Constance Street

by Charlie Connelly

  ‘Hundreds,’ she said. ‘There are bleedin’ hundreds of them.’

  ‘We’d best get a bloody move on,’ said a man as he passed and scurried across the bridge.

  Rose had never moved as fast or as nimbly as she did in order to make it to the Tate & Lyle shelter. She skimmed down the steps on the other side of the station, scurried over Factory Road and ran to the shelter entrance. A woman took Val from her and two men lifted her up and over the lip. They all hurried to the stairs nearby and made it to the large, reinforced room just as the first bombs began to drop on Silvertown.

  Chapter Forty-One

  There were 348 Heinkel and Dornier bombers over the east of London that day, accompanied by an escort of 617 Messerschmitts. It was by some distance the largest military force ever to assault the coast of Britain; larger than the Armada, larger than the Norman invasion, larger than Caesar’s Roman army. Although the Battle of Britain was close to being won in the skies over Kent, this was something different, something on an unprecedented scale.

  A couple of weeks earlier bombs had fallen on the eastern part of the City of London and on the East End, accidentally as it turned out, as the German pilots had thought they were over the refinery at Thameshaven. Churchill’s reaction was to launch an air raid of his own, sending a fleet of bombers to unload over Berlin in retaliation, and this raid, the first night of what became a sustained German attack on Britain’s civilian population, was in response to that.

  Ford’s at Dagenham was the first target, then Beckton Gas Works, the largest in Britain, just the other side of Barking Creek. The gasometers went up in spectacular flourishes of flame, but that was nothing compared to what else was to come.

  The docks were an obvious objective. Their importance to the British war effort made them a legitimate target and they were, other than the Thames itself, the most easily identifiable landmark in the city from above. The concentration of industry close by was a happy by-product that the bombers exploited to the full. The Heinkels and Dorniers began unloading sticks of incendiary bombs, more than 800 of them, onto the former marshland on the north bank of the Thames. Within minutes of the first planes passing overhead the whole of the docklands was alight and burning furiously. Because Silvertown was home to probably the most highly flammable materials you could imagine – tar, wood, oil, rubber, timber – the conflagration was swift and spectacular. Soon the smoke from the burning warehouses, factories, docks and homes was so thick that a brilliant, sunny Saturday afternoon had become as dark as night. In the Tate & Lyle shelter, in the Oriental Road swimming pool shelter, and beneath the arches of the newly built Silvertown Way flyover, the people of Silvertown heard the crump of falling bombs, the sounds of cracking and tumbling masonry and the low, terrifying roar of the fires that rumbled and thundered and seemed to come from beneath the very ground itself. Rose, her eyes flashing with fear, held Val close and tried to make soothing noises. There was crying, there was heavy, gasping breathing, there were shouts of fear and shouts of profanity. In one corner a group of dockers began to play cards, trying to keep some sense of normality among the inferno. A small man in a suit with a pencil moustache attempted to raise spirits by singing.

  ‘Come on, everyone,’ he said. ‘Old Adolf would be laughing his self silly if he could see us all cowering here. Let’s show him what we’re made of.’

  He launched into a lusty rendition of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ and a few people joined in, but the song soon sputtered out when a bomb dropped close by. When the song had stopped, a voice called out. ‘Right now I ain’t so sure there will always be an England.’

  On the other side of the river Charlie screeched to a halt close to the Woolwich Ferry pier. The scene on the other side of the river was absolutely horrific, with huge fires and huge plumes of smoke being blown east by the wind. And still the relentless tide of bombers passed overhead, sowing destruction. The bombs were landing south of the river too, with the Woolwich Arsenal an obvious target, and Charlie kept ducking involuntarily at each boom. The ferry was in the middle of the river, and clearly wasn’t making any passenger runs, so Charlie ran towards the domed entrance to the Woolwich foot tunnel. There was another man there apparently in an argument with an ARP man in the doorway.

  Charlie made to go past them into the tunnel when the warden sprang in front of him.

  ‘Tunnel’s closed,’ he squeaked in a high-pitched voice. ‘Tunnel’s closed, no one’s going through, it’s too dangerous.’

  Charlie gestured at the other side of the river.

  ‘My family’s somewhere in among that lot,’ he roared. ‘I’ve got to get over there!’

  ‘Nobody’s going over,’ shouted the warden over the whistle of falling bombs, explosions and the persistent malevolent hum of the bombers, his face lit orange in the glow of the fires. ‘Too dangerous.’

  Charlie looked at the man who’d also been arguing with the warden.

  ‘You too?’ he asked.

  The man shrugged and nodded. Then, as one, they rushed the warden, sending him sprawling onto his back and his white ARP helmet spinning off his head.

  Charlie descended the stairs two at a time all the way down to the bottom, where the long, white-tiled, damp expanse of tunnel stretched off into the distance. All half a mile of it. He and his new companion began to run, their breath echoing in accompaniment to the muffled booms from above the surface. He knew that if a stray bomb were to fall into the river, a direct hit on the tunnel, that would be it – that was why the poor ARP fella had tried to stop them. But he couldn’t think about that, he just concentrated on the far end of the tunnel and kept his legs and arms pumping.

  Back in the shelter nobody spoke. There was no human sound apart from the odd involuntary yelp and scream when a bomb fell nearby and the crying of a couple of small children. Rose held Val to her chest and rocked back and forward. The raid had been going on for nearly an hour, yet still the planes were passing overhead and dropping bomb after bomb after bomb. Surely there’d be nothing left up there now; everything must be either burning or flattened. She knew it was daft, but she kept thinking about the second half of the buttered bun she’d left on the table.

  Charlie’s thighs screamed with fatigue as he bounded up the stairs at the North Woolwich end of the tunnel. He was gasping for breath and the sweat was pouring off him, but he gritted his teeth and kept climbing. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got to the top but somehow he’d get across to Silvertown.

  When he reached the top, startling the ARP warden stationed outside, he looked around in disbelief. It was bad enough viewed from the other side, but up close nothing seemed real. The sky was completely obliterated by thick black smoke, darker than night, yet the fact that just about every building was burning meant that at ground level there was an orange-hued light, as bright as daylight. There were people running towards the pier.

  ‘Why are they running to the pier?’ he shouted to the warden above the roar of the flames and the whistle of the bombs.

  ‘Boats,’ the man replied. ‘There are boats turning up to get people off and take them up the river, up west, where it’s safe.’

  It was an option, thought Charlie, but how would he get down to Silvertown and then back here with Rose and Val? He saw a boy of about twelve on a bike, painted yellow, and called him over.

  ‘I need your bike, son,’ he said. ‘My family’s over there, in Silvertown.’

  He gestured at the source of the thick black smoke that had blotted out the sun.

  ‘I can’t, mister,’ he replied. ‘I’m an ARP messenger. I’ve got to get to the fire station.’

  Charlie released his grip on the bike and let the lad go with a thin-lipped nod of resignation. Then he had a thought. He was close to the beer stores where he sometimes loaded up his van to do his delivery rounds. There’d be vans there. He ran to the stores and tried the gates but they were locked. Picking up a stone he smashed open the padlock and ran inside, only to find the
shed where the spare vans were kept had collapsed on top of the vehicles.

  He punched the wall of the nearest shed in frustration. Then he had another thought. The shed he’d just punched was where old Fred, one of the supervisors, sometimes left his motorbike if he was taking one of the vans home at the weekend. He wrenched the door open and, sure enough, there was Fred’s bike, and it had the key in the ignition.

  ‘Bless you, Fred,’ shouted Charlie and swung his leg over the machine. Just before he gunned the engine, he heard the all-clear siren sound.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  In the shelter people began to realise that above the roar of the conflagration the hum of aircraft engines appeared to have stopped. The door to the shelter opened and a man in an ARP helmet, his face blackened and shiny, said, ‘They’ve just sounded the all-clear.’

  He swallowed and said, ‘But be careful out there, if you go out. The whole bloody world’s on fire.’

  Rose followed the straggle of people up the stairs and then out towards the loading bay. Someone had arranged a couple of wooden crates as steps and she descended carefully, but her eyes were wide with horror at what she saw. Everything was on fire. The heat prickled her skin and the orange-red light struck her as the weirdest light she’d ever seen, terrifying yet strangely beautiful, calming even. The thunder and crackle of the flames meant people had to shout to communicate and she could hear the bells of fire engines. From behind and to the left she heard a rumble: it was the burning grain refinery further along the river collapsing into the Thames. She stepped tentatively out from beneath the extending roof of the loading bay and then saw the blackness in the sky above. Next door to Tate & Lyle, Silver’s rubber works was burning fiercely, most of the buildings now just blazing shells, with flames leaping high into the darkness and the occasional crash of ceilings collapsing inside. Dazed, she walked out into Factory Road towards the railway bridge and started to climb, holding Val against her shoulder. When she reached the top and looked across the debris-strewn Connaught Road to Constance Street the scene was one of absolute devastation. Cundy’s hadn’t taken a direct hit but all its windows had been blown in. A fire appliance was parked across the end of Constance Street and two hosepipes snaked away over the cobbles, where, on the left-hand side, the terrace of buildings that included the Greenwood laundry and their family home of a quarter of a century was gone, just a pile of masonry and splintered timber. Firemen were working on the burning buildings that could possibly be saved further up the street, but there was so much damage and so many burning houses that Rose, who had been born there and lived all her life in this street at the heart of Silvertown, barely recognised it. Suddenly she became aware that the air was filled with billowing flakes, like snow, floating and cascading through the air and dropping gently to the ground – only these snowflakes were black, with an orange glow at their edges. It was fragments of burnt paper from the paper mill, falling like a black blizzard from a featureless black sky.

  Charlie had ridden a motorcycle in the past but he was far from being an expert. By trial and error he zigzagged and lurched along Albert Road until he got the hang of it. The heat from the fires was almost unbearable – one roadside telegraph pole outside a burning shop burst into flames apparently spontaneously – but he crouched low over the handlebars until, a couple of hundred yards short of the sugar refinery, he saw what appeared to be volcanic lava oozing across the road, black with burning orange flecks and blue flames playing across the top. It was the tar distillery: one of the tanks must have taken a hit and the tar was spreading out from the works and across the road. Charlie couldn’t risk the tyres of the bike, so he skidded to a halt and leaned it against some railings above a low wall. Then he hopped on to the wall, grasped the railings and worked his way along them until he was clear of the tar and could rejoin the road again. At one point, halfway along, something clanged against the railings about ten yards away – a paint tin. The Pinchin & Johnson paint factory, he thought; it must be burning and turning the bloody paint tins into mortars. As he ran towards Constance Street another paint tin flew out of the dark sky and hit the ground a few yards away, exploding into flames.

  As he got closer he saw the fire engine across the end of Constance Street and a small knot of people standing near it looking up the street. Skidding to a halt he saw what was left of the Greenwood home and wrapped his arms around his head. He knew that Rose would have taken the baby to a shelter, probably the Tate’s one, but that didn’t stop the tiny chill sliver of fear in his stomach that told him, for whatever reason, they’d stayed behind and were now under that pile of rubble.

  He’d try Tate’s first, he thought, and turned and ran for the footbridge, taking the steps three at a time, turning at the top to cross the railway line, then looking up and seeing his wife and baby daughter standing right there in front of him.

  There was no time to be relieved. He grabbed Rose’s shoulders and shouted, ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘They all left before the raid,’ she screamed, holding her hand protectively around the back of Val’s head. ‘There was just me and the baby.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Right, we’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a motorbike but it’s further up the way. Follow me.’

  They scampered down the steps of the bridge and ran up Albert Road, swerving between the people running back and forth and watching out for the debris and burning paint tins that still shot through the air. They reached the slick of molten tar and Charlie motioned at Rose to hand him the baby. He pressed Val to his chest in the crook of his left arm, grasped the railings with his right and pulled himself up and along until he reached the other side, and motioned Rose to follow. When she reached the other side of the tar he handed her the crying baby, straddled the motorcycle and shouted at Rose to climb on behind him. She slung her leg over, held Val tightly against her chest with her right arm and wrapped her left around Charlie. He revved the engine and they sped off back towards North Woolwich, swerving around the spilled masonry of collapsed buildings and a couple of what Rose thought at first were burning logs but later realised were burning people.

  When they reached the queue for the boats at North Woolwich, Charlie realised they might wait for ever until it was their turn. If they stayed on the bike he could take them out to relatives in Essex, away from the docks, away from the fires, away from the burning remains of Silvertown. He reached the bascule bridge over the King George V Dock just as the sirens sounded again.

  Oh God, thought Rose, they’re coming back.

  ‘That raid was incendiaries,’ said Charlie over his shoulder. ‘They’re just to light the way! This next raid’s going to be even worse.’

  A policeman waved them to stop just before they crossed the bridge.

  ‘The sirens are going. You’ll have to go back to the shelter,’ he shouted above the tumult.

  ‘What?’ said Charlie.

  ‘You’ll have to go in the nearest shelter. They’re coming back, more bombs, can’t let anyone over the bridge.’

  For a second Charlie sat astride the bike, the engine idling. He was trying to work out which other ways he could take, but then realised that with Silvertown being an island, this was the best, in fact the only chance of getting out before the bombers returned. He beckoned the policeman towards him, as if he wanted to tell him something. The officer leaned forward.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Charlie, and quick as a flash landed a punch square on the policeman’s jaw. It wasn’t enough to do serious damage, but as the stunned officer reeled back, it bought Charlie the time to rev the engine, shoot the bike over the bridge and race off towards Romford.

  When they reached Charlie’s relatives’ home and he killed the bike engine, it took Rose a good few seconds before she allowed herself to release her grip around her husband’s midriff. She looked at Valerie: the baby was still weepy, her cheeks wet with tears and a trail of shiny slime glistened und
er her nostrils. Other than that, she seemed no worse for wear. Charlie, his shirt covered in a black sheen and peppered with small holes from sparks and the flakes of burning paper, reached out and took the child from her. Rose climbed off the motorcycle, took her daughter back and the three of them went inside. It was only when she’d had a cup of strong, sweet tea that she became aware of the searing pain in her thigh. She hitched up her skirt and saw an angry red welt. For the whole journey she’d had her leg pressed against the exhaust pipe but had been so petrified she hadn’t felt any pain at all. The burn was in almost exactly the same place as her father’s had been.

  Across London, in Shepherd’s Bush, Norah had pointed out of the window and commented on what a striking sunset there was. John stood up and went to the window.

  ‘You daft mare,’ he said. ‘That’s not the sunset. That’s the east.’

  Nell stood up and joined them, looking across at the curious red glow above the trees, and her blood ran cold.

  ‘That’s not just the east,’ she said. ‘That’s Silvertown.’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Charlie had been right: the planes did return that night, for an eight-hour bombing raid that went on until the early hours of the morning. The streets of Silvertown, like the rest of the riverside areas of east London, shuddered with the impact of high explosives, fizzed with shrapnel and roared with the sounds of flames and collapsing masonry. On that September night 436 people died in the raids and more than 1,600 were seriously injured, and this was just the beginning: the bombers would return every night, every single night, until 2 November – 57 consecutive nights of bombing, a period during which more than 22,000 Londoners would lose their lives.

  The scale of the devastation wrought by the Blitz is clear even from the electoral roll. In 1939 there were 1,155 registered voters in central Silvertown. By 1945 that number had reduced to just 64. Of those 64, nine were still living at the same address as they had been at the outbreak of the war.