Goodnight from London

by Jennifer Robson

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “No, he was ringed round by the mayor and people like that. But he walked by me, close as you are now. Never thought to see the king with my own eyes.”

  She nodded, fixing his words in her memory.

  “The thing is . . .” he began.

  “Yes?”

  “What happened to the cathedral is awful. Standing here, looking at it, anyone would agree. But five hundred people died that night, maybe more, and hundreds more lost their homes. Seems like all anyone wants to talk about is the cathedral. And I’d have thought that all those people dying is worse. I mean, you can rebuild a church. But you can’t bring the dead back to life, can you?”

  “I’ll talk about them. The people, that is. I’ll write about them in my article.”

  He nodded, swallowing awkwardly, and then, turning away, scrubbed a hand across his face.

  “We’re meant to go to the funeral,” Mary said, her voice soft and strangely tentative. “Is it at the cemetery we passed on the way in?”

  “On the London Road, yes. Straight back the way you came.”

  “May I have your name?” Ruby asked the constable.

  “John Stevens.”

  “And may I quote you, Constable Stevens? What you said about the people who died and so on? And use your photograph? Everything we print has to pass inspection with the Ministry of Information,” she added, sensing his hesitation.

  “All right, then,” he said after a long pause. “I said it. Might as well stand by it.”

  They thanked him and shook his hand, and as they made their way back to the car Ruby repeated his words in her head over and over, not wanting to forget or change them in any way. As soon as they were seated and Mary had reversed around for the journey to the cemetery, Ruby pulled out her notebook and scribbled down their conversation in shorthand. Mary’s photographs would be the backbone of the story, but the constable’s words would be its beating heart.

  The funeral was easy to find, for they simply followed the trail of people dressed in black walking along the side of the road. Mary parked the car just inside the cemetery gates, pulling onto the verge next to a handful of other vehicles, and they walked the remaining distance to the burial site.

  Seeing Mary’s camera, a policeman directed them to an area where a clutch of other journalists was gathered. Ruby knew some by sight, having encountered them at the occasional MOI press conference, but apart from perfunctory greetings no one spoke.

  They stood some yards distant from the graves, four endlessly long trenches that ran parallel to one another, and which were as deep as they were wide. The government had mandated this mass funeral—mass burial, to be brutally honest—as a measure against disease, and also to spare families the expense of burying their loved ones. The unacknowledged fact that so many of the dead had been burned beyond recognition had surely also been a factor.

  The assembled dignitaries took their places as a convoy of trucks drew up nearby, the bed of each vehicle laden with plain, tarpaulin-covered coffins. One by one, the coffins were lowered into the trenches. Ruby stopped counting after a hundred and fifty.

  The Bishop of Coventry, dressed in magnificent vestments and a steel helmet, said some words that were carried away by the wind, then another churchman recited the Twenty-Third Psalm, and that was all. No music, no hymn for the mourners to share. Only the distant drone, far above, of a pair of fighters that wheeled and turned like watchful eagles. “To stop Jerry from bombing the funeral,” someone whispered.

  The service at an end, mourners began to approach the trenches, silently setting down wreaths at the edge, or casting single flowers, many of them fashioned from paper, onto the rough, unadorned wood of the coffins below. Soon the graves were all but obscured by the tributes.

  Ruby was glad of Kaz’s injunction against approaching any of the mourners, many of whom looked to be still in shock; many were bandaged or hobbling on crutches. She hung back, as did the rest of the assembled journalists, and only once the mourners had dispersed did she go in search of her friend.

  “Best be on our way,” Mary said. “I don’t much fancy trying to find my way around London in the blackout.”

  They stopped at a roadside café outside Daventry for a late lunch of greasy sausage rolls and astringent tea.

  “I’ve been wondering—”

  “Oh, no,” Mary muttered.

  “Wait until you hear my question. How come you don’t carry around a load of gear? I’ve only ever seen you with your camera. Where are your lenses and whatnot?”

  “Don’t use them. I’m not much of a photographer, to be brutally honest.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes in dissent. “I beg to differ. I’ve seen your pictures, remember?”

  “Thank you. What I mean is that I don’t know much about photography, not technically, I suppose you could say. I know how my camera works, and I can get it to do just about anything I want it to do, but I’m rubbish with flashes and lenses and the like. What’s the point of a long lens, anyway? I need to be close to someone to take their picture.”

  “Close enough to see the whites of their eyes?” Ruby said with a laugh.

  “Pretty much, yes.” And Mary picked the camera off the table and took three pictures of her, one—two—three, just like that. “There. Something for you to send home.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice of you. Except, well, there isn’t really anyone at home,” Ruby said, her gaze fixed on the chipped spout of the teapot at her elbow. “I’ve no family anymore.”

  “What about friends? You seem like the sort of girl who’d have no end of friends.” Mary’s voice was gentle. Careful.

  She shook her head. “Not really. The people I knew in New York were friendly acquaintances, but not much more. Not . . . not really,” she ended, realizing too late that she’d repeated herself.

  “Well, you’ve friends here already,” Mary said. “Will you look at me a moment? Come on—you know I won’t bite. There. Now listen to me: you have friends here in England. You do. And you mustn’t ever forget it. D’you hear?”

  “Yes, Mary,” Ruby said, and then she had to look away again. That, or risk crying for the first time in living memory.

  “Now finish up that wretched excuse for a sausage roll so we can be on our way.”

  They’d just passed Watford when Mary abruptly pulled onto the graveled shoulder.

  “Do we have a flat tire?” Ruby asked.

  “A what? Oh, you mean a puncture. No—the petrol’s nearly gone. Need to top it up.” Mary got out, tilted her seat forward, and pulled out a rectangular metal jerry can. “Hope this is enough to get us home.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to drive around with containers of gasoline? What if we got in a crash?”

  “Didn’t have a choice,” Mary explained as she tipped the fuel into the Austin. “It’s not my car, so I don’t have my own petrol ration. Had to buy it off my friend. Oh, hell—I’ve gone and got it all over my hands. If Nigel gives me any guff about paying me back, I’ll make him regret it, so help me I will.”

  They got back in the car, Mary still complaining about the smell of the gasoline on her hands, and set off again. They were both feeling very grumpy and hungry when they arrived back in central London, the light fading fast as Mary drove down Shoot-Up Hill.

  “Why don’t you drop me at the nearest Tube station,” Ruby suggested. “You need to get the car back before the sun goes down.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind,” Ruby insisted. “Look—we’re coming up to Edgware Road. Just set me down here. See you tomorrow?”

  “That I will. Not at the crack of dawn, mind you. I’ll need a lie-in after today.”

  THE NEXT MORNING Ruby had been hard at work for a few hours before she happened to catch sight of the calendar hanging on the newsroom wall. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before?

  “I can’t believe I forgot about it,” she muttered to herself.

 
; “Forgot about what?” asked Nell.

  “Thanksgiving. It’s today.”

  “Your American holiday? The one where you say thanks to the Almighty for your freedom from Mother England?”

  “Ha, ha. No, Peter—it’s more to do with the Pilgrims and their first harvest meal. At least that’s what I learned in school.”

  “So what do you do? Go to church?”

  “Most people just share a meal together. A big one, with roast turkey and potatoes and pumpkin pie. There’s a parade in New York, too, with huge balloons and floats and sometimes even movie stars walking down the street, and the last float is always Santa Claus on his sleigh.”

  “Pumpkin pie? That sounds like something dreamed up by the Ministry of Food,” Nell observed, her nose wrinkling.

  “It does, doesn’t it? But there’s more cream and sugar in it than actual pumpkin. At least I think there is. I’ve never made one myself.”

  “You going to celebrate?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not feeling like there’s much to be thankful for. Not this year,” she said, adrift on a sudden swell of homesickness.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?” said Nell, not unkindly. “There’s plenty of others who wouldn’t mind being in your shoes.”

  “I know. You’re right, I know.”

  “Sure I am. So let’s celebrate your odd American holiday with a spot of lunch downstairs.”

  That night, huddled on her camp bed in the hotel’s basement, waiting for the all clear to sound, Ruby let her mind drift across the ocean to New York. Last year she had watched the Macy’s parade on her own before going home and eating Thanksgiving dinner with the other boarders. It had been a good day, if a bit lonely at times.

  She’d lived in England for five months, and in all that time she hadn’t written to anyone back in New York, nor had anyone there tried to keep in touch with her. Without quite meaning to, she had found a home in London. It wasn’t forever, though, for the war would end one day, someday, and she would go back.

  Back, but not home. For here, in this battered and stubbornly beautiful city, where death and destruction fell from the skies night after night, she had finally found a home. Here was the one place in the world where she truly belonged. And that alone, she decided, was reason enough for thanksgiving.

  Dispatches from London

  by Miss Ruby Sutton

  November 26, 1940

  . . . The foundations for Coventry Cathedral were laid in the 1300s, roughly two centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World, four and a half centuries before America won its freedom, and almost six centuries before the Empire State Building became the tallest structure in the world. Yet the end of 1940 sees it in ruins . . .

  CHAPTER NINE

  December 1940

  Ten days later, Ruby and Mary were again traveling north, but this time by train. Their destination was Liverpool, and their assignment was to report on the Durning Road disaster of two nights earlier.

  In Liverpool they would have the help of John Ellis, the longtime editor of the Liverpool Herald. “Gave me my first job,” Kaz had explained. “Hired me straight out of university, even though I was an idiot in every measurable way. I’d walk on broken glass for the man, so be on your best behavior.”

  Mr. Ellis was waiting for them at Liverpool’s Lime Street station when their train pulled in at midday. He was in his early fifties, with thick spectacles that failed to obscure his inquisitive eyes, and graying hair badly in need of a trim. He was also utterly exhausted, and Ruby felt a twinge of guilt that he would be spending his day showing them around when he so clearly needed to rest.

  “Good morning, Miss Buchanan. Good to see you again.”

  “And you as well, Mr. Ellis. This is my colleague Ruby Sutton.”

  “Ah, yes. The American writer. Kaz sang your praises in his last letter. Shall we be off? My driver is just outside.”

  The car was an older saloon-style vehicle, about twice as big as the Baby Austin that Mary had borrowed for the trip to Coventry, and wide enough for Mr. Ellis to sit alongside them for their tour around the city. “I thought we might start here in the city center,” he said as they got under way. “It will give you an idea of the damage Liverpool has seen so far. We can certainly go out to the docks, but I doubt the MOI will let you publish any descriptions or photographs, and you’ve only got a few hours here before you have to head back to London.”

  There seemed little to distinguish the streets of central Liverpool from those of London, at least to Ruby’s untutored eye. The buildings they passed were a hodgepodge of styles, and the people doing their shopping wore the same sort of clothes as Londoners. There were even the same shops as she knew from the capital: Boots, Woolworth’s, W. H. Smith, and more than one Lyons teahouse.

  It was a warm day for late November, and through the car’s half-open windows she could hear snatches of conversation from time to time. Even to her ears the local accent was startlingly distinctive, and thinking back to her arrival in July, she recalled the first time she’d heard its expressive, almost musical cadences. The ticket agent at the train station had spoken just so, as had the train conductor, and she’d had to ask them to repeat their words several times before she had understood. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  They circled through the central part of town, with Mr. Ellis pointing out significant buildings as they passed, many of them huge neoclassical edifices that, in their grandeur, reminded Ruby of the Capitol building back home. Not that she’d ever seen it in person; the farthest south she’d ever been was New Jersey.

  “Have you lost any landmarks?” she asked.

  “Not yet, no. Parts of the docks have been badly damaged, but places like St. George’s Hall and the Customs House are still standing, as are all of the churches.”

  “So compared to London?”

  “Compared to London we’ve barely been touched. Through September there were scattered raids with no rhyme or reason to them, or not as far as I could see. October was much the same. Damage, yes, but nothing like the East End has seen.”

  “And casualties?”

  “Low if you set them against the numbers killed in London, but awful still. Three generations of one family were killed by one bomb last month, on Chapman Street, I think. Then, a few days later, ten children were killed in the same block of flats. Ten. I . . .”

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  “It’s silly to try and quantify such things. Foolish, even. But the disaster at Durning Road is a turning point, for lack of a better expression. We’ve had a taste of the worst the war can throw at us, and it’s bitter. By God, it’s bitter.”

  They rode on in silence, broken only by Mr. Ellis’s occasional directions to the driver.

  “Where is Durning Road?” she asked.

  “It’s in Edge Hill, due east of here. A fairly typical working-class neighborhood. Close-knit. Sort of place where everyone knows everyone.”

  “What happened?” She knew the basics: a bomb had hit a shelter and killed a number of people in what the MOI had termed an “incident” in official briefings. As if such a bloodless term could properly express the limitless tragedy of what had befallen the people of Durning Road.

  “It was a school. A training college. People had crowded into the basement shelter. Something like three hundred were packed into the boiler room. I imagine they thought it would be safer there, since the ceiling was reinforced with iron beams. But there was a direct hit, and the entire building, the entire weight of it, fell into the basement. Fell onto the people in the shelter. Those who weren’t crushed by the beams and the bricks and everything else were scalded to death by water from the boiler. And then the gas from the mains caught fire.”

  “Do they have an idea yet of how many died?”

  “The last I heard it was at least a hundred and fifty dead. Many of those who did survive are badly burned, so that number will certainly climb.”

  They turned
off the main road and onto a wide street lined with brick-and-stucco shop fronts and older terraced homes. It was a tidy road, utterly unremarkable but for the smoldering ruin of bricks, stone, and blackened lumber in the middle distance.

  “Mr. Ellis?” came the driver’s voice from the front. “We’re coming up to the, ah, college. Where’d you like me to stop?”

  “Just ahead is fine. We’ll walk the last block.”

  They approached quietly, tentatively, standing at the fringe of the crowd of onlookers, and all the while Ruby worked to fix the image of the collapsed building in her memory. It had fallen in on itself, its exterior walls folded upon its roof beams, which in turn rested heavily, crookedly, on layer upon layer of floorboards, plaster, stonework, and broken glass.

  At ground level, near what once may have been a set of stairs, a group of men in steel helmets and boiler suits were pulling at the debris, shovels at the ready, their muttered instructions to one another barely audible above an undercurrent of noise that Ruby didn’t at first recognize. It was a sort of low, keening cry, reminiscent of an animal in distress, and it made the hair on her nape stand on end and her breath catch in her throat. She turned her head this way and that, trying to discern what she heard, and then she realized it was coming from the people around her, men and women alike, some of them covering their mouths with their hands to contain their horror.

  The sound rose and rose, and then the crowd parted before her, and she stood and watched mutely as two men shuffled past with a stretcher. On it was a blanket-draped body, far too small to be that of an adult, and as the men stepped free of the debris the blanket shifted, only a little, but enough to reveal a tiny shoe, its leather wizened and twisted by fire and water and . . .

  The horror of that one shoe fell on her, a body blow that stole the breath from her lungs. She took a step back, closed her eyes, but the image would not flee, it was still there even in the darkness. She could see it, see the child’s little foot, so still and cold. How was she ever to wipe such a sight from her mind?