“Now,” Dunne said when they were sitting, “what will the point of this film be? What will you be trying to prove?”
Paul smiled. “Well, I’ve always been interested in—”
“Hosting a documentary.”
“Not hosting it, sir. I probably won’t appear at all, actually.”
“Interviewing me, then.”
“Someone else might film the interviews.”
This news seemed to please Dunne.
“I’d write the script and direct the whole thing,” Paul said defensively.
“Good for you.”
“Yes, well, it would be, rather. I’ve wanted to make this film for a long time.” Paul took a quiet breath. “Sir Laurence, my parents used to say you were the only one who understood the crowd wasn’t guilty.”
“Barber. It’s a common name.”
Paul thought Dunne meant uncommon for someone who looked like him. He was used to this. He had responses, jokes, a whole range of things he usually said. Now, though, he shrugged and tried to change the subject.
“As you know, the thirtieth anniversary is approaching, and many producers will find it a compelling time to look back.”
“Thirty years.”
“Hard to believe?”
“Why not the twenty-fifth or the fiftieth?”
Paul smiled again. “I see. Well, I suppose there is an arbitrary aspect, but if we wait until the fiftieth—” He stopped.
“Oh, I know I’m not going to live forever. Of course, you always think death might make an exception for you, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence.”
Paul tried to start again. “The report, sir, came at such an interesting historical moment. I wonder if you could tell me—”
“When did you read it?”
“At university. I was twenty-two.”
“So the subject is academic to you.” Laurie frowned. “No, you said you grew up in Bethnal Green.”
“That’s right.” Paul looked down, and when he looked up,
his eyes were wide and innocent. “Sir Laurence, it’s not academic for me.”
“Oh?”
“My family was in the crush.”
Dunne waited.
“I was adopted after the accident.”
The magistrate didn’t flinch. He merely blinked twice, then smoothed his legs with his palms from his hips to his knees. “That’s very interesting,” he said softly. “I thought the name was familiar. Did the family keep a grocery?”
“Yes, for a time. My mum did after my dad left.”
“Ada Barber.”
“That’s right. You remember her?”
“Where is she now?”
“She died a few years ago, I’m afraid.”
“And Tilly?”
Paul was impressed. “She lives in Islington.”
Dunne held his breath, then exhaled loudly. He stood up and switched off the television.
“Ada adopted one of the orphans,” he said, facing away from Paul. “Why?” He turned around quickly. “Do you know?”
“I think our families were friends.” Paul didn’t understand the way Dunne was staring at him. His secret not having gone over the way he expected, he wasn’t sure where they were now. “My understanding is that there was a terrible sense of communal guilt in the area after the accident.”
“Do you know anything about your birth parents?”
“No. My mother said the orphanage kept very spotty records during the war. She had no love for the matron, apparently.”
Dunne looked down. “Your parents said I knew the crowd wasn’t guilty. Did Ada say that?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the opposite of guilty?” Dunne asked.
“Innocent?” Under Dunne’s scrutiny, Paul couldn’t suppress the question mark.
“Well, they weren’t that, either.”
Eighteen
Mrs. Barton-Malow, matron of the Shoreditch Orphanage for Babies and Children, was a heavy woman with a bounce in her step at odds with her large body. Ada didn’t ask for a tour, but this was what Mrs. Barton-Malow assumed she wanted. And Ada, who wasn’t sure what she wanted, found that following Mrs. Barton-Malow up and down the passages was easier than anything else. They looked into the girls’ and boys’ dayrooms, the cafeteria, the classrooms, everything broom clean but dull. Many women worked among the children at the orphanage, older women who seemed to touch the world more bluntly, the ends of their fingers round and soft from work. Their quiet, constant motion implied two things: everything needs care, and you don’t have to be as gentle as you think. Just help. Change a pair of pants. Make a bed. Do what you can. At the end of the tour, Mrs. Barton-Malow showed them the small rear garden, with its buried Anderson shelters, five of them in a row, so that the garden looked as though it had swallowed a serpent.
“We haven’t had a casualty yet,” Mrs. Barton-Malow said proudly. She turned to Tilly. “We’re organized by age. You’d be in the one on the end there, I imagine. What are you? About ten?”
Ada waited for Tilly to correct her.
“Eight,” Ada said, nudging Tilly.
The girl, unmoved, looked out at the shelter on the end.
“What about the babies?” Ada asked Mrs. Barton-Malow.
“Which ones, dear? We have lots.”
Mrs. Barton-Malow began to walk back toward the girls’ dayroom. Ada followed, and Tilly trailed behind her. When Mrs. Barton-Malow opened the door and ushered them in, Ada steered Tilly toward a group of girls playing a game of marbles, then joined Mrs. Barton-Malow back at the doorway. “It’s the shelter orphans I’m curious about,” she said.
“They’re in the nursery now, with all the other babies.”
“Have any been adopted?”
“Not yet, despite all promises to the contrary.” Mrs. Barton-Malow sighed. “We agreed to take them—we were already at capacity, mind you—only because we were promised they’d be adopted in a hurry. Public sympathy running high, they said. Well, not high enough.”
Sudden, wild laughter caught her attention, and Mrs. Barton-Malow turned sharply toward the room. She rapped her knuckles on the door frame, and the children were quiet. Then she took Ada’s arm and moved her a step farther into the passage.
“Anyway, ‘Give it time,’ they said.” Mrs. Barton-Malow scrunched up her nose to show what she thought of that idea. “In my experience, that’s not how time and sympathy work.”
Ada shook her head. She’d never thought to have an opinion on the pair.
“I’ll tell you what time does do,” Mrs. Barton-Malow continued, leaning down to press a piece of broken tile into the floor. “It makes things harder to fix.”
When Mrs. Barton-Malow stood, her cheeks were flushed. “Might have all passed over if they’d kept it out of the papers, but now we have a real mess. I guess that’s what you get when you offer sweets to children.”
“Money,” Ada said.
“What?”
“I thought it was money they offered.” She looked for Tilly, still playing marbles. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“The point is, time weakens people. Their sympathy, courage, what have you.”
“What I came about,” Ada said, making an effort to sound friendly, “is the shelter orphans. I’d like to see them, if I could.”
“I don’t know how you expect me to know those babies from all the others, but if you’d like, I’ll take you to the nursery.”
“Yes. Thank you.” Ada turned to get Tilly, but Mrs. Barton-Malow stopped her.
“Older children are not allowed,” she said. “The possibility of contagion is too great.”
Ada’s eyes filled suddenly. “Can’t you make an exception?”
Mrs. Barton-Malow raised her eyebrows.
“We were in the crush!” Ada said. “I had another daughter, who died.”
Mrs. Barton-Malow patted Ada’s hand. “And her sister is taking it very hard and wants to see the babies?”
Ada nodded and, turning, was startled to see that Tilly was standing right behind her.
“Shall we?” said Mrs. Barton-Malow.
It seemed Mrs. Barton-Malow had been disingenuous. In the nursery, a row of seven cribs stood apart from all the others. In fact, they were nearly partitioned off by a wall of boxes overflowing with stuffed animals, clothes, toys, bottles, and tins of milk and food. On every box someone had scrawled 3/3 Orphans. It was the neatest room they’d seen so far and, though dimly lit, smelled of soap and warmth. Several babies were gently snoring.
“Are any of them Jewish?” Ada asked quietly.
Mrs. Barton-Malow raised an eyebrow. “One of the boys is circumcised, if that’s what you mean.”
Ada passed by each crib. She would have known anyway—there was a strong resemblance to his mother in his lips—but she glanced over at Mrs. Barton-Malow to confirm. Yes, Mrs. Barton-Malow nodded. That was the circumcised boy.
When Ada picked him up, she remembered Emma: a heartbeat, the smell of milk, a hand tucked into hers whenever she permitted it.
Standing next to her mother, her cheek on the baby’s blanket, Tilly remembered Emma’s smile, her blue coat in the snow.
Mrs. Barton-Malow stood by the window. Her only child, a boy, had died in the fire raid the first year. She looked out the window—double hung in here to make the room warmer for the babies, her own design—and saw a pair of dead bumblebees between the panes. They were furry and ancient, bleached white by the sun. Mrs. Barton-Malow opened the inside window, had to shove hard to unstick it, and angrily swept them up in her hand. She was sorry for herself, for Ada, for all the mothers the war had damaged. When she turned back to Ada, she said, “Why are you here?”
Ada’s eyes were full of tears. “I thought it would help.”
“Ah, well. It does help some. Depends what kind of person you are.”
Nineteen
Laurie opened the inquiry the afternoon of Thursday, March 11, 1943.
“There is something I think it is probably my duty to mention,” he began. In the room with him were Ross, secretary to the inquiry, and a stenographer, Mrs. King, from the local school. “There will be matter given in evidence that is strictly confidential, and of course any improper use of that material would constitute an offense under the Defense of the Realm regulations.” Ross and Mrs. King nodded.
“Now let’s call and examine the first witness.”
As it was not a court, Laurie found it desirable to vary some of the usual procedures. There was no procession. The witnesses were kept across the hall in the small office of Mrs. Mallory, who typed requests for building repairs in the borough. In the days that followed, Mrs. Mallory fell into the habit of engaging all the witnesses in conversation. Ross often had to wait a few minutes while she jotted down a name or finished giving a piece of advice. A number of times he had to insist that Mrs. Mallory release a witness from a hug.
“Lord knows they need this more than anything else,” she said.
“You are feeling below the mark?” Laurie asked. He wanted to be kind at the beginning.
“I am very much below the mark, sir.”
“Is this owing to the shock of what happened?”
“Yes, sir. I worked up to the last before I went down to the first aid, and this is how it has left me.” The man was pale and shaking. “The doctor has ordered me to go to a place where it is very quiet.”
“Very wise. Let me just turn up your statement, and we will try to be brief. Now, your name is Henderson?”
“That is right.”
“And you are a constable at the Bethnal Green Police Station, H Division?”
“That is right.”
“What is your full name?”
“Martin, sir. Henderson.”
“Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“We were in a desperate position, sir. We thought we could not do anything outside until the pressure was removed inside, you see.”
“Now you’re getting ahead of me. Let us just take it by stages. Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“On patrol, sir.”
“What are your instructions in an alert?”
“To get to the shelter entrance.”
“Were you able to do that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This particular night, March third?”
“Yes.”
“When you got to the entrance, what was happening?”
“I saw men working there as I have never seen men work before. They were crying because they were so desperate. We could not extricate the people.”
“So when you arrived, something had already gone wrong?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“I was directed by my superior officer to get over the crowd and work from the bottom. We thought it would be simpler from the bottom.”
“You got over the people on the stairs, did you? How?”
“I swung from a girder. I accidentally kicked one or two people, but it couldn’t be helped. From the top it looked as if it would be much simpler to get at them from the bottom, but when you got to the bottom, it looked simpler from the top. It was actually much worse from the bottom.”
“They were filling the landing, I imagine?”
“No one was on the landing.”
“But they must have been pressed against that far wall?”
“No, sir. It was very dark, of course, but I can tell you no one was on the landing. That’s where I and several other people stood to try to get them out.”
“Have you ever known any trouble of this sort before at the shelter?”
“No, sir.”
“No panic or disorder at the entrance?”
“None whatsoever, sir.”
“You are the superintendent of H Division?”
“Yes.”
“And that includes the whole area affected by this tragedy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the area roughly served by the shelter—could you tell me that?”
“Mainly this end of Bethnal Green. I think most of the shelterers live in Bethnal Green.”
“What would it involve, the longest walk for a resident to get to the shelter in the area served? A quarter of a mile, half a mile, that sort of thing?”
“Ten minutes at the outside.”
“Ten minutes would cover it?”
“Assuming a person could walk half a mile in ten minutes.”
“You have been in charge of this division since before the war. Has there been any similar incident in the division?”
“No, sir.”
“Generally the population behaved well during the Blitz?”
“Extremely well.”
“And since?”
“Yes, very well.”
“There was a good deal of expectation, I suppose, that there would be a retaliation that night.”
“Yes, quite a deal.”
“Do you think the people were jumpy?”
“I would not say jumpy. They were expectant. We all were.”
“You had difficulty in getting the pile sorted, in getting the people away from the entrance?”
“It was nearly impossible to sort out which person was free to be removed. I am at a loss to account for it. I did not think it was possible for people to get so mixed up that it would be impossible to lift them off one by one.”
The work suited Laurie’s manner and physique. He had a penchant for seeming to understand even when he didn’t—this reassured his witnesses—and he was good at asking a lot of questions until he did. He held his hands in front of him, often touching his fingertips together in the shape of a vaulted ceiling. If he was at a loss for words, he sometimes rubbed his neck as if he had a sore muscle. The four prominent lines running in parallel across his forehead tended to knit themselves in consternation during the hardest interviews but always unraveled for a joke. From his clothes and background, he knew they expected acad
emic pretension, and he hoped they were surprised when they got conversational warmth. He wanted them to know that he, like they, had not left the city at the start of the war. This was certainly a mark in his favor.
“When you arrived, were other officers and wardens already working there?”
“Two constables, I believe. I didn’t see any wardens.”
“That was at your end?”
“That was at my end.”
“That was the lower end, inside the shelter?”
“Yes.”
“You came by way of the emergency exit?”
“That is correct.”
“And you saw no wardens in tin hats?”
“No, sir. It was very dark, though.”
“And when you got to the bottom of the stairs, was there difficulty removing the people?”
“There was terrible difficulty in extricating the bodies.”
“Why was that? Why couldn’t you just take them away one
by one?”
“It is rather difficult to explain. The only way I can describe it . . .” The witness stopped a minute. “If we imagine my fingers as being about two hundred and fifty people, they were just like this.” He interlaced his fingers with a punch, then twisted and turned his wrists until it looked like he might be hurting himself.
“I see. They were all wedged up like that, were they?”
“It was impossible, sir.”
“And the pile shifted forward from the bottom step, onto the landing, I imagine?”
“No, sir. No one was on the landing.”
“You are an officer at Bethnal Green Station?”
“That’s right.”
“Had you or any of the other officers ever anticipated anything like this happening?”
The Report Page 8