It was the last of the night. The bombing had ended.
The only sound was the tympanic crackle of fires burning and the low bass of their more distant roar. It had begun to rain, a gentle spitting from the clouds—the red, bloodred, and orange clouds were still giving off light, as if the entire sky had become a nearby star, its swirling hot core just above St. Paul’s Cathedral—and I took off my helmet. What damage had occurred was for the most part done, and what people there were in those buildings were saved or not saved. We were near delirium, and it was only after walking for a half hour that Glynnis said, “Fleet Street once more. We’re walking in circles.”
We were all quite lucky to be alive. Next to St. Bride’s Church, down that little alleyway, the voices of firemen came loud and cheerful out of a pub whose windows had been blown out. At two o’clock in the morning, on this night that our whole city was in flames, this public house was open for business.
“Here comes another rope and tackle team,” a fireman seated near the front of the pub said. “Friend—pull three more.” The publican stood us round after round, and joined us. We discussed what we’d seen with these men from the fire brigade—they were eager to learn that we’d been in Gough Square, not far from where they’d been.
“Let us all drink a round to Samuel Johnson!” the first fireman called out. An old woman walked into the bar carrying a large bag. She walked up to the firemen behind us and pulled out three turkey sandwiches with thick wedges of rationed cheddar. The old woman looked as if there was nothing more in the world she would like to see than for them to eat her sandwiches, so they took and ate them without a moment’s hesitation.
Clive got up to buy us another much-needed round. While he was gone, Glynnis turned and not looking me in the eyes said, “Guy’s Hospital. That’s where I am if you want to call on me.” Her eyes met mine for just long enough. Then she said we had better join the crowd. Outside, the city was burning.
11.
“A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones,” Roald Dahl, himself a former RAF pilot, once said. The period that followed the Blitz, those early days of 1941 into 1942, returns to me in the piecemeal memory of small incidents. Those early days during the Blitz, there were moments through the winter when we continued at our rescue work as squaddies and weeks when cloud cover was too thick for flight; nights with Clive at the pub and nights at home with Johana and Niny. Air raid sirens sounded and ack-acks fired and I rode my bike less and then more around London.
Glynnis dropped by to see me.
Clive came by to see me and then to see Niny, until soon he ceased looking for me as much and really only sought out my cousin, and during this period my thoughts of joining the Royal Air Force would be waylaid.
Glynnis needed my help. Her mother had taken ill. Glynnis had been raised in Knightsbridge. Her mother still maintained a home there, but in the early days of the Blitz she had traveled out of London to a town to the north and west of Stanhope, the Goldring family’s ancestral home. The Goldrings had lived in Kent since the late fourteenth century. They could trace their lineage to a vassal whose work on that land could still be seen in certain stone fences that wended deep into the deciduous forests native to that land. There was a famous story of a church deep in a wood where an imp had been carved into the cornerstone, an attempt to replicate something similar found in Lincolnshire. Glynnis felt pride that her forebears had been responsible for it. But none of that was the reason for Mrs. Goldring’s having absconded to Kent at the start of the air war, as I was soon to discover. Her mother was living in a cave, she’d told me. I didn’t know even what to expect when we saw her.
We both secured weekend leave, and on a Saturday mid-March we found ourselves aboard a train east, staring off into the verdant hillsides of the area east of London. It bore the occasional mark of Luftwaffe attack. Every dozen miles we might see space in the far horizon where earth had been upturned, a brown gash in the grass. Sometimes there was water lying in the fields. Glynnis pointed out where a flock of brown geese had stopped to wet their feathers.
We stood by a window smoking. My arms and chest felt filled by some kind of acid in the first moments of this solitude—the anxiety that had underlain my thoughts all those days of falling Luftwaffe bombs now seeking exit. That reprieve was granted only in my looking at Glynnis’s face as standing water and swaying rushes passed outside our window. Tendrils of cigarette smoke surrounded her lovely plump face.
Not thirty miles later we detrained. The air was fecund and still and the distinct lack of carbonite in my nose felt a presence for its absence. Glynnis and I walked for what felt like an hour until the straw-thatched houses gave way to deciduous forest, maple leaves like palm fronds overhead. Soon the road took on steep declivities.
There was nothing before us but granite boulders lifting up from the ground like bunkers, covered in flat, wide leaves. I followed Glynnis into the woods. With each step it felt I was somehow moving further back into time. This was evident at the very least from the clouds of black midges, which grew in density as the vegetation thickened until they seemed to envelop our heads. We had no such dense forest anywhere near Leitmeritz. Alongside the Elbe trees might offer protection, but I was used to the swish of tall grasses. I don’t believe I’d taken in so many smells in years, if I’d ever smelled so much before—deep rich loam kicked up beneath our feet, the tickle of spores from toadstools lifting up sharp like mustard. I’d been looking at my feet so long—the breaking of toadstools, the overturning of thick leaves, all of this so different from that rigid cobblestone order of my youth and memory—I didn’t realize Glynnis had stopped.
“We’re here,” she said. We went in through the mouth of the cave. It was far smaller than what I’d imagined. Having never seen people living in a cave before, I don’t know that I’d imagined much of anything. Glynnis stooped down and I stooped behind her. We squeezed through a dank passageway, alongside which walls jabbed at my hips, until I heard a sound ahead. At first I thought it was the babbling of a brook, but as we walked farther in, I saw light flitting in the distance. By then we were standing, and the babbling of the creek was the sound of voices, voices growing louder until I could see the back of Glynnis’s brown hair and ovoid shapes materialized alongside voices, and then we were in a room with a cave ceiling twenty feet above our heads. Ahead of me were hundreds of people, all sitting on stools of stalactites and blankets dark and shadowy amid light produced by candles and an occasional kerosene lamp.
“It will take us some time before we’re able to find my mother,” Glynnis said. “I’ll ask around.”
She went forward to find a familiar face. I wandered. When they were children, Glynnis told me some time later, she and her brother had come to see their grandmother, and they came to spelunk in these caves. What we’d seen at the Leicester Square station only weeks before was nothing compared with this small village belowground. In a far recess of this enormous cavern, in the soft darkness of the cave’s shadow, men stood before large cauldrons, cooking for the masses. It was almost impossible to see where door openings led off into the farther recesses of the cave. For a moment panic gripped me as I couldn’t see where I was going and I felt I heard someone calling my name, and then a hand was on my arm.
“It’s confusing in here until you’ve learned your way,” Glynnis said. “Stick with me.”
“You’ve found your mother?”
“She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
We walked from the few light sources until I could feel cool moisture lifting off cave walls. We were squeezing again through a passageway just wide enough to let others past. Bodies pressed against me without a word of apology. Someone was breathing heavily behind me and soon he was pressed up against me. I thought to turn and say something when light came before us again and we were in a smaller cavern, this one with ethereal white planes covering the ground ahead.
“This is where Mother slee
ps,” Glynnis said. She took me by the hand. We crouched alongside a mattress nested on the cave floor. Mrs. Goldring was lying prone. When Glynnis announced our presence, her mother did her best to prop up on one hand.
“Mother, this is—” Glynnis said. But she stopped there as I’d already begun speaking.
“My name is Poxl Weisberg, Mrs. Goldring,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The English and the accent I’d acquired in the previous months were a source of pride for me.
“Wherever are you from?” Glynnis’s mother asked.
It was impossible to tell if she was looking at me, as a bright kerosene lamp cast light behind her, obscuring her face in deep shadow. I told her I lived near Bermondsey now, in Corbett’s Passage, where I worked as a squaddie.
“Not what I meant,” she said.
“Well, Mother, I told you that Poxl is Czech, come to help with the war effort,” Glynnis said. She had, she had, Mrs. Goldring said. She was sorry; she’d forgotten.
Glynnis’s mother was suffering from the very earliest stages of dementia. At first the frankness of her ramblings caused me great discomfort. While Glynnis worked to set up her linens and to see what needed to go back with us to London for cleaning, I did my best to engage her mother. At times she rambled about poisonous snakes she believed were populating the latrine cavern, or old Mr. Lovelace whom she knew from childhood and whom she feared might take liberties with her in her sleep. But soon a kind of honesty arose amid her bellyaching.
“It’s about impossible to sleep in this cave,” Mrs. Goldring said. Before I could ask her why, she continued. “Isn’t a single flat spot anywhere in this whole room. I’ve put my bed down everywhere I could and one space is bad as the next.”
“What’s so bad?”
“Ever slept on uneven ground?”
It was a simple question, but one that took me some time to answer.
“No,” I said.
“For a time you might settle into it,” Mrs. Goldring said.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark now. Deep creases drew down from the prim line of Mrs. Goldring’s white mouth. She wasn’t looking at me—she looked up at the ceiling, off at the sleeping men behind her. She didn’t look me in the eyes.
“Without fail, every night, I jump upright, gripping the sides of my mattress. Even the slightest tilt, the slightest dip to one side or the other, and there’s no way but to feel you’re falling off the ends of the earth. As if the whole world has tipped, invested in shaking you from it.”
I didn’t know what to say. More than anything it was nice to hear someone complaining about something so mundane. For so long it had been the stiff upper lip of the Britons—and only that stiff upper lip. How good it could feel to hear someone complain. I asked Mrs. Goldring if she didn’t find some entertainment here. Had she made friends? She looked at me a bit oddly and then with no small fanfare pulled out from beside her pallet a large book. It was wrapped in oilskin, and so had no water damage from that damp floor.
“I read at a play each night, and that keeps me going,” Mrs. Goldring said. In her hands she held a complete edition of Shakespeare, a portable edition in soft cover she’d brought with her. We’d been assigned a German translation of Romeo and Juliet in the gymnasium back in Leitmeritz, but if I’d paid any attention, not a word or character or idea had stuck.
Now something stirred in Mrs. Goldring—and in me. I don’t know if it was the plays, or the company, or the simple fact of our having a respite from the Blitz, but I focused completely on listening to Glynnis’s mother. Where in the moments before—and in so many of the days to come—Mrs. Goldring’s oncoming dementia had brought her from complaint to compliance, from cohesion to chaos, when she began to speak of the madness of Lear, suddenly precise thoughts coalesced. She told me much about these characters I’d never heard of. Her favorite, Mrs. Goldring explained, was Cordelia. The love for a father should always be so strong and clear, she said, and she could only hope that her Glynnis loved her quite so much. When I told her I didn’t know this play, for the first time Mrs. Goldring stood.
“Don’t know the greatest achievement of Western culture, Mr. Weisberg!” she said. “Only one way to remedy such a grave offense.”
She opened the volume to King Lear. Before I knew it, we were taking turns, she as Cordelia and I as Lear, she as Goneril and I as Edmund. There we were in a cave in the countryside east of London, dividing up ancient England over the mistaken response of a daughter who loved her father. We felt as if France and Albany were standing in the nooks of our cave, listening in as we unwisely divided the kingdom; our anger at Goneril and Regan was as great in those moments as it was for the Messerschmitt pilots over London. The pages of that edition were all very clean, not a mark on any one of them.
Near the end of Act 2, Glynnis returned to us. She told her mother we would be back, that we’d come see her when we had a leave.
“We,” she said.
“Poxl and me,” Glynnis said.
“Upon your return, we will find our way into Act 3, my boy,” Mrs. Goldring said.
Kerosene light danced on the ceiling ten yards above our heads, about the deep-lined face of Glynnis’s mother. She looked right at me for the first time.
“I could do with that,” Mrs. Goldring said.
On our long walk back to the train, Glynnis asked what had allowed her mother to seem so lucid at some moments after weeks and months of decrepitude. I told her I didn’t know. I’d only just met this woman and wouldn’t purport to know.
“But we read King Lear together the whole time you were gone,” I said.
I suspected there might eventually be more to say on the matter, but I left it at that.
12.
In the months ahead, when we were granted weekend leave, Glynnis and I went to see her mother. While Glynnis went off to procure whatever her mother needed, I stayed and read. First we read Lear, and then the rest, from Timon of Athens to Titus Andronicus, from All’s Well That Ends Well all the way to The Merchant of Venice, where we paused as Shylock asks, so pained, If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
When Glynnis grew tired and returned, I would survey the cave myself, while Glynnis and her mother talked, or read from the plays as well, though having grown up with them, Glynnis surely didn’t have the same patience for her mother’s proclivities that I did. I wouldn’t say I came to know its every recess, but the cave itself came to be a kind of holiday home for us.
And without our quite knowing when it had happened so fully, Glynnis and I had taken to each other. We made love quietly on weeknights when we could. While her face bore that constellation of freckles, when her shirt came off, I found that every inch of her skin not touched by the sun was wholly white. I liked to turn on a lamp in the corner of her small room near the hospital when we undressed. In the quiet after we’d disentangled I heard about her childhood. She’d grown up on a dairy farm, her family one of modest means. After watching her parents’ husbandry of their cattle—“I’d seen more pink bleating calves pulled from their mothers by the age of ten than one should see in a lifetime,” Glynnis said—she came to decide that medicine attracted her. Not just medicine but also the birthing process. She began her training as a midwife soon after leaving her parents’ home. But then the war threatened, and now she was a handful of years into working as a nurse.
“It’s a funny transition, innit?” Glynnis said. I told her I didn’t follow her meaning. “I wanted to be in a hospital helping to bring new life into the world. Here were are in London watching it taken.”
“You’re doing exactly what you should be doing now,” I said. “The war will end one day, and you’ll go back to it.”
“I suppose. And you, Poxl West? What will you do when the war you’re so certain will end does end?”
I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t know, so I gave her an answer somewhere in between.
“Before this war i
s over, Glynnis Goldring, I will fly for the RAF.” It wasn’t the first she’d heard of this desire, but I suppose it was the most clearly she’d heard it.
“And what will become of me while you’re off flying?” she said.
“The same thing that becomes of you now. Or you’ll come with me, come work for the Women’s Auxiliary.”
“I don’t want to leave here,” Glynnis said. And for a time we left it at that. We stopped speaking and held each other tight. After hours on Mrs. Goldring’s pallet there was something almost too ordered about Glynnis’s bed—there was no sense of being thrown off by the gravity of the shifting world, no feeling of the disruption that a dim cave can bring.
So more often than not we found ourselves back in that cave on every weekend pass we could procure. I liked to carry a lamp with us on those weekends when we went to see Mrs. Goldring and observe every cave room there was. I learned after the war that as many as eight thousand Britons had set up camp there, and by springtime they’d moved beyond a dining room and sleeping areas. Deep in the paths water had borne through the rock over many thousands of years, through a passageway so tight one felt one might be stuck until one starved to death, a ballroom had been constructed. Some boy small enough to pass through the crevice along with a small chandelier had brought tools as well, and near the top of the cave ceiling, he had installed that glimmering glass. An old Victrola was powered by a hand crank in a far corner of the room.
It took some convincing to get Glynnis in there with me. She wasn’t much of a dancer and neither was I, but when Glenn Miller came on I took her hand and we did the best we could.
One night for a fast dance someone put on one of those old Decca Records recordings of Bill and Charlie Monroe doing “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way.” For just a second I hesitated when Glynnis came to me, my mind thrust away from that place, but I did my best to regain myself. Glynnis took my hands, and she and I danced hard to it. I had her hands gripped in mine, and I didn’t let go. The low-slung rock of the cave’s ceiling seemed to push down toward my head, and as if against my desire, constructed images of Françoise stuck under the beams of a bomb-imploded house entered my mind. I didn’t picture Rotterdam: I pictured that building in Gough Square where Glynnis and I had first met, only now Françoise was there. I can only guess that as I held her there, Glynnis thought I was simply a young man in love—with her. And that wasn’t inaccurate. But there was more on my mind. My palms grew sweaty as I considered that this empathy for Glynnis, considering her thoughts, was more move to empathy than I’d given Françoise even after I left her, even after I arrived in London.
The Last Flight of Poxl West Page 11
