by Andrea Levy
So much for women and children first: Bernard helped Arthur on to the steps of the shelter, whispering for him to ‘get a grip’, while I was still hurrying along Mr Plant, who was grumbling away in German. Then I stepped on to the ladder of the shelter and that was when I looked down. Blow me, Arthur had been out there day in day out and he’d not dug us a shelter: he’d burrowed a tunnel. I swear I couldn’t see the bottom. I climbed out again as Mr Plant passed by me, and Bernard managed a look of confusion behind the mask.
‘I’m not going down there – we’ll be buried alive,’ I told him.
‘Come on, Queenie,’ he said, all agitated.
‘Not on your life. They’re not meant to be that deep.’ I knew it had taken Arthur a long time to dig it, coming in night after night mucky and excited as a boy from a sandpit. Bernard would help at weekends. ‘How’s it coming along?’ I’d ask him. ‘Fine,’ he’d say. I didn’t know they’d dug half-way to Australia. ‘I’m not being buried alive, Bernard. I’ll die up here, if you don’t mind.’
And I thought I heard my husband say, ‘Suit yourself,’ but it might have just been the mask. He started to climb in but then the all-clear sounded. The half of him still sticking out of the ground reminded me of a worm. I took my gas mask off to giggle.
When I got back inside I talked to no one. I went straight to our bedroom, shut the door and turned the key in the lock. That raid was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in this house. Tingling with life, that was how I felt. I took two steps and leaped up on to the bed. There was no doubt about it, I was looking forward to this war.
When the real war started Mr Plant was gone.
‘That’s better all round,’ Bernard said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
It was all that ministry stuff Bernard complained about, although he was always at the bank and never at home to deal with it. The sinister government man with his notebook and sly looks over my shoulder, wanting to know who visited Mr Plant. Where did they go, what did they say?
‘He sits in his room,’ I told him. Sometimes he would come down and sit with Arthur on the step looking out on to the yard. He’d tell Arthur, in English with an accent better than Lord Haw-Haw’s, about the things he and his wife used to grow in their garden just outside Berlin. So when this ministry man visited to check up on our refugee, all I had to do was tell him, ‘Nothing and no one.’
But Bernard said, ‘These Jews are more trouble than they’re worth.’
They came really early in the morning to get him. ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked. Internment for his own protection. He wasn’t the only one who went from the street. There was a woman, too, and a family with little children from further down the road. They were put in the back of a lorry, although they were only taking them to Olympia. Mr Plant just had the little leather case that he’d first arrived with when Bernard couldn’t find an excuse quick enough not to give him the room. Just before leaving, Mr Plant tipped his hat at me. On seeing the lorry, he had stopped, frozen, for a second then shrugged.
‘He was German, you can’t be too careful,’ Bernard said, before going upstairs to lay newspaper down in the room.
‘You devils, you devils!’ I yelled, when I heard the first bombs exploding. ‘You devils.’ Those terrifying noises. They were hardly real – I had no image in my mind that went with a racket like that. It wasn’t wardrobes falling down the stairs. It wasn’t a lorry full of cans spilling over a road. It wasn’t the coalman dropping hundreds of sacks on the pavement outside. Our neighbours weren’t all slamming their doors at once. But somewhere people were learning about that din. Someone now had a vivid picture of what went on with all that commotion.
Bombers arrive like thunderclouds. Can you see them? Maybe not. But the threat sits on you like an ache. Majestic almost, those dark formations grimly determined on their target. Acks-acks shouting, ‘Over here, over here!’ trying to distract them but making no difference. We couldn’t get Arthur into the shelter when the real bombs came. No amount of coaxing or pushing could get him into another trench during a bombardment. He was off. Into his room and under the bed as if a bayonet was prodding his backside.
So it was just me and Bernard in the shelter, which was now a regulation four feet down. A little bunk each. A chair that Bernard usually sat on, it being next to the little table with the lamp. His knees seemed to be everywhere I turned, knobbly as a hammerhead even through his trousers. He read his paper, sniffing and making that queer dislodging-a-tickling-hair face. He’d clear his throat with such a phlegmy noise I thought he’d have to spit but then he’d blow his nose pushing his crumpled hankie up each nostril in turn to scour it out. The shelter started with the smell of damp earth, sharp as manure, and I felt like a daffodil waiting for spring. But after a few hours it became his breath – tobacco mixed with whiffs of digesting potato from dinner. Then the stale, under-the-blanket smells of a lifeless mouth. And there was me saying, ‘What was that? Did you hear that one? Oh, God, someone’s got it tonight . . . I hope Arthur didn’t hear that . . . Do you think he’s all right? That was close. Was that closer?’ and hearing absolutely nothing in reply. That shelter was so blinking noisy and so bloody quiet all at once.
* * *
Bernard became almost animated talking with the next-door neighbour, Mr Todd. ‘They’d be happier among their own kind,’ he said. The two of them, arms folded, heads practically touching and shaking sombrely. ‘Putting them here really isn’t doing anyone any good.’ I thought it must be Hitler outside our door. Or perhaps the entire Third Reich was moving in down our street. There was such a rumpus. Curtains were lifted to look, some stood in their front doors, windows were opened, endless disapproval was being tutted. But it wasn’t an invasion – it was a sadder sight than that. It was a family. A mother wearing a brown coat with one sleeve hanging off, carrying a baby wrapped in a shawl made of an old sheet. Her face not so much blank but unreadable as a corpse. And straggling behind her were four kids. Filthy, grimy mudlarks – sootier than any miners ever got. Their hair matted to string and flying this way and that. And they’re all staring around, looking up one minute at the houses, mouths gaping enchanted. Then in the next moment, feeling the tutting grown-ups watching them, they’re looking down at their feet. One of the children – could have been a boy or a girl it was that hard to tell – was pushing a pram. One wheel was buckled, and it wobbled so much another child stretched up trying to hold a couple of shabby boxes on to it. Then there were two little mites who were holding hands – one, a girl, carried a gas-mask box, the other, a boy, a little stuffed toy. The boy was wearing trousers too big for him – short trousers that were tied at the waist with string and came down to well below his ankles. And these two little ones were trying to keep up with the pram. And the pram was trying to keep up with the mother. And the mother was trying to keep pace with a rather smart woman dressed in a wool suit with a fake rose in the lapel, who was marching resolutely forward.
They were not the first such family, so Mr Todd told all the other neighbours. This was the third lot he’d seen and he hoped there would be no more. They’d been bombed out round Rotherhithe and someone high up in some ministry had decided they should be rehoused in the empty rooms down our street. Mrs Newman at number thirty was taking this lot.
‘I don’t want to,’ she told anyone who’d listen. ‘I’ve been made to. And, let me tell you, there are many people in this street that have more room than me.’
‘Is every waif and stray to end up here?’ Mr Todd asked. ‘I mean, we’ve got enough Poles living here to start their country anew. Now these Cockneys. I ask you.’
We weren’t getting that much bombing, not like in the East End. Some clown in the butcher’s said it was because if Hitler invaded he’d want somewhere nice to live. ‘Treasonous,’ that’s what Bernard said about that comment.
The little boy in the giant trousers tripped over the hem. He looked like a sack all splayed out on the pave
ment. He didn’t cry. Got picked up by his sister and carried on. I don’t know if he realised he’d dropped his stuffed toy. He looked back for a second but then had to rush to keep up. It lay there in the road, and got run over by a car, becoming camouflaged in muck. I picked it up. It was a soggy, wet, filthy little dog or horse made out of someone’s old sock with eyes sewn on in black wool.
‘What on earth are you doing with that?’ Bernard asked me, when I’d washed it and pegged it out on the line by its spindly legs that looked to be cut from an old glove. It came up quite well – made fluffy by the breeze. One of its legs needed a repair where it had started to unravel and I put a bow at its neck to make it look a little less forlorn.
I swear the attic room Mrs Newman had that family in was no bigger than our Anderson shelter. She looked to be storing them in a cupboard, not giving them somewhere to live. The mother had to push the little boy forward to take the toy from me. He didn’t recognise it. ‘It’s yours,’ I told him. ‘You dropped it.’
He turned it round in the air, then his face opened like a shiny present. ‘It’s Neddy,’ he said.
He showed it to his mum who said, ‘Say thank you to the lady, Albert.’
But he couldn’t quite manage it even when his sister hit him round the head and his mum said ‘Oi, you, stop that – if there’s any hitting to do, I’ll do it.’
Mrs Newman complained to me as I left that she couldn’t let the family in the bathroom because they smelt and were too filthy. ‘Well, what do you expect, if you won’t let them at a bath?’ I said. And she said, ‘I know you have plenty of rooms in your house, Mrs Bligh. You take them instead if you think you would do better.’
He’d got stubble on his chin, Bernard, almost a beard. Hadn’t been in the house long enough to get a shave. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair ungreased and ruffled, skin pale as a potato root. I probably looked as bad. I’d been in the same clothes for days, my hair only combed with a quick flick from my fingers. We’d spent every night in that blinking shelter for what felt like for ever. Sleep? Wasn’t that something we used to do during a peaceful night?
When they’re close, bombs whistle. Their melody is a sharp descending note that only sounds right when it ends with a bang. Then everything you thought was solidly fixed to this earth suddenly takes flight, for just a second, and then is put back down – if you’re lucky in the same place. Breath is ripped from your lungs, your eyes bulge, your stomach squeezes its contents up or out, and your heart races so unfamiliar you think it a clockwork toy. I remember fairgrounds – the helter skelter, the switchback – paying good money to make my face blanch, my knuckles whiten. In those days, before the war, I thought it fun to be scared witless.
I knew it would be close by the whistle – clear as the kettle on my stove. Bernard turned the page of his paper, lifting his chin to read something at the top, his lips involuntarily parting with the effort. I couldn’t say I heard the bang, I was just weightless for a moment, my arms swimming in air. He was still reading when I landed back down. Still concentrating on the news when everything that used to stand silent around us burst with clatter. Shrapnel and who-knows-what pelting the shelter like hail. Only his upper lip stood firm. And I swallowed back the sick that came up into my mouth.
When his newspaper started to rustle I looked round for the source of the breeze. When it began flapping, as if it was trying to bring a fire to life, I realised Bernard was trembling. His fists, tight as a baby’s, were gripping the pages, screwing up the words so they were unreadable.
‘Are you all right, Bernard?’ I was expecting no more than a grunt in reply.
‘Queenie,’ he said, softly. ‘That’s the house.’ He gulped then, and grabbed for another breath that wasn’t there. ‘Father . . . Father . . . Father in the house . . . That’s the house . . . gone . . . Queenie . . . Queenie . . . Father . . . in the house . . .’
A drowning man could breathe easier. I went to take the paper from him but his grip was so tight I had to rip it from his hands. And he was left with fists still clenching bits of torn paper. ‘Calm down, Bernard.’
He was gasping now, his chest jumping hiccups, ‘We’re going to die . . . die . . . here . . . Father . . . that was the house . . .’
‘Bernard, listen, calm down. It’s not our house. It wasn’t that close. Listen, let me have a look,’ I said.
I was on my knees and only turned round to open the curtain at the entrance when he howled a mighty, red-blooded, full-bodied ‘No!’ He lunged for me, flinging his arms round my waist to drag me back, then he swaddled me in his arms popping any last breath out of me.
‘No . . . no . . . not you . . . no, never . . .’ He buried his head in my neck, shuffled his knees up round me until I was totally captured by him. And I could see the house as he held me there. A hulking black mount against the sky. Intact. I ran my eye over all its corners – every one present and correct. Arthur was under the bed – probably dirty, scared, but all right.
‘I can see the house,’ I said. His gasps were pumping warm breath into my neck. ‘Arthur’s all right. It’s still there, Bernard, the house. Look – look for yourself.’ But he wouldn’t lift his head up, he just clung to me for safe-keeping like a toddler. And there I was, protecting my husband against those big bad incendiaries, that nasty flying shrapnel, and the horrid, horrid bombs from the naughty, naughty German planes. And the funny thing was I felt so peaceful being embraced by him and gently whispering, ‘There there, Bernard, there there.’
It was quieter outside by the time I felt his grip slowly release me. He shuffled away like he had shuffled towards me – sitting on his backside, his knees up. He didn’t look at me. Wiped his nose. Gathered up the paper from the floor, folded it and placed it on the table. He righted the toppled chair. Coughed, cleared his throat, smoothed his hair and sat down. And all the while I was watching him. There was a bitter smell of burning and whiffs of smoke were foggy inside the shelter. From outside there was shouting, feet running, crunching along on broken glass. And water was trickling somewhere. Bernard at last looked at me and I nodded to say, Hello, so you’re back. But his eyes didn’t hold my gaze for long. He looked to his hands, to his slowly intertwining fingers, and he licked his lips twice before murmuring, ‘I want you to know, Queenie, I do love you.’
Number thirty looked like a blinking skull. The bomb had come in through the roof of the house, down through the floors to explode on the inside. All the windows were gone, so was the front door. Which just left the shell, an empty head in the middle of a terrace. This skull was crowned with the crumbling jagged walls of what was left of the attic rooms. Open to the sky with the green wallpaper of one room and the brown paint of the other, the skull looked to be wearing a gaudy Christmas hat. Everything that was on the inside was now on the outside – the smashed wreckage of this home spilling over the pavements in great mountains of rubble, blocking the road and crunching underfoot. ‘You’ll be safe as houses,’ Auntie Dorothy had been very fond of saying. Anything solid she thought to be safe. Even Bernard. I was glad she wasn’t alive to have to face the fact that even solid can crumble.
Everyone was out to stare. Enraged at the devastation but relieved it wasn’t them and theirs. ‘Lucky they were in the shelter . . . Lucky no one was at home . . . Lucky no one’s buried alive in there.’ Mrs Newman, whose house it was, was left uncharacteristically speechless. Shock, the warden said, as someone took her away. It was only number thirty, nowhere else was touched. What the hell did that house have to do with this war? Was Hitler sleeping easier now he’d turned it into a heap of junk? Like all the other houses either side, we’d lost a few windows and some little bits of number thirty’s chimney went through our roof. But that was it.
‘That bomb had their name on it,’ Mr Todd decided.
We were all being kept back by a tin-hatted warden shouting, ‘It’s not safe to come too close. That lot could come down at any minute.’ While firemen with black faces and dreadfully tired e
yes were gingerly peering inside, pushing at walls, looking up, looking down, looking around.
‘Oh, fucking ’ell!’ That’s what the Rotherhithe woman said when she came home to see her tiny attic room now open to the sky.
‘There’s no need for language like that,’ Mr Todd said.
‘It’s understandable,’ I told him. ‘She’s just lost her house.’
‘It was not her house, Mrs Bligh.’
‘Oh, how would you like it?’
‘Could be me tomorrow and, let me assure you, I won’t be using language like that.’
The woman took no notice, slumping down to sit on a wall saying, ‘Has anyone got a fag?’ After more silent, disdainful rolling of eyes she was given one. She only had the two little mites with her, the others were still down in the Underground. And these two kids, scuttling like rats, disappeared over the rubble and into the house with the warden chasing them, shouting, ‘Get out of there, it’s not safe.’ The next minute the little boy, still in his overlong trousers, was being dragged out of the house by the warden who had him by the ear. His feet were nearly off the ground. And the warden was telling him, ‘Give that back. I saw that. That’s not yours.’
The mother was on her feet, ‘Oi, put ’im down.’
‘He’s got something, saw him pick it up. He’s put it in his mouth.’
‘Get off ’im.’
‘Not until I know what he’s got in his mouth. You shouldn’t be round here.’
‘They live here,’ I told him.
‘Here? They live here? You sure?’ the warden asked, while the mother was still shouting at him, ‘Let ’im go or I swear I’ll land you one. I’ve had enough – all right? Jus’ let ’im go.’ The little boy puffed out his cheeks then spat something on to the ground. It was a brooch.
‘There – little thief,’ the warden said, triumphantly.
‘He ain’t a thief!’ the mother shouted. She picked up the brooch.