The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  He would not picture the same scene in his own house, with his own family.

  There was something up ahead. Gerald snatched up the field glasses. Yes, a dark, square shape, not a building, too small for that, but definitely manmade.

  ‘Crouch, north thirty degrees!’

  It was a Panzer, unmistakable by its grey colouring. A big old Panzer III just sitting there, alone and abandoned, in a flat and utterly barren area of scree and gravel. Nothing else for miles in any direction. It was the first intact Panzer they had come across. What was it doing all the way out here? It had a range of only about ninety miles at most, and a top speed off-road of twelve miles per hour. She made the British Mk VI seem like a sports car by comparison. She was larger than their own Mk VI, a five-man vehicle with a three-man turret. At her hull was almost an inch of armour which made her invincible against the Allies’ anti-tank guns—if you took her face on. From the sides and the rear she was useless and a well-aimed machine gun could pierce her like a piece of cheese. She was an obsolete model, superseded by the Panzer IV years back, and perhaps that explained her presence out here, for she would not have been risked in battle, would in all likelihood have been abandoned during the final Axis retreat, or taken by those wishing to avoid the advancing Allies.

  He gave the order and they trundled warily towards it, pulling up fifty yards short. Crouch switched off the engine and inside the Mk VI no one spoke. After a moment Gerald jumped down and cautiously circled the immobile Panzer on foot. It was caked in a thick crust of sand and the caterpillar tracks were worn almost to shreds, but just below the turret the insignia of the Afrika Korps, a black cross and palm tree, was intact. The turret hatch was closed. Gerald walked over, aware that Crouch and Enderby were watching. The tank was abandoned; he was certain of this. The dust had settled all around it. No tracks were visible before or behind, though the terrain was so scrubby, the winds so quick and intense, that any tracks it might have made—even an hour ago—would long have vanished. He climbed up onto the body and stood for a moment beside the hatch. He was close enough to read the manufacturer’s details on the rim: DAIMLER-BENZ · STUTTGART · 1938. His heart was thudding in his chest, which was odd because the war in the desert was over and he had survived. But his heart was thudding.

  He eased open the latch and swung the lid back, brandishing his unloaded pistol as he did so and ducking lest a shot was fired. But no shot was fired. After a long moment he peered inside then jerked back at once as the smell of decaying flesh struck him. He turned away, gagging and choking. Bloody hell, he thought furiously. It had not even occurred to him someone might be dead in there. He stuck his head back inside, this time seeing the driver’s seat, the gunner’s perch, a damaged radio set.

  And a body.

  It was slumped over the fuel chamber at the rear of the tank, a gunner in fatigues, arms flung out before him, his cap on the floor at his feet, the side of his head dark red with matted hair and blood. A second wound, on his leg below the knee, was festering, the flesh black and putrid. Gerald pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose.

  ‘Crouch! Enderby! Get over here. Let’s get this poor bugger out.’

  If they were going to salvage the Panzer, and it was not clear to him if they would or would not—it might simply depend on how much fuel it had—they were not going to drive the thing away with a corpse inside.

  They came running, Crouch first, Enderby a few yards behind, both with that odd reluctant run of men commanded to do something they really had no wish to do.

  ‘Looks like a gunshot wound,’ said Gerald, climbing down inside the Panzer. His foot kicked a Luger that had been lying on the floor near the man’s cap, sending it skidding away beneath the driver’s foot pedals. As it began to cross his mind that the man had pulled the trigger himself, that the gaping wound in the side of his head was self-inflicted, the body let out a groan.

  Gerald jumped back, banging his head painfully on the roof. Crouch, who was climbing after him, lost his footing and fell with a sickening thud onto the metal floor. Enderby, still standing outside on the top of the tank, fell back with a shout and disappeared.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ cried Crouch, scrambling to his feet and backing away. ‘Bugger’s not dead,’ he added unnecessarily.

  ‘Well, he’s not exactly going anywhere, is he?’ said Gerald, prodding the man with the end of his pistol, which merely elicited another groan. The man was alive, but barely so. ‘Come on, let’s get him out, for God’s sake!’ And they manhandled the fellow feet first out of the turret hatch and then over the side of the tank, where, horribly, they dropped him and he rolled off the tank and onto the ground and lay, face down, letting out a dreadful wheezing whine that was barely human.

  Dear God, thought Gerald. He scrambled down and they turned the man over and lay him on his back. The side of his skull was gone, blown away by the Luger, and there was nothing they could do for him. The other side of his face was quite untouched, and it was the face of a young man badly malnourished and unshaven for many weeks, his skin blistered and destroyed by the desert sun and deprivation. His eyes were wide open though they seemed not to see anything, thank God. Enderby fetched a canteen and they wet his lips, which were cracked and swollen and bloodied, but he was too far gone to notice.

  Dusk had come and they were going nowhere, now, till dawn. They broke out their meagre rations and, as the temperature began to drop, huddled on the groundsheet beside the tank and listened as the man made horrid gurgling, drowning sounds in the back of his throat.

  ‘Die, you bastard, die!’ muttered Crouch in a low voice.

  But it was almost dawn before the man took his final breath.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A man had no control over his life. It was daft to think otherwise.

  Five months ago the navy had placed Stoker 2nd Class Joe Levin on the corvette, HMS Polyanthus, on North Atlantic convoy duty. The Polyanthus had already survived a number of transatlantic crossings, cheating death, avoiding—somehow—the U-boats that roamed the northern oceans. The odds were against you. But a stoker spent his life in the ship’s engine room shovelling coal. He did not calculate probabilities, he did not plot positions on a chart. That was for other men.

  In September of ’43 the Polyanthus set off from Liverpool, part of a convoy of sixty-five merchant vessels escorted by nineteen warships bound for New York and Halifax.

  At the end of his first shift the sun emerged over the stern and Joe smoked a cigarette, gazing at the line of ships that stretched as far as the horizon, and he wondered how the U-boats, patrolling a line south of Greenland and directly in their path, could possibly miss them. The Germans had a new type of torpedo, one that homed in on the sound of a ship’s engine and its propeller. What could you do? Turn off your engine and drift? Or plough on and trust to luck? The stoker was the first to die when a torpedo struck, the last to make it to a lifeboat. And yet some convoys did make it through. He himself had crossed the Atlantic and he had returned. A line of sixty-five ships in an ocean this big was like trying to locate a single star in a galaxy full of stars.

  And so it was. Day after day there was no landfall and no sign of anyone or anything. The lashing grey waves merged with the low grey skies so that the war might have ended, the land might have been swallowed up by the ocean, and you would not know it.

  Some convoys did make it through.

  But not this one. On the sixth day, at a point somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, the U-boats found them. A Canadian ship, the St. Croix, was the first to be sunk. The Polyanthus, turning back to pick up survivors, was struck next. She broke up and sank so quickly barely a handful of men survived. Clinging to the scorched remnants of their ship through the night, some of the survivors froze to death. The remaining few were picked up at dawn by HMS Itchen.

  All but two. Two men in a lifeboat were missed. In the darkness and the rough seas, in all the chaos, and as their shipmates were pulled aboard the rescue ship, a st
oker and a petty officer watched helplessly as the current took them further and further away. The petty officer, mortally wounded in the explosion, died quite soon after. The stoker, who had been blown clean out of the vessel when the torpedo had struck and who remembered nothing at all of the explosion, now salvaged the dead man’s clothes in an effort to keep warm and pushed the man’s corpse overboard.

  Then he waited to die.

  A day later the Itchen was hit and sank, along with most of its crew and the few survivors from the Polyanthus who had been plucked from the ocean the day before. Stocker 2nd Class Joe Levin, after three days adrift, was picked up by a passing Polish merchant vessel and a week later was recuperating in a Liverpool hospital suffering nothing worse than hypothermia, dehydration and frostbite.

  He spent a fortnight in the Liverpool hospital, and while he lay in his bed on the ward with his fingers and toes in bandages, watching the nurses pad softly back and forth and listening to the seaman in the bed opposite scream for his mother, he found himself thinking about the lack of control a man had over his life and the futility of thinking otherwise. He thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who worked the night shifts and who smelled of carbolic soap and whose uniform rustled with starch so that he knew she was coming seconds before she entered the ward. At night he dreamed about the dead petty officer whom he had stripped and tipped overboard. He saw the man’s bloated corpse lying on the seabed in utter darkness many fathoms beneath the sea, then he saw the corpse picked clean by all the various creatures of the ocean until only a skeleton remained, but the skull still had eyes that watched him, accusingly.

  On his last night, as the rest of the ward slept and the seaman in the bed opposite wept quietly, the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent came to him in the still of the night. She crept into his bed and gave him what he had waited a fortnight for. It did not surprise him that she did so. He was a man who had cheated death and he had done so not with any great skill or prowess, but simply by dumb good fortune and the nurse recognised this. She gave herself to him, in part, as a reward but in some other, almost indefinable way, in the hope that his good fortune would rub off on her, would permeate her. She said nothing whatsoever to suggest this but Joe felt it and he did not question it.

  After two weeks in the hospital the navy had sent Joe home to recuperate and after more than three years at sea, after nearly four years away, he had had to learn how to live in a house with a wife and a small child. And they had had to learn how to live with him.

  An explosion somewhere to the south-east—the docks maybe—caused a low rumble and the air lit up a brilliant yellow and Joe dived for cover. The last thing he needed was a sky lit up like Guy Fawkes Night. He had found a narrow passageway between two buildings, barely wider than the breadth of a man’s shoulders, and he crouched there, swallowed by the shadows, until the sky turned black once more.

  It was the first time he had stopped running since he had left Nancy in the Underground station and he leaned his head back against the brickwork and closed his eyes, drawing in slow, deep breaths. He still wore the buff-coloured seaman’s duffle coat he had purloined from the warehouse he had taken refuge in and now he stuffed his hands into its pockets for warmth, feeling the coat stretch across his shoulders and ride up at his wrists, feeling his own stocky frame fit uneasily inside another man’s clothes. He pulled up the hood of the coat, wishing he had taken a hat. He was making his way south. He was, he believed, though it was difficult to be sure, in Three Colts Lane.

  He didn’t pause for long. Even in the air raid people were out and about. He eased himself to his feet and set off once more, moving in a low crouching run with both hands thrust out, partly for balance, because the ground was uneven at best, partly in case he ran slap bang into something or someone, because he could see no more than a yard or so in front of his face. The clouds that had blanketed this part of the city for some hours shifted and a pale moonlight now illuminated his way. Joe stopped dead. This wasn’t Three Colts Lane. He had missed his way in the blackout.

  Where, then, was he? He stood quite still, his heart hammering under his ribs, the boom of distant explosions rippling through the air and making the earth beneath his feet vibrate. There were buildings on both sides, warehouses perhaps, and a large structure a little way ahead that stretched up and over the road. A railway bridge. He listened for footsteps ahead or behind him but could make out nothing. You’d have to be crazy to be out in this—crazy or desperate.

  What was to be done? Go back and try to retrace his steps or press on and trust he’d find himself somewhere familiar soon enough?

  A train rattled over the bridge in the darkness, making a terrific sound in the deserted lane, and Joe realised the bombing had stopped, for a time at least. The train showed no lights but it was going east. This was the overground line that took you north-east through Walthamstow and Wood Green as far as Chingford, or north to Seven Sisters and Edmonton and Enfield. Only a goods train would be travelling at this hour. Carrying munitions, perhaps, or armaments. He stood quite still, waiting for it to pass, wincing every time the wheels sent sparks spraying into the darkness. It would make a good target for any stray passing bomber.

  The last railway truck rattled nosily overhead and was gone and the laneway shuddered into silence. Not silence: a rat scurried over his foot, distant sirens, shouts, the bells of emergency vehicles testified to the continuing chaos of the raid. But it was to the south, over towards the docks, wasn’t it? There had been no bombs behind him, from the direction in which he had just fled, had there?

  Joe turned, his fingers clenched tightly in his coat pocket, feeling every muscle, every nerve tense and ready to spring forward. He wanted to go back, to run full pelt back to the Underground station to find Nancy and Emily. In his head he was already running and his heart was racing and he was gulping down breath after breath to fill his aching lungs. But he had not moved.

  He mustn’t go back.

  He bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing deeply. He searched for a cigarette then stopped himself—the flare of the match would advertise his presence as accurately as a searchlight or the blast from a police whistle.

  After a moment he straightened up, feeling his alarm slowly dissipate.

  Behind him was the unmistakable crunch of a man’s footsteps on broken glass, a heavy step in boots, perhaps a fireman, policeman, serviceman. He didn’t wait to find out but set off once more, moving swiftly, under the railway bridge, keeping close to the side of the street, a shadow among shadows, finding his way not by memory or starlight but by instinct. This way was south and now this way and now this. When at last he swung into Whitechapel Road he stopped as though as he had walked into a wall. It was dark, of course, but his eyes had adjusted by now. He could sense the broad east–west thoroughfare before him and a little to his left the giant edifice of the London Hospital, black against a black sky.

  Thank God. Here was a place he had left behind when he had met Nancy, but here was a place he fled to now when he needed help. Something welled inside him. It was the same feeling he had had adrift in the lifeboat when the Polish ship had appeared out of the mist and his life had been saved.

  He waited a few minutes in the shadow before venturing to cross the wide road. Even in a blackout, with a raid going on half a mile away, Whitechapel Road was never entirely deserted. And there were plenty of men out tonight simply because there was a raid on, and each one of them was every bit as desperate as he was and would not hesitate to cut his throat and rob him if it advanced their own position. It wasn’t just men. Out of the darkness a girl emerged, shivering in a summer dress, her thin arms wrapped around herself, pacing the roadside. She turned to stare at him, her face was as white as the whites of her eyes. You’d have to be desperate to ply your wares in a raid, in the blackout, on a night this cold. But there was always someone more desperate than yourself, that was what war taught you.

  The
girl saw him, called out to him, but her words were lost in another explosion. This time it was to the west, towards the City, and under its cover Joe darted over the road and plunged down the first side street he came to, and then another. He heard the drone of an enemy aircraft right overhead and he dived into a doorway, crouching, his hands covering his head.

  After his three days adrift in the North Atlantic he had spent three months at home recuperating. One month for each day—that had seemed the least the navy could do; three months for the entire ship’s company lost, eighty-five men, roughly one day for each man. Two or three days each, he reckoned, for the few who had survived and been picked up by the Itchen only to be torpedoed a day or so later, and a day or two for the petty officer whose body he had tipped out of the lifeboat and who lay now at the bottom of the ocean. And with each day of his leave some part of him had thought, The navy has forgotten about me, they have forgotten I am here. If I just keep my head down they will let me be. For, by then, he had learned how to be at home with his family, and they had learned how to be with him.

  It had not been easy. He had been married so short a time before his call-up that all he wanted on his return was to be alone with his wife, to remember who she was, to learn what it meant to be a husband. But they were not alone. There was Emily, who had grown up in a house with only her mum and the Rosenthals upstairs, who had no place in her world for a dad, had no use for one. She had screamed when he had arrived home in his uniform with his sun-blistered skin and his bristly chin and smelling of the sea. Nancy knew how to handle her and he did not. He learned, quickly, to resent how much of his wife’s time, his wife’s energy, the kid gobbled up.