The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  He pulled his coat around himself and slept.

  ‘Got hold of Radnor last night,’ said Yelland at his desk the following morning. His unruly grey hair was more unkempt than usual and his uniform appeared to have been slept in, but no one in the office commented on it or seemed to notice—but, then, most of them looked like this, Gerald realised. The only smart people he saw were the Americans and Miss Linklater.

  ‘Yes, Radnor was surprisingly forthcoming. Came back with all sorts of things. I wrote it down myself . . . sorry it’s impossible to read. Here let me . . . Now, the raid on the nights of the twenty-first and the twenty-second were mostly in the Westminster area, Embankment, Pimlico, Clapham, Surry Docks, Poplar, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Rotherhithe. One or two further out, Home Counties, but you said just London? Alright, forty-eight houses destroyed or badly damaged, mains out in six locations, two warehouses burned down, a number of other commercial and civil buildings and utilities damaged. There are twenty-three UXBs still waiting to be dealt with. As for casualties. . . twenty-nine dead, another sixty or so injured or missing—that’s everything from gravest not-likely-to-survive through to minor abrasions and concussions and the like.’ He paused and looked up. ‘Anything there sound like what you’re after?’

  ‘The buildings that were hit or damaged—any of them Underground stations or shelters?’

  Yelland perused his notes. ‘Railway lines hit at Clapham Junction, no casualties . . . Roof collapse at Bethnal Green tube—that what you want?’

  Was it? He could not imagine Diana travelling into the East End. She had taken Abigail to a pantomime, which surely would be in the West End somewhere.

  ‘I’m not sure. The dead—do you have any details?’

  ‘Family of six in Poplar, direct hit—grandparents, mother, three children. Elderly couple in their home. Three young women walking home in Stepney. One policeman. Four firemen. One warden. Man in his forties stabbed in an Underground station—though that was a murder, so probably not what you want.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Gerald, appalled. ‘Do you mean to say someone was murdered in a shelter during a raid?’

  ‘’Fraid so. Not so unusual as you might think, sadly. But this appears to be a gang-related incident. Black market. All sorts of shady things go on, unfortunately, under cover of the blackout.’

  ‘My God, we risk our lives while others line their pockets. It’s unforgivable!’

  ‘Quite so. Here we are: another family killed—four children and one baby. And an airman home on leave (unlucky) and two members of another family—brother and sister. Mother and child . . . and another mother and child.’ He looked up.

  ‘Where were the two mothers and children? Do you have that?’

  ‘Rotherhithe: twenty-seven-year-old mother and ten-year-old boy. And . . . Bethnal Green: mother and female child—age not shown.’

  Yelland looked up and their eyes met over the desk.

  Afterwards Gerald walked, in a sudden and heavy downpour up Kingsway to Holborn and caught the number 8 bus going east, which was a mistake. So many of the streets on the number 8’s route were blocked off and impassable that his journey of perhaps two miles took him the best part of an hour.

  The downpour ended as suddenly as it had begun. Seated, dripping wet, on the upper deck, Gerald looked out of the window at row after row of bombed buildings, at craters filled with water and choked with bomb weed that gave everything an abandoned, semi-permanent feel, as though the very landscape of London had been changed forever, as though an angry deity had torn the city up by its roots and tossed it about a bit then hurled it back down to Earth. He saw a city that had fallen from the sky.

  It got worse the further east the bus went. As it rounded Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate, as it passed through Shoreditch into Bethnal Green Road, the rows of gutted, destroyed houses became whole streets, one after another after another. Why would Diana come here? he wondered. Why would she bring Abigail here? He made himself look away, watching instead a sailor and his girl across the aisle eating chips from a greasy newspaper, a little boy sitting with his mother idly drawing shapes on the misty window with his finger while his mother totted up her ration-book points with a pencil and a scrap of paper. He was the only one looking out of the window and seeing the devastation. He was the only one shocked by it.

  The bus met an ambulance coming the other way and came to a juddering stop. In the street below he saw teams of workers—decontamination squads, Auxiliary Fire Service, rescue teams standing around a bombed-out building. Someone handed around mugs of tea. No one seemed in much of a hurry—a salvage operation rather than a rescue. The bus jerked forward and they made their way in slow stops and starts along the road. He saw a street market, a kosher butcher, a synagogue, a tailor, another tailor, shops advertising lockshen, borsht, salami, beigels. Most of the shop signs were in Yiddish. But what was there to buy? None of the shops he had seen so far had any food to sell.

  The bus passed beneath a railway bridge and he jumped off. He had never been anywhere east of Liverpool Street in his life but here was the station, right on the corner beside a large Georgian public house, the London Underground roundel clearly visible, a flight of steps leading downwards. The station was clearly closed—temporary wooden barriers marked off an area on all sides, blocking off the pub and half the road. There would be nothing to see; indeed, he could not be certain that this was even the right station. He crossed the road and as he came nearer he saw that someone had laid a posy of daisies, dandelions and rose bay willow herb at the top of the flight of steps.

  Quite suddenly his legs were encased in glue so that he could not feel the road beneath his feet. He groped for somewhere to place his hand, finding the solid and reassuring brickwork of the pub. Two people had died here—a mother and a little girl. People swirled around him, hurrying past with no more than a cursory glance, intent only on finding food to fill their empty baskets, on getting out of this cold winter morning. But the sun had burst through, unlikely as that had seemed just a short time earlier, and the fragments of broken glass in the gutters glinted brightly. After a while, Gerald stepped forward and climbed over the wooden barrier and made his way over. The posy had been laid against the steps and he crouched down and picked it up. It was bedraggled and rather pitiful after more than a week. There was no note, no card, no identification of any kind to indicate who had placed it there or for whom. A family member, or just a sympathetic neighbour? He sat back on his haunches and lifted his face to the sky, blinking in the unexpected sunlight. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again the sad little bunch of dead weeds was still clenched in his fist. He gently replaced it.

  ‘Lose someone, did you, luv?’

  He turned to see an elderly woman in a decrepit and sodden black coat and matching hat, leaning on an umbrella and peering short-sightedly at him. Wisps of long yellow-white hair escaped from the hat over a face that might have been beautiful half a century ago but was now puckered and wrinkled and mottled with age. She seemed to be about four foot tall.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ he replied, getting stiffly to his feet. ‘I think they might be dead. Do you happen to know the names of the mother and child who died here?’

  ‘Sorry, luv.’ She gave a sad little smile. ‘But you take yourself off to the Warden’s Station. They’ll be able to help you. It’s just round the corner, you can’t miss it.’ She began to shuffle off, placing the umbrella on the pavement before she attempted a first step. ‘I hopes you find ’em.’

  Gerald watched her go, inching her way painfully along the path, returning home—what kind of home? he wondered—with her basket empty. But she had pitied him, he realised.

  He found the Warden’s Station easily enough. It was little more than an Anderson shelter dug deep into the ground with a wall of sandbags at the entrance. A short flight of crudely made steps had been cut into the ground and led to a door which, presently, was closed. He went down the steps and rapped loudly and a moment lat
er the door was opened by a young lad with slicked-back hair and distrustful dark eyes in a crumpled and unbuttoned APR uniform. He viewed Gerald, his uniform, his stripes and insignia, with alarm, stepping out and hurriedly pulling the door shut behind him.

  ‘Meadows,’ Gerald said, giving the boy a brief nod. ‘I’m from the ministry. I’d like to ask you some questions about the raids on the twenty-first and the twenty-second. Details of casualties, that sort of thing. Shall we go inside?’

  The boy gaped at him, but Gerald pushed past him. Inside was an urn, a wireless, a field telephone, the hut lit by a single light bulb strung from the shelter’s ceiling. A trestle table took up most of the space, though all that was on it was a pile of creased papers. Tacked to the walls were spotters’ guides to enemy aircraft and diagrams of detonators and fuses. Logbooks were stacked against the wall and a collection of warden helmets hung from nails.

  There was also a girl, a slight thing with tiny, flashing eyes and a small rather pointed nose, cheaply peroxided hair and smudged lipstick. She was pulling on a dress, snapping on suspenders with clumsy, hurried fingers, and she stared in dull horror at Gerald’s arrival.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, and waited as the girl pulled down the hem of her dress in a failed attempt at dignity, rammed her feet into her shoes and snatched up coat and hat and swept passed him.

  The boy stood, wretched and uncertain, in the doorway, a schoolboy outside the headmaster’s office.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Prentice. Arthur Prentice.’ A chin thrust out in defiance.

  ‘Well, Mr Prentice, are you the senior warden here, or do I need to speak to someone else?’

  ‘Mr Regis’s District Warden, but he ain’t here. What is it you need to know?’ The boy had regained his composure now and stood with eyes narrowed unsure whether to be helpful or belligerent, to be in awe of the man from the ministry who was seated at his table, or resentful.

  ‘Alright. You’ll have to do. I need the names of the two casualties from the raid ten days ago. It was a mother and a daughter, I believe. Do you hold that kind of information here?’

  Prentice pushed himself up from the wall and nodded towards the logbooks. ‘’Course we do, that’s what the logbooks are for, innit? Not that I need ’em cause I can tell you straight off. It was Levin. Nancy Levin. That were the mother’s name.’

  ‘And the little girl?’

  At this the boy’s knowledge apparently failed him, for he slid over to the nearest logbook and opened it, making a show of moving his finger down a list of names. ‘Emily,’ he said at last, reading from the page. ‘Approximately three years of age. Killed when the roof collapsed at the station. Early hours of Sunday morning.’

  ‘Who identified the bodies? Were there surviving family members?’

  ‘Can’t tell you that, can I?’ replied Prentice, as though these questions were absurd. ‘We don’t keep that kind of information.’

  ‘Well, then, where did they live? Do you have other family members in your list of shelterers? That is how it works, isn’t it? You have a list of the names and addresses of the people in your district, and where each person shelters?’

  Clearly annoyed at being told his job, Prentice reached for another book and flipped through it with bad grace. ‘Odessa Street. Number forty-two. No other family members listed.’ He snapped the book shut with a bang.

  Gerald stood up. ‘Alright, one last question. Where are they now? Their . . . bodies, I mean. Where would they have been taken?’

  Prentice shrugged. ‘Mortuary, o’ course.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘Down the London Hospital, most likely. Or the temporary mortuary. They set one up in an old warehouse down Roman Road. You can’t miss it. Smell’ll take you there.’

  Gerald found Roman Road by crossing over Cambridge Heath Road and walking in an easterly direction. The only warehouse he could see had an ambulance stationed outside it and two women drivers standing beside the cab smoking.

  ‘Is this the temporary mortuary?’ he called out and they nodded wordlessly and looked away as he passed them.

  He walked to a small doorway cut into the brickwork, hesitant to go in. When he did, the place was deserted and he thought he had made a mistake until he saw, laid out against the front wall, three lifeless forms on stretchers covered by black tarpaulins. One had a blackened toe poking out to which a label had been attached. A short distance away a little group stood in solitary communion, an elderly woman weeping, a younger woman, her daughter perhaps, patting her arm, and two men in overalls standing nearby but clearly separate, observing in silence. One of them saw Gerald and came over. The man was in his forties and had the unmistakable exhausted demeanour of a doctor in wartime who had worked a thirty-six-hour shift and had no real expectation of ever seeing his bed again. His face was very pale, as were his eyebrows and lashes, as though he had never got quite enough exposure to sunlight. He wore a dirt-stained apron over his overalls and was carrying a pair of bloodied gloves.

  ‘Do you need help?’ His manner suggested he had helped a lot of people recently and none of it with a good outcome.

  Gerald gave the man a brief nod but did not introduce himself and the man did not look as if he expected it.

  ‘I’m looking for two bodies from the raid on the twenty-first and twenty-second—a mother and child. Name of Levin?’

  The man nodded. ‘Yes, I remember. Long gone I’m afraid. This is very much a temporary facility. Not sanitary to keep the bodies here longer than a day or two. These poor devils—’ he indicated the three covered forms ‘—were dug up last night. Been buried since Friday night. Now they’ve been identified they’ll be moved.’

  ‘Were they identified? The Levins? Were their remains claimed by the family?’

  ‘Identified, yes. By the warden I think. But not claimed, no. There was no family, far as I recall. Or none that turned up here. They were only here an hour or two before they got taken off to the London. May I ask what your interest is, Captain?’

  ‘It’s possible there was a misidentification,’ Gerald replied carefully. ‘What happened, to the bodies if they went unclaimed?’

  ‘They would have been cremated. But look here, I don’t think you can be right about a misidentification, not if the warden made the identification himself. They know their patch.’

  ‘Not the woman. The child. Easier to mistake a child, I think.’

  The man looked away, thinking or just tired, and if he was surprised by this line of questioning he did not show it. ‘Well, of course it’s possible,’ he conceded, turning back. ‘But pretty unlikely. In ’40 and ’41, yes, I can well believe all sorts of errors occurred—frankly, it was nothing short of pandemonium—but now, well, I’d be surprised. Unless someone wanted to perpetrate some sort of fraud.’

  He shrugged in a way that suggested it was beyond his jurisdiction and, frankly, beyond his concern.

  Gerald thanked him and left. It was, quite literally, a dead end.

  The women ambulance drivers were still smoking, quite possibly the same cigarettes; he had been inside the warehouse so short a time. Despite Prentice’s warning, the mortuary had not smelled. Perhaps that was because the bodies were frozen solid, or perhaps it meant he had got used to the smell of decay in the desert, where a man began to rot almost before he had taken his final breath.

  They had already been cremated.

  Afterwards, things became confused. He had been standing in the doorway of the warehouse watching the two women drivers, thinking about what he had just learned, but now, somehow, he was crouching on the ground with his hands over his ears as though in the middle of an enemy barrage. The world spun over and over itself like a film on a projector that has come off the spool. When it finally settled down one of the women was crouching before him, her hand on his shoulder, peering into his face. His eyes focused and he saw green eyes frowning a little, with concern and curiosity, the girl’s skin mottled red b
y the cold, thin lips chapped from the wind. An ordinary face, an ordinary girl who should have been serving in a shop or raising a family but who, thanks to a quirk of fate, was driving an ambulance in a war. She offered him a cigarette, and he saw that she had seen many, many frantic and desperate people enter this place and the same people leave a few moments later, their hopes destroyed.

  Gerald accepted her cigarette and got unsteadily to his feet. He had trouble lighting the cigarette and, when he had, smoked it quickly, feeling the nicotine blur his senses just enough to take the edge off them. The two women said nothing and he was grateful for this. When the cigarette had been smoked he left, pausing at the final moment to ask for directions to Odessa Street, which they gave him, promptly and without hesitation, and if you drove an ambulance in an air raid you probably did know your district pretty thoroughly.

  He returned to Bethnal Green Road and fought his way through the market stalls, and there was food to be had, for he saw a woman deftly slice and gut a live eel and his faintness returned. Elderly Jewish women selling hot beigels called out to him but otherwise no one bothered him, though many people looked at him, at his officer’s stripes. Sailors arm in arm with their girls met his gaze openly, while squaddies larking about fell silent as he passed, and he thought, for the first time in about a week, about Enderby and Crouch. It all seemed a very long time ago.

  He left the market behind and turned off the main road, passing a pawnbroker, garment manufacturers and cabinetmakers, French polishers and upholsterers, all with European names—Jewish names—an entire cottage industry going on much as it had for a hundred years, untouched by war.