by Sarah Moss
The eyewitness accounts speak of the bombs as a kind of weather. One man, leaving work on his bike, looked at the sky and decided he could make it most of the way home before anything started, was waiting at a red light when the first planes came over. A bus-driver on the Leamington to Birmingham route decided to serve the Coventry stops according to the timetable despite the sounding sirens, because his passengers were mostly wives and mothers who’d been shopping in Leamington and needed to get home to cook the tea and put the kids to bed, bombs or no bombs. Reaching the central bus station in Coventry on time, having driven around a couple of incendiary bombs falling into the road in front of him, he saw that ‘no-one was about’ and so left for Birmingham at the timetabled 8.08 p.m. The first bombs were already falling on the Cathedral. Domestic routine takes priority over political violence until the very last minute; this is one reason why some wealthy Jewish families were still in Berlin and Prague and Innsbruck when the Final Solution was ratified. Who can believe that his wife will die while cooking dinner in her own kitchen, that his children, tonight, won’t survive bathtime? Perhaps more importantly, how can we live once we have understood that any or all of us may be killed while tying our shoelaces or going up the stairs? While reading a novel, or writing one? Two children died in the Coventry raid because the older one had left their Anderson shelter to take her younger brother back to the house to use the toilet. A man survived because he’d left a shelter to pee in a neighbour’s garden and the shelter received a direct hit while he did so.
I looked up from my books, stroked the handle of the blue cowslip mug that Miriam and Rose gave me for my birthday. I remembered my mother’s father, whom I rarely saw after my mother’s death; he had other, more amenable children who gave him other, more amenable, grandchildren. We didn’t ‘do’ that war in primary school in the 1980s. It wasn’t history then. But I did once ask him what he remembered about it, after Dad had been telling me about my other grandfather’s journey from Austria to Bristol and then to Brooklyn. Nothing, Grandad said, it was very dull. I was in the Navy and I saw an awful lot of waves. You should ask your grandmother, she was fire-watching in London all the way through the Blitz. But I’d forgotten about it by the next time I saw her. Surely, I thought, what shaped that generation, and even more so their parents, who were young in 1914 and almost old in 1939, was not knowing how to make jam out of marrows and wedding dresses out of parachute silk, reusing wrapping paper and, as I remember my grandmother doing, washing used paper towels so she could use them as handkerchiefs, but living with the knowledge of death. And, worse than mortality, deliberate harm.
There were four men protecting the Cathedral that night. The Provost, two young men, and an elderly mason who knew every stone in the medieval building. They stood on the roof, where moonlight on frosted lead must have made it and them visible from miles above. Quietly shining to the quiet moon, my mind murmured, as if all moonlit frost belongs to Coleridge, but many of the people in Coventry that night remembered not only the bright moon and the embossing of frost but the glamour of the flames. A man twenty miles away was reminded of the aurora borealis, which he had seen from the North Atlantic during the First World War. Those working on the streets of the city thought of fireworks on a previously unimagined scale, of forests of flame and huge chandeliers. Buildings leapt and shimmered.
People were crushed and burnt.
There were no defences. Four hundred and forty-nine Nazi planes reached Coventry and almost all returned to their bases before morning.
Men and women hurried around the streets pouring sand over incendiary devices and water over burning buildings, escorting people from bombed and burning shelters to not-yet bombed and burning shelters, and the sky was bright as day but red.
The four men could not control the fires in the Cathedral. A Victorian restoration had put in steel roof beams, which conducted heat through the ancient timbers. Melting lead dripped from the roof. Flames wrapped the organ.
Coventry’s water mains broke. Bombs blew deep holes in the roads. Vehicles burned. The telephone lines melted. In Manchester, they sent fire engines to Stoke so that Stoke could send fire engines to Birmingham and Birmingham could send fire engines to Coventry, but the roads were broken and there was no more water.
Coventry burned. The Cathedral ended.
I was tempted to pass on to my imagined audience the small comedies, the man whose superior told him not to smoke while wearing his uniform as the air around them both glittered with sparks and burning filled the air like rain; the workers at the engineering plant who took the opportunity to test their new water-pumps using water from the canal after the fire brigade gave up for lack of mains water; the man who sat under a table eating an entire box of Dairy Milk chocolates because he wasn’t going to die and leave them unfinished. Maybe later, I thought, and I began to write about the three-year-old holding his dead mother’s hand all night, and the family who survived a direct hit on their house because they were sheltering in the cellar, but could not get out when the mains burst and the cellar filled with water.
echolocation
Mostly, the parents in the playground had stopped speaking to me. I do not know, even now, that I would know what to say to a father whose daughter was being indefinitely detained in hospital. Word had spread; we had become a tragic family, one to whom terrible things happen. Rose ran off to play with her friends, a game involving pawing their feet like horses and pretending to hide behind a netball post. I took out my phone and read the news, so that no-one would have to acknowledge me. I did not care about the news – let politicians rage, no-one was giving the hospital enough money to feed the children adequately or run MRI scans within a week of being ordered – and at the same time the news had become unbearable as it does when you have a newborn baby. The sacred buildings of ancient civilisations which had stood for thousands of years were being obliterated by men who didn’t like them. In Palestine, children were cowering through the night in schools and hospitals while bombs landed around them. Body parts flew, there was blood on the walls. Glass shattered and blew into the heads of children, into little girls’ plaits. In the morning, fathers ran open-mouthed, howling, through the ruins with small misshapen bodies in their arms, small heads drooping at appalling angles.
The bell rang. Rose hurtled towards me and clung on hard.
‘I don’t want to go to school. Don’t make me go. It’s not fair, Mimi gets to spend all day lying around playing and watching TV. Just because she’s so lazy she lay down and went to sleep in the field.’
I stroked her hair. Her pony-tail was off-centre and I should have brushed it better.
‘Sweetheart, Mimi would so much rather be at school. She’s bored there. She misses you and all her friends. And Rose, she didn’t go to sleep. Not like that. It wasn’t her fault at all.’
The children had all lined up.
‘Can we talk about this later? Or at least, with Mummy, because it’s my night to stay with Mim?’
Rose butted my stomach with her head. ‘No. It’s not fair. Mimi always gets everything, all those presents you keep giving her, and you always make me go to school.’
She kicked at my shoes. Her class began to file in. The other parents were watching. I’d been hoping to get the 9.15 train and I needed to call at the post office on the way to the station, for more of Miriam’s parcels.
‘OK. Do you want me to ask Mrs Wasley if she can find us somewhere to have a talk about all this now? It’s not us giving Miriam presents, you know that. They’re all coming in the post. And there have been some for you.’
Almost as many as for Miriam, in fact, and Miriam was passing on the puzzles and colouring books from Emma’s aunt, who seemed to have forgotten which child was which. Not that any of this was about presents.
She pushed me and began to run across the playground after the last of her line. She turned back to shout. ‘No. I have to go now. I don’t want a kiss and I’m not saying goodbye to you.’
>
I could feel the other parents’ gaze. It was like a TV show, they’d say later, Adam and poor little Rose yelling at each other across the tarmac. I kept my eyes on Rose as she disappeared through the double doors. What if she died before I saw her again, what if anger was the last thing to pass between us, what if I had to remember this miserable interaction for the rest of my life as our last? My hands clenched in my pockets.
‘Adam.’ It was Martha, Phoebe’s mum, late as usual, a twin still clinging to each hand. ‘You OK?’
I nodded. I didn’t speak.
‘Adam, it’s not you she’s angry with. You must be doing pretty well for her to be able to tell you how she’s feeling at all just now. She feels safe enough to shout at you. Look, I have to take these two to nursery now, but shall I have Rose after school? Give you and Emma a bit more time? It’s no trouble, you know that, four’s not much different from three and I did the shopping yesterday, we’ve more food than we can eat.’
Martha used to be a psychologist, before the twins were born.
Four is different from three when the fourth is Rose. Especially furious Rose. But if Dr Chalcott was finally able to see us today, I wanted Emma to be there too. Or I wanted Emma to have a little time between leaving Miriam and collecting Rose, to eat something or catch up with her email or replace the tights she’d laddered while folding up the chair-bed. Though I didn’t want Rose to feel any more neglected than she already did.
Tom and Lily pulled on Martha’s hands, one one way, one the other, pulling her in two. They do that. ‘Mummy, we’re late again and you’re making us even later.’
‘Shush a minute. Adam, I’ll make a fuss of her, make her feel special. I’ll paint their nails or something.’
I remembered teaching Phoebe to swim and helping her cut out gingerbread when she was upset about the new babies and Martha as overwhelmed as any sane person would be when left in sole charge of infant twins and an angry three-year-old. ‘OK. Thanks, Martha. It really helps. I’ll get Emma to text you when she’s on the train. Won’t be too late.’
Can you feed Emma too, I wanted to ask, can you stick a plateful of something in front of her and distract her while she eats it. Because I don’t know what we’re going to do, what I’m going to do, if she gets sick too.
I had a book to read on the train, a memoir about sailing along the coast of the Pacific Northwest which I’d read before and remembered as absorbing. I was finding it as hard to read as Emma was to eat: nothing was what I wanted. Books that mattered were too demanding and books that didn’t were too trivial for the new reality in which death stood in the corner of every room and came to breathe over my shoulder whenever I took my eye off him. This one, at least, was too demanding. I let it close. The city spreads a long way and all of it is ugly, but the first part of the journey crosses fields and canals, the half-heartedly rural landscape of my runs and bike rides. Four unkempt horses stood in a field with a coil of rusty barbed wire and something under a flapping blue tarpaulin. I watched the back gardens of houses as meanly miniature as our own, faded plastic toys crowding around faded plastic conservatories. A stand of trees, fenced with Keep Off notices, and a bird of prey hanging in the damp sky above. The canal, a runner on the towpath. I had not run since that day. Sheep grazing as if the motorway bordering their field were a sparkling river. Lorries in full spate, flashing overhead signs above the carriageways. Slow down, accident ahead.
I opened the book again. Forest and quiet water, the sounds not of the roaring Pacific but of small inlets, backwaters. Light refracted from ripples dances on the sail, on the cabin roof. Wind stirs the trees, pulls across the water like breath on glass. Our narrator remembers the people who used to live here, who could take all this for granted as he and I cannot. He resists our Romantic impulses. He thinks about the paintings and carvings those people made, the way the reflections and the movement of the sea came to live in their eyes and in their minds. Everything, he says, they saw everything as if lit by dancing water. Our narrator’s father, I remembered from my first reading, is dying, but at this point in the book our narrator does not know that, or at least – since by the time the author wrote the book his father was dead – he is pretending not to know what will happen before the ending.
So am I. So, perhaps, are you.
Rain spattered the window. We were entering the city now, via an avenue of derelict industrial buildings interspersed with expanses of concrete and rubble. Victorian hubris hung around ornate brickwork between smashed windows and rooftop turrets through which shrubs grew towards the grubby sky. The streets here were malevolently quiet and there was no-one walking.
The inchoate shapes of the city centre neared, the bulbous shopping arcade and the skyscrapers dwarfing the nineteenth-century pomp and circumstance at street level. Whatever the embarrassing ambitions of Victorian architecture, it was at least designed to speak to pedestrians, to catch the eye of the man on foot. Most of this city’s more recent buildings would appear to address people in airliners. We passed the first of the two derelict churches, its windows boarded and its graveyard clipped by a dual carriageway, willow trees pushing their way through its chain-link fence. Knock them down, launch wrecking balls at traceries and Gothic stone and marble memorial slabs meant to last for ever? Convert them, mildly haunted flats or self-consciously iconoclastic clubs and cafés? Resurrect some gods and give them a home.
I hurried from the station. Christmas was coming and people were shopping, people whose children were not in hospital. Look, Adam, I know you don’t want to think about this but you need to know that this wasn’t just a freak event, that there’s an ongoing risk and always will be. It may well happen again. Christmas, I thought, what if she’s still on the ward at Christmas? I stepped around a puddle. Rain was coming through my hair and through the shoulders of my coat. I tried to push Miriam’s packages further into their plastic bag, shifted the weight of the holdall on my shoulder. Past the Magistrates’ Court, another Victorian brick building where realities change with the telling of a tale, where people walk up those stone steps, through those heavy wooden doors, with one story about themselves and leave, some other way, with another. A bus passed and splashed my trousers. I found myself almost running, the bags hammering my back and legs.
Miriam was still in bed, hair tousled and face blurred, hands beneath the covers, doing nothing. Above the hospital sheets and blankets we could see the deep neckline of the red silk pyjamas she had bought herself the week before it happened, and upon which she was now insisting. A protest against infantilisation, a way of making everyone who came in to listen to her chest feel as uncomfortable as she was. The silk pyjamas meant we couldn’t pretend we weren’t violating her, all of us. I could hear a whistle on her breath again, a breezy descant to her breathing, but knew now not to comment. Emma had refolded the chair-bed and was sitting on it, dressed as if for work, feet neatly beside each other, doing something on her iPad. It is the saving grace of general practice that very little work can be brought home, or indeed to your daughter’s hospital bed, but Emma finds exceptions when she needs them.
She looked up. ‘Oh, is it raining?’
Miriam sighed. ‘No, Mum, it’s not raining, Dad just decided to pour water all over himself on the train. Probably because it’s more interesting than sitting here waiting for me to stop breathing again.’
Emma and I exchanged glances.
‘And stop looking at each other like that, I’m not stupid.’
I went around the other side of the bed to kiss Miriam.
‘Wash your hands, Dad. Haven’t you seen all the signs?’
I put the holdall down on the floor, where it would get in the way when the nurse came to make her two-hourly observations of Miriam’s pulse, blood pressure and temperature. I started moving things around on the table, as if I’d be able to make room for the parcels, and then dumped them on Mimi’s bed while I went to wash my hands. When I came back, Mimi had folded her hands behind her head
and was gazing at the ceiling. The whistle was still there, singing in her ribcage. Her eyes rested on some cracks in the plaster. Above her hung fluorescent strip lights, one a paler shade of aluminium than the others. Emma shook her head at me.
‘Don’t you want to get up, Mim? Have you had breakfast?’
Emma swiped something on her screen. ‘She says she’s not hungry. I offered to phone you and ask you to bring a croissant but she said not to bother.’
You should have done, I thought. As if, its name once uttered, a croissant might have significant properties. As if I could have bought or brought something that would make a difference.
‘Would you feel better for a shower?’ I asked Miriam.
She closed her eyes. At least she’s angry, I thought, at least she’s telling us how it feels. Isn’t that what Martha said?
Emma stood up. ‘Adam, is it OK if I go for a walk? Just around the corridors. I’ve got my phone.’
‘Get yourself a coffee,’ I said. ‘Go over the road for a croissant, if you like.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes. Bye, Mimi. It would be lovely if you were out of that bed when I come back.’
Miriam and I listened to her clipped footsteps retreating down the ward. Poor Mimi, having us come and go like the figures in a weather-house while she lay immured and shackled by stickers and wires. The child in the next bed, behind the curtain which Emma had kept half closed, began to whimper.