Caught, Back, Concluding

by Henry Green

  ‘Quite right too.’

  ‘You remember I told you about how men and women came right in to the station to say why weren’t we in the army? The other morning we had come back from being out all night and an old gentleman walked up to me like a schoolboy stopping a well-known footballer. He said, “well you’re real firemen now, all right, aren’t you?” I was so tired I just sneered at him. You get so frightfully tired that half the time you’re in a fog,’ he went on, wavering.

  ‘I suppose it’s a sort of protection by nature, darling. I do wish something of the kind was arranged when one was having a baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. He wanted to go on talking about himself. It was urgent. ‘This is the first time in weeks I’ve felt rested and when I get in I’m going to sleep the clock right round again.’

  ‘But you won’t before the children have their tea, will you?’

  He had a surge of rage.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You’re surely not expecting me to dance attendance on a nursery tea?’

  ‘Well, you see, there’s no nursery now, darling. The days of nurseries are over. You’ll have to be with them unless I bring you some in bed. But do stay up. Just for them. Please. It makes all the difference for him to have you in front of Rosemary. Besides,’ she added, and she was not going to give in, ‘it will be so good for you.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I’m being tiresome. Tell me, d’you find it awful without a nanny?’

  ‘No, not a bit, really. You see he’s old enough to look after himself. He’s no trouble. It’s a great relief on the whole. There’s not the nanny to think of all the time.’

  ‘That’s one of the things about the blitz,’ he said, getting back to himself as soon as possible, ‘there’s not a sub officer within sight. You just get ordered on to an address. I’m usually in charge of our pump, and you’re absolutely on your own. I used to wonder in the old days about Peewee, how it would be possible to fight fires and try to spare his feelings.’

  She said to herself, there he goes, he’s back again. Oh I do hope he’s all right, hope he’s all right.

  ‘Who’s Peewee?’ she asked.

  ‘Why Pye, of course. Didn’t you know, that’s what Hilly christened him? You remember Hilly,’ he asked awkwardly, ‘the driver you met when you brought Christopher along that time?’

  ‘Oh her,’ Dy said, remembering the girl very well. She had obviously been up to something with Richard. ‘What’s become of her?’

  ‘Hilly? She’s about still. Yes,’ he went on rather fast, ‘the great idea is to be on your own.’

  Yes, and to have your wife with your parents not on her own, she thought.

  Then he opened the floodgates, really getting down to it.

  ‘The first night,’ he said, ‘we were ordered to the docks. As we came over Westminster Bridge it was fantastic, the whole of the left side of London seemed to be alight.’

  (It had not been like that at all. As they went, not hurrying, but steadily towards the river, the sky in that quarter, which happened to be the east, beginning at the bottom of streets until it spread over the nearest houses, was flooded in a second sunset, orange and rose, turning the pavements pink. Civilians hastened by twos or threes, hushed below the stupendous pall of defeat until, in the business quarter, the streets were deserted.)

  (These firemen at last drove out on to the bridge. Here two men and a girl, like grey cartridge paper under this light which stretched with the spread of a fan up the vertical sky, were creeping off, drunkenly, defiantly singing.)

  (The firemen saw each other’s faces. They saw the water below a dirty yellow towards the fire; the wharves on that far side low and black, those on the bank they were leaving a pretty rose. They saw the whole fury of that conflagration in which they had to play a part. And they cowered where they sat beneath the immensity. For, against it, warehouses, small towers, puny steeples seemed alive with sparks from the mile high pandemonium of flame reflected in the quaking sky. This fan, a roaring red gold, pulsed rose at the outside edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, were for a space a trembling green.)

  ‘I almost wetted my trousers,’ he said, putting into polite language the phrase current at his substation.

  ‘I had an old crook called Arthur Piper on my crew that first evening,’ he went on, ‘he was killed about three hours after. I’ll tell you about him some time. He was old, it was his fifth campaign. When he saw the blaze from the bridge all he said was, “Oh mother.” It sounded so odd coming from inside the taxi. No one else had said a word.’

  ‘Don’t talk about people being killed.’

  ‘Well, he was. So was Shiner Wright, that same night. But what I can’t get over is the months we sat waiting. Now it’s on us, not nearly as bad as we thought. We were sitting talking one day. Everyone was agreed that it was going to be so noisy, when we did have a raid, that the only thing would be to carry paper and pencil so as to write messages. Shiner was the one man there to say it wouldn’t be necessary. Well he was right. Of course, he had had experience already. He had been invalided out of the Navy with a bad arm. But when it did come there was hardly any noise at all. You see there were practically no guns at first.’

  The anxiety she felt for him did not prevent her, in the other half of her head, thinking how very dull his description was. But she could not get over the great fact. This was how wonderful it was to have him with her. Particularly along this dejected path she had grown to hate in the months she had been down here. And she began to feel confident that he was all right, really. He was just doing his usual, going over everything.

  ‘Did I tell you?’ he went on. ‘We used to have tremendous arguments about whether the Regulars would be any good. Well, of course, it was exactly what might have been expected, which was just what we did not think of at the time. Some were, and some weren’t. There was one old boy in charge of a station who gave up. As he walked off he was heard to say, “I joined this job to fight fires, not bombs.”

  Every inch of the path they followed slowly through the wild garden, which was no longer tended, would, at any time before this, have reminded him of so many small events he had forgotten out of his youth, of the wounded starling here, the nightingale there one night, the dog whining across the river one morning, while he stood motionless behind that elm, to watch two cats from the stables. Because it was overgrown, now that the old tidiness had, so to speak, been allowed to ramble, he would once have lingered all the more with what was left him of days when these surroundings were the moist fat skin which covered the skeleton of his adolescence. Today it was different. In his pre-occupation with air raids he could even let his son run on ahead without sentimentalising over the boy.

  Even when, twelve months later, he had begun to forget raids, and when, in the substation, they went over their experiences from an unconscious wish to recreate, night after night in the wet canteen, even then he found he could not go back to his old daydreams about this place. It had come to seem out of date.

  ‘. . . but when at last we drove through the Dock,’ he continued, taken up by this urge to explain, ‘there was not one officer to report to, no one to give orders, we simply drove on up a road towards what seemed to be our blaze. Of course it was half daylight in the glare reflected from the pall of smoke, but we couldn’t see our fire, there was a line of sheds three hundred yards in front.’

  As he gave this inadequate description he was avidly living that moment again. It had been an unwilling ride to a great destruction.

  (He was cold as they churned along in the taxi, which was boiling over from the distance it had been driven towing the heavy pump. Part of the steering wheel shone blood red from the sky. The air caught at his wind passage as though briars and their red roses were being dragged up from his lungs. The acrid air was warm, yet he was cold.)

  But there was nothing in what he had spoken to catch her imagination. She wen
t along at his side, by this path she hated, and looked up at his face in what he took to be the attention she was paying to the account he gave. In fact, she was trying to analyse the extent to which his features had altered. She listened with half her mind as she decided his face was thinner, while his neck had thickened. His shoulders were broader. He was much dirtier than he used to be. Of course, his hands were awful, and then probably he could not get them clean. But his forehead was grey with dirt. Suddenly, with a real pang, exactly what she felt when she had first noticed it in her mother, she saw grey in the red hairs at his temples. She almost put the fingers of her hand up to them, and then she did not. She realised if she did he would know that she was not listening.

  ‘. . . no one to report to,’ he was telling, ‘just a road leading to what was obviously a gigantic fire and no one knew if it was the right wharf. We had been ordered to Rhodesia Wharf, Surrey Commercial Docks. I never felt so alone in all my life. Our taxi was like a pink beetle drawing a pepper corn. We were specks. Everything is so different always from what you expect, and this was fantastic. Of course, we couldn’t hear for the noise of the engine, and we had shut the windows so as to get more inside. There was only the driver, old Knocker, on the front. No one said a word. Yet I suppose it was not like that at all really. One changes everything after by going over it.’

  ‘But the real thing,’ she said, getting her teeth into this, for she liked arguments, and the bit about the beetle had drawn her attention because she thought it vivid, ‘the real thing is the picture you carry in your eye afterwards, surely, darling? It can’t be what you can’t remember, can it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘only the point about a blitz is this, there’s always something you can’t describe, and it’s not the blitz alone that’s true of. Ever since it happened I feel I’ve been trying to express all sorts of things.’

  ‘I expect that’s the result of your being blown up.’

  ‘No,’ he said, exasperated suddenly, ‘there’s an old fault of yours, you’re always trying to explain difficult things prosaically.’

  ‘What’s prosaically?’ she asked. She did not understand.

  ‘Oh, ordinarily,’ he said, his exasperation cooling. ‘But you must let me plough on, Dy. It was so fantastic afterwards, when we were ordered out of the Dock, it was almost like an explanation of the whole of our life in the war, waiting in the substation for just this. I do so want you to get the whole thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, when we got round those buildings I told you about, they were great open sheds really, for keeping the weather off the more expensive timber, we were right on top of the blaze. It was acres of timber storage alight about two hundred yards in front, out in the open, like a huge wood fire on a flat hearth, only a thousand times bigger.’

  (It had not been like that at all. What he had seen was a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.)

  ‘Then an officer did turn up, out of a surface shelter. I was just getting off the step to report to him when he saw us. He yelled out to take cover, as though I’d insulted him by arriving. So I dived off the cement road under some big baulks of wood in the nearest open shed. As I listened to the planes I remember thinking this was the first time I’d lain on the earth in London. Hyde Park doesn’t count. Then I saw the crew was lying on the hard road. I’d read somewhere that if a bomb fell on it up to six hundred yards away, they would have their ribs crushed by the vibration. So I yelled out to come where I was. And old Shiner, who’d had some the night before, though not so bad as this, shouted back for me to move instead. D’you know where I’d put myself? Right under a skylight in the roof, quite thirty foot up, just where the broken glass would have cut me to ribbons if a bomb had brought it down. And when the particular plane, which seemed to be searching, searching, searching, when it did drop its load I’ve never waited so hard. But they didn’t drop anywhere near that time.’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, gently malicious, ‘I thought you wrote and told me you people never take cover, that you work all through the raid.’

  ‘So we do now,’ he said, not noticing, ‘but we know by this time more or less how near the bomb is going to be. And that night being the first, we were strange. All except Piper. He was absolutely true to form. When there seemed to be at least five planes overhead, would you credit it, he got up from where he was lying and went across to the officer who had shouted at me? Believe it or not, the old Pied one stayed with that man all night. I don’t suppose they moved nine yards away from the shelter. So Piper was making up to officers till the last, and it killed him, because when a bomb came down, just before we had to evacuate the place, that was where he was killed. The officer was decorated in his coffin for the way he had directed our fire-fighting.’

  ‘No!’ This time she was shocked.

  ‘Well, what does anything matter?’ he replied. ‘And green as we were, you don’t know how good some of us were that night, Regular and Auxiliary. Shiner was superb. He should have been in charge of our pump. Because I made a Piper mistake almost at once. You see there was no room left to put our suctions down into the water. As soon as that first wave of bombers passed hundreds of men came out of the ground, it was surprising really, and went back through the mounds of burned-out stuff to get back to the fire. There wasn’t room to get in among their pumps at the dockside.’

  (Nearby all had been pink, the small, coughing men had black and rosy faces. The puddles were hot, and rainbow coloured with oil. A barge, overloaded with planks, drifted in flames across the black, green, then mushroom skin river water under an upthrusting mountain of fox-dyed smoke that pushed up towards the green pulsing fringe of heaven.)

  ‘I went up with my crew to the fire, which dried out my rough mouth even more. And a sub asked me to try for some drinking water. Instead of sending one of my mates, I went myself. You see, that was wrong.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I was number one, I was in charge, and I shouldn’t have left the crew.’

  ‘But you were told to, darling?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I ought to have passed the order on.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you were right. No one can disobey orders at a time like that, can they?’

  ‘That’s just the moment when you have to disobey if you’re any good,’ he said. ‘But what a night. Think of the way we’d waited a whole year behind those windows, then suddenly to be pitchforked into chaos. We used to think we’d get some directions. Instead we had about eight acres of flames and sixty pumps with the crews in a line pouring water on, when the bombing did not drive them off. And, because of the size of the whole thing, doing practically no good at all. And no orders whatever.’

  ‘But I don’t see,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me that it was no use giving orders, that there was nothing you could do, really, anyway nothing more than you were all doing.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘that’s exactly it. In some fantastic way I’m sure you only get in war, we were suddenly alone and forced to rely on one another entirely. And that after twelve months’ bickering. Each crew was thrown upon itself, on its own resources. The only thing to do was to keep together.’

  ‘It sounds grim.’ She shuddered. He had caught her attention properly.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ he replied, ‘it was like mustard. Cold and exciting. No, as a matter of fact, we should have been withdrawn to let the timber yard burn out. It was surrounded by water and we couldn’t have stopped the shower of sparks flying off in front with the wind if we’d had all the pumps in London. No, what I mean is, we were suddenly face to face with it, as I was with Pye two months before when I pulled him out of the gas oven.’

  She wondered again, as she had often done, why someone else could not have found that hateful man. />
  ‘Well, you were all wonderful. Everywhere, every day I read the most wonderful things about you in the papers.’

  ‘You should have seen us evacuating the Dock,’ he answered, ‘only that was later. There was nothing wonderful about that. No, somehow, even with old Pye, I always seem to be making up to the Regulars, I’m not able to help it. Can you think of a more ridiculous picture than a number one man going to get water for a sub officer? They’re no more than sergeants after all.’

  ‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘I think it was very brave. I’m sure carrying water round a place like that was no joke.’

  He began to get exasperated again. ‘You don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘Well, anyway, I got on to one of the big ships tied up to the dock at the rear of us. They fetched a little caretaker out of the Pied Piper’s shelter to shew me where I could get water on board. I asked him what Piper was talking about back there, describing the old man carefully, but this caretaker was a Swede, and I could not make him listen. He got me to sit down in the crew’s quarters. You’ve never seen such filth lying about in all your life. He simply would not fetch the water. He went on and on about his own brand of fatalism, making out that when your number was up it was up, you can imagine the sort of thing. And I was nervous to get back. I was afraid Shiner would think I’d gone to ground. Every time they dropped a bomb in the river it shook the ship as though someone had fetched the keel a great welt. Nothing came very close. The ship rocked gently in between. We might have been off to sea down the old Tamese.’

  She was not listening once more. Their walking up and down was beginning to get on her nerves, and this path, half a mile long through the wild garden under snow, was so wet to the feet. For when they came to the stile, which led out of the garden, he had turned back. She had planned a walk by the road below. He was so deep in his account she did not like to tell him what she wanted. So they had retraced their steps. Now they were coming to that stile again. She wondered if she could get him out of this beastly, decaying place. But he was hot with the breath of his first night in real London. And the old boy, who had found himself a stick, was ranging busily about through undergrowth, to one side or the other, slashing down the snow from overweighted branches.