Images etched themselves in John May’s mind and remained there throughout his life: a bus standing on its end, a warden hugging a silent, terrified child, a bright blue hat at the edge of a blood-spattered crater. One night, audiences emerged from Faust at Sadler’s Wells to find the sky on fire. If London was the centre of the world, the world was burning. It was a violent place in which to discover a purpose. It was a good place to forge a friendship.
5
SANDWICHES ON THE BRIDGE
On the morning of Monday, 11 November 1940, after a weekend of sirens, booming anti-aircraft guns, distant bombs and droning aircraft, nineteen-year-old John May was most concerned about getting to work early, because it was his first day in a new job and he was anxious to make a good impression.
He jumped from the rear platform of the bus as it slowed on its turn from the Aldwych, and searched the ashen pavements of the Strand, wondering if he had somehow missed an air-raid warning. It was still quite dark, too early for a daylight assault. The blackout ended half an hour before sunrise, when the greatest danger to commuters was the ‘silent peril’, trolley buses that glided by with a whisper of sheened steel. The clear weather of the last two days had allowed heavier bombing raids than usual, but the morning was mild and overcast, a healthy sign; German bombers were unable to follow the river into London’s heart when the cloud base was so low.
May wasn’t sure where the nearest shelter was, and had yet to make his way to Bow Street. He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force.
The shops and restaurants of the Strand had been boarded up from the Kardomah to the Coal Hole, but a sign nailed beneath a shirtmaker’s ‘Business As Usual’ banner pointed the way to a shelter. May made a mental note of it. The street lamps were off, and only strips of white paint on the kerbs marked out his route. He passed a large branch of Boots fortified with sandbags and, near the top, when those had run out, old telephone directories.
May wondered if he was over-keen, turning up so early on his first day. There had been several raids the previous night and few Londoners had managed more than four hours’ sleep, despite the protestations of patriots who insisted that their slumber was undisturbed by falling bombs. This morning it seemed as if the entire city had decided on a late start. He passed a pair of sleepy-eyed girls walking arm in arm, their matching homemade hats pinned with luminous brooches. An ARP warden paused in a shop doorway to draw guiltily on a thin roll-up. An elderly man in a cap and a heavy wool coat checked the gutter for dog-ends. The grey street smelled of rolling tobacco and charred wood.
Sixty years later, John May would amble along the same route and see more people sleeping rough than he had during the war, but at the moment, on this anaemic Monday, all he cared about was reaching his office before someone decided that they had made a terrible mistake and didn’t actually need a new recruit to work in an experimental police department, especially not a kid who had been prematurely thrust into his profession by the outbreak of war.
He found the police station at Bow Street with ease—he’d spent enough mornings in Covent Garden with his father to know his way around—but could not locate the entrance he had been instructed to use. Carfax, the bulldog-faced desk sergeant, sent him out of the front door, past the hand-printed sign to the public that read: ‘Be Good—We’re Still Open’, and into a side alley where he discovered the unmarked blue door. Failing to find a bell, he was about to knock when it suddenly opened.
‘Are you the new chap?’ asked a statuesque young woman whose cockney accent emerged through carmine lips. ‘Blimey, you’re a bit eager, aren’t you?’ She opened the door wider. ‘You’d better come in, you’re making the street untidy.’
May pulled off his cap and stepped into a narrow corridor. The young woman’s protuberant bust was alarmingly close to his face in the darkness, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Go up the top of them stairs and take the first right. Mind you don’t trip on the treads, some of the rods are gone, and there’s textbooks everywhere. We only just moved in.’
May reached the linoleumed landing and found himself standing before a faintly lit office door. Radio music played inside. On the panel in front of him was tacked a sheet of paper reading: ‘KNOCK AND WAIT’. He did so, lightly, and when nothing occurred, more heavily.
‘You don’t have to bash the thing in,’ called an irritated voice. ‘Just open it.’
May entered a cluttered sepia room with a sloping floor. A pair of green glass desk lamps threw cones of light against the blackout curtains, where a young man with chestnut hair and a purple scarf knotted round his throat was trying to see something through a magnifying glass. ‘The Home Office insists on the “Knock and Wait” signs,’ he explained, not looking up. ‘They’re meant to give us time to clear away sensitive papers. As if we had any in the first place. Here.’ He thrust the glass at May, together with a sheet of butcher’s paper covered in hand-drawn illustrations of butterflies. ‘See if you can spot a hidden message on that.’
Taken aback, May turned his attention to the drawing and studied it carefully. ‘They all have the same pattern, red admirals,’ he said, ‘but the colours are wrong. They rather look like naval code. You know, signal flags. Admirals, I suppose that’s the tip-off. I think I can read it.’ He squinted at the page. ‘W-E-R-E-O-U-T-O-F-T-E-A.’
‘I see.’ The young man snatched the sheet of paper back from him. ‘It’ll be from the tailors downstairs. They were both in the navy. We have to share the kettle and the gas ring. Bit of a smartarse, are you?’
‘N-No,’ stammered May.
‘Jolly good,’ said the young man, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Arthur Bryant.’ He tugged his fawn cardigan over a pudgy stomach and smiled conspiratorially. ‘You must be Mr May. What should I call you?’
‘John, sir.’
‘Don’t call me “sir”, I’ve not been knighted yet. You look fairly sturdy. We could do with someone like you.’ Bryant was the indoor type, shorter and fleshier than his counterpart. May boxed and played football. He had a long reach, wide shoulders and thick thighs, a look women liked. In decades to come, the difference in their heights became more noticeable as Bryant shrank and May’s posture stayed firm.
‘Did you meet our glamorous DS?’
‘Rather.’ May nodded enthusiastically.
‘She’s a hoot, isn’t she?’ Bryant’s smile unclouded into a grin. ‘One of the first female detective sergeants in the country, thanks to this mess.’ May assumed he was referring to the war and not the room. ‘Idolizes American film stars, wears make-up and high heels to work against the rules, not at all frightened of looking like a tart. Gladys Forthright. She’s engaged to a sergeant called Harris Longbright. Do you think she’s just doing it for the assonance?’ Bryant barked an extraordinary laugh. ‘I must say I thought they were going to send me someone older. You’re what, twenty?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen, eh?’ Bryant rolled his pale blue eyes. ‘That’s a bit young for this lark.’
‘Not at all,’ May bridled. ‘There were lads younger than me lost at Scapa Flow.’
‘You’re right, of course. Eight hundred on the Royal Oak. It makes one doubt the existence of a grand plan. Still, all hands to the pumps at home, eh? I hope we’ll be able to do something useful together. I hear they’re making you a detective.’
‘Apparently.’ May tried to sound nonchalant. ‘I was on a one-year intensive but I wasn’t able to finish the course. It’s impossible to get into Hendon, and our place was closed down. They’ve run out of instructors.’
‘So they just bumped you up? Very decent of them. I’m twenty-two and absolutely forbidden from participating in investigations unaided because they think I’m irresponsible, but there’s no one else available to head the un
it, ha ha. They probably sent you here because you look sensible. Good trick, that.’ Bryant peered round the edge of the blackouts, saw that the street was growing light and opened the curtains, hastily switching off the desk lamps. ‘We can’t afford to get fined again,’ he explained, looking down through the X-taped windows. ‘I’m hopeless at remembering to turn things off.’
‘You didn’t get called up?’
‘Well, I did, but I’ve a bit of a dicky pump.’ He gave his chest an exploratory tap. ‘And there were other factors that prevented me from going,’ he added mysteriously. Years later, May found out that Bryant’s brother had died on a Thames barge, and because their mother lived alone in Bethnal Green without financial support, the Port of London Authority had arranged a special dispensation for her surviving son. There was another mitigating circumstance that protected Bryant from conscription, but it was not something he felt comfortable speaking of. ‘What about you?’
‘Essential industry. I’m waiting for a post to come up. I’ve been recommended for cypher-breaking. Shortlisted for a special unit intercepting codes coming from the Atlantic.’
‘They’re putting something together in Hertfordshire, aren’t they? If they don’t get a move on it’ll all be over. Do you want a pipe? We’ve still got some tobacco, but it’s a bit ropy.’ Bryant waved a wallet of foul-smelling shag past him and dropped it into the chaos of the desk.
‘I don’t, thanks,’ said May, removing his coat and looking for somewhere clean to put it. ‘There’s a very good code station already running, but they’re stocking it with the best of the Oxford grads. I’ll just have to wait my turn.’
‘You probably want to know what this is all about,’ said Bryant, pushing a chair at him. ‘Sorry no one could tell you much, but the MoI and the Home Office are very big on public morale at the moment.’
‘I’ve noticed,’ said May. ‘The block on information is a bit stiff. Part of Hyde Park near Marble Arch was roped off at the weekend. They reckon an underground shelter was blown to bits, heads and arms and legs everywhere. The only way they could tell the girls from the men was by their hair. But I didn’t see anything about it in the papers.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. I can understand that, but some of the other directives are driving us barmy.’ Bryant sucked noisily at his pipe. ‘This business with lifts having to be kept at the bottom of shafts during raids, except in tube stations, where they have to be kept at the top. I suppose it’s sensible, but all transgressions have to be reported, and it makes so much paperwork. Not that you’ll have had any paperwork on us.’
‘No, they wouldn’t even tell me what PCU stood for.’
‘Peculiar Crimes Unit, isn’t it frightful? I think their perception of the word “peculiar” and mine differ somewhat. I’ve got some bumph here you can read through.’ He rooted around among his papers, sending several overstuffed folders to the floor, but failed to locate anything specific.
Thinking about his first impression of Arthur Bryant some years later, May was reminded of a young Alec Guinness, bright-eyed and restless, distracted and a little awkward, filled to exhaustion with ideas. May was less excitable, and his habit of keeping a rein on the more excessive reaches of his imagination pegged him to others as the reserved, serious one. After their deaths, it was said by their biographer that ‘Bryant said what he meant and May meant what he said’. May was the diplomat, Bryant the iconoclast, a decent combination as it turned out.
‘They meant “peculiar” in the sense of “particular”, but the damage is done, and the name is attracting some very odd cases. We had a report last month of a man sucking blood out of a Wren in Leicester Square. It’s hopeless. The Heavy Rescue Squads are busy trying to locate people who’ve been buried alive under tons of rubble, most of the central London constabulary remaining at home have left to join the ARP, the ATS and the AFS, and we’re expected to go chasing around after Bela Lugosi. Morale again, you see. They don’t want people to think there’s a bogeyman roaming around in the blackouts, otherwise they won’t head to the shelters. Panic in the streets; it’s an image that scares the hell out of them. You’d think we were more of a propaganda unit than a proper detective squad.’
‘How many of us are there?’ asked May, moving a stack of handwritten music scores from a chair and seating himself.
‘Half a dozen, including you. Superintendent Davenport’s the most senior DI, spends all of his time haunting the HO and the Met, or playing billiards with Sergeant Carfax, who’s married to his ghastly sister. She comes creeping around here on the scrounge for salvage donations, got a face like a witch doctor’s rattle. No, we don’t see too much of Davenport, luckily. Then there’s Dr Runcorn, rather ancient and not much cop but the only forensics wallah they could spare us. We have a young pathologist called Oswald Finch, tragically born without a sense of humour, we use him for the serious stuff. DS Forthright is also a part-time member of the WVS. Then there’s us two, and finally a couple of utterly vacant PCs, Crowhurst and Atherton. Crowhurst has something wrong with his depth perception and falls over a lot, and Atherton used to be a greengrocer.’
‘My father is a greengrocer,’ said May indignantly.
‘No offence, old man,’ apologized Bryant, whose own father had abandoned his family to earn drink money in Petticoat Lane peddling rings for blackout curtains at a shilling a dozen, ‘but poor old Atherton really would be better employed shifting sprouts. Oh, and we’re getting one more today, a former copper called Sidney Biddle. I’ve got his details around here somewhere. Davenport was very keen about taking him on. I get the feeling he’s coming in as a bit of a spy, though I’m not sure what he’ll find to report on. We’re rather a dead-letter office. To date we’ve had a hand in a couple of prosecutions, but nothing that can be made public.’
‘Why not?’
Bryant rubbed his nose ruminatively. ‘The sort of cases that pass through here are a bit of an embarrassment for everyone concerned. The regular force can’t handle them, so they end up on these desks.’ He indicated the overflowing surfaces of the two desks that had been shoved back to back beside the window. ‘I’ll have a clear-up while you get settled. Have Forthright find you a tea mug, and hang on to it. You never know when there’ll be a shortage. We can get most things, but you hear rumours and everyone goes mad.’
May knew what he meant. With each passing week, a household item, so taken for granted before the war, would vanish from the list of available home comforts. Last week there was a run on toothbrushes. The smallest rumour was enough to spark panic buying. Foods were fast disappearing from the daily menu. Oddly, the commonest items seemed to cease first, so that sugar, butter and bacon were rationed while milk chocolate remained available.
At lunchtime, Bryant took his new partner for a walk down to the Thames. The city was turning itself into a fortress, barricaded, sandbagged and patrolled in imminent expectation of invasion.
‘What topsy-turvy times we live in,’ laughed Bryant, striding across the windy reach of Waterloo Bridge, his scarf flapping about his prominent ears. ‘I’ve stood here after the alert has sounded and watched the German bombers flying low along the river, dropping their loads on the docks, then I’ve gone back to the unit to investigate a theft of cufflinks from some diplomat’s quarters in Regent’s Park as if it was the most important thing in the world.’
‘What’s your speciality?’ asked May, pacing beside him.
‘Mine? Academic studies, really. Classics. Abstruse thought. The HO thought the war might throw up a few cases that need sensitive handling, and realized that there were no brainboxes in the field of detection.’
‘Who decides which cases we get?’
‘Well, Davenport likes to pretend he does, but the orders come from higher up. He’s not a total dunderhead, of course, just ineffectual. I think being placed in charge of this unit is a bit beyond him. He’s rather straitlaced. The RAF wouldn’t have him because he’s short-sighted, and he’s still miffed. My word, I
don’t like the look of that.’
In the distance white clouds were breaking, and shafts of sunlight glowed above patches of oily water.
‘They’re trying to restrict movement around the city, putting up a lot of barricades, something about not wanting too many people out on the streets, but I managed to flannel a couple of passes out of Davenport that should get us anywhere we want to go. Where do you live?’
‘I’m staying with an aunt in Oakley Square,’ May explained, leaning on the white stone balustrade and looking down into the water. ‘Camden Town. I’ll be able to walk in if the services are disrupted. I was born in Vauxhall, not a very salubrious area, but my mother managed to get me into a decent school.’ He laughed. ‘They’ve shifted all the children from our local Mixed Infants down to Kent for the duration. Poor people of Kent.’
‘I heard a country woman on the wireless say that she would rather take a savage from Fiji than a child from Birmingham,’ said Bryant. ‘Those kids will probably give the countryside a good shaking up.’
‘I take it you’re a town man, then.’
‘Lord, yes. I went on a hop-picking holiday once and was never so miserable in my entire life, although I did learn how to poach rabbits. I’d hate to be out of the city and miss all this. Everyone’s so friendly all of a sudden. I think it’s because we’re part of something at last, not pulling in different directions. Can’t you feel it? Things are shaking up instead of sticking where they’ve always been. Remember how everyone used to hate the ARP wardens before Christmas, going on about how they did nothing except play darts and cards all day? Look at them now, being treated like heroes. I think some good will come of it. The old sangfroid is starting to melt, don’t you think? Lords and layabouts sharing the same misfortunes.’
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