Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  Ursula didn’t mention that she had been called to an incident, a house that had been hit, where the occupants had chickens in a makeshift run in the back yard and that when they arrived they had found the chickens, nearly all of them alive, with their feathers blown off. ‘Ready-plucked,’ Mr Bullock had laughed callously. Ursula had seen people with their clothes blown off and trees in the middle of summer stripped of all their leaves, but she didn’t mention these things either. She didn’t mention wading in effluent from ruptured pipes, certainly didn’t mention drowning in that same effluent. Nor did she mention the gruesome sensation of putting your hand on a man’s chest and finding that your hand had somehow slipped inside that chest. (Dead – something to be thankful for, she supposed.)

  Did Harold tell Pamela the things he had seen? Ursula didn’t ask, even introducing the topic seemed wrong on such a pleasant day. She thought of all those soldiers from the last war who had come home and never spoken of what they had witnessed in the trenches. Mr Simms, Mr Palmer, her own father too, of course.

  Sylvie’s egg production seemed to be at the heart of some kind of rural black market. No one in the village was particularly short of anything. ‘It’s a barter economy around here,’ Pamela said. ‘And barter they do, believe me. That’s what she’ll be doing now, at the front door.’

  ‘At least you’re pretty safe here,’ Ursula said. Were they? She thought of the UXB Hugh had gone to look at. Or the previous week when a bomb had come down in a field belonging to the Hall farm and blown the cows in it to pieces. ‘A lot of people have been quietly eating beef around here,’ Pamela said. ‘Us included, I’m happy to say.’ Sylvie seemed to think this ‘terrible episode’ had put them on a par with London’s suffering. She had returned now and lit up a cigarette rather than finish her food. Ursula ate what she had left on her plate while Pamela took one of Sylvie’s cigarettes from the packet and lit up.

  Bridget came out and started clearing plates and Ursula jumped up and said, ‘Oh, no, I’ll do that.’ Pamela and Sylvie remained at the table, smoking in silence, observing the defence of the wigwam from a raiding party of evacuees. Ursula felt rather badly done by. Both Sylvie and Pamela spoke as if they had it hard whereas she was working all day, out on patrol most nights, facing the most awful sights. Only yesterday they had been at an incident where they had worked to free someone while blood dripped on their heads from a body up in the bedroom they couldn’t reach because the staircase was knee-deep in broken glass from a huge skylight.

  ‘I’m thinking of going back to Ireland,’ Bridget said as they rinsed plates. ‘I have never felt at home in this country.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ Ursula said.

  The apple charlotte turned out to be simply stewed apples as Sylvie refused to use precious stale bread on a pudding when it could be fed more usefully to the chickens. Nothing went to waste at Fox Corner. Scraps went to the chickens (‘She’s thinking of getting a pig,’ Hugh said in despair), after bones had made stock they were sent for salvage, as was every last tin and glass jar that wasn’t being filled with jam or chutney or beans or tomatoes. All the books in the house had been parcelled up and taken to the post office to be sent off to the services. ‘We’ve already read them,’ Sylvie said, ‘so what’s the point in keeping them?’

  Hugh returned and Bridget grumbled back outside with a plate for him.

  ‘Oh,’ Sylvie said politely to him, ‘do you live here? I say, why don’t you join us?’

  ‘Really, Sylvie,’ Hugh said, more sharply than was his usual manner. ‘You can be such a child.’

  ‘If I am then it’s marriage that’s made me so,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘I remember that you once said there was no higher calling for a woman than marriage,’ Hugh said.

  ‘Did I? That must have been in our salad days.’

  Pamela raised her eyebrows at Ursula and Ursula wondered when had their parents become so openly quarrelsome? Ursula was going to ask him about the bomb but then, ‘How’s Millie?’ Pamela asked brightly to change the subject.

  ‘She’s well,’ Ursula said. ‘She’s a very easy-going person to share digs with. Although I hardly ever see her in Phillimore Gardens. She’s joined ENSA. She’s in some kind of troupe that goes round factories, entertaining workers in their lunch hour.’

  ‘Poor blighters,’ Hugh laughed.

  ‘With Shakespeare?’ Sylvie asked doubtfully.

  ‘I think she turns her hand to anything these days. A bit of singing, comedy, you know.’ Sylvie didn’t look as if she did.

  ‘I have a young man,’ Ursula blurted out, catching them all unawares, including herself. It was more to lighten the conversation than anything. She should have known better really.

  He was called Ralph. He lived in Holborn and he was a new friend, a ‘pal’, that she had met at her German class. He had been an architect before the war and Ursula supposed he would be an architect afterwards too. If anyone was still alive, of course. (Could London be erased, like Knossos or Pompeii? The Cretans and the Romans probably went around saying, ‘We can take it,’ in the heart of disaster.) Ralph was full of ideas for the rebuilding of the slums as modern towers. ‘A city for the people’, he said, one that would ‘rise from the ashes of the old like a phoenix, modernist to the core’.

  ‘What an iconoclast he sounds,’ Pamela said.

  ‘He’s not nostalgic in the way we are.’

  ‘Are we? Nostalgic?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ursula said. ‘Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed. We imagine an Arcadia in the past, Ralph sees it in the future. Both equally unreal, of course.’

  ‘Cloud-capped palaces?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But you like him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you … you know?’

  ‘Really! What kind of a question is that?’ Ursula laughed. (Sylvie was at the door again, Hugh was sitting cross-legged on the lawn pretending to be Big Chief Running Bull.)

  ‘It’s a very good question,’ Pamela said.

  They hadn’t, as it happened. Perhaps if he were more ardent. She thought of Crighton. ‘And anyway there is so little time for …’

  ‘Sex?’ Pamela said.

  ‘Well, I was going to say courtship, but yes, sex.’ Sylvie had returned and was trying to separate the warring factions on the lawn. The evacuees made very unsportsmanlike enemies. Hugh was tied up now with an old washing line. ‘Help!’ he mouthed to Ursula but he was grinning like a schoolboy. It was nice to see him happy.

  Before the war her wooing by Ralph (or his by her, perhaps) might have taken the form of dances, the cinema, cosy dinners à deux but now, more often than not, they had found themselves at bombsites, like sightseers viewing ancient ruins. The view from the top deck of the number eleven bus was particularly good for this, they had discovered.

  It was perhaps due more to a kink in their respective characters than the war itself. After all, other couples managed to keep up the rituals.

  They had ‘visited’ the Duveen Gallery at the British Museum, Hammonds next to the National Gallery, the huge crater at the Bank, so big that they had to build a temporary bridge across it. John Lewis, still smouldering when they arrived, the blackened mannequins from the shop windows strewn across the pavement, their clothes ripped off.

  ‘Do you think we’re like ghouls?’ Ralph asked and Ursula said, ‘No, we are witnesses.’ She supposed she would go to bed with him eventually. There was no great argument to be found against it.

  Bridget came out with tea and cake and Pamela said, ‘I think I’d better untie Daddy.’

  ‘Have a drink,’ Hugh said, pouring her a tumbler of malt from the cut-glass decanter that he kept in the growlery. ‘I find myself in here more and more these days,’ he said. ‘It’s the only place I can get peace. Dogs and evacuees strictly barred. I worry about you, you know,’ he added.

  ‘I worry about me too.’

  ‘Is it bloody?’


  ‘Dreadfully. But I believe it’s the right thing. I think we are doing the right thing.’

  ‘A just war? You know the Coles still have most of their family in Europe. Mr Cole has told me some dreadful things, things that are happening to the Jews. I don’t think anyone here really wants to know. Anyway,’ he said, raising his glass and trying for a cheerful note, ‘down the hatch. Here’s to the end.’

  It was dark when she left and Hugh walked her down the lane to the station.

  ‘No petrol, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘you should have gone earlier,’ he added ruefully. He had a stout torch and there was no one to yell at him to put the light out. ‘I hardly think I’m going to guide in a Heinkel,’ he said. Ursula told him how most rescue squads had an almost superstitious horror of lights even when they were in the middle of a raid, surrounded by burning buildings and incendiaries and flares. As if a small torch beam would make any difference.

  ‘Knew a chap in the trenches,’ Hugh said, ‘lit a match, and Bob’s your uncle, a German sniper shot his head clean off. Good chap,’ he added reflectively, ‘name of Rogerson, same as the bakers in the village. No relation.’

  ‘You never talk about it,’ Ursula said.

  ‘I’m talking about it now,’ Hugh said. ‘Let it be a lesson to you, keep your head below the parapet and your light beneath a bushel.’

  ‘I know you don’t mean that. Not really.’

  ‘I do. I’d rather you were a coward than dead, little bear. Teddy and Jimmy too.’

  ‘You don’t mean that either.’

  ‘I do. Here we are, it’s so dark you could walk right by the station and never see it. I doubt that your train will be on time, if there is a train at all. Oh, look, here’s Fred. Evening, Fred.’

  ‘Mr Todd, Miss Todd. So you know, this is the last train tonight,’ Fred Smith said. Fred had long since graduated from fireman to driver.

  ‘It’s not really a train,’ Ursula said, bemused. There was an engine but no carriages.

  Fred looked back along the platform to where the carriages should have been, as if he’d forgotten their absence. ‘Ah, yes, well,’ he said, ‘last time they were seen they were hanging off Waterloo Bridge. It’s a long story,’ he added, clearly unwilling to elaborate. Ursula was puzzled as to why the engine should be here sans carriages but Fred looked rather grim.

  ‘I won’t get home tonight then,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Well,’ Fred said, ‘I’ve got to get this engine back up to town and I’ve got a head of steam up and I’ve got a fireman, old Willie here, so if you want to hop up on the footplate, Miss Todd, I think we can get you back.’

  ‘Really?’ Ursula said.

  ‘It won’t be as clean as riding on the cushions, but if you’re game?’

  ‘I certainly am.’

  The engine was impatient to go so she gave Hugh a quick hug and said, ‘See you soon,’ and climbed the steps up to the footplate where she took up her perch on the fireman’s seat.

  ‘You will take care, little bear, won’t you?’ Hugh said. ‘In London?’ He had to raise his voice above the sound of hissing steam. ‘Promise me?’

  ‘I promise,’ she shouted. ‘See you later!’

  She twisted round, trying to see him on the dark platform as the train chugged off. She felt a sudden stab of guilt, she had played a rowdy game of hide-and-seek with the boys after supper. Instead she should, as Hugh said, have left when it was still light. Now Hugh would have to walk back in the dark alone along the lane. (She thought suddenly of poor little Angela, all those years ago.) Hugh quickly disappeared into the dark and smoke.

  ‘Well, this is exciting,’ she said to Fred. It didn’t cross her mind that she would never see her father again.

  Exciting, it was true, but also somewhat terrifying. The engine was a great metal beast roaring through the dark, the raw power of the machine come to life. It shook and rocked as if it were trying to dislodge her from its insides. Ursula had never previously thought about what went on in the cab of an engine. She had imagined, if she had imagined it at all, a relatively serene place – the driver alert to the track ahead, the fireman cheerfully shovelling coal. But instead there was non-stop activity, a continual conferring between fireman and driver over gradients and pressure, the frantic shovelling or the sudden closing down, the continual rackety noise, the almost unbearable heat of the furnace, the filthy soot from the tunnels that didn’t seem to be kept out by the metal plates that had been put up to prevent light escaping from the cab. It was so hot! ‘Hotter than hell,’ Fred said.

  Despite the wartime speed restrictions they seemed to be travelling at least twice as fast as when she travelled in a carriage (‘on the cushions’, she thought, she must remember that for Teddy who, despite now being a pilot, still harboured his childhood desire to be a train driver).

  As they approached London they could see fires in the east and hear the distant pealing of guns but as they neared the marshalling yards and engine sheds it became almost eerily quiet. They slowed to a halt and all was suddenly, thankfully, peaceful.

  Fred helped her down from the cab. ‘There you go, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Home sweet home. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.’ He looked suddenly doubtful. ‘I would walk you home but we have to put this engine to bed. Will you be all right from here?’ They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, just tracks and points and the looming shadows of engines. ‘There’s a bomb at Marylebone. We’re at the back of King’s Cross,’ Fred said, reading her mind. ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’ He switched on the weakest of torches, it illuminated only a foot or so in front of them. ‘Have to be careful,’ he said, ‘we’re a prime target here.’

  ‘I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said, a little more gung-ho than she felt. ‘Don’t give me a second thought, and thank you. Good night, Fred.’ She set off resolutely and immediately tripped over a rail and gave a little cry of distress when she banged her knee hard on the sharp stones of the track.

  ‘Here, Miss Todd,’ Fred said, helping her up. ‘You’ll never find your way in the dark. Come on, I’ll walk you to the gates.’ He took her arm and set off, steering her as they went, for all the world as if they were on a Sunday stroll along the Embankment. She remembered how she had been rather sweet on Fred when she was younger. It would probably be quite easy to be sweet on him again, she reckoned.

  They reached a big pair of wooden gates and he opened a small door set within them.

  ‘I think I know where I am,’ she said. She had no idea where she was but she didn’t want to inconvenience Fred any longer. ‘Well, thank you again, maybe I’ll see you next time I get down to Fox Corner.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I start in the AFS tomorrow. Plenty of old codgers like Willie can keep the trains running.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she said, although she was thinking how dangerous the fire service was.

  It was the blackest blackout ever. She walked with a hand in front of her face and eventually bumped into a woman who told her where she was. They walked together for half a mile or so. After a few minutes on her own again she heard footsteps behind her and she said, ‘I’m here,’ so the owner of the feet didn’t walk into her. It was a man, no more than a figure in the dark who went with her as far as Hyde Park. Before the war you would never have dreamed of hooking arms with a complete stranger – particularly a man – but now the danger from the skies seemed so much greater than anything that could befall you from this odd intimacy.

  She thought it must be nearly dawn when she got back to Phillimore Gardens but it was barely midnight. Millie, all dressed up, had just returned from an evening out. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘What happened to you? Did you get bombed?’

  Ursula looked in the mirror and found that she was smudged all over with soot and coal dust. ‘What a fright,’ she said.

  ‘You look like a coalminer,’ Millie said.

  ‘More like an engine driver,’ she said, rapidly recounting the night’s advent
ures.

  ‘Oh,’ Millie said, ‘Fred Smith, the butcher’s boy. He was a bit of a dish.’

  ‘Still is, I suppose. I’ve got eggs from Fox Corner,’ she said, removing the cardboard box that Sylvie had given her from her bag. The eggs had been nestled in straw, but now they were cracked and broken from the jolting of the track or when she fell in the engine yard.

  The next day they managed to make an omelette from the salvaged remains.

  ‘Lovely,’ Millie said. ‘You should get home more often.’

  October 1940

  ‘IT’S CERTAINLY BUSY tonight,’ Miss Woolf said. A glorious understatement. There was a full-scale raid in progress, bombers droning overhead, glinting occasionally when they caught a searchlight. HE bombs flashed and roared and the large batteries banged and whuffed and cracked – all the usual racket. Shells whistled or screamed on their way up, a mile a second until they winked and twinkled like stars before extinguishing themselves. Fragments came clattering down. (A few days ago Mr Simms’s cousin had been killed by shrapnel from the ack-acks in Hyde Park. ‘Shame to be killed by your own,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘Sort of pointless.’) A red glow over Holborn indicated an oil bomb. Ralph lived in Holborn but Ursula supposed on a night like this he would be in St Paul’s.

  ‘It’s almost like a painting, isn’t it?’ Miss Woolf said.

  ‘Of the Apocalypse maybe,’ Ursula said. Against the backdrop of black night the fires that had been started burnt in a huge variety of colours – scarlet and gold and orange, indigo and a sickly lemon. Occasionally vivid greens and blues would shoot up where something chemical had caught fire. Orange flames and thick black smoke roiled out of a warehouse. ‘It gives one a quite different perspective, doesn’t it?’ Miss Woolf mused. It did. It seemed both grand and terrible compared to their own grubby little labours. ‘It makes me proud,’ Mr Simms said quietly. ‘Our battling on like this, I mean. All alone.’

  ‘And against all odds,’ Miss Woolf sighed.

  They could see all the way along the Thames. Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element. They were on the roof of Shell-Mex House. The building was now occupied by the Ministry of Supply, for which Mr Simms worked, and he had invited Ursula and Miss Woolf to come and ‘see the view from the top’.