Authors: Kate Atkinson
Despite the wartime speed restrictions they seemed to be travelling at least twice as fast as when she travelled in a carriage (‘on the cushions’, she thought, she must remember that for Teddy who, despite now being a pilot, still harboured his childhood desire to be a train driver).
As they approached London they could see fires in the east and hear the distant pealing of guns but as they neared the marshalling yards and engine sheds it became almost eerily quiet. They slowed to a halt and all was suddenly, thankfully, peaceful.
Fred helped her down from the cab. ‘There you go, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Home sweet home. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.’ He looked suddenly doubtful. ‘I would walk you home but we have to put this engine to bed. Will you be all right from here?’ They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, just tracks and points and the looming shadows of engines. ‘There’s a bomb at Marylebone. We’re at the back of King’s Cross,’ Fred said, reading her mind. ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’ He switched on the weakest of torches, it illuminated only a foot or so in front of them. ‘Have to be careful,’ he said, ‘we’re a prime target here.’
‘I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said, a little more gung-ho than she felt. ‘Don’t give me a second thought, and thank you. Good night, Fred.’ She set off resolutely and immediately tripped over a rail and gave a little cry of distress when she banged her knee hard on the sharp stones of the track.
‘Here, Miss Todd,’ Fred said, helping her up. ‘You’ll never find your way in the dark. Come on, I’ll walk you to the gates.’ He took her arm and set off, steering her as they went, for all the world as if they were on a Sunday stroll along the Embankment. She remembered how she had been rather sweet on Fred when she was younger. It would probably be quite easy to be sweet on him again, she reckoned.
They reached a big pair of wooden gates and he opened a small door set within them.
‘I think I know where I am,’ she said. She had no idea where she was but she didn’t want to inconvenience Fred any longer. ‘Well, thank you again, maybe I’ll see you next time I get down to Fox Corner.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I start in the AFS tomorrow. Plenty of old codgers like Willie can keep the trains running.’
‘Good for you,’ she said, although she was thinking how dangerous the fire service was.
It was the blackest blackout ever. She walked with a hand in front of her face and eventually bumped into a woman who told her where she was. They walked together for half a mile or so. After a few minutes on her own again she heard footsteps behind her and she said, ‘I’m here,’ so the owner of the feet didn’t walk into her. It was a man, no more than a figure in the dark who went with her as far as Hyde Park. Before the war you would never have dreamed of hooking arms with a complete stranger – particularly a man – but now the danger from the skies seemed so much greater than anything that could befall you from this odd intimacy.
She thought it must be nearly dawn when she got back to Phillimore Gardens but it was barely midnight. Millie, all dressed up, had just returned from an evening out. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘What happened to you? Did you get bombed?’
Ursula looked in the mirror and found that she was smudged all over with soot and coal dust. ‘What a fright,’ she said.
‘You look like a coalminer,’ Millie said.
‘More like an engine driver,’ she said, rapidly recounting the night’s adventures.
‘Oh,’ Millie said, ‘Fred Smith, the butcher’s boy. He was a bit of a dish.’
‘Still is, I suppose. I’ve got eggs from Fox Corner,’ she said, removing the cardboard box that Sylvie had given her from her bag. The eggs had been nestled in straw, but now they were cracked and broken from the jolting of the track or when she fell in the engine yard.
The next day they managed to make an omelette from the salvaged remains.
‘Lovely,’ Millie said. ‘You should get home more often.’
October 1940
‘IT’S CERTAINLY BUSY tonight,’ Miss Woolf said. A glorious understatement. There was a full-scale raid in progress, bombers droning overhead, glinting occasionally when they caught a searchlight. HE bombs flashed and roared and the large batteries
banged
and
whuffed
and
cracked
– all the usual racket. Shells whistled or screamed on their way up, a mile a second until they winked and twinkled like stars before extinguishing themselves. Fragments came clattering down. (A few days ago Mr Simms’s cousin had been killed by shrapnel from the ack-acks in Hyde Park. ‘Shame to be killed by your own,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘Sort of pointless.’) A red glow over Holborn indicated an oil bomb. Ralph lived in Holborn but Ursula supposed on a night like this he would be in St Paul’s.
‘It’s almost like a painting, isn’t it?’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Of the Apocalypse maybe,’ Ursula said. Against the backdrop of black night the fires that had been started burnt in a huge variety of colours – scarlet and gold and orange, indigo and a sickly lemon. Occasionally vivid greens and blues would shoot up where something chemical had caught fire. Orange flames and thick black smoke roiled out of a warehouse. ‘It gives one a quite different perspective, doesn’t it?’ Miss Woolf mused. It did. It seemed both grand and terrible compared to their own grubby little labours. ‘It makes me proud,’ Mr Simms said quietly. ‘Our battling on like this, I mean. All alone.’
‘And against all odds,’ Miss Woolf sighed.
They could see all the way along the Thames. Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element. They were on the roof of Shell-Mex House. The building was now occupied by the Ministry of Supply, for which Mr Simms worked, and he had invited Ursula and Miss Woolf to come and ‘see the view from the top’.
‘It’s spectacular, isn’t it? Savage and yet strangely magnificent,’ Mr Simms said, as though they were at the summit of one of the Lakeland fells rather than a building on the Strand in the middle of a raid.
‘Well, I don’t know about
magnificent
, exactly,’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Churchill was up here the other night,’ Mr Simms said. ‘Such a good vantage point. He was fascinated.’
Later, when Ursula and Miss Woolf were alone, Miss Woolf said, ‘You know, I rather had the impression that Mr Simms was a lowly clerk in the ministry, he’s quite a meek soul, but he must be quite senior to have been up on the roof with Churchill.’ (One of the firewatchers on duty on the roof had said, ‘Evening, Mr Simms,’ with the kind of respect people felt obliged to afford to Maurice, although in the case of Mr Simms it was less grudgingly given.) ‘He’s unassuming,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘I like that in a man.’ Whereas I prefer assuming, Ursula thought.
‘It really is quite a show,’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Isn’t it, though?’ Mr Simms said enthusiastically. Ursula supposed that they were all aware how odd it was to be admiring the ‘show’ when they were so painfully conscious of what it meant on the ground.
‘It’s as if the gods are throwing a particularly noisy party,’ Mr Simms said.
‘One I would rather not be invited to,’ Miss Woolf said.
A familiar fearful swishing sound made them all duck for cover but the bombs exploded some way away and although they heard the explosions
bang-bang-bang-bang
they couldn’t see what had been hit. Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men. Although she would make an exception for Hitler. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I think the man is quite, quite mad.’
At that moment, to their surprise, a basket of incendiaries came swooping down and crashed its noisy load right on the ministry’s roof. The incendiaries cracked and sparked and the two firewatchers ran towards them with a stirrup pump. Miss Woolf grabbed a bucket of sand and beat them to it. (‘Fast for an old bird’ was Mr Bullock’s estimation of Miss Woolf under pressure.)
‘
What if this were the world’s last night?
’ a familiar voice said.
‘Ah, Mr Durkin, you managed to join us,’ Mr Simms said affably. ‘You didn’t have any trouble with the man on the door?’
‘No, no, he knew I was expected,’ Mr Durkin said, as if feeling his own importance.
‘Is
anyone
left at the post?’ Miss Woolf murmured to no one in particular.
Ursula felt suddenly compelled to correct Mr Durkin. ‘
What if this
present
were the world’s last night
,’ she said. ‘The word “present” makes all the difference, don’t you think? It makes it seem as if one’s somehow in the thick of it, which we are, rather than simply contemplating a theoretical concept. This is it, the end right now, no more shilly-shallying.’
‘Goodness, so much fuss over one little word,’ Mr Durkin said, sounding put out. ‘However, I obviously stand corrected.’ Ursula thought that one word could mean a great deal. If any poet was scrupulous with words then it was surely Donne. Donne, himself once the dean of St Paul’s, had been moved down to an ignominious berth in the basement of the cathedral. In death he had survived the Great Fire of London, would he survive this one too? Wellington’s tomb was too hefty to move and had simply been bricked up. Ralph had given her a tour – he was on the night watch there. He knew everything there was to know about the cathedral. Not quite the iconoclast that Pamela had presumed.
When they emerged into the bright afternoon, he said, ‘Shall we try and get a cup of tea somewhere?’ and Ursula said, ‘No, let’s go back to your place in Holborn and go to bed with each other.’ So they had and she had felt rotten because she couldn’t help thinking about Crighton while Ralph was politely accommodating his body to hers. Afterwards, he had seemed abashed as if he no longer knew how to be with her. She said, ‘I’m just the same person as I was before we did this,’ and he said, ‘I’m not sure I am.’ And she thought, oh dear God, he’s a virgin, but he laughed and said, no, no, that wasn’t it – he
wasn’t
– it was just that he was so very much in love with her ‘and now I feel, I don’t know … sublimated’.
‘Sublimated?’ Millie said. ‘Sounds like sentimental twaddle to me. He has you on a pedestal, heaven help him when he discovers that you have feet of clay.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Is that a mixed metaphor or is it a rather clever image?’ Millie, of course had always—
‘Miss Todd?’
‘Sorry. Miles away.’
‘We should get back to our sector,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘It’s strange, but one feels rather safe up here.’
‘I’m sure we’re not,’ Ursula said. She was right, for a few days later Shell-Mex House was badly hit by a bomb.
She was keeping watch with Miss Woolf in her flat. Sitting at her big corner window they drank tea and ate biscuits and could have been any two women spending the evening together if it hadn’t been for the tolling thunder of the barrage. Ursula learned that Miss Woolf’s name was Dorcas (which she had never liked) and that her fiancé (Richard) had died in the Great War. ‘I still call it that,’ she said, ‘and yet this one is the greater. At least this time we have right on our side, I hope.’ Miss Woolf believed in the war but her religious faith had begun to ‘crumble’ since the start of the bombing. ‘Yet we must hold fast to what is good and true. But it all seems so random. One wonders about the divine plan and so on.’
‘More of a shambles than a plan,’ Ursula agreed.
‘And the poor Germans, I doubt many of
them
are in favour of the war – of course one mustn’t say that in the hearing of people like Mr Bullock. But if
we
had lost the Great War and been burdened with great debt just as the world’s economy collapsed then perhaps we too would have been a tinderbox awaiting the strike of a flint – a Mosley or some such awful person. More tea, dear?’
‘I know,’ Ursula said, ‘but they are trying to
kill
us, you know,’ and as if to demonstrate this fact they heard the
swish
and
wheee
that heralded a bomb heading in their direction and flung themselves with remarkable speed behind the sofa. It seemed unlikely that it would be enough to save them and yet only two nights ago they had pulled a woman out, almost unscathed, from beneath an upturned settee in a house that was otherwise more or less destroyed.
The bomb shook the Staffordshire cow-creamers on Miss Woolf’s dresser but they agreed it had landed outside their section. They were both finely tuned to the bombs these days.
They were also both terribly down in spirits as Mr Palmer, the bank manager, had been killed when a delayed action bomb had detonated at an incident they were attending. The DA had blown him some distance and they found him half buried beneath an iron bedstead. He had lost his spectacles but looked relatively unharmed. ‘Can you feel a pulse,’ Miss Woolf said and Ursula puzzled as to why she was asking when Miss Woolf was much more capable of finding a pulse than she was, but then she realized that Miss Woolf was very upset. ‘It’s different when you know someone,’ she said, gently stroking Mr Palmer’s forehead. ‘I wonder where his spectacles are? He doesn’t look right without them, does he?’
Ursula couldn’t find a pulse. ‘Shall we move him?’ she said. She took his shoulders and Miss Woolf his ankles and Mr Palmer’s body came apart like a Christmas cracker.
‘I can put more hot water in the pot,’ Miss Woolf offered. To cheer her up Ursula told her stories about Jimmy and Teddy when they were boys. She didn’t bother with Maurice. Miss Woolf was very fond of children, her only regret in life was not having had any. ‘If Richard had lived, perhaps … but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One cannot step in the same river twice?’
‘More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be “You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”’
‘You’re such a bright young woman,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Don’t waste your life, will you? If you’re spared.’