London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “I can’t stay and argue any more,” he said finally.

  “I know,” she said. “We’ll be all right.”

  So with his uniform on, and carrying his helmet and his boots, Charlie Dogget set off for his dangerous night’s work.

  At a quarter past six Helen Meredith kissed her mother goodbye. She looked so well in her uniform, with her fair hair pinned up under her cap. “I swear you don’t look a day over twenty-five,” Violet said with a smile.

  Helen smiled and nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Helen,” her mother gently took her arm as she was turning to go. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

  Neville Silversleeves was a man who naturally collected responsibilities. It was not his fault: people asked him to do things and he did them very well. At an early age he had succeeded his father as head of the respected old firm of Odstock, Alderbury and Silversleeves, Solicitors. If he joined any society, within a few years he was inevitably asked to be its secretary. He was tall, with thinning black hair, and a very long nose. “That nose,” a cruel barrister had once remarked, “collects petty authority like a flypaper.”

  As a good churchman, whose firm had done work for the diocese, Neville was a verger of St Paul’s and, given his position, had become one of the select group of ARP wardens in the City and Holborn. In recent months the wardens all over London had been unpopular for their ruthless enforcement of the blackout – a policy they had only followed because they had been informed, quite incorrectly, that even a lighted cigarette could be seen from a German bomber five thousand feet above. In the City itself, the residential population was small, but with so many banks, offices and churches to protect, the wardens had important responsibilities. They were also at considerable risk from bombs and fires themselves. But to Neville Silversleeves, this was just another of the burdens which he believed it was his destiny to bear.

  He was on duty that night.

  The Fleming brothers’ substation lay in section 84, at the outer edge of the London region’s authority. It was an evacuated schoolhouse. The equipment consisted of four taxis with ladders, three trailer pumps, a van and two motorcycles.

  The crews had all arrived by soon after six, but there might be hours to wait before they were summoned to back up the hard-pressed crews in the centre. There were two women on the telephones. There was the substation officer, who had been a regular fireman, and the crews, all Auxiliary Fire Service men. Percy and Herbert did the back-up tasks and Percy usually looked after the kitchen.

  The men had set up a darts board in the main schoolroom; and Herbert had made himself a popular figure by playing all the favourite music-hall songs on the old upright piano there. The only problem, as Percy saw it, was the food.

  It was unfortunate that the AFS administration had not done so well in the matter of provisions. Percy only had some rice, cabbage and a tray of corned beef which, it seemed to him, had a rather greenish look. “It’s not much of a meal,” he had remarked to Herbert.

  There was nothing to do but boil the rice and wait for the first drone of the German planes as they passed – sometimes directly overhead – on their way to central London. Darkness had long since fallen and Herbert was busily playing a music-hall number when Percy, who had walked to the door to look out, heard the sound of a single approaching engine coming straight towards him, saw two lights and then, after a brief pause, something huge and fiery red that made him tremble.

  “Oh, my God,” he said.

  Admiral Sir William Barnikel stood six foot three; his chest was reminiscent of the prow of a battleship and his beard was huge and red. He looked exactly like the descendant of Vikings that he was. “My grandfather Jonas was an ordinary sea captain,” he would admit modestly enough, “and before that we discovered the family were common fishmongers.” Having little knowledge of the City, the admiral had no understanding of the importance of the members of the ancient Fishmongers Guild. But whatever his antecedents, once Barnikel was on the quarterdeck he was a stupendous leader of men.

  The authorities had taken a calculated risk in putting the admiral in charge of a large part of the London Auxiliary Fire Service. “He is not always diplomatic,” certain bureaucrats gently suggested. His bellow could astound a frigate. “It is not a diplomat we need,” Churchill himself had remarked, “but a man to raise morale.” And so Admiral Barnikel’s mighty heart and mighty temper had been let loose upon the AFS.

  It was his great red beard that Percy now saw bearing down upon him as the Admiral arrived unannounced, as was his habit, to inspect this little outpost of his vast domain.

  “Oh, my God,” he murmured again.

  The firemen all followed the admiral round. “More sandbags by that door,” he jovially commanded. Then, seeing the piano, he roared: “Give us a song!” As Herbert bashed out Nellie Dean, he boomingly joined in. “Well done.” He clapped Herbert on the back. “Best I’ve heard in any station. But is that piano in tune?”

  “Not quite,” Herbert confessed.

  “Tune it, man!” he bellowed.

  He inspected their uniforms and boots, pounded his fist on a cracked helmet until it disintegrated, produced a fresh one from his car and told them all that they were heroes. Then he entered the kitchen.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

  Percy nervously said he supposed he was.

  “But you just prepare what they give you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Percy replied truthfully. “And thank God,” he said shortly afterwards, “that I did.”

  Having given the rice and cabbage a disgusted glance, Barnikel began to inspect the corned beef. If there was one thing Admiral Sir William Barnikel understood, it was rations. A well-fed ship, he knew, was a contented ship. He also knew that many of the fire-fighters still suspected that nobody really cared about them. He lifted up a slice of the greenish corned beef with a fork, eyed it and sniffed it. He took a bite, chewed it, screwed up his face and spat it out.

  “It’s gone off!” he bellowed. “This is the food they supplied for your men? Good God, you’ll all be poisoned!”

  And then Barnikel became very angry indeed. He twisted the fork so violently that he almost knotted it. His great fist pounded the kitchen table so hard that one of its legs fell off. He seized the tin tray of corned beef, marched outside with it, and hurled it away over the station roof into the sky – as far as anyone knew it might have landed in Berlin, for it was never found again. Then he went in to the telephone, called headquarters and ordered them to put a proper dinner in a staff car and bring it round to Crystal Palace immediately. “If necessary, you can send my own supper too.” He turned to Percy.

  “Your name?”

  “Fleming, sir.”

  With his blue eyes blazing, the red-bearded admiral tapped his huge finger on Percy’s chest. “Fleming, if you are ever given food like this again, you are to pick up the telephone, ring HQ and ask for me personally. If they argue, you tell them I told you to. I’m trusting you to do that. Do you understand?”

  “Oh yes, sir,” said Percy. “I do!”

  “Good. Next time I come, we’ll have a song on that piano.” He looked at Herbert. “I shall eat supper with you.”

  And after a brief private word with the station chief, the Admiral was off to galvanize and put heart into some other unsuspecting outpost.

  Charlie listened: the drone had begun. Soon it became a roar as they came over, wave after wave of Heinkels and Dorniers, escorted by buzzing clouds of Messerschmitts. The barrage was beginning now, a huge chorus of bangs, thuds and rattles, and of bursts of light in the night sky; the searchlights waved back and forth like strange, silver wands in the darkness above. The first few nights the barrage had been an exercise in noise, just to make the Londoners feel that they were being defended; but the operation was improving now and some enemy planes were actually being hit.

  Soon he could hear the thud and boom of the high-explosive bombs crashing down. They sound
ed closer than they had last night, and sure enough a few minutes later, the telephone rang with the first request.

  “It’s the City. A serious fire near Ludgate. Off you go, lads.”

  There were two categories of big fire. The largest of all would be an entire block: this was termed a conflagration. A serious fire was the other category, but would still require over thirty pumps, which meant that AFS taxi-trailers from all over London would be converging to help the handful of proper fire-engines of the regular service.

  Charlie’s team crossed the river at Vauxhall Bridge, made their way along past the Houses of Parliament, up Whitehall and into the Strand. St Clement Danes flashed by. Then they found themselves joining a line of similar vehicles crawling down past the newspaper offices that lined Fleet Street, towards the church of St Bride’s.

  It was quite a sight. A single high-explosive bomb, Charlie guessed, must have struck, ripping out the guts of two houses. But a cluster of magnesium fire bombs had also fallen and it was these that were really doing the damage. Though in themselves the fire bombs were not very fearsome – they burned like a large roman candle firework and you could actually kick them away or put them out – they often lodged somewhere practically inaccessible and before the firemen could get to them, the fire had frequently taken hold. In this case, half a dozen houses were already blazing furiously. The last house in the row had not yet caught, but there was an incendiary on the roof.

  “Lines!” the officer in charge was calling. “More lines!”

  They were close enough to the river to run hose lines straight down to its waters and pump from there. Already a dozen hoses were in operation.

  “Come on,” said Charlie, “let’s go up there.” While the others started undoing the ladder, he and the senior man on the team ran up the narrow staircase. They could hear a crackling sound coming from the next house, but the walls were quite thick and they knew that if the fire came through underneath them they could move along the roof, or have a ladder run up to them.

  Once on the roof, they saw the incendiary easily enough. It was lodged up beside the chimney. “Here,” said Charlie. “I could get that with a grappling hook.” He started climbing up towards it. His foot went through once, but he managed to grab a hold on the chimney to steady himself. “Lovely view!” he shouted, and, at a signal from his companion that the coast was clear, he took aim, swung, and knocked the fire bomb clean off the roof into the street below.

  They had just neared the bottom of the stairs when they noticed the smell. For a second they looked at each other in surprise, then Charlie’s companion grabbed the stair rail. “I feel dizzy!” he cried, and Charlie had to catch hold of him. Charlie grinned. “Here,” he hissed, “get a grip on yourself and come with me.” They descended the stairs until they came to the cellars which, like many in this part of London, ran along under several houses. As they entered, they could see that the ground floor of the neighbouring house was burning. Falling embers would start a conflagration in the cellar at any moment. The dizzying smell was almost overpowering, but its cause was now obvious. “Alcohol,” said Charlie.

  The ground floor of the next door house was a liquor store; the fumes were from the broken bottles. They could be heard popping and exploding above and soon the same thing would start down in the cellar where the crates were stored.

  “No way we can save this lot,” his companion whispered.

  “No,” said Charlie, “but look at that.” On the floor, not twenty feet away, was an open crate full of miniature bottles. Neither man spoke as they moved towards it.

  A fireman’s boot stretched well up his leg and had a large top. It was amazing how many miniatures would fit in there. A bit of floor fell in near them, but they took no notice until they had finished.

  “Charlie,” the other whispered, “you have all the luck!”

  Helen drove through Moorgate. It seemed astonishing that even when there was an inferno in one street, the next could be pitch dark. Twice they had to stop to negotiate around a bomb crater. On the second occasion, they had only just seen it in time. There were just two of them in the ambulance – a sturdy old van with faint markings on its sides. It might have seemed a little primitive, but it carried a stretcher and a full complement of first aid materials, which was a great improvement on the situation some months before when she had been asked to drive her own little Morris and to find scissors and bandages for herself.

  There was a lull in the bombing. Though a few searchlights stalked the sky, the drone of the bombers had died away. The quiet would certainly not last. Although the Spitfires were out there searching for prey, most of the bombers were not only getting through but were returning to base, reloading and coming back for a second run.

  The tenement block came into sight. A single fire appliance was hosing down the corner where a bomb had neatly taken down a section of wall, leaving the interior exposed like a child’s dolls’ house. The firemen had brought an old lady out and laid her on a blanket to await the ambulance. It only took Helen a moment to ascertain that one of her legs was badly broken. The pain must have been considerable. But the old woman’s response to it all was not unusual.

  “I’m sorry, dear, to give you all this trouble.” She tried to smile. “Should have gone to the shelter, shouldn’t I?”

  Helen strapped the old woman’s leg to a splint and was just moving her on to the stretcher when she saw a fireman look up and heard the drone of the next wave of bombers approaching.

  “Better hurry, Miss,” he said.

  She bent down to pick up one end of the stretcher and then realized that the old woman was trying urgently to say something to her. Patiently she leaned over her.

  “Please, dear, if I’m going to hospital,” the old woman pleaded, “I just realized. Could you help me? I forgot. . . .”

  Helen did not need to let her finish.

  “Your teeth.”

  It was always the same. They always wanted their false teeth. They had nearly always been left on the mantelpiece. The blast had always blown them somewhere else. And, if she possibly could, she always went in to look for them. Keeping their teeth was the one little bit of dignity they still had. “Besides, with the war on, you never know when you’ll get some more,” an old man had once pointed out to her.

  “What floor?” she sighed.

  “Raid’s beginning,” the fireman called.

  “A bomb never hits the same place twice,” she said calmly, though she knew there was no reason why it shouldn’t.

  As the drone turned into a roar, and the barrage erupted above her, Helen walked through the door into the tenement building.

  The premonition that had been troubling Violet was not of a definite kind. She had not seen a vision of Helen lying dead, or injured, it was more general: a sense that something important – she could not exactly say what – was coming to an end. When Helen had gone out for her walk and she had been sitting in her chair, she had closed her eyes and suddenly heard a sound, quite sharp, as though someone had abruptly closed a book. She told herself it was nothing, but she suspected that as people came close to some great watershed in their lives they might become a little psychic. After Helen had left that evening, the feeling had grown stronger.

  Only after the first raid of the night had passed did it occur to her that it might be her own life rather than Helen’s which was about to be snapped shut. There had only been a few bombs on Belgravia, presumably aimed at Buckingham Palace, but of course it was possible. She wondered whether she should try to do anything about it. She sighed to herself. She was over seventy. Did she really have the energy?

  It couldn’t have been the corned beef since that had never been touched, but, whatever it was, by midnight Auxiliary Fireman Clark was in no state to go out. Crew number three, therefore, was a man short.

  When the news came through that the Bull Brewery had been hit, the station officer looked round for an extra man. He had always hesitated to use the older me
n like the Flemings. As both were in their sixties, they really belonged in the Home Guard and, in fact, though neither of them knew it, they were only there because he felt Herbert’s performances at the piano were good for morale. Just now, however, he was a man short and faced with a conflagration. Thoughtfully, he looked at Percy.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to go along?”

  “Come on, Percy!” the others cried. “It’s a chance to get in the brewery. We’ll have a party!”

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  Now it was really coming down on every side. Incendiaries were falling, both magnesium and oil ones. Again and again, Charlie heard the scream and the awful thump of a high-explosive bomb. One fell in Blackfriars, another somewhere near the Guildhall. Above, the sky was full of starbursts as though they were witnessing a huge firework display put on by madmen. The roars, cracks and bangs were deafening.

  They had been sent up to St Bartholomew’s after Ludgate. On their way there, they had passed the high dome of the Old Bailey criminal court whose elegant figure of Justice holding the scales had presided over this quarter of the City for the last thirty years. Thinking of the illicit bottles in their boots, Charlie and his mate grinned at each other as they passed her.

  The St Bartholomew’s fire proved to be small and quickly dealt with. But they were not left idle: within minutes a dispatch rider told them to go over behind St Paul’s. An office building between Watling Street and St Mary-le-Bow had caught fire. A dozen other appliances were hastening towards it.

  Just as they were leaving, Charlie, who was driving, caught sight of something gleaming as white as an angel, drifting slowly towards them over the dome of the Old Bailey.