Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  The following is an account of one of those nights—which, at this long distance, seems to me to have an extraordinary reality; though a point that interests me is its curiously flat tone and entire lack of humour. Goodness knows, there was fun and humour enough around in those days; we couldn’t have got through it otherwise.

  It is several weeks now since we had the nightly, all-night raids over London, and already the memory of what effect they had on one, personally, is growing dim; I made up my mind that the next time I was obliged to go up to the shelter and spend a night there, I would write an account of it immediately so that in days to come I should remember just what it was like. The following account was written, therefore, entirely for myself; without exaggeration or embellishment, because it was for myself. It was no different from ninety or a hundred nights that we spent last year and doubtless shall spend again, except that, as luck would have it, the raid I had determined to record turned out to be a particularly ‘good one’.

  I am very fortunate in being allowed to use one of the air-raid shelters attached to the V.A.D. quarters at the hospital where my husband is a surgeon; it takes me about ten minutes to get there from my house, but it is larger and more comfortable, and, incidentally, safer, than the ordinary Anderson attached to the house where I have my rooms.

  The warning went at about seven o’clock, while I was sitting reading by my fire, and I don’t think I even lifted my head. There are many people whose stomachs turn over when they hear that wailing sound, but I have the good fortune not to be one of them; it’s a purely physical reaction. I get it all right, but only when I hear a falling bomb.

  ‘I’d been sleeping upstairs in my bed most nights, warn- or no warning, and only going to the shelter if things got very noisy; but I’d had one or two uneasy nights when the ‘alerts’ went, off and on, and the gunfire became very heavy, indicating bombers overhead; and had been wondering whether it wouldn’t be simpler to go up to the shelter and get the trouble over in one sweep, instead of waking up and quaking every little while. I decided to see how the raid developed, and I went on reading till, at about nine o’clock, I went to the front door to have a look. I opened it cautiously so as to let out no ray of light from inside; there was a lot of gunfire and the sky was bright with searchlights, criss-crossed up to the stars; a flare hung dripping stars of gold that seemed to grow and in their turn break into starlets. I shuddered to see it for where there are flares there are very soon going to be bombs.

  I went back into the house and got my tin hat and put it on while I found a warm coat and a scarf and collected a few books and things for the dug-out; it was going to be cold and I had a small drop of whisky to warm me up. My landlady filled me a hot-water-bottle and, hugging it to me, I started off. One or two bombs fell, not very far away.

  I was wearing old corduroy trousers, a warm jersey, woolly socks and a pair of dear old, rubber-soled slippers that have seen me through many a long trudge up to the shelter: I had tied a scarf under my chin and my tin hat, sitting on top of that, gave a strangely medieval effect. After a minute I remembered that I’d left my lucky chestnut in the house and I went back for it; my husband gave it to me one day during the autumn blitz and I wouldn’t go through a raid without it, not for anything! I went up to my room and began to search for it, flashing my torch into cupboards and drawers in my bedroom, where the blackout blinds were not drawn. Just as I found it and put it into my pocket, there was a knocking at the door. Two men stood there, air-raid wardens; they said they could see a light flashing on and off upstairs and it looked very suspicious. I apologised humbly and explained that I was looking for my chestnut; they laughed and said there were chestnuts falling all round and I’d better go to earth before one found me. There was a screaming sound and the younger man put his hand on the other man’s arm, in an involuntary movement; the older man stood still for a second and then said, coolly: ‘Only a tram!’ But those trams with their screaming brakes, do sound horribly like bombs, sometimes.

  I had not the slightest feeling of fear; only an irritation at having to leave my warm room on such a cold night and trudge up to the shelter. I thought it was going to be pretty rotten, for the flares had multiplied and the sky was bright with them and it was terribly noisy with shell-splinters falling like hail; I was torn, as always, between walking close to the high wall to avoid them, and the fear that if a bomb fell close and the wall collapsed, I might be buried for days and nobody would know I was there. However, I tripped over a shell-fragment and it soon sent me close to the wall; for it had fallen so recently that it was still hot and it weighed nearly two pounds—I have it now and use it as a paper-weight. If I had been a few seconds earlier it would certainly have hit me. I walked steadily but slowly: I always did this, in spite of all temptation to hurry to shelter: if you can get control over yourself in such little matters, you’re more likely to be all right when anything really happens.

  Suddenly there was an extra bright light in the sky, at first white, growing to green and then blue and, all in the space of about three minutes, bursting into a raging fire; from where I stood watching I could see the great flames, and the shape of the burning building, glowing deep red. There was an incessant drone of bombers above me, and the noise of anti-aircraft gunfire was tremendous, shaking the earth under my feet; I could see the great flash of the gun, a second before its roar, and then a bright star-burst in the sky as the shell exploded. There was the pop-pop-pop of machine-guns, and red tracer-bullets streamed upwards to the flares; it was difficult to know the thud of a bomb from the crash of a gun firing, unless the bomb was so near that you could hear it whining as it fell.

  The dug-out is about twenty foot long and six or seven foot high, a sort of concrete tube driven into the earth with steps leading down to it from either end. We had stuck bright-coloured pictures on the walls; it was furnished with wooden benches on which were lying an assortment of lilos and straw palliasses; three enamel pails hung from the roof to catch the drips when rain came down the ventilators; there was electric light, two bulbs under Woolworth shades. I sat down on one of the benches and began to do a Times cross-word puzzle; nobody else had yet arrived.

  After about twenty minutes the Assistant Commandant of the V.A.D.s—familiarly known as the Ass. Com.—arrived from the hospital; she said we were obviously in for a filthy night; the noise of guns and aeroplanes was uninterrupted and a good many bombs were falling. We propped a lilo against the concrete wall and sat down side by side, leaning against it, to do the puzzle.

  Ten minutes later there was a terrific explosion. The dug-out shuddered and rocked; I have a distinct vision of the ceiling caving in on us, and of a light-hearted feeling that we should be all right because there was nothing very heavy to come down on us. Actually the ceiling didn’t crack and in fact if it had, there would have been several tons of concrete to come down on us. We were thrown forward off the benches and I think the air-filled lilo at our backs saved us from a very nasty jar: now, after three days, my arm is very painful and aching, and I can’t think when else it can have been hurt. I remember putting my hand out in a quick movement and clutching her arm. I drew it back again immediately with a feeling that I’d betrayed my cowardice. She said at once: ‘It was a heavy gun, I think. Nothing worse.’ I don’t know why she said it; to prove to us both that she was not afraid, I suppose. I said: ‘If it was a gun, they must have poked the muzzle right in at the door!’ Actually, if we’d known it, her ‘gun’ was the simultaneous explosion of a thousand-pound bomb and a parachute-mine and (if we’d known it!)—it was five doors down from my home.

  I was not at all frightened; the first sensation was one of joyous relief that nothing had happened after all, a sort of exhilaration; but I became terribly cold. I got my hot-water-bottle and hugged it but couldn’t get warm, and I was afraid she would think I was trembling from fear instead of from cold; indeed, I suppose I was, for the cold was certainly from shock, but I didn’t feel any fear. My ears hurt
terribly from the blast of the explosion.

  After a few minutes she began to worry about the girls in the various small houses attached to the V.A.D.’s headquarters house, which was ten yards or so from the dug-out. We went up the steps and pushed up the wooden ‘flap’ which protects the entrance; the noise was still terrific, guns, aeroplanes, machine-guns and occasional bombs. We decided to wait for a bit and moved restlessly about the dug-out, longing for action. Soon we heard water dripping and decided that it came from the V.A.D. headquarters, and, though we knew there’d be nobody in this house, we thought we really must go and see what had happened.

  Water was pouring from somewhere, but we couldn’t find it. It is hard to explain that, though the sky was so bright that you could have read these notes by its light, at ground level it was very dark. The big fire was still burning and there was a glow here and there of other fires, further away. There seemed to be a second fire, nearer than the first; it looked just about where my digs were, and, as it turned out, so it was, but I couldn’t worry then. I knew the fire-watchers and wardens would look after my landlady and her husband, and my own husband was in the hospital; as to my possessions I hardly gave them a thought, except for the copies and manuscripts I had left in my room. We could smell burning.

  We went into the V.A.D.’s house. In the light of our torches we saw that all the windows had been blown in, and glass and wooden frames littered the floor; the plaster ceilings had all come down and lay in lumps and dust, four or five inches deep. The Ass. Com. said, ‘Oh, damn! Just when I’d got the whole place so clean and nice after the last lot.’ I think she was slightly showing off.

  We went all over the house, clambering up stairs littered with glass and plaster but we couldn’t find where the leak was and as things were getting very hot, we decided to go back to the shelter. We hadn’t been there long when there was a tearing sound and a tremendous crash as a bomb hurled itself through the trees and exploded in the gravel path that runs round the hospital grounds; my heart turned over as it always does at the sound of a bomb screeching through the air. We said to each other that that was a bit near; and so it was—perhaps twenty yards away.

  A man clattered down the steps, one of the hospital guards, and asked us if we were all right; we asked him where the bomb had fallen and he said they couldn’t find it in the dark, and rushed off, letting the wooden flap fall with a frightful bang. We were very cross about this—the bang had made us jump, and we thought it was adding insult to injury.

  The Ass. Com. was getting more than ever worried about what was happening outside the dug-out and we decided to make a dash for it over to the hospital and see. It is about fifty yards to the actual hospital building. She told me not to shine my torch as it was much too bright; I noted with amusement, for the hundredth time, that everybody thinks everybody else’s torch is too bright. In any event, what with the fires and the incendiaries, our pathetic little torches couldn’t have made much difference.

  Most of the girls were in beds in an underground ward, or rather in two-tiered bunks. Several of them, however, had got up and were making tea in a tiny kitchen, just off the ward; they called to me to have a cup. I said I’d come back and went off on a round with the Commandant to look at the black-out, for a lot of the windows had been broken, and the curtains were blowing in. The only time I didn’t care about was when we were up in the corridor that runs through all the hospital buildings; it is composed almost entirely of glass and a lot of it was broken and a lot more might be broken at any moment, and I didn’t particularly want to get my face gashed open by flying glass; it inflicts the most horrible wounds. We saw four girls, ambulance drivers, standing ready, in the corridor; we told them that there was a place for them in the basement where they should be waiting, but they didn’t move; I can see them now, standing there, dumbly shaking their heads. It was not our business, but we thought they were very silly.

  The Commandant asked me to fill her a hot-water-bottle while she went to see about the water that was leaking in the house; I stood with the girls in the little kitchen and they gave me a cup of tea while they boiled up water for the bottle. It was very hot in there and there was a strong smell of gas; we spoke in undertones so as not to wake the sleepers in the ward outside, though I don’t know that many of them can have been asleep. I told them about the mess their house was in, and they said that Gosh, it would be cold tomorrow, with no windows! They looked very comic, with their hair done up in curlers and coloured nets, in a strange assortment of sleeping garments; one girl was mending a tear in her uniform frock; we said that she looked like one of the old women sitting knitting as the guillotine fell on the necks of the aristos.

  They were three very young and particularly foolish girls; their hands were ugly with hard work, but their pretty little heads were still full of dancing and young men. They laughed and giggled a lot, and I was worried about the people trying to sleep outside; but they were kind and friendly little souls with their hot-water-bottles and cups of tea and anecdotes. I stood there, leaning against the wall, talking to them, with my tin hat on the back of my head, drinking tea and suddenly there came another tremendous crash and again I saw the ceiling crack open and again I had the idiotic idea that there was not much to fall on us—though this time there were three storeys of brick and concrete. I know I thought that this time it was really ‘it’, but again I felt no fear, only a sense of exhilaration that whatever had happened was over, and I was safe. The ceiling didn’t really split open, though the ground rocked and the walls seemed to press in upon us in that stuffy, brightly-lit, gas-smelling little room. I looked round at the three girls; if their faces had shown alarm or excitement, they were right back to normal; they laughed like anything and said that that had been a near one, and we all wondered and speculated as to where it had fallen. I didn’t see any trace of nerves in any of them; the one mending her frock just sat on her wooden box and went on mending; she said that bombs or no bombs she had to wear it on duty tomorrow. They held an earnest discussion as to the best way to deal with a three-cornered tear. I think that the burst must have been the blast from a second parachute-mine which had landed about five hundred yards away and did a great deal of damage, but I can’t be sure. It may have been a delayed-action bomb which feel about thirty feet from the hospital (though much further from where we were at the time) but I don’t think it was, for this felt more like an explosion and the D.A. didn’t go off for a couple of hours; still it was a two-thousand pounder, so it must have made rather a conk.

  More glass went. It was round about midnight; we collected an elderly lady, the mother of one of the V.A.D.’s who was also using the dug-out; she had been waiting in the dispensary with her daughter, for a lull during which she could get over to the shelter, but as the aeroplanes and guns hadn’t ceased for a moment during all this time, we decided there was no point waiting any longer. She was full of descriptions as to all the glass that had been broken in the dispensary, and all the bottles that had been knocked off the shelves, while we were trying to tell her of the mess at the V.A.D.’s house; by dint of saying nothing to our stories, but immediately going on with her own, she won. We left the shelter of the hospital and started off through the grounds; she hung on to my arm pretty tightly but she showed not a trace of nervousness and I think it was simply because it was dark and the ground was bumpy.

  We were pretty glad to roll ourselves in our flea-bags and rugs and try to get some sleep. I was just becoming drowsy when the Ass. Com. suddenly sat up and said: ‘Good heavens, we’ve forgotten Figaro!’ Figaro was a small, black cat.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘You’ve left him over in the house?’

  ‘I meant to bring him when I went for my bedding,’ she said. ‘I suppose we’d better go and look for him.’

  We got out of our sleeping bags and put on our tin hats and went back to the house. It was eerie, clambering about in that dark place, with the wind howling in at the broken windows, scrunching over broken glass
and great lumps of fallen plaster, with the Jerries droning overhead and the guns crashing and the bombs falling with their sickening wheeeee-crash! calling to the cat, and all the time afraid of finding its poor little corpse, knocked out by a lump of plaster, or cut by breaking glass. We couldn’t find it; we spent about ten minutes searching and calling, and all the time the Commandant was explaining that it wasn’t her fault that Figgy had been left there. After a bit, it became obvious that he had either run out of the house, or was hiding somewhere, and as things were really getting nasty outside, we went back to the dug-out. There was a cold, dank mist coming up and we blessed it, for it might be helping to put out the fires and it would make visibility impossible; not that German bombers worry about that—otherwise things would have looked very different next morning.

  We went back to our beds; blissfully grateful for the comfort of straw palliasses on wooden benches, but we were so used to that that we saw nothing incongruous in it. The noise of the guns and planes died away and I thought, Thank God, now we can sleep in peace! One feels pretty safe in a dug-out, though of course nowhere is very safe; but I was anxious about my husband over in the hospital, even though I knew he was sleeping in another underground ward, as safe as was possible. All our patients were in underground wards, too.

  But the noise began again; there was another sharp crack, as though something had fallen on one of the wooden flaps. I still don’t know what it was but it was something big and not far away; it may have been the bursting of the delayed-action bomb in the grounds. The earth shuddered and shook and I began to feel physically sick with the motion of it; I had felt so much of it that night. I can feel it now as I sit typing in a perfectly steady room; it’s like the sensation one has after a few days on board ship, that the solid ground is rocking beneath ones feet… I have had it, on and off, ever since. That’s shock too I suppose.