In front of the shelter, Ross spoke with the constable on duty, while Laurie looked at the new handrails and bulkhead light, now ensconced in a steel cage. If only someone had treated the local council’s plan for a new entrance as more than a routine application for the expenditure of public funds. But was everyone supposed to live with a mind full of potential horrors? He walked slowly down the steps, painted now with whitewashed strips along both sides and the center, until he stood at the bottom of the first flight, looking back up toward the entrance. The sunlight made a jagged geometric pattern along the left side, and in the sky above the entrance, he could just see the white, shuttered cupola of St. John’s. The stairs were relatively new but looked old. They seemed to him apologetic, but perhaps that was just the effect of the new paint and his imagination. The cement was damp, as if recently cleaned, and the metal handrails had a seawater smell that transferred to his hand as he walked back up. A torn sandbag hunched nearby, half its contents strewn about in anticipation of more snow.
As Ross and Laurie walked back in front of St. John’s, they saw the minister sweeping the church steps.
“Reverend McNeely,” Ross said. “He’s been quite a lot of help since the disaster.”
When they approached, McNeely looked up and smiled. “Mr. Dunne,” he said. “I’d been hoping to see you around the area a bit more. I’ve wanted to meet you.”
Laurie liked the man’s eyes, dark and full of what struck him as an unusual mixture of wisdom and worry.
“We’re very eager for your report.”
Laurie nodded.
“We’re desperate for a story, you see.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Laurie said, just as Ross said, “Reverend, with all due respect, we’re not telling stories. The report will be the truth.”
McNeely smiled at Laurie. “I do hope then that the truth won’t be the one I heard in the pub yesterday. A new German weapon is to blame, they say. A beam that incinerates everything for miles around.”
“How can they think that?”
“Nothing burned,” Ross said incredulously.
“We listen better than we observe, obviously,” said McNeely. “It’s the only explanation for the persistence of rumor.”
“Were you near the crush?” Laurie asked.
McNeely shook his head. “God spared me a role.”
“You have certainly played a role,” Laurie said.
“I don’t know.” McNeely squinted at his church in the sunlight. The doors needed paint; the broken weather vane dangled. “I don’t know what it means.” He turned back to Laurie. “Maybe you’ll come for a service sometime?”
“I’d like to. Perhaps after the report is published, if the area will still have me.”
McNeely smiled. “Forgiveness without understanding is like faith without proof,” he said. “Difficult, but many in Bethnal Green are quite good at it, I’ve found.”
Ross and Laurie continued west on the Bethnal Green Road. They passed a grocery’s with a bushel of bananas on display, and Ross, recognizing an opportunity, pointed at them. “These are rare around here. I’d like to buy a few, if you don’t mind.” Laurie agreed, and they stepped inside. Tilly Barber stood behind the counter.
“Is your mother here?” he asked.
The girl shook her head.
Ross paid for his bananas, and Laurie glanced around the shop. “Well, what else is good?”
“The potatoes are freshest,” she said. “Nothing else, really.”
“Half a pound, then.” He studied her face. “Do you remember before the war?”
“A little bit. My sister—” Tilly stopped and put her hand over her mouth. It was her mother’s gesture.
“Go ahead.”
“My sister didn’t. She never saw the moon.”
“Because of the blackout.”
Tilly nodded.
“Did you describe it to her?”
Tilly nodded again.
“Often?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, then you were a good big sister. She was lucky to have you.”
Tilly smiled.
Thirty-eight
Although he’d promised to arrive earlier, Bertram came home from the Salmon & Ball near midnight, drunk. He was carrying, and stroking extravagantly, a small, underweight cat. Wary of his welcome, he stayed by the door, his coat on.
“They say it’s blind,” he said softly. “The blokes down the pub.”
Clare came over and touched the warm, slightly damp ears. It was raining outside, and the animal, Bertram explained, had insisted on keeping its head out of his coat on the way home. Clare lifted the cat out of his hands and put it on the floor.
“It’s been hanging around the pub since the accident,” Bertram said.
Clare watched the animal exploring the room in a manner decidedly less fluid than that of most cats she’d seen. It was a tortoiseshell, the fur a motley pattern of orange and black and white. The face, particularly, seemed mismatched, half-orange, half-black, with some white around one side of the mouth, almost as if it were wearing a mask that had been bumped askew.
“That doesn’t make any sense, Bert. They linked it to the accident so that you’d take it. Why would the accident have blinded a cat?”
Bertram shrugged and weaved. “I just thought I’d bring it home. That way if something happened to me, you’d have it to take care of.”
Clare looked at the animal again. “I don’t like cats.”
“Oh.”
Clare hung up his coat and walked him to the sofa. Bertram’s dreams—heavily populated and full of voices, he’d told her—were leaving him tired and sad. She knew the regulars at the Salmon & Ball had started saving a stool for him at the end of the bar. She’d seen it. The stool had two full-length legs in back and two shorter ones in front to accommodate the step up to the back room. The game was to get the bloke who sat there to drink too much, forget, and scoot back from the bar, with predictable results. Bertram hadn’t disappointed them yet.
“Bertram,” she said. “You’ve got to stop this.”
“Why don’t you like cats?” he asked, bleary, innocent.
She stroked his cheek. “They’re too independent.” Bertram nuzzled his head into her hand. He was falling asleep.
She smiled and ruffled his hair, waking him. His eyes opened, and she told him Mr. Dunne had requested his list. She saw the news slowly permeating the drink. He smiled.
“This is what you’ve been waiting for, Bert,” she said.
“I’ll take it tomorrow.”
She had things she wanted to tell him. She thought of waking him up with coffee. She could turn off the lights and open the window; a blast of cold air might bring him back. But while she was thinking, he tipped to the right, fast asleep. She settled his head on a pillow, took off his shoes. She covered him with a blanket, then turned off all the lights, opened the heavy curtain, and sat by his chest on the sofa.
She loved this reversal of the blackout—black inside and out, so that you could open your curtain. It felt like bending the rules, although it wasn’t, as long as you didn’t forget and turn on a light. The blackout seemed to her useless; surely the German pilots knew how to find London and her landmarks by now. Yet every night the city turned itself into a dark blanket beneath the sky, hiding and waiting.
How do you black out a home? She’d thought a lot about it at the start of the war. How do you blot out every bit of light and warmth? Bertram said you had to think of yourself as an animal or an insect, a drone of some kind, working away at the edges of a honeycomb. Fill this crack, gnaw, gnaw, cover that gap. In those days of the war, everything was preparation; spirit and determination ran high. But the blackout materials were heavy and inconvenient, and once the blackout became a reality, many just kept their windows darkened all the time. Now sometimes even she didn’t open the curtains during the day.
She leaned over and kissed Bertram’s lips. They tasted sweet, a little beery. She
thought of his notebook, his careful record, the way he’d cared for the last carried objects of a group of people in a particular time and place. “It’s war work, Bert.” She pressed her hand to his chest, hoping he would feel the warmth in his sleep. “Just as much as anything else. You did it.”
She put a bowl of milk out for the cat, lay next to Bertram, and went to sleep. In the morning, Bertram was gone, and the cat was licking her hand, hungry again. He’d left her the notebook for Dunne and a pair of shoes with beautiful green soles that looked almost new.
Thirty-nine
By the end of the inquiry, Laurie had called and examined eighty witnesses and imagined the night of March 3 so many times that when he closed his eyes, he heard the pounding of feet slowing from a run to a walk to a shuffle. He saw girls in long braids, boys in short trousers, the hands of mothers trying to keep them moving.
The weather remained cold and gray, most often the sky nothing but layers of cloud. Laurie’s notes were scattered wildly; his hair and clothes were a mess. When Armorel brought the tea tray, he would pat his forehead, hoping to smooth the hair and his thoughts. She’d never seen him like this—he knew that. They were both accustomed to his work behaving like a good prisoner, always quiet and on schedule. It must have been his imagination, but as he worked in the study and Armorel sewed in the drawing room, it seemed the house groaned from the strain of this new battle. Or perhaps the bombs had shaken the building’s foundations after all, as their friends who left had warned.
He’d interviewed shelter wardens, police constables, superintendents and inspectors, local officials and regional officials. He’d talked to ambulance drivers, light rescue workers, heavy rescue workers, and volunteers from every other service drawn out that night. He’d questioned medical professionals who were either on the scene or who had admitted and examined casualties at one of several local hospitals. He’d spoken to surveyors, engineers, and technical advisors. Most of all he’d tried to listen to the average Bethnal Greener, as many of them as would come before the inquiry. He let all of them talk until they were done. The airing of grievances was important—he knew the good it could do—but now his head was full, and no clear picture of the night had emerged.
On March 19 Laurie worked at home, going out only once, for a short walk in the park. He would have liked Armorel to have accompanied him, but she was busy. He’d seen many small gray boxes around, ingenious creations of cardboard and felt, and assumed that meant the stitching had progressed from the countryside into Hamburg. According to the RAF, the German women were also sewing, and they were ahead. Before the war, while England was at peace, growing slow and fat on the false assurances of distance and victory, the German women had kept busy. But the landscape of Berlin had been completed, contributing to the enormously successful mission earlier in the month. Hamburg, Armorel said, was not far behind.
In the park without Armorel, Laurie counted people. He found himself compulsively counting, the numbers mesmerizing him. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five. What did those amounts look like? If he heard a bomb had killed ten people, he drew imaginary circles the next day: that woman on the bench, the man by the water, those children playing jump rope, the boys feeding ducks. Ten people. Gone.
Even so, he couldn’t make sense of one hundred seventy-three suffocated in a heap.
At five o’clock he returned, poured himself a drink, and watched Armorel stitch. He imagined their son, Andrew, a small speck on someone else’s landscape and asked if there was anything he could do to help, to speed the project along. She shook her head. The sewing, he knew, was keeping something at bay for her, the black worry that would seep in without constant work. Periodically she asked about the inquiry, and he told her what he could. Once she said, “Mothers and children should have a separate entrance at the biggest shelters, don’t you think?” and he’d made a note of it.
Back in his study, Laurie put on a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Bach’s complete preludes and fugues. He began to pair a witness’s position in the crush with what he or she had considered the main cause of the disaster. If a person had been behind or in front of the mass on the stairs, he or she likely made furious claims: a mysterious new bomb, a gas leak, a Jewish panic. If the person had been in the stairwell, there was less certainty about anything, just a terrible bewilderment. Laurie had thought the chart might bring out an essential theme, the way Richter found inner voices in Bach. He was sure there was something here about tragedy, blame, and responsibility, but he couldn’t see it.
The next day it snowed. At his desk early, Laurie watched the flurries for a time, impressed by the silence. He’d never considered snow stealthy, but that was what struck him now. How could something so extensive happen so quietly? Why was the sound of rain more reassuring?
He pressed his eyes and tried to concentrate.
During the inquiry he’d filled two notebooks, thirty-five loose sheets, and one napkin from a pub on Russia Lane. All of it was a mess. Half the testimony contradicted the other. The crowd was quiet; the crowd was loud. The constables and wardens had worked hard; the constables and wardens were nowhere to be seen. There was light on the stairs; the stairs were dark. There was a loud blast no one had ever heard before; there were no unusual sounds that night. There were only a few Jews in the crowd; the crowd was filled with Jews.
He turned to the sheet in his typewriter. There he’d begun: It will, I think, be convenient to give you at once the more important measurements of the part of the shelter involved.
He stared out the window again. He’d nearly recalled the man Steadman for a second interview, to see if he could corroborate what Tilly had told them, but decided he didn’t want to. He didn’t want Ross to hear the story again. He didn’t want to reduce the disaster to just another example of there being too many Jews in the East End. This was not the story he wanted to tell; nor was it the one the city needed to hear.
He turned back to his typewriter. I am satisfied the wardens responded well and did what they could once the accident was under way, he wrote. In a matter of seconds, the jam was complete across the full width of the landing.
Jam? Was he really going to call it a jam?
He thought through the sequence. The alert sounded just after quarter past eight. Between 8:27 and 8:28 a woman fell. Would she have fallen if the stairwell hadn’t been so dark? Would she have been able to get up and go on if there hadn’t been so many people? The constable who should have been in place earlier didn’t arrive until 8:35. By then the calamity was irreversible.
Laurie tried music, choosing his favorite recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Melody, all melody, seemed to speak to him of the tragedy. He was listening to Chopin and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, their works somehow hinting at how the memory of this event would one day feel.
He turned to the newspaper clippings he’d saved, among them the March 2 story in the Daily Herald about the raid on Berlin. Witnesses had mentioned many times the Halifax captain’s breathless description of the mission: A minute or two after ten o’clock, I saw the first flares drop. A cloudless sky and excellent visibility enabled the crews to recognize their exact targets on the streets in Berlin. Bomber after bomber dropped its load, and we watched the fires break out and spread until they became a great concentrated mass.
The precision of this attack had worried the Bethnal Greeners, and by March 3 the area was preparing for a terrible German response. It seemed unfair to Laurie to label as panic such imaginative empathy. There were just too many people, all of them with these fires in their thoughts—a crowd thinks in images. Then someone fell on a dark staircase, and the rest kept coming.
He put in a fresh sheet of paper.
If the purpose of a report is to explain what caused a tragedy, then I should begin with maps and diagrams and endeavor at once to describe the particulars of the accident in detail. But if perhaps the better purpose of a report is to understand a tragedy, then I should begin with a woman in a crowd, sur
rounded but alone.
He sat back in his chair. These felt like the truest words he’d written so far. He stood and paced the room. He was a man who reputedly understood the lives of others, so why not start here? With this poor, overburdened woman.
She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone.
It didn’t sound like a report, but it was how he wanted to begin.
She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone. When the crowd flowed into the stairwell …
He looked up to see ash and debris suddenly mixed with the snow falling over the park. Fearful for the report, this promising beginning, he stood and shouted for Armorel. He was gathering papers madly, certain that there was a fire, that they’d have to evacuate, when she ran in and assured him it was only a gardener burning the last of the winter brush.
She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right?”
Relieved, he sat down. “Armorel! I’m as well as I’ve been in days.”
He worried how he would address some of the more specious rumors and allegations. He wondered how to include some of the most useful complaints and suggestions. And yet for the first time he felt he was on the right track. He wrote a quick note to Ross, asking him to get the clerk’s notebook. He would use Bertram’s list. It would have details he’d need to fill out the narrative he was imagining, and it would help the boy to turn it over. He’d seen many times that people needed others to understand and accept the manner in which they tried to make amends.
Forty
When Sarah asked Rev. McNeely to visit her husband, he came immediately, expecting to find a man in bed, but Low was in the tiny back garden, working at turning the soil. McNeely’s first thought was that perhaps, in her concern, Sarah had exaggerated her husband’s symptoms. But when McNeely approached and saw Low’s round glasses sliding down his gaunt face, he knew she had not.
The Report Page 16