London (166 page)

It was not surprising that there were complaints. “You’re upsetting people,” her boss explained to her, “and agitating the other girls. I must ask you to stop.”

“I can’t,” she said.

She was out of a job. She looked for another in Westminster but found nothing. She decided to travel and spent some months touring on the Continent, in particular in Germany. She intended to write a little book about it, but within a month of her return, the great crisis of Europe had begun and, just as she had feared, the country drifted towards war.

When it came, she had volunteered to drive an ambulance. It was frightening, of course, and dangerous, but she did not mind. “I’m single, mother,” she had remarked the previous week. “So if someone has to get killed, it really may as well be me.”

London had never seen anything like Hitler’s terrible Blitzkrieg before. Many had predicted that a war with modern weapons would bring the world to an end and, she supposed, if it went on long enough the whole capital would be in ruins. But she did not think about that as she went about her work. She couldn’t.

As the rain slackened off she left the hotel and turned towards Hyde Park. Usually she liked to walk right across past the waters of the Serpentine, but today she decided to turn left and continue westward past the Albert Hall and into Kensington Gardens.

In many ways the park with its quiet avenues of trees and its wide open lawns retained its Stuart and eighteenth-century air. As she caught sight of the small brick palace of Kensington sitting so discreetly under the pale sun, with the lawns in front of it shining softly from the rain, Helen could almost imagine that at any moment a horse-drawn carriage might emerge from it and roll away into the trees. Yet looking around, the rude sights of twentieth-century war were all too evident. There were trenches everywhere. She passed an anti-aircraft gun. As she came on to the open ground by the Round Pond in the middle of the gardens, she could see barrage balloons by the dozen, tethered in the blue sky. Most incongruous of all, an entire section of the open lawn had been converted into an enormous cabbage patch. “Dig for Victory!” Londoners had been told. Food supplies would be ensured during the war, even if every inch of park had to be turned into a vegetable allotment.

It was time to turn back. Helen allowed her eye to run round the quiet scene, drinking it in for perhaps the last time. She sighed. She was sorry that she might not see it again.

EVENING

Though the huge glass palace itself had burned down four years before, the area was still called Crystal Palace. From Percy and Jenny’s little garden, you could see right over London. Now they stood with Herbert and Maisie, gazing across to the distant line of Hampstead.

The sky in the west was red, a presage of things to come. In the east, the dark shadow of night was spreading in from the estuary. As for the huge sprawl of the metropolis which filled the whole basin, the black-out was being rigidly enforced. The usual glimmering of a million tiny lights was absent. London was a vast blackness waiting to become invisible.

There were just the four of them. Herbert and Maisie had never had any children. Percy and Jenny’s son was in the army; their daughter married and living down in Kent. Although Maisie and Jenny had never been close, they had learned to get on together and that afternoon, to take their minds off the Blitz, the two women had gone to see
Gone with the Wind
. The previous night they had stood together in the garden, watching as the waves of planes droned over London again and again, and the red fires lit up, flickering here, bursting out there into great clouds of burning cinders that soared up into the blackness of the night sky. The East End had got it again last night. Where would the bombs land tonight?

“Will you be staying here?” Jenny asked.

“No, not tonight,” Maisie replied.

“Time to be off,” said Percy.

He and Herbert, now in their sixties, worked at nights down at the little Fire Brigade substation nearby, helping out. “I couldn’t just wait around and do nothing,” Percy had explained. Maisie felt that Herbert should have stayed with her. “But it’s good for them to be together,” Jenny had told her.

“Right then,” said Herbert. “Let’s be going.”

At six o’clock sharp, Charlie was off again. Before he went, though, there was an argument. The subject had always been the same ever since the three older children had been evacuated, and Ruth had refused to leave Charlie. Every night he worried about her and the baby.

“Where are you going to spend the night, then?”

There were three places where Ruth could go. The first was the shelter. In central London this would probably have meant the tube or some other place underground. But out at Battersea it simply meant a converted building, well sandbagged, where people could go and share the danger. A near miss and you were protected; a direct hit and you all died together. “All according to preference,” as Ruth said drily. The second choice was an Anderson shelter. The Anderson shelters were quite effective. Essentially a semicircular tube of corrugated iron, just high enough to walk into stooped, it could be half buried in the garden, sandbagged, and covered with soil. So long as a bomb did not fall directly on top of it, the chances of survival in an air raid were rather good.

The narrow back garden of the house the Doggets rented below Lavender Hill had already been put on a wartime footing. First, beside the little concrete path, the grass had been dug up and a vegetable patch substituted. Next to that was a pen with three chickens which provided eggs. Beyond that was the Anderson shelter.

Ruth hated it. “I just can’t bear being cooped up in that little thing,” she complained. “It’s damp anyway, so it’s bad for the baby,” she insisted, though Charlie found it perfectly dry. But he knew Ruth: obstinate as could be. So that left the third choice, which was to stay in the house, under the stairs. Charlie had sandbagged the back door and window. It was as safe as he could make it. “If the bomb’s got our names on it, there’s nothing you can do anyway,” she had told him – and six out of seven Londoners felt the same way. But even so, he still tried to persuade her into the Anderson shelter each night before he left.

“I can’t stay and argue any more,” he said finally.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll be all right.”

So with his uniform on, and carrying his helmet and his boots, Charlie Dogget set off for his dangerous night’s work.

At a quarter past six Helen Meredith kissed her mother goodbye. She looked so well in her uniform, with her fair hair pinned up under her cap. “I swear you don’t look a day over twenty-five,” Violet said with a smile.

Helen smiled and nodded. “Thank you.”

“Helen,” her mother gently took her arm as she was turning to go. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

Neville Silversleeves was a man who naturally collected responsibilities. It was not his fault: people asked him to do things and he did them very well. At an early age he had succeeded his father as head of the respected old firm of Odstock, Alderbury and Silversleeves, Solicitors. If he joined any society, within a few years he was inevitably asked to be its secretary. He was tall, with thinning black hair, and a very long nose. “That nose,” a cruel barrister had once remarked, “collects petty authority like a flypaper.”

As a good churchman, whose firm had done work for the diocese, Neville was a verger of St Paul’s and, given his position, had become one of the select group of ARP wardens in the City and Holborn. In recent months the wardens all over London had been unpopular for their ruthless enforcement of the blackout – a policy they had only followed because they had been informed, quite incorrectly, that even a lighted cigarette could be seen from a German bomber five thousand feet above. In the City itself, the residential population was small, but with so many banks, offices and churches to protect, the wardens had important responsibilities. They were also at considerable risk from bombs and fires themselves. But to Neville Silversleeves, this was just another of the burdens which he believed it was his destiny to bear.

He was on duty that night.

The Fleming brothers’ substation lay in section 84, at the outer edge of the London region’s authority. It was an evacuated schoolhouse. The equipment consisted of four taxis with ladders, three trailer pumps, a van and two motorcycles.

The crews had all arrived by soon after six, but there might be hours to wait before they were summoned to back up the hard-pressed crews in the centre. There were two women on the telephones. There was the substation officer, who had been a regular fireman, and the crews, all Auxiliary Fire Service men. Percy and Herbert did the back-up tasks and Percy usually looked after the kitchen.

The men had set up a darts board in the main schoolroom; and Herbert had made himself a popular figure by playing all the favourite music-hall songs on the old upright piano there. The only problem, as Percy saw it, was the food.

It was unfortunate that the AFS administration had not done so well in the matter of provisions. Percy only had some rice, cabbage and a tray of corned beef which, it seemed to him, had a rather greenish look. “It’s not much of a meal,” he had remarked to Herbert.

There was nothing to do but boil the rice and wait for the first drone of the German planes as they passed – sometimes directly overhead – on their way to central London. Darkness had long since fallen and Herbert was busily playing a music-hall number when Percy, who had walked to the door to look out, heard the sound of a single approaching engine coming straight towards him, saw two lights and then, after a brief pause, something huge and fiery red that made him tremble.

“Oh, my God,” he said.

Admiral Sir William Barnikel stood six foot three; his chest was reminiscent of the prow of a battleship and his beard was huge and red. He looked exactly like the descendant of Vikings that he was. “My grandfather Jonas was an ordinary sea captain,” he would admit modestly enough, “and before that we discovered the family were common fishmongers.” Having little knowledge of the City, the admiral had no understanding of the importance of the members of the ancient Fishmongers Guild. But whatever his antecedents, once Barnikel was on the quarterdeck he was a stupendous leader of men.

The authorities had taken a calculated risk in putting the admiral in charge of a large part of the London Auxiliary Fire Service. “He is not always diplomatic,” certain bureaucrats gently suggested. His bellow could astound a frigate. “It is not a diplomat we need,” Churchill himself had remarked, “but a man to raise morale.” And so Admiral Barnikel’s mighty heart and mighty temper had been let loose upon the AFS.

It was his great red beard that Percy now saw bearing down upon him as the Admiral arrived unannounced, as was his habit, to inspect this little outpost of his vast domain.

“Oh, my God,” he murmured again.

The firemen all followed the admiral round. “More sandbags by that door,” he jovially commanded. Then, seeing the piano, he roared: “Give us a song!” As Herbert bashed out
Nellie Dean
, he boomingly joined in. “Well done.” He clapped Herbert on the back. “Best I’ve heard in any station. But is that piano in tune?”

“Not quite,” Herbert confessed.

“Tune it, man!” he bellowed.

He inspected their uniforms and boots, pounded his fist on a cracked helmet until it disintegrated, produced a fresh one from his car and told them all that they were heroes. Then he entered the kitchen.

“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

Percy nervously said he supposed he was.

“But you just prepare what they give you?”

“Yes, sir,” Percy replied truthfully. “And thank God,” he said shortly afterwards, “that I did.”

Having given the rice and cabbage a disgusted glance, Barnikel began to inspect the corned beef. If there was one thing Admiral Sir William Barnikel understood, it was rations. A well-fed ship, he knew, was a contented ship. He also knew that many of the fire-fighters still suspected that nobody really cared about them. He lifted up a slice of the greenish corned beef with a fork, eyed it and sniffed it. He took a bite, chewed it, screwed up his face and spat it out.

“It’s gone off!” he bellowed. “This is the food they supplied for your men? Good God, you’ll all be poisoned!”

And then Barnikel became very angry indeed. He twisted the fork so violently that he almost knotted it. His great fist pounded the kitchen table so hard that one of its legs fell off. He seized the tin tray of corned beef, marched outside with it, and hurled it away over the station roof into the sky – as far as anyone knew it might have landed in Berlin, for it was never found again. Then he went in to the telephone, called headquarters and ordered them to put a proper dinner in a staff car and bring it round to Crystal Palace immediately. “If necessary, you can send my own supper too.” He turned to Percy.

“Your name?”

“Fleming, sir.”

With his blue eyes blazing, the red-bearded admiral tapped his huge finger on Percy’s chest. “Fleming, if you are ever given food like this again, you are to pick up the telephone, ring HQ and ask for me personally. If they argue, you tell them I told you to. I’m trusting you to do that. Do you understand?”

“Oh yes, sir,” said Percy. “I do!”

“Good. Next time I come, we’ll have a song on that piano.” He looked at Herbert. “I shall eat supper with you.”

And after a brief private word with the station chief, the Admiral was off to galvanize and put heart into some other unsuspecting outpost.

Charlie listened: the drone had begun. Soon it became a roar as they came over, wave after wave of Heinkels and Dorniers, escorted by buzzing clouds of Messerschmitts. The barrage was beginning now, a huge chorus of bangs, thuds and rattles, and of bursts of light in the night sky; the searchlights waved back and forth like strange, silver wands in the darkness above. The first few nights the barrage had been an exercise in noise, just to make the Londoners feel that they were being defended; but the operation was improving now and some enemy planes were actually being hit.