All Clear

by Connie Willis

  She set the bucket down and ran back to the staircase and up the twisting steps, round and round, to the gallery above.

  It was even more full of smoke and ash and cinders. And it will get worse as you go up, Polly thought, ducking her head to protect it from the embers as she ran along the gallery, trying doors, searching for a stairway which would take her farther up. A library. A closet, filled with choir robes.

  The stairway must be in the transept, she thought, and hurried toward the dome.

  It was in the transept, just past the corner of the gallery. It led up to a dark and stiflingly hot corridor roofed with low wooden beams that she had to duck under and huge bumps in the floor she had to edge around or crawl over. The tops of the arches’ vaults?

  But she must be going the right way, because coils of hose and tubs of sand and water stood every few yards against the walls and, in one case, in the middle of the corridor. She splashed into it as she tried to step over a hump, and it was only then that she realized she was still in her stocking feet and her shoes were still in her pockets. She sat down next to the tub, put her shoes on and went on, looking for a stairway leading farther up.

  She finally found one. It led up to a maze of even lower-roofed, narrower, and smokier passages that had to be just beneath the roofs. She could hear planes and anti-aircraft guns through the ceiling.

  And voices, coming from farther along the passage and above her. “Easy, easy,” she heard one voice say, and then a second voice from a bit below the first, saying, “Watch the turning.”

  They’re coming down a flight of stairs, Polly thought. And they were no more than a few feet away, which meant this passage had to connect to the stairs. She scuttled along the passage, trying not to crack her head against ceiling beams she could only half see in the dimness, straining to spot the doorway to the stairs.

  “No, no, you’ll—” the first voice said.

  “Come back this way.”

  And the other said, “Wait, I haven’t got a good grip.”

  They must be carrying something between them. They were nearly even with her. She needed to hurry or she’d miss them. She rushed toward their voices.

  And straight into a wall. The stairway lay on the other side of it—she could hear the two men only inches from her—but there was no door, no connecting link. The passage she was in dead-ended. And in the meantime, the men had already passed below her with their burden, their voices still repeating, “Easy” and “Careful,” as they got farther away. And now she had the entire maze to crawl back along, hoping she could remember the way she’d come and find a way out.

  She was so focused on retracing her steps that she nearly missed the door. It stood behind an angled beam and was so narrow that she had to squeeze through it and up the shallow stone steps, not certain she wouldn’t get stuck as she did. The stairs ended in a trapdoor, which she had to push up mightily on with both hands to budge. It fell back, opening on the suddenly deafening roar of planes and a rush of heat and wind that blew her hat off. She grabbed for it, but the hat was already gone, caught in an updraft.

  But it didn’t matter. She was through it and finally, finally, out on the roof.

  On one of the roofs, she amended, pushing her blowing hair out of her eyes and looking at the long, flat roof and the stone wall and steep slant above her.

  In spite of the distance she’d climbed, this was only one of the lower aisle roofs which ran the length of the nave. The pitched central roof and the dome were still a full story above her, and she had no way to get to them.

  I’ll need to go all the way back down and find another way up, she thought despairingly.

  But if an incendiary fell down here, they had to have a way to get to it quickly. There must be something here to make that possible—ropes or a ladder or something.

  A ladder. It stood against the wall, hidden by the shadows of the transept roofs above it. She began to climb it.

  Blustery as it had been on the aisle roof, the surrounding walls had protected her from the brunt of the wind. And from the cold. As she climbed higher, freezing gusts whipped around her, flapping the tail of her coat and blowing her hair across her face. She leaned forward to grab at the leaded gutter and then the parapet. Her foot accidentally kicked the side of the ladder as she pulled herself over the edge, and it fell away and down with a muffled clang.

  Polly clutched at the parapet with both hands, squinting against the driving wind, and pulled herself up over it and onto the roof. The wind was even icier up here, though it shouldn’t have been. It was filled with darting sparks and flecks of fire and ash. She slitted her eyes against them and pulled herself to standing, holding on to a stone projection, and looked out over the edge of the roof.

  And gasped. There were flames below her as far as she could see, building after building, roof after roof on fire.

  Oh, God, Mike and Eileen are down there somewhere in that, she thought.

  Off to the right, a church spire was blazing like a torch. One of the Wren churches? Beyond it a scattering of just-fallen incendiaries sparkled like stars. It had no business being beautiful, but it was, the white searchlights piercing the billows of crimson and orange and gold smoke, the shining pink curve of the Thames, the burning windows glowing like row after row of Chinese lanterns. And nearer in, a solid ring of fire, closing inexorably on St. Paul’s.

  “It can’t possibly survive,” Polly murmured, looking down at the flames. Pails of water and sandbags and stirrup pumps and a score of firewatchers can’t stop that.

  “Where is it?” a man shouted behind her, and she whirled around.

  One of the firewatchers was standing there. It was too dark to make out his features. “Where’d the incendiary fall?” he shouted at her over the wind. “Down there?” He peered over the edge at the roof she’d just climbed up from.

  “Are you John Bartholomew?” she shouted at him.

  “What?” He straightened and looked at her, astonished. “You’re a girl. What the bloody hell are you doing up here?”

  “I’m looking for—”

  “How did you get up here? Civilians aren’t allowed on the roofs!”

  “Peters!” he shouted, grabbed her arm, and pushed her ahead of him, the two of them half walking, half crawling over the steep roof to the base of the dome, where half a dozen men were flailing at the roof with wet burlap bags. Sparks sizzled as the sopping bags smothered them. The firewatcher pushed her toward the nearest man. “Peters! Look what I found over on the pocket roof.”

  “How’d you get up here?” Peters demanded, looking about for someone to blame. “Who the bloody hell let her up here?”

  “No one,” Polly said. “Is any of you John Bartholomew?” she called over to the other men, but the wind carried her words away, and a new batch of planes was approaching, droning off to the east.

  The men all looked up alertly. “You can’t stay up here!” Peters bellowed at her. “You’re in danger.”

  “I’m not leaving till I speak with John Bartholomew!”

  He ignored her. “Nickleby, take her down and see that she stays there.”

  Nickleby pulled on her arm.

  She wrenched away from him. “Please,” she said to Peters. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Emergency,” he repeated, looking out at the burning City, the encroaching fires. “Bartholomew’s not here. He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” she echoed. “He can’t have gone yet. He—when did he leave?”

  “A quarter of an hour ago. He took one of the watch who was injured to hospital.”

  And I heard him carrying the man down, Polly thought sickly. He was just on the other side of the wall.

  “Then let me speak to Mr. Humphreys,” she said.

  She could at least give him a message to give John Bartholomew when he returned. If he returned. Eileen had said he’d left immediately after he’d been injured. She’d had it wrong—he wasn’t the one injured—but she might have got the part about
his leaving then right. He might have gone to hospital and then not been able to get back to St. Paul’s because of the fires.

  “Humphreys went with them.”

  “To which hospital?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “St. Bart’s, I think,” Nickleby said.

  “Where is that?” Polly asked.

  “Over there,” the first firewatcher said, and pointed over the northern edge of the roof at a sea of smoke and flame. “But you’ve no business going out there. You need to be in a shelter.”

  An anti-aircraft battery just below them started up. “Nickleby, take her down to the Crypt,” he shouted over it, “and then get back up here!” He looked up at the smoky sky, listening to the planes, now nearly overhead. “We’re due for another round.”

  Polly let Nickleby lead her over to a doorway at the base of the dome, then wrenched free of him and ran down the spiraling stone steps to the Whispering Gallery—oh, God, those stairs do go all the way up! If I’d only come that way!—and the telephone post of the watch just below it.

  She shot past the startled fire-watch volunteer on the phone and on down the steps and out into the nave. And down it, through the whirlwind of burning cinders and orders of worship, past the visitors’ desk, past the charred sixpenny print of Light of the World, and fled out the door and down the steps into the fire.

  Not a hope. Nothing can get through.

  —BUS DRIVER TO A NURSE TRYING

  TO REACH HER HOSPITAL,

  29 December 1940

  The City—29 December 1940

  EILEEN AND THE CHILDREN MADE FIVE RUNS TO AND FROM St. Bart’s with Dr. Cross over the next few hours with no opportunity to get away from him. When they returned to St. Bart’s, he never even got out of the ambulance. Instead, he had Eileen back up to the entrance, where attendants unloaded the patients while he gave instructions to the house officer through the window and was told their next assignment.

  “St. Giles, Cripplegate,” he’d say to Alf. “Do you know where that is?” and they were off again.

  On the third run, Eileen had said, “We’re nearly out of petrol,” hoping she’d be sent to fill the tank when they arrived back at St. Bart’s and they could escape, but Dr. Cross had simply asked the incident officer for a tin, which he’d poured into the tank as flames licked less than five feet away.

  We’ll have to make a run for it when we arrive back at St. Bart’s this time, Eileen thought.

  But they didn’t go back. At the last moment the incident officer leaned in to say, “Injured ARP warden in Wood Street. St. Bart’s wants to know if you can pick him up on the way back.”

  “Tell them yes,” Dr. Cross said.

  “But what about the patient in the back?”

  “He’s stable for the moment,” the doctor said, and they took off for Wood Street through streets filled with reddened smoke and lined with orange flames, maneuvering around spills of bricks and sparkling, sputtering incendiaries.

  “HE,” Dr. Cross said as Eileen edged past a huge crater.

  Alf nodded. “Five-hundred-pounder.”

  I thought Mike said they didn’t drop any HEs, Eileen thought. And he said the raids were over by midnight.

  But even though the all clear had gone while they were on the way back from Moorgate, she could still hear the low growl of the planes, and so could Binnie. “ ’Ow come they done the all clear when them bombers is still comin’?” Binnie asked.

  “It ain’t bombers makin’ that sound, you noddlehead,” Alf said. “It’s the fires. Ain’t it?” he asked Dr. Cross.

  “Yes,” Dr. Cross said absently, wiping the windscreen with his hand to clear it, but it wasn’t the windscreen. It was the smoke, which seemed to be growing thicker by the moment as the number of fires increased.

  When it began to rain a few minutes later, Eileen thought, Good, that should help put out the fires, but all it did was send up smothering clouds which came down over the streets like a blackout curtain.

  Even Alf couldn’t find his way in it. He got them lost twice, and even when he was able to tell which way to go, more often than not the route was blocked with debris or with fire pumpers and miles of snaking hose.

  They detoured around fallen masonry and a broken gas main shooting a jet of flame across the road. It was impossible to avoid all the broken glass—it was everywhere, testament to the HEs Polly had said the Luftwaffe hadn’t dropped.

  Eileen drove cautiously over it, praying she wouldn’t get a puncture and strand them in the midst of the flames. She backed, turned, bore left in response to Alf’s directions and then right, trying to get to the incident and the injured warden and then trying to find a way back to St. Bart’s in an endless nightmarish round of darkness and flame and smoke.

  Occasionally, a gust of wind would blow the smoke aside, and she’d catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s dome, floating above the smoke. It was never any closer, always just out of reach. Even if she could somehow have got free of Dr. Cross and the patients in the back, she couldn’t have got to it. When they tried to go to Creed Lane, a soot-blackened warden had stopped them and said, “You can’t get through this way. You’ll have to go round by Bishopsgate to Clerkenwell.”

  “Bishopsgate?” Alf said. “That’s miles. Can’t we take Newgate?”

  The warden shook his head. “The whole of Ludgate Hill’s on fire.”

  “Even St. Paul’s?” Dr. Cross asked anxiously.

  “Not yet, but it won’t be long now, I’m afraid.”

  “What about the fire brigades? Can’t they do anything?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t get to her, and even if they could, there’s no water. She hasn’t a chance.” And he gave them directions to make their way back to Bishopsgate.

  “There’s got to be some way to go to Creed Lane without goin’ all that way,” Alf said after the warden walked away. “Try Gresham. Second left.”

  But Gresham Street was a solid wall of flame, and so was the Barbican. They ended up having to go all the way to Bishopsgate after all, and by the time they reached Creed Lane, the burn victim had died.

  “Young woman in her twenties,” the incident officer said, shaking his head. “Flames jumped the lane.”

  He indicated the body that lay in the street, covered with a gray blanket. “That coulda been you if I wasn’t navigatin’,” Alf said to Eileen.

  “She should have been in a shelter,” the incident officer said. “She’d no business being out in this.”

  “Can Alf and me go look at the body?” Binnie asked.

  “No,” Eileen said. They had no business being out on the streets in this either. “Is there a shelter near here?” she asked the officer. “These children—”

  “You can’t leave us here,” Alf said. “We’re your assistants.”

  “But your mother will be worried about you—”

  Alf said, “We ain’t—”

  Binnie cut him off. “Mum ain’t ’ome. She’s at work.”

  “And if you make us go to a shelter, who’ll tell you ’ow to get back to St. Bart’s?” Alf asked.

  He was right. She wouldn’t have a prayer of getting the ambulance back to the hospital without him. She was completely disoriented in the smoky fog, and Dr. Cross was even worse. “No sense of direction, even in the daytime, I’m afraid,” he’d said on the first trip. “That’s why I never learned to drive.”

  “You can leave us behind in some shelter,” Binnie said, “but you can’t make us stay there.”

  She was right, and God knew what the two of them would do or where they’d go if they weren’t with her. “Get in the ambulance,” Eileen said, and went over to Dr. Cross and the incident officer.

  The doctor was speaking on a field telephone. As she came up, the incident officer said, “Are you injured, miss?”

  “Doctor,” he said, turning to Dr. Cross, “this young lady is—”

  “I’m not injured. I’m Dr. Cross’s driver.”

  Dr. Cr
oss took the receiver from his mouth and said, “I’ve just been in contact with Moor Lane Fire Station. They’ve a fireman in Alwell Lane with burns and a broken leg. Guy’s Hospital was supposed to send an ambulance, but they can’t. The hospital’s on fire, and they’re busy evacuating their own patients.” He handed the telephone back to him and turned to Eileen. “We need to go pick up the fireman.”

  He started for the ambulance.

  “Wait,” Eileen said. If she could phone the fire watch and get a message to John Bartholomew, she could tell him they were trying to get to him and to wait till they arrived.

  “Can you get through to St. Paul’s on that telephone?” she asked the incident officer. “My husband’s a member of the fire watch. I was on my way there to take him his supper when I was recruited into driving. He’ll be frantic with worry over where I—where the children and I are. If I could only telephone him to let him know I’m all right—”

  The incident officer looked doubtful. “These phones are supposed to be for official business only.”

  “This is official business,” Dr. Cross said. “We don’t want any of those lads worrying. We want their full attention on saving that cathedral.”

  The incident officer nodded, cranked up the telephone, then put it to his ear and said, “Put me through to the fire watch at St. Paul’s,” and handed it to her. “It’ll take some time to patch it through.”

  Eileen nodded, listening to a series of hums and trying to think what to say. She couldn’t mention their drops or time travel with the incident officer listening. And Mr. Bartholomew hadn’t met her yet. Who should she say was calling?

  Mrs. Mr. Dunworthy, she thought, and I’ll tell him I’m trying to get to St. Paul’s so we can go home together, and to—

  There was a sharp crackle, and a man’s voice said, “St. Paul’s Fire Watch here.”

  “Yes, hello, I’m trying to reach—”

  There was a volley of static, and then silence.