The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Come on,’ he said, throwing a stick for Hector. ‘Let’s walk into Greenwich Park and get a proper view of the river and the City from General Wolfe’s statue. At least St Paul’s is still standing. That’s something to be grateful for.’

  ‘And Big Ben,’ she said, falling into step beside him. ‘Though you can’t see it as clearly from the Park as you can St Paul’s. You’d think two such landmarks would be prime targets, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I imagine they are,’ Leon said dryly, looking eastwards into the winter-grey sky, wondering when the Luftwaffe would next appear; wondering how much more punishment the battered city could take. ‘I imagine all that’s spared them so far is luck.’

  Three nights later it seemed to both of them as if all luck for London had run out. It was late evening when the radio went off without warning.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ Kate said, rolling her knitting up and sticking her knitting needles firmly into her ball of wool. ‘I think there’ll be time to make a Thermos of tea, there usually is. Will you take Hector into the shelter for me while I put the kettle on?’

  ‘No,’ Leon said, closing the atlas he had been studying and rising to his feet. ‘I won’t.’

  Her eyes widened.

  He held his hand out to her, helping her to her feet. ‘I won’t do it, because that’s what you’re going to do. I’m the one who’s going to stay behind and make a Thermos of tea. Take your knitting with you.’ The rising wail of sirens nearly drowned his voice. ‘And my atlas.’

  Though his voice was quiet there was utter authority in it. Kate didn’t trouble to argue against it. There wasn’t enough time and the issue wasn’t important enough.

  She tucked her knitting under one arm, picked up the atlas and said to Hector, ‘Come on, Hector. Shelter time again. Lead the way.’

  Hector’s heavy black tail hung miserably between his legs. He didn’t like the sirens and he didn’t like the word ‘shelter’. He knew what it meant. Hours of sitting in a half-buried tin hut in the back garden enduring unspeakable roaring and whooshing sounds.

  ‘Be careful out there in the dark!’ Leon shouted after Kate as she stepped out of the kitchen door on to the narrow path leading down to the shelter.

  Kate felt almost light-hearted as she made her way cautiously towards the Anderson, Hector pressing close against her. Always, previously, this was a nightmare she and Hector had endured by themselves. Tonight they wouldn’t be doing so. Tonight they would have Leon to keep them company.

  The few steps leading down into the Anderson were damp and slippery and she descended them with very great care. She was nearly eight months pregnant and she didn’t want any accidents.

  Hector whined and nuzzled her hand with his head. She patted him lovingly. ‘It’s all right, Hector,’ she said as she stepped inside the pitch-black shelter. ‘And we’re going to be snug tonight. Leon has put a paraffin heater in here and a storm lantern.’ She fumbled in her pocket for the matches that went everywhere with her. ‘We’ll wait till Leon joins us before lighting up,’ she said, talking to him as if he were a person, as she always did. ‘It will save him having to fight with the black-out curtaining in order to get inside.’

  She sat down, her hand lovingly on the silky-smooth fur of his neck. ‘It may only be a hit and run raid. It may even be a false alarm.’

  Moments later, as Leon limped down the steps and into the shelter, she knew that her optimism was unfounded. Eastwards, in the distance, came the approaching zhoorzh, zhoorzh, zhoorzh sound of hundreds of unsynchronized German engines.

  ‘Have you got the matches?’ Leon asked, handing her the Thermos flask. ‘And if your next-door neighbour is an Air-Raid Warden, why the hell didn’t he check on you before haring off to the ARP post? To the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know I’ve moved in here as a lodger. For all he knows you’re on your own.’

  ‘We don’t speak,’ Kate said succinctly. ‘We haven’t spoken ever since he supported the Cricket Club Committee’s decision to relieve my father of his captaincy of the team.’

  Leon lit the storm lantern and turned his attention to the Aladdin paraffin heater.

  ‘Mr Nibbs is scrupulous where duty is concerned,’ Kate continued, aware that for the first time she was talking about Mr Nibbs without bitterness or rancour in her voice. ‘It must worry him, his not knocking to check on me.’

  ‘Then he should stop worrying and do it.’ Leon’s voice was blunt. He had no time for a man so unchivalrous.

  ‘He can’t,’ amusement was thick in her voice, ‘because he’s even more stubborn than he’s scrupulous. In fact, when I think of his dilemma, I feel quite sorry for him.’

  ‘I don’t.’ There was no amusement in Leon’s voice. ‘He knows you’re pregnant and on your own. He should be checking on your safety whenever there’s a raid.’

  The sound of the ack-ack guns on the Heath blasting into life made further conversation impossible. Kate removed her ball of wool from her knitting needles. She was knitting a matinee-coat for the baby. Leon picked up the atlas he had been studying earlier and opened it up again at North Africa, trying to work out just where British and Australian soldiers were engaging with the Italians.

  The whoosh Kate had come to recognize as being the sound of dropping incendiary bombs filled the air. She looked across the lamp-lit shelter towards Leon. His concentration seemed to be entirely on the map he was studying. A slight frown knitted his eyebrows. They were extremely nice eyebrows; well-shaped and attractively winged.

  Sensing her eyes on him, he raised his head slightly and looked across at her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said comfortingly, ‘for the moment everything is falling on the City.’

  ‘The City? Not the East End? How can you tell?’

  ‘I’m a sailor,’ he said with the easy, friendly smile she had grown so accustomed to. ‘I can judge distances by sound.’

  She believed him. She believed everything he told her because it was impossible to even imagine him telling an untruth.

  He returned his attention to the map and outwardly she returned hers to her knitting. Inwardly she was praying that St Paul’s wouldn’t be hit; that when she and Leon looked out over the City in the morning they would still see Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece and not a burning pyre.

  Leon’s attention, too, drifted. Instead of concentrating on what the British army’s next move would be in North Africa and what part the navy might play when Libya’s coastal strong-points were attacked, he found himself staring across at Kate.

  Her head was bent over her knitting, the needles flashing like quicksilver between her long, supple fingers. He thought her very beautiful; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There was strength as well as delicacy in her features. It showed in the stubborn set of her chin and in the pure line of her jaw. Once she had made her mind up about anything, he suspected it would be the very devil to get her to change it. Yet she was also heartachingly loving and gentle. Not towards him, of course. Towards him she was friendly and generous and he had the common sense to know that that was the most he could ask for. It was the way she treated Hector that revealed the innate loving gentleness that so attracted him, as well as the way she talked about the coming baby.

  The atlas lay forgotten on his knee. From perilously near, Woolwich or Greenwich, there came the sickening crump and blast of falling bombs. The tin walls of the Anderson vibrated. The ack-ack guns on the Heath pounded deafeningly. Hector whined and crept even closer to Kate’s feet. She broke off from her knitting to put a hand down to him, comforting him.

  Watching her, Leon felt a lump form in his throat. Once, long, long ago, a woman with the same gentleness in her eyes and the same kind of inner strength, had also broken off from her knitting and stretched a hand down comfortingly. He couldn’t have been more than three years old, for when he was four years old she had died in the street of a heart attack, a loaf of fresh bread and a bunch of flowers in her arms.

  He shut off that
memory, as he had shut it off for twenty-three years. It was too painful; too traumatic for him to dare to dwell on it. Instead he remembered the warmth and comfort of sitting at her feet while she knitted or sewed, telling him stories and nursery-rhymes.

  In memory he could almost feel the flickering yellow flames of the fire and see again the pictures she had helped him to find in the red-hot coals. He never remembered her as being anything other than soft-spoken and loving, yet she had been strong, too. She had had to be, marrying a West Indian sailor fifteen years her senior in pre-First World War Britain. If mixed marriages were regarded as unpleasant oddities now, in 1940, they were regarded as being little more than obscene violations of nature in 1912. She had been a schoolteacher from a conventional, middle-class home and not for the first time he wondered how she had endured the insulting and salacious remarks he knew she must have met with.

  The noise of plane engines and explosions was horrendous, nearly as deafening as a bombardment at sea. He noticed that though Kate was still knitting, her face was ashen. He touched her lightly on the knee.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he shouted across to her. ‘Everything is falling on the City. There won’t be many lives lost. All the businessmen will be safely at home in their Andersons.’

  She smiled, a touch of embarrassed colour flaring in her cheeks, ashamed that she hadn’t been thinking of the businessmen who worked in the City but only of the survival of St Paul’s.

  He mistook the colour in her cheeks for discomfort at the way he had touched her to attract her attention. Cursing himself for an idiot, he once more outwardly returned his attention to the atlas. After all the care he had taken ever since he had moved in with her not to say or do anything that might raise the awkward spectre of sex and make her feel uncomfortable, why had he tapped her on the knee and not on her arm? It was an action taken without thought, but he knew now how she would react to any increase of familiarity between them and was appalled at how fiercely disappointed he felt.

  Once again he began to think of his father and mother and what an odd couple they must have made. His father had been born in 1864, a year before slavery was officially abolished in the United States of America. He had been very black and defiantly proud of his blackness.

  A smile tugged at the corner of Leon’s mouth. His mother had always insisted that he attend Sunday School and even after her death and up until his father’s death, when he was eight years old, he had done so. It was in a book given out at Sunday School that he had first seen pictures of African tribal chieftains: naked, with war-paint on and standing amongst spears, they had looked magnificent.

  They had also looked, apart from their nakedness and splendidly barbaric finery, just like his father. It was then that it had occurred to him that there was something exciting and special in being black. His father was certainly special. It had been quite a revelation and from that moment on any racial insult hurled at him in the school playground, or worse, the classroom, was robbed of any power to hurt. The ones who hurled the insults were the losers and the ones to be pitied. They weren’t special. They didn’t have a special dad who could, if he wanted to, easily look like a magnificent warrior.

  There was a lull in the nightmare bombardment. ‘Do you think it’s over?’ Kate asked, breaking in on his thoughts of the past. ‘Could we take a look outside?’

  He didn’t think it was over for one minute, but he knew how claustrophobic many people found it, hiding semi-underground and not being able to see what was taking place around them.

  ‘I think we could get a little air,’ he said, more than happy to have a look-see himself. If it hadn’t been for ensuring her safety, he wouldn’t for one minute have even entered the Anderson. Despite the handicap of his injured leg, he would have been volunteering his services at the nearest ARP post.

  Mindful of her discomfort when he had touched her knee, he didn’t offer her his arm as she stepped outside into the night, but he watched her feet with hawk-like concern, ready to steady her instantly if she stumbled.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ she whispered devoutly as she reached the top of the shallow flight of steps and stood on the overgrown grass of the garden. ‘Look at the sky, Leon! It looks as if it’s full of blood!’

  Everywhere was red. Even though they couldn’t see across the city and the river from where they were standing, it was obvious that the worst fires of the war were raging. The smell of burning hung in the air like fog. Kate felt a dusting of ashes sweep her cheek. Tears stung her lashes.

  ‘Could we go up on to the Heath and take a look across the city?’ she asked a little unsteadily. ‘Though you can see best from the Park, you can also get a good view from the north-west corner of the Heath.’

  Giant searchlights swept and re-swept the stained sky. ‘No,’ he said, knowing what it was she wanted to see and knowing that it would have to wait until morning. ‘This little lot isn’t over yet, Kate.’

  Even as he finished speaking there came the roar of a fresh wave of approaching aeroplanes and the nearby ack-ack gun opened up, blasting upwards to no very good effect but making those who could hear it feel that at least some kind of retaliation was taking place.

  ‘We’d better take shelter again,’ he said, fearful for her safety. ‘We’ll go up to the Heath the minute the all-clear sounds.’

  She nodded, her fingers crossed, thinking of St Paul’s and wishing as hard as she was able.

  ‘The City has been pulverized,’ Harriet Godfrey said to her six hours later as Kate made her a cup of tea. ‘It’s been the worst night of the war. Indescribable. Unbelievable.’

  ‘We’ve seen the damage for ourselves, from a distance,’ Leon said quietly. ‘It looks like a raging hell down there.’

  ‘It is,’ Harriet Godfrey said, her voice thick with weariness. She had been on duty all the way through the nightmare of the raid and was utterly exhausted. ‘God knows when the fires will be brought under control. The fire services are doing their best but the water mains were hit and the back-up service from distant pipes failed.’

  ‘What about the Thames?’ Kate asked, hugging the knowledge of the miraculous escape of St Paul’s Cathedral to herself like a comforting blanket. ‘Couldn’t the firemen take water from the Thames?’

  ‘It was low-tide last night,’ Leon said, answering the question for her. ‘I don’t suppose the water could be reached.’

  ‘It couldn’t.’ Harriet Godfrey accepted the cup of tea Kate proffered her and reached with an unsteady hand for the sugar-spoon. ‘The tide has turned now but the damage has been done. Huge swathes of the City have been reduced to charred rubble. I felt as if I were living through the Great Fire of London in 1666. The streets in the City are still as narrow as they were then and fire just leaps from one building to another.’

  ‘But they didn’t hit St Paul’s,’ Kate said, unable to refrain from putting her heartfelt feelings into words.

  ‘Incendiaries certainly did hit St Paul’s,’ Harriet said, not wanting Kate to be under illusions. ‘That the Cathedral isn’t a smouldering shell this morning is due entirely to the vigilance of its fire-watchers and their swift, preventative action. The trouble in the streets around it was that the buildings, being all banks and offices, were not only locked but double-locked. No-one was fire-watching in them. No-one was able to smother an incendiary the instant it landed.’

  ‘They will in future,’ Leon said dryly. ‘You can bet your life there’ll be laws brought in immediately to ensure that no property is left unguarded.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Emmerson,’ Harriet Godfrey said, rising wearily to her feet. ‘But any such laws will be too late for the Barbican and Moorgate areas of the City. Almost every single building is ruined.’ She turned to Kate. ‘Thank you for the tea, Katherine. It was much appreciated. I’m going to bed now before I fall asleep on my feet.’

  During the next forty-eight hours, as firemen and volunteers continued to fight the raging fires, Leon set about making the And
erson even more comfortable for Kate. He removed one of the school-benches and replaced it with a narrow single bed. Though he hadn’t referred to it, he had been appalled by the discomfort she had endured, heavily pregnant and all night in the Anderson without being able to even sit comfortably, let alone lie down. He assumed her father, when he had furnished the shelter, had had little idea of the length of time raids would last. And he could have had no idea that his unmarried daughter would become pregnant.

  ‘It looks like Buckingham Palace,’ Kate said in grateful amusement when he showed her the results of his labours. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen in Magnolia Square. Jack Robson, Charlie’s son. He’s in the Commandoes but is home on a forty-eight hour pass.’

  ‘He’s a good bloke,’ Leon said, referring to Jack as Kate put a plate of sausage and mash in front of him. ‘He’s converted the Misses Helliwells’ Morrison shelter into a table tennis table and he and Mavis have been having a rare old time showing off their table tennis skills to Emily and Esther.’

  ‘Emily and Esther?’ Remembering the way she had overheard Emily Helliwell speak of Leon to Miriam Jennings, Kate’s eyebrows rose. ‘Are you referring to Miss Emily Helliwell, Magnolia Square’s famed clairvoyant and palm-reader, and her sister, Miss Esther Helliwell? And if you are, since when did you get on first name terms with them?’

  ‘Since the day I rescued their cat from the clutches of a rather vicious bull terrier.’

  ‘Was Faust wearing his gas mask at the time?’ Kate asked, amused. ‘He was almost the first Magnolia Square inhabitant to be kitted out with one.’

  It was Leon’s turn to be amused. ‘No,’ he said, chuckling as he speared a sausage. ‘And he didn’t have it in a canister around his neck, either.’