by Henry Green
Well, thought Hilly, I’m pretty certain I know where she is, it’s obvious she’s in the train on her way to that precious son-in-law of hers. It’s a fairly sure thing she’s making a big mistake. But if the old lady would not tell sweet nasty Peewee, no more will I, in fact I can’t. So she said,
‘Perhaps she has been knocked down or something.’
If she had had more experience of the Brigade Hilly would have known better. The answer was obvious.
‘Then I can’t do any other than send ’er up as adrift in my return to Number Fifteen. The moment they get the report from hospital to say she’s been admitted then I’m caught. You understand what covering is? It’s pretending someone is at the station when they ain’t. When I was in the kitchen dinner time yesterday I didn’t think you girls did comprehend. I offered to cover her then. You heard me. She didn’t answer. She may be waitin’ to see the Chief Officer now with her troubles, whatever they may be. Or she may be inside, the police may ’ave took her in. I don’t know, I can’t tell.’
So he still classes us all in the kitchen as ‘girls,’ Hilly thought, grandmothers and all.
‘Well, I’m sure I don’t know what to advise.’
‘And I’m not asking anyone for advice. Does the staff car want petrol?’ With this he dismissed her. He prided himself that, at lectures and on official occasions, he could speak as educated as the next man. But he had forgotten. He realised it almost at once. He called Hilly back.
‘And ’Illy,’ he said, smiling, ‘you took me out inspectin’ ’ydrants yesterday morning when I went ’ome early, you drove me in the staff car, don’t forget, and you omitted to make the entry in your log book. All right?’
‘OK skipper.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll cover ’Owells for today, though it may cost me my pension. You get in touch with ’er. Tell ’er to ring through to the watchroom and say she’s gone sick. She don’t need a doctor’s certificate for forty-eight hours. You do that. Else tomorrow I shan’t be able to ’elp myself, I’ll be forced to send ’er up adrift. Get it?’
In any event he could do no other. He was simple enough to believe Hilly would not realise that the return for the twenty-four hours had gone in already, with Mary Howells included as present. And that return could not be scrubbed out, or altered in any way. Pye was caught if he was detected. He did not like it. He had already got the wrong side of Trant. He was jumpy the rest of the day.
He had reason. That afternoon Trant came down to turn them out, that is, to give them a false fire call and time it, to see how long they took to get cracking. As Pye said to Chopper afterwards:
‘I couldn’t bloody well believe the evidence of my own eyes, mate, couldn’t credit it. I ’appened to be standin’ at the door of the office, you know, just lookin’ through the near window watching the ladies, the birds, the lovely bits of grub go by, when I sees two figures of men I takes to be cat burglars for a minute, they’re actin’ so bloody suspicious, mate. They’re creeping along the port bow in front of this building, backs turned to the windows, and in their blue macs and caps being so you couldn’t see the peak or the badge, they looked most like a couple of drivers that had done a ’old up. But I said to myself, I says, “I’ve seen the back of that man’s ’ead, I know that man’s thick neck,” and it’s so red I naturally think among all those that use the same pub as I do. Honest, it was just a drayman’s neck, you know, one that ’as ’is beer all day long and most of the night, a proper drunkard’s. Proper Guy Fawkes johnny. An’ then, when ’e gets to the door he whips round an’ dashes into the watchroom to put the bells down. Trant ’isself. Not so much as a ’ow-de-do to me of course. But the Job used to ’ave dignity. We was smart and we knew it. The officers didn’t go creepin’ around.’
‘You’ve said it skipper.’
Fortunately, Trant took no notice of how many cooks were in the kitchen. He was too busy finding dirt. Upstairs he pushed a particular bed aside with his foot. ‘Not been swept for a week, this ain’t,’ he said. Standing there, viewing the accumulation, he kicked the bed yet farther away. ‘Not seen a soft brush for a month.’ Getting angry, he kicked once more, so hard this time that the bed upset. ‘Never been scrubbed under since you got here, can’t have been,’ he remarked. Of course it was Richard’s bed.
Back in the appliance room Pye expatiated on the huge area of sandbagging that had already been completed, and on the immense amount that remained still to be done. In this way he managed to placate Trant, for the moment.
After Trant had gone, Pye had the bells put down again for work. He addressed the men. He did not specifically refer to Richard. ‘I’m speakin’ to them whom the cap fits,’ he began. ‘’Oo the cap fits,’ Piper echoed, looking fierce. Pye went on to mention his pension at some length, ‘I have scrubbed floors white for twenty years, an’ I’m not lettin’ my pension be put in peril by one or two of you lads not doing your end of it.’ ‘An’ I’m not blamin’ yer,’ Piper added. Pye ended a long harangue by exhorting them ‘to keep on top line,’ the phrase Trant had used at parting.
Richard did not feel the backwash for several days. When he did he was surprised to find it came from his mates who began, as he thought in best public school tradition, to take it out of him for letting the guvnor, in other words, the housemaster, down.
One or two even refused to drink with him, although Chopper was not among them, nor Arthur Piper. Roe was bewildered. ‘Not so savoury,’ he heard said of himself a few times. Some ridiculed his habit of asking questions. He became homesick. He wondered if his wife put up with a lot in him these others found out soon enough. It was the heyday of Regular Firemen, the Auxiliaries had not yet found them out. They were idolised. But Richard bought his way back into favour with free beer, plus extra housework. Before he managed, however, he crystallised in his imagination a false picture of what his home life had been, and sought advice from Hilly.
‘Well, I’m up the pole now, as they say,’ he said to her.
‘I know.’
‘What does one do about it?’
‘Nothing I should think. But it’s so stupid of the men. There’s lots do much less than you. Shall I speak to Peewee?’
‘No, no, for God’s sake promise me you won’t.’
‘All right, if you don’t want.’
‘That would be disastrous.’
Not many days later he came to realise he could have done worse than to get her to put in a word for him. But at this moment he had another use for Hilly. He began to describe to her, as he had tried with Ilse, the architecture of his life in peace, married, and with a son. The physical change that had befallen him he could still not escape. He had forgotten that he used to take office worries home at night. He remembered only the beatitude of those evenings and began by asking if they should, either of them, ever see those days again, ‘nights,’ he corrected himself. ‘I mean after work was done, when the office was over.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Oh I don’t know.’
She wanted to ask whether it was Ilse or Prudence had given him that feeling, but he looked so miserable she thought she had better not.
‘What do you mean, quite?’
‘The obvious thing, having worked pretty hard, really, and got a home together, with someone I adore in it, and a child, and now I shan’t be able to afford to keep it up. If the war ended tomorrow I suppose everything would be different to what we have known.’
‘I don’t see still. Whatever happened to your money you would be able to keep things going.’
‘I suppose we shall all be killed, which makes all the fuss about cleaning and dusting pretty silly.’
‘But it’s discipline, Dickie.’
‘No never. It’s mad this public school business from the proletariat, about you’ve let the old man down. If he wants the work done why doesn’t he see that it’s done? And anyway,’ which was consciously untrue, ‘I’ve got cleaner habits than any of ’em. And
when my wife wanted the house spotless she didn’t trust the servants to keep the place clean, she saw that they did their work. We do enough for Pye, I’d like to see him do something for us.’
‘Oh he does quite a lot. Really.’
‘Well what?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you yet,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s still going on, you see.’
‘All right, I don’t want to know. But I thought you wouldn’t be able to give me an example.’
‘I’m sorry. I will tell you some time.’
There was a silence between them. Then he began again.
‘We’ve had to turn in everything over this war, all our private hopes, all our plans. We come here ready for at least death, and then we get into trouble for not doing under our beds.’
‘But, Richard, of course. It’s quite right.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘it probably is, but not the way it’s done. Be punished, get crimed, but not this schoolboy stuff about you’re endangering the skipper’s pension. That’s crazy. Would a corporal in the army lose his stripes if one of his privates was dirty? And anyway they pushed all that stuff under my bed to save picking it up themselves.’
‘I’m sorry. I really am.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ he said. ‘But it does make me long to be back where I could make my own way, without having to make someone else’s for them.’
‘It must be miserable for you with your wife out of London.’
‘It is.’
‘But come on, you see lots and lots of people in the evenings.’
‘Believe me I don’t.’
‘No girls?’
‘No, none.’
‘Truly?’
‘I swear to you everyone I know has gone. Torquay’s the place now they tell me.’
‘Well, that’s all wrong,’ she said, thinking what a fool his wife was to have left him, so to speak, unattended. Like a fire. She smiled to herself.
He went on, ‘And I don’t know that the Regulars are so very wonderful at fires. They actually are supposed to know all about those things.’
‘You’re going too far,’ she said. ‘You know the reputation of the London Fire Brigade is right up ahead of any other.’
‘Yes, well look at the other morning. Your Peewee and the magnificent Chopper were beside themselves, they truly had no idea what they were doing.’
‘I’m not so sure. But I promise you they’ll be all right when raids start, when the time comes, if it ever does.’
She was wrong about Chopper. Almost twelve months to a day after this conversation Richard was number one, that is in charge of a pump, called during the night blitz to an incident at which two heavy bombs had fallen within a hundred yards of each other.
He found the driver had brought them to a statue, which still looked blindly on, in the centre of a London square.
Two great streets converged ahead at a sharp angle, and he could see up both because the gas mains had been set alight. Two thirty-foot high sprays or fans of flame lit the face of ornate hotel buildings, or what may have been the east and west sides of a vast block of flats fronting these two streets, and illuminated them so well that, at the distance, he was able to pick out details of brickwork and stone facings more easily, and in colours more natural, than would have been possible on a spring morning, in early sunlight.
Against this livid incandescence stood the old war horse, pitch black, his bronze rider up, pitch black, both, as always, facing south.
Richard was told by the officer in charge, whom it had not been easy to find, to take his men and help another crew lay out hose up one of these streets that might have been twin approaches to a palace in a story, the story of ruin. As they stumbled along, and the sickly sweet smell of coal gas got thicker, over small debris which lay like a vast slumped down load of slag, he looked up and found he could now see beyond this lighted gas main, up a side street decorated by black hacked-out house fronts flickering above large, flame tongue leaping mounds of broken wood and stone.
He laid out the last length of hose. He was told to go back to his pump and keep the crew in reserve. As he went he thought he saw a shimmer out of a roof in the agitated semi-light which half lit, half shrouded those buildings nearest the bronze rider that he could no longer see, now his back was to the gas glare. Accordingly he stopped and shone his torch up at the sky. At once he heard a cry that was lost, ‘Put it out, put that light out.’ It was Chopper’s voice. At that moment, with what seemed a final crash, every gun opened up on a chandelier flare which, with infinite ease, with the greatest menace, had begun to float swaying down like pearls on fire, dropped by magic.
Then for a space the din stopped. Richard heard Chopper moan, ‘They’ve seen us, the bastards’ve seen us.’ He looked down. The Regular was lying flat at his feet.
Richard had had similar nights already. And it was not until he was back among dams that had been erected on each side of the bronze horse, black on one flank, rose coloured on the other towards the now spreading fire beyond the gas mains, it was not until then that he was frightened. More dangerous than the fire those lighted mains must attract bombers. Through shattering silence he heard two aircraft. Then machine gunning. He looked up. He expected a dog fight he would not see. That flare, nearer, was still coldly, majestically descending with his fate. Rising in a long arc from the ground red tracer bullets now lobbed up at speed, and kept on missing. At last every pump started up at once. The roar of their engines enveloped everything. The ground shook. And then the guns opened again, firing this time at the bombers.
There was a surface shelter close by. Richard went inside, making the excuse that he wanted to find out how many Regulars were hiding. The structure seemed to shake, the one light to flicker with that percussion, concussion of gun fire up above. And in the near corner a girl stood between a soldier’s legs. He had been kissing her mouth, so that it was now a blotch of red. He held on to her hips, had leant his head back against the white painted brick. Hair came down and trembled over his closed eyes with the trembling in the wall. Man and girl were motionless, forgotten, as though they had been drugged in order to forget, as though he had turned over a stone and climbed down stairs revealed in the echoing desert, these two were so alone.
Richard went out, abashed. Also he resented the way they were passing time. Leaning against the outside wall he found Chopper, second in command at this incident, jawing with the crew. He had packed it in. Even at such a moment Richard could not resist the temptation to be friendly to a Regular. He went up. The noise was now so terrific that, to make himself heard, he knew he must cup his hands to Chopper’s ear and shout. He yelled, ‘Have you looked in there?’
A reluctance came over Chopper’s spade-shaped face. He thought Richard was telling on some Auxiliary who was too flare struck to come outside. But there were witnesses, so he went in. He stayed a longer time. When he came out he had a soft, serious look on him. He cupped his hands. He shouted in Richard’s ear, almost with reverence, ‘More power to his elbow mate, more power to it.’
He might have come from seeing a Prince and a Princess.
Richard shouted back, ‘Pity old Pye never saw,’ and wondered if one of these bombs they rained down each night on London would turn him out of the cover he had taken, willy nilly, in his coffin, eaten by worms six foot underground.
At that moment two ambulance men carried a stretcher up. They laid it down. The twisted creature under a blanket coughed a last gushing, gout of blood.
Two police brought past a looter, most of his clothes torn off, heels dragging, drooling blood at the mouth, out on his feet from the bashing he had been given.
Then, alone, carrying a music case, handkerchief to her mouth, her thin body made angular in the glare, sharp as a saw, an old lady came slowly by, on her own, looking to the ground, ignoring it all.
And then that soldier tottered out. He was drunk. He shouted in Richard’s ear. ‘Would you boys like to ’ave a w
hip round, see, to raise me a shilling so I can ’ave another go?’ Chopper leaned over. ‘What’s ’e say?’ Richard yelled it. Chopper turned round and was sick. The crew nudged one another, and wryly smiled.
Twelve months almost to a day before such things happened every night, Richard wound up the talk with Hilly by saying:
‘Well you never know. Raids may not be anywhere near as bad as we imagine, when we shan’t know who’s right about the Regulars.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ she replied, having the last word, ‘they’ll be much worse, and these men you think so hopeless now will be wonderful, honestly wonderful, you’ll see.’
Three weeks later Richard asked Hilly out for a night. He took her to a small place in Soho, and was glad to see no one he recognised also having dinner. Halfway through a bottle of claret she began to tease him that he did not hear a fraction of what went on at the substation. He was thinking of Pye’s sister when he replied that he was willing to bet he knew more than she did.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘what?’
But he did not mean to tell the story of Christopher’s abduction. He did not want to bring Hilly into family secrets. He must not, he repeated to himself, realising that he would when he had had enough to drink. It would be too intimate. He knew she would only plague him asking after Christopher, as his relations had. It was over now, there was no sign that the boy had suffered in any way. He could do without her enquiries in the substation at odd times just when his aunts and cousins, after so many months, had begun to forget.
‘Isn’t there something up between old man Piper and Mary?’ he asked, to head her off.
‘Don’t be so silly.’
‘There could be, you know.’
‘Anything’s possible, and all the more so now, but not between those two, please.’
‘Then you do feel, as well, that anything is possible between people now?’ said he, with a purpose.
‘But, Richard, of course. This war’s been a tremendous release for most.’
