The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  By July the photographs showed signs of unusual activity. A latticework of footpaths scoring the dove gray of a formerly pristine patchwork of fields and pasture appeared on the north coast of France. New telephone lines, identified by the early-morning shadows cast by telephone poles, pinpointed the local military headquarters. The heavy tread of truck tires exposed the white clay beneath the topsoil five miles inland from Calais, marking the locations of ammo depots. The War Office kept up a drumbeat for more covers.

  In the final days of August, forty to fifty merchant ships showed up at Kiel, with another 350 large launches of a type not previously seen appearing at Emden. Fifty-six barges were suddenly missing from Amsterdam. Michael noticed that the bows of five 130-foot barges in the Rotterdam shipyards had been modified. Conceivably this might enable them to offload tanks and troops. Modified barges began showing up at the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. Launches and other craft were also photographed progressing down the coast toward the ports and estuaries of the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France.

  Wembley acquired an airfield section to keep a tight focus on the French coast. Every clear day Spitfires took covers of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. One hundred modified barges suddenly left Antwerp while eighteen popped up at Ostend. Photographic intelligence saw more and more movement as barges hopscotched down the coast to arrive at embarkation points opposite the white cliffs of Dover. By Friday, September 6, two hundred barges were assembled at Ostend.

  69 Oriental Road, Silvertown, London,

  Saturday, September 7, 1940

  When the sirens went at 4:43 p.m. Nancy climbed out onto the station roof to watch for dogfights. The late-afternoon sky was pale blue with not even a scrap of cirrus. Only in the east was there an oddly shaped pink-tinged cumulus. A call came for her to collect a man who, fearing the worst, had blown out his brains. By the time she returned there was some lingering apprehension, but it was all over by 6:00 p.m. One hour after the first incendiary fell, the bomb racks were empty and the planes headed back across the Channel. Fire engines raced through the city, clanging their bells. A call went out for emergency transport. When she next ventured out the small cloud she had seen earlier had ballooned out, billowing and exploding, its color a menacing red with blackened edges.

  Intelligence maps had called for German bomber pilots to focus their bomb drops on a place called Silvertown in London’s docklands. After crossing the Channel the bombers had flown over the southeast coast, following the Thames west. The British chiefs of staff, meeting that afternoon in Whitehall, had been caught by surprise when the roar of the engines reached them. They had always understood that a heavy bombardment of London would precede an invasion. Was this it?

  By 7:00 p.m. there was still no all clear. At 8:10 the sirens went again. A second wave of bombers was en route, the glow of the fires their beacon. Nancy’s call to attend came an hour later. Two ambulances were needed at 69 Oriental Road, somewhere south of West Ham. The driver assigned to her was about fifty and balding and had driven an ambulance in the First World War. Nancy grabbed her tin hat from its peg and a load of blankets.

  The ambulance took off down Holloway Road with no headlights and Nancy in the passenger seat watching bombs fall in the distance. They were driving at about forty miles an hour, but Nancy wanted to go faster. She grew testy. Her driver calmly told her they would get there in the end and that quieted her. Every few miles men in white hats holding torches waved them on. They swerved to avoid hitting a dog only to have the ambulance behind run over it. The red glow before them gave a sharp outline to the jet-black silhouette of houses. They reached the rendezvous point in West Ham where a number of Greenline buses and ambulances were parked. After waiting a bit she saw an incident officer.

  “Is this right for Oriental Road?”

  “Good gracious, no,” he said. “Oriental Road’s in Silvertown.” Nine miles on. They had some trouble starting the ambulance up but with a push from some men they set off again. They dodged and dipped between streets that became more twisted and narrow as the red glow they glimpsed between houses got closer and brighter. They stopped again to ask a man the way to Silvertown. He said it was another two miles on, but there was no point in trying: the docks were aflame from the Tower of London to Tilbury. Soon there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

  To envision the scale of London’s dockland, as critical to the enterprise of empire as the square mile of the City, one must pull back, rise several thousand feet, and view it as if one were a goggle-eyed airman. From this vantage the network of piers, warehouses, false quays, sluices, culverts, channels, entrance locks, and basins looks more like an engineering diagram than a landscape. The warehouses of the London and St. Katharine Docks began below the Tower of London. Here derricks offloaded sacks of Australian wool and strips of Malayan rubber. The commercial docks of Surrey on the south side of the river followed. Three times bigger, they were designed to accommodate dairy produce and grain from Canada and resinous cedar, pine, Douglas fir, and spruce. Across the landward side of the hairpin loop of the Isle of Dogs were the piers of the West India and Millwall Docks. The West India Docks handled Burmese mahogany and teak, tropical fruits, molasses, and raw sugar from the West Indies. Millwall Dock was built to store grain. Adjacent to Millwall were the deep-water East India Docks. These had once serviced the thousand-ton East Indiamen carrying tea, spices, indigo, silk, and Persian carpets, ships plying every port between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Continuing downstream hugging the north shore were the vast Royal Victoria, Albert, and King George V Docks, equipped to unload frozen meat, grain, and tobacco.

  After the Isle of Dogs they drove onto a narrow swing bridge. Warehouses lit up like blazing cathedrals were collapsing in front of them. Dark-red flames enveloped the tenements crowded between the docks and the factories. Two steamers and an ocean liner were entirely alight. Bonfires of smaller craft drifted between the burning shores of the Thames. A warehouse collapsed into the river, spewing beans like a sudden downpour. Every so often a gas main would explode and another building would go up like a fountain. A dense pall of smoke arose from snaking rivers of burning tar flowing into bomb craters. And the entire scene before them was reflected in the water of the canals, basins, and locks.

  Suddenly there was a line of vehicles in front of them, a few ambulances but mostly firefighting pumps, pulling water from the canals. They couldn’t see what was holding things up and so they tried to pass, but a warehouse crashed across the road in front of them, burning debris thudding across the ambulance’s roof. With the firemen helping them, they turned around. All the other ambulance drivers shouted there was no way to get through.

  “We know another way,” Nancy’s driver said. He was winging it.

  “Wait for us,” the ambulance drivers shouted.

  “We can’t wait for you,” Nancy shouted back. “We can’t stop here; we’re jamming the roads.” Antiaircraft fire could no longer be heard above the roar of fire. Searchlights rolled across the night sky like the spokes of a tremendous wheel. They found their way back to the swing bridge that, miraculously, was still there, and after trying several roads and finding them blocked, her driver left the road to cut across the burning wharf, driving over tangles of hosepipes and cinder tracks.

  How quickly the fire moved, Nancy marveled, as if it was desperate to burn down everything at once. Each warehouse seemed to harbor a different sort of fire. Stacks of Canadian timber exploded, showering sparks. Barrels of West Indian rum detonated like bombs while liquefied West Indian sugar coated the surface of the Thames with fire. The smoke of smoldering peppercorns from Ceylon seared the lungs. Assamese and Darjeeling tea burned with a sickeningly sweet smoke. Clouds of flies moved over walls in a black swarm. Singed pigeons flew in confused circles above the flames while rivers of panicked rats streamed over the burning ground.

  They drove up and over chairs, prams, bedsteads, roof slates, and piles of bricks. Every time they got stuc
k firemen would launch them forward again. At every turn another house would explode. They came to a ghastly and towering wall of flame and, in a terrific burst of speed, drove through that, too. Pulling up to a group of firemen wearing masks, Nancy rolled down the window and called out:

  “Anybody hurt here?” A man removed his mask to answer: “All dead, go on.”

  They finally reached Silvertown, “the warehouse of the world.” The construction of the Royal Docks had left Silvertown a virtual island. Factories and sweatshops took up most of the square mile between the Victoria Dock and the Thames, but there were also lodgings for thirteen thousand dock laborers and seafarers. All were without shelters. The water table was too high for cellars.

  They came across a man covered in soot who had lost his wife and his mother’s house was gone. They took him in. It would be weeks before men of the docklands learned whether the families they left that morning were alive or dead. The next person they asked for directions said Oriental Road was an inferno. They passed a place that looked like a deserted village, where not one two-story cottage had a roof. Finally, they arrived at a spot where no walls remained, where there was nothing but enormous empty craters ringed with debris and a jet of canary-yellow fire burning off gas in the center. This was Oriental Road.

  Heads of people digging in the rubble for survivors popped out of holes in the ground. Nancy thought it looked like a scene from Wystan’s war in China. Her ambulance was the first to arrive since the bombs began falling the previous night.

  “Is this Oriental Road?” Nancy shouted.

  “Ambulance?” one head shouted back.

  “Yes, anybody hurt?”

  “Over in the shelter,” another head said, pointing at the large brick arches holding up an aqueduct in the smoky distance. “You can’t get your ambulance there; you’ll have to leave it.” Nancy pulled out a stretcher, and she and the driver made their way over the rubble. She looked into what seemed like a cave under the arches and saw about forty people.

  “Anybody hurt?” she asked, but was met with blank faces. She went up to a woman and grabbed her shoulder. The woman turned and pointed out another woman with a newborn baby. They had just been dug out. Two more were catatonic. The warden was dead. They loaded sixteen people into the ambulance and closed the curtains to shut out the glow of the fires. No one said a word. Later Nancy learned they had been given the wrong address; that Oriental Road wasn’t in any ambulance station.

  The all clear sounded sometime after dawn. The barges of Burma teak that had been set adrift to burn themselves out on the river returned with the tide on Sunday morning, still burning. The survivors of Silvertown had to be evacuated by water. A national day of prayer was called. Reverend Scott, sharing a London flat with Michael Carritt, was working as an air raid warden that night. The civil authorities, constrained by their “bowler hatted little money values,” had failed to anticipate the scale of suffering, he wrote later. As he raced about in the confusion he said a prayer for Gandhi, who had.

  Three weeks later entire families were still living and foraging among vistas of rubble. They were discovered taking sanctuary with the dead in the crypts of dockside churches. Still liable for rent on homes with no water, electricity, gas, or roofs, some returned home and lived under tarps. A year later, they were still there. By then the press ferreted out that Sir John Anderson, the “Home Front Prime Minister,” had made more provisions for the dead than the living. When he was forced from office Winston Churchill invited him to join the War Cabinet, taking the seat of the dying Neville Chamberlain. He had the former governor of Bengal in mind to replace Linlithgow as viceroy. He called Anderson Jehovah, and counted on his support to save the empire.

  By the time a bomb rendered Nancy’s maisonette unsafe, the windows had been shattered three times. For a while she was homeless. The editor of Horizon asked her to write about the first night of the Blitz but Sonia Brownell promptly handed it back, pronouncing her effort “not literature.” That December, en route to a new posting Bill came by Nancy’s new flat in a sentimental mood. He absolutely hated military life. Though they could never live together, he said, they could also never divorce because of their long history. They wept. Sonia had dumped him.

  In the coming months Nancy would often stand on the roof of Camden station to watch the red lights of fire trucks humping their way through a dark maze of ruined streets. Wrapped in smoke against the night sky, she cut a solitary figure, secure in the knowledge that when all the East End was ablaze and five hundred ambulances were sent for, she alone had traveled sixteen miles into its fiery heart.

  Aircraft Operating Company Factory,

  Wembley, Northwest London, September 17, 1940

  While his squadron leader shouted over a bad phone line, Michael Spender followed the German advance sortie by sortie. Ten days after the dockland bombings, photographs showed fully stocked supply bases, an armada of merchant vessels and convoys, and 266 barges at Calais, twenty-two miles from Dover. There were another 220 at Dunkirk and 600 lined up side by side at Antwerp. When Michael arrived at midnight to check over the PI reports, the factory buzzed with anxiety. Michael calculated that 130 barges had arrived in four days. Suddenly, he threw down his stereoscope and approached a Cambridge archaeologist he had trained in PI.

  “Haven’t you had enough of counting barges? The invasion will happen tomorrow or the next day. Shouldn’t we go down to Kent? If we could each kill one German, even if we both were killed in the attempt, it would be a good thing for this country and for history.”

  It was late and the man was tired after three straight shifts counting barges. The factory had been under constant bombardment. He thought for a moment while Michael’s eyes bored into him.

  “Your next night on duty is the day after tomorrow,” the archaeologist finally said. “I shall have a car ready: we will drive to Dover.”

  By the time the archaeologist returned, the photographs showed barges parallel to the quays instead of perpendicular. The numbers had declined. No one knew why. When Michael came on duty at midnight, he gave the archaeologist a hard look.

  “So we don’t have to go to Dover,” the man prompted.

  “No, and just as well. You told me you were a bad shot,” Michael said with his usual delicacy. “Would you now please concentrate on the occupied French ports?”

  CHAPTER 16

  A Representative Indian

  49C Hazra Road, Ballygunj,

  Calcutta, August–October 1940

  The secret diarist arrived in the middle of a debate over the devastation being inflicted on the English Channel counties. All agreed that aerial bombardment was destined to take a greater human toll on land than any lives lost at sea from torpedoes. It was well-nigh impossible to make defense arrangements, Sudhin pointed out, when one out of four English citizens lived within range of German bombers. With the Spitfire, someone else volunteered, the RAF made up in skill and technology what it lacked in numbers, but how long could Great Britain sustain such losses? Not that he believed everything he heard on the wireless, he added quickly, looking at Hiren-da.

  “England will surrender in a month’s time,” Hiren-da said with the utmost assurance.

  “Germany is on the verge of collapse,” Sudhin countered. “The barbaric aerial bombardment of England is a clear sign of Hitler’s desperation.”

  Before they could start another argument, Apurba Chanda made a late but stately entrance. Since he’d begun working as Shaheed Suhrawardy’s private secretary, Apurba’s attendance had been spotty. Everyone eagerly anticipated his tiffins of gossip from the back corridors of Simla and Delhi. As soon as Apurba had his tea, Sudhin pounced.

  “What was Congress saying about the viceroy’s ‘August Proposals’?”

  After the fall of France Congress had once more offered to support the Allied war effort in exchange for recognition of India’s right to self-rule. Linlithgow, ignoring the opening, presented his own offer several months later. He
would make a few more Executive Council seats available to “representative Indians.” After the war, with the least possible delay, he would recommend that His Majesty’s Government call a constitutional congress to prepare a new constitution. That is, another Government of India Act, dictated from London. He was now prepared to talk but only on his terms, thereby opening and closing the door at the same time.

  Linlithgow was as dim-witted as a rock, Nehru had by now decided, with a rock’s corresponding self-awareness.

  Apurba paused long enough for Hiren-da to jump in.

  “Congress will have to reject that proposal. It has no choice but to do so.”

  “Will Jinnah accept it?” Sudhin asked Apurba, ignoring Hiren-da. Six months earlier Shaheed Suhrawardy had been one of the signatories of the Lahore Resolution, Jinnah’s call for the creation of Pakistan, a nation of separate Muslim-majority states to be carved out of India like choice cuts of meat. When first conceived, the idea of a Muslim homeland did not include Bengal; Jinnah’s focus was on the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, Sindh, and the Punjab. But now Bengal was considered part and parcel of Jinnah’s Pakistan scheme. Knowing Shaheed, Sudhin supposed he was already anticipating living the life of a nawab as Bengal’s first native-born governor. He feared Jinnah would agree to the viceroy’s offer in exchange for British support for Pakistan, with inevitably fatal consequences for Bengal.

  Apurba cleared his voice and the room went quiet.

  “A well-placed bureaucrat I know in Simla told me that the arrogance and bragging of each and every white bureaucrat from the viceroy on down had risen manifold since the publication of the August Offer.” Apurba summed up the official mood: “Whether we win or lose the war, at least we won’t be stupid enough to hand over power to the natives.”