But if Laurie defended Bethnal Green and its high-minded history in one breath, he condemned it in the next. He thought the working classes an increasingly troubled lot. He sometimes harshly described the people who appeared in his court, but with an authority informed by experience. He saw them every day; he knew their local and domestic disputes, their confusions and misunderstandings, their habits and obsessions. What did his friends know, when they saw these people only on their occasional forays to the market at Covent Garden? And then did not even deign to make eye contact? As a metropolitan magistrate—part judge, part mediator, part counselor—Laurie wanted to improve the lives of the poor.
Take, for example, a recent dispute before his court at Bow Street, in which a man stood accused of smashing lightbulbs and vandalizing the public surface shelters in his neighborhood. Rather than punishing the man, Laurie asked why he was intent on this damage. Mr. Brimmer explained, rather eloquently, that he thought the government’s standard of protection too low. He was forty-five years old, had fought in the first war, and followed the current one in the papers in great detail.
“Those shelters are safe from a five-hundred pound bomb only if it falls fifty feet away. What’s the use of that?”
Laurie asked him if he could agree to put his argument in a letter to the home secretary, then redirect his energy to clearing bomb sites.
Mr. Brimmer eyed him, then agreed that he could. They shook hands, and Laurie inquired about his work. In good humor, Mr. Brimmer told him the family business was a bakery.
“Brimmer’s Bread and Broken Bulkheads,” Laurie said, knowing the alliteration would be joke enough. And indeed, Brimmer laughed.
Laurie looked across the fire at Armorel, wrapped snugly, stitching. Her skin was dry and red this time of year, symptoms of a mild allergy to wool. “How’s the landscape?” he asked.
Armorel and their daughter, Georgina, were members of a sewing circle preparing a section of a topographical quilt for the Royal Air Force. Folds and folds of material—shades of green and gray—covered the floors of their rooms, and Laurie found bits of thread on everything. The RAF insisted these “flexible landscapes,” as they were known, were invaluable to pilots studying the terrain before bombing missions. Armorel’s circle had been assigned the hills north of Hamburg, and sewing circles all over London had other portions of the map.
“How does a mother save her child in a crush like that? I don’t understand the geometry of it.”
“Armorel,” he said.
“The sewing’s fine. I’ve taken over Elizabeth Fulton’s part.”
“Why?”
“She’s not on it anymore.”
“I see. Had a falling out, did you?”
Armorel stopped sewing and looked at him. “Not at all. Toby’s been killed.”
“Oh, God.”
He was their son’s good friend. Andrew, also in the army, had known him since childhood. Laurie turned to the window and watched several crows balancing on the thin top branches of the plane trees in the park. Against the low sky, the birds seemed huge, ungainly. What was wrong with them? Did they grow larger in winter?
“Might that make her want to sew more?” he said. “For the war effort?”
Armorel wiped her eyes. “Not at the moment. That’s just ridiculous.”
“Where’s Georgina?” He thought he knew but wanted the comfort of saying her name. For two months she’d been working for the Ministry of Information, living with several other girls near Bond Street, but she often came home for a night or two to sew and be under her mother’s care. A series of respiratory illnesses had afflicted her since childhood. “I thought she was staying the night.”
“She is. She’s just gone down to the shops. They have oranges, apparently.”
“Oranges,” Laurie murmured.
Armorel smiled. “If it turns out to be true.”
“I’m very sorry about Toby,” Laurie said.
They looked at each other a moment, both thinking of Andrew.
“He’s going to be fine,” Laurie said. “I believe that.”
“Please find out about the mothers,” Armorel whispered. “And those babies.”
Laurie turned back to his desk. He took out a sheet of writing paper and dashed off a note to the home secretary, agreeing to his request, but on slightly different terms.
Thirteen
Emma’s funeral was at St. John’s, and Rev. McNeely did the best he could. He hadn’t known Emma well, and there was not much to say about the life of a four-year-old, he was discovering, that didn’t fall into the category of innocence lost or adult regret. In his moth-bitten robe he spoke of her smile. He spoke of her devotion to Tilly. He spoke of her likeness to Ada. He did not mean to say how much her father, Robby, had wanted a boy when Emma was born, only how much he had loved his younger daughter, but this was his tenth funeral for a child under five, and, even with Psalm 23 read at each, he was having trouble keeping his mind clear. Anyway, the family was too far gone in grief to find fault with his words.
Ada and Robby stood in the front pew, Tilly between them. On March 3, Robby had made it to the shelter. He’d been waiting for his family on the platform when the accident occurred. Ada had blamed him at first, said that if he’d come back for them instead of heading straight for the shelter from the Plots & Pints, everything might have been different. But Tilly had not agreed. Several times during the service, Ada reached for her shoulder. The girl didn’t complain, but the stillness with which she greeted the pressure worried Ada.
They buried Emma in the churchyard of St. John’s, a privilege granted by parish law to all families within the parish, regardless of religious affiliation. Three small graves, covered with fresh flowers, ended the row just behind Emma’s. The flowers were the same—blue violets and white snowdrops, gathered from bomb sites—although the ceremonies had been quite different, two Jewish and one Catholic. When the service for Emma ended, when Rev. McNeely had said all the words the prayer book required, plus a few more of his own, and Tilly had tossed down the pouch of red checkers pieces she wanted Emma to keep, the rain started. Everyone noted it, the way people always do when nature appears to take an interest in their lives.
At home Robby uncovered the sandwiches, and no one made jokes about that not being a man’s work. The women took the cloths from him, put on the kettle, opened the back window, in spite of the rain, for air. No one had properly tended the flat since the accident. Ada, from a chair in the corner of the kitchen, asked her friends to sit and not worry. Ignoring her, they dampened cloths and went at the rooms with the energy of the lucky. “We’ll put things right,” they said.
In the small flat, Tilly didn’t know where to go. The kitchen made her nervous. The lounge, where her father and his friends were drinking and growing loud, confused her.
“There are more refugees in the neighborhood than ever before, aren’t there.”
“Where was the bloody light?”
“You can bet they have a center handrail at Kensington.”
“They won’t have a public inquiry because they know they’ll be found out.”
“When they say ‘Jewish panic,’ do they mean they panicked or we did, about them?”
“I liked Mrs. W.,” Tilly said abruptly. “She smelled like lavender.”
Everyone stared. Then a neighbor, Mrs. Chase, knelt down. “That’s nice.”
Tilly looked at Mrs. Chase, unblinking. She had seen Mrs. Chase make faces many times behind Mrs. W.’s back.
“I didn’t mind when she picked out her own vegetables,” Tilly said. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? If we were too busy to help her?”
Mrs. Chase turned to Robby. “Tilly has such beautiful skin,” she said.
The men had brought pints from the local, and Robby’s empty was being swapped for a fresh one. “Takes after her mother,” he said.
Mrs. Chase saw no resemblance whatsoever but continued to smile agreeably. She turned back to Tilly and, sudden
ly inspired, attempted to match her demeanor. She dropped her smile.
“How brave you were, Tilly.”
“We weren’t brave. We—”
“Tilly,” her mother interrupted from the kitchen. “Come here.”
Mrs. Chase struggled to her feet while Tilly turned away.
“I heard Max Keeler was carried right along, his feet off the ground, his arms raised,” one of the men said.
“Remind Keeler when he’s out of hospital,” said Robby. “Might inspire him to raise his wallet more often!” A burst of laughter filled the room.
In the kitchen, Ada pressed Tilly into a hug. Tilly tried to resist but couldn’t. She sank to the floor with a sob, her head in her mother’s lap. “I want Emma,” she said.
Ada didn’t speak but smoothed Tilly’s hair with her palms.
Someone in the kitchen sloshed soapy water on the floor. Someone else threw a sponge at the back of a man who came in for more glasses. Tilly closed her eyes and pushed her forehead hard into her mother’s leg, hard enough that Ada shifted. “Ouch. Tilly, stop now.”
Tilly looked up.
Ada held her daughter’s cheeks and wiped her tears with her thumbs. “What happened?” Tilly asked. Ada shook her head.
That afternoon Robby joined the mourners at St. John’s. Many of his friends were there: Burnley, who’d lost both his children; Hunt, who’d lost his wife, sister, and brother-in-law. Part of the group was talking about starting a petition for a public inquiry. Everyone was angry about the government’s assumption that they’d accept a mass funeral. Thinking of that, Robby’s knees nearly buckled. He swayed on the front steps, his cheeks streaked with tears the beer had released. The porch was fairly clean, given the constant gathering of people since March 3. Someone had collected some fish and chip wrappers and stacked them in a corner beneath a stone. A dozen small bouquets lay soaked in the rain.
Some were saying that Max Keeler hadn’t just raised his arms but had been passed over the heads of the crowd in the stairway so that he might help remove people from the bottom of the accident. His strength was legendary on the docks. Others said someone had climbed over the pile, but it wasn’t Keeler; it was an off-duty police officer who’d done nothing to get the people out. The question rose again of a land mine, the sound that night, the missing bulb.
“Was it missing?”
“Yeah!”
“Burned out and never replaced!”
“What about a center handrail? They’ve got them at Kensington.”
“Bloody iron ones!”
Would a center rail have helped? It didn’t matter. It was compelling enough that the West End had them and the East End didn’t.
“Where were the bloody wardens?”
“And the police? There was no constable at the entrance!”
Then someone mentioned the Gowers report, which had come hand in hand with the mass-funeral offer, and that was it. The crowd sparked. People jumped to their feet, swearing.
“They hushed up the inquiry!”
“The shelter’s shit!”
“Why’d they tell us to bring the children home!”
“Emma!” Robby yelled. “Emma!”
His posture, slightly pitched forward, elbows out for balance, suggested determination to the largely inebriated gathering. The group rose behind him, mourners turned protesters turned organized crowd. All Robby had to do was raise his fist to elicit cheers of his name and Emma’s. This was tantalizing, and he did it again and again. He led the crowd up Cambridge Heath, past the public baths and cinema, past the children’s hospital, left on Old Bethnal Green Road, to the police station. As they arrived in front of the dreary brick building, the sound of his dead daughter’s name in the thick, damp air suddenly made him so angry, he kicked his foot through a car window. Then he fell backward and knocked his head on the curb.
Fourteen
Just before dessert, the club’s tent collapsed, the far end, away from Laurie and William. It happened slowly and softly, the two end poles falling away from the tables, so that the white tent settled over the luncheon like a blanket over a cradle. There were quite a few whoops and hollers. The men at the collapsed end scrambled quickly to escape; those at the other end stood and walked out relatively calmly. With the exception of Smith, who banged a knee against a chair while temporarily blinded under the tent, no one was hurt.
The members stood in groups about the lawn while the work of cleanup began. Some had emerged with their drinks. New glasses appeared quickly for everyone else. Many told jokes about American manufacturing. Others discussed the relative merits of oak paneling versus white sailcloth as a form of shelter. One older member evaluated the experience against that of his in the RAF during the war; a younger member questioned what the debacle implied for the empire.
Without saying anything, the older members came to the same conclusion: the garden lunch had failed. Long live the grill room!
And the younger members decided they should give the tent another try but that in the long run the club would need an addition, a covered veranda of some sort. They proposed various fund-raising ideas.
Laurie and William stood together in the sun, mostly silent. The mishap had neither improved nor diminished Laurie’s humor. He felt remote, numb. When he did speak to William, saying something about how small the space looked with the tent down, William was preoccupied with his shirt collar. It turned out a beetle was crawling there; he removed it and tossed it into the grass.
Once they were seated again inside, Laurie decided he would phone Paul Barber when he got home. He was staying at the B and B on High Street, poor chap. He wouldn’t find much to eat, Mrs. Loudon having become enamored recently of the idea (and low cost) of the continental breakfast. But Laurie would cooperate with his film. That would feed the boy’s enthusiasm, at any rate.
Had it really been thirty years? Laurie couldn’t believe it. His fingers counted out the decades against his leg—’53, ’63, ’73. It was a habit, a dismal summary of the bulk of his life passing in a feathery movement of his fingers against his leg. He couldn’t resist the chance to tell the story again, or at least play a role in what would inevitably be its new iteration. And that morning he’d done something new: he’d broken a rule of the Test and used more than one fly. His last cast before lunch, he’d tried Barber’s clumsy lure and caught his biggest trout of the morning. His excited yelp had made Smith, that river muddier, lose his footing.
Inquiry
Fifteen
The tragedy does not remain the story. As with any other public property, it is transformed by use. What you want is a loved one, child, friend, to be found, safe, alive. That’s not possible now. A few days earlier you might have accepted an apology from the government, or an explanation of what happened, or a promise that it would never happen again. But none of these things came about, and now you want someone humiliated, forced to resign. You want someone to admit responsibility, someone held accountable. Desperate for these things, grief hot in your blood, you stand on a cold curb in front of the town hall, chanting with the others who are there every day, “The light, the light,” because to the crowd, the light is at the heart of the matter, the accident, the disaster, the catastrophe, whatever today’s papers are calling it, the event that ended the lives they had and gave them new ones they never wanted and never will. All their misery, all their unmitigated despair at what their lives have become, reduced to two words.
As the inquiry began, winter rallied. Temperatures sank, and the radiators in the room were not up to the task. That first morning, a crowd gathered and watched Laurie arrive by cab the way, he imagined, defeated villagers awaited their conquerors. They looked wary, but when Laurie stepped out and waved an arm in greeting, he needed the help of several constables to move through the sudden surge. They were not angry or violent, just insistent. Men called his name but were mute when he turned to listen. Women begged him not to forget the shelter orphans. They pulled back rough sleeves to
show him their bruises, their children’s bruises.
Laurie strove to be warm and cordial yet noncommittal.
The second-floor room he’d reserved for the inquiry was charmless, high ceilings and a wall of windows opposite the door its only attributes. Borough residents called it the marriage room because it was often used for civil ceremonies. Now, under a rolling chalkboard, a pile of gas masks huddled like a small clan of burrowing animals. Stacked in a corner, several crates overflowed with donations for the shelter library, the pride of Bethnal Green. The room had burgundy carpeting and white walls splotched gray with damp. Cracks ran through the plaster ceiling, here and there a seam widening into a hole the way a stream feeds a lake. The place was freezing and dusty and in general smelled like a church.
“Quakers and conscientious objectors,” explained Ian Ross, the Bethnal Green constable appointed Laurie’s messenger for the duration of the inquiry. “They’ve held a few meetings here. With candles.”
A small stage, just a foot and a half high, also carpeted in burgundy, anchored the far end of the room. Between Laurie and this stage stood a small sea of chairs. Most were wood, but a few upholstered ones, like royalty among the masses, had been dragged in as well. The uneven rows gave the room that first morning, Thursday, March 11, the air of an amateur theatrical or a children’s story hour rather than that of the site of an official inquiry. The lights were dim, the curtains heavy, though someone had tied them back to let in what light there was from the street. The walls all around displayed hand-lettered signs about where families should go to collect the clothes and pocket items of the victims.
The Report Page 6