“No, sir. We’ve had a little trouble, ordinary trouble, but nothing like this.”
“What is the sort of trouble you have had?”
“It is a very mixed crowd, sir, all nationalities here, so just the ordinary sorts of clashes. There are the blacks, the Yiddish people, Maltese, Chinese, every kind down there, and when you get a crowd of that description, you are bound to have a little disorder.”
“I see. Have you found much difference in the behavior of the different races?”
“Not particularly.”
“One is as easy to control as any other?”
“Most of the time, sir.”
“And yet a mixed crowd like that has clashes.”
“In my experience, sir.”
Laurie remained poised but friendly, engaging but not eager. He was taller than many of the East Enders, but because he was thin, they could tell themselves he lacked strength. This was far from true, but unimportant. During breaks, he walked the streets and studied the poor condition of the dwellings. He’d already taken note of the worn and mended clothing, the blue and gray best clothes the Bethnal Greeners wore to come before the inquiry. He didn’t expect to be invited in, and he wasn’t, but he knew that many families of multiple generations lived in no more than two or three rooms, sometimes with boarders. To Laurie, this proof of their already cramped lives made the crush even crueler.
“In your opinion, did the different races or nationalities or creeds or denominations we have here play any role in it?”
“No, sir.”
“No difference in behavior, then, that you’ve noticed?”
“Well, I do know that it is necessary for the Jew to wail. I didn’t know that before.”
“I see. How long have you lived in Bethnal Green?”
“My whole life, sir.
Twenty
“Could you tell me more about the room?” Paul asked. The windows were open to the garden. They’d been talking for an hour, and Paul had been invited to stay for lunch. He hoped they might eat outside.
“Many attributed your success with the East Enders to the casual atmosphere you created.”
Dunne smiled.
“The table, for instance. A small one, arranged as if at a club.”
“I liked that table. So did the mayor, as I recall.”
Paul studied his notes. It was their second day of interviews, and he couldn’t tell if Dunne was being serious or not. Since Dunne had learned he was one of the orphans, their conversations had eased but not deepened. The old magistrate seemed amused by his questions, as if reminded of an old joke or a favorite childhood friend, and Paul felt a bit lost. He tried another direction.
“Let me ask you about the opening of the report. Stylistically, it was an unusual choice, and yet it gave the report a wide popular appeal.”
“When it was published.”
“Yes. Was that your hope, that it would have popular appeal? Were you trying to set a precedent for future government reports?”
Dunne tilted his head in thought. “Good questions. Let’s eat first, and I’ll try to think of answers.”
Paul followed him to the kitchen. A loaf of bread was set out, still in its plastic sleeve, next to plates, napkins, wineglasses—all mismatched from several ornate sets. Slices of cheddar and roast beef were displayed unceremoniously in their deli papers.
“A luncheon buffet,” Dunne said, gesturing to a chair. “I thought we’d fend for ourselves. What would you like to drink?”
There was no room on the small table for Paul’s notebook, so he slid it under his chair, surprised to find the floor sticky. Dunne poured two generous glasses of wine and offered him the bread.
“Help yourself.”
He brought over mayonnaise and mustard, an avocado, and a bag of carrots. Paul smiled and assembled his lunch a step behind Dunne in order to understand the rules. When Dunne used his fingers to peel a piece of roast beef, so did Paul. When Dunne used the same knife for the mayonnaise and the mustard, so did Paul. He would have liked a slice of avocado, but Dunne’s peeling of it made such a mash, Paul declined. Dunne had nearly finished his glass of wine before the sandwiches were complete.
“Bon appétit,” Dunne said, lifting his sandwich with one hand, pouring more wine with the other.
Paul took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. Never had he felt less hungry.
“Are you married?” Dunne asked.
Paul shook his head.
Dunne regarded him with affection. “Don’t wait too long. Oh, well, do whatever you want. I can see you’re trying to make something of yourself. Good for you. Now’s the time.”
Paul looked down at the mess of his sandwich. He wasn’t sure what Dunne was talking about, but he hoped to find a way back to the report. “It’s been almost thirty years since the accident,” he tried.
“You keep reminding me.”
Paul wiped his mouth. “You faced an impossible task—to make sense of a pointless tragedy—and in three weeks you interviewed eighty witnesses and wrote a full report yourself. That would be inconceivable today. Today it would take two weeks merely to decide on the members of the investigating commission.” He stopped, but Dunne’s pleased expression encouraged him. “Then there’s the writing itself. It’s artful and compassionate—the opening, especially, of course. The story I want to tell is how and why you told the story of the tragedy the way you did.”
“Death demands ceremony. An inquiry is just a kind of ceremony.”
Paul shook his head. “The inquiry, yes. Call it ceremony. But not your report. It was something else.”
“I wanted it to be. I did have this idea that the people should read it, needed to read it.” He took a small foil-wrapped cake out of the refrigerator.
“And with the almost novelistic opening you gave them, they did.” Paul reached for his tape recorder, thought it might be all right now, but Laurie shook his head.
“Another angle that interests me,” Paul continued, setting the tape recorder back down, “is that the first woman to fall was never identified.”
“Angle,” Laurie said, and Paul could tell he’d used the wrong word.
“Perspective. Maybe I just mean detail. It was widely known at the time that a woman was the first to fall. But she was never identified, right?”
Laurie was silent.
“Is there something we don’t know?”
Dunne fussed with the foil around the cake a moment, then gave up. “Yes.”
Paul stopped chewing.
Dunne picked up a knife and began sawing into the cake through the foil. “I’ve always thought of reports as the gospels of our time. The way they authorize a particular version of events.”
“That would make you the messenger,” Paul said.
“Oh, I didn’t mind that,” Dunne said. He served Paul a pile of cake crumbs. “The first woman to fall was a refugee.”
Twenty-one
“What is the shelter’s rate of intake, normally? How long does it take to get, say, six thousand people down?”
“I should think fifteen to twenty minutes. Three to three and a half minutes a thousand. That is what I would estimate.”
“That is something over two per second passing a given point on the escalator?”
“Yes.”
“That is a good many, is it not?”
“They go through very quickly. The speed is quite good.”
“I see. Is it your opinion that nationalities, races, creeds, denominations, played any part in this at all?”
“Not in this, no.”
“Have you ever noticed, as a matter of interest, any difference in behavior between the different nationalities or races we have here?”
“I cannot say that I have. Of course, we have here at Bethnal Green a lot of the fellow we call the Cockney, the real good old Cockney, and I think that is why we have little panic here. But even the Jew, contrary to what we believed, stood up to it pretty well. They surprised me and everybod
y else who knows this part of London.”
“You were in the crowd outside the shelter the night of March third?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see when you arrived?”
“It was very dark. The crowd was moving along all right down the stairs, and suddenly the people in the front seemed to stop, and I felt an awful pressure from the back.”
“You couldn’t go forward and you couldn’t go back?”
“That’s right.”
“And you didn’t know why you couldn’t go forward. Did anybody seem to know?”
“No.”
“Could you see down the staircase at all?”
“Not really.”
“Did any of the people seem to be seeing down the staircase?”
“No.”
“What were the people doing?”
“How do you mean?”
“What were they doing, how were they behaving?”
“We were waiting. Some people were worried. We thought the bombs had started.”
“Why?”
“People yelled they’d started dropping them.”
“Who yelled that?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long do you think you were there?”
“I should think ten minutes.”
“But everybody is all right?”
“The baby came through. I lost my two oldest.”
“Where was your husband?”
“I was talking to him and trying to pull him out, right at the bottom of the stairs.”
“He was at the bottom?”
“Yes, right at the bottom. All he was saying was ‘Get Ivy out!’—she’s our baby—and luckily someone did pull her out for me.”
“But your husband, unfortunately—”
“No, he is in hospital.”
“Oh, that’s good. What is the matter?”
“He says he cannot feel his legs.”
“I expect the doctors will patch him up all right.”
“Of course, I lost my mother and two sisters.”
“I am interested in the first woman who is supposed to have fallen. You say you saw her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you see her afterward? Did she make it out of the heap?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You live at Seventy-one Royston Street, Bethnal Green?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you when the alert sounded?”
“Indoors with my three little ones.”
“At home?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I gathered up what I could and ran with the children to the shelter.”
“You ran, did you?”
“Yes.”
“How old are the children?”
“One is three and a half, the next one is six, and the other one is eleven.”
“Let me ask you right away, because the notes I have are not always accurate about this: the children are all right, are they?”
Laurie ate a cold Woolton pie that night with Armorel. He told her some of the stories he’d heard. “The victims looked alive until a warden touched them. Then they disintegrated.”
Armorel shook her head.
“The result, they say, of a new bomb that takes the breath out of people. Some took the bodies of their children home with them, convinced that the government, for unspecified reasons, wouldn’t allow them a proper burial.”
“Oh, Laurie.”
He told her that many of the witnesses mentioned a sound, something they heard that night that was different. They described it variously as a screaming blast, a crack, a rocket. What was clear in all cases was that it had made no sense to them. The East Enders knew the nightmare of aerial bombardment: the sirens, the drone of aircraft, the rumble of guns. They had nicknames for the searchlights and the barrage balloons, the pilots and the bombs. They claimed to be able to gauge by sound alone the location of a bomb, exploded or unexploded, incendiary, oil, or high explosive.
“Do you believe them?” Armorel asked.
“About this, I do.”
“Then I do, too. That night they must have heard something.”
“But when, exactly? That will be important. Anyway, I have a good lad helping. Ian Ross, a local constable. Quite capable, I think.”
Armorel put down her fork. “Isn’t it remarkable,” she said.
“What?”
“There is always such a supply of capable young men around you, and yet the city complains of a shortage.”
“If you’re worried about Andrew, remember you’re also proud. He’s going to be fine.”
Armorel shook her head again and picked up her spoon. “This is just soup with a crust. Do you think Lord Woolton eats it?”
Laurie smiled. Like most of their friends, they’d dismissed their servants for war work and now managed on their own. Woolton pie was supposed to count toward making your main dish a potato dish three times a week, according to the Ministry of Food’s Potato Plan. “I read the other day that crockery breakage is down ninety percent,” he offered.
“Yes, and indigestion is up a hundred,” replied Armorel.
Laurie took another bite of the tasteless soup. “The mayor’s an odd woman,” he went on, “but I don’t think she’ll be any trouble.”
“Did you choose this Ross, or was he assigned to you?” Armorel asked.
“I chose him. He seems intelligent.”
“Should we have him to dinner?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“I mean, would you like to have him to dinner?”
Laurie shook his head, his thoughts returning to the day’s testimony: “A few witnesses insisted on telling me the story of how they escaped being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Infuriating. Don’t they know a near miss is always safe enough?”
Twenty-two
After the orphanage, mother and daughter suffered a reversal. Tilly lay in bed now, while Ada moved about the flat. She could hear her mother’s knees and ankles popping as she cleaned at night, her dull humming as she started taking care of the kitchen again and preparing the window boxes for vegetables. Her father was busy in the grocery, his work ethic as improved by the fall, her mother said, as his comprehension was diminished. Now and then, Ada came to the bed and pulled Tilly close. She touched her cheek to the top of her head, so that Tilly felt like a baby
bird tucked under a wing—that press of comfort, wordless. When it worked, Tilly fell asleep. When it didn’t, Tilly held her breath so as not to have her mother’s scent in her nose.
Rev. McNeely visited. At first Tilly thought it was a condolence call, but as she listened to their conversation from the bedroom, she realized her mother had asked him to come.
“I think I could endure anything,” she said. “I’m not even scared. If I died I would miss Tilly, but I feel as though I have a child on each side of an abyss now and death would be just crossing over to spend time with the one I haven’t seen in a while.”
When Tilly pulled herself up on the pillow, she could see Rev. McNeely’s face through the doorway and beyond her mother’s shoulder. She startled him, and he spilled some tea on his hand. Her mother said, “Quick, pinch your earlobe.”
He stared at Ada, his burned fingers pressed into the opposite palm.
“It takes the heat and your ear doesn’t feel it.”
He did as he was told. After a moment he said, “About your question.” He spoke softly, but Tilly could make out most of what he said. “According to parish law, anyone residing within the parish is entitled to the sacrament of baptism, regardless of race. Marriage and burial, too.”
“That’s good,” her mother said. “And godparents?”
“Of course. If they agree.”
“Would you?”
There was another silence.
“Do you mean as a matter of principle, or are you—”
“I don’t know who else to ask.”
Now Tilly knew why her mother had set the table with their best cloth. She offered more tea, but McNeely declined.
“I see. Well, yes, it is an interesting question, isn’t it?”
Ada waited.
“If you needed me,” McNeely said, “of course. But perhaps you’ll think of someone else.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It must be very hard, Mrs. Barber.”
“I got Tilly out.”
McNeely nodded vigorously. “Of course. And with time …”
Her mother shook her head and closed her eyes. After a minute she continued as before. “Time has nothing to do here. Two is what I’m used to.”
Rev. McNeely took a last sip of tea. He had to go. He had another funeral at the church.
At the door her mother thanked him for coming.
“I hope I’ve been of service, if perhaps not a comfort.”
“Yes, thank you.”
McNeely stopped in the doorway. He was only a bit taller than her mother, but it seemed to Tilly he looked down on her from a great height with kindness. “Ada,” he said, “you can always come see me privately if there’s something more to discuss.”
Tilly was as surprised as he to see her mother begin to shake.
Twenty-three
“Before you headed to the shelter, Mr. Steadman, was there anything you had to finish up in the Bricklayers’ Arms?”
“I was drinking a pint, sir.”
“And you dealt with that, I trust?”
“I drank my pint right up.”
“Good man.”
Bill Steadman, a fifty-year-old pensioner wearing a police-issue vest, explained that he’d been concerned about a heavy flow of people that night and was serving as a volunteer.
“I often did so, sir. My heart, it dislikes the damp. Warden Low was always kind enough to let me stay in the booking hall, so I tried to be of some use.”
“And were you wearing this at the time?” Laurie indicated the vest.
“No, sir. I got this after the accident. I’ve become more official at the shelter since the night in question.”
The Report Page 9