London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  The night of the 26th of August had been the worst. And he hadn’t expected to get through it. Bombs with his number on them had fairly been raining down. But here he was, on the seventh of September, still alive. Marshal Goering hadn’t been able to do for Mr Puddy. And even if he weren’t exactly smiling, at least he’d got his nerve back. All because of the eight ounces of ham, he was calm and self‐possessed again.

  He didn’t tuck into it as soon as he’d hung his hat up. No rushing at it. Anything eaten before midnight was simply by way of a snack. It was the 2 a.m. break that counted. And Mr Puddy had everything ready for it. He’d put the ham out on a plate with another plate over it; and the tomatoes were in the bag at the side. The ham was still intact. All that he’d allowed himself was a tiny nibble that had been adhering to the paper.

  His first round of the premises had been entirely uneventful. Simply a saunter past sleeping mountains of tea. Even the rats had been quiet to‐night. Unusually quiet. There wasn’t a thing to disturb the stillness. And the soundlessness finally began to get on his nerves a little. He might have been somewhere on the moon, instead of inside the City, he was so lonely. So lonely, and so muffled up in silence.

  He was standing by the front‐door when the sirens began. They were faint at first, a mere flickering disturbance of the atmosphere. But Mr Puddy heard them all right. He had ears in his stomach. And, immediately, a large cold patch began to spread right through him. And this was absurd because sirens as indistinct as that hadn’t got anything to do with the tea warehouse. Those sirens were warning the sleepers of Gravesend or Dagenham.

  All the same, as Mr Puddy sat there listening, his heart was thumping so hard and his breathing was so noisy that he had to hold his breath altogether, simply so that he could listen. Then, before he was ready for it, the next rank of players in this queer nocturnal orchestra had taken up their fiddles. London itself was howling and whining away at him. And, next moment, Mr Puddy’s own personal siren, the one just outside the back entrance, went off. It was so near that it wasn’t simply a matter of hearing it. Mr Puddy was engulfed and surrounded by it. His stomach went up and down with the wailings. Mr Puddy was the siren.

  When it stopped, Mr Puddy went on vibrating for several seconds all by himself.

  It was at this point that Mr Puddy was supposed to go up to the sandbagged telephone kiosk on the roof and tell the London Fire Brigade about any incendiaries which might come his way. Right up there, with nothing but chimneys and a stirrup‐pump and long‐handled shovel for scooping up the things when the Germans had dropped them.

  And did he go?

  Have a heart. There were 58 stairs to the roof from where Mr Puddy was sitting. And even if he had wanted to perch himself right under the bombs, fifty‐eight is an awful lot of stairs. What was more, supposing he had gone, how long would he have to stay there? For all he knew, he might still be up there at breakfast‐time, a lofty anchorite looking down on the ruins of smoking Babylon. Taking it for granted that was, that he himself was still all right. And, in air‐raids, it isn’t safe to take anything for granted. That was why he picked up his big box‐torch – he had a terror of being left suddenly in the dark – and went down to the underground cubby‐hole where the ham was.

  Not a moment too soon, either. This wasn’t just a siren‐raid. Already there was a kind of summer‐thunder, a rumble in the air, as though the suburbs were being racked by earthquakes. Mr Puddy didn’t wait to hear the drone of planes. What he had heard was quite enough. It was tympanum and double‐bass of this ten‐thousand‐acre orchestra.

  ‘Let’s hobe it’s odly recodaissance,’ he told himself stoutly. ‘Just wud or two plades cub over to sby on us.’

  But, if it were only one or two, the guns were making an extraordinary fuss over them. Either that, or the gunners had lost their nerve and were simply loosing off wildly. Even down there in the basement it was noisy. Which just showed what it would have been like if he’d gone up on the roof. Mr Puddy took his steel helmet off the hook and put it on.

  Then came the kind of sound that Mr Puddy liked least of all. The guns were going woof‐woof in all directions: there was a kind of hollowness about them. But this last noise was quite different. It was a sort of crrr‐rump. And it came the wrong way. Instead of coming through the air like all the other disturbances, it rose suddenly out of the ground at Mr Puddy’s feet. It was as though the hard concrete floor had growled and then kicked him.

  ‘That’s wud,’ Mr Puddy told himself. ‘This isn’t recodaissance. This is the real thig.’

  As he said it, the globe of cold in his stomach expanded and re‐iced itself. And, with the rapid changes of temperature inside him, Mr Puddy began sweating. He passed his hand across his forehead. It was sticky. And no wonder. Because they were overhead all right. The cello passage had started. Even from there where he was, with a roof and five floors above him, Mr Puddy could hear them. Clear and distinct above the general uproar, the throb – throb – throb came through the walls as though bees were swarming. Mr Puddy tried not to think about that sound. To produce it, the night sky must have been practically solid with planes.

  But the cellos weren’t the worst. The bar with the flute and piccolo had now been reached. And it was an altogether new sound. Beginning as not much more than a shrill whistle, it mellowed and rounded and then changed suddenly into a vulgar whoosh. As soon as Mr Puddy appreciated what it was, that he was really hearing a bomb coming down, he forsook all dignity and crawled underneath the table – the table with the ham still on it. Even before he had got under it properly, the thing gave a little jump into the air and a lot of dust and cobwebs were dislodged from the ceiling.

  But that was all. Even the whoosh hadn’t meant that it was Mr Puddy’s bomb, the one with his name written on it.

  It was while he was still down there on all fours – as it were playing bears with himself under the table – that he suddenly realised that, shut away from everything like that he mightn’t know what was happening until it was too late. Not merely too late to save the building. But too late to save himself.

  That was how it was that Mr Puddy came to leave the security of his cubby‐hole for the open draughtiness of the basement corridor. And out there with his helmet on he felt fairly in the thick of it.

  All the same, it seemed about the safest place that he could think of. And he remained where he was. Remained there until the gunfire had died away again as though the summer thunderstorm had moved on to another parish and the bees had ceased their swarming. When it was quite quiet, Mr Puddy looked at his watch. It showed five to two. There was just comfortable time for him to nip up to the top floor, punch the infernal clocking‐machine on the fourth landing and get back down to his cold ham.

  And perhaps it was just as well that Mr Puddy should have decided to put work before eating. Otherwise it might have been five minutes, ten, even a quarter of an hour before he smelt the aroma that now filled the tea warehouse. And by then it would probably have been too late.

  It was a queer elusive sort of smell when it first reached him. A long flickering feeler of fragrance came out and tickled his nostrils, and went away again. And that was all. There was nothing about it to which you could give a name exactly. It was more the sort of thing that at dawn gets carried on the wind to schooners as they draw near to the Spice Islands. Mr Puddy stood still and sniffed. Sniffed, and sniffed again. But there was nothing unusual about the smell. In the leaf, tea is always strangely mutable. He’d known a sudden change in the weather to be quite sufficient to set a whole floor of Lapsang exuding so powerfully that you couldn’t go in there without sneezing.

  Then it reached him again, the fragrance. Stronger than before. Stronger than he had ever known it, in fact. The whole basement now smelt like an open tea‐caddy. And there was a roughness about, a harshness, that he had never noticed before. It wasn’t a really nice smell any longer. Somewhere in it, there was just a suggestion of an old autumn bonfire.
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  A bonfire! Mr Puddy gave a brief involuntary belch of sheer terror. And he started to tremble. He shifted from one foot to the other, wondering whether to go on or turn back. It was not an easy decision to make. Because if it was anything serious, he naturally didn’t want to be caught in the building. On the other hand, if it was nothing to worry about – say somebody else’s warehouse on fire – he would like to be able to reassure himself.

  In the end it was not the smell but the ham that decided him. He wanted to get the second round over and sit down to his main meal. Mr Puddy went on.

  At the top of the stairs, he found the swing‐doors and sniffed again. He was on the track of the smell all right. It was distinctly nearer by now. And if he just went on quietly as he was going, he ought to catch up with it in about two more flights. There was, however, a nasty surprise in wait for him just round the next corner. Up to this moment, he had simply been pursuing an unplaceable tantalising smell. But as he went past the concrete buttress on the stairs, the beam of his torch suddenly encountered something. It was as though the middle air were churned and milky, and the beam itself took on a shape. It became a long white horn probing the mistiness that lay ahead. Mr Puddy had got as far as the smoke.

  Not that there was anything very courageous so far. He could see perfectly well along the full‐length of the first‐floor corridor. And the smoke wasn’t anywhere enough to be what you might call choking. It was simply that the atmosphere was slightly tainted.

  Then the next shock came. When he opened the swing doors on the second storey a puff of smoke, real smoke this time, came out at him. But there still wasn’t much of it. What there was escaped past him up the staircase and he could see the rows of cases, extending in front of him, orderly, peaceful and unfiery. The second floor was evidently nothing to worry about.

  ‘False alarb,’ he reflected. ‘Id’s subwhere else. The sboke’s gedding id frob oudside.’

  But the third floor made him wonder. He paused when he got there. And not merely because he was out of his breath, and his legs were giving way under him. He paused, because it either was hottish, or he was imagining it. Those last eighteen steps seemed to have taken him back into the middle of the September afternoon.

  He couldn’t, for the moment, get himself to go on any further. Suppose the building really was on fire? Suppose the raid started up again? Suppose he fainted? On the other hand he couldn’t go back down again just like that. Because he was far too jumpy and on edge to be able to eat anything. Just for his own peace of mind he had to continue and make sure.

  There was hardly any smoke on the top landing when he reached it. But there was something else. From underneath the door a brilliant shaft of light like a searchlight was streaming. And the air around him was roaring in his ears. When he opened the door and peeped inside, he jumped back. And pretty quickly, too. In the very furthest corner of the floor, the Soochong floor, a fire was raging. The smoke was rolling up from it as though a small volcano had started. And in the tiny glimpse that he had got, Mr Puddy understood now why the smoke hadn’t been thicker outside. In the roof over the volcano a large untidy hole had been scooped out, and there was a straight updraught like a chimney’s.

  Mr Puddy got back down the fifty‐eight stairs faster than he had ever moved before. He had seen quite enough. And he wanted to share it with someone. With as many people as possible. The telephone he used was the one on the ground‐floor just beside the main entrance. He chose that one because it was farthest from the fire. But it wasn’t that far, all the same. He stood there banging the receiver up and down and wondering how long it would be before the flames were lapping round him.

  The voice at the other end – when at last he got to the other end – didn’t seem in the least surprised when Mr Puddy announced that he was speaking from a burning building. On the night of September 7th, 1940, there were too many burning buildings in London already to get very excited about one more.

  As soon as he had rung off, Mr Puddy wondered where he should wait until the engine got there. He didn’t like stopping where he was because, at any moment, the floor above might come crashing down on him. Nor did he fancy hanging about outside because a tin‐hat didn’t seem much of a protection against the sort of things that might start being dropped again at any moment. In the end, he decided on the alcove under the front stairs. And while he sat there he remembered everything he should have done – like keeping the blaze under control with the stirrup‐pump until the engine arrived, and stuffing up the underneaths of doors with a damp cloth to exclude the draught, and moving inflammable objects as far away from the blaze as possible.

  And, as he remembered the last, Mr Puddy laughed. A hollow kind of lonely laugh. Because everything around him was inflammable. If he had tried to do what the handbook said he would have had to shift the whole blooming warehouse and put it down again on the other side of the river. And, in any case, the handbook wasn’t all that reliable. If he had been up there on the roof where he should have been he wouldn’t have been down here now. The place where the incendiary had come through was exactly where he would have been standing.

  By the time the firemen arrived, the whole corner of the warehouse was well alight. Simply by pushing the front door ajar and peeping out into the night, Mr Puddy could see the reflection of the flames in the windows opposite. And so far as he personally was concerned he would have been quite content to leave it at that. But the fire officer wouldn’t hear of it. He was a brusque efficient sort of man and wanted to know everything about the warehouse. He even insisted on Mr Puddy’s going round with him.

  During the past twenty minutes things had certainly taken a bad turn. The wind had shifted and the smoke was now curling down the staircase in great wreaths. There were shrill cracklings like a forest fire as well as the roar that Mr Puddy had first heard. Even the third floor was a bit further than Mr Puddy really cared to go. But he had reckoned without his companion.

  ‘You’d better lead now,’ the fire officer shouted at him through the din. ‘You know the way. I’ll follow.’

  And follow he did, so closely that Mr Puddy could not possibly turn back. He could feel the fire officer’s knee pressing into him. The fourth floor, however, was beyond even the fire officer. Smoke like this needed masks and equipment. The two of them came back down again choking.

  And once he was back down, Mr Puddy remained down. He stood there by the telephone in case he was needed. And he wasn’t. The A.F.S. got along perfectly well without him. Mr Puddy watched fascinated, while an enormous tape‐like bandage of hose was unwound and carried up the staircase. And the young men who followed it carried axes, crow‐bars, jemmies… Then the fire officer, all blackened and besmirched like a nigger minstrel, came back down the stairs and, pushing Mr Puddy out of the way, began telephoning. It seemed that the A.F.S. wasn’t so self‐efficient after all: the officer was appealing for a fire tower.

  Mr Puddy had only just taken up his place again after the officer had finished with his call, when the top floor gave way. Not all of it, but the north‐east corner where the volcano had been. And, as it broke, it scattered the ignited cases of Lapsang into the quiet orderliness of the Ceylon bay. Two minutes later, despite the water that was cascading down from the top floor, the Ceylons were burning furiously, too. The fun, in fact, had really started.

  Even the fire‐tower couldn’t save the building. The huge giraffe‐like thing arrived and immediately went into action like a Niagara. And, for all the good it did, it might just as well have stayed at home. The jet of water, heated nearly to boiling point by the flames, spread across the floors, with the contents of the broken cases floating on top of it. Soon the warehouse was swimming in gallon upon gallon of half‐brewed tea.

  Mr Puddy had left the telephone by now because that position no longer looked healthy. He was over by the bicycle sheds. The air‐raid really seemed at last to be over, and he was breathing more easily. The only thing that worried him was having to
explain to the manager how he had come to let the warehouse get into such a state. So far as he could judge there would be only the four outside walls left by the morning. The whole incident would almost certainly lead to a row. A row. And, of course, a spell of unemployment.

  It was while he was thinking these gloomy thoughts that he remembered his ham. Thank God that was safe! Right down there in the basement it probably wasn’t even warm. The only danger was that some of the water might have leaked through on to it. And so that he could rescue it before it was too late, Mr Puddy decided to slip in for a moment through the side door that led straight into the basement corridor. From the look of the building he had cut things pretty fine anyhow.

  It was stopping to pick up the tomatoes that was Mr Puddy’s mistake. He had got the plate with the ham all ready, when he tried to balance the tomatoes on top. And in his haste he dropped them. Picking them up again cost him nearly two minutes because one of them had burst. And by then the ground floor, rotten for years and now sodden as well by the weight of water, gave way as well. Admittedly, it was only in one place where it collapsed. But a basement is a naturally confined sort of spot anyhow. And a great blast of sparks and smoke rushed in a gust past Mr Puddy’s door. It was like standing to one side while a swarm of fiery bees tore by. Mr Puddy re‐dropped the plate that he was carrying.

  He was so frightened now that he ran blindly to get out. The side door was only twenty‐five feet away and he reckoned that, full‐speed, he could just reach it holding his breath all the time. He might even have managed it, if he hadn’t fallen over something. Right in his path, where he couldn’t see it because of all the smoke, there lay an obstacle. And Mr Puddy fell headlong. The bulb of his electric torch was broken, and he found himself abandoned in the basement, with no light except the big red glow at the far end of the corridor. Mr Puddy screamed. And, at the same moment, the obstacle that he was lying on gave out a long groan. Mr Puddy screamed again.