Coventry: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  It’s dark in The Coachman, the blackout curtains stretched tight across the front window. Even during the day, with the curtains open, the window glass is taped so it won’t blow out in a blast. There is so much tape across the window that it might as well be a curtain, so little light gets through. But the regulars are there, as usual, at the same tables. There’s the familiar shuffle of chairs and voices.

  Maeve is sitting at a small table in a nook by the fireplace. The only real light to see by is the firelight, and it is unreliable. She looks down at her sketchbook, at the drawing she has started and stopped half a dozen times now. It would have been wiser to stay home this evening. She would have had a better chance of getting this done.

  All around Maeve are bubbles of conversation, the slap of glasses against the wooden tables, the loud voice of the publican as he shouts down the length of the bar to alert a patron to the pint he has just poured. If Maeve had stayed home, she may have been able to execute her sketch, but she would have been alone. On the nights when her son is on duty, Maeve likes to come to the pub. It feels better to be around other people in case the air-raid sirens go off, even if she never feels like talking to anyone while she’s there. Maeve just likes to sit quietly and listen to the laughter and chatter around her. It makes her feel less isolated.

  Maeve has not lived long in Coventry. She came north because there were jobs on offer, and because it had seemed unlikely, at the beginning of the war, that there would be any threat to the northern cities. Now, after endless raids, it is clear that Coventry is a prime target for the Germans. The motor and armament factories that lured Maeve and her son north have lured the enemy across the Channel as well. Still, they are relatively settled here, and travel is increasingly difficult in wartime, so Maeve is prepared to wait out the war in this town that she has visited before but where she never meant to live.

  Maeve doesn’t remember her childhood in the south of England very well. Her early life seems broken into vivid tableaux, each one seemingly unconnected to any of the others. She has trouble thinking chronologically anyway, never thinks, When I was seven but rather That colour blue is the same colour blue as the sky out my nursery window that morning I woke up to the dogs barking. She is caught on these small hooks of the past all the time, has difficulty untangling herself from them.

  The soft green of the grass in her front garden this evening, shining in the moonlight, is the same green as the leaves Maeve used to post through her grandmother’s letterbox at the country house. She picked them from a plant in the front garden, after she’d been turned out of the house to play, following tea. The leaves were as soft as bunny ears. Maeve rubbed them against her face before shoving them through the heavy steel flap of the letterbox. The elderly golden retriever that she’d been sent out to play with watched her disapprovingly from the open garage door. After a while Maeve was discovered and got into lots of trouble for decimating the front garden, but in the moments before that, when she was reaching up on her tiptoes to push the leaves through the metal slot, there was an immense feeling of satisfaction as she completed the task. Maeve can still recall that feeling.

  “What are you drawing?” asks the old man at the table opposite. He has been watching Maeve since she first sat down, and she has been careful to avoid eye contact with him so she won’t have to make idle chit-chat.

  “Nothing,” she says, which is a stupid answer, so she says, “Nothing much.”

  “What then?”

  “A bird.” Maeve looks down at the wings, the small smooth head, the scissored tail. “A swallow. There was one flying about in my street today.”

  “Impossible,” says the man. “Swallows are long gone by now.”

  “It was a swallow,” says Maeve. She is distracted by this man, whom she never wanted to talk to. She is tired of England’s population being made up now almost entirely of women, children, and the elderly. Old men in particular are too convinced of themselves, she thinks.

  The swallow had sliced through the air outside her kitchen window, and she had followed it outside, watching the bird’s sweet slide over her garden’s stone wall. She had always liked the flight of the swallow. It was such a graceful bird. It made so many interesting shapes in the air.

  “It was most likely a sparrow,” says the man opposite, and before Maeve can respond with indignation, the air-raid sirens begin to wail. This is the eighteenth raid on Coventry since the middle of August and there is a weariness in the patrons as they rise from their tables and follow the publican down the cellar stairs.

  When Maeve was young, she’d had a book with a painting of Lady Godiva on a white horse, her hair carefully arranged to cover her naked body. The hair was so unnaturally long it suggested another creature. The woman, the horse, and the hair, all of these fascinated a young Maeve Fisher. This was her entire knowledge of Coventry.

  But it was the visit in 1914 that had stayed with her, and she had been happy to move here this year, when there seemed to be no jobs anywhere else in the country. The time with the irritating Charlotte had seeded in her an appetite for independence. It took four more years to root, but she had been preparing herself the entire time for that glorious day when she would be free from expectation, from duty, from her parents’ plans for her. It didn’t quite happen the way Maeve had imagined it, but it happened all the same.

  After her parents found out she was pregnant and she refused to divulge the name of the father so he could do the decent thing and marry her, Maeve’s father told her to leave the family home. For years, her parents disowned her, and it is only recently that her father has decided he wants to see her again, and only because he is getting on in years and is worried about his place in the afterlife if he hasn’t satisfactorily tidied up all his business here on earth before he dies. But Maeve isn’t sure she wants to co-operate.

  Those first months, the months after Maeve had left home but before Jeremy was born, were the worst of her life. Her friends, most of whom still lived with their parents, were unable to take her in. She had little money and no employment. She was too proud to beg for charity. Eventually, out of desperation she took a gamekeeper as a lover so she could stay with him in his cottage on an estate.

  The gamekeeper’s cottage was shrouded in ivy. Some of the windows were completely covered over and the inside of the cottage glowed green when the sun was shining. It was like being underwater. Maeve moved through the space that way, drifting from pool to pool, being borne along by a current of need or mood, whatever was strongest at a particular moment.

  Her baby slept in a dresser drawer on the floor by the bed, and sometimes, when Maeve woke to the green light at the window, her son’s cries sounded like the birds outside. The gamekeeper complained about the noise the baby made and the attention he demanded from Maeve.

  She was always disoriented in that cottage. The inside was outside, and the outside was inside. The gamekeeper would leave dead rabbits flung down on the kitchen table for Maeve to prepare. Their legs would be tied together, but otherwise they still looked alive, lying there in the morning when she came down, their eyes open and watching her as she came into the kitchen. Even the dead rabbits were judging her and finding her wanting.

  Maeve is crouched in the cellar of The Coachman. It is damp and smells of old wood. She is sitting on a pile of burlap sacks with a cask on one side of her and the annoying sparrow man on the other side. Everyone is much more crowded here than they were upstairs. The publican and his wife have lit candles and placed them on top of the beer barrels. They illuminate the faces of the patrons in ghostly shadow. Maeve hugs her knees to her chest and huddles closer to the cask. The wood is rough against her cheek. She can still hear the wail of the air-raid sirens, but there is no reverberating echo to indicate that bombs are falling on the world above them.

  “False alarm,” says the sparrow man.

  “No,” says an old man across the room. “Jerry will be after the motor works.”

  “A quick and di
rty raid,” says the publican.

  “Could last all night,” says his wife.

  “Bound to be a false alarm,” says the sparrow man.

  Maeve thinks longingly of her half-full pint and wishes she’d had the presence of mind to bring the beer down into the cellar with her.

  She thinks of Jeremy, how she watched him walk up the road in his fire-watcher’s uniform. How proud he seemed to be, doing his bit for the war effort. She worries constantly about him, her only son. But he will be safe tonight, she thinks. The cathedral is massive. There will be a shelter in the crypt, and he will be safe there. He is clever and resourceful. He won’t take chances.

  She suddenly has an image of him not as the young man he is now but as the infant he used to be, squalling in her arms as she rocked him in the gamekeeper’s cottage at night, trying to keep him quiet.

  When we are safe, Maeve thinks, then Jeremy is a man. But when there is danger, he is my child again.

  Coventry Cathedral is the largest parish church in England—evidence of the wealth the city had once possessed. It is the literal heart of the city, known to everyone who lives there, the spire visible from every street. Even though she is not herself a believer in God, Harriet is always comforted by the magnificence of the cathedral, such an impressive monument to faith.

  Now Harriet stands in front of the cathedral, helplessly watching it burn. There is a small crowd of people around her. She recognizes the provost, an important dignitary in the city. He is rushing about, ushering the last of the men down the ladders from the roof. The man standing on Harriet’s left is crying. Someone else is cursing the bloody Jerries.

  “There’s the fire brigade,” yells Jeremy, and Harriet turns to see a single fire truck lurch to a stop in front of the cathedral as the men unravel the hose and begin to wind it around the building. Length after length of hose is fitted together until, finally, a spray of water falls over the chancel roof.

  There is a cheer at the sight of the water and then, just as it started, the water stops.

  “We’re doomed,” says the man beside Harriet. “This is the end of Coventry.”

  “No,” says Jeremy. “They’re running lengths to the hydrant on Priory Street. The water will come back on.”

  But the water doesn’t come back on.

  “The mains must have been hit,” says Harriet. It takes her a moment to realize the seriousness of this. With no water there will be nothing to stop the fires spreading throughout the city. The whole of Coventry will burn.

  There is not much that can be salvaged from the cathedral—the altar cross and candlesticks, a silver chalice, a silver wafer box. From the high altar in the sanctuary—its cross and candlesticks, a wooden crucifix, the altar service books, the book of gospels. Everything has to be taken quickly from the smoke-filled rooms. Everything must be small enough to carry.

  On the walls of the sanctuary are the colours of the 7th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment. They had been left in the cathedral at the beginning of the war, for safety’s sake, and now they are torn from the walls and carried out of the burning church.

  It is a small and sombre procession that hurries, under the colours of the Warwickshire Regiment, from the cathedral to the police station to deposit the valuables in the basement of the station. No one can think of a safer place, and yet all around the police station fires are burning and Harriet realizes that there really are no safe places in the city tonight.

  She carries a pair of heavy silver candlesticks, one in each hand. They are warm against her skin from the waves of heat billowing through the streets.

  Inside the police station men are rushing about, shouting at one another. Phones are ringing. A man sits at a desk repeatedly dialling his phone, until another policeman shouts to him that the lines out aren’t working, only incoming calls are getting through.

  “If the phones don’t work, how will the rescue services know where the fires are?” says Harriet to the man in front of her on the staircase as they ascend, out of the basement.

  “It’s not the fires we have to worry about,” he says. “It’s the bombs. They light the fires so they can see where to bomb.”

  Harriet waits for Jeremy at the top of the stairs. He had carried the silver wafer box into the basement with both hands, holding it away from his body.

  “It was burning me up,” he says when he emerges from the cellar. “Just as if it had come from the oven.”

  He stands close to Harriet, looking around at the activity inside the police station. “I need to find my mother,” he says.

  “Where do you live?” asks Harriet. She feels oddly calm.

  “Mayfield Road.”

  “That’s near me,” says Harriet. “I’m on Berkeley. We could go together.” It would be quicker without the boy, but Harriet likes the way he has tucked himself against her, as though he somehow belongs to her. No one has ever sought her out for protection before. It makes her feel she is a better person than she knows herself to be.

  “Yes,” says Jeremy. “I’d like that. We only moved here this summer. I hardly know the city at all, and I certainly won’t recognize it when it’s burning.” He still wears his tin helmet. There’s a smudge of black across his cheek. He looks impossibly young, and Harriet realizes with a shock that he is probably the age she and Owen were when they married.

  “Let’s go then,” says Harriet, and they weave their way through the frantic policemen and step outside into the chaos.

  It is about a mile to Berkeley Road. The fires have made the streets as bright as day. Harriet moves tentatively down the front stairs of the police station. She can see great clouds of smoke swirling up the street, people flitting through the flames like moths. There’s the shudder of buildings falling, and an overwhelming smell of cigars. How strange, Harriet thinks. It takes her a moment to realize that the tobacconist on the corner is burning.

  “Let’s stay to the centre of the road,” she shouts. “It will be safer there. We won’t be hit by falling debris.” She can see the charred ribs of the timbers sticking out from the smouldering heap of rubble.

  “Wear my hat,” says Jeremy. He takes his tin helmet from his head and places it gently on Harriet’s. He then offers his arm, and Harriet takes it, and they step carefully down the centre of Broadgate, as though they are a couple strolling out after dinner to gaze at the stars.

  They make it to the end of the block before Jeremy stops. “Look up,” he says.

  Harriet looks up and sees four land mines drifting down under parachutes. They are lit from beneath by the fires, the soft, filmy hoods of light making the bombs seem like a school of jellyfish, not descending, but swimming up out of the darkness.

  Just as the man at the police station predicted, the incendiaries are followed by bombs. The bombs in turn create fireballs. It is impossible to escape down Broadgate.

  Harriet and Jeremy crouch in an alley between two buildings. They ran as fast and as far as they could before the land mines finished their dreamy drift down, but there was no time to get to a more secure place before one of them exploded. The noise is deafening and they can feel the rush of heat and air as it blasts through the street. The buildings on either side of them sway and tremble but do not buckle and fall.

  Harriet feels detached, but when she adjusts Jeremy’s helmet on her head she notices her hand is shaking. Jeremy seems frozen.

  “We need to get to a proper shelter,” she yells. A direct hit and the buildings they are crouched beside will collapse on top of them. “We’re not far from Owen Owen. There’s a concrete shelter in the basement there.”

  Owen Owen is the new pride of Coventry, a massive department store in the centre of the city, right on Broadgate. It has one of the largest public bomb shelters in its basement.

  The brick wall of the building Harriet is leaning against is warm against her back. The wood inside is starting to groan and creak.

  “I think this shop’s on fire,” she shouts. “We need to get o
ut of here. Keep your head down.” She grabs Jeremy’s hand and pulls him along the alley toward the street.

  Owen Owen is burning. The acrid smoke rolling from the building makes it difficult to breathe. Harriet’s lungs burn with the effort. A small crowd stands helplessly on the road outside the department store, watching the flames dance around the oven that the brick shell of the building has become.

  “What about the people in the shelter?” asks Harriet. The man beside her shrugs his shoulders.

  The Anderson shelter at the bottom of her neighbour’s garden on Berkeley Road is too far. They need a place now.

  “Where are the other shelters?” she asks the man. Jeremy has moved closer to the building to get a good look at the fire. Harriet can see his long, thin back up ahead of her. She is determined not to lose him.

  “Where are they?” she demands.

  “No need to snap at me,” says the man. “Try the churches.”

  Harriet just wants to be off Broadgate now. The main street in the city is so obviously under attack as well. She pushes through the knot of people in front of her and grabs Jeremy by the collar.

  “We’re off,” she says. “We’re going to try the church around the corner.”

  Another bomb explodes. The ground rocks slightly beneath Harriet’s feet and she has to scream to make her words heard above the blast. “We have to get out of here.” She hauls Jeremy backwards, away from the burning shell of the building.

  The sparrow man has started singing “Rule Britannia.” He has a thin, reedy voice that spirals through Maeve Fisher. All around her, people stumble into song. The candles stutter with the sudden bursts of breath.

  The air-raid sirens have stopped. The bombing has stopped. There is no sound from above. Surely it would be safe to go up now, even if the all-clear hasn’t sounded? What about Jeremy? What if he has tried to come home rather than sheltering at the cathedral?