, the carrion stench of high explosive. Paul’s chest was tightening all the time, but he didn’t feel he could just walk away.
He found the chief warden and offered to help with first aid, though with no clean water or bandages there was very little he or anybody else could do. Wardens and voluntary workers were everywhere, trying to help, but the press of bodies defeated them. By now, moving was almost impossible. No Underground train at the height of the rush hour had ever been as packed as this. He could see Kenny and his mother, who now had the grizzling toddler in her arms, at the other end of the main corridor, but there was no hope of reaching them. He pointed to the stairs, mouthing: Got to go. Kenny raised his hand to wave good-bye, then turned to his baby sister, who stopped crying and held out her arms.
At first, getting upstairs against the crush of people surging down seemed impossible, but then somebody at the top started organizing those coming down onto the left. Paul and another warden edged up step by step, persuading people to move to one side. At the top of the stairs Paul looked around for somebody in authority. An exhausted little man with a gray, bristly mustache bleated, “What am I supposed to do? They can’t stay up here, it’s not safe.”
When, finally, Paul struggled out of the playground into the street he held on to the railings and watched the stream of the shocked and homeless going through the gates. It wasn’t all bad. That basement was deep enough to withstand even a direct hit. But then, just as he was about to leave, he noticed the building was already bomb-damaged. One wall had a crack running from the roof down to the ground. Immediately, he wanted to go back and get them out, but it was impossible and anyway they’d be all right, the buses would be here in another hour, the wardens would get everybody organized and they’d be off to Kent, and safety. And Kenny was back with his mother, where he’d wanted, and needed, to be.
NINE
Back at the house he picked his way across the mattress in the hall, remembering Kenny’s outrageous accusation: And we slept in the same bed last night. It was difficult not to feel a certain reluctant admiration for the boy’s single-minded and utterly unscrupulous determination to get what he wanted. Little toad.
He ought really now to go straight to his studio and start work but he was finding it unusually difficult. That walk with the suitcase had taken a lot out of him. So he went out, bought milk and bread and made himself a pot of tea and toast. He was just finishing the last mouthful when he heard the front door open.
“Elinor?”
It had to be: the only other person who had a key was the housekeeper, who’d gone to stay with her sister in Dorset and God alone knew when she’d be back. He went upstairs to the ground floor and found Elinor in front of the hall mirror, unpinning her hat. She raised her cheek for him to kiss.
“This is a surprise.”
“Yes, Tim gave me a lift; I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. And I need some more clothes anyway.”
“Oh, you’re going back?”
She pulled a face. “Well, I’ve got to, really. I can’t leave Rachel to do it all.”
“I thought Gabriella was supposed to be coming?”
“Yes, but she’s eight months pregnant. She’s not going to be doing a lot of running around. Where’s Kenny?”
Paul looked surprised. “With his mother.”
“So you took him back?”
“Well, yes, of course. That was the point.”
“Are they all right?”
“So-so. The house was bombed, but they’re being evacuated this afternoon.”
“Was she pleased to see him?”
That was not a comfortable question. It forced him to weigh his impressions. “No, not very. I don’t think he gets on with his stepfather and she’s got two younger children.”
“And she kept them with her?”
“Well, yes, obviously.”
“I wonder what Kenny thinks about that.”
“He doesn’t seem to fit in, but on the other hand, he obviously loves them.”
“I don’t think you should’ve taken him back.”
“He wanted to go.”
“He’s a child. Anyway, it wasn’t your decision.”
“No, it was Rachel’s. And Tim’s. Tim said bugger-all and Rachel couldn’t wait to see the back of him.”
She turned back to the mirror and started fluffing up her hair where the hat had flattened it.
“You think it was about me, don’t you? My mother?”
She met his eyes in the glass. “Wasn’t it?”
The conversation disturbed Paul. Kenny had wanted more than anything to be back with his mother. Wasn’t that justification enough? He remembered the way her soot-blackened arm had come round to press his head into her side. No, absolutely, he didn’t regret it. A lot of this uneasiness was no more than the shapeless anxiety that comes from extreme tiredness, and he couldn’t afford to give in to it. He was on duty tonight, and the next night. And the next. No, he’d taken the decision, and now he just had to forget about it and move on.
—
BY THE END of the second night on duty tiredness had become another dimension. He snatched an hour or two of dozing on the bed between coming off duty and walking round to his studio, but during the long, golden, sludgy afternoon he had to force himself to go on painting; it was dangerous even to think about sleep.
On the morning after his third night, he was standing in the kitchen, drinking a cup of hot sweet tea and idly flicking through the newspapers. There was a certain grim fascination in seeing how officialdom packaged the destruction of the night before. He was about to turn a page when a
headline about a direct hit on a school in the East End caught his eye. Seventy-three people dead. Well, there must be hundreds of schools in the East End. Under the headline there was a grainy photograph of the ruined building with a heap of rubble breaking through iron railings onto the pavement. Was that Agate Street? Well, even if it was, Kenny and his family would have long since moved on.
He opened the door, intending to walk round to his studio as he did every morning. Another fine day, though the smell of burnt brick dust tainted the bright air. Farther along the street, an old man was sweeping up the first of the autumn’s fallen leaves, a sight you saw every year around this time, only this September the familiar rustle was sharpened by the scratching of broken glass. If you closed your eyes, it sounded exactly like waves seething between the pebbles of a shingle beach. Only he daren’t close his eyes. Even the action of blinking brought with it the strong, dark undertow of sleep.
A crowd had gathered at the entrance to a side street, people who’d spent the night in shelters returning to find access to their homes denied. He looked across the road. From where he stood, the tape cordoning off the street was invisible, so the people seemed to be pressed against a glass wall—like insects splatted across a windscreen. Lured by the attraction of that forbidden space, he crossed the road and stared up the empty street. At first nobody spoke, and then a few whispers began to break the cathedral hush. There was a time bomb in the street. Nobody was allowed to go home and, after the long night in a cramped, foul-smelling shelter, that was hard. Some of the group were in pajamas and dressing gowns; one of the women had thrown a mackintosh over her nightdress. An old lady with her hair in thin, gray plaits was trembling with shock, or perhaps it was just the general frailty of age, and yet she seemed positively cheerful; defiant, even. She touched his sleeve—her hand as skeletal as a dead leaf on a bonfire, but God how she crackled and sparked as the flames licked round her. “That’s my house,” she said, pointing. “The one with the blue door.”
It was odd; when he’d crossed the road to join the little group staring into the sunlit silence of the cordoned-off street, he’d fully intended going to his studio to do a normal day’s work, and yet, minutes later, as he turned away, he knew he had to go to Agate Street. At the corner of the road, he turned and looked back. There they still were, haloed in light, as if the air had somehow solidified in front of them. How would you paint them—convey that sense of suspended motion—or of an infinitely slow, noiseless collision—when there was nothing visible to account for it?
He took a taxi as far as he could, then walked. All around were signs of last night’s destruction. A burst water main with a group of boys egging each other on to run through it, their shrieks, sharp as seagulls’ cries, slicing the crisp air. Farther along, he passed a broken shopwindow with mannequins inside, all prudishly shrouded in brown paper, one leaning out into the street, arm and wrist elegantly posed, smirking at devastation. All the time, now, you noticed these oddities. What survived; what didn’t. And that first feeling of indecency at peering into other people’s lives—their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their toilets—had already begun to fade.
As he walked, he thought not about Kenny—he still felt there was no real reason for anxiety—but about that cordoned-off street, the way a perfectly ordinary road acquired, merely because access to it had been denied, an air of mystery. He remembered looking through a periscope into no-man’s-land: the inhabitation of rats and eels, and of the corpses, submerged in flooded craters, whose slow, invisible decomposition sent strings of bubbles spiraling to the surface. But, no, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t the obvious horrors that made the hairs on the nape of your neck stand up. It might be a country lane: not bombed, not devastated, pretty, even; but a lane you couldn’t walk down, because it was enemy territory. And that lane, merely by being forbidden, acquired depth, mystery and terror. It seemed shocking to him that now there were streets and squares in London that aroused the same prickling of unease. He’d never before felt that he wanted to paint London, or any other built-up area, and yet those roped-off, silent squares and streets had started to haunt him. Perhaps because blacked-out and bombed London felt less and less like a city?
Agate Street wasn’t difficult to find. A corkscrew of black smoke twined into the sky above it, almost like a question mark reversed. This was the school in the photograph. Even before he turned the corner, he knew that.
Despite the coil of smoke, the fire service must have declared the building safe, because teams of rescue-squad workers, wearing overalls and tin hats, were clambering over a scree of rubble, slipping and slithering as they tried to get a footing. The school seemed to have imploded; there was a crater at the center where the roof had crashed through onto the floors below. Whoever had been in the basement when the upper floors collapsed was dead now. Nobody could have survived tons of brick landing on them like that.
The scene in front of Paul was oddly static. Heat and dust everywhere, but no sense of urgency. The rescue workers with their covering of white dust might have been carvings on an antique frieze: a funeral procession, though, not a wedding feast. There was no sound. Four ambulances were parked by the side of the road, the drivers leaning against their vehicles, smoking, occasionally wiping sweat from foreheads or lips. They looked as if they’d been there for hours.
Still wearing his warden’s coat and tin hat, Paul ducked under the tape and strode confidently towards the ambulances. A tin hat could take you almost anywhere. Close to, it was obvious the drivers had been there all night. Red-eyed, exhausted, stubble sprouting from their chins, lips parched from the long hours of chain-smoking, none of them looking as if they expected to be going anywhere in the next few hours. As he approached, the door of one of the vehicles opened and a figure he recognized jumped down on to the road. Derek James.
“My God,” Paul said. “They’re keeping you busy.”
“Twelve bloody hours I’ve been stuck here.”
“What’s happening?”
“You can see what’s happening—bugger-all.” He fished a packet of Woodbines from his pocket and offered it. “What you doing here anyway?”
“You know that lad I was with when you gave us a lift—Sunday?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it turned out his house had been bombed and they were sent here.” He could tell from James’s face that something was wrong. “That was Sunday. They were just waiting for the buses to take them away.”
“Bloody long wait.”
Paul stared at him.
“They didn’t come. Apparently, there was some mix-up over the address, Canning Town, Camden Town, God knows. And then, when they finally did show up, a raid started so they decided to postpone the evacuation. They were still here last night.”
“But that’s three days.”
James shrugged. “Another bloody cock-up. They’ve had years to get this right. Years.”
Paul pictured Kenny and his family at the end of the crowded corridor, how at the last moment the little red-haired girl had turned and held out her arms. “How many?”
“They’re saying seventy-three.”
Paul twisted sharply to one side. “I was there, it was bloody well jam-packed.”
James said, slowly: “To begin with you could hear them crying out…You know? And every now and then they’d call for silence and everybody stopped and listened, and then the last time…” He shook his head. “Mind, we did get two babies out. Tough little buggers, babies.”
“Nobody else?”
“Not that I saw.”
The rescue squads had started gathering in small groups around their leaders, the men who’d been climbing across the rubble sliding down and walking across to join them.
James nodded. “I think they’re calling it.”
“What, pulling out?”
“What else can they do? It’s going to take weeks to clear that lot. Hundreds of bodies, this heat?”
He was right, of course. Every nigh
t these rescue squads were needed to dig out people who could still be saved. How could you possibly justify using them to retrieve dead bodies? No, the only thing to do with this was cement it over. Walk away. Paul patted James’s shoulder and walked across to the railings. Now he was closer to the building, he noticed a smell that was not the stench of high explosive. The rescue workers wore masks against the plaster dust, but others, this side of the railings, were pinching their noses and covering their mouths with their hands. No, James was right, that was all you could do, declare it a mass grave. But my God…All those people. Kenny, the little girl, the baby. Kenny.
Resting his forehead against the railings, Paul realized he was looking at the small area of playground that was clear of rubble. Somebody, perhaps a teacher but more likely a child, had chalked out squares for a game of hopscotch. He saw, for a moment, with the clarity of hallucination, a stick of yellow chalk gripped in a small, pudgy hand.
Blinking the image away, he looked instead at the wrecked building and above it to the sky, where the corkscrew of black smoke was beginning to change shape. Again, he saw Kenny raise his hand and wave; again the little girl stretched out her arms, while flakes of soot, whirled around on the slight breeze, fell onto his upturned face like snow.
TEN
Crappit heid. Dear God, fancy being reduced to that after all these years. Fishmonger just now give her a funny look—you’d think it was in his own best interest to be civil, wouldn’t you, but oh, no. Just stood there in his straw hat and his white coat, fag end stuck to his bottom lip, bloody great turd of ash ready to drop—and he was leaning over the fish. “Cod’s head?” he asked. She felt like saying: You want the business or not? Didn’t, of course, just raked about in her purse for the coppers and handed them across. As she walked away, she felt his gaze stitched to her back, though when she turned round she saw he’d already moved on to the next customer, wasn’t watching her at all.