Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  The thirst that from the soul doth rise

  Doth ask a drink divine;

  But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

  I would not change for thine.

  At the end of the verse, the accompanist leaped to his feet, fairly blazing with enthusiasm and exclaimed, “I’ve seldom heard that better sung! You’ve simply got to sing the second verse now. It’s not so often sung, but it contains some of the most beautiful words in the English language. Let’s be sure and get them right.”

  He recited them to us. We repeated them after him. And then the battered old piano started again.

  I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

  Not so much honouring thee

  As giving it a hope that there

  It could not wither’d be;

  What did it matter if Spaniard or German were trying to tear life from us? This was one of the great songs of great England, and we would sing it to the end, whether it were the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

  But thou thereon didst only breathe,

  And sent’st it back to me;

  Since when it grows and smells, I swear,

  Not of itself but thee!

  Immortal words, immortal tune, immortal people. They were making history, and they sang as they did it.

  To all of us who love music, and have been fortunate enough to indulge that love, there are half a dozen performances that stand out in the memories. An opera performance, with singers, orchestra, conductor and composer in the exact combination one has always hoped to hear it and seldom does. A Mozart serenade on a warm, starry night in Salzburg, when even the surrounding mountains seem to listen.

  But, among my own list of great performances—every other one of which owed much to professional artistry and the exercise of trained and perfected art—I must place that strange and moving occasion when two hundred Cockneys sang “Drink To Me With Thine Eyes” in the cellar of a London factory and forgot that from overhead the bombs were falling.

  12

  Finally the event we had all been dreading occurred: the night when we really were hit. The factory overhead was not directly hit but a public house and block of flats next door to the factory and almost directly over one half of our shelter were.

  We heard the sound of the descending bomber, the sound of the descending bomb—to which we were all quite accustomed—but the final thud seemed to hit us personally; it was succeeded by the new and terrifying sound of masonry crashing down over our heads for endless, horrible moments. We rose instinctively to our feet in a body, wondering, wondering if the roof above us would hold.

  It held. But through the shelter came drifting clouds of dust from the rubble overhead, and there was an immediate call for volunteers to go out and help. Volunteers were particularly needed to enter the gradually collapsing public house and bring out those who were still alive.

  A boy of nineteen, whom I had never before associated with anything but the rather tiresome playing of a piano-accordion, was the first one in. Afterwards, he described what had happened. After crawling in, he had switched his lamp around and the first thing he had seen was a woman, quite dead. “And me stomach came up and hit the roof of me mouth,” was the expressive way he had described his feelings.

  But he described the rescue work very matter-of-factly, while he drank hot Oxo and relaxed. And he finished by saying thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’ll tell my Mum and Dad I was in it.”

  “Won’t you?” I exclaimed. For, unashamed sensationalist that I am, I was dying to get home and tell my Dad about it all. “But why not?”

  “Oh, they’ll only worry,” he explained tolerantly. “But, coo!” he added reflectively, “I’ll never be nearer to heaven than I was tonight. I heard them harps playing.”

  Curious though it may sound, there was a sort of relief about having been hit at last. It was the quite illogical feeling that we had had our turn and survived. I remember feeling indescribably cheerful as I went home next morning.

  During the day, I had occasion to go up West. As my bus went up Park Lane, I suddenly saw the wonderful, fantastic riot of purple, white and golden crocuses that, every year, burst forth at that side of Hyde Park in a glory of insolent colour. It was a perfect day, and I was alive. I should have been dead, but I was alive. The sky had never been more blue, the grass more green nor the crocuses more incredibly beautiful.

  The memory of that tidal wave of thankfulness has never left me. Every year, when I first see the crocuses in Hyde Park, I feel the tears come into my eyes, and I remember again that wonderful, glorious sensation.

  It was, I think, only two weeks later that we experienced our worst night of all. Most people in London at that time will recall the two fearful raids of April 16 and April 19. I was down in the shelter on that memorable Wednesday, and from the very beginning, we knew it was going to be what was euphemistically called “a lively night.”

  The lights were not turned out that night. Or, rather, I think we turned them out for half an hour and then, by common consent, turned them on again. The great tarpaulin over the doorway—for it was unsafe to have anything rigid like a door—was lifted almost to the ceiling again and again by the force of the bomb blasts, and a few of the women could not help crying a little.

  I remember doggedly reading an evening newspaper over and over. By driving my elbows hard into my ribs and holding the paper in both hands, I could manage not to let its leaves tremble too obviously.

  Once, dear Mrs. Gee came over and remarked, “It’s a nasty night, isn’t it?”

  And, with false cheeriness, I managed to say, “Really, an awful lot of the noise is gunfire, you know.”

  Mrs. Gee laughed with real humour and replied, “But an awful lot isn’t, Miss Cook.” And we both smiled feebly.

  I had been frightened before, of course. There had often been odd moments when I had thought, This is it. But that night, for the first and only time, the growing conviction came over me that we could not live until the morning.

  I remember thinking, I shall never see Mother again. I shall never hear Rosa sing again. And those two acceptances seemed to make it absolutely final.

  Every half hour or so our fire guards came through the shelter to see that we were all right and report on events above. They were wonderfully cheerful and chaffed us a good deal for having the lights on.

  “What’s the matter with some of you girls?” they wanted to know. “If you can’t get to sleep on a nice quiet night like this, what’ll you do when it’s really noisy?”

  We laughed rather sheepishly, trying to look as though we didn’t really mind what was happening.

  But, as the night wore on, they took a different tone during their rounds of the shelter. They stressed how foolish people were who had stayed up above when they could have gone to shelter underground.

  “You mean it’s been a bad night for casualties?” someone asked.

  Yes, it had been a bad night for casualties. Made you feel how glad you were just to be alive. Better to lose everything you possessed than risk your lives and the lives of your families by staying near your worldly possessions.

  Yes, we all agreed fervently, the really important thing was just to be alive.

  “You can buy fresh homes,” one of the men said. “But you can’t put back people who’ve been killed.”

  How true, we agreed again. None of us minded what was lost so long as we and our dear ones were safe.

  At this point, one of them remarked casually that it was a good thing we felt that way, the only sensible way.

  Then one of the women realized where the conversation was drifting. She said, rather hesitantly, “Is there a lot of damage up above?”

  Yes, there was a lot of damage.

  We looked at each other. “Some of our places gone?”

  Yes, several people’s places had gone.

  Then one woman looked directly at her husband. “Is our place gone?”

  “I’m afraid so, girl,” he said. “Th
ere isn’t much left up there. But we’re alive. We’re all lucky to be alive. We’d have been dead if we’d stayed up above.”

  “Oh, what a mercy we didn’t!” she exclaimed. “How lucky we are!”

  Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldly possessions.

  About four o’clock in the morning, things had grown a little quieter, so I asked one of the fire guards if I might go up to the top of the stairs and look out. He said I might; the worst was over. And up the long flight of stairs I went.

  It is still difficult to visualize that scene. As I stepped out into the open air, I saw everything by a warm, almost cosy glow. It was not daylight. It was not moonlight. It was firelight on a colossal scale. I was looking at the outside world by firelight. It is impossible to describe how monstrously incongruous that can seem.

  As I looked around, it appeared to me that ours was the only building that had not been hit. All around were burning ruins. Since I had gone down to the shelter the night before, the whole skyline had changed. It was like finding myself in a totally unfamiliar part of the town.

  * * *

  When that incredible night passed into an incredible dawn, we all started picking our way homeward. The smell of burning was everywhere and the air was thick with bits of charred paper: the last of the big book centres in the City had been hit that night, and in the tremendous draught created by the fires, the remains of millions of books had been drawn up and now were drifting down, sometimes miles away in the outer suburbs.

  One charred sheet, which fell in our garden at home, came from a Bible. On it was something about the wicked being confounded. I found that oddly comforting, before the sheet fell to pieces in my hand.

  On Saturday of that week, there followed an almost equally terrible raid, and then there was a pause until the famous May 10 raid, the last great raid of the Big Blitz. After these events, extreme terror retreated until the days of the flying bombs, or doodlebugs.

  For the purposes of continuity, I have intentionally kept only to the history of the shelter throughout that winter of 1940-41, but I must go back now and deal with the one great personal tragedy that had hit us during that period.

  One weekend in November, 1940, I had been up in Wales, staying with Louise. On my return, I telephoned Nesta’s office, as usual, to arrange to meet her and Jane and give them all the news about our exile.

  A rather subdued voice replied, “Oh, haven’t you heard about Nesta? Then I think I’d better put you on to the man for whom she works.”

  After a short but agonizing delay, another voice spoke to me and, without any preamble said, “I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you. Their house was bombed on Friday night. Nesta and her mother are both very badly injured, but I understand Jane and her father are not so seriously hurt. Jane has been moved to a hospital outside London, but Nesta and her mother are too ill to be moved.”

  I stopped only to ask the name of their local hospital, put down the telephone, and set out, running. I remember running along the top of our road, unable to bear waiting for a bus. All the time I kept on thinking, if only I’m in time. I don’t think I even allowed myself to realize what I hoped to be in time for.

  Such a scene of devastation surrounded the hospital that I wondered how anyone had survived at all. And yet, somehow, I had never really accepted the idea of any of us being hurt. One doesn’t. One hears about others, one is terribly sorry, one is often frightened. But one doesn’t, I realized then, ever accept the complete idea that one of one’s own may be a victim.

  I was admitted at once to see Nesta, who was in a room by herself. She didn’t know me. Poor child, I hardly knew her.

  “Speak to her,” the nurse said. “See if you can hold her attention for a moment and persuade her to rest. We can’t.”

  I spoke to her. I repeated her name; I repeated my name. I tried to hold her attention for that one precious moment. But she only moaned and muttered and took no notice.

  Then, out of the welter of shared recollections, I pulled the one I knew had always meant most to her. Of all the operatic loves we had shared together, no one had meant so much to Nesta as Krauss and Ursuleac.

  “Nesta dear,” I said, “try to go to sleep and dream of K and Vee.” I was using our affectionate nicknames for them.

  She stopped moving her bandaged head and said, “What?”

  I repeated what I had said. After a moment, she replied thoughtfully, “Yes, I will.” And for a little while, she was quiet and seemed to rest. Oh, blessed shared opera memories—they were almost all that were left to us then!

  I went after to see her mother, who was conscious and spoke to me a little, quite coherently. To my inexperienced judgment, she seemed rather less seriously hurt than Nesta. But she died the next day.

  And our brave, inextinguishable Nesta hung on to life day after day, though the nursing sister herself told me that by every known medical rule, she should be dead.

  Every day, I went to see her. Every day, I hoped that she would know me and speak to me. And finally, the moment came when she recognized me. She looked very brightly at me out of the one eye left to her and said, “It’s all right, Ida. Don’t worry. We’ll celebrate victory together.”

  She was the bravest thing I ever knew. In addition to the loss of an eye, she had terrible head injuries, which later necessitated months and months of plastic surgery. For a long time, we thought she would have to lose an arm. Yet I never heard her complain. And, more impressive still, she never altered her sense of values.

  One evening, when she had been in hospital about a month, I was sitting by her bed and it was growing dark. We had not talked for a while, and then she said reflectively, “I’d like you to know, Ida, that all this hasn’t made me feel any different about things.”

  “How do you mean, Nesta?” I asked.

  “I still think,” Nesta explained, “that we had to go to war to stop what was happening in Europe. I don’t regret it. I give you my word that never once, not even when you told me Mother was dead, or when I knew I had lost my eye and thought I must lose my arm, never once did I feel so bad as the day we signed the Munich Pact. I know now which are the really terrible things in life.”

  There are so many crowded, yet clear-cut memories of those days. There was the afternoon of Christmas, 1940, when I had gone as usual to visit Nesta in hospital. As I came away, I was struck afresh by the scene of dreary ruin round me. The street leading from the hospital appeared to be an uninhabited shell.

  No one had had time to clear the poor personal possessions that lay about in gardens or gutters. Pictures, broken ornaments, bits of furniture, books, papers, clothes; they were all there. Rain-soaked, forlorn, horribly familiar, because I passed them each day on the way to the hospital. Some of them I knew quite well. There was an engraving of Kitchener greeting someone after an engagement in the Boer War. Once it had hung on someone’s sitting-room wall. Now it lay there in rain or snow, and I never could resist glancing at it as I passed.

  That Christmas afternoon, the scene was drearier than ever. I felt a bit like crying from sheer depression. I heard the sound of a familiar voice speaking.

  I stood still in the ruined street, in the grey chill of the December afternoon. From the basement of one of the apparently deserted houses came the voice. Someone was living in one of those ruined shells. Someone was listening to the radio. And over the radio, the king was speaking to his battered, but unbeaten, people.

  I stood there all the while he was speaking, too far away to hear the words, but following only the sound of that unmistakable, faintly hesitant voice. Presently the strains of the national anthem signalled an end to the broadcast. But I felt a thousand times better.

  The street was still in ruins. The afternoon was still grey and dismal. Kitchener was forever greeting someone in a rain-soaked picture. But the voice of Britain had spoken
, literally, from beneath the ruins. It was strangely and heart-warmingly symbolic. For where there seemed to be only ruin and destruction, there was really life and hope.

  I also found my spirits unexpectedly raised at a point when they were sagging badly the first time I went back into what remained of Nesta and Jane’s home. It was impossible to enter some of the rooms, as the walls had shed most of their plaster. Only the inner framework remained, which gave the place a grisly likeness to the flimsy “slatted” walls in Madama Butterfly. I climbed what remained of the stairs, stepping over odd pieces of masonry and plaster, and found my way to Nesta’s room.

  All the ceiling had fallen here; the window had come in, frame and all; the floor was ankle-deep in rubble; and what remained of the furniture was in fragments. I don’t know now why I idly pulled at a picture cord that protruded from a pile of rubble. But pull I did, and from this heap of ruins, with its glass still unbroken, emerged Nesta’s enlargement of the snapshot taken of Krauss and Ursuleac outside Covent Garden on that sunny day in 1934.

  It was dirty, of course, and the cardboard backing had been torn. But it was there, virtually intact, a symbol of the days that had been, but, I believed in that moment, would surely come again. I took the photograph away, and to this day it remains among us, treasured, in its battered condition.

  Apart from the general fears and worries that everyone shared, I had hit a rather tough spot in my own affairs. I had gone into the war owing hundreds of pounds, which I had borrowed for the refugee work—literally everything I could raise. And I had undertaken to pay out something like half my income in maintenance for the various cases who were temporarily—or in some cases of old or sick people, permanently—unable to support themselves.

  I know this sounds very improvident. But in the summer of 1939, the sands were running out with fearful speed. It was no good planning to give help in the future, when money might have been saved for the purpose. The only thing was to undertake the responsibilities then, and trust to heaven or luck or one’s own gumption to be able to raise something to meet those responsibilities. Either one took the risk and people lived, or one played safe and they died.