They moved up her dress and freed an arm. The young policeman took her hand.
‘She’s cold,’ he said.
‘I’m not bleedin’ surprised,’ said Harry, ‘if she’s been in here all bloody night.’
‘No, she’s cold,’ said the policeman, placing her hand back down and standing up. ‘Corpse cold.’
No one said anything; they just carried on clearing the rubble away until they came to her head, tipped right back, her neck broken. Wordlessly the men lifted her from where she lay, Harry supporting her head between his forearms, and carried her to the roadside, where they laid her down. They smoothed down her clothes and Harry took out his handkerchief and wiped the dirt from her blue-white face, pushing her dark hair back from her forehead. She was no older than Win. Her blue eyes were open and he closed them for her, and thought how peaceful she looked.
‘What now?’ asked Harry, looking up at one of the policemen, who was writing in his notebook.
‘We’ll take her to the Graving Dock Tavern,’ he said. ‘They’re using the upstairs as a mortuary and there’s every chance the inquest will be there anyway.’
The younger policeman and the man who’d found the body pulled a piece of varnished board from some rubble nearby, the top of a dresser or wardrobe, Harry thought, possibly from the very house in which the girl had lived.
‘We’ll take her on this.’
The men lifted the dead girl gently onto the board. Harry folded her arms across her stomach, took off his jacket and laid it over her face and chest. Three of the men bent down ready to lift but the first policeman, the older of the two, held up his hand, said, ‘Let’s give her a moment,’ removed his helmet and bowed his head. The other men did likewise, and they paused in a moment’s silent prayer. ‘Thanks, lads,’ said the policeman, and they lifted the girl from the ground of her home and carried her to the Graving Dock Tavern.
Upstairs there it was a grim scene. There must have been about twenty-five bodies, but Harry certainly wasn’t about to count them. Some were like the girl, barely touched, others were badly charred and, most horrifically of all, there was a table at the far end of the room that contained just body parts: feet still inside shoes, a couple of arms, some hands and a man’s torso.
They left the girl on her varnished stretcher in a corner near the door, Harry retrieved his jacket and an ashen-faced man whom Harry recognised as the pot man from the pub replaced it with a cloth draped over her face. The senior policeman spoke quietly to a man in a dark suit with wing collars and wearing little gold-rimmed glasses, who jotted down the information in a notebook, nodded, and put the notebook in his breast pocket.
‘Let’s go, lads,’ said the policeman, ‘see if we can’t find someone who’s still with us.’
They all turned to leave. Harry paused in the doorway, looked down at the girl, and then said to the man with the glasses, ‘You will look after her, won’t you?’
The man gave a very slight, tight-lipped nod of the head.
Harry stayed for the rest of the day, searching piles of rubble with the two policemen and the other man with whom he’d carried the dead girl to the Graving Dock Tavern. His hands were raw from picking up bricks and masonry, and his back ached, but he kept going in the belief that they might still find someone alive in the wreckage. He kept turning up poignant personal possessions from the rubble – photographs in broken frames, a doll, a smashed baby’s crib, lace doilies, cooking pots, cutlery, the remains of a washstand – everyday things that looked wrong among the muck and the filth and the chaos. Every now and again they’d uncover a piece of clothing and time would stand still for a moment, but it would just be that – a piece of clothing. Everywhere Harry looked there were things where they shouldn’t be: the chassis of a vehicle upside down on a roof, half of a giant boiler planted in the middle of the road as if it had fallen from heaven itself. It was the impudence of destruction – things strewn about the place without a care – and it made Harry feel the whole world was upside down.
In the late afternoon it began to get dark and he started to feel the cold. There were no lights, the street lamps having all been destroyed in the explosion, and eventually as the gloom descended the older policeman said, ‘I think we’ve done enough for today, lads.’
They all shook hands; raw, cut, bruised hands that had handled death and its aftermath. As the two police officers walked off towards Stratford, Harry turned to the other man and said, ‘I think I need a drink.’ The man said he did, too.
‘Jubilee Tavern?’ said Harry.
‘It’s gone, mate.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yep, well, most of it anyway, so I heard. Killed the landlord outright, apparently.’
‘Old John? Bloody hell.’
They walked back towards the Graving Dock Tavern. Despite the horrors upstairs, despite the fact that the windows were boarded up, they were still serving. There were lamps and candles on the bar and the tables that made shadows dance on the walls.
Harry knew what was needed.
‘Two brandies, please, mate.’
For once, when he came back late from the pub, he wasn’t in the dog house. Nell was still up when he got home, despite having had hardly any sleep the previous night.
‘Hello, love,’ she said. ‘How was it?’
‘It was bloody awful, doll.’
‘Much left up there?’
‘Not really. There must be hundreds of houses destroyed. Hundreds. They reckon the death toll might be lower than expected, though, because of the time of day. The night shift had just come on at Brunner Mond’s so it would have been a skeleton staff, and a lot of people would have been out at work themselves. Much later and the poor sods would all have been at home in bed and wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘Your hands, Harry!’
He looked down and held them out. They were red raw and swollen, and as they warmed a little by the fire were starting to become very sore.
‘They look as if they’ve been pounded like a piece of steak on a butcher’s slab.’
‘We were shifting rubble up there all day, seeing if we could find anyone.’
‘And did you?’
‘Nobody alive, no,’ he said and looked into the fire. Nell had never seen his sparkling blue eyes looking so dark and lifeless.
‘I’ll find a warming pan for the bed,’ she said, and left him to his thoughts.
Chapter Twenty-Four
All the refugees had gone now, except one. All of them would come back in the weeks that followed to thank Nellie for her kindness and hospitality, and they were all surprised to see the little girl still there. They’d comment on how spruce the laundry was looking, how everything was back to normal, at least on the surface, and then they’d see a familiar face.
‘Lilian’s staying with us,’ explained Nell, before taking them to one side out of earshot.
‘Her parents were killed, their house was completely flattened,’ she’d whisper. ‘I kept asking if she had any other family, but she says no, she hasn’t, it was just the three of them. Well, I can’t turn her out and I can’t send her to the workhouse, so if you ask me she’s better off here with us. My girls love her, she’s about their age and she’s already calling us her new family.’
Lil seemed to have an old head on her young shoulders. She said her parents trusted her to do things not many girls of her age could. That’s why she wasn’t in the house when the explosion happened; she was just off a train at Silvertown, having run some errands for her mother in Stratford and walking home when she was blown off her feet and across the road by the explosion, landing against some old wooden crates. She’d run towards her home but when she reached the house saw that it was completely destroyed, the bodies of her parents visible in the pile of rubble, and just turned round and walked away, keeping walking until she heard Nell outside Cundy’s offering shelter to those who needed it.
‘I don’t know where she’d have ended up if she hadn’t come
in to us,’ said Nell.
There were moments when the mask slipped. Sometimes Nell would hear sobbing in the night and she’d go into the girl’s room and Norah or Ivy would have their arm round her, but the worst one was the night the Knight’s Soap Works caught fire, three months almost to the day after the explosion. It traumatised most people, truth be told, to see the sky burning orange again and flames leaping high into the night, even in an area where industrial fires were almost commonplace, but when at around one o’clock in the morning Nell was woken by screaming and saw the orange light playing on the walls, her first thought was, oh God, not again. She went immediately to the girls’ room where Lil had her hands over her ears and was screaming hysterically. Nell sat with her all night, feeling her body trembling, her heart racing, and her muscles jerking and twitching even long after the fire had been dampened down and the night sky had dimmed to its normal hue. Whatever memories she was replaying stayed behind her clamped eyelids, and it was hours before she even considered letting go of Nell.
The following year, almost exactly a year after the Silvertown Explosion, the Greenwood brood increased again with the birth of another daughter, on 26 January 1918, a fortnight after Nell’s fortieth birthday. The women of Constance Street had rallied around as ever, half a dozen makeshift midwives that made Harry feel almost an intruder in his own home. The new arrival brought the household up to seven girls plus Lil, who was now one of the family, and when Nell saw her unofficially adopted daughter peering over the edge of the crib to look at the new baby she was overcome with a rush of mixed emotion.
Every new baby girl reminded her of Lilian, the daughter she and Harry had lost at the turn of the century at a year old, but now, here was another Lilian looking down at the new baby. Tears formed in Nell’s eyes as she watched one child looking down at another and wondered how alike the two Lilians might have been. She still thought of all of her babies, every day, every one of them, Cissie, Lilian, Christopher, Thomas and Charlie, and hoped they were looking down on their sisters, Lil included, and watching over them. With Nell having just given birth, Harry was marshalling the girls to look after the laundry until she was ready to return. He tapped on the door and walked in.
‘All right, doll?’ he asked. ‘You crying? What’s up?’
‘Oh, nothing, Harry, it’s fine, honestly. Just a bit up and down from the birth, you know.’
‘You all right, Lil?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replied. She didn’t call Nell and Harry ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ or even by their names; in fact she never addressed them as anything specific at all. But she was clearly content, and very settled. She’d left Drew Road School now, where the headmaster had told Nell she was a bright child who had clearly handled the trauma of the violent death of her parents as well as could be hoped.
‘I’m just having a look at my new sister,’ she said.
Sister, thought Nell. She said sister. Lil had been the most excited out of all the girls about the new arrival. The other Greenwood girls were so used to new babies about the place as to be almost blasé, but for Lil, an only child, this was a new thing, a special thing. The new baby also meant that Lil was no longer the newcomer in the family.
‘Ain’t she a peach?’ said Harry.
He looked at Nell.
‘Can I get you anything, doll?’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks. I’ll be down today, you can tell them.’
‘Take your time, gel, there’s no rush,’ said Harry, tenderly. He was even more of a sucker for a new baby than the rest of them. ‘I’m going to pop over the town hall and get her registered. Thought about a name?’
‘No, I’ll leave this one to you,’ she said.
Harry hadn’t intended to call in at Cundy’s, but in the circumstances, a new baby and all, he thought it would have been rude not to. Frank Levitt was in there, having a cheeky lunchtime half, and there was Ted Jarrett, his partner in the great odyssey. He shared the news.
‘We heard,’ said Frank. ‘Congratulations, old mate.’
A whisky was put in front of Harry.
‘Are you not going to have any bleedin’ boys in that place, H?’ asked Ted.
‘Not through want of trying, Ted,’ he replied, knocking back the drink, ‘believe me.’
Four whiskies later, Harry left Cundy’s in excellent form, crossing the road to the station with his legs snapping out in front of him as he walked, and taking the train to West Ham. At the other end he popped into a pub near the town hall for one more to mark the occasion, before heading through the doors and into the office for the registering of births, marriages and deaths.
He was such a regular visitor, the man behind the desk recognised him.
‘Oh, hello, Mr Greenwood. Nice to see you again. I hope this occasion is a happy one?’
Harry swayed slightly.
‘It is indeed. Another baby, born Saturday.’
‘Well, congratulations,’ said the man, pulling out the appropriate book of forms. ‘Boy or girl?’
‘Another girl,’ he said. ‘Just for a change, you know.’
‘Marvellous,’ came the response. ‘And what are you going to call her?’
Harry looked at him for a moment.
‘Do you know what,’ he said, ‘I don’t have the faintest idea.’
‘Righto,’ said the registrar. ‘Well, we need to put something down. No ideas at all?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Harry. ‘We’ve had so many girls I think we’ve run out of names altogether.’
‘Hmm,’ the registrar murmured, tapping the end of his pen against his lips. ‘Well, what’s your wife called?’
‘Nellie,’ said Harry. ‘She’s called Nellie.’
‘And have you had a daughter called Nellie already?’
‘No,’ said Harry, brightening visibly, ‘no. Do you know what? We haven’t.’
The registrar spread his arms wide.
‘Then how about Nellie for the new arrival?’
‘Brilliant,’ said Harry. ‘Yes, stick Nellie down. Perfect. Lovely.’
The more he thought about it the more he couldn’t believe they hadn’t used Nellie before. Staring them in the face it was, all this time.
‘Now,’ said the registrar, ‘what about a middle name?’
Harry deflated slightly and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Oof, I dunno.’ He looked at the registrar, a small man with oiled hair and a thin moustache, and had an idea. ‘What’s your wife called?’
‘My wife?’ he said, a little surprised. ‘My wife’s name is Ruby.’
Harry gestured at the form, over which the man’s pen was poised.
‘That’ll do, stick that down. Ruby. Yes.’
The man scribbled on the form, saying, ‘Well, my Ruby will laugh when I tell her tonight,’ and once the formalities were completed handed Harry his copy of the birth certificate.
‘There you are, Mr Greenwood. That’s all settled now.’
‘Nellie Ruby Greenwood,’ he said, proudly. ‘It’s got a ring to it, all right. Nell will be delighted.’
So happy was Harry with his afternoon’s work that, his arrival back in Silvertown having coincided almost exactly with opening time, he popped into Cundy’s to show off his nifty work at the birth registry.
A couple of pints later he meandered back up Constance Street and pushed open the shop door. Nell was there, having come back down to supervise the laundry even though she’d given birth barely two days earlier.
‘Hello, doll,’ he chirped. ‘You up and about, then?’
Nell had a sheet held beneath her chin with her arms outstretched, a corner in each hand, ready to fold.
‘Well, no point in lying around up there when I can be getting on with stuff, is there? So, what did you call her, then?’
‘Well, I dunno why we’ve never done it before,’ said Harry, straightening and adding, ‘Our new daughter is called … Nellie. Ruby. Greenwood.’
Nell’s arms dropped to
her sides. She lifted her chin, allowed the sheet to fall and looked straight at him.
‘Our new daughter is called … what?’ she said, levelly.
Harry raised his arms in an expansive gesture and repeated, ‘Nellie … Ruby … Greenwood.’
‘Tell me you haven’t registered that, Harry.’
‘What? Of course I have. Are you not delighted?’
He held out the certificate to her.
‘Delighted? No, Harry, I am not bleedin’ delighted. I am bleedin’ FURIOUS!’
The sudden increase in volume caused Harry to take a step back.
‘Nellie?’ she roared. ‘You’ve called that poor bloody girl Nellie? What on earth did you think you were doin’ of?’
‘It’s a nice name,’ he protested in a high-pitched voice. ‘It’s … it’s your name.’
‘Exactly!’ she shouted, pointing a finger at him. ‘That name’s been a bleedin’ curse on me, it has,’ she roared. ‘I’ve not had single stroke of bloody luck my whole life under that name! And you go and call our new baby Nellie! You’ve pulled some strokes in your time, Harry Greenwood, but this about takes the cake, it really bloody does.’
She turned away, balled her fists against the counter top and seethed for a few moments.
‘Well, I’ll tell you something,’ she said without turning to look at him. ‘As long as I live, that child is never, ever going to be called Nellie. Ever. What middle name did you give her again?’
‘Ruby.’
‘Right, well, from this day on as far as we’re all concerned that child’s name is Ruby and that’s the end of it.’
And so it was that Nellie Ruby Greenwood never knew her real first name until she left school and had to present her birth certificate to her first employer. She would be known as Ruby by everyone until her death in 2001.
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