Coventry: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  The Germans tried to bomb us out last night, but of course failed. This is the second time in this trench that I have helped to repulse the raiding enemy.

  I’m now writing under candlelight in a foul-smelling dug-out which is fairly safe from shellfire. It must be at least 11 p.m. and my turn for guard comes at 12, for we only sleep by day.

  Whatever happens, you must not believe that the Germans are worse than us. The regiments who opposed us just recently in Ypres were as human as could be to our wounded, even more so than we were to them. One fellow, having been wounded in the head during the night fighting lost his way, and hardly having the strength to stand, made for the nearest trench, or what was left of it. Just before he was about to jump in, he saw Huns crouching beneath him, and believing himself undetected, was about to turn back, when one of the Germans, seeing his wound in the head, immediately spoke in English and comforted him. The wounded man, feeling so weak, accepted and allowed himself to be helped into the trench. Then the German undid his cup and gave him water, laid him down and sacrificed his coat. Soon afterwards the Germans evacuated this section, and when this man came to, he saw British soldiers carrying him out on a stretcher. As soon as he could he told his benefactors the story and showed them the cup that the German had allowed him to keep. I saw this mug. Many of our wounded have been found covered with coats.

  On the other hand, it is a recognized fact by both sides that when charging, enemy wounded left in the rear are killed to prevent any chances of their sniping.

  The morrow morning: I am writing in a ruined church, on an improvised table, and I am facing what was once a garden. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and a cooling breeze is blowing into my face. What a difference, what a contrast to the stagnant fire-swept, shell-torn battlefield, where all a man can do is to hug the earth and rot in dirty holes, and to inhale the filthy thick air.

  The letter ends there, in the middle of the page. Owen has hastily scrawled a line of x’s and o’s for hugs and kisses, signed Love, and then written his name. Because the letter was completed over the course of three days, Harriet knows it was a struggle to write.

  Harriet had never known him to write so beautifully. Early on in their courtship he had written her a few letters, but they were all of the I can’t wait to see you variety—short, impatient declarations. This letter, even though it had taken three days to write, felt as though Owen had spent time with the words, had been careful in a way Harriet had not expected of him.

  Harriet thinks how that letter has both stopped her from hating the Germans and has given her a small taste of the man she was just beginning to know, how because there is no body to grieve, it is the last thing she will ever have of her husband—those words on that page.

  Sanctuary Wood is a torn piece of earth with a few upright dead trees, standing like burned matchsticks in the dirt. It is impossible to imagine that it was once a wood filled with flowers and birds and that particular kind of light that sifts down through the leaves overhead. In the early days of the war, it had offered a brief respite from the fighting to the men who had become lost in the maze of muddy trenches and had climbed out, retreated back to the wood, and waited there to reunite with their regiments.

  “It wouldn’t have been a wood for very long,” says the woman beside Harriet as they walk between the blackened trees. “For most of the war, it would have looked like this.”

  Harriet wonders if Owen was ever in the wood. She had thought, on the journey across the Channel, on the journey into Ypres, that she should try to find the church where he had penned the last fragment of his letter. She hadn’t anticipated the utter devastation of the city.

  “Do you know where your husband died?” she asks the woman.

  “Brother,” says the woman. “My younger brother, Robert. And no, I don’t know where he died. He is missing.”

  Believed killed, thinks Harriet. They move out of the trees, look across to the rest of the group gathered near the trenches. The rain is still falling. Harriet can feel it creeping over her skin under her clothes. “What was he like?” she asks. “Your brother.”

  The woman turns and looks at Harriet. She’s wearing a mackintosh pulled up almost to her ears. Her hair is limp and stuck to her skull. Harriet can see the muddy hem of her black dress at the bottom edge of the mackintosh. It looks like the same black dress she herself is wearing.

  “He was a lot of fun,” the woman says. “Always up for a lark. He made me laugh. And your…?”

  “Husband,” says Harriet.

  What can she say about Owen now? It feels to Harriet as though she never knew him, he has slipped so far out of reach despite all her efforts to hang on to him. Even though she keeps a photograph of their wedding day beside her bed, she can’t remember his smile, or the look in his eyes when he laughed, or the sound of his voice. She knows he liked bicycles, but that seems a ridiculous thing to say. He’s been missing for so long now that all she can really be sure of is what he meant to her.

  For all her efforts Harriet can’t really remember Owen very well. His memory has been worn thin from use, like a patch of cloth rubbed too vigorously and too often. She has her ideas of him and of their happiness, but at this point the reality of him has been subsumed into her own need to remember him in a certain way. In real life he would never have bent to her will, but now that he’s dead she can do whatever she chooses with him. This knowledge sickens her, but she is also powerless against it.

  She turns away from the woman without answering her question and moves out of Sanctuary Wood to rejoin the rest of the tour group.

  That night in the hotel, Harriet can’t sleep. She lies fully clothed on the narrow guest-house bed, listening to the women crying through the thin walls that separate the various rooms. The high-pitched murmuring sounds like birds in the trees.

  She is thinking of the mud dragging her feet to ground, of the black trees, sharp as spears, standing upright in the small patch of earth that had once been a wood.

  She gets up, lights a candle, and carries it over to the chair by the fireplace. There are a few books on the mantel. She trails a finger over their spines.

  She puts the candle holder on the floor, gets down on her hands and knees in front of the fireplace. She tries to pray, but the words have left her. The fire has only recently gone out. She puts her hand into the grate and pulls out a warm half-burned lump of coal. She makes a mark with it on her arm, then another on the tiles around the fireplace.

  Harriet gets up and goes into the hallway. People have put pieces of cardboard by the doors to their rooms for the muddy boots. She carefully lifts her boots off the cardboard, and carries it back into the room. She gets down, once again, on the floor by the hearth and turns over the cardboard. She picks up the piece of coal and begins to draw.

  Later, much later, when she is back home in England, she will write what will become the first of what she comes to call her descriptions.

  For hours, for no reason that I could imagine, I drew black swans. Hunched over a piece of cardboard on the floor of the hotel room, the coal softening to dust on this surface beneath me.

  What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn’t come, couldn’t come. I don’t know how to make you return to me.

  But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow—darkness lifting me home.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1940

  Harriet Marsh is certain of very few things. As she washes the front hall of her building, she takes an inventory. She used to believe in love, but she has worn that down to nothing. Every time she visits the memory of Owen it is foggier, farther away. She used to believe her writing was a way to stay connected to her dead husband, but years
of typing up her descriptions after work in the cold offices of Bartlett’s Coal Merchants have left her emptied out of feeling. She is tired of trying to hammer a moment shut with words. All she has left is the outdoors, and most days this is a noon-hour head-down tromp through the muddy farmers’ fields that surround Coventry, where she tries desperately to be moved by a single dog rose or the flower of the black-thorn hedge.

  Nothing holds its truth for long enough. Home leaves us, not the other way around, she thinks. And what are we meant to do when we come to know that?

  Harriet is disappointed by the new war but not devastated by it. She won’t suffer as she suffered in the first war. This war does not have the power to do that to her. She sullenly capitulates to the rationing, doesn’t mind eating the horse meat—although the yellow fat that rivers through it is disgusting. She has even eaten the new meat product called snook, which is a rather horrifying cross between Spam, corned beef, and rubber. It has a grey appearance and smells like fish gone off.

  Harriet endures the talk of raids and bombardments, listens to Wendell Mumby’s endless fantasies of saving the entire nation single-handedly from enemy capture. She has sewn blackout curtains for the flats in her building, painted her bicycle black, helped her neighbours dig a three-foot pit in their back garden for an Anderson bomb shelter. As if that would save them.

  But this war, although not equipped to cause emotional pain to Harriet, is more dangerous to her physical well-being. The Germans are intent on flattening London and other major British cities. Having recently conquered Holland, they can use airbases there and in France to fly back and forth across the Channel, carrying their deadly cargo of bombs. Since September 7, there have been bombing raids against London for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Churchill, instead of being persuaded by these attacks to negotiate peace, has appealed to the British public to stand firm against the onslaught. Everyone is trying to be courageous. The most common thing Harriet sees in the boarded-up shop windows is the hastily scrawled sign Business as usual.

  The RAF is countering with raids against Berlin and other German cities, but it is no match yet for the steady wave of German bombers. The RAF targets are too far inland. The most it can hope for, at this point, is to engage with the enemy planes over the Channel, when the Luftwaffe is on its way to bomb England.

  Harriet admires Churchill’s stubborn refusal to admit defeat, but she also fears privately that the Germans are winning the war, and that it won’t be long until London is completely destroyed, although she dares not say this to anyone. And, if London is destroyed, England will fall.

  “Bomb!” yells the boy on the chancel roof.

  Harriet hears the drop and sizzle, can see that the object that has fallen from the sky to the roof is too small to be a bomb. It looks no bigger than a rubber ball. She can smell the singe of it from her roof.

  “It’s not a bomb,” she says, and the boy turns back toward her voice from where he had skittered off in the direction of the ladder.

  “You’re a woman,” he says.

  Harriet Marsh coughs and lowers her voice. “No, I’m not,” she says hopelessly. “I’m Wendell Mumby.”

  The boy laughs, then he crouches on the chancel roof.

  “What is it?” says Harriet.

  “It’s a bird, Wendy,” he says. “It’s a bird, and it’s fully cooked. It must have flown through the fire.” He nudges the charred body of the swallow with his foot until it rolls off the edge of the roof.

  Perhaps the fire on the horizon is so great that the flames reach right up into the sky, as high as the flight of a bird. This is what Harriet thinks but does not say. She also thinks the glow of the fire is brighter, closer than it was mere minutes ago. All these autumn nights Wendell Mumby has fire-watched on the roof of this cathedral and never had to deal with a fire. He assured Harriet she would have the same experience. She feels angry at Wendell for misleading her; and then she realizes she is feeling angry so she won’t have to feel afraid. But it’s no use. She feels afraid anyway.

  As if to give voice to her fear, the air-raid sirens start to wail. The thunder of the German bombers rolls across the sky.

  The first incendiary bomb falls on the chancel roof. It is long and cylindrical, like a firecracker, and the moment it makes contact with the roof it blossoms into flame.

  “Sand. Use the sand,” yells the fire-watcher on the south chapel roof.

  The boy douses the fire with his bucket and kicks the extinguished flare off the roof.

  An incendiary drops on the roof of the south aisle, above where the massive pipe organ sits. A firebomb hits the roof above the nave. This one burns through the lead tiles. Men are climbing from the ground, up the ladders, and onto the roof of the cathedral with extra buckets of sand and water. Someone splits the roof with an axe and someone else pours sand onto the burning wooden rafters below. The stirrup pumps are married to the buckets of water. The water falls in veils above the flames.

  The fire-watchers know that the cathedral roof is really two roofs. There is an inner ceiling of panelled oak and an outer wooden roof covered in lead tiles. There is a space of eighteen inches between the two roofs, and if a fire catches and burns in this space, there will be no way to extinguish it.

  Harriet helps haul the buckets of sand and water up onto her roof. Her tin helmet knocks against her forehead and tips down over her eyes. She pulls it off and lays it on the roof by her feet. A shower of incendiaries falls on the cathedral and Harriet can see smoke pouring from the holes where the axe has split through the tiles.

  There are more men on the roof. There is a rush of buckets, a spray of sand. The smoke seems to be diminishing and Harriet thinks that perhaps the fire is under control.

  And then another cascade of incendiaries hits the roof.

  “Get off. Get down,” the men are yelling to one another.

  “Call the police. Call the fire brigade,” they shout to the waiting crowd at the base of the church. “The cathedral’s on fire.”

  There is no sound of approaching fire trucks, only the yelling of the fire-watchers and the crackle of the fire on the church roof. And above that, the surge of bomber engines as the planes continue coming.

  Harriet has lost sight of the boy from the chancel roof during the fire-fighting, but she finds him on the ground when she scrambles down the ladder. He’s by himself, a little way away from the building, watching the fringe of flame feather along the roofline. He seems frozen, but his hands are trembling.

  “What can we do?” he asks. “How can we stop it, Wendy?” He rubs his head nervously.

  The job of a fire-watcher is to alert the rescue services to fires and to extinguish any fires in their area. There is no procedure for what happens after the fire is raging out of control.

  All around them Coventry is slowly catching fire. The incendiary bombs are falling not just on the cathedral but on all the buildings around the cathedral, all the buildings in the old section of town.

  Harriet’s flat is away from the centre of Coventry and she is wondering how she will get back there. She is afraid for Wendell and for her cat, Abigail, whom she left curled up contentedly in the armchair by the airing cupboard. But as to her own safety, she is surprised at how little she cares.

  “I’m Harriet,” she says. “Not Wendy.”

  “James,” says the boy. “James Fisher. But everyone calls me Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy Fisher, like the frog?”

  “My mother used to read me that story,” says the boy. “When I was young.”

  He still seems like a boy, has the quick, skittish movements of a child, but his voice is the voice of a man, and when Harriet looks at him she sees that he is as tall and broad as any man.

  Perhaps if she talks to him he will stop trembling. “I always thought the Jeremy Fisher story was a little sad,” says Harriet. She likes the Beatrix Potter stories herself and is too ashamed to admit that she dips into them regularly. She finds the escapades of the small a
nimals comforting. Jeremy Fisher goes fishing for minnows and then is almost eaten by a trout. But the trout spits him out. He doesn’t like the taste of the frog’s mackintosh.

  “There’s that drawing of Jeremy Fisher crawling up the riverbank, his mackintosh in tatters,” says Harriet. “This is the awful moment when he realizes his life is not what he thought. He has been operating in the world as a predator and now he understands that he is really prey.” What a strange conversation to be having, but he seems to be calmer now.

  The boy is quiet for a moment. “I hope my home hasn’t been hit,” he says.

  “I’m sure it hasn’t.” Harriet is astonished to find that she wants to protect him, this young man with the name of a frog in a children’s story. She thinks again of Wendell Mumby, home in front of the fire with his leg elevated. He has been waiting all autumn for some action and now he will miss everything.

  But the factories of Coventry are right beside the housing districts. The bombs falling on Triumph Engineering, Daimler, Rover, and Singer Motors are also falling on the streets next to them—streets full of houses, and the houses full of people at this time of night, unless they have managed to reach the shelters. It is only a matter of time, thinks Harriet, before the centre of the city is on fire. The ground that she and Jeremy stand on, here at the base of the burning cathedral, is no safer than the factories on the edge of the city.

  Maeve tries not to drink her pint too quickly. She hasn’t eaten anything this evening and she doesn’t want the beer to go to her head.