The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  ‘It was not a matter of ethics,’ Babcock said. ‘It came down not to conscience, but to expediency.’

  ‘Bad for morale, you mean. Londoner mowing down fellow Londoner.’

  ‘They didn’t want to waste the ammunition,’ Babcock said, climbing down to the floor. ‘They couldn’t afford to squander the bullets on a handful of militant civilians.’

  Finlay stopped polishing.

  ‘You said there were hundreds of you.’

  ‘Thousands, Finlay. There were thousands of us.’ Babcock examined his work from the bottom of the step-ladder, sinking the length of his screwdriver into a narrow sheath riveted along the leg of his overalls. ‘It was a scene reminiscent of the storming of the Winter Palace.’

  ‘You were there too, were you?’

  ‘No,’ Babcock said. ‘But the wife and I saw Mr Eisenstein’s filmic interpretation of the event at the Locarno in Waltham-stowe. Anyway, that should do you.’

  Finlay looked up. Babcock had replaced the bulbs and shades and in so doing had changed the character and effect of the lighting in Finlay’s quarters. He was going to have to study architects’ plans of buildings that time and change of use had made intricate, obscure and sometimes labyrinthine in their complexity. The lights that had turned his bloodied shaving water violet would make the blueprints of buildings unreadable. So he had done as Grey suggested and telephoned Babcock, using the number Grey had given him, and had asked for a draftsman’s table to study from and improved lighting to study by.

  ‘Not asking for much, are you?’ Babcock had said.

  ‘Can you arrange it for me?’

  ‘Of course I can. Captain – Mr Grey – says you’re to have anything you want.’

  Finlay had wondered about Grey’s status, about his rank. ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem,’ Babcock said. ‘The capital is being bombed into oblivion. And you request more amenable lighting. And exotic furniture. What could possibly be the problem?’

  White’s background briefing had been succinct. Some of it Finlay had learned since his return to England from the newspapers. But most of the detail was entirely new to him. All of it was confirmation of what he had seen already on the streets. The air raids proper had begun a month before, at around four o’clock on the afternoon of September 7, when more than two hundred German bombers launched an assault on the docks at West Ham and Bermondsey. Bombs strayed as far away from the target as Victoria Street. But Stepney, Poplar, Bow, Shoreditch and Whitechapel bore the brunt. The bombardment continued for more than twelve hours and left almost five hundred people dead. The bombers, one hundred and seventy of them, returned the following night. They concentrated their attack on the same areas as before and this time killed four hundred people. Dawn brought no respite. On September 9 the Luftwaffe despatched two hundred bombers to attack by day. Almost the same number of enemy aircraft delivered the night assault. Another three hundred and seventy Londoners died.

  ‘And the following night, they came back and gutted St Katherine’s Dock,’ White said. ‘The warehouses surrounding the dock were full of inflammable material. Paraffin wax, mostly.’

  Finlay listened and imagined. Wax ran molten across the quays and into the docks, flooding into the water where it set on the surface of the Thames in a black and brittle sheet reflecting flames rising two hundred feet from the burning quayside buildings.

  ‘Since then it has been pretty unrelenting,’ White said. ‘You can imagine the nightly destruction to property a hundred and fifty bombers brings. We’re averaging around three hundred deaths a night. In the aftermath of the raids, people come up from overcrowded shelters filthy, hungry and frightened. They are increasingly weary because the noise of the bombing makes sleep impossible. They return to homes, if their homes are still there, without windows, water, sewage provision or power. Gas and electricity have become very scarce. Nobody wants to run the risk of working through the night, so no bread is being baked. Opening the Underground up as air-raid shelters has helped morale a bit. So has what anti-aircraft fire we are able to provide. We can’t hit anything, but our citizens apparently find the noise of retaliation reassuring.’

  ‘When were the Underground platforms opened up?’

  ‘Night after the first big bombardment. Liverpool Street was first and the rest followed.’

  ‘Whose initiative?’

  White coughed. ‘Popular demand,’ the Immaculate Major said.

  ‘Is provision elsewhere so bad?’

  White looked at the Major. It was the Major who spoke.

  ‘The London County Council realized several years ago that in the event of another international conflict, London would be a target from the air. It is not just the greatest city in the world. London condenses a fifth of the population of the British Isles into an area of seven hundred and fifty square miles. That makes it a very economical target. An LCC delegation asked the Government to provide funding for deep shelters. The Government declined to provide the funds.’

  Finlay thought of Colonel Baxter and his batteries of antique guns.

  ‘What defences were the funds allocated to in place of deep shelters?’ he asked the Major.

  White turned to Finlay. ‘Are you aware of something known as Deep Shelter Mentality?’

  Finlay shook his head.

  ‘Should the civilian population of a city be provided with deep shelters and then bombed, they will survive the bombing, but they will be aware of it and speculative about the scale of destruction. Panic breeds and the people in the shelters simply never re-emerge. Chaos ensues. Since a city cannot run itself, defeat becomes inevitable.’

  ‘That’s the theory?’

  ‘The LCC predicted numerous potentialities,’ the Major said. He had taken off his gloves. Finlay saw that the flesh of his hands was pink and the skin flaking off them on to the desk, on which they reposed, like dandruff from a badly afflicted scalp. ‘Their worst projection was thousands dead each day after mass bombing raids. They planned to fill disused quarries with quicklime and turn them into mass graves. They planned to fill fleets of barges with the dead, tow their cargo of corpses out to sea and dump them in the Channel. Thankfully, it hasn’t come to that.’

  Finlay was silent for a moment.

  ‘What has it come to?’

  The Major tapped out a tattoo with the pink tips of his fingers.

  ‘The Oval cricket ground is a vegetable allotment. We fire an average of thirty thousand shells to score a single hit against an enemy aircraft. The black-out is facilitating a crime wave unprecedented since policing in this country began. And you can’t get nylons. Not for love nor money.’

  ‘There was some unrest in the East End,’ White said. ‘Too many things were left to local government in the first fortnight of raids and the town halls didn’t have the wherewithal to cope. We believe that West Ham was closest to insurrection.’

  ‘Pockets of insurrection,’ the Major said.

  ‘Then Jerry did us a favour,’ White said. ‘The bombers turned their attention west of London Bridge. Mayfair took a fearful pounding. Our East End friends felt much better once the toffs were getting a taste of it. And then terrific luck. The Palace was hit, with the King and Queen in residence.’ He opened a drawer and pushed a ten-by-eight-inch press photograph across the desk. It showed the Queen, pretty and plump, picking a dainty path through Palace rubble at the side of her gaunt husband.

  ‘I would like to contact my mother,’ Finlay said. ‘Write to her, I mean. I want to let her know where I am so that she can write and tell my brother. I want to know from my mother how my brother is. And I want to be able to send my mother money.’

  ‘We can let her know how you are,’ White said. ‘We cannot for the moment let her know where you are, or permit any kind of direct contact. Am I right in believing that your mother lives alone, a widow, in Liverpool?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will reassure her about you and ensure that she is comforta
ble. That much I promise you.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I haven’t seen a single fire hydrant on the streets,’ Finlay said.

  White straightened the blotter on his desk. The Major coughed.

  ‘The good burghers of London deemed that the river would suffice,’ White said.

  ‘It won’t. Fighting fires requires water under pressure. Out of reach of the river, it requires supplies of static water.’

  ‘Static water?’

  ‘Ponds, tanks. Where do you live, Mr White?’

  ‘Town, you mean, or country?’

  ‘He means town,’ the Major said.

  ‘I’ve a place in Cadogan Square.’

  ‘Flat, or house?’

  ‘House.’

  ‘Then if I were you, I would flood my basement.’

  ‘There is the sand,’ the Major said. ‘We have turned Hampstead Heath into the Grand Canyon in the excavation of sand. But I don’t suppose, Chief Fire Officer, that sand will satisfy.’

  ‘Sandbags are adequate for blast protection,’ Finlay said. ‘At least, they are if they’re packed tightly enough. But the weight of sand prevents easy transportation and handling and it won’t fight fire except by smothering, and to smother, it needs to be dropped from above.’

  ‘Useless, then,’ White said. ‘Do you have any more questions?’

  Finlay rolled the blueprints he had been given and inserted them into the cardboard tube they had provided him with. He turned to the Major. ‘Where were you gassed?’

  ‘Vimy Ridge,’ the Major said, without looking up. Finlay nodded and turned to go.

  ‘I think we’ve got that chap all wrong,’ White said, after Finlay had exited the room and the door had closed on his absence.

  ‘One thing, anyway,’ the Major said, stretching his gloves taut over tender flesh. ‘Pound to a penny the fellow knows about Gommecourt Wood.’

  Finlay left the Ministry building for a false dusk accelerated by the absence of light from street lamps and passing traffic and by soot, mournful and heavy in the autumnal sky. Vestiges of sun burned with an orange afterglow on the buildings to his left as he walked along Whitehall. The green Whitehall roofs shed slipping fingers of ochre sunlight and lapsed into shadow and refuge as night augured the onset of darkness and the bombs. By the time Finlay reached Trafalgar Square, the spaces of the night city were no longer singly articulated, but blurred, bringing a weird claustrophobia as the blackness grew close to absolute. He sensed rather than saw the mad, imperial apostrophe of Nelson’s Column, just as he sensed rather than distinctly heard footsteps behind him, like an echo of his own blind but deliberate progress towards the east, and home.

  Finlay’s journey along the Strand was slow and groping. The sensation of the night river, coursing to his right, suggested itself in a swift breath of cold air on his right cheek whenever the buildings were breached by the flattened spaces of bomb damage in gaps blacker than the dark penumbra of the buildings lining the empty avenue. When Finlay passed these, he was aware of their absence of mass. He walked, listening for the sound of approaching aeroplane engines, for the oncoming rumble of death, still aware of the footsteps echoing his.

  Finlay had traversed the black chasm of Aldwych and was on Fleet Street when the cloud above him shifted and stars and a fragment of moon swept the skulking city in a brilliant silvery light. He turned, convinced that his pursuer would be caught, exposed as if by the flash from a camera bulb. But Finlay saw, instead of one figure, a dozen phantoms flitting this way and that. He saw a caped warden astride a bicycle, searching the sky; two men in buttoned overcoats and hats hurrying under the clock outside the Express building; a woman with yellow hair splayed garish across her shoulders, hair spilling from a netting scarf as she smoked with the cigarette cupped in her palm in a surreptitious doorway. Then cloud shrouded the sky and blindness crept over them all and he was alone again. And then he heard the vibrant drone of the approaching Junkers with their cargo of explosion and flame. He was hurrying along New Fetter Lane when the air-raid siren sounded. Then he heard the crump of bombs and saw flashes of crimson and yellow rise in the east. Wapping, he thought. The docks again. He was further here from the intended target than he would be at Liverpool Street. But he knew that his sepulchre there was safe. He needed to study the plans he carried by the light of Babcock’s newly fitted lamps. There was a public shelter close to Fleet Street and Finlay could have taken refuge there. But the Immaculate Major had told him about the public shelters earlier in the day, when White had left the room briefly to take a telephone call. And knowing what he knew now about the public shelters, Finlay felt safer taking his chances on the streets.

  They had given him responsibility for five buildings. His job was to make them as fire-proof as possible in the event of attack from the air. He had to try to proof them against the assault of incendiaries. He had to try to make them reluctant to ignite into flame if hit by explosives, or burn in series as flames spread from bomb damage to neighbouring buildings. Finlay’s buildings were a disparate lot. They ranged in age and original use from the town house of a bishop built by Thomas Hawksmoor to a cathedral of cement and granite that rose in six-storey tribute to the modernists of the Chicago school. Proximity was the single unifying element. All were located in the City, within a rough triangle of thoroughfares extending from its northern base on Leadenhall Street to its southern apex where Bishopsgate and Houndsditch coincided.

  It was a tiny acreage and uncomfortably close to the prime bomb targets of the Bank of England, St Paul’s and the main-line railway terminus at Liverpool Street. But the density and narrowness of the streets through which they were reached had not changed since the rebuilding that followed the Great Fire. Lanes and alleyways, some the mere width of a cart, teemed and tumbled with portico, column, keystone, cobble and arch in a great conumdrum of brick and beam. Finlay estimated that it would take a concentration of bombs, delivered deliberately and over many consecutive nights, to lay waste to everything inside his triangle. A stray 8oo-pounder; a spiteful string of incendiaries; a payload dropped in panic on the way to blast St Paul’s to smoke and ruin: these were much more his likely concerns.

  Finlay had asked Babcock for cartridge paper and a set of pencils with a range of leads from hard to soft. He heard Babcock chuckle into the telephone receiver, and he was delivered five sheets of tracing paper and a propelling pencil apparently cadged from Grey. He brewed some of the coffee Babcock had provided on the gas ring in his cell. The coffee tasted of acorns and cistern water. He doubted the ration coupons Babcock had brought him would fetch anything better from the streets. So he elevated his draftsman’s board and set to learning, one by one, the singular intricacies of the five buildings committed to his care. Soon he would visit them. But the conflict had brought about a stifling officiousness in civilians charged with war work, as he had discovered walking the streets of Bootle on his last home leave, picked on and lectured needlessly by a man transformed by ARP armband and black bicycle into a haranguing god. Such men would lurk in caretakers’ uniforms, haunting the vestibule of each of Finlay’s buildings, he was sure.

  It was why he had polished the buttons on his tunic. It was why he now pinned the five tracings he had made to his walls. He wanted to know these buildings intimately before visiting them. He did not feel he had the time to debate demarcation with Home Front martinets before going about the business of making these buildings as safe as he was able to.

  But when obstruction came, it did not present itself portly and belicose, wearing a tin helmet and a tobacco-stained moustache. Obstruction did not confront Finlay. It stole into his new life over the telephone and was delivered to him by Grey.

  ‘Absalom House,’ Grey said, insinuated into Finlay’s still slumbering brain. He looked at the luminous hands of the wristwatch on his nightstand. His mind’s eye conjured a tall edifice, slender, flanked by a blank office façade and a Gothic Revival bank.

  He coughed. ‘Camo
mile Street,’ he said. He was searching for the face of his watch, but could see only Absalom House, its polished black brick stretching upwards. He could hear Grey breathing into the telephone. Finlay wondered whether this wasn’t a dream.

  ‘Finlay?’

  His eyes finally found and made sense of the glowing pattern of his watch dial. It was a quarter to six. ‘Has Absalom House been hit?’

  ‘No,’ Grey said. ‘There is a compliance issue. The skylight?’

  ‘Atrium,’ Finlay said. He sank back on to his single pillow with the telephone receiver cradled and his wristwatch in his fist. ‘The building has a domed summit of glass.’

  ‘Whatever. You need to get there and you need to find a different way from the one you suggested of making the building fire-proof. There’s a not entirely disgusting café in the basement of a church on Fournier Street. North side of Spitalfields. Meet me there in half an hour and I’ll buy you a spot of breakfast and we’ll discuss the matter.’

  Silence.

  ‘Finlay?’

  Finlay was thinking. ‘There is no other way,’ he said.

  Grey chuckled. ‘Invent one then, there’s a good chap.’ The connection was broken by what sounded like a hiss.

  He got to Absalom House at nine-fifteen. He had breakfasted on boiled ham and bread and tea in the Spitalfields crypt with Grey. For Grey’s table there had even been the extravagance of butter on the bread. Afterwards the barriers around an unexploded parachute bomb on Bishopsgate had impeded his progress back to Broad Street and another look at the plans of Absalom House. But he had still had over an hour to work out a way of minimizing the risk posed by the atrium.

  ‘Be gentle,’ Grey had said, spreading his lips to blow steam from the surface of his tea.

  ‘Why?’

  But Grey had merely winked and sipped and then smiled and asked about the progress in general that Finlay was making in his tasks.

  At 9.30 a.m. Finlay was shuttered into the lift at Absalom House and taken up to the fifth floor. The lift did not extend to the sixth. The atrium was reached by a set of stone steps across the floor from where the lift stopped. The steps extended to a heavy door scrolled in some soft and decorative metal that time and perhaps damp had filigreed in its deep depressions with green. The door was not locked. Finlay had been asked to wait in the atrium. The door swung easily despite its weight, balanced perfectly on four steel hinges set in a massive stone architrave. Finlay examined the locking mechanism. He was seeing the door for the second time and was again impressed by its construction. The door was not only elaborate. It was immensely strong. The soft metal would absorb blast vibration and would not burn. Locked, it would form a formidable barrier against the spread of fire from above or from below.