I was wearing a black afternoon dress and Richard had said to me, ‘You never wear your pearls now, they’ll lose their colour if you don’t wear them,’ and so I had put them on for the first time since the Blitz.
The raid became heavier and heavier after we reached home. The wardens were all out – we had met Nonie Iredale-Smith and George Evans and several others hurrying on their bicycles. And sitting in the road, oblivious to the noise of guns, was the faithful Peer Gynt. I tried unsuccessfully to send him home. I was no longer on duty. Betty Compton had said that the refugees took up enough of my time and as the raids were lessening I should do as our gynecologist wished and take things more easily. It seemed strange not to rush to change into my uniform and report at the FAP or at the Control Centre. We left the studio and went downstairs to the dining-room in which we still slept when the raid became even more heavy. As it intensified and more and more planes came over I telephoned Kathleen and asked her if she were not going to take shelter over the road in the basement of her little shop. She said she was tired and felt like sleeping in her own bed. Her bedroom, like Anne’s and Cecil’s, was right under the roof. I don’t know why I begged her so strongly to come downstairs, offering her a bed in the hall, which we considered the safest place as it had one wall of ferro-concrete and the others were very thick. Richard added his arguments to mine in vain. I asked about Anne and Cecil. ‘What d’you expect?’ she said. ‘They’ve gone to bed.’
Anne came to the telephone herself; she sounded as if she were in a dilemma. It was quite clear that she did not like the raid – the noise must have been even more deafening up there and with the terrific barrage it would have been quite possible for shell-caps to penetrate the roof. Cecil settled the matter. He quite obviously took the receiver from her, speaking to me himself. ‘Have a heart,’ he said laughingly. ‘It’s still our honeymoon – we’ve got two more days.’ ‘You can have our bed,’ I said, ‘if you’ll only come down. Richard says it’s a terribly heavy raid and that there are droves of German planes. Do come down – anyhow for a while.’ ‘Sure we’ll come down,’ he said jokingly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll come down with the rubble.’
We had never experienced such a night – bombs seemed to rain down – and in the intervals of their explosions which tonight were the loudest and longest we could remember we could hear the guns in the planes as the fighters chased them. The sky was alight with flares, searchlights, and exploding shells – it was a magnificent but appalling sight! The fires which we could see were terrifying – the largest, in the direction of Victoria, was enormous and appeared to be increasing. Behind us, much nearer, there was a terrible blaze in the direction of Burton Court. Wardens kept running by and we heard the revving up of engines from the auxiliary fire-station a few doors down at No 21. We were keeping a sharp look-out for incendiaries and there seemed to be no watchers about at all. About twenty past eleven we decided to settle down and read for a time. Neither of us felt like going to bed – it was far too noisy and exciting. A warden raced by shouting, and suddenly we heard a shout of ‘Lights, lights’ from the street. Richard wondered if the recent near explosions had caused the black-out curtains to shift in the studio and he said, ‘I’ll run up and have a look.’
He had scarcely gone when the lights all went out. There was a strange quiet – a dead hush, and prickles of terror went up my spine as a rustling, crackling, endless sound as of ripping, tearing paper began. I did not know what it was, and I screamed to Richard, ‘Come down, come down!’ Before I could hear whether or not he was coming down the stairs, things began to drop – great masses fell – great crashes sounded all round me. I had flung myself down by the bed hiding Vicki under my stomach, trying thus to save her and the coming baby from harm. I buried my face in the eiderdown of the bed as the rain of debris went on falling for what seemed ages ... ages … The bed was covered and so was I – I could scarcely breathe – things fell all round my head – some of it almost choked me as the stuff, whatever it was, reached my neck and my mouth.
At last there was a comparative silence and with great difficulty I raised my head and shook it free of heavy, choking, dusty stuff. An arm had fallen round my neck – a warm, living arm, and for one moment I thought that Richard had entered in the darkness and was holding me, but when very, very cautiously, I raised my hand to it, I found that it was a woman’s bare arm with two rings on the third finger and it stopped short in a sticky mess. I shook myself free of it. Vicki, who had behaved absolutely perfectly, keeping so still that she could have been dead, became excited now as she smelt the blood. I screamed again, ‘Richard, Richard’, and to my astonishment he answered quite near me. ‘Where are you?’ I cried – more things had begun falling. ‘At the bottom of the stairs,’ he said.
‘Keep there. Keep still – there are more things falling,’ I cried and buried my head again as more debris fell all round me. At last it appeared to have stopped. I raised my head again – I could see the sky and the searchlights and I knew that the whole of the three upper stories of the house had gone. ‘We’ve been hit,’ I said. ‘One in a million!’ and the only feeling I was conscious of was furious anger.
It was pitch dark – too dangerous to move without some idea of what the position was. I had had my torch in my hand but the blast had thrown it from me. ‘Light a match,’ I said. ‘What about gas?’ asked Richard. ‘Can’t smell any yet – be quick,’ I said. He lit several matches, standing, as I saw by their light, in the entrance to the room. There were no ceilings, nothing above me as I crouched there. The front of the room had blown out – but the wall nearest to the one where I was crouching, the ferro-concrete one, was still there, as was the one to the hall. By the light of the matches I saw something more terrifying than the arm which was now partially covered with debris – the light lathes from the ceiling had all fallen down across me – so that their weight had not hurt me at all – but balanced on them were huge blocks and lumps of masonry. If I moved they might all crash down. ‘Don’t come any nearer,’ I shouted to Richard. He said, ‘Keep still – I’m going to try and get out – the front door is twisted and jammed.’
I had seen where my best exit passage lay when Richard had lit the matches for me and while he was trying to shift the broken door I began wriggling very, very carefully and cautiously along the floor. It was not easy – for I was not as slim as normally, and I had Vicki. It was so perilous that I thought of loosing her and letting her find her own way out. Had she not behaved so wonderfully I would have been obliged to leave her – for the thought uppermost of anything else in my mind was to save my baby. The baby, hitherto a nebulous dream of the future, now became urgently real and my only thought was of it. I shouted again and again – for if only the heavy rescue would come, as they had always promised me they would if I were buried, I would not have to face this perilous crawl – but no sound came from the streets.
I have never been brave at doing dangerous things – I can only do them if I do them very quickly. As children we used to go fishing with my father in Devonshire, and had to cross some of the deep streams bridged only by a tree trunk – not even a flat one. My father always walked straight over without looking to left or right. This, he told me, was the only way. Sometimes I would not cross and he would simply leave me behind until I did.
There were constant terrific explosions and things fell each time there was a fresh thud. If I did not get out soon some of those huge blocks were bound to fall on me. I shouted again, ‘Help, help,’ and so did Richard. The sounds echoed in the darkness and then far away I heard a woman’s voice calling…‘They’re coming…they’ll come…’ and it died away and we didn’t know if it was to us they would come, because from the thuds and whooshes and violent explosions all round they must have been pretty busy.
‘I’ve got the door open enough to squeeze through,’ Richard called. ‘Don’t light any more matches, I can smell gas,’ I warned him. I could not see him – nor he me. ‘I’m going to try an
d crawl through this space to the door,’ I said, and I began doing it immediately. I remembered what Tapper told me, ‘Test it first, tap it gently!’ and his warning, ‘Don’t go scrabbling at anything in case it all comes down on you.’ Very slowly and cautiously I squeezed my way along the tiny tunnel under the hanging lathes, on which were balanced the concrete blocks which I had only caught sight of for a split second in the light of the matches. It seemed a life-time. There were two awful moments when my shoulders brushed something and there was a fall of stuff again – and then I was at the door and Richard had caught me and pulled me carefully up. We stood there for a minute clinging together.
‘Anne’s dead – her arm is in there,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid they’re all dead – the whole stories have gone,’ he said. ‘D’you think you can walk?’
We now had to squeeze through the jammed door, which he had managed to shift a little. I begged him not to put his weight on it again in case there was another collapse of what was left standing. It was almost impossible to get out because of the piled-up glass in the entrance to the flats under the archway. I had to climb and even so I could feel the glass cutting my legs. At the back of the archway there was a solid mass of debris – and above it nothing remained of the Marshmans’ flat – just this great pile of rubble. I rushed at it crying frantically, ‘Kathleen, Kathleen! Cecil! Cecil!’ but there wasn’t a sound.
Above the garage the flat where the landlord’s chauffeur lived looked pretty badly damaged. I shouted for him – and he answered from the shelter, the entrance to which was blocked by another great mound of debris. ‘We can’t get at you,’ I screamed. ‘We’ll tell them to come – the house has gone.’ But there was no answer to this, and none to my further halloos. We climbed out finally over the broken glass to the Royal Hospital Road. A great fire was blazing in the direction of the Elms Garage behind Paradise Walk and the whole street was piled several feet high with glass and rubble. In the sky the light from fires was brilliant, it looked like Blake’s pictures of Hell.
On a pile of glass in the middle of the road sat Peer Gynt, who had been courting Vicki all day. He was in the very spot where he had been when the policeman had complained that all the traffic had to go round him.
When he saw me come out carrying her, he leaped from his pile of glass and saluted her with joyous barks and whines. He had sat there through all that appalling Blitz, and would not leave her now.
The Ferebees were, we knew, in the basement under the shop, but the whole shop was wrecked and we ran to the entrance and shouted again and again. The fire behind their premises was appalling. We shouted and banged on the ruined door to try to get some reply from them. The whole scene was so like the vision I had had of it after the doctor from the Spanish war’s lecture that it was incredible. Fires blazed on every side, great masses of brickwork and masonry kept falling and falling, crashing into the already huge mounds, and the smell was like Guy Fawkes night.
There was not a warden, not a soul about – it looked like a dead place – not a sign of life from anywhere and yet we knew that in many of the houses people were down in their basements unconscious of the horrors above them. I looked down at my legs – they felt cold – and saw that I had no dress below the thighs. It, and my slip, had vanished; the top of the black dress was quite whole – but the skirt was gone. The whole of it felt wet and sticky – and I knew it was the blood from Anne’s arm.
I went back resolutely under the archway in spite of Richard’s protests and shouted again and again but there wasn’t a sound. In the mass of glass under the archway I saw something which looked like a garment – white – and I thought I could wrap it round my bare thighs, but it was caught firmly and I could not get it. ‘Come along – the whole place is going to collapse!’ cried Richard as another tremendous thud shook the road, and I had barely got back under the archway before another avalanche of what had once been No 31 fell on to the remains of No 33. It was horrible!
And then I saw Nonie dashing towards us. ‘They’re all trapped – all of them – the Marshmans – the Ferebees – the Evans, do something quickly!’ I cried.
‘Get to a shelter somewhere – there’s more coming down! They’re coming – they’ll be here very soon – you can’t do anything!’ she cried and continued on her urgent errand. In the telephone box at the top of Tite Street a badly wounded warden was trying to get through. ‘God, what a night!’ he gasped. He was bleeding profusely but would not let me help him in the street. ‘Let’s go to the FAP,’ I said to Richard. ‘It’s only a second from here.’ ‘Go there,’ shouted the warden. ‘They’ll be glad of help.’
We were just turning down Tite Street when we saw two parachutes floating down in the direction of the river. ‘Lie down! Lie down!’ screamed the warden. We flung ourselves down – but it was not pleasant to lie on glass. After what seemed a lifetime there followed two long dull roars and then an appalling explosion. The fires in Burton Court were mounting high in the sky and against them Blossom the balloon stood out in brilliant relief, and at the bottom of Paradise Walk there was a tremendous red glare.
I did not want to go to the FAP. Anne, Anne, I kept thinking. Could one live with one’s arm ripped off at the shoulder? Was she alive, and Kathleen? What of her? She had told me she had a stray kitten in the bed with her when I had telephoned. Like me she loved animals, and had adopted this small homeless creature because she missed her dogs, which were still in the country.
But Richard pulled me firmly by the arm now. ‘There’s nothing you can do – only the heavy rescue can get through those piles of masonry and bricks,’ and he steered me firmly into the heavily sand-bagged FAP. Here the scene was indescribable. There had been a bomb so near that it had severed the water mains and damaged the place itself, and they had no means of sterilizing. The roof, which had been damaged on a previous occasion, had a sort of canvas overhead. Stretchers lay all over the floor awaiting ambulances and casualties were everywhere, humped on benches, huddled on chairs, lying on the floor. We walked in and I bumped into Peggy. She stared at me obviously without recognition. ‘Peggy,’ I said, ‘our house has gone – I think everyone else is dead.’ And then she knew me. She put down her tray and took me upstairs. She found me an overall and a cloak.
‘The AFS Station has been hit – that’s only a few doors from you,’ she said. ‘It’s one hell of a night. There are people trapped everywhere and we’re full of homeless as well as casualties.’
‘We’re homeless,’ I said. ‘The whole of our piece of the Royal Hospital Road has gone.’ ‘Are you hurt?’ she asked, still looking at me as if I were a ghost. I said I was all right and we went downstairs to the surgery where the casualties were being attended to. Suddenly my legs gave way, and I sat down on a bench next to an old woman wearing a straw hat. Waves of terror came over me – each resounding crash of the bombs which were raining down sent fresh waves of awful sickening fear over me. I was terrified now, and I knew that this was really craven fear – such as I had never known. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up – to hide me from this fearful terror from the skies – it was a disgusting, degrading, nauseating feeling – my body was still wet with Anne’s blood – I was literally petrified with terror. ‘Where is Richard?’ I cried suddenly to Peggy, for I knew that he had gone back to try to do something about the others still under those great mounds and the fear was partly for him – and the baby. She finished dressing a wound and said, ‘I think you’d better let the doctor see you – you look terrible.’ I said, ‘I’m frightened – horribly frightened – I’m sick with fear – it’s nothing else.’ She took my hands and held them tight. ‘Come,’ she said. In the crowded passage we bumped into Richard. To me he looked ghastly pale. ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘But the Ferebees are all right and so are the Evans – they’re only trapped – but there is no sign of life from what was our house.’
‘Don’t go out again. Don’t!’ I cried and I clung to him for a minute –
the world kept rocking round – and then the stretcher-bearers said to him, ‘Could you come and help us – we’re overwhelmed.’
‘Drink this first,’ said Peggy, appearing with a small glass. Richard swallowed the drink – and vanished into the noise of the streets with the stretcher-bearers. Peggy brought me a glass and told me to drink. It was brandy – hot and fiery as I swallowed it. What I wanted was water – my throat and mouth were full of dust and filth, but the brandy pulled me together. I went to a table on which was a bowl for scrubbing up and washed the filth from my hands. All over the floor were casualties and stretchers, for every ambulance was out. Lots of the Canadians who were billeted over the garage behind were in with cuts and wounds from glass – some had burns. Sister-in-charge said, ‘Come along, you can start here,’ and I took my place with the other VADs who were flooded out with waiting casualties and more and more arriving.
For one moment I felt I couldn’t do it. How could I dress wounds, pick out glass, bandage and clean up when Kathleen, Cecil, and perhaps even Anne were still alive lying under that weight of debris? A wave of acute terror swept over me again as another huge bomb fell – it sounded as if it were just down on the Embankment. We knew from a warden who came in that one of the parachutes we had seen had landed on the Infirmary of the Royal Hospital and that there were over forty old Pensioners and nurses trapped there. I looked at Sister-in-charge – calm, placid, and authoritative – and then at Dr Lendal Tweed, unperturbable as she attended to each case, and the words of the Sister at that first hospital I had worked in came back to me, and I put Anne, Cecil, and Kathleen and all of them out of my mind and concentrated on what was before me, waiting to be done. At once the sickening fear left me, and suddenly I was quite steady again. The terror had only lasted a few minutes – but it had humiliated me, and was the most degrading experience I had ever known. With Peggy, Joyce, Doreen, and others whom I knew and had always worked with, I fell into line.
A Chelsea Concerto Page 27
