The Rescue Man

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘Yer tea’s still there.’

  Baines looked round at the untouched mug. His eyes itched and his tongue felt horribly furred. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  Mavers shrugged. ‘Couple of hours, maybe. You looked ’alf dead.’

  ‘Hmm. That’s pretty much how I feel. I’m starving hungry.’

  ‘We can go and get some brekky, if you like.’

  They emerged into a raw, gloom-shrouded morning and trudged down James Street towards the Pier Head. Great swollen sea clouds were heaving up from the river, and the sky was the mottled colour of pigeon feathers. In the streets around the financial district a skewed sort of routine was taking hold; bowler-hatted men with furled umbrellas were talking unconcernedly outside their bombed-out chambers and office buildings. It seemed that many had decided to continue business hours out on the pavement. Road-repair teams were busily attending to tramlines and overhead cables. The air down by the river had a thick, charred smell from the docks that had been set ablaze, and the burnt cargoes of rum and sugar and pepper added to the fiery bouquet. The cafe Mavers had brought them to was just by the Goree, and had taken a recent hit from flying shrapnel. One side of its plate-glass front had been boarded up with plywood, on which had been painted a defiant WE’RE STILL OPEN.

  They sat by the window, where they could watch the dock traffic rumble by. From the pocket of his reefer jacket Mavers removed a pack of cigarettes and his book, to which he called Baines’s attention.

  ‘You ever read this?’

  Baines examined the spine: it was The Secret Agent, by Conrad. He shook his head.

  ‘It’s all right. Not as good as Lord Jim, that was me dad’s favourite.’

  He added, slyly, ‘There’s a feller in this one called the Professor. He’s got a thing about bombs.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous. Maybe that’s where Farrell got my nickname from.’

  ‘Nah, Terry doesn’t read. Not even sure he can read.’

  Mavers had the subtly sceptical pride of an autodidact, and he liked to use Baines as a sounding board for his literary opinions. Having left school at fourteen, he had worked on building sites for most of his life. Baines gathered that he had been close to his father, a merchant seaman who had bequeathed to him a reading habit, along with a full set of Conrad.

  ‘So,’ Mavers was saying, with a shrewd, measuring look, ‘was Terry right about you before?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Down in that cellar – he said you played it cool when you saw that bomb.’

  Baines shrugged, remembering. ‘I don’t know why he said that. I was honestly and absolutely terrified.’

  It was true, and yet he did acknowledge to himself that something had happened to him since the bombing had started in August, some internal shift that had exposed an unsuspected resolve. It was not that he had found sudden reserves of courage. He still felt a clammy fear seize his innards when he heard a bomb whistling down, or when he heard the foundations of a house he was tunnelling through start to creak and groan. What surprised him was the fierceness of his determination to keep going. It had taken the unambiguous proximity of death to make him comprehend how dearly he prized the sweets of life. And inextricable from this sentiment was a piercing sense of regret, of shame almost, that his life up to this point had not been properly lived. Now, thrust into the eye of a storm, he had promised himself he would not be found wanting again.

  Mavers had turned pensive. ‘You know, you read in the paper about how brave we all are for carryin’ on in the Blitz. But when you think about it, what choice have we got?’

  Baines smiled wryly. ‘It’s called making a virtue out of necessity.’

  Their breakfast arrived. They had wanted bacon, sausage and eggs, but the war had quickly seen off such luxuries. Instead they were served a pie filled with meat whose provenance neither of them felt inclined to question.

  ‘Duh,’ said Mavers, wrinkling his nose. ‘Try maken a virtue out of this, la’.’ He forked a gobbet of it into his mouth, chewed, and shook his head. They ate for a while in silence. Through the window Baines watched a dray-horse limp along, an enormous load of crates in tow. Mavers had been watching it too, and said, ‘D’you ever wonder about all the traffic that’s been through this port? I mean, all the slaves and dockers and merchantmen walken over those cobbles, wearen the stones down …’

  ‘Do I ever wonder?’ said Baines. ‘Liam, I’ve spent nearly my whole life wondering about things like that.’

  Mavers looked at him, and realised he wasn’t joking. Baines explained a little about the aborted book he had been compiling on the city, and about the photographic exhibition that was its accidental offshoot. As he did so he wondered how many of the places he had documented had been turned to ashes and rubble by the raids. And what of the ones he hadn’t documented?

  Mavers, smiling to himself, said, ‘Our gran’s always tellun these stories about Everton, that’s where we live, and how it used to be a village with pasture and tha’. Thee used to run sheep through it! She got it all from her gran, I s’pose.’

  ‘Well, she’s right. In 1800 it was a favourite residence for well-to-do families – they built mansions and pleasure grounds there.’

  Mavers snorted in amusement. ‘They didn’t stay, though, did thee? I haven’t spotted many mansions on Netherfield Road lately.’

  ‘It was being built up with terraced streets by the middle of the nineteenth century. They had to find somewhere for the Irish to live when the Famine starved them out.’

  ‘Yeah, our grandad was one of ’em. He’s still fit as a fiddle, like, eighty-somethin’ now, they live round the corner from me and the missus.’

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘Fifteen years!’ Mavers exclaimed, as if he found the fact as implausible as anyone else. ‘We met when we were kids, like, went to the same school. Sounds a bit soppy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. It sounds rather lovely,’ said Baines. ‘And you have children?’

  ‘Yeah, four of them. Our oldest wants to start as a builder, but I’m not havin’ it – I just told her straight, it’s no job for a girl.’

  Baines looked at him blankly, until Mavers spluttered with laughter.

  ‘I’m joken, la’! She’s a bright kid, actually, our Beth, bit of an artist on the quiet.’

  Opening The Secret Agent, he removed a betting slip which he’d been using as a bookmark, and handed it carefully to Baines. On the reverse was a faint pencil drawing of a face – Mavers’s face. Baines examined it closely for some moments.

  ‘Pretty good. She can draw.’

  ‘Told yer,’ said Mavers, with smiling pride.

  Outside, the dust in the air was making Baines’s eyes smart again. Having bidden a tired goodbye to Mavers, he rerouted his walk home via Chapel Street, another of the old city streets he knew had been bombed. Across the road fire hoses lay scattered and spent, floored by their exertions from the night before. Baines was muttering a half-remembered prayer to himself as he approached Magdalen Chambers, which, to judge from the wounded building a few doors along, had had a lucky reprieve: hardly a mark on it. It was a small mercy when set against the general panorama of desolation, but he felt nonetheless grateful for its escape. He was about to turn into Temple Street when he heard a motor horn parp, and looked round to see a woman’s head leaning out of a van, its engine running. It was Bella, at the wheel of the mobile canteen she drove for the Women’s Voluntary Service. Baines walked over, conscious for the first time that morning of his bedraggled appearance.

  ‘Hullo! Fancy running into you. Where are you going?’

  ‘Just finished a shift,’ said Baines.

  ‘So have I! Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.’

  ‘I’m – well, covered in grime, as you see –’

  Bella raised her eyes heavenwards. ‘Just get in, you nit.’

  He went round the side of the van and climbed into the cabin. They bumped along the streets, crowd
ed with people cleaning up the pavements or else gravely assessing the damage. On the corner of London Road and Lime Street a tram had been flipped on to its side, and a policeman was directing a desultory flow of traffic around it. Glass shards still spangled the setts. Bella eased cautiously on the brake.

  ‘Now, I’d better be careful around here. I’ve already popped a tyre once this week.’

  She was wearing an old overcoat of Richard’s and a pair of dark serge trousers, like a sailor’s. Remarkable, Baines thought, that even in these drab duds she could look fetching.

  ‘I see women in trousers all the time now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes – I don’t get so many funny looks any more. I was grateful for them this morning, I can tell you, standing in the cold handing out tea and sandwiches. Those firemen had been hard at it.’

  ‘I think last night’s was the worst yet. These huge craters are from the landmines – they come down on parachutes, so you don’t hear them before they explode.’

  Bella glanced round at him. ‘You had a busy night, then?’

  ‘You could say.’ He told her about the pub off Canning Place and what they had encountered in the cellar.

  ‘Heavens! You mean you walked right past it? Were you –’

  ‘Petrified? Yes. But as you can see, I’ve lived to tell the tale.’

  ‘I think it’s a tale Richard might like to hear,’ she said, as they turned into Berry Street. ‘He’ll probably be back by now. Come and have a cup of tea.’

  Richard was in the living room entertaining a guest of his own when they arrived at Slater Street. The air was permeated with the bitter fug of cigars, and Baines felt a sudden wave of nausea rise in his nostrils and then subside.

  ‘Hullo, you two,’ Richard said, and introduced them to a dapper uniformed fellow who had stood up as Bella entered the room. His name was Jimmy Andrews, and as they shook hands Baines recognised him as the officer who had held the enrolment meeting at Dale Street the week after war was declared.

  ‘Ah, so you answered the call,’ said Andrews pleasantly, on being reminded of the occasion. ‘September last year – doesn’t that seem an age ago? Well, we certainly caught it last night.’

  ‘Tom’s lucky to be alive,’ said Bella, jumping in, and began to describe the bomb as if she’d seen it with her own eyes.

  Richard whistled. ‘Sounds like a 250. That must have given you a turn.’

  ‘Mm. But so did the meat pie I ate for breakfast this morning – and I had to pay for that.’

  ‘Hard to know what’s worse, Jerry’s bombs or the want of some decent grub. God, it’s like being in the bloody army again.’

  Baines noticed Jimmy smirking at this.

  ‘I hate that screaming noise the bombs make,’ said Bella. ‘It’s either that or that awful sound of a sheet being ripped in two.’

  ‘They say you never hear the bomb that’s got your name on it,’ said Richard. ‘It just lands on top of you and – bouf.’

  There was a brief silence, as if that moment of noiseless death were about to burst upon them. Richard theatrically lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and they all laughed.

  ‘At least it would be over quickly,’ said Andrews, drawing meditatively on his cigar. ‘When we were being shelled at the front – as Richard will tell you – most of the poor buggers couldn’t have known what hit them. There are worse ways to go, really.’

  ‘Such as –?’ enquired Bella.

  ‘Fire,’ said Andrews crisply.

  Fire. Yes, thought Baines, that would be a worse way to go. He had been at a bombed warehouse a few weeks previously and watched firemen trying to contain the blaze; the brick walls seemed to glow a kind of Halloween orange, and an avalanche of fiery splinters cascaded from the roof. It had amazed him how daringly close the men on the fire hoses came to the leaping flames. If he could feel their furnace heat from where he was standing, how much more intense would it have been for them? His mind had turned to stories of martyrs and witches at the stake, the flames crackling, engulfing and finally consuming their poor weak flesh. He must have looked away for a few seconds, because the next thing he saw was a man staggering away from the conflagration, a whirl of flame coursing dementedly about his head and body; the fire had the mad quicksilver movement of a dervish, and in its blind fury was dragging a hapless partner into its dance. His colleagues managed to douse the burning man almost immediately – and saved his life, he later heard – but he had seen enough to know he would rather be blasted to atoms than fry like that.

  Richard in the meantime was complaining about the official reporting of the Blitz. ‘It’s just a farce! Everyone knows London’s taken a pounding because they report it on the wireless, but when the Luftwaffe rain bombs down on us the BBC never mentions Liverpool, or even Merseyside – they just say “attacks were made on the north-west”. Do they think we haven’t noticed, or that we don’t care? Jimmy, can you explain it?’

  Andrews shrugged tolerantly. ‘The BBC is probably under orders from Whitehall. I suppose their argument would be that the Blitz on London can hardly be hidden from the world, but if news gets out that a strategically important target like Liverpool is being regularly hit then they’re handing a weapon to the enemy.’

  ‘But for pity’s sake, the Germans aren’t fools. They know they’re battering Merseyside, they can see the place burn! There’s no point in censoring news when it’s obvious to everyone what’s happening.’

  ‘Or else the BBC doesn’t think we’re that important,’ said Baines. ‘Maybe to them a city like Liverpool is just “up north”.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s more news you won’t be hearing on the wireless,’ Andrews said gravely. ‘There was a shelter hit in Durning Road last night. A junior technical school collapsed into the basement. The last I heard was at least 150 dead.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said Richard. ‘Shouldn’t we be helping?’

  Andrews shook his head. ‘They’ve got teams on to it. Direct hit from a parachute mine – I shouldn’t think there’ll be many survivors.’

  Nobody said anything for a while. Bella went out to the kitchen to make tea. The scale of the loss felt suddenly too exorbitant to merit discussion. This really was war, thought Baines; one minute there are men, women and children crowded into a basement listening to the noise of the raid as it gets nearer, the next minute the whole world convulses and their own little space in it is being incinerated. You never hear the bomb that’s got your name on it, so Richard said. But what about the bomb that has 150 names on it? Did none of them hear the noise as it hurtled towards that shelter? Did they all die instantaneously, or were some killed by fumes, or fire? In the end it didn’t bear thinking about. You just had to keep your head down and hope that the storm, when it broke, would miss you.

  ‘Tom might be interested in helping with this.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Baines’s attention swam back into focus on hearing Richard’s voice.

  ‘Jimmy here has a commission for me direct from the War Office. They want a photographic record of bomb damage on Merseyside, here, Birkenhead, all over.’

  ‘It will be useful,’ said Andrews, ‘for when we eventually come to prosecute Göring, Sperrle and the rest of them.’

  ‘Well, if you need a hand …’ In truth, the prospect of recording the city’s Blitz damage was far from appealing. He was already far too familiar with the scorched, smoking guts of wrecked buildings to want to spend any more time photographing them. Then again, he had not seen as much of Richard since they had been assigned to different rescue squads, so this might at least serve to renew a companionship he rather missed.

  ‘Have a think about it,’ said Andrews, standing up and brushing flecks of cigar ash from his uniform. ‘In the meantime I’d better be going. I have a press briefing about last night’s raids.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be telling them there were few casualties and some “negligible damage” to buildings,’ said Richard.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replie
d, with a wintry smile. He turned to Baines. ‘Pleasure to meet you, and – I hope your good luck holds.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said as they shook hands.

  Half an hour later Baines was preparing to leave when the doorbell rang in the studio downstairs.

  ‘That’ll be the postman.’

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ said Baines, ‘I’m pushing off anyway.’

  ‘Thanks, Tom. Just leave whatever’s there on the ledge.’

  He said goodbye and ambled down the stairs, glancing as usual at the Nicholson portrait of Bella, and made his way out of the gallery. But it wasn’t the postman at the door, it was a boy on a bicycle holding a small orange envelope. Baines felt almost certain of what it contained.

  ‘Telegram for Tanqueray,’ said the boy.

  Baines nodded and signed for it. He retraced his steps up the stairs, feeling the envelope in his hand like a loaded gun. Bella was clearing up the tea things as he reappeared, and she met him with such an innocent, enquiring look that his heart flipped over.

  ‘Forget something?’ she said brightly.

  He shook his head and handed her the envelope, and as she took it he saw her expression pass in a blink from bemusement to suspicion. She broke the seal, removed the folded sheet within and began to read. As she did so her eyes flicked up to Baines, who experienced the reasonless pricking of a messenger’s guilt.

  ‘It says …’ and she turned disbelievingly back to the text, ‘“The Air Ministry regrets to inform you that your brother, Flight Lieutenant David Garnett, number——, failed to return from operations over enemy territory during the night of 22nd November … You will be informed as soon as further information becomes available.” This – they must have made a mistake.’

  She turned to Richard, who was standing in the doorway, and handed him the telegram. He read it, and the way he kept his eyes lowered was sufficient to suggest no mistake had been made.

  ‘It’s not conclusive, these things never –’