The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  It was not a happy house that first week or two.

  Then Harry turned up.

  He appeared one evening at Joe’s local when Joe had not even told his brother he was home with an offer of work down the docks. It was extra money, Harry said, and Joe welcomed the idea, though Nancy, when she found out, was furious.

  But a convoy had come in and after his first shift Joe arrived home with two tins of peaches in syrup and a tin of Carnation milk and his wife and child fell on him like he had won the Victoria Cross. The kid ran to him, screaming with delirious excitement. After this they had got along just fine, he and the kid. He took her to the park, though it was all dug up for the war effort. He carried her on his shoulders through the stalls on market day and sat with her on his lap at his local letting her lick the froth from his beer. He marvelled at all the things she could do and say, this tiny perfect creature that was a part of him and a part of his wife, at times almost a miniature of Nancy the way she became cross in a moment just as his wife did, the way she would shrug her tiny shoulders with contrary stubbornness.

  She tripped one Sunday evening after tea on the hard kitchen tiles and split her lip and he felt his insides turn over. He scooped her up and felt the world a hostile place closing in around them.

  It had not been easy with Nancy either, and her love had required more to coax it than a tin of peaches and a can of Carnation milk. In a world of rationing and bombs and blackouts his wife had learned to survive on her own. And then he wondered, had she already been that person when he had met her, orphaned and alone, brought up in a Shoreditch boarding house? He did not know. The person he had written frantic, bored, yearning letters to from his bunk on board his ship seemed not to exist except in his own head. His wife was strong. She hardly seemed to need him. Her beauty and her strength overwhelmed him, it frightened him. The two of them, she and the kid, had grown to fill the space he had left and he felt clumsy in her presence, a grotesque giant of a thing, too large for the furniture, too tall for the room, always crashing into things. He blamed his sea legs for this; he had been at sea three years, it took a while to learn how to be on dry land.

  At night he thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who had crept into his bed on the ward and made love to him as a stranger would. His wife made love to him in the same way, like a stranger, and that disturbed him. And it bewitched and transfixed him. The evening she had told him she had gone with another man he thought he would go mad. But he did not go mad. Instead he crossed the space that had separated them and woke the next morning beside her in their bed. It turned out his wife knew him better than he knew himself.

  He had not let her out of his sight or out of his heart since that morning.

  The enemy aircraft had flown right overhead and a searchlight tracked it across the sky, followed a second or two later by a burst of fire from an AA gun. He looked up, watching the tracer bullets from the gun create a flickering red trail before fading away. The first greyish tinge of dawn glowed faintly in the east. The night was ending and he needed to be further away than this by daybreak.

  He had taken a stupid risk going to the tube station to find Nancy, but she needed to be warned, for there was every chance the police would go to the house, might even arrest her. And he had needed to tell her his plan, which had appeared to him, laid out like a map, as he had sat with her: they would go to Dublin, and from there to America. He had been to America, to New York. A man could get lost there. They could start a new life. He had sat with Nancy and remembered the coves and inlets and endless beaches of Long Island and the wharves on the dockside at Brooklyn, the ferries hopping to and from Staten Island, the statue that overlooked the city at the point where the East River met the Hudson. If he could just have explained it to her he knew that Nancy would understand, would feel the excitement, the hope that he had felt when he had seen these things. But he had been unable to explain it and she had been filled with dismay, not hope, at leaving London. He was unsure if he had convinced her or not. But she would come, he knew, because it was better to be far from home in a strange place with your man than it was to be safe at home without him.

  But so far his journey had got him only as far as Whitechapel, and America was as far off to him now as it must have seemed to Nancy a few hours earlier.

  He left the doorway in which he had taken refuge, moving silently, and there was silence now, the AA gun had fallen still, the enemy aircraft gone. It was quiet enough that he heard the bells of an ambulance suddenly loud dead ahead and he realised he had become disorientated and was much closer to the hospital than he had supposed. He followed the sound when he ought to have gone in the other direction, away from it, and he saw the ambulance pulling up at the front of the hospital, a second one close behind. And then two more—four ambulances, one after another, their bells ringing, and into the emerging dawn nurses, porters, a doctor streamed from the hospital and moved from one to the other opening doors, pointing, shouting, directing.

  Something had happened, something had taken a direct hit.

  And now a fifth ambulance appeared but this one had no bells ringing and it drew up not at the main entrance but at a side door where the mortuary was. No one ran to open its doors.

  This was the moment to leave. The darkness was fast disappearing and all around him people in uniforms were shouting and running. It was not a time to be standing around waiting to be observed, waiting to be questioned, although in the chaos no one did observe him, no one did ask questions. All the same, it was time to leave. A young woman stood at the bottom of the steps in a volunteer nurse’s uniform madly checking a clipboard, flipping over one page after another as though she could save a life simply by finding a name on a list. Joe went over to her.

  ‘Miss, what’s happened?’

  She looked up, peering at him through round spectacles with the bewildered expression of someone who had worked through the night. ‘A bomb went off. At the Underground station where people were sheltering. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to move. We’ve got a lot of injured.’

  ‘Which underground station? Whitechapel?’

  But Joe could see Whitechapel Station. It was just the other side of the main road. He could see it had not taken a direct hit. Shoreditch then. Aldgate. Stepney—

  ‘Bethnal Green,’ said the woman. And she hurried away.

  The seams of her stockings were crooked and little spots of mud were caked on the back of her legs as though she had been splashed though it had not rained for days. Joe turned away. In the cab of the first ambulance a woman driver sat with the door open, smoking a cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers and watching her ambulance being unloaded in her rear mirror and he approached her.

  ‘I say, don’t stand there,’ she called out, waving him away. ‘We’re about to take off. You’ll be mown down.’ She had a clipped voice, like the voice of the woman program announcer on the BBC.

  ‘How many hurt?’ he asked, ignoring this.

  ‘About a dozen I should say, but really you must—’

  ‘Any dead?’

  Before she could answer her colleague jumped in beside her and she tossed away her cigarette and started up the engine.

  ‘Please, miss—any dead?’

  ‘Two,’ she called out. ‘Mother and child, I think.’ And they moved off and he leaped out of the way.

  He was quite calm. There had been a hundred, two hundred mothers and children in that shelter. There was no reason to think it was them. He watched the stretchers being unloaded and followed behind, moving from one to another, peering at each face. When they had all been unloaded and the last ambulance had gone he walked around to the side entrance and it was still there, the fifth ambulance. No one had bothered with it. But at that moment the mortuary door swung open and a porter emerged, followed by a second man, and they walked over and cranked open the rear doors of the ambulance. They disappeared inside, re-emerging a moment later with two lifeless forms on stretchers,
one an adult—he could see a single uncovered foot sticking out of the end of the blanket, no shoe, no stocking, clearly a woman’s foot, and the porter twitched the blanket to cover it. The other form was much smaller, a child. Joe watched. He was calm. Somewhere in the distance he heard a low drone, becoming louder. An aircraft.

  ‘Move aside, please,’ said the porter as they manhandled the first stretcher up a short ramp and through the door. The man paused then, glancing up and scanning the dawn sky, seeking out the source of the sound.

  ‘Are they from the tube station?’ asked Joe, pointing. ‘A mother and child? Please, mate, let us take a look, I need to know if—’

  ‘Just let us do our job,’ the man interrupted tersely. He seemed anxious about the droning, which was louder now.

  ‘Blimey, let the man look if he wants to,’ cut in his colleague, who was fat and wheezing and pink in the face and seemed glad of an excuse to stop. ‘These two ain’t going anywhere, are they? Here.’ And he pulled back the blanket from the remaining body, the child.

  Joe stood and looked down. He saw a dark-haired little girl with a red hairband and a very white, still face. It wasn’t Emily. It was some other child. He looked at her and felt his heart would break because a little girl had died. He had thought he would be relieved, that the relief would make him faint, sick, but there was no relief. Though he did feel faint and sick.

  ‘Let me see the other one,’ he pleaded, turning away from the lifeless form before him. ‘Let me see the mother.’

  But the AA gun started up then with a sudden, short burst, and the gun emplacement must be right here on the hospital roof, for the noise made him reel and clap his hands to his ears. It made sense to put the AA gun on the roof of the hospital, which was the highest building for miles around, though it was crazy too, a gun on the roof of a hospital—you would think it made the hospital a target for enemy bombers. As he thought this, the enemy bomber flew right overhead, filling the whole sky, turning dawn back to night-time, and Joe flung himself to the ground, covering his head because the aircraft was surely going to fly right into the hospital, and the AA gun burst into life again. He curled into a ball and his fingers dug into the concrete.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Cairo

  The Light Mk VI was done for. They had limped into GHQ late in the afternoon and the engine had blown up. They had rescued their kit, saluted the old girl, given her an affectionate pat on the turret and abandoned her to her fate. No one had seemed to mind or to question it. The roads leading into Cairo were littered with abandoned military hardware that no one had the inclination or the time to salvage. Gerald had made his report to Cathcart, his CO, and Cathcart had seemed supremely uninterested and given him no further orders. That was fine by Gerald. He had had a long bath, dug out a change of clothes and presented himself at the officers’ mess, where he proceeded to drink large quantities of pink gin in the company of an adjutant from the Royal Rifle Corps and a captain from the Argylls.

  The mess swirled about him disconcertingly in a pungent fug of Turkish cigarettes and Turkish coffee. Before the war the place had been the bar of a lavish turn-of-the-century European hotel that in daylight hours afforded magnificent views over a sweeping terrace, a polo field and a croquet lawn down to the banks of the Nile. Now the blackout blinds and stuttering hurricane lamps threw the interior, crowded with wicker chairs and tables and potted palms, into flickering relief. A radio tuned to Egyptian State Broadcasting idly played light music in the background and a copy of a week-old Egyptian Gazette lay discarded on the table before them. Six months ago, a year ago, the whole place had been teeming with South Africans, Greeks, Maltese, Cypriots, Czechs, Poles, Australians, New Zealanders—officers from all over the Empire, with sappers and engineers and infantry, with signalmen and airmen and naval commanders, even the top brass, and one had had to fight for a seat and elbow one’s way to the bar. Now the war had moved elsewhere and the place had a neglected, somewhat depressing air to it and the only men left were the wounded, the pen-pushers and the salvage and cleanup boys. The single barman, a bald Egyptian with a drooping moustache and a resigned air, polished glasses and looked bored.

  There had been no letters waiting for Gerald upon his return and that had surprised him. So instead he addressed the adjutant who had a letter open before him and who was marginally less drunk than the captain from the Argylls.

  ‘What’s the news from home?’

  ‘My wife’s left me,’ said the adjutant, a large man with a clipped moustache and rapidly blinking eyes. He reached unsteadily for a cigarette and swore when it dropped to the floor.

  ‘I say, I’m most dreadfully sorry, old boy,’ said Gerald, who had only met the fellow an hour before and had already forgotten his name. He gave the man one of his own cigarettes and lit it for him. ‘Jolly nasty for you.’

  ‘Ran off with a Yank!’ the man said, sitting up and becoming bellicose. ‘Bloody little tart! He’s welcome to her.’

  ‘Aye. You’re well shot of her, mon,’ said the captain, a Glaswegian with an almost impenetrable accent and a florid complexion, his eyes half closed by alcohol. It was not clear to Gerald if these two already knew each other and if the captain in the Argylls was therefore in a positon to make an informed observation about the adjutant’s wife or was merely drunk. ‘They’re all bloody tarts!’ the man added, addressing his tumbler of gin morosely.

  ‘Not all, surely,’ said Gerald. ‘My wife—’

  He paused, not quite certain what he had been going to say. He wished them to understand that his wife was not a tart, but he could not quite bring himself to utter the word in the same sentence. It felt wrong, thinking of Diana in the same breath as a tart. It defiled her, somehow. It defiled him.

  ‘My wife is a good woman,’ he said finally, and because it was the truth.

  ‘You’re a lucky man,’ said the Scot darkly, as though he found something sinister in Gerald’s assertion.

  ‘Bloody little tart,’ said the adjutant and, to their horror, he began to weep silently.

  They got the poor chap back to his quarters and the Scot wandered off to the brothels in Clot Bey to find a tart of his own, leaving Gerald to kill the remainder of his evening alone. Having no wish to spend it in the company of other morose or belligerent fellow officers, he wandered past the commandeered Semiramis Hotel and the closed and blacked-out palaces and government offices in Midan Ismail and down towards the riverside.

  The air had a different quality here away from the desert, having an almost tangible viscosity that made one’s flesh clammy to the touch. The flies were gone but in their place angry mosquitos buzzed, and crickets, frogs—or at any rate some unidentifiable form of wildlife—croaked and sang and chirped loudly and relentlessly the closer one got to the river. Wide, graceful steps led down to the water at this point, framed by a regal line of palm trees, and he imagined that, in another era, white-suited colonial officials and their wives would have paraded, liveried man servants scurrying a step behind wielding elegant white parasols. Now the few people one met were government officials in battered panama hats or the girls sitting smoking outside the brothels or locals in their long white tunics peddling, for a few piasters, whatever came to hand and who regarded one with suspicion if not open hostility. The European hotels along the water’s edge that had all been requisitioned during the desert war had, for the most part, been decommissioned but were sadly knocked about, an echo of their former selves showing keenly the effects of four years of military occupation and enemy air strikes. Still, it was safer here in the European part of the city. He had an idea if he strayed too far he’d end up as a corpse floating in the river. He had been here in ’42 when Rommel had been a mere two hours away and the local traders, in anticipation of his arrival, had displayed Rommel Wilkommen signs in their shop windows.

  He had reached the river’s edge and he paused. Small naval craft were moored to a pontoon along with a scattering of merchant vessels and the smaller, rick
ety craft favoured by the locals. The water lapped gently, a crust of detritus washing against the bulwark. Moonlight shimmered on the water’s surface, illuminating what the blackout tried to obscure, and he could make out the shadows of the bridges that crossed to Gezira, the island that sat squarely in the middle of the river, and on its northern tip Zamalek, where the ex-pats had lived in those far-off days before the war.

  There had been no letters waiting for him. He did not fear that his wife would run off with a Yank, for he trusted implicitly in her fidelity and in their marriage. It concerned him that her letters to him had not got through, had perhaps been sunk by enemy action, or that his letters to her had somehow failed to arrive. In his last letter he had taken some time to describe the desert at dawn to her because it had struck him at the time as something beautiful and he had sat on the roof of the Mk VI and tried to put down in words how it had seemed to him. Of course, it was entirely likely the censors had struck the whole lot out as it gave away his location—though what use the enemy would make of it he could not imagine. But the rest of the letter, where he had asked after her and Abigail, about the rationing and the bombing, where he had recalled in vivid detail a tennis match they had attended together before the war, she would have been able to read that part. In that dawn sitting on the roof of the tank he had wanted to write, I am alive! Ashby is dead but I have made it! but he did not write that. Instead he asked about the rationing and recalled a tennis match.