Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  Our correspondent did not say if the man went into hiding, but I imagine he must somehow have done so. Anyway, at the end of the war, they were among the first families who emigrated to South America, where they started a new life.

  Characteristically, our last contact with Germany was strangely melodramatic. On August 24—I remember because it was my birthday—news was received that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact had been signed, and even the most naïve could not pretend to themselves any longer that war was avoidable.

  It had been a curious and nerve-racking day. Just as we were going to bed, around midnight, the telephone rang. I answered it and was informed by an obviously harassed operator that there was a call coming through for me from Germany. Would I wait a few minutes?

  As I waited, I realized that, in the hurry and muddle of the moment, my line had not been isolated. From every side, there rushed in upon me voices speaking in a variety of languages. They all sounded agitated, of course, and simply registered as a jumble of sound.

  It was as though I were listening in to a mad and terrified Europe. In the silence of our hall, I seemed to be on an island, listening to the cries of those who were about to be engulfed. I was completely helpless. Soon, I too was to be swept into at least the outer currents of the swell. In just over a year, the very ceiling above my head was to crash down under the attack of the German bombers. But for the moment, I was simply “listening in” to what was coming. I have never forgotten those dramatic few minutes.

  At last my line was cleared. The voice of a friend in Frankfurt came through, with a final request for help for someone, which she and I both knew must be too late. Then we said goodbye, and added, “for a long time.”

  I rang off. Our refugee work was over.

  11

  It seemed odd to say that one’s first impression of a war could be boredom and release from tension, but that was exactly the case with us. For years, Louise and I had been living amid melodrama and urgency. And, quite suddenly, there was nothing else that we could do. The horizons had shrunk to the limits of ordinary life, except insofar as “ordinary life” included those rearrangements and readjustments necessary in every family, now that war had actually come.

  Jim, the youngest of the family, had been a Territorial Army soldier for several years, and he joined the army the day war broke out. And Dad, now seventy-five, informed the family that he intended to be a stretcher-bearer. This greatly annoyed Mother, who was severely practical. With the candour for which she was justly celebrated in the home circle, she said, “If you try to do anything like that, you’re more likely to end up on the stretcher rather than at the end of it.”

  This statement was accepted in such complete silence that Louise and I wondered if Dad’s feelings were hurt. We made it clear that we respected Dad’s intentions, while agreeing with Mother’s practical outlook. One of us said, “We think it is fine of you to want to be a stretcher-bearer, Dad, even if Mother thinks it’s impractical.”

  Dad looked mildly and amiably astonished and replied, “I don’t care in the least what any of you think, so long as I do what I think is right.” Then he went off to the enlisting offices of the Home Defence Service and volunteered as a stretcher-bearer, in the event of air raids.

  Instead, they finally accepted him as a full-time air-raid warden. He served throughout the war, though he was nearly eighty when hostilities ceased. And very marvellous he was, too. Several people from the same air-raid post told me that, during the Great Blitz, he was one of the best and most reliable wardens they had. Not even the worst raid ever seemed to rattle him.

  To me, the significance of the war years is not so much what they contained for us as what they left out. Because virtually all connections with the outside world were broken, everything that was of overwhelming personal interest to us ceased. Those years represent a sort of gap in the essential line. Opera and adventure, intertwined so inextricably for years, both ceased. The cord had suddenly snapped.

  One might have supposed that, in this sudden release from conflicting interests, I should have found it easier to devote myself to writing. On the contrary, never before had I found it so difficult to write. I had more time; I was undisturbed by hurried journeys to and from the Continent; my correspondence had dropped to one tenth of its previous bulk. And yet I found writing a genuine effort.

  I think the sudden severing of those tremendously human ties had left me dry of inspiration. Not that I ever wrote of our experiences in my novels—far from it. But when you are very close to people and seeing life in terms of big, simple essentials, your top spins and your perceptions are immensely quickened.

  During the first year of the war, Louise and I were separated. Her office was evacuated to some remote spot in Wales, and our contact was limited to the odd weekends I could spend with her or she could spend at home. We loathed it, both feeling that bombing was preferable to evacuation any day. When she finally managed to get a transfer back to a London office in September, 1941, we felt that the two worst years of the war were over.

  The brightest spot in that first boring, horrid, frustrating year was Jim’s marriage. Ena is the sort of sister-in-law for whom everyone longs and, I suppose, few deserve. We hope we are among the few deserving, for we do most certainly appreciate her. With our other sister-in-law, Bill’s wife, Lydia, we have been equally fortunate. In fact, we always tell our brothers that if we had chosen the girls ourselves, we could not have done better.

  On the occasion of the first great air raid on London in September, 1940, Louise had chosen to make one of her hurried weekend visits to us. Nesta and Jane, still our constant companions and good supporters in all our hopes and undertakings, came over to see us that evening. And, in the interval between two air-raid warnings, Louise arrived.

  We all realized that the principal activity was in the east. Looking out of our top windows, we could see an occasional midge-like cloud of fighters go up to the attack.

  Presently, we notice what seemed to be huge, slowly moving clouds massing in the eastern part of the sky. Then, as darkness fell, we noticed a curious red reflection thrown upon these clouds. And, with a sense of incredulous shock, we realized that the “clouds” were made up of thick, slowly billowing smoke rising from the burning docks.

  It is an indescribably strange moment when you see your own city on fire. You can read of the same fate befalling other cities and be horrified. You can visualize the thing happening to places you have visited and known and possibly loved. But when your own place starts to burn, there comes a sensation that is entirely new and incredible.

  Similarly, you may have seen house after house come down in raids, and you may have helped sweep up the remains of friends’ belongings, thinking you share their feelings. But when you suddenly see your own dining-room ceiling lying about in jagged lumps, you know you’ve never quite understood disaster—in the material sense—until that moment.

  Well, as everyone who was in London then will remember, it was a strange and oddly exciting night. We were frightened, of course, but the sheer sensationalism of the whole thing kept up one’s spirits. It was much later, when night after night of the same thing turned into a sort of grisly boredom, that we found it much more trying.

  Nesta and Jane stayed the night with us. When the “All Clear” sounded about six o’clock, they said they must start for home at once. Louise and I walked them part of the way. And as we came through Battersea we saw, for the first time, a collapsed and crumbling building that had been hit by a bomb.

  It was one more strange “first impression” of what was to become commonplace in the following weeks.

  Sunday was a beautiful day, but Louise had to go away again in the evening. Once more, as the light faded, we realized that the eastern sky was still red. The docks were still burning. Even the least experienced of us understood that they must make a perfect target for any planes returning that evening.

  The planes did return—that night and for an i
ncredible number of nights to come.

  On September 13, we received our first hit.

  That is to say, a smallish bomb exploded in the garden of a house opposite. Most of our windows blew in, part of our roof came off and our hall ceiling came down. But no one was hurt. And in the grey chilly dawn, we all went out and swept up the mess. It is strange to hear the clink of your own windows and the crackle of your own roof slates as you sweep them into the gutter. But oh, how soon you grow used to that, too!

  A week later, a good deal of our local railway station was blown away, and we decided it was time Mother left London. Louise was still evacuated at this time; Jim was “somewhere in England,” waiting for daily expected orders to go overseas; Bill, while waiting to be called up, had been evacuated with his office to Devonshire. He came to London that weekend and fetched Mother back with him to Devonshire, and there she stayed for nearly a year and a half.

  That left Dad and me to hold the fort. There is no one companion I would sooner have had during those extraordinary days and nights. It was really quite difficult to be panic-stricken with Dad around.

  A week later, we were hit again. This time, I heard the damned thing coming and had time to bolt under the kitchen table. While I was trying to decide if it was wiser to hold up the table and receive any impact of falling ceiling or just to crouch there and let everything cave in, I heard a tearing sound, and then something hit the ground like a giant mallet. All our front windows blew in and our back windows blew out once more.

  But the moment was over, and I crawled out, feeling rather as one does after a bilious attack. Being bombed is quite a bit like that. The long and half-hopeful, half-gloomy anticipation precedes that dreadful moment when you know it is going to happen after all and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then comes the general upheaval—in every sense of the phrase—and finally the lovely, weak, thankful feeling: well, at least that’s over!

  About this time, I decided that, with Mother away and Dad often on night duty, there was no reason why I should not volunteer for some night duty in one of the East End shelters. Workers were badly needed, and I was freer than most. So off I went to make enquiries. In next to no time, I was sent to one of the big shelters in Bermondsey.

  Here, I found again that tremendously close and simple contact with people I had missed so much when the refugee work ended. The story of our shelter differed little from the stories of hundreds of similar London shelters during that winter of 1940-41. But for that very reason, it is perhaps worth the telling.

  I had been asked if I would do “night-watching,” and feeling that this was about my mental level in these days, I agreed with alacrity. I was assigned to one of the really “swell” shelters that stood somewhere between Tower Bridge and the Elephant and Castle, near that quarter endeared to us all by a thousand music-hall jokes—the Old Kent Road.

  In the hurricane of fire that had been battering London, this shelter had come to be—in the very real sense of the hymn—“a shelter from the stormy blast.” Sometimes it seemed likely to become “our eternal home.”

  Remote though those times appear now, they seemed endless while we lived them. The days were little more than uneasy, work-paced intervals between the “All Clear” and the siren’s wail; the nights an ever-recurring test of endurance. The Battle of the Blitz was fought out—in the air, on the ground and, with grim determination, beneath the ground.

  The sirens had sounded and the guns were just starting up when I felt my way down the flight of stone steps to our shelter for the first time. A smell compounded of cement, disinfectant, Oxo, people and sawdust rose to meet me. And the sound of many voices made a cheerful and determined conquest over the rumble of distant gunfire.

  People were already making up beds, exchanging greetings and sharing suppers. I stood about for a minute or two, feeling quite superfluous as a night-watcher, whatever that might be, in this busy and extraordinarily cheerful throng.

  I decided to go to the sick bay to see if there were anyone with whom I could talk.

  There was. Behind the heavy sheeting that curtained off the sick bay from the rest of the shelter, I found Alice, who was in charge there.

  In answer to my rather bashful, “May I come in?” she cried, “Of course you can, ducks. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  So in I went, and Alice took me under her wing from then on. First she gave me a tour of the shelter, which was composed of four very large sections, and explained that during the day, it served as an air-raid shelter for the workers in the factory overhead. At night, those workers who lived nearby brought their families down there. In addition, some people in the immediate vicinity, who had been bombed-out, stayed there.

  Except on occasions when there was a big disaster near, and we would have some “temporaries” down for a night or two, our clientele was composed of “regulars.”

  Alice herself was the first-aid worker in the factory by day, and at night she continued the same work in the shelter, not even commenting on the fact that she was on duty twenty-four hours a day. She dispensed hot drinks, aspirin, bandages and good counsel with impartial good humour. I am sure she would have laughed or been embarrassed if anyone tried to class her as a heroine. But she was one, nevertheless. Just an everyday one, never to be named in any official citation. But in spite of the fact that she was just as much afraid of bombings as anyone else I know, she helped to win the war.

  It was Alice who introduced me to one or two of the regulars, and they accepted me as one of them with an unforced hospitality that I was to find was an outstanding characteristic of Bermondsey. That—and their deep affection for their own bit of battered London. People often talk movingly of mountains or woods or moors. But these amazing women truly loved the familiar, and not very beautiful, streets falling about them in ruins. They shed no tears for them, but they spoke with cheerful determination of replacing them one day.

  As one woman said, “Still, never mind. We’ll build Bermondsey again after the war, even better than it’s ever been.” She found it hard to imagine any improvement on the Bermondsey she knew and loved. But it would go on as one of the constant factors of existence; that she did know. It was nothing to her that all the brazen hordes of Germany’s might were pounding this island into what they fondly supposed was submission. When they found they were wrong and stopped, then we would “build Bermondsey again.”

  Someone who noticed how thrilled and moved I was, said, “There’s nothing like the Bermondsey people, miss. They’re nice, aren’t they?”

  I agreed that they were. And, even on that first evening, I meant by that a whole lot more than she knew. For the life of our shelter and its people was beginning to unroll before me—sketched in simple lines, but coloured in bewildering richness by unconscious courage, unselfishness and a blazing confidence that no bombing could dim.

  That very first evening I was told, quite simply and unemotionally, stories of unflinching courage. No one thought very much of them, really. It was simply that one naturally accepted whatever trial was necessary for the ultimate bringing of victory.

  “It doesn’t matter as long as we beat him,” was the general verdict.

  One of them had said that to the queen when she had come down to Bermondsey a few days before. And the queen had patted her on the shoulder, woman to woman, and said, “That’s the right spirit!”

  This same woman told me how, on the previous day, she had been helping her sister to sweep up what remained of their old father’s home.

  “And while we were sweeping up, Miss Cook,” she explained, “my sister stopped and said to me, ‘Well, Em,’ she said, ‘we must always remember we’d be much worse off under Hitler.’ And it’s true, you know. You have to think of that.”

  I doubt if a correct sense of values has ever been more tellingly expressed. Better destruction than dictatorship!

  One of my most vivid memories of that first night was the five minutes before “Lights Out.” There were
prayers for those who cared to join in, but no compulsion on those who did not. Only a courteous request for quiet for a few minutes. In the crowded, rather dimly lit shelter, there was the murmur of a couple of hundred voices repeating the ageless words of the “Lord’s Prayer.” And the not very distant crash of a bomb lent a terrible point to the earnest petition “Deliver us from evil,” breathed from the farthest, shadowy corner.

  Then goodnights, and lights out. I was told to sleep until two o’clock, when I should be wakened to enter on my simple duty of remaining awake and seeing that all was well with the sleeping people.

  “Call me if anyone has a fit or a heart attack or anything,” were Alice’s last encouraging words. “But you’ll manage all right.”

  I lay awake for a long while, listening to unfamiliar sounds. Not the gunfire and the bomb blasts from the outer world; those had become familiar enough in the last few weeks, but the stirring and whispering of a great community settling to sleep in comparative safety while war raged overhead.

  At last I fell asleep. And then it seemed only three minutes before someone was shaking me gently and whispering, “Time to get up.”

  I got off my improvised bed of blankets on wooden slats and put on my shoes, the removal of which was the only concession to undressing. And then I crept quietly out of the sick bay, where I had been sleeping, and made my way through the big shadowy rooms of the shelter to the one bright lamp under which a chair had been set for the night-watcher.

  At first I read. Then I crocheted an interminable blanket, which lasted me through many a night of watching. And then, finally, because your eyes grow very tired about half-past three in the morning, I put down my work and just looked round.

  On every side, lay sleeping people. People who were glad and thankful for a few square feet of concrete on which to make up some sort of bed. People who had no idea that there was any alternative to this, because they knew nothing about the technique of surrender and no one could teach it to them. It required no feat of fancy to imagine that, in time to that concerted, rhythmical breathing, beat the unconquered heart of Britain.