It was a familiar voice, the familiar voice, but it came from behind him. He turned and there was Nell, standing on the opposite platform.
‘Nell?’
They both looked at each other for a moment, across the tracks. Then Harry picked up his bag and hurried to the footbridge. Neither of their faces gave anything away. Harry took the steps two at a time, bustled across the bridge and bounded down the stairs on the other side until he found himself standing in front of his wife. He dropped his bag to the ground and looked at her. She was wearing what appeared to be a new hat and coat.
‘You’re a bit dolled up, ain’t you? Fancy man, is it?’
He’d meant it as a joke, but it was probably the least appropriate thing he could possibly have said.
Nell took a quiet breath and then, with all her might, slapped him hard across the side of the head.
‘You BASTARD!’ she yelled.
Harry’s vision swam and his ears rang. She’d caught him with an absolute corker. He shook his head and blinked, waiting for the noise bouncing around his cranium to subside.
‘Eight months, Harry,’ she said, voice quivering with emotion, ‘eight months of not knowing, eight months of worry, eight months of wondering whether you’d ever walk through that door again, not knowing if you were alive or dead. A couple of letters and a stupid photograph. And you turn up, out of the blue, and say something like that, on a day like this.’
‘I’m sorry, doll, I didn’t mean anything by it,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake. I didn’t ask to go away for eight months, but I made a mistake and it happened and I couldn’t get back and it was rotten.’
‘The worry, Harry, you’ve no idea. Christmas without you, the girls pretending it was normal, and now poor Charlie …’
She tailed off and he looked at her. A train was approaching.
‘What do you mean, poor Charlie?’ he asked.
Nell sighed.
‘It looks like pleurisy,’ she said. ‘He took bad after Christmas. Coughing, always coughing. And crying. He wouldn’t stop crying. His throat was red raw, his breathing was shallow, nothing I did seemed to help, so in the end the doctor came and sent him straight to the hospital. He’s not well, Harry. He’s really not well. I’m going to the hospital now. Coming?’
He nodded. The train pulled in and they boarded, not saying a word until they reached the hospital.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Charles Greenwood coughed and breathed his last rasping, hoarse, shallow breath he was five days shy of his first birthday. Both his parents were at his side and the silence folded itself around them. They didn’t stay with him long; they had to go back to Constance Street and break the news to their daughters. It was barely two years since they’d lost their eldest sister; now their younger brother was gone too. They’d said their prayers that their father would come home and that their brother would come home, and they had only been half answered. It was the strangest feeling for the girls, who now ranged in age from six to thirteen. The joy at seeing their father walking through the door was immediately tempered by the expression on their parents’ faces.
They buried Charlie Greenwood in Camberwell, near his sister. Harry put the hat he’d saved for him into the tiny coffin. The trauma of losing their son meant that Harry’s booze-addled sabbatical from the laundry was never mentioned. The huge red scar on his leg was a constant reminder but it was never spoken of again. Life went on at 15 Constance Street. Even Harry’s handcart was in the yard when he got home. He’d parked it on the quayside when he’d taken the laundry on board and asked one of the Bessant boys, who’d delivered some bread to the PLA office, to keep an eye on it for him until he got back. The lad waited and waited until the Aquitania cast off its moorings and eased away from the quayside, sounding its thunderous horn, sending vibrations up through the cart. Realising Harry wasn’t coming back, he’d taken the cart home with him to the bakery, where he thought he’d keep it until Harry came back to claim it. It stayed in Bessant’s back yard for a couple of days until Frank Bessant recognised it and, knowing what had happened, returned it to Nellie.
The laundry returned to its routine, and soon the cries of a new baby were heard again over the sound of the steam presses. Nine months, almost to the day, after Harry’s return, Nellie gave birth again. It was another girl, whom they named Rose Eleanor.
And then, on a cold, clear Friday evening in January 1917, as Nellie Greenwood was locking up the laundry, there was a flash, a pause, and then all the windows blew in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Harry and the girls had been clearing up as best they could. They’d swept the broken glass into a corner by the door and were carefully picking shards and splinters from the worktops and piles of laundry. Harry was now hammering away, blocking up the gaping windows at the back of the building, using some pieces of old fencing that had blown down in the yard. He’d pulled down the shutters to cover the front window: it wouldn’t keep out all the cold but it might stop most of the wind.
Then Nell arrived like a gruesome Pied Piper, trailing a pathetic train of the bleeding and the befuddled. She ushered them in through the door.
‘Ivy,’ she instructed, ‘get the big ironing boards, lay them on the ground and put some sheets on them. Norah, run upstairs and get as many blankets as you can find. Annie, take some sheets from over there and start tearing them up for bandages.’
Harry stopped hammering for a moment.
‘Is it a bomb, doll?’ he asked.
‘Someone said Brunner Mond’s has gone up,’ she replied.
‘I knew it,’ said Harry, ‘I bloody knew it.’
‘When you’ve done that, Harry, can you get some tea on? Strong, and plenty of sugar in it. Is Rose still asleep?’
‘Somehow, doll, yes.’
Between them, the Greenwoods of Constance Street managed to set up a makeshift field hospital for the walking wounded of the Silvertown Explosion. Most of them had cuts from flying glass, all of them were numb with shock. The lad whose arm was at a funny angle was the most seriously injured, but the shock seemed to have numbed the pain for now. Nell fashioned a sling from half a tablecloth and carefully placed it around his arm and neck just to take the tension off the limb, and made sure he was the first to receive a cup of strong, sweet tea. She tried not to think about what might happen when the shock wore off and the pain hit, but the hospitals would be absolutely overwhelmed at the moment and every doctor in the area would have headed towards the site of the disaster. He was better off here for tonight at least.
The room was quiet, like a doctor’s waiting room; a strange, unnatural calmness. Nell looked around the room and saw that not one of the dozen or so people sitting on chairs or lying on the improvised ironing board beds was interacting with anyone else. There was no eye contact. Everyone was looking into the middle distance with haunted eyes. She knew they were either replaying some of the horrors they’d seen, thinking about loved ones whose welfare and whereabouts were a mystery, or, most likely, both. They didn’t even seem to feel the chill of this January evening in a building with no windows, and the only sound was the breeze shifting the shutters and the shallow breathing of a dozen traumatised people.
The door opened and Win and Kit, aged thirteen and six respectively, walked in. They looked around in fearful wonder at the collection of humanity at its most vulnerable gathered in the chill of what should have been the warm reassurance of the laundry. Neither of them said a word, just went to their mother and wrapped themselves around her.
Sitting quietly on the worktop, hands in her lap, blood on the front of her dress from the cut on her forehead that Nell had just washed, was a girl of about eleven. She was thin and pale-skinned with long, jet-black hair that fell halfway down her back, and when Nell had asked her name she had whispered ‘Lilian’.
‘Our house has gone,’ she announced in a firm voice to nobody in particular. ‘Mummy and Daddy, too. I shall have to find somewhere else to live.’
Then the room was silent again but for the clicking shutters, the shallow breathing and the thumping hearts of the Silvertown refugees.
‘Everything is gone,’ she said, calmly. ‘This is the end of all things.’
The traumatised occupants of 15 Constance Street were woken from fitful sleep the morning after the explosion by the sound of scraping and tinkling glass from outside. With daylight came the clean-up, and the people of Constance Street were out early, glumly sweeping the remains of their windows into piles of turquoise fragments speckled with the little charred wheat grains that had billowed out of the night sky from the burning flour mill. Nell had been up for most of the night, making sure the fire was still going and moving among her wards, checking to see that everyone was as comfortable as possible and reminding them that in the dark and among the horrors they weren’t alone. The young man with the broken arm was whimpering softly to himself, in great pain now the shock had worn off but doing his best not to wake anyone else.
Nell went over, knelt at his side and brushed a few strands of hair away from his forehead.
‘We’ll have the doctor out to you this morning,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll send one of the girls for him as soon as I can. Just lie still and I’ll bring you some tea as soon as it’s ready.’
‘Thank you, missus,’ he replied, softly, in a strained voice. ‘You’ve been very kind but I must get going. My mates will be worried about me and I’m due at work at nine.’
‘Where do you work, son?’ she asked.
‘At Brunner Mond’s. I’m on the day shift today.’
Nell sighed and stroked his forehead.
‘I don’t think there’ll be much work done there today, son,’ she replied. ‘Besides, you’re not going anywhere until the doctor’s seen you. And don’t worry, I’ll get word to your mates. What about your family?’
‘I’ve none here, missus,’ he said, swallowing. ‘My brothers are in France, my father’s dead and my mother is in Devon, but she’s blind.’
A fitful wakefulness spread through the room and people began to stir and shift. A man shouted ‘Rosie!’ as he woke and the memories of the previous night came flooding back. Two young women with cuts on their heads put their arms around each other and began to cry. The young girl who said her house was gone was sitting upright again, her hands folded in her lap and with an expression that gave nothing away but was one, Nell thought, that simply didn’t belong on a child’s face.
Norah and Ivy appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
‘You two,’ said Nell, ‘get some tea on. I’ll go out and see what I can find to feed these poor so-and-so’s.’
She stepped through the door and saw most of the neighbours on the street, some sweeping up glass, others standing surveying the mess, yet more standing talking quietly in groups.
There was Bert Lock, who ran the dining room three doors down, tipping some broken glass into a wooden crate with a coal shovel.
‘Some affair, this, Bert,’ she said.
‘It’s like the end of the world, Nell.’
‘Every one of yours accounted for?’
‘All here and fine, thanks, Nell. It’s further west that’s really copped it. Could hear the bells from the fire engines most of the night.’
‘We didn’t sleep much at our place, that’s for sure,’ she said.
Bert nodded towards the laundry.
‘You’ve a houseful, I hear.’
‘Just some poor so-and-so’s who looked like they had nowhere to go. A couple of them didn’t even seem to know where they were. Couldn’t just leave them wandering in the dark.’
‘It’s good of you.’
‘Was just going to see if I could find something for them to eat, but I don’t suppose anyone’s opening till the mess is cleared up.’
‘I’ll give ’em something if you want to bring them in,’ said Bert.
‘You can’t do that, Bert. There’s about a dozen people in there.’
‘It’s all right. It won’t be much in the circumstances, but it’s no trouble, honestly. Give me ten minutes and send them along.’
‘That’s kind of you, Bert. You’re a good ’un.’
‘Oh, a proper angel of the firmament, me,’ he said, with a grin, ‘and anyway, we look after our own here, because no bugger else will.’
Once they’d had their tea and Nell had re-dressed some of the cuts with more torn bed linen that had until the previous evening been the property of the New Zealand Shipping Company, she led her pale-faced, empty-eyed crowd of strays along the street to Bert Lock’s and sat them down. The fare was modest, bread and butter with jam, some coffee and a few rounds of cheese sandwiches, but nobody was complaining. In fact, nobody was saying anything much as everyone still appeared to be under a blanket of shocked silence. The man who’d shouted ‘Rosie’ earlier was the only one to break the silence, saying he’d seen a man pulling the bodies of two children out from the wreckage of a house. His clothes were shredded, his hair was a mix of blood and dust, and he didn’t seem to notice that he’d lost his right foot.
They drifted away as the day went on, some to see what state their homes might be in, others to family outside Silvertown. With their local doctor clearly otherwise occupied she took the lad with the broken arm round to the Seamen’s Hospital at the Albert Dock. As expected the place was overwhelmed with casualties, some who’d lost limbs, others who’d lost a lot of blood to bad cuts, and a few with quite dreadful burns. They took the young man in, a kindly nurse putting an arm around his shoulder, and Nell watched him go. He didn’t look back, this boy with the shattered arm, the brothers in France and the blind, widowed mother hundreds of miles away.
When she returned to the laundry there were just a couple of people left, a middle-aged man with what seemed to be bruised ribs, a younger man with a cut on his cheek and a swollen knee, and the little girl who’d announced that this was the end of all things. She was playing quietly with Kit, while the other two sat talking together in low voices. The rest of the Greenwood girls tried to busy themselves with bundling up the makeshift bedding to wash and picking up the ironing boards.
‘Where’s your father?’ asked Nell.
‘He’s gone up the way to see if he can help with anything,’ said Win.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Harry had walked along the North Woolwich Road countless times over the years, but on that grey, damp Saturday morning it looked like nowhere else on earth. The closer he got to the Brunner Mond works the more unbelievable the damage became. Entire rows of houses were reduced to mounds of bricks, the few standing interior walls exposed to the air in a way that struck him as entirely perverse: what had been an upstairs bedroom showed its pink wallpaper to the world, a small iron fireplace facing a void, a picture in a frame still on a mantelpiece that was now a precipice. Harry’s breath caught in his throat: these were people’s private, intimate spaces; they shouldn’t be on show like this for all to see. When he reached the Brunner Mond site itself, he had to look around to find his bearings and make sure he was in the right place. There was nothing left. Nothing. The entire works had vanished, leaving a giant crater in the earth. Next door, at Silvertown Lubricants, firemen played hoses over the smoking oil still. Looking past it, he realised that so many buildings had been destroyed or had collapsed that he could actually see the opposite bank of the river. He turned around and saw that the fire station, only a couple of years old, was all but gone too, just a few stunted plinths of brick protruding from a pile of rubble, from which a couple of smoky wisps meandered into the air, and the tower they used for training, which appeared miraculously untouched.
A Salvation Army trailer had parked nearby, dishing out tea and soup to volunteers, the police and the newly homeless. Harry walked over and asked if there was anything he could do to help. A man with a dirt-blackened face, holding a tin of steaming tea, adjusted the peak of his cap and said, ‘Over there, mate, the firemen’s cottages – the police are tryi
ng to see if there’s anyone alive under the rubble. I’ve been there all morning, listening so hard I’ve started bloody hearing things.’
Harry picked his way across the road, strewn with bits of masonry and pieces of iron twisted into grotesque shapes, to what had been a little row of houses built for the firemen and their families. Three policemen in long blue overcoats stood astride parts of what had until the previous day been warm, cosy family homes but were now slippery piles of bricks and splintered timber, all greased by the oily Silvertown drizzle. Harry moved to the end of the group of men who would stand like statues, one ear turned to the rubble, listening for any sign of movement, and came to a house whose external wall was still intact. On the other side of the wall was green striped wallpaper and, still hanging there, a framed painting of a firefighter carrying a little girl away from a blazing house, entirely untouched, not even knocked crooked by the blast. Taking two large steps up on top of a pile of bricks, Harry lowered himself onto his haunches and listened. The wind rumbled in his ear, there was the slight hiss of the drizzle falling, but otherwise, nothing. He moved carefully over the wreckage, straining to hear a moan, a sigh, a whimper, anything that might suggest someone alive under there. But there was no sound. He saw a flash of something beneath a lump of masonry, moved it to one side and pulled out a clock, the sort that would have sat on a mantelpiece, the hands beneath its cracked glass frontage stopped at just after ten to seven, the time of the explosion.
‘Here! Here! Found something!’
Harry had been concentrating so hard that the cry of the man twenty yards down the street nearly made him jump out of his skin. He scrambled down and hurried to where the owner of the voice was carefully removing bricks. Two of the policemen ran over.
‘It’s a girl’s foot, still with a boot on,’ said the man, urgently. ‘I’m sure I just saw it move.’
Harry joined them in shifting the bricks and tossing them down the pile. Sure enough, there was a girl’s black boot, and behind it another. They slowly worked their way up her blackened stockings to her skirt and realised her body was bent back into the rubble, meaning her head was much deeper than her feet. The men kept working, one of the policemen, only a young lad, saying, ‘It’s all right, love, we’ve gotcha. It’s all going to be all right now. Just keep still for us.’
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