London (168 page)

It was an awesome sight. Somehow, Wren’s mighty, leaden dome remained intact. All around, the burning roofs created a surrounding lake of red, from which the massive temple of London arose dark, immovable, silent, with a rock-like indifference. It was as if, Charlie thought, the old cathedral was declaring that even Hitler’s Blitz could never touch the City’s ancient heart and soul.

After a few minutes, Charlie glanced down into the crater beside him. It seemed like any other, bigger and deeper than most, perhaps, but nothing very special about it. It was clear that the bomb had gone clean through the foundations of the houses that had been standing there. He could discern lines of earlier foundations of stone, too. In the flickering light from the surrounding fires, he thought he could make out a piece of tiled floor of some kind. From a nearby building, a little explosion caused a flash of reddish light to illuminate the pit further for a moment, and as it did so Charlie noticed a faint glint from something down at the bottom. Curious, he glanced about to check that no one was looking, and clambered over the edge. A second or two later he was feeling about in the dark. The faint glint seemed to have come from under a lid of some kind, covered over with rubble. He must have been looking from the top of the crater at just the right angle. He felt inside, frowned, whistled softly, and then drew his hand out carefully. The coins were heavy. He guessed they might be gold, but he hadn’t enough light to see.

Then, all of a sudden, a powerful torch cut down from the rim of the crater and in an instant he saw that he indeed had a fistful of solid gold coins. The metal lid belonged to some sort of box and in the beam of light he saw that it contained a quantity of similar coins, and saw, too, that there were other containers like it nearby. Charlie Dogget, though he could not possibly have known it, had found the stolen bullion left by Roman soldiers one sunny afternoon nearly seventeen hundred years before.

“What are you doing?”

The owner of the torch was a tall man wearing an ARP warden’s tin hat. By the light from the fires, Charlie could see that he had a large nose.

“You’re looting! It’s against the law,” said Neville Silversleeves.

“No, I’m not. This is buried treasure, this is,” Charlie riposted. “I’m entitled.”

“The building, as it happens,” Silversleeves said officiously, “is Church property. You are entitled to nothing. Now get out of there at once!”

“If you ask me,” said Charlie firmly, “another bleeding raid’s starting and it’s you who’d better move!”

For the air suddenly erupted with the sound of anti-aircraft fire from every side, while overhead a fresh, droning roar of approaching bombers was heard.

Charlie had no intention of being shifted from his gold, and it seemed that Silversleeves was equally determined to stay at his post to make sure that the fireman didn’t sneak off with any of it. The crash and thud of approaching bombs was heard, but neither man moved. The bangs grew louder.

“I shall report you,” called Silversleeves.

“Suit yourself,” muttered Charlie.

Then the bomb fell. It must have fallen, Charlie supposed, a hundred yards or so behind Silversleeves. The flash and roar were so great that for about twenty seconds he could not even make out what had happened. Then he realized that the unconscious body of Silversleeves was lying half-way down the opposite side of the crater from where he had been standing.

“And I hope you broke your bleeding neck,” he murmured. Reaching in again to the coins, Charlie quickly began to stuff them into his boots. Ten, twenty, thirty. He had just got to his fourth handful when he realised that he was going to die.

The sound made by a high-explosive bomb just before it lands is a whistling scream. Charlie had heard plenty of those in the last two weeks. He had become quite an expert at sensing where they were about to fall. As he heard the pitch of the bomb’s scream above him he knew at once that it was subtly different from any he had heard before. It was coming directly for him.

He dived frantically for the side of the crater. Hampered by his boots weighted down with gold, he started manically scrambling upwards, the rubble crumbling under his hands. As the bomb crashed on to the exact spot where he had been standing just two seconds before, he was still, ludicrously, scrambling. He continued to scramble until he reached the top. The bomb had not yet exploded.

Charlie Dogget sat shaking on the edge of the crater looking in. The bomb, all eight hundred pounds of it, was half-buried in the centre where the gold had been. Silversleeves was still lying unconscious where he had landed in the blast. Charlie stared at the bomb, half expecting it to explode. But nothing happened. Unexploded bombs – UXBs – were not uncommon, but they could go off at any time. Charlie got up slowly and wondered what to do. He supposed he ought to summon help and get Silversleeves out, but there was, of course, the matter of the gold. Was it all buried under the bomb now, or was it possible he could still get some more out? “If I’m lucky enough not to be killed by the Messerschmitt last night or this bomb now,” he thought, “I should think my luck will hold good.” Slithering down into the crater again, he started towards the bomb.

There was more light now. Some other building must have been set ablaze nearby because a wall of flame suddenly leaped into the sky behind him. By its light he saw one gold coin lying near the bomb, but nothing else. “I know what it is. It’s God up there, sparing my life but keeping me from temptation,” he thought. “Just when I think I’ve struck it rich, He goes and buries all the money under eight hundred pounds of high explosive.” He reached down slowly for the gold coin only to be interrupted, from behind, by a roar that made him jump half out of his skin. He whirled round, looked up, and beheld a most awesome sight.

Standing on the edge of the crater, his huge form seeming even larger against the wall of flame filling the sky behind him, his great red beard appearing almost to be on fire itself, the mighty person of Admiral Sir William Barnikel was staring down into the pit. His arm, like that of some avenging Viking god, was raised and pointing at him.

“My God,” thought poor Charlie. “He’s caught me at it.”

But Admiral Barnikel knew nothing of Charlie and his Roman gold. As his car came by St Paul’s, all he had seen was the figure of Silversleeves being tossed by the blast into the crater, and now this gallant little fireman with his shock of white hair going down beside an unexploded bomb to get the warden out.

“Well done that man!” he thundered. “By God, you deserve a medal! Hold fast there. I’m coming!” Striding down into the crater himself, Admiral Barnikel cried: “You’ll never haul him out alone, man! Here we go.” Charlie took Silversleeves’s long legs and Barnikel his arms, and they hauled the unconscious warden up to the roadway where the admiral flagged down a passing ambulance and told the two women in charge to take the ARP warden straight to St Bartholomew’s. A moment later Helen was on her way with Silversleeves, still out cold, in the back of her van.

“Now then,” cried the admiral cheerfully, “I want you to come with me. I need your name and station.” He took Charlie over to his car. “I think,” he said in a low voice, “we might also get out of here. You never know when one of these unexploded buggers is going to go off.” Thirty seconds later, it did.

When an exhausted Percy got home from the big brewery fire at nine o’clock the following morning, Jenny did not tell him about Maisie.

“He’s been out all night and he’ll feel he’s got to do something. Let him sleep,” Herbert had insisted. So the brothers did not share their grief until the evening.

When Helen Meredith arrived home, however, she received a severe shock. The house in Eaton Terrace had been completely destroyed by a high-explosive bomb. One glance at it told her that no one could possibly have survived in there. She was still standing in the ruins unable to take in what had happened when her mother Violet walked round the corner.

“It’s the strangest thing, my dear,” Violet explained. “I had this extraordinary feeling I was in danger, so I went round to the shelter in Sloane Square Underground. I must say,” she added confidentially, “it’s what you might call rather
close
down there. But,” she beamed at the charred remains of her house, “wasn’t I lucky?”

Until recently, though acts of conspicuous gallantry in the military could be rewarded by the famous Victoria Cross, there had been no equivalent honour for civilian gallantry. This had now been remedied by the institution of the George Cross and the George Medal.

If there had ever been any doubt about the gallantry of the members of the Auxiliary Fire Service during the Blitz, that doubt was utterly vanquished when a number of fire-fighters won the George Cross. One of them, on the personal recommendation of Admiral Barnikel himself, was Charlie Dogget.

For Charlie it was rather an embarrassment. Though, as any of his colleagues could have attested, he’d earned a medal many times, he knew he hadn’t deserved this one. But what could he say? Even Silversleeves, who remembered nothing at all of the moments before the explosion, had insisted upon visiting him and thanking him personally. He also had a letter from his Auntie Jenny when she saw it in the papers.

He had visited the place once, out of curiosity, but there was no sign of any gold. He kept the Roman coins he had, though, in a little box, and later gave them to his son.

THE RIVER

1997

Sir Eugene Penny, chairman of the mighty Penny Insurance Company, member of a dozen boards and alderman of London, was feeling rather virtuous. Few possessions had been more treasured in his family than the collection of river landscapes, a number by Monet, that his father had bought just after the Second World War from the estate of the last Lord St James. And today he had just given the whole lot away.

The trouble with going on to the boards of charities and good causes, he thought wryly, was that sooner or later you always started putting your own money into them. As a trustee of the Tate Gallery it was impossible not to be excited by its plans, both for the original museum of modern art in its lovely classical building by the river and for the vast new gallery they planned to open in the old Bankside Power Station on the south side of the river, just near the reconstructed Globe Theatre. When a fellow trustee had hinted that really, those Monets of his ought to be seen by a wider audience he had felt bound to agree. After signing them over that morning, he had paid a visit to the nearby Chelsea Flower Show, followed by lunch at his club and a visit to Tom Brown, his tailor. He was in an excellent mood, therefore, when he turned up for his visit to the site by the river this afternoon.

In recent years he had become interested in the Museum of London. His interest had first been sparked by an exhibition the museum had mounted on the Huguenots. As a Huguenot himself, Penny had always known a fair amount about the French community, which still had its own association and charities. He had even known that three out of four Britons had some Huguenot ancestry. But the exhibition had been a revelation. Silk-weavers and generals, artists, clock-makers, famous jewellers like the Agnews, firms like his own – the exhibits, as well as showing off some wonderful arts and crafts, had revealed the Huguenot origins of any number of concerns that one thought of as quintessentially British. The thing had been so well done that he had begun to take more notice of the museum, and a little later, secretly hoping to find more evidence of Huguenot genius, he had gone to another show they had put on.

“The Peopling of London” had been very well done; but it had also been a surprise.

“I thought I knew something about my British heritage,” he remarked to his wife. “It turns out I didn’t at all.” In his schooldays the history of England at least – if not of the whole of Britain – had been about the Anglo-Saxon race. “We knew about the Celts, of course. And then there were the Danes and a few Norman knights.” But the exhibits on the peopling of London told a completely different story. Angles, Saxons, Danes, Celtic folk: they had all been found in London. But even back in the days when the Tower of London was built, Penny learned, there had been Norman and Italian merchants, then Flemish and Germans. “The Flemish people kept coming all the time, and they settled all over the island too, right out into Scotland and Wales.” In more recent times, the big Jewish community, the Irish, and still later, the people from the former empire – the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean, Asia. “But what is really so striking,” he concluded, “is that even from the Middle Ages there is no question – London was always a city of large numbers of aliens who quickly assimilated. In historical terms, London has been just as much a melting pot as, say, New York.” He had grinned. “I knew I was of immigrant stock, but it turns out that everyone else is too!”

“So the much vaunted Anglo-Saxon race . . .?”

“Is a myth. The northern half of Britain is more Danish and Celtic; and even in the south,” he shrugged, “I doubt very much whether our Anglo-Saxon ancestry would make up one part in four. We are, quite simply, a nation of European immigrants with new graftings being added all the time. A genetic river, if you like, fed by any number of streams.” The museum had produced a book on the subject. He kept it in the drawing room for guests to see.

“So how would you define a Londoner, then?” Lady Penny asked curiously.

“Someone who lives here. It’s like the old definition of a cockney: someone who’s born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner,” he added with a grin, “is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.”

Now that he thought of it he had seen the process in the huge offices of the Penny Insurance Company. In the decades after the Second World War, there had been massive immigration from the Caribbean and from the Indian subcontinent into London. In a few places – Notting Hill Gate above Kensington, and Brixton, south of the river – there had been friction and even riots. Yet recently as he toured the office and found himself talking to the young generation in their twenties, he had realized that they all – black, white, Asian – not only talked with the local accents of London, but had taken on the same sports, the same attitudes, even the same irreverent cockney humour as the London folk he had known as a child. “They’re all Londoners,” he concluded.