Coventry: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  Maeve shifts on her pile of burlap. She feels damp from sitting on the floor. Just then there is an enormous thunder-clap and the building sways and settles, sways and settles. Dust trickles down from the cellar rafters onto Maeve’s face. The first explosion is followed by a second. Maeve can hear something tearing and splintering above her head.

  “Looks like we’ll be here a while,” says the publican, and the whole room belts out the chorus of “Rule Britannia” all over again. This time, Maeve sings along.

  After Maeve left the gamekeeper, she was hired as a domestic in a big country house. The lady of the house took pity on Maeve’s situation, and although Maeve didn’t want pity, it served her well enough to be on the receiving end of it.

  Maeve was well liked in the country house. Her cheerfulness made her popular with both the servants and the family. Consequently, Jeremy was looked after by everyone, shuttled around the estate like a parcel, and though at first Maeve worried when she didn’t know where he was or whom he was with, she learned to trust that he was being properly looked after.

  One summer a painter came to visit the estate and Maeve was asked to act as her personal assistant. The artist liked to paint from nature, but needed such a large amount of equipment to do this that Maeve ended up wheeling the easels, boxes, and brushes through the bumpy fields in the gardener’s wheelbarrow. The painter’s name was Marguerite, although later, after she’d left the estate, Maeve found out that her name was really just plain Margaret. She had long red hair that she kept tied up with coloured scarves. She smoked French cigarettes and swore as fitfully as the gamekeeper when things weren’t going well with her painting.

  The summer as her assistant was the best summer Maeve ever spent. At first she read a book or picked wildflowers. But she soon tired of this and began to watch Marguerite. Then she began to ask questions. One day Marguerite gave Maeve a sketchbook and a set of pencils so she could draw. At the end of every day, as they walked back to the estate, she would critique Maeve’s attempts and offer advice on how to improve her drawings. Maeve hadn’t drawn since before Jeremy had been born and it felt such a relief to be able to take it up again.

  Maeve found her fascinating, although a little frightening. But the walks back to the estate in the evenings, when Marguerite would open Maeve’s sketchbook and pronounce on what she’d done, were so important to Maeve that she can still remember, almost word for word, what the painter said.

  No perspective, Marguerite said tersely of a meadow sketch. No feeling, she said of a drawing of a tree. No surprises, she said about a portrait of herself. Sometimes she would stop suddenly and Maeve would bang into her with the wheelbarrow from behind. Look at this, she would say, pointing in the sketchbook to the stem of a flower or the rise of a hill. That has movement. That sings. She was not one to give praise easily, and those moments when she found something to extol in one of the drawings would carry Maeve through the rest of the day. The morning when Marguerite left, at the end of the summer, Maeve went into her room and wept right through the afternoon.

  The church basement bomb shelter is damp and smells of wet stone. There are wooden benches set along the walls. When Harriet sits down on one she realizes that it is an old pew. People sit facing the opposite bench, as though they are travelling in a train carriage. There is an oil lamp in the centre of the floor and a couple of people have electric torches, but the lighting is too dim for Harriet to have a good look at the room. Opposite her is a woman with two small children, one nestled under each arm. The mother bows her head to one and then the other, never looking up.

  There are roughly fifteen people in the bomb shelter, four to a bench. The corners of the room are in shadow so Harriet can’t be sure that the flaps of black she sees there are people or the dark tuck of the stone walls.

  There’s a hollow booming sound above them, and the basement shudders. Harriet is exhausted, feels she can’t endure another blast. Her nerves are completely raw.

  “I wanted to enlist,” explains Jeremy. “I wanted to fight the Jerries, but they won’t let me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m colour-blind.”

  Harriet turns on the bench and looks at Jeremy as though she will be able to tell from staring into his eyes what they are capable of seeing. He has dark hair, eyebrows that are two black slashes across his face, lips that are pale. He appears older than he had on the roof of the cathedral.

  “You don’t see red or green?” she asks because she knows that, like dogs, certain people can’t make out all the colours in the spectrum.

  “I don’t see any colour,” says Jeremy. “It’s a severe sort of colour-blindness.”

  “You only see in black and white?”

  “Well.” Jeremy grins at her and Harriet can’t help but smile back. “I don’t think of it as black and white. It’s more like night and day.” He looks around the small underground room. “That wall opposite is night. That lamp is day. His hair is night. You.” He smiles at Harriet again. “You are a sunny day.”

  “Flatterer,” says Harriet, but she is secretly pleased.

  A man passes silently along the pews with a tin cup and bucket of water. Harriet and Jeremy take a drink. The water is soft and cool and tastes of stone.

  On the bench beside Harriet are an elderly man and woman. The woman sits bolt upright, her hands curled around each other in her lap. The man has removed his hat. This is, after all, a church. They stare straight ahead, as though they are on a journey, are watching the countryside unfold before them.

  We could die here, thinks Harriet. And worse, we are prepared for it.

  Jeremy shifts on the bench, shifts again. “My mother will be worried about me,” he says. “There’s just the two of us. She relies on me.”

  Harriet’s own mother never did a thing for her. A good thing. She sent Harriet out to root the potatoes, collect the eggs, bring in the coal. Once, she showed her daughter how to press flowers but later, in a fit of rage, she crumbled the dry, delicate blossoms into the fire. Harriet can’t imagine that her mother ever worried about her. She eventually went mad, trying to burn the house down with Harriet inside.

  Harriet crosses her legs, uncrosses them on the hard wooden pew. Her mother remains a mystery to her, a woman full of alarming volatility. She always said she was full of passion, but Harriet now thinks she was just full of rage. When Harriet was brave enough to move away with Owen, her mother did burn the house down, with herself inside it.

  For a long time Harriet thought it was her fault, and then one day she didn’t, and that felt worse because at least when it was her fault her guilt kept her tied to her mother. Being absolved freed her not just of responsibility but of connection. For a long time she had lain awake, imagining her childhood home ablaze, her mother’s screaming face at an upstairs window. The last time she made a visit to her father, at the start of this war, he was drunk for the entire three days she was there. He couldn’t drive her to the station to catch her train home because he had passed out in the potting shed. She had to walk, and then, because she was in danger of missing her train, she had to cadge a lift with the milkman.

  “Do you have any family waiting for you?” asks Jeremy.

  “No. I’m alone.”

  One of the children opposite Harriet has begun to cry. Small, ratcheting sobs break from her body until the room and the dark are filled with the noise of her crying. Harriet wants her to stop, wants her to shut up.

  “I’m unbelievably selfish,” she says to Jeremy, but he appears not to have heard her.

  “I work at the Triumph plant,” he says. “I’m training to be a motor mechanic.”

  At a time when the rest of the country faces massive unemployment, there is work to be found in vehicle production at Coventry. There are factories for the production of automobiles, Lancaster bombers, and tanks.

  “It’s what they’re coming for, isn’t it?” says Harriet. “All the factories. It’s why we’re being bombed.”

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nbsp; The crying child will not shut up. The sobs are more frantic, quicker.

  “You make it sound as though it’s my fault,” says Jeremy.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  And then Harriet knows why the crying child is fraying her nerves. The noise of the sobs, their rhythm, reminds her of the ack-ack guns the Coventry defence is using tonight against the German bombers. Harriet can’t abide the noise of the guns, is glad she hasn’t been able to hear them over the noise of the bombing raid. The guns make her think of Owen, dying in that muddy field in Belgium.

  Harriet can’t bear to think of Owen. “Tell me about your job,” she says to Jeremy.

  “I’m apprenticing. And we only moved here this summer, before the raids started, so I haven’t been at it long.”

  “Tell me anyway,” says Harriet.

  Jeremy stretches his legs out. He has long legs, like Owen.

  “I’m learning about engines,” he says. “I’m learning how things work.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  Jeremy hesitates for a moment. “I like to think that an engine is a system, like a heart. The hoses are veins; the oil is blood. The engine valves are the valves of a heart, opening and closing, producing energy for the engine to run.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There must be something,” says Harriet impatiently. The child’s cries seem to be increasing in volume with each breath it takes.

  “I suppose,” says Jeremy, “what I don’t like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine.”

  Just like us, thinks Harriet.

  Underneath the child’s crying there is a new sound, the low keen of someone moaning. Harriet can’t tell who is moaning, but it sounds as if it’s coming from the dark fold in the far corner of the room. Farther away, muffled, but still distinct, are the thuds of the bombs landing, the crash of buildings falling.

  I can’t stand this, she thinks, we could be buried alive, and when Jeremy says, “What?” she realizes that she has said it out loud.

  It amazes Harriet that she stayed in Coventry; though it wasn’t so much that she has stayed as that there never seemed a good time to leave. At first she couldn’t go because it was the last place she’d been with Owen. It had been their first place together—the small flat on Berkeley Road—and how could she leave those last traces of him that rivered through those rooms? Then she’d stayed for his family, but she and Owen hadn’t been married long enough for her to have become close to his parents, and after a few years they seemed to forget all about her. But by this time she had the job at the coal merchant’s and a routine to her days that brought her comfort. She bicycled to work, walked out to the shops at lunch, cooked herself an egg for dinner or a bit of mackerel or some potted meat on toast. And by this time she had begun her discovery of Coventry, had started to research the history and explore the city and surrounding countryside. She had become attached to a place where she’d never imagined living by imagining life there before her.

  At the library she discovered that Coventry was once part of a Roman road that went from Leicester to Mancetter. She spent a day walking up and down the old Roman riverbed of what had become Cox Street and wrote her description of it that evening.

  Water running underground sounds like a woman crying. People often mistake streams beneath their houses for ghosts. The land on which St. John’s Church is built is right where a lake used to be and the church is prone to flooding. There is a word I remember from my childhood—guzzle—a low, perhaps damp spot on an estuary or inland from a beach, as far inland sometimes as to be a field, where the sea can enter if it chooses. It is a place that is really a ghost, because it exists only under certain conditions, when water remembers where it has gone and what it has touched; when it imagines what shape it once filled and held. When it remembers who it used to be.

  There is a sudden crash and clatter, and a large metal object, smoke and dust spilling from it, skids to a stop at the bottom of the stone stairs.

  “It’s a bomb,” cries one of the men. “Don’t move.” And then, realizing as everyone in the shelter is realizing, that it is an unexploded bomb, he yells, “Get out. Get out before it goes off.”

  “Don’t panic,” says Jeremy to Harriet and then to the roomful of people.

  The bomb blocks the section of floor in front of the basement steps. The cylinder has been dented by the tumble down the church stairs. Harriet can see the crumple of metal in the muted light of the oil lamp and thinks she can hear a hissing coming from the interior of the bomb. She stands up slowly and treads carefully, pressing herself against the damp stone wall of the basement in order to get past it.

  She is one of the first to get out, to emerge into the cacophony of the city, which suddenly seems, absurdly, like a safe place. Jeremy is right behind her, and behind him follows the rest of the group. There is no explosion. The bomb must be defective or has simply refused to detonate on impact. No matter, everyone who was in the church basement disperses. In the shelter, they were in it together. In the chaos of the bombed city, they return to being strangers.

  For a moment Harriet thinks that Jeremy will leave, will scatter with the others, but he stays with her. And then she remembers that he doesn’t know how to find his way through the city without her.

  The air is so filled with dust it is hard to breathe. Harriet inhales and chokes. She can smell something strange, the odour of cooked meat. It is the smell of roasted pork. There must be a butcher shop burning nearby.

  Barrage balloons, huge and whalelike, are tethered just above the remaining roofs of the buildings. She hears the clang of fire engine bells but no engines. They must be stuck behind the rubble that is starting to crowd the streets.

  Wires are down and flames leap like dancers in the empty window frames of bombed shops. A river of fire runs down the street.

  “Look out!” yells a man near Harriet. “It’s from the dairy.”

  Harriet realizes that it’s a slick stream of burning butter. To her left is a crater with a double-decker bus in it.

  “Stay away from the buildings,” says Harriet. She has to yell to be heard above the noise of the bombing. “Stay with me.”

  They need to get out of the middle of Coventry. They have a better chance of survival on the smaller streets, the ones farther away from the centre of the city. Harriet reaches for Jeremy’s hand and they run, lungs full of smoke and dust, lungs full of the dead air of the city, down the middle of Bayley Street.

  The bombing shakes the ground so that the people fleeing through the streets stumble as though drunk. The trembling earth shifts them one way, and then another, and Harriet finds herself reaching out to steady herself on walls that are no longer standing. She falls in the street, picks herself up from the shaking ground, and falls again. Her leg is bruised. The combination of debris, noise, and the shaking ground makes her lose her bearings. The hot waves of air pull her hair straight back, push the air out of her lungs.

  She tightens her grip on Jeremy’s hand. We are the lucky ones, she thinks. The ones who have escaped. The unlucky ones were sheltering under their furniture, or crouched in their cellars, when the whole house dropped to its knees, drowning them in bricks and beams, burying them under everything they once held dear.

  The singing has subsided and a melancholy gloom has descended over the inhabitants of the bomb cellar in The Coachman. Maeve prefers the melancholy to the singing. At least it’s quieter. She is worrying about Jeremy as she listens to the rhythm of the bombs falling overhead, trying to decide if there has been any break in the action.

  “Sounds like it’s intensifying,” says the publican, and Maeve has to agree that it is getting worse.

  They have been instructed by the government to seek s
helter during an air raid, but there has never been any mention of what to do if the air raid doesn’t end. What if the city is destroyed? Is it the best choice to remain entombed in the basement of a pub? Maeve’s house is literally around the corner. Surely she has a good chance of getting back there, and once she is there she can shelter under her massive oak dining table. Perhaps Jeremy has returned to the house while she’s been in the pub basement.

  She stands up.

  “What are you doing?” says the sparrow man.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I live close by, and I need to get back home to my son,” says Maeve.

  “I can’t let you go,” says the publican. “We need to stay in the cellar until the all-clear.”

  “Are you going to stop me?” asks Maeve.

  There is a silence, and in the silence, while the publican ponders whether he should physically restrain her, Maeve nimbly steps over the people in her way and bolts up the cellar staircase.

  The pub is as it was when they left it to stumble down the cellar stairs. The tables still hold the pint glasses, each one containing its measure of beer. The fire still burns, casting wires of light out into the room. The front window is still intact. Everything looks the same, but when Maeve passes the table where she had been sitting, she puts a hand down on the wood, and when she lifts it up it is covered in dust. She briefly considers finishing her pint, but the dust dissuades her from this.

  Outside, the world blooms and fades, flaring bright and then subsiding. The ground trembles and the noise of the exploding bombs is deep and guttural, something felt as well as heard, something that resounds through Maeve’s body like a heartbeat. There is the cough of the ack-ack guns and the drone of the bombers. They’re flying so low over the city that when Maeve looks up she can actually see, in one bomber, the outline of the German pilot in the cockpit.