The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  ‘WE ARE QUITE ALRIGHT,’ Diana assured him, and she wondered if she had shouted this because the fireman started slightly. She had heard the words quite clearly inside her own head but not in her ears, which was an odd sensation.

  The fireman made some reply. He held out both arms as though he would take Abigail from her but Diana clasped her child tighter to her and after a moment the man appeared to be called away to help elsewhere as he stood up and left. But they were quite alright, she and Abigail, and after a time Diana got unsteadily to her feet, for they could not remain here. And why had the fireman ignored the poor, stricken little girl? she wondered. Perhaps he had not seen her, for she lay quietly beside the stretcher. She was oddly still. Surely the poor child could not believe her mother was alive?

  It was time. Awkwardly, stiffly, Diana got to her knees. Her legs quivered beneath her, as feeble as cardboard, but did not give way. She took a tentative step then another before turning back and reaching down to scoop up Teddy: he had survived; she would not abandon him now. Abigail would never forgive her. They made their way, scrambling and uncertain, up onto the platform. From here they made their way to the stretcher and Diana kneeled down beside the lifeless form covered by the grey blanket where the single bare foot protruded. She wanted to say a prayer—it would be a prayer not just for the dead woman but for them all, the dead woman’s child and herself and her own child—but in the end she said nothing as she didn’t know what such a prayer might sound like.

  It was time. She lowered her gaze to Abigail’s face, which was perfect, flawless, untouched, just as though the explosion had sucked the breath out of her, had sucked the life from her body. So still. She could be sleeping. No sign of an injury, nothing to show that she was gone, just an absence of life. Diana kneeled. Another Diana, watching from very far above, saw her take the lifeless form that was at her breast and lay it beside the dead woman. Saw her bend over and for the final time kiss her child’s smooth, white face. Saw her get calmly to her feet. Her child was dead.

  She turned to the little girl who had lost her mother and who was crouching, senseless in her grief, beside her mother’s body, and she picked the child up in both arms and walked out of the station with her.

  Outside the dawn had come. Brilliant sunlight blinded them. A dozen, two dozen people milled about. Rescued shelterers sat on the floor with blankets wrapped around them. First-aid crews handed out steaming mugs, men from a fire crew stood silently sipping drinks. Hoses and buckets and shovels and axes lay in piles at their feet. Stretchers were being loaded into waiting ambulances, a young woman with a limp was being led away. A man was having his head bandaged, his face and hands bloodied. The entrance to the station was blackened and smouldering, many of the bricks charred where a fire had broken out. It had rained in the night so that everything was shiny with that damp after-rain smell, and after the shouts and cries and screams and the crash of falling rubble there was now the silence of a sky free of bombers and searchlights and flak, the silence of an English winter morning.

  Diana saw all this and saw none of it. The roaring continued in her ears but she could make out other sounds now, too, though they were muffled and that was fine. The great pressing weight had gone, right at the very moment that it had overwhelmed her. A woman in a maroon apron reared into her line of vision to thrust a mug of tea into her hands, to place a blanket around her, but Diana veered away from the woman. She tasted dust and ash on her lips. She swallowed and ash coated her tongue and her throat. She picked her way over the debris, passing piles of rubble and the twisted girders of smouldering metal and the skeletons of houses that had been hit during the night. Hoses were strewn across the streets and huge puddles of water were everywhere. A column of thick black smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, covering everything with a choking, seared smell that grabbed at the windpipe and sucked the air out of her lungs. Many of the buildings had been cordoned off. On the ground were strewn pieces of furniture, items of clothing, a doll’s head. Odd shoes. A hat. On the corner of Bethnal Green Road someone had hung a Union Jack and it fluttered limply in the chill winter air.

  Diana picked her way carefully, maintaining her balance with difficulty as she held the little girl in both arms, though unhampered by the little blue travelling case, which she had not brought with her nor even given a thought to. They made their way to a bus stop. Surprisingly they did not have to wait long. London had been bombed and people had died but this morning the birds were singing and the buses were running. A number 8 bus came along and they got on and the bus pulled away and left.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  North Africa

  Gerald Meadows kneeled down beside a dead German officer and saw that the man’s eyes had been picked out by vultures. Two gaping black holes stared blankly back at him and a swarm of flies shot into the air and swirled angrily about him. Otherwise the man’s face was untouched, the flesh puckered a little and peeling from the sun, but the forage cap still on his head, his unit insignia glinting in the sun, his uniform, that of a captain in the Afrika Korps, intact. His holster was empty. Someone had been here before them. The man was lying on his back and Gerald could see no obvious sign of how he had died. If he turned the fellow over he would see some gaping wound in the back of his skull or a scorched, bloodied hole in his back.

  Gerald stood up. They were not here to investigate anyone’s death.

  A short distance away a burnt-out armoured vehicle lay on its side as though it had struck a mine or been hit by an anti-tank missile. Perhaps the dead officer had been thrown from the car. It was a distance of thirty, forty yards but it was possible. Anything was possible, it seemed, in war. The limits of what one assumed was possible, in terms of human endeavour, human survival, human depravity, just kept expanding. Perhaps there was no limit. Perhaps the very notion of a limit was pointless.

  Gerald walked away from the dead officer, ostensibly to look over the burnt-out vehicle but really just for form’s sake. The vehicle had been destroyed, there was nothing salvageable. The upholstery was gone, the radio melted, even its markings had been burned off. It had clearly been here a long time, months perhaps. And yet the corpse was fresh. In the desert a two-day-old corpse was bloated and blackened and riddled with maggots. If you pulled, even gently, at a limb while searching for documents or identity discs it would come off in your hand.

  But this corpse was fresh. Where had he come from, then?

  The war here in the desert had ended six months ago with the capture of Tunis. Most of Rommel’s troops and what remained of the Italian forces had been rounded up. Most, but not all. Some had escaped, made their way along the coast hoping for some sort of Dunkirk-esque evacuation by the German Navy that had never eventuated, or fled south into the Blue—like this chap, presumably. Had he been trying to get back to his own lines all this time? He would have been better off surrendering to the Allied forces rather than dying out here alone, in a desert, his eyes plucked out by vultures.

  I would have surrendered, thought Gerald.

  He studied the ground. Clearly the poor bastard had not come here on foot, yet there were no tracks, or none discernible in the rough scrubby terrain. Desert stretched in all directions, rocky and impassable in this part, unscaleable soft sand dunes elsewhere, and it was odd, he reflected, referring to it as ‘the Blue’, for there was every colour in the desert except blue. But that was what the men called it. And it was beautiful at dawn and at dusk when the myriad colours, the sudden change in temperature, made you stand in awe to see it. The rest of the time it was a hellish cauldron.

  And the flies. They were enough to send a sane man crazy. He brushed them away from his face and readjusted the scarf that he wore wrapped Arab-style around his head. It was not official military headgear but the usual rules did not seem to apply in the desert. He had arrived fresh off a troopship three years earlier, laden down with all manner of kit, none of which seemed to have been designed with desert warfare in mind. Now all he wor
e—all any of the men wore—were his boots, a single pair of khaki drill shorts, a shirt so caked in dried sweat it was stiff as a board, and the headscarf. Aside from a change of underwear and a groundsheet and his mess tin and canteen, this was all the kit he had. It was all he needed.

  Enderby and Crouch stood a little distance away, not together, smoking their foul cigarettes. Enderby, their gunner, stood in the shade provided by their stationary tank, squinting at some papers he had pulled from his pocket. Crouch, their driver, stood a little further away on a slight rise, surveying the horizon, a hand shielding his eyes, the other hand swatting the unceasing flies. They both waited silently, patiently, unquestioningly, for Gerald to decide what they would do next.

  What would they do next? He wasn’t entirely sure.

  It had bothered him at first, that constant need to give orders, to make decisions. It had seemed wearying, burdensome, potentially catastrophic, but they had survived thus far. Indeed, it had turned out that his decisions made very little difference. They would stay the night or move on; they would head south or bear east, they would stop and investigate, they would continue on their way. None of it actually seemed to matter. The war in the desert was over, the rest of the division had landed in Italy in September and were now back in England for rest, refitting and retraining. A handful of skeleton units had been left behind on a mopping-up operation: salvage and rescue, though there was nothing to salvage and no one to rescue.

  Gerald pulled a battered chart and his sun compass from his shirt pocket and studied both carefully, hoping to find something that would help him. There was nothing on the chart. It was a chart of the desert. They were some sixty or seventy miles south of Khoms, between Misrata on the Mediterranean coast and the desert settlement of Bani Walid, which was, one presumed—one hoped—somewhere to the west, though it had thus far eluded them. They weren’t lost, there was no question of that, it was just that their exact position at this moment was tricky to pinpoint. Their tank had a hundred-and-thirty-mile range and they had enough petrol for one more refuelling, assuming the petrol had not evaporated in the can.

  The rest of the division had landed in Italy and they had been left behind. Gerald hadn’t questioned it, one didn’t, though the assumption among one’s fellow officers was that one was chomping at the bit to follow the action, to get across to Italy. In truth, it had been a relief to be left to trundle around the desert in a light tank. But now the division was back in England, and he and Enderby and Crouch were stuck in the desert unable to find the only settlement for hundreds of miles. It was no longer a relief. Gerald stuffed the chart and the compass back in his pocket and looked over at his men.

  Enderby and Crouch. They sounded like a small but long-established firm of solicitors whose business was made up entirely of wills, entails and probate. Gerald rather liked the firm of Enderby and Crouch. He sometimes imagined their offices, housed in a Georgian building on one side of a square in a small market town in Suffolk perhaps, or Lincolnshire.

  The reality of Enderby and Crouch was somewhat different. Enderby, a short, taciturn dairy farmer from Northallerton, had reddish-blond hair, ears that protruded like jug handles and a fair complexion well suited to the low skies, short days and endless winters of North Yorkshire and utterly unsuited to the crippling heat and relentless sun of the Western Desert, so that his skin was permanently burnt, blistered and peeling.

  Crouch, who was equally diminutive, heralded from Walthamstow in north-east London and had worked at Smithfield meat market before the war. He had something of the disreputable bookie about him, and where Enderby had a thin, almost malnourished frame, Crouch was lean and wiry, packed with all the pugnacious energy of a bantamweight boxer. He viewed the world through suspicious eyes and sharp features and a mass of very dark, brylcreemed hair, and there was Jewish blood, Gerald presumed, a generation or so back.

  The fact that both men were below average height perhaps went some way to explaining their presence in the tank regiment. It certainly wasn’t their skill as soldiers. You didn’t want a six-foot chap in a tiny, cramped vehicle with no windows save for a flap through which the driver could see out and a turret to climb in through. Gerald knew this because he was a shade under six foot himself and could attest to how extremely inconvenient it was.

  Enderby and Crouch did not like each other. They tolerated each other when the confines of the tank dictated it, but once the turret hatch was open and they were both outside smoking their foul cigarettes or striking up a brew they squabbled like a married couple, and Gerald, for the most part, let them—so long as it didn’t come to blows, which occasionally it did. He had been presented with the pair of them in November and the three of them had been making short, and sometimes longer, incursions into the Blue ever since.

  In the new year their field of operations had expanded south and west, and they had encountered only unresponsive smoking Arab men on camels, the occasional opportunistic civilian Europeans driving big old thirties cars who had resurfaced now that the war in the desert was ended, and one or two other straggling Allied units like themselves. They had found no sign of the enemy, other than corpses and burnt-out equipment and vehicles. Anyone who had made it this far had either died or turned back. It had been five days since they had left GHQ and they were running low on provisions as well as fuel. Their means of transport on this seemingly unending and purposeless mission was a Light Mk VI, a tank that had once been the mainstay of Britain’s overseas territories but was now largely redundant. Vickers had ended production four years ago when the division had switched to the heavier Matilda and Cruiser tanks and later the American Grants and Shermans. The Mk VI had an off-road top speed of twenty-five miles per hour, which meant it could be outstripped by all but the most sluggish Panzer. It had space for just three crew: the gunner, a driver and the commander, who doubled as radio operator. The radio, their only link back to GHQ and the outside world, did not operate at this range, though every so often Gerald placed the headphones over his ears and listened to the unvarying and eerie storm of static that seemed, to him, to be the sound of the desert. As well as a short-range radio the Mk VI was fitted with one .303-inch gun, which had jammed the only time they had tried to use it, and one .50-inch Vickers machine gun. The Mk VI’s half-inch of armour stopped rifle fire and machine-gun bullets sure enough, but against the German 88mm anti-tank guns it afforded as much protection as, say, a tennis net might.

  ‘What’s the score, then, guv’nor?’ said Crouch, coming down from his position on the ridge, scratching his backside furiously and shaking his head disgustedly as he spat out a fly. The muscles in his sinewy arms rippled beneath the leathery-brown skin and it was an easy stretch to see him right back at Smithfield after the war, a carcass slung over his shoulder, in bloodied white overalls caked in sawdust. He would survive, Crouch would, when others who had shone more brightly, who had made a difference, had died.

  Gerald thought of Ashby, just briefly, and then he stopped.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Crouch,’ he replied mildly, fishing for a cigarette. Crouch’s guess was not as good as his, they both knew that, and it didn’t need to be, Crouch being the trooper and Gerald being his commanding officer, but it served them both to relax the formalities a bit. It made being stuck in a small tank with two other men just bearable. For they all slept together under the same tarpaulin at night and they all shared the same rations. They all knew when Crouch’s dysentery had returned and that Enderby had not been able to shit in five days. And they all knew why they were really here. If they had been a crack team they would have been on that troopship heading towards the Italian coast, they would be with the Americans fighting their way towards Rome. As it was they were lumbering about the desert in a clapped-out Mk VI mopping up. None of them had any illusions about this nor any complaints, and as such Gerald could see no reason why they needed to be forever saluting and jumping to attention and all that nonsense, not in the desert.

  And
they had done their bit, had taken part in the skirmishes around Mersa Matruh and Sidi Barrani in late ’40 and early ’41, arriving in Tobruk to see the Italians surrendering in their thousands. They had retreated with the rest of the division to Cairo in ’42 after Rommel and the Afrika Korps had landed, they had played their part in both the El Alamein battles. They had followed the division into Tripoli a year ago and six months later had finally linked up with the Americans and swept triumphantly into Tunis. They had seen the King himself thanking the troops. In three years they had come under fire, they had experienced mechanical failures in the middle of minefields, their guns had jammed, they had had their tank shot from under them and had leaped for their lives under enemy fire, they had become bogged and stranded and lost, they had rounded up prisoners, they had shot at their own troops in the madness and the confusion and been shot at from above by the RAF. They had seen men die and had seen other men scream with pain and cry out for their mothers. They had each of them played his part and the war, this part of the war at least, had been won.

  If it had been left to him, Gerald accepted, they would probably have lost. But they had not lost. The war in the desert was over and better men than he had won it. And perhaps that was how it was—a handful of really good men made the decisions and performed heroically and everyone else just did what they were told.

  He thought of Ashby, whose Sherman had been hit by a shell on the first day of the advance at El Alamein. He had watched it happen and there had been no question of survivors. The earlier Shermans ran on high-powered and highly inflammable aircraft fuel. Ashby’s tank had exploded into a firebomb that had lit up the pre-dawn desert. That was how wars were won. And El Alamein had been a spectacular victory.

  It was best not to think. War was something one took part in but did not understand. He suspected it was so for most of the men, in this war and in previous ones.