Ashes to Ashes (5 page)

‘W-what’s a c-chaplain?’ I knew about army chaplains, but what they did in civvy street I didn’t know. ‘W-what’s that mean here?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Mr Ronson said. ‘I’m Jewish.’

Mr Smith was talking to another man now and so I sat down in the chair next to where Mr Ronson was sitting at his desk. Like me he was a dark, rather thin man, although very much younger. Mr Ronson was, I thought, about thirty-five years of age.

‘So why do you, er, why if you’re J-Jewish . . .’

‘Why do I come and watch over the cathedral?’ He smiled and offered me a Passing Cloud fag which I took very gratefully. ‘Because as an architect, I know that St Paul’s is the heart of the City,’ he said. ‘A St Paul’s of one sort or another has stood here since Saxon times. Fires and wars, and God alone knows what other disasters, have overtaken this place, but it’s always gone on and it must continue to do so.’

I said I thought that even if St Paul’s was destroyed, we, the people of Britain, would build it up again as our ancestors had done before us. I believed that then and I believe it now.

Mr Ronson frowned. ‘Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘do you believe in evil?’

I did and do. I may not believe in God, but the Great War acquainted me very closely with the evil, some would say the devil, that lives in people’s hearts. How else would you explain how our generals and the generals of France, Germany and Russia allowed so many of us to die? Whatever side they were on, they were all as wicked as each other.

‘Hitler is evil,’ Mr Ronson said. ‘What he’s doing, what it is said he is doing to Jews in Czechoslovakia, Poland, well it’s . . . I hope it is beyond belief, Mr Hancock, but I really do fear that it is not.’

Hannah, my lady friend, is Jewish and she’s told me some things about Hitler. There’s nothing much in the papers of course, but word amongst the Jews is that Hitler is killing them in their thousands. For some reason he hates certain types of people; Jews and Gypsies, mainly. Some folk even go so far as to say he wants to completely do away with such people, so there are no more Jews and Gypsies. That’s far more frightening than the destruction of just one building . . .

‘Mr Hancock, this cathedral was built by a very great architect,’ Mr Ronson continued. ‘Sir Christopher Wren built this place on the ashes of the old Gothic cathedral that burnt down in the Great Fire of London. He built it as a symbol of survival. Yes, I agree with you that if St Paul’s is destroyed tonight, we, or people like us, can build a new cathedral on this spot yet again. But if we can protect it, if we can ensure this place survives . . .’ He stopped for a moment, turned away, and, I think, wiped some tears from his eyes. ‘Christian or not, a Londoner is a Londoner and this great big dome we’re sitting under is our mascot.’ He turned back towards me and smiled. ‘It’s sticking two fingers up at Adolph – you understand?’

I did. But then he said something that I didn’t understand.

‘Sir Christopher’s true men are here tonight, Mr Hancock, we’re fighting the enemy both outside and in.’

‘Outside and—’

The ringing of the Watch telephone meant that Mr Ronson had to go and find out what was happening. The Watch are very well organised with telephones in the crypt and up in the Whispering Gallery. These instruments are connected to each other and to control rooms across the City. The message this time was about another incendiary on the roof. It seemed to me, ear-wigging as I knew I really shouldn’t to Mr Ronson’s conversation, that on this occasion the Watch had failed to control the flames.

‘Call the Fire Brigade,’ I heard Mr Ronson say to Mr Smith. ‘I’m going up top to see what I can do.’

‘All right.’

Together with Mr Smith, I watched Mr Ronson go. By ‘up top’ he’d meant the Whispering Gallery. As far as I could see he went on his own.

I’ve always found the idea of the Whispering Gallery to be a little bit disturbing. Like most London schoolchildren I was taken to visit St Paul’s when I was a nipper and, as boys will, I mucked around. I ran about in the cathedral, took the mickey out of the staff who patrolled the place and I was very uncomplimentary about a couple of the choristers I saw walking up the front steps. Maybe it was the long climb up to the Gallery that silenced me, but I do recall being far more sombre up there. I was also, so an old mate told me, struck dumb by it. But then that would make sense given my reaction to the Gallery now. To hear something whispered by a person to someone else can be exciting, but to have your own whisperings listened to, isn’t. It is or has the potential to be very frightening indeed. After all, if you whisper something to somebody, you only mean for them to hear, no one else. The whole place breaks your confidences and sometimes more than that, too, as we were all soon to learn. I was glad, at the time, that it wasn’t me going back up there again. I hoped at that point, to never have to face the Whispering Gallery’s cruel stairs or the potential its walls hold for treachery ever again.

Once Mr Ronson had gone, Mrs Andrews came over and spoke to me.

‘You’re the gentleman who was looking for that little girl, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, madam.’ I put my hand up to my head in order to raise my top hat to her, then realised that I wasn’t wearing any sort of head-gear. I hadn’t worked that day and so I’d been in ‘civvies’ over at my great aunt Annie’s. I’d had a hat, a flat cap, but that was long gone. It had blown or fallen off my head somewhere after Smithfield Market.

She put a hand, old and heavily veined, on my arm. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much if I were you,’ she said. ‘The cathedral is packed, what with the clergy and the watchmen. They’ll find her. My husband’s looking.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. I know I’d asked Mr Andrews to do so, but I was also very aware of the fact that the clerics and the watchmen had a lot of other things on their minds too. Even down in the crypt I could hear yet another wave of bombers come over. The ack-ack was furious, loud as I didn’t recall ever hearing the like of it before. I could, I was sorry to admit to myself, imagine what it was like up on the roof for the lads fighting the fire. Most old Great War soldiers have fought against fierce enemies with only very minimal equipment at one time or another. The Fire Brigade had been called for a very good reason. The dry riser still wasn’t working and the water the cathedral staff had hoarded for just such an eventuality as this, was running out. There was so much activity in the skies above us that it had to be only a question of time before we suffered a direct hit and I didn’t want to be in the crypt when that happened. I didn’t want to be in the cathedral at all.

‘You know that if I thought that death was actually the end, I couldn’t be here?’ Mrs Andrews said. ‘I’d be a coward and get out of the cathedral now.’

Were I the fanciful sort, I might have wondered whether she could read my mind.

‘No one is comfortable here,’ she said. ‘The Nazis are bombing us now, fanning the flames of the incendiaries. But we must put our trust in God and hope that He will bring us through this terrible ordeal. If not religion, then some faith in the skill of Sir Christopher Wren would probably not go amiss.’

Now that I was up close to her, I could see that she was livelier – her eyes positively twinkled with something or other – than her husband. She was also considerably older than he was. Mrs Andrews could be, I realised, as much as eighty.

‘He, Wren, was not only an architect you know,’ Mrs Andrews said. ‘He was also a man of God. He was a Freemason . . .’

‘The er, the Pope d-doesn’t hold with Masonry,’ I said. I didn’t say it in a way that was judging it. I suppose I was making a comment more than anything. The fact that the Pope doesn’t hold with it is about, or was, the most I knew about the Masons.

‘Ah, you are a Catholic,’ Mrs Andrews said.

‘Well . . . yes, I suppose so.’

‘Well, Masonry and the Catholic Church, they don’t exactly go, do they?’ She shrugged. ‘But you know, Mr, um . . .’

‘Hancock.’

‘Mr Hancock, there are two sides to Masonry. There are two sides to most things, it’s the natural order as it were. Male and female, day and night, et cetera. But Masonry definitely has its light as well as its dark aspects. Sir Christopher and those who appreciate his true legacy were and are good men, men of faith and of morality. Men of the light.’

I didn’t know anything about what she was saying. I’m Catholic, and so as soon as the Masons were mentioned we cease to understand each other. I had thought that women were ignorant of the Brotherhood, but apparently not this woman. Talk of light and dark with regard to things way above my head was pointless also. Mrs Andrews either knew or sensed this and so she changed the subject. She asked me what I did for a living and I had just told her I was an undertaker – and clocked the usual frown this provoked – when young George came down the stairs and walked towards us. Mr Smith, who was sitting at Mr Ronson’s desk behind us, stood up. He did this, I realised later, because the boy looked funny – pale and almost in another world.

‘The fire’s under control now, Mr Smith,’ George said. ‘You can tell the Fire Brigade that they don’t need to come.’

Mr Smith got on to it right away. All around us people who’d heard him cheered and smiled because, yet again, St Paul’s had made it through another crisis. The celebrations made what George was doing now even more peculiar. His face suddenly reddened and he gulped. I thought he might be about to have a fit.

‘Oh, Mrs Andrews!’ he said as his big young eyes filled up with tears. ‘Mrs Andrews!’

As she had done with me, the elderly chaplain’s wife put a hand on to the boy’s arm.

‘George Watkins, what is the matter?’ she asked. ‘Good heavens, lad, the cathedral roof is spared, what can the problem be?’

George just simply shook his head and then buried his face in his hands.

‘All the excitement can do it,’ Mrs Andrews said as she looked at the boy who was now almost bent over double at the waist. ‘The older choristers, like George, want to do their bit but they’re very inexperienced in the ways of the world. It can all be a tad . . . overwhelming.’

‘Mr Ronson is dead!’ George was upright again, tears streaming down his face.

Save for the sound of the bombers up above and Mr Smith on the telephone, the whole crypt fell silent.

‘He fell,’ George said after what seemed like a very long time indeed. ‘The floor was wet, he fell from the Whispering Gallery on to the cathedral floor. That wasn’t meant to happen! He . . .’ Then he looked around at all the people in the crypt and said, ‘Didn’t you hear him? Didn’t you hear his body hit the floor just above your heads?’

When you actually fight a war as a soldier you get used to, if not comfortable with, the idea of blokes being here today and gone tomorrow. Civvy street even in the middle of bombing raids, doesn’t quite get a handle on this. There was shock, which I didn’t share. Why shouldn’t Mr Ronson, nice though he was, die in the middle of a bombing raid? What I overheard a few minutes later was, however, another matter. While everybody talked and sobbed over someone who to most of them was a perfect stranger, Mr Andrews came in and took his wife to one side. Whether he just had no idea that I was so close to them or whether he actually wanted me to hear what came next at that point, I did not know. But as plain as day I heard him say to his wife, ‘Sidney Ronson was murdered.’

They exchanged a look that seemed to tell me that this was not a surprise to either of them.

I didn’t know what to do or say and so I just stood there, pretending I hadn’t heard anything, sweating, my head pounding with fear. But then as I stood there thinking, I wondered whether I had heard what Mr Andrews had said or whether it was just another example of my madness. The things I hear and see that others do not are always of this sort, always frightening and sinister. Events in the mad side of my world are never innocent or benign. Men die because they are murdered not because they fall because a floor is wet or greasy.

‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’ It was Mr Smith, just off the phone to the fire brigade. His face was drained of all colour and was more lined than I’d noticed before.

‘Mr Ronson has had an accident,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘It’s wet up in the Whispering Gallery, and he fell. Unfortunately he’s dead.’

No murder now. Not even a suggestion of it.

‘I see.’ If someone that I knew or had worked with had had such an accident, if accident it was, I would have wanted to know the hows and whys of the affair. But Mr Smith on this occasion did not give in to any further curiosity he might have had.

He said, ‘The Fire Brigade film unit want to come and film from the Stone Gallery. What’s happening must be recorded. They won’t stay long, they won’t be able to. The heat and . . . I said they could come.’ He walked away then, his head down, Mr Andrews’s sharp gaze following him for a moment until he returned it back to his wife.

‘I’ll have to go . . .’ he began.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ I asked. Fidgety as I get sometimes, I had to do something. I was also in one of those short phases that happen to me sometimes during a raid, periods when I can speak without stuttering.

Mr Andrews looked at me with what seemed to be contempt. ‘Why?’

It was a fair question but it wasn’t one I had a real answer for and so I said, ‘I’m an undertaker, in Plaistow. Can’t help the poor fellow if he’s passed on, but I’m accustomed to the dead if you need to do anything or . . .’

‘I think we can do without the advertisement for your business,’ he said with even more contempt, and made as if to go right then.

I thought that was the end of it. But then Mrs Andrews took her husband to one side for a few seconds and whispered something to him. When she had finished he came back over to me and said, ‘But if you think you can help . . .’

I followed him up into the cathedral. He was a miserable old sod to my way of thinking, but I wasn’t doing what I was doing for him.