by Bill Mesce
Sirens started going off closer. A bomb — a stray, Harry hoped — fell close; windows, dishes, and silverware rattled.
“Might’ near nicked us ’at time!” someone in the dark chuckled.
Harry threw some pound notes on the table and left.
Out on the street, a few brazen individuals and couples, some giddily giggling at their own daring, stood, looking at the sky show: beacons rolling crazily back and forth; dissipating ack-ack bursts glowing with moonlight; an orange glow showing along the skyline toward the river.
The waiter had said something about a shelter but Harry couldn’t recall it. Seeing the steeple of a small church silhouetted against the fire glow, he headed for it.
The church was a dark, granite pile, its steeple a blunt, glowering pyramid. Harry took the church steps two at a time, then gripped the wrought-iron handles of the massive doors and pulled. The doors did not open. He looked helplessly up at the steeple and tugged again. Now, sirens were sounding all round him. He looked about and saw the streets were empty.
An Underground; that was what the waiter had said! He ran, past a 90-mm antiaircraft gun in its sandbagged pit, the crew frantically swiveling the tall, graceful barrel of their piece into place in response to the commands of the “talker” taking his instructions over his headset from the RDF controllers. Beyond the gun he saw the sandbagged entrance of Embankment Station. He stumbled through the entryway and down the steps to the platform below.
Candle flames dotted the platform, fragile circles of amber glow, and he saw a match flare to light up a cigarette, and over there a covered torch, but for the most part the platform was dark. Harry could sense the people crowded on the platform, the air stale with body odor and sweat. Just a few steps from the stairway his shoes began nudging bodies.
“’Ave a care there, mate!”
“Sorry,” Harry mumbled and went back to the bottom of the stairs. Leaning against the wall he could feel the pulsing of the earth on the other side of the tile as the antiaircraft guns nearby began pumping fire into the night; first the high-shooting 90-mm guns, then the thud-thud-thud of the Bofors guns, then the clatter of the Oerlikons and quad.50s as the bombers pressed in.
“Ruddy great racket, eh?” There was something familiar about the voice. In the blackness across from him, Harry could not make out anything more than a shadow. “Ruddy great waste, too,” the voice added cheerfully.
“A waste?” another voice asked from somewhere on the platform.
“I hear they don’t really expect to hit anything with all this,” the first voice replied. “Morale, you understand. Makes us all feel a bit better hearing the guns bang away on our behalf So they say.”
“I know 1 feel a ’elluva lot better wif it,” the second voice said.
“Oh-oh,” a third voice warned.
There was a second chorus of humming engines now, detached from the heavy main droning south of the river, sounding deeper, closer.
“They’re lost,” the first voice said.
“That’s for us,” said the second voice.
“Here it comes!”
The bombs began whistling down close by and these weren’t odd strays. They came down in a close-knit stick. The pulses of the AA guns were washed out by the quaking of bomb explosions. Harry pressed himself against the wall and fought to keep a tight rein on his bowels. Men came running down the Underground stairs, silhouetted against the flashes of bombs landing nearby. Harry heard a child cry. It sounded like a little girl.
“Here, lass.” Harry heard the first voice, and now he identified the Scottish burr. “Lose your mum, eh?”
He saw the shadowy figure across from him stoop, then rise, a small bundle in its arms. He could see the cradled child heaving with sobs.
“Your mum’ll be along, girl, so for now you just stay with me. You sing a song with me and you won’t even be hearing all this fuss, eh? It’s not worse than a thunderstorm. Sing with me, girl.” And they sang:
In Dublin’s fair city
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone...
A bomb crashed, so close that Harry felt the tiles against his back crack and buckle. The crowd hiding in the dark murmured and shuffled. He heard the droning of prayers.
The crying little girl hugged the Scot tightly, but calmly he sang on:
Crying cockles, and mussels,
Alive, alive-o.
Fifteen minutes later, Harry was standing on the sidewalk near the Underground entrance, mopping at the sweat lying thick on his hatband. Behind him people filed out of the station — those who weren’t among the bombed-out souls forced to take up permanent residence there — and headed back to homes they hoped were still standing.
As close as the crashing bombs had felt, Harry saw little damage on the street. Concussions had shaken a good deal of window glass onto the sidewalks, and far down the block, beyond the 90-mm gun crew openly praising God for their good fortune, a smoking crater reached curb to curb, arcing geysers of water spurting from a ruptured water line. Wherever the bombs had come down was already the target for the sounds of fire engine and ambulance bells.
Harry put his cap on and walked round the station to the Embankment. Across the river, toward Southwark, tall flames rose from among the buildings there, and alarm bells clanged. The spray of the hoses shone in the firelight.
“After the docklands is my guess,” came the Scottish burr.
The moonlight helped Harry pick out the features of the man from Hyde Park. The Scot held out a pack of cigarettes.
“Not that awful Brit stuff, if that’s your worry,” the Scot promised.
Harry nodded and took one. His hand was shaking so much he almost dropped the cigarette. The Scot drew one for himself. Harry extracted his own matches from his breast pocket. He had trouble keeping his hands steady enough to strike the match. He felt a strong, callused hand come round his and hold the match steady, then the Scot bent down to the flame. Harry tried to get a glimpse of the man’s face by the match light, but the wide brim of the frayed Panama hat blocked Harry’s view. The Scot pulled the match from Harry’s fingers before he burned himself, then took the book of matches and struck a fresh light, holding it out for Harry.
“You look like a man who could use a drink,” I said.
He nodded.
I found us an outside table at a pleasant little osteria I knew just a block away. Harry said nothing until I had the waiter set a second sherry in front of him, then, plainly embarrassed, he said, “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Eddy.”
He nodded. “Sorry. I feel like an idiot.”
“This can all be a wee distracting. This can’t have been your first. How long have you been here?”
“I came over in January. I’ve been through them before, but...” He turned toward the gentle rumble of flames and the clanging alarms across the river. “Never this close. I don’t care how long I’m here, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them.”
“Some never do. Then there’s those — Ach, you’d be surprised what some get used to. During the Blitz they were coming over every night, Jerry was, every night all night it seemed. After a bit, I knew people who couldn’t sleep without it.”
“You almost sound like you miss it.”
I shook my head. “But it was history, eh?”
“I’m still not sorry I missed it.”
“Typical American. No sense of history.”
Harry was silent. By his third sherry he had finally stopped shaking. “Do you live around here?”
I laughed. “Aye, that’d be the ticket, eh? Me in this neighborhood? Picture me ensconced at the old Savoy, eh? I’d like that, I would.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
I thought of offering some sort of fat tale about who I was and how I’d come to be there, but I saw that despite his having stopped shaking he still held his wineglass hard and close to him. I’d followed hi
m all the evening, seeing how alone he was, and now seeing how afraid he was. He didn’t need a lie or two added to his burden.
“Let’s just say it’s a small world,” I told him.
We chatted; nothing important or intrusive. He spoke of Cynthia and his children; I told him of my disaster with Cathryn. I told him of Scotland, and how the small gravel beach where, as a boy, I’d skipped stones, was now behind the perimeter fence of an Air/Sea Rescue base; he told me how grand hotels in the coast towns of his youth — places like Atlantic City — were now massive hospitals for wounded GI’s returned from Europe. It was the first time in a long time I could remember sitting at a table in conversation having nothing to do with my work. We were just two old duffers alone and far from home, keeping each other company.
After a bit, we felt the need to stir the blood and took to our feet. For the first time he noticed my gait.
“Are you all right?”
I rapped on the limb and the sound of wood made him flinch. “Don’t let it worry you, Harry Rare’s the good Scots pubster not born with a hollow leg as standard kit.”
We made our way down to the Embankment. There were few people down there; the hour had grown late and the sight of flames was no longer the novel attraction it would have been three years earlier. At the sound of another fire engine clanging along behind us, streaking toward the small conflagration on our side of the Thames, Harry jumped.
“Chap I know in Whitehall says the whole bloody mess started as accidents,” I said. He looked at me quizzically, so I explained: “Back in the beginning, during the Blitz, Jerry would come over and there’d be strays. Then, we’d go give it ’em back and there’d be more strays. Then chaps on both sides got a bit wrought up over all these noisemakers going astray, so they started dropping them all about with what you might describe as concerted effort and determination.”
He leaned on the wall over the river and repeated what he’d said earlier, about never growing used to it. He said it with his gaze fixed across the river, the flames a sorrowful glow in his eyes. He asked if I was used to it.
“You get used to the fact that it’s done, and that it’s going to be done. You don’t get over being terrified of someone dropping a bomb on your bean.”
“You didn’t seem terrified down in the Underground tonight.”
“You don’t have to look afraid to be afraid, Harry. They start going off right over your noggin and it sounds like Death himself stomping round up there looking for you, you’d have to be a bit of a loon not to be afraid. ‘Death plucks my ear,’ said the old poet, ‘and says, Live — I am coming.’ I always remember that afterward.”
Harry yawned. “It’s late,” he said apologetically, squinting at his watch face in the moonlight.
“The full name’s Eddy Owen.” I held out my hand in reintroduction.
“Harry Voss,” he said and took my hand, then we bid each other good night.
*
The Annex court was dark but not empty. Two men on one of the stoops quietly debated the respective merits of Glen Miller’s version of “In the Mood” versus Tex Beneke’s. Another of the Annex’s occupants reclined in the passenger seat of one of the parked jeeps, smoking a cigarette, his head tilted musingly toward the moon. Behind blacked-out windows Harry heard a laugh, the clatter of poker chips, orchestral strains from a wireless.
The two duty PFC’s in the orderly room of his BOQ were being regaled by a third man Harry vaguely recognized as a captain quartered there. The captain’s dressing gown was splotched with dampness and there were little patches of drying soapsuds in the captain’s hair. He wore slippers.
“Y’all believe these sumbitches?” he demanded of the giggling orderlies. “Ah mean, do y’all be-leeve ’em?” He was a youngish sort, loud, with a crawling Oklahoma drawl. “Ah’m waitin’ thu-ree weeks for ’em to run the wateh lawng ’nuff to take a damn bath — How do they say it ovah heah?” The captain stuck his nose up in the air and held it even higher with the tip of his index finger. “Draw me a bahth, Reginahld!” The two PFC’s howled. “So Ah’m sittin’ there soapin’ my best parts ’n’ that’s when the sumbitches start to get all military! Ah damn neah didn’t make the shelteh ’cause ’o all that damn soap in mah eyes!” The captain finally noticed Harry in the orderly room door. “Ten-hut!” he called out and all three snapped to.
Harry nodded at the robe. “You out of uniform?”
The captain grinned. “Not really, suh. It’s government issue.”
Harry grinned back and went up to his room.
He left the lights out and pulled back the blackout curtains. The courtyard slowly emptied and went quiet except for soft music from a wireless somewhere. He heard a cry above him, sounding like a child. He looked up and saw a hawk, aglow with the moon, carrying off a small wren.
From the wireless, Ted Lewis finished his song and asked, “Is everybody happy?”
*
A breeze whiffled the mustaches of the elderly Home Guardsman standing in front of Harry’s jeep, carrying toward Harry the sting of smoke and the taste of cinders. Harry had sampled that same taste all night, and it had been there when he had awakened from his fitful sleep.
He had not bothered with breakfast or a morning brushup, but had clambered unwashed into yesterday’s clothes. He was sure that any distraction — even something as trivial as a cup of coffee — would lead to some reason for him to abort his journey. I asked him what he thought he’d find there.
“I wanted to see,” he explained simply. So, within twenty minutes of waking he was driving across Westminster Bridge and heading east toward the docklands, driving until he’d been stopped by a Guardsman at a line of barricades hung with warning signs.
“Can’t get through here,” said the old man from under his oversized white helmet. “Jerry paid a visit last night, ’e did. Lot o’ cleanin’ up to do, ’n’ the UXB chaps is all at it, too, ’n’ ’ere’s the casualties ya see, ’n’ all that. Won’t be able to get in for quite a bit, I’d say.” The man leaned close. “If it’s important, try goin’ round t’over side; down by the river. It’s all open down there.”
Harry nodded a thanks, shifted the jeep into reverse, and turned the vehicle round as the old man waved him on his way.
Cobblestones paved the narrow streets that led down to the river, which glared with a sheen of oil and grease. Skeletal dogs trotted furtively alongside the houses, ducking into alleys as Harry drove past. Adolescents stared. Between houses lines of laundry hung like tattered flags, threadbare shirts and knickers and dresses waving wearily. Here, the smell of the breeze mingled with coal smoke, septic refuse, slum cooking. The closer Harry drew to the river, the narrower the streets became, the fewer the people, the danker the stones, the more oppressive the shabby buildings pressing in on him from either side. The gloomy, twisting streets brought back a memory from university days: something about the Minoan labyrinth and the beast preying within.
Harry stopped his jeep, stood up on the seat, and looked about. Behind him rose dark blocks of dingy flats. To one side were abandoned houses; plain, brick hovels with grass tangled round their facades. To the other were old maritime warehouses with rusting hoists and lopsided shutters. Beyond their dull, brick silhouettes, shining in the interstices, was a golden plain, stretching off under a sky of lowering clouds to a horizon of dust dancing in the wind, and gleaming like a revelation.
Harry slid back behind the wheel and turned the jeep toward the glittering expanse. Was it a few hundred yards to those low, blue-shadow buildings poking through the dust clouds on the other side of the clearing? Or a few thousand? Except for an occasional patch of scrappy brush and wildflowers his view was of a vast, unbroken stretch of emptiness carpeted with cracked bricks and splinters and twinkling bits of broken glass.
There had been warehouses there, some from the time when they had housed goods from the American colonies. Harry pondered the years, the money, the material and blood, the expenditure of human ge
nius required to erase so completely a few centuries of history. He turned round to look back across the river, at familiar London. There was the dome of St. Paul’s, and the spires of Parliament framed by Victoria Tower and Big Ben. Turning round again he saw emptiness, the dirt and clay and shattered glass underlying it all. Here, the City had been rubbed raw.
Harry set off toward where columns of dirty black smoke boiled up from a line of buildings. His jeep lurched out of the dust and into a world of cobblestones and shadows, fire and brick, and human faces streaked with soot and sweat.
Firemen stood by the smoking ruins. Rooster tails of shimmering water hung high in the air and thundered down on the smoldering wreckage of a house, a garage, a shop, the hulking shell of a warehouse. Men in white helmets walked solemnly up the inclines of broken walls, or picked their way through mounds of plaster and lathing. With hands cupped about their mouths they looked down at their feet and shouted, “Hoy! Hoy!” and listened for an answering call from under the debris. Others followed the sniffing noses of dogs hunting human scent. Still others, with hooks and joists, peeled back crumbling floors to reveal dusty sacks of cloth and hair; corpses that flailed awkward limbs when hauled from their burrows. Hitched to a horse lazily twitching its tail at a cloud of flies, a wagon stood nearby. The corpses were piled neatly in the wagon. Civilians, returning to what remained of their homes, shuffled past Harry’s jeep, ignoring his uniform, and delicately picked through the wreckage, salvaging a framed photo here, a box or brooch there.
The reedy exhalation of bagpipes sailed eerily over the sound of falling water and grumbling flame, the shifting of debris and the shouting of orders. Spinning the steering wheel, Harry followed the music. It was a song he’d often heard after a bombing, a dirge — “Flowers of the Forest.”
The piper led a small procession of men in ill-fitting, working-class suits, and women in dark, old dresses. Some of the women held handkerchiefs to their eyes. Two of the men pulled a dogcart with rubber automobile tires, which bounced over the bricks and timbers in the road. On the cart were three bundles wrapped tightly in winding sheets. The diminutive size of one of the wrapped bundles revealed a child. Harry turned away.
