A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  All around her young women, her friends included, are doing all sorts of things they’ve never done before — driving trucks and ambulances, even flying planes. And it might sound silly, even childish, but to Iris it looks exciting. Fun, even. While all the time she is stuck in a stuffy office away from the real world. Locked away from everything vital. For when you’re stuck at a desk it becomes a paper war. And she feels as though the whole war could pass, could come and go, and not even touch her. Not really. Which would be wrong. For these are her times, and she must know them. See them and walk through them. Let them pass through her. Let the times fall upon her. But none of it falls upon her in her stuffy office, and life often as not feels small and contracted at her desk (eight foot by ten — and she’s had time to measure it). So for this reason, and because she wants to ‘do her bit’ (although she’d never say it like that), she has asked for these duties — at first to the quiet protests of loving, but overly protective, parents who moved to the country to get away from the bombs. Two fire-watchers ‘received’, as they say, (which, she notes with that grim sort of irony that is everywhere now, makes it sound like certified mail) a direct hit a few weeks before. But she assured her parents that Bloomsbury was relatively safe. And she prevailed. Of course, she would have done it anyway and her parents understood this. It’s been years since they told their daughter what to do, and years since she obeyed anything other than the dictates of her own thinking. Besides, she knows it’s no great matter. No grand romantic gesture. She knows a woman who flies a Spitfire who knows a woman who was dropped into France. Not only was dropped into France, but came back. And has since been dropped somewhere else. No, it’s no great matter. She’s perfectly aware of that. But it’s something, something that makes her feel as though she’s in her times, not hidden away from them behind a desk.

  She keeps notes too. An organisation she’d never heard of before, Mass Observation, contacted her a year ago and asked her to write things down. They wanted to hear about life, the war, everything, from the point of view of the ordinary person — she thinks the letter even added ‘on the street’, although she can’t remember. She’s filled half a dozen notebooks already. But not for them. She wrote the first notebook for them, but decided to keep it. Decided it was hers, not theirs. Besides, she was always going to write. That’s what the notes are really for. Iris is going to write a book one day. About these days, in all their strangeness. And her notebooks are full of them, these days. A man in a suit and a bowler hat stepping over a bomb crater in the road on his way to work as if it had always been like this. A street that she used to play in as a child, bombed out and sealed off like a ghost town. Her father in the kitchen, before her parents moved to the country, looking up to the ceiling, jittery, when the first sirens sounded. Her mother grabbing their coats for the shelter, plates and cups of tea half drunk on the table — and still there when they got back. And the tired look on everyone’s faces — except for the children, who play on bomb sites because they don’t really know what death is, even though it’s all around them. Or perhaps because they do know, have grown up reckless and deny death the very respect that it thrives on, and are determined to find fun where they can. And the toddlers who cry themselves to sleep in the shelters because they can hear, see and smell fear and know that there are monsters out there and that the monsters know who they are and are coming to get them. What a jumble. What a mess. What days. Brittle. It’s the word she silently pronounces in the streets, in trains and buses, and in the corridors at work. Brittle buildings, brittle people, and brittle too all those everyday words they mutter (‘Morning’, ‘Evening’, ‘Cuppa?’), always just at the point of falling to pieces in their mouths as they speak them. Words like macaroons. Everyone, everything, just hanging on, but no one saying so. It’s all in her notebooks. And she wants to know more of them, let these days fall upon her, but you can’t know more sitting at a desk all day.

  So she asked for these duties. And she didn’t have to look far. For Mr Eliot, the famous Mr Eliot, whom she not so much read as devoured before she ever met him, before she ever studied him, is the warden at her old church, St Stephen’s — the church she steals away from for the guilty pleasures of Maiden Lane. She knew he was a fire-watcher one or two nights a week because he talked about it after the Ash Wednesday service which she went to just to please her parents. Looking out for firecrackers, did he say? Something like that. She liked the sound of it. And so she asked if she could too, a task made easier because she had already spoken to Mr Eliot (for the inside of the church, where fame was foreign, vulgar even, where Mr Eliot was just another parishioner, where he came and prayed and drank the wine of communion like anybody else, was a different world from the one outside).

  And so tonight she will start her duties. Looking out for firecrackers on the same rooftop from which Mr Eliot observes them. With, it seems, a couple of retired Indian Army officers. The afternoon is still bright as she steps into St Martin’s Lane, but the evening can’t come too soon.

  Throughout the remainder of the afternoon she immerses herself in the odd, hypothetical business of calculating the wages of civil servants who’ve been taken off to the war, and the annual increases they’ll be due when they return. If they ever do. And as much as it’s her job (and as much as she’s been told again and again she does it well and that the Treasury would never let her go, not until the war is over), it’s an odd business, calculating the increments due to someone whose life might return to normal one day. Or might not. But the calculations go on anyway. They call it Notional Promotion in Absentia, and that gives her a smile before opening another file. Finnegans Wake is beside the pile. Iris, a curious reader, is not afraid of Mr Joyce and all his tricks (in fact, she’s inclined to agree with Mrs Woolf, who thinks it’s all tricks and smoke and mirrors). And she will take that same curiosity up onto the roof.

  They have been bombed every night now for so long she can barely remember when it started. And it will happen again tonight. Of course. Every night they come over. From France, just over there. And it’s so terribly strange to think that just over there, not so very far away, twenty-one miles from coast to coast, close enough to see on a clear day, a young woman who reads and dreams of falling in love one day (or already has) is sitting in some town square eating a sandwich in her lunch break. Except she’s got Germans all around her. And her country’s not hers any more. And neither is her life.

  She puts one file down in the Out tray and picks up another. Laughter, a woman’s, echoes up the hallway outside and she looks up from the file, noting that it’s not just the loudness of the laughter but the fact that it is laughter that catches her attention, for the raid the night before was the nightmare raid that everybody, all along, has dreaded was coming. So many dead. They don’t even know how many. And there’s no end to it. It just doesn’t let up. So this laughter rings strangely in her ears. They’ll come over again tonight, of course. They always do. Like clockwork. Like Germans. Like good Germans. And the sky will fill with the drone of their clockwork return. She refuses to listen to the commentaries on dogfights and whatnot on the wireless, as if it were a football match, and has written to the BBC to complain. The laughter in the corridor dies down and she goes back to the file, vaguely wondering what the joke was.

  She’s witnessed raids from her bedroom window (in a converted stable near St James) on those nights when she has been too tired to go to the shelter, and has even been caught up in one. She was part of a group one night, before the big raids started. They were tipsy and young and death didn’t exist for them. That night there were no bombers out there in the night following the line of the river and saying I know who you are and where you are and I’m coming for you — which is how she has since come to think of them. And not just her. Others too. At the office, in the pubs, they say the same thing. That the bombers speak to them in the night. And it’s funny, this need to give the bomber a voice. To make it human. To make it speak. To make it jus
t like some dodgy character coming up a laneway at you. ‘I know who you are and where you are and I’m coming for you.’ Or does giving a voice to the bomber, your bomber, make it more than human? Does it make it a sort of god? After all, it knows who you are, and where you are — and it’s coming for you. Is there perhaps something gratifying in that? That it knows you and you’re not just some featureless number? One of those dots on the ground? No, it knows you. A god has singled you out. You’re special. Worth coming all this way for. But on this night they were young and tipsy, death didn’t exist and the bombers were yet to be given voice. The flames were far away over the river and so was the sound of the raid. And they found a restaurant with a name that had that summer-holidays-in-Europe ring (that none of them had ever had). Frascati’s. They ate the five-shilling menu and drank the wine until the bombs got close and somebody said that maybe death did exist that night after all, and maybe there really was a bomber out there following the line of the river saying I know who you are … Just for them. And maybe that’s the way death gets you, just when you think it’s not there. So they left the restaurant and were in the street when they saw a building go up and were nearly blown over by the hot wind at the same time as the windows of Frascati’s blew out. And in the shelter they couldn’t stop talking. For an hour they couldn’t stop talking, and then they went deathly silent and couldn’t talk at all.

  Such days. Such strange days. But for all that she’s never stood through the night on a rooftop and seen one through. Not a big raid. Tonight, though, if tonight is like all the other nights and the Germans are good Germans and have their clocks set, she will. The times will fall upon her, like ash in the air. Thunder and silence will ring alike in her ears. And firecrackers will fall to earth and she will watch them fall and watch where they fall because that is what she is there for.

  Behind her on a wall the clock grinds on, and slowly, gradually, the afternoon light begins to dim. And she welcomes the dying of the light, at the same time fingering the ring in her purse, given to her by a young man that morning who left for war, wondering where on earth he might soon be.

  3.

  YOU WON’T FORGET ME

  A small group, three middle-aged men and a young woman, make their way, one by one, onto the rooftop. Two retired Indian Army officers go first, through the open window and onto the roof. The third to appear is a distinguished-looking gentleman wearing a thick tweed overcoat to protect him from the cold, for although it is May, this is a chilly night. Besides, he is a heavy smoker and prone to colds and pneumonia. It is his office that the small group has emerged from. His roof that they have stepped onto. He has worked here all day, which explains the three-piece suit under his overcoat, and will now spend the night, right through until dawn, on the rooftop of the office in which he works. It is, in fact, a famous office, for this is a famous publishing house. The retired officers are aware of this. As is Iris, who pauses before stepping through the open window and onto the rooftop.

  It may be her first night on duty, but she knows exactly where she is, even if she has never seen inside the place until now. For this is the office of Mr Eliot. And they are standing in the house of Faber and Faber. It is, she believes (and she is not alone in believing it), Mr Eliot who made the house famous. For although it was known before, it was the conjunction of Mr Eliot and the house that made it famous to the likes of Iris. And it was from this office in particular (low ceiling, white walls, and she can’t help feeling there’s a touch of the monastery in those walls) that the fame of the house was created. It was here that the author of ‘The Waste Land’ brought his fame (and his banking experience), to this room, and she stands staring around her at the framed photographs of famous people on the wall above the mantlepiece (is that really Groucho Marx with the cigar?), then at the overflowing desk by the window upon which the manuscripts of the generation of poets who followed Mr Eliot and his kind landed. For it is in this office that names that are now known but were once unheard of were chosen, plucked from the air like so many fluttering white birds. It was here that fame was conjured. And the magician was Mr Eliot.

  Iris is familiar with all of them — the chosen, those whom the eyes of Mr Eliot fall upon approvingly — for she reads them. And she has even dared to imagine that one day a manuscript of hers might land on that desk and that she, too, like one of those fluttering white birds, might be plucked from anonymity. So this office is a kind of mythological site, which is why she pauses before stepping out the window. A long pause. And even though she has met him before, many times, the Mr Eliot she observes here in this office, together with the signs of the poet’s day-to-day life (the overfilled ashtray, the cigarettes, the drained tea cup), constitutes a different Mr Eliot from the world of the church, and it is, therefore, something of a jolt to be standing here.

  But as much as it may be a mythological site, it is not history. For it is a working office, and the manuscripts continue to arrive and the work goes on, which makes it all the more potent a mix — that meeting of past and present humming, or so it seems to her, in the confined air. And she would stand here longer if she could, but she must join the others, so although it is a long pause, it is a pause nonetheless. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she steps through the window. Firecrackers await.

  Soon they are all gathered on the rooftop, the three regulars talking and joking, the solemn face of Mr Eliot breaking into smiles and laughter from time to time. For these hours, early in the evening before it all begins, are hours that have to be seen through. And the jokes, smiles and laughter all help. For they will stay on this rooftop until the sirens sound the all clear in the grey hours of the morning, when all the bombs and the firecrackers have fallen or fluttered to earth, usually in the relative distance of the East End — although a parachute bomb fell on Bloomsbury Park a while ago, and the Ministry of Information just across Russell Square in front of them, whose glittering lights regularly defy the blackout and which some wag has dubbed the Lighthouse of Bloomsbury for the way it draws the enemy bombers, has been hit often enough. They will stay on this rooftop until the sky is emptied of sound and they are aware only of that eerie silence that follows a raid and falls on the city like the dust left in the air, drifting slowly back to earth, landing on the dead and the living with equal indifference.

  But at the moment it is merely quiet. Iris steps carefully across the rooftop, for the roof slopes and is tricky at first. She makes her way to the railing which has not yet been cut up for scrap and takes in the view. There is a faint breeze. And although there are thick, low clouds over the river, here the clouds part and it is a bright, moonlit night. They have a clear view over Russell Square, and back towards Tavistock Square behind them. Nobody is about, but still there is the sound of the occasional motor car or lumbering bus. And there, beside them almost, the unmistakable structure of the Senate House, looking, it is generally agreed, more like something out of Manhattan than London, or one of Stalin’s Moscow towers — not so much ugly as out of place. Out of character.

  Everybody smokes. And Mr Eliot, unable now to purchase his favoured French cigarettes, is reduced to Navy Cut or Woodbines or whatever is around. But it is names, not cigarettes, that Iris is contemplating. For she is faced with a quandary. Exactly what to call Mr Eliot. The two regulars call him Tom. But she can’t possibly do that. Nor can she fall back on the absurd formality of Mr Eliot, which is how she always addressed him (when she needed to) at the church, and which is fine for the church. But not (and she’s not sure why), not here. So she has decided to avoid calling him anything.

  A siren whines across the park and the group falls silent. Faces turn towards the source of the sound, almost the whine of a beast in the night. Prehistoric. A call. And the group turns as if responding. Suddenly they are tense. All of them. The night before they witnessed, the regular watchers, the worst raid of the war so far. And they didn’t need to be told that by the newspapers or the wireless. Hour after hour, wave after wave, the sky filled
with the drone of engines. The dead were so many they haven’t been counted yet, and inevitably some streets will be left smelling, for days, of the sweet corruption of death, from bodies still buried where their houses fell on them. These things take time.

  And the talk in the Treasury corridors that morning was unusually tense. Brittle. Even jittery, which is why that outbreak of laughter in the afternoon rang strangely in Iris’s ears, like laughter at a funeral. Any more nights like that and the kind of anarchy (riots, looting, the law of the jungle, heaven only knows what) that many thought would happen might yet surface. Society is a fragile thing. You never know just how fragile until it breaks. Or comes tumbling down. Society is a house of cards. Doesn’t take much. Any more nights like that and we just might see it fall to pieces. We’ve never been here before, not in a situation like this — only in books, and dire books at that with dire titles and dire predictions. And it was all delivered, this talk (and possibly ‘loose’ talk, to which Iris never contributed), in pockets of hushed conversation here and there, in offices and corridors, with a raising of the eyebrows that said you didn’t hear this. Not from me.

  So, it will soon begin. From here, this relatively safe spot (if anywhere is safe) where they will watch for firecrackers. And report them to the fire brigade on Mr Eliot’s telephone. Even put them out if they’re near enough and they have to. But that has rarely happened. The hum of the bombers and the whine of the fire trucks will mingle with the clap of bombs and continue for hours, until the all clear sounds.