All Fall Down (28 page)

‘Where are they?' Walter saw that Ernie's face was grazed and cut.

‘I'll find them,' he promised. ‘I have to get them to the shelter.' Walter stared for a second into his uncomprehending face. ‘It's all right, Ern. It's not your fault. Let's both look.' He had to calm down; the worst danger now was the fire blazing at the site of Tommy's shop, not a hundred yards down the street. Too late the sirens had begun to wail as the fire-fighters set up ladders and hoses. ‘You can't get up Duke Street. If you find them, hang on tight. Shout for me as loud as you can.' He sent Ernie down Meredith Court while he scouted along Duke Street.

‘Hang on tight.' Ernie gasped.

‘No. Ern!' Walter called him back? ‘Listen, never mind the boys. Leave them to me. You head straight for Nelson Gardens, you hear.' He didn't want any delay. He wanted to be quite sure that Ernie knew what to do. ‘Got that?'

‘Nelson Gardens?'

‘That's it, you got it!' Walter pushed him on ahead. Then they split up, heads down, trying to shield their faces from the fierce blaze. ‘Bertie! Geoff!' Walter shouted himself hoarse. He accosted anyone staggering through the thick smoke; had they seen two small boys? Which way were they heading? At last someone said, yes, there were a couple of kids hiding behind an upturned car a few yards up the road. They wouldn't budge poor things; too terrified. Walter's heart leapt. He raced across the street. It was them, his two boys. He ran and gathered them up. They sprang sobbing into his arms when they saw who it was.

‘We lost Uncle Ern,' Geoff cried.

‘I know. But we wouldn't go off and leave you; you know that.'

‘I found Geoff.' Bertie rubbed his smudged, blackened face.

‘Good boy. And you're all in one piece, both of you?' Walter checked them quickly. ‘Here, grab hold of my hand. Let's get you out of here.' Relief choked him as he looked up and down the street. ‘Come on!'

‘What about Uncle Ern?'

‘He's heading for Nelson Gardens. Run, there's good boys.' He took them down the Court, away from the worst of the flames. By now the streets had emptied. An ambulance crept through the rubble, searching for survivors.

The boys shouted and yelled. They wanted to find Ernie. But the wind grew hotter in their faces, the firemen ordered them on.

‘Uncle Ern's fine,' Walter told them. ‘Let's go and find him at the shelter.'

‘I want Ma!' Geoff cried, suddenly realizing. He pulled at Walter's sleeve as they ran.

‘Ma's safe. She's at Gran's, but we can't get there right now. It ain't safe.' There was a bank of flame between them and the pub.

Walter picked Geoff up and carried him. ‘We'll get you two safe and go and find Uncle Ernie. I told him to head for Nelson Gardens. That's where he is, you'll see!'

After Walter's final order to make for the public shelter, Ernie followed the stooping figures that fled from the fire down Meredith Court. Some limped, some cried out loud. In the confusion he heard an earlier voice telling him to find the boys, not Walter's last instruction to head for the Gardens. That slipped from his mind. Yes, he had to find them. Ernie coughed and wiped his face, turned towards Duke Street.

‘Get back!' An ARP warden blocked his way. Ernie was heading towards the flames. ‘You can't go that way.' The wind was creating a firestorm, flames sucked and roared through the ruined buildings not fifty yards away. ‘You'll get burned to a cinder if you don't watch out!' he pushed and swore. ‘What's the matter, are you out of your mind?'

But Ernie knew one end of Duke Street from another. His job was to find the boys, and boys knew as well as he did what to do
when the siren started. They'd started now. The words ‘Nelson Gardens' slipped from his mind.

‘The Duke,' he said out loud. ‘Geoff and Bertie. The Duke.'

‘What the bleeding hell . . .?' The warden lacked the strength to hold Ernie back.

Flames caught fresh energy from the wind and roared on. Ernie could see that the fire would stop him from running straight home to find the boys. He must duck down an alleyway, work his way around the back. The warden was right; no one could go down Duke Street. He turned and disappeared between two tall tenements, down an unlit court. The Duke of Wellington. Home. Shelter. The boys. He could hear his own footsteps, his own breath coming in choking gasps. The smoke was thicker down here. It blinded him. He ran on without seeing. A smell of smoke, another suffocating, sour smell, like gas from the cooker when it wasn't lit. The new fumes caught in his throat, he stumbled. He would have to turn back.

A fireball roared down the narrow street. It lit the escaping gas from the fractured main. The last thing Ernie knew, as a searing wind lifted him off his feet, was a sudden bright light and a wall of flame.

Chapter Seventeen

For two nights and three days Tommy remained trapped in the dark basement. The work of rescuers at ground level was hampered by temperatures well below zero and frequent showers of snow. It settled on the blackened skeleton of his shop, falling from a grey sky, a pall provided by nature for all who had lost their lives.

Over two hundred people had been killed in Southwark alone. Thirty-six along Union Street, fifteen in the Cathedral Close, five on Duke Street and the neighbouring courts. Many more were reported missing.

Annie went with Rob to identify Ernie in his makeshift coffin.

‘Let me go,' he begged. ‘No need for you to come too.'

‘I must.' The heart was knocked out of her when they told her the news, but she knew her duty still.

‘Let her,' Frances said quietly. She held on to Annie's hand and led her out to Rob's waiting taxi. Hettie stood weeping on the doorstep, Sadie at her side. Jess was coming on the train from Manchester in spite of the danger, for no one was in any doubt that the body in the mortuary at St Guy's was Ernie.

‘How can she bear it?' Sadie sobbed.

‘Because she must.' Frances let Sadie bury her face against her shoulder. Their youngest sister had felt the blame fall squarely on her for their loss.

‘I wish I'd never let him out of my sight!' she cried. ‘I wish I'd kept them all at home, then this would never have happened.' She went over in her own mind the sequence of events: Bertie and Geoff's excitement as they heard about the train smash, Ernie's
promise that he would keep an eye on them when he took them to see it. ‘I should've looked after him better, poor Ern.'

He'd been discovered in the court after the flames had died down. A great force had lifted him clean off the ground and thrown him sideways. They found his body inside a burnt-out house, trapped against some cellar stairs where he had been smothered by smoke and failing stone. He had escaped the flames and was still recognizable, not even much marked, they said.

At the mortuary Annie gazed at the corpse. ‘I want to bring him home,' she said.

Rob turned to the attendant, who said arrangements could be made. Then they left her alone for a few minutes, at her request.

It was hard to believe, looking at his peaceful face under the cold white mortuary lights, that they wouldn't soon have Ernie back amongst them. Shrouded to the neck, the face was still him, and in death very like Duke's, with its broad forehead, long nose, strong jaw. She stooped to draw her fingers down his cold cheek. She must touch him and say goodbye.

‘It ain't too late, son. I know you can hear me, so you just listen to me. You died a brave man, thinking of others as usual. That was your way and we loved you for it, Ernie. I only hope you never suffered. Bertie and Geoff are both fine, so no need to worry there. Sadie's heartbroken. We all are.'

She sighed and stood in silence for a while. ‘Why won't you wake up and come on home with us, son?' Tears fell, she bowed her head.

‘He won't, Annie.' Rob had come in, and he took her arm. ‘But we'll bring him back for the funeral.'

She gave Ernie one last look. ‘You tell that pa of yours that we miss him too, and God bless both of you.'

Rob took her home, hollowed out by misery, feeling how small and frail she was as she sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead. They drove slowly through the burned and ruined streets.

‘How did he look?' Frances asked him. Hettie took Annie upstairs to rest.

‘Like himself.'

She nodded.

‘I wish I'd looked after him, Frances.'

‘You've enough to look after.'

‘I should've made sure he knew what to do.' Rob refused to be comforted, slamming a table with his fist. Walter brought a stiff drink, sat him down, told Frances that he and Rob would talk while she did what she could upstairs.

Tommy knew that he might freeze to death. As the temperature dropped and still he remained sealed in the basement, he began to care less and less about surviving a first, and then a second night without food or warmth. He soon left off his early efforts to lever his way out, and after one or two failed attempts to raise help by yelling up the ventilation shaft, he came to see this as futile too. There was nothing for it but to sit it out.

Meanwhile, after the news had sunk in that the shop was razed to the ground and Tommy missing, presumed dead, Edie came with Lorna to see what was left. Nothing remained of the building; what the explosion had left standing, the fire had soon destroyed. Oddly, in the days since the disaster, as the demolition services worked doggedly to clear the street and dismantle unsafe buildings, a milkman had been along and left his daily deliveries on whatever doorsteps he could still find.

‘I've tried the shelters, I've been to the hospital and the Enquiry Bureau; no one's got any news.' Edie refused to hear what Lorna was telling her. In her own mind she still believed that Tommy could have got out before the bomb had dropped. After all, the demolition men hadn't discovered a body, he hadn't turned up on any official record. That meant there was still a chance.

‘Edie?' Lorna thought she was morbid, poking at the piles of rubbish. She'd unearthed part of the sign that ran along the shop front. ‘Ideal'. The rest was splintered and unreadable. ‘Come and have a drink.'

Edie sat heavily on a stone ledge, part of the coping from the top storey. ‘We can't. Annie's shut the Duke until after the funeral.'
The day, which had hardly grown light, already began to fade. Three days since the bomb.

Lorna turned up her fur coat collar. ‘When is it?'

‘Tomorrow. Hettie says they're to have the coffin there overnight. They set off for the church first thing tomorrow.'

‘They'll have to work hard to clear the street for the hearse to get through.' The gloom and the talk depressed Lorna. She was one of those who had to get on and live life as normal, otherwise things would get her down. Tonight, for instance, she would head up the West End and forget her troubles. She invited Edie along. ‘Come on, Edie, life goes on.'

‘You go. I want to stay here a bit longer.'

She didn't linger. ‘You'll meet up with us later if you change your mind?'

‘Yes, righto.' She promised not to stay out and freeze to death.

‘Sitting there won't do any good . . .' But Lorna knew that Edie wasn't listening to a word she said. She made her way up the street alone.

Caught in a tangle of despairing thoughts, Edie didn't pay much attention to the arrival of a gang of boys who came picking through the rubble soon after Lorna had gone. They were perhaps eleven or twelve years old, five of them in boys' clothes with old men's faces; thin, shadowed and scrawny, with brutal haircuts. Scavenging their way along the burnt-out streets, they knew the value of every item they came across.

‘Fire-grate!' One spotted a good find. Two others helped to pull the mangled piece of iron free. The price for scrap was good. Another of the boys found a poker. They climbed up the heap where Edie sat and turfed aside some charred, crushed tins of paint. But the site was evidently worth staying oh. They ran up and down like steeplejacks.

‘Stone me!' Another good find.

‘Stuff it!' This time, a disappointment.

‘Over here!' They ducked out of sight as she sat on in the gathering dusk.

‘Blimey, missus!' After a few seconds, one of the boys shot back over the mound. ‘There's a geezer down there!'

She jumped to her feet. ‘Where?' He was pointing wildly the way he'd just come. ‘Tell me!' But the boy made his getaway and now she could see the others haring off in all directions. She scrambled up the heap of bricks and peered down a dark slope, where she could just make out a metal grille which they'd prised from an air vent, then abandoned in their fright. Edie slid down the slope of loose nibble and charred wood, loosening the debris underfoot. There was no light. She had to feel her way towards the vent.

‘Tommy!' She knelt and put her mouth to the opening. ‘Answer me if you're there!' It must be him. It wasn't a ghost, though the boy looked as though he'd seen one.

‘Here!' The answer came faintly at last.

‘Oh, thank God!' She worked furiously at the rubble around the hole. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm bleeding freezing.' Waking out of a torpor as a smattering of small stones trickled down the narrow shaft, he'd heard what sounded like boys' voices. He'd called hoarsely for help, but the sounds stopped and though he'd called again, no one answered. Then, a few minutes later, he picked up a woman's voice. Edie. He recognized it at once. ‘You'll have to go and get help. Get me out of here!'

‘I will.' Overjoyed, she lay full length and stretched her arm down the shaft. It was only a few inches wide, too narrow to crawl down. ‘They said you'd copped it!'

He allowed himself a brief grin. ‘Well, I haven't. But I soon will if you don't get someone quick. I can't take another night down here.'