V for Vengeance (14 page)

At first he thought that the area through which he was passing must have suffered with particular severity from the Germans having attempted to put the railway terminus out of action, but only having succeeded in plastering the streets all round it; yet, as his taxi progressed, turning and twisting alternately through main thoroughfares and side-streets across the great shopping centre of the West End, he saw that the bombing had been entirely indiscriminate, and that the whole of central London appeared to have suffered equally from the sustained savagery of the attacks.

He noticed too that the streets were almost empty compared with when he last saw them. There was now little traffic, and the people, although still going about their work with a dogged look, were showing the strain in their faces.

On arriving in Carlton House Terrace he saw with some relief that Sir Pellinore's house was still standing, although two others quite near it had dissolved into a great heap of rubble and twisted metal, which overflowed into the roadway. The elderly butler remembered him at once, but informed him that Sir Pellinore was out and would not be back until dinnertime. He thought, however, that Mr. Sallust was still living at his flat in Gloucester Road and rang up to find out.

As so many of the telephone exchanges and cables had been damaged it took the best part of twenty minutes to get through, but at last the butler secured the number. Gregory was not in, but his faithful henchman, Rudd, took the call and said that his master was expected back quite shortly; so Kuporovitch decided to go down there right away.

His second taxi-ride gave him a further opportunity to assess the damage which had been inflicted on inner Southwest London, and he now decided that the reports of the bombing had not been exaggerated at all. It was only the vast size of the capital, with its scores of square miles of buildings,
streets, squares and parks, together with the fact that the Germans did not appear to have concentrated upon any particular area, which had enabled the population to carry on. Had the thousands of bombs which had been dropped been directed upon a smaller city it must inevitably have been wiped out.

At Gloucester Road Rudd received the Russian, and having installed him in a comfortable chair with a large whisky-and-soda proceeded to give him some account of the blitz.

‘Well, it ain't exactly a picnic, as yer might say,' he remarked cheerfully, ‘speshully when Jerry's dropping them things abaht, and yer's aht in the street, as me and Mr. Gregory is nah, every night—'im and me belonging to the Fire-Fightin' Service; but it ain't nuffin compared wiv what we 'ad to put up wiv in the hold war when we was at Ypres. Yer see, it's this way, sir. London's the 'ell of a big place, when yer comes to think of it, and I reckons little hold 'Itler bit off more than 'e could chew when 'e started in to knock it dahn. O course, I ain't saying 'e ain't done a tidy bit o' damage, and it makes us just screamin' mad when we 'as to pull what's left o' wimmen and kids aht from underneath great 'eaps of rubble; but I reckons that there American journalist 'it the nail on the 'ead when 'e wrote 'ome to 'is paper. ‘E said that at the rate the Nasties are going now it'd take 'em two thousand weeks to destroy London, and 'e don't reckon 'Itler's got another forty years ter live!'

Kuporovitch's command of English was not yet sufficient to follow Rudd's Cockney idiom entirely, but he got the gist of it, and it heartened him a great deal. He was just saying how wonderfully the English railways seemed to have stood up to the crisis when the door opened and Gregory came in. He looked a little tired and was clad in a dirty suit of blue dungarees, but as he saw the Russian his lean face lit up, and he gave a great shout:

‘Stefan! By all that's holy!'

‘Gregory,
mon vieux
!' exclaimed Kuporovitch with equal delight, and standing up he gave the Englishman a great bearlike hug, while the grinning Rudd slipped quietly out of the room.

‘And to think that I left you for dead in Paris last June!'
Gregory cried, breaking into French. ‘Yet here you are in London, looking as fit as when I first met you.'

‘I owe that to the nurse whom you so thoughtfully left to look after me.'

‘What! That pretty little Madeleine! You old devil! I only left her the money with which to bury you. If I know anything of your way with women I'll bet that by this time the poor girl's beginning to regret your resurrection!'

Kuporovitch came as near to blushing as such a hardened sinner could, but he covered his confusion with his hearty laugh.

‘No, no! The little Madeleine has nothing to regret on my account, thank God!'

‘Then your recovery must be very recent,' Gregory teased him. ‘ “The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; the devil was well, the devil a monk was he!”'

‘No, no!' Kuporovitch protested again. ‘I would not harm a hair of her lovely head.'

‘Then, dammit, you must have
really
fallen in love with her!'

‘I have,' Stefan confessed. ‘Most desperately. But, tell me, what news of Erika?'

‘She's better—practically recovered now, thank God! But she had a positively ghastly time, and for weeks after I got back it was still touch-and-go as to whether she'd ever get really fit again.'

‘Is she in London?'

‘No. Pellinore sent her down to Gwaine Meads, his place in Montgomeryshire, and I went with her. I was about all in myself after those terrific weeks we had between the invasion of Norway and the collapse of France. The old man absolutely insisted that I should kill two birds with one stone by helping her recovery through being with her and taking a proper rest myself.'

‘I suppose you came back when the blitz started?'

‘Yes, I'm still unemployed officially. Naturally, as soon as Erika had turned the corner and I was feeling more like my old self, I tried to get some sort of job. But there was no special mission upon which Sir Pellinore could send me, and my friends in the Services seemed to think that I should only
be an awful misfit if they took me into one of them as a junior officer. That was pretty depressing but old Pellinore assured me that sooner or later something suitable to my peculiar talents was bound to turn up. Directly the Boches started knocking hell out of London I came back, and Rudd got me taken on as a member of his fire-fighting squad.'

‘Is that a permanency? Will it tie you here?' asked Kuporovitch anxiously.

‘Oh no. If something in which I could be more useful offered I could always put in my resignation.'

‘Good! I'm glad of that, as I come from Lacroix with an invitation which, I think, will intrigue you.'

‘Lacroix!' Gregory echoed the name almost in a whisper and with something of awe in his tone. ‘Is that great little man still with us?'

Kuporovitch nodded. ‘Very much so. He still holds his job but only so that he can the better sabotage collaboration between the Nazis and the Vichy French.'

Gregory's brown eyes lit up his lean face as he murmured: ‘This sounds like something really in my line. I'm off duty tonight, so we'll go out and dine somewhere, and you must tell me all about it.'

Dusk was now falling.

Rudd came back to do the black-out, and Gregory added: ‘Make yourself comfortable here for a bit while I get out of these things and have a wash.'

Soon after he had left the room the sirens began to wail, and gunfire could be heard in the distance.

When Gregory returned, spick and span in one of his well-cut lounge suits, he remarked: ‘It's no good telephoning for a taxi. It takes ages to get on to a number in these days, but we'll be able to pick one up in the street.'

‘Do they still run when an air raid is in progress?' asked Kuporovitch doubtfully.

‘Good Lord, yes!' Gregory assured him. ‘The London taxi-men are absolutely splendid. They don't give a damn for the Jerries and carry on, however bad the blitz. I only wish it was the same with all our other services.'

‘What's wrong with them?' Kuporovitch inquired, as they went downstairs and out into the darkness.

Gregory suddenly began to speak with bitter fury. ‘In August, through the absolutely splendid show put up by our Air Force, we demonstrated to the world that there were still prospects of Britain's emerging victorious from the war. In September the lack of resource, initiative and even common-sense displayed by some of our Civil Authorities is putting us well on the road to losing the war altogether. In the Spring before the war the people responsible for Home Security issued a thing called an Anderson Shelter, which was turned out by the thousand and distributed free among the poorer people for them to set up in their back-gardens. That was grand, but ever since the Ministry concerned has been sound asleep. Hitler might have blitzed London any day after September the 3rd, 1939, yet they didn't even start to erect street air raid shelters until the bombs actually began to fall, and, when they did, they set about it in the most crazy way.

‘No attempt seems to have been made to secure designs from Britain's leading architects and military engineers in order that various types of shelter might be erected on waste-ground and tested out for blast resistance. If they had done that the most satisfactory model could have been adopted as the universal type; instead, each Borough Council is being allowed to erect any old brick structure that it likes, and some of them are so flimsy that their ends fall in if a car drives into them in the black-out.'

‘I don't wonder that happens,' muttered Kuporovitch with an oath, as he stumbled over a sandbag.

‘Then the Tubes!' went on Gregory angrily. ‘Any fool could have foreseen that the poor wretches who had been bombed out of their homes would take refuge in London's only natural deep shelters—the Underground Stations—but the London Transport Board can have received no instructions from the Government. They even closed their stations in the daytime, every time those filthy sirens sounded.'

‘What! They shut the people who could shelter in them out in the streets? But that is incredible!'

‘Nevertheless, it's a fact; and it's only during the last week or two that unofficially, and entirely as a compassionate measure, the Transport Board have allowed homeless people to remain down in their stations for the night. But even now
the Government hasn't taken any measures for the comfort of these poor wretches, or to ensure proper sanitation. It's a…'

A nearby anti-aircraft battery suddenly let off a terrific crack, and the rest of Gregory's sentence was drowned, but a moment later Kuporovitch caught his words again.

‘Why the hell nobody does anything about the blitzed buildings I simply can't think. This party's been going on for over a month now, yet not the least attempt is made to tidy things up. Whenever a place is bombed and huge chunks of masonry crash down, half-blocking a street, they simply rope it off, instead of putting the unemployed on to clear away the débris and erecting a hoarding which would hide the worst effects of the mess. We've got millions of troops in this country. If they can't get ordinary labour why not bring in the Army to lend a hand? As it is, half the streets in London are either blocked by bomb-craters or have a time-bomb in them.'

‘Yes, I noticed that when I was coming down here and on my way from Paddington to Sir Pellinore's,' Kuporovitch agreed. ‘No attempt at all has yet been made to deal with the damage that has been done and in time that is bound to have a very bad effect on the people.'

‘But that's only a small thing,' Gregory persisted. ‘All the municipal services such as water and gas are getting in a hopeless state. The bombing isn't so bad, and people are standing up to it pretty well, but what does get them down is the awful inconvenience that it causes. In half the houses in London now the gas pressure is so low that one can't cook anything, or it's cut off entirely, owing to the damage to the mains; and water is even worse. Only a trickle comes out of the tap, so we're lucky if we get a bath once a week these days. That's pretty hard when one comes home black as a sweep from having been fire-fighting all night. And it's all so damned unnecessary, because things could be reasonably straightened out in no time, if only the Government would call in engineer units from the Army to mend conduits and telephone cables and so on that have been broken in the raids.'

There was a horrid droning of enemy planes overhead. Somewhere south of the river bombs were falling, but only
the practised ear could distinguish them from the detonations of the heavier anti-aircraft guns. Except for an occasional A.R.P. warden the streets were deserted, but some distance along the Cromwell Road they struck a crawling taxi, and Gregory having told the man to drive to the Hungaria Restaurant they climbed into it. He was evidently intensely bitter and continued to let himself go.

‘Worst of all is the way that the Post Offices are behaving. At Dunkirk the Army lost everything except its pants, and we were all told afterwards that not one moment should be lost in any form of national activity which might help to build up its strength again; yet the Post Offices all shut down the instant they hear a siren.'

‘What difference does that make to munition workers?' Kuporovitch asked in some surprise.

‘My dear fellow, the Post Office is the index of all commercial activity in this country, because it's the only shop in every High Street which is under Government control. If the Post Office shuts, and its staff seeks refuge in the basement, how can a private employer of labour be expected to ask his people to carry on? Countless offices and shops immediately followed this cowardly example. The custom has spread to the banks, the great stores and the factories. Even when a single raider comes over the Estuary of the Thames, all Government offices from Hendon to Croydon, with the exception of those of the Fighting Services, close down, and practically everything else, except the brave little individual traders, closes with them. You have a look around tomorrow if there's an air raid in the daytime. You'll see queues of angry people left on the pavements, who can't telephone or send telegrams, often of the greatest urgency, cash cheques at the banks, or make applications at the Labour Exchanges, or even do their household shopping. Literally millions of hours of the nation's vital time are being wasted through this criminally wicked funk and apathy in our Civil Authorities.'