‘Come on,’ Charlie Goodall said, checking the strap of his tin hat. And then they were on their bicycles and pedalling unsteadily through the street towards their first incident.
I mustn’t let them down, Peggy thought, pedalling mechanically and trying to steel herself for the ordeal ahead of her, not when I was born in the Tower and I’m a soldier’s daughter. And the words that the Reverend Beaumont used to say all those years ago in Tillingbourne, came into her mind unbidden as a blessing. ‘Lord give us the strength to endure those things that have to be endured.’ And she said the words to herself praying ardently, ‘Lord give me the strength. Please.’ And after that she felt a little hope, a little warm hope that she would be able to endure, that she would manage somehow, despite her fear. And they propped their bikes against a wall and walked into the dust cloud.
There were mounds of bricks under her feet, bricks and broken planks and shards of glass, so that she slipped and stumbled as she climbed, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the sting of the dust she saw a body lying, limbs askew, among the wreckage, a trousered body with its head turned away from her, thick hair matted with blood and brick dust, one white hand smeared with what looked like brown grease. She knew at once that whoever he was he was dead, there was something so broken and discarded about him. But she went across to make sure, because that was her job and now that she was here she had to do it.
There was still some warmth in the wrist she took gently between finger and thumb but no pulse at all. How could there be when half his face had been cut away by flying glass? She looked at the horror that had been his head, taking a mental note of it so that she could write her report afterwards, and she felt vaguely pleased that she could do all this without being sick. Then, working slowly as though she had all the time in the world, she straightened his limbs, closed his remaining eye, and pulling a torn curtain out from among the planks, covered him up in a neat bundle, folding the edges of the cloth around his body as though she was tucking him up in bed.
Then she was sick.
The rescue teams were climbing about on top of the wreckage. One house had been blown to bits and its neighbour was sliced in half. It was eerily quiet. There were no screams, no cries for help, only Mr MacFarlane’s voice reed thin in the dust calling, ‘Over here, Mr Goodall. Over here.’
Peggy scrambled towards him. ‘There’s a wee lass down there under a table or something,’ he said, and now they could see that he was holding up a large piece of brickwork in both hands, straining to stop it from falling back into the pile.
‘Get a lever under,’ a man’s voice said.
‘You’re all right, lassie,’ Mr MacFarlane soothed. ‘We’ll soon have ye oot. Dinna fash yersel’.’
It took the rescue teams such a long time for them to lift the wreckage from the table, even though there were dozens of eager hands working at speed. When the last lump was lifted away and the table was revealed at the bottom of the hole they’d made, Peggy could see that it was cracked in two but the child huddled underneath it was alive. Mute with shock, covered in brick dust, her clothes shredded, but alive.
The only trouble was that she wouldn’t or couldn’t crawl out. She seemed to be frozen where she was, sitting crouched under the tilted table, her eyes staring.
‘Someone’ll have to go down and get her,’ Mr Goodall said. ‘Someone small. You’ll do, Peggy.’
And so it was Peggy who was lowered into the hole on a rope to lift the child from her prison. ‘Can you put your arms round my neck, lovey?’ she asked as she crawled under the table. And the child did her best to obey.
‘That’s my darling,’ Peggy encouraged, dragging her clear. ‘I’ve got you. Peggy’s got you. You’re all right.’
It was rather upsetting that as soon as they’d been been hauled out of the hole the child began to cry, clinging about Peggy’s neck and howling in anguish, her face distorted. ‘I want my mummy. I want my mummy.’
‘You’re all right, lovey. You’re all right,’ Peggy said over and over again, chafing the child’s cold limbs as she carried her to the waiting ambulance. ‘We’ve got you out, see. You’re all right.’
‘Shock,’ a nurse explained, enveloping the little girl in a red blanket. ‘Is there anyone else?’
There must be, Peggy thought, but until that moment she hadn’t thought of any others. She hadn’t even considered how terrifying it would be to be lowered into a hole in the ground, where they could both have been buried alive. All her emotions and energies had been caught up in the rescue of this child. Now her mind started to function again and she realized the danger they were all facing and her legs began to tremble.
‘We’ll wait five minutes,’ the driver said.
Mr Goodall was organizing a team on the far side of the ruin, and she could see Mr MacFarlane lying on the bricks with his ear to the mess, listening. So she controlled her stupid legs and went to join them.
‘There’s someone groaning,’ Mr MacFarlane said as he stood up. ‘If we could just get this ceiling lifted.’
The lifting gear arrived, more rubble was shifted and the woman was finally located, smeared with dirt and streaked with blood, unconscious but still alive.
‘Two,’ Mr MacFarlane said with satisfaction. ‘How long did that take us, Charlie?’
It was nearly two hours, which surprised them all. Nearly two hours and the raid still going on all round them. But as the ambulance team were strapping the woman onto a stretcher, the all-clear sounded and after a few minutes people started to emerge from their shelters. Soon an anxious group of neighbours had gathered on the remains of the pavement.
Mr Goodall was still searching the wreckage where the kitchen had been. ‘Easy, lads,’ he warned, as the rapid removal of a piece of broken timber brought a landslide of bricks and plaster tumbling. ‘Listen again, Mr Mac. Go and talk to the neighbours, Peggy. See if you can find out who’s supposed to be at home.’
The neighbours were too shocked to have much idea. ‘Being it’s Saturday,’ one woman explained, ‘they could be anywhere. Old Man Terry’ll be at Catford. I can tell you that. Up the Greyhounds.’
Peggy wrote down what little they could tell her and turned to climb back over the bricks to Mr Goodall. Directly in front of her, rising above the shattered roofs was an immense cloud, thick, grey-white and billowing. At first she thought the weather had changed but then she realized she was looking at the smoke from a fire and she was stupefied by the size of it. It was the biggest fire she’d ever seen and very close, just over the river. Now that her mind was functioning again she remembered hearing fire-engines racing past them all the time they’d been rescuing the little girl.
‘It’ll be the docks, Miss,’ a man in a cloth cap told her. ‘Rotten bleeders!’
‘They’ve set fire to the docks,’ she told Mr Goodall when she’d climbed back to his perch on the brick pile.
‘I know,’ he said shortly. ‘Cop hold a’ this.’
They worked on at the site until the rescue teams were satisfied that no one remained under the rubble, and by that time the smoke cloud had grown so big they couldn’t see the top of it. It stretched for miles on either side of the river and now they could see red and yellow flames licking up into the base of it.
‘They’ll be back tonight with a marker like that to aim for,’ Mr Goodall said. ‘Cut off home, have something to eat, get some kip. We shall all be needed tonight.’
So Peggy went home, to a street frantic with rumour, a mother prostrate with nerves and no sign of Mrs Geary or her parrot.
‘Oh Peggy, whatever are we going to do?’ Baby said. ‘She could have been blown to bits. We’ve been in the cellar all afternoon at work and when we came out and saw the fire …’
‘Have you asked the neighbours?’ Peggy said taking off her tin hat.
‘No. I came straight home as soon as they let us out. We had to stay in the cellar for ages. There were firebombs in the road and Mr Jones said …’
‘
Put the potatoes on,’ Peggy said, wearily, ‘and I’ll go and find her.’ She was dog-tired and riven with pity, the face of that injured woman still filling her mind, but family was family. They had to be cared for too.
Mrs Geary was in the kitchen at number four, she and Polly and Mr Cooper, and she was so drunk she couldn’t stand up.
‘Lil’, drink,’ she explained, trying to focus her eyes. ‘Keep ‘a pecker up.’
‘The Chief Warden says there’ll be another raid tonight,’ Peggy told Mr Cooper. ‘Will you take her to the shelter?’
‘Can’t go to the shelter no more,’ Mrs Geary said. ‘Won’t take me parrot, so bugger ’em. That’s what I say.’
‘We’ll stay here, won’t we mate?’ Mr Cooper said, patting Mrs Geary’s limp hand.
Peggy was too tired to argue with them. ‘Well go under the stairs then,’ she advised. ‘It’s going to be a rough night.’
It was rougher than any of them could possibly have imagined.
As soon as she’d eaten Baby’s badly-cooked chop, Peggy fell asleep in her chair with her poor cat purring with relief on her lap, but tired though she was she went back to the wardens’ post when they sounded the siren. She wasn’t supposed to be on duty until the morning but she felt she ought to help. And besides, she wanted to be out in the open air, up and out and with something to do, not cramped in a shelter, waiting and not knowing.
The docks were still burning, dear God, and the smoke cloud was now thousands of feet high, more black than grey and full of red sparks. But far far worse than the smoke was the sight and sound of the fire beneath it, which roared into the sky in a massive wall of flames, red, lurid, seething and infinitely terrible, and stretching as far as she could see. All that fuss about black-out, she thought, and now London itself had become one great burning torch to guide the bombers to their target. How could they miss? She could hear timber crackling and roaring over in the Surrey Docks as she cycled down to the post, and she could smell it too, like some overpowering bonfire. There were so many smells, burning rubber, burning leather, burning paper and mixed among them, a sweet treacly smell that was probably burning sugar. What a wicked waste!
‘It’s all the way from Beckton gasworks to Bermondsey,’ Mr Goodall told her when she arrived at the post. ‘Ten miles long. There’s ships on fire in the Millwall Docks. Never seen nothing like it. They’ve got fire engines from all over London. Ten miles from end to end.’
Then it must be in Deptford too, Peggy thought, her heart shrinking, it must be where Joan and the kids are. But there wasn’t time to think any further because the ack-ack started up and they could hear the bombers approaching in the darkness beyond the fire and presently one of the wardens came running in to the post with news of a clutch of incendiaries down by the river.
‘Stirrup pumps,’ Mr Goodall said. And they were off.
It felt horribly exposed out there in the streets with no sandbags to protect them and only their tin hats between them and the shrapnel that was now falling in white-hot fragments into the road. If a bomb falls what shall we do? she wondered. There was nowhere to take cover except doorways and precious few of them, for as she now realized, most of the houses in their area had no front gardens and no porches.
And as if to show her what they would do, she heard the descending swoosh of a falling bomb at that moment. They were all flat on their faces in the road in an instant and they stayed there until the explosion had roared into the air around them and the shock waves had rippled the road beneath them and the debris had finished falling.
‘Where was it?’ Mr MacFarlane said as they got up again, dusting themselves down and adjusting their helmets.
It had been quite a long way away. And yet it had sounded so close. ‘You stay here and deal with those,’ Mr Goodall said. ‘I’ll go and see what’s what.’
There were six small blue fires burning like fireworks in the middle of the road just ahead of them.
‘Sandbag ’em,’ Mr Goodall said, jerking his head towards the usual pile of sandbags sagging in front of the entrance to a street shelter. Then he ran off in the direction of the bomb.
It was quick and easy to douse the fires, to Peggy’s relief, because the cobbles hadn’t allowed them to take hold and the bags smothered them completely, but the next part of the operation wasn’t easy at all. An incendiary had fallen through the roof of an empty three-storey house nearby. They could see yellow flames licking out between the roof tiles, and by the time they’d broken in and run up six flights of stairs, the attic was well alight, the flames raw and alarming in the cramped darkness of that little sloping room. Peggy was filled with panic at the sight. They must put it out, and quickly too, before the Germans saw it and used it as a target for another bomb.
‘I’ll work the pump,’ she said to Mr MacFarlane, ‘you get the water. Only hurry.’ In their slopping run up the stairs more than half the water in her bucket had been spilled.
It was very hard work. The plunger in the stirrup pump had to be pushed up and down at an exhausting speed. After the fourth bucket Peggy’s arms were aching and she was completely out of breath, and what was worse, the fire seemed as strong as ever despite all the water they’d thrown on it. Fortunately two more pumps arrived just as she and Mr MacFarlane were giving up hope and between them they finally managed to get their ‘incident’ under control. There was a gaping hole in the roof, the timbers were burnt black, they were all soaking wet and covered in smuts, but the fire was beaten.
Now that the flames were gone there was no light in the attic except for the red glow from the patch of sky they could see through the roof and the small white beams of their inadequate torches.
‘Och, Peggy Furnivall,’ Mr MacFarlane said swinging his torch towards her, ‘you look like a nigger minstrel.’
Peggy took off her tin helmet and wiped the dirt and sweat from her forehead. Her face felt as though it had been covered in hot oil. ‘Now what?’ she said.
‘Back to the post, mebbe?’
It was quite a relief to be inside in the familiar order of their familiar headquarters, back to where life was normal, or as near normal as it could be with the noise of the raid still going on above them.
‘I wonder where Mr Goodall got to,’ Peggy said. And where that bomb fell. And who was hurt.
They had time for a quick wash, a mug of tea and a cigarette before Mr Goodall came back and settled down to write his report of their two incidents. But he had no time to tell them about his incident because even before he’d started his mug of tea there was a rattling clatter like somebody dropping a tray full of tins out of the sky. It turned out to be another basket of incendiary bombs, scattered over an even wider area and with even more fires. But this time they knew what they were doing. They were beginning to learn how to tackle a fire, working in from the edges, dampening steadily. There was less panic and more order. And in a peculiar way they were even getting used to the raid itself. Having so much to do kept your mind off the horrors.
Even when they were called to a fire in a tenement crowded with people, they managed to cope, working in two teams, one to evacuate the tenants to a nearby church hall, the others to fight the fire until the AFS arrived. But as they ran from the tenement to the church hall shepherding half a dozen terrified children before them, ‘Quick! Quick! Never mind your shoe. Leave it’, Peggy heard a new sound that made the hair rise on the nape of her neck.
Gunfire? Surely not. And yet the rattle was unmistakable. Had they come up the river with their damned invasion barges?
‘It’s the Royal Arsenal,’ one of the firemen told her, shouting above the din. ‘Terrible it is. Out a’ control they reckon. We been there hours. I never seen nothing like it. They got fireboats out on the river with shells all bursting round ’em. Like a battle.’
It isn’t like a battle, Peggy thought grimly. It is a battle. And we’re the troops. The citizen army, that’s who we are. And if Hitler thinks he can grind us down he’s got another
think coming. Anger against the wanton destruction of her city had been rising in her all day and all night. Now she recognized it for what it was and welcomed it, because it was strong and passionate and damped down her fear. Damn him, she thought furiously. He needn’t think he can beat us.
CHAPTER 28
On that first awful night of the blitz the bombers stayed overhead until dawn. When the all-clear finally sounded Peggy was so tired she hardly knew what she was doing. She walked home to Paradise Row through the smoke and dust like an old woman, her back bent, her eyes bloodshot, covered in filth from her tin hat to her boots, and fearful of what she would find. And there was Paradise Row, still dark because there was so little daylight filtering through the smoke, but miraculously intact, not a door off its hinges, not a window broken, not a brick out of place. She stumbled in through the door limp with fatigue and relief.
Flossie was sprawled in her chair beside the kitchen fire wearing the martyred expression that showed she was in the middle of an attack of nerves. But when she opened her eyes and saw the state that Peggy was in, she was so shocked she sat up at once, nerves forgotten.
‘Good God alive, girl,’ she said. ‘What have you been doing?’
Peggy was too tired to tell her. She flopped into the nearest chair and closed her eyes.
‘Put the kettle on,’ Flossie said to Baby. ‘We’ll make a cup of tea and then we’ll get that boiler lit. You need a bath.’
‘Where’s my poor Tom?’ Peggy said.
‘Under the stairs,’ Baby told her, filling the kettle as well as she could with such a limited flow of water coming from the tap. ‘Hiding. He’s been there all night. Wouldn’t come out for us. He might if you called him.’
But it wasn’t until the tin bath had been carried in from the garden and set before the fire with a clothes-horse draped with towels to serve as a screen, and Flossie had washed her daughter as if she was a little girl and helped her into a clean nightgown, that the terrified cat answered her call.
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