London Pride (50 page)

The anti-aircraft guns over in Woolwich were firing now and the noise overhead was intense and terrifying. ‘Come on!'

They slipped and stumbled down the narrow stairs and hobbled into the street, where their neighbours were all running headlong to the shelter too. Flossie caught a glimpse of Mrs Roderick's green coat as she hurtled through the entrance and she could hear Leslie's high-pitched voice shouting hysterically, but then she and Mrs Geary were in the push and scramble at the entrance and the first bombs were falling with a loud screaming whistle that sounded as though they were coming straight down on top of her and made her stomach shake with terror.

It was dark and smelly inside the shelter and it took Mr Allnutt some minutes to light the hurricane lamp.

‘We're in it now,' Nonnie Brown said, as the little light spread through their darkness. ‘We're in it now.' She
sounded happy and excited, as if she'd arrived at some long-awaited party.

‘Oh do shut up,' Leslie growled at her. ‘We shall all be killed. I left Ernest in the shop with the new chrysanthemums. He'll be killed as sure as fate. We shall all be killed.'

The parrot was still squawking, its feathers dishevelled and one eye perpetually closed.

‘Make it shut up,' Flossie said to Mrs Geary. ‘My nerves are in shreds without that bird.'

‘Come on Polly. Good boy! Nice Polly!' Mrs Geary said to the bird but the shrieks went on.

Mr and Mrs Grunewald arrived panting and pop-eyed, with all the men from the woodyard and three customers who lived round the corner.

‘My boy's at work,' one woman worried. ‘What'll they do at work? They ought ter let 'em home. Don'tcher think they ought to let 'em home? Oh dear, oh dear, what if something happens?'

‘They'll have shelters somewhere,' Mrs Geary tried to comfort her. ‘He'll be all right, you'll see.' But the woman was weeping.

Flossie became aware that John Cooper was missing. ‘Where's Mr Cooper?' she said, shouting to be heard above the din outside.

Nobody knew.

‘Did we ought ter go an' find him, poor man?' Mrs Allnutt said.

‘No,' Flossie said at once. ‘You have to stay in the shelter. They said on the leaflet.'

‘We shall all be killed,' Leslie moaned. ‘I was just getting his tea and now he's going to be blown to smithereens. And all those chrysanthemums fresh in this afternoon.'

‘Bloody sod it,' the parrot said, opening its eye at last.

Behind the thick walls of the shelter they could hear the drone of engines and the screaming descent of bombs. And all so close. Leslie was right. They could be killed at any moment.

‘Bloody bloody bloody,' the parrot said.

‘If you don't stop that bloody bird,' one of the woodmen
shouted at Mrs Geary, ‘I'll take it out its cage so help me and wring its bloody neck.'

‘Oh the bugger!' the parrot said.

‘You're not supposed to bring pets in a shelter,' another man complained. ‘What if a bomb fell on us, it could bite someone.'

‘You oughter put it outside,' the first man said, advancing on the parrot as though he meant to carry the cage out himself.

Alarmed by the fear and antagonism all round it, the bird clacked into a paroxysm of obscenity, using every swear word it could lay its black tongue to.

‘This is too bloody much,' the first man said. ‘We shall all go mad if we have to put up with this.' And he put his hand on the cage ready to lift it.

To Flossie's surprise Mrs Geary stood up at once and lifted the cage away from him. ‘All right, young man,' she said. ‘We know where we're not wanted don't we, Poll?' And with great dignity despite her hobbling gait, she carried the cage out of the shelter.

‘Mrs Geary!' Flossie cried. ‘Don't go out there. You'll get killed.' But the old lady had already gone. Oh this was awful! ‘You shouldn't have said that to her,' she rebuked the man.

‘An' you can shut your face an' all,' he growled at her. ‘Shelters ain't fer pets.'

For a few seconds Flossie drew on her power to try and find an answer to him but then a stick of bombs began to fall somewhere horribly close by. They could hear each one whistling down, one, two, three, four. The smell of fear in their dank shelter was overpowering, and now that the parrot was gone they could hear every sound much more clearly. Five, six.

Mrs Roderick was weeping quietly into a handkerchief. ‘I wish your Peggy was here,' she sobbed to Flossie.

‘She'll make her rounds presently,' Flossie remembered with relief. Peggy visited all the shelters in her area whenever there was a raid. ‘She'll be here presently. She knows how bad my nerves are when the sirens go. We shall be all right when Peggy comes,' she told the shelterers.

But Peggy was already at her first incident.

When the yellow alert came through she'd been in the wardens' post with Mr MacFarlane and Charlie Goodall and four other local wardens. They'd just brewed a pot of tea, and Charlie reckoned they'd have time for a quick cup between the yellow alert and the red, if it came. The speed and violence of the attack was a surprise to them too.

‘They're after the docks,' Mr Goodall said as they stood in the doorway and looked up at the armada in the sky. ‘God help the poor buggers in the East End.'

The barrage balloons bobbed above them, shining silver in the afternoon sun, and above the balloons the bombers were being harried by RAF fighters that roared through the formation spitting tracer fire, but the Germans pressed on with their attack, the front rank circling ready to make a bombing run. To Peggy's mesmerized eyes, the movement of their manoeuvre looked oddly beautiful in that peaceful blue sky. This was the moment she'd been trained for, the moment she'd been expecting and dreading and yet now that it had finally come she felt detached from it. Even when the first bomb fell, twisting and turning in the air before her eyes she couldn't believe it was happening. The explosions and the shock waves and the clouds of dust spuming into the sky were all unreal.

‘Come on,' Charlie Goodall said, checking the strap of his tin hat. And then they were on their bicycles and pedalling unsteadily through the street towards their first incident.

I mustn't let them down, Peggy thought, pedalling mechanically and trying to steel herself for the ordeal ahead of her, not when I was born in the Tower and I'm a soldier's daughter. And the words that the Reverend Beaumont used to say all those years ago in Tillingbourne, came into her mind unbidden as a blessing. ‘Lord give us the strength to endure those things that have to be endured.' And she said the words to herself praying ardently, ‘Lord give me the strength. Please.' And after that she felt a little hope, a little warm hope that she would be able to endure, that she would manage somehow, despite her fear. And they propped their bikes against a wall and walked into the dust cloud.

There were mounds of bricks under her feet, bricks and
broken planks and shards of glass, so that she slipped and stumbled as she climbed, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the sting of the dust she saw a body lying, limbs askew, among the wreckage, a trousered body with its head turned away from her, thick hair matted with blood and brick dust, one white hand smeared with what looked like brown grease. She knew at once that whoever he was he was dead, there was something so broken and discarded about him. But she went across to make sure, because that was her job and now that she was here she had to do it.

There was still some warmth in the wrist she took gently between finger and thumb but no pulse at all. How could there be when half his face had been cut away by flying glass? She looked at the horror that had been his head, taking a mental note of it so that she could write her report afterwards, and she felt vaguely pleased that she could do all this without being sick. Then, working slowly as though she had all the time in the world, she straightened his limbs, closed his remaining eye, and pulling a torn curtain out from among the planks, covered him up in a neat bundle, folding the edges of the cloth around his body as though she was tucking him up in bed.

Then she was sick.

The rescue teams were climbing about on top of the wreckage. One house had been blown to bits and its neighbour was sliced in half. It was eerily quiet. There were no screams, no cries for help, only Mr MacFarlane's voice reed thin in the dust calling, ‘Over here, Mr Goodall. Over here.'

Peggy scrambled towards him. ‘There's a wee lass down there under a table or something,' he said, and now they could see that he was holding up a large piece of brickwork in both hands, straining to stop it from falling back into the pile.

‘Get a lever under,' a man's voice said.

‘You're all right, lassie,' Mr MacFarlane soothed. ‘We'll soon have ye oot. Dinna fash yersel'.'

It took the rescue teams such a long time for them to lift the wreckage from the table, even though there were dozens of eager hands working at speed. When the last
lump was lifted away and the table was revealed at the bottom of the hole they'd made, Peggy could see that it was cracked in two but the child huddled underneath it was alive. Mute with shock, covered in brick dust, her clothes shredded, but alive.

The only trouble was that she wouldn't or couldn't crawl out. She seemed to be frozen where she was, sitting crouched under the tilted table, her eyes staring.

‘Someone'll have to go down and get her,' Mr Goodall said. ‘Someone small. You'll do, Peggy.'

And so it was Peggy who was lowered into the hole on a rope to lift the child from her prison. ‘Can you put your arms round my neck, lovey?' she asked as she crawled under the table. And the child did her best to obey.

‘That's my darling,' Peggy encouraged, dragging her clear. ‘I've got you. Peggy's got you. You're all right.'

It was rather upsetting that as soon as they'd been been hauled out of the hole the child began to cry, clinging about Peggy's neck and howling in anguish, her face distorted. ‘I want my mummy. I want my mummy.'

‘You're all right, lovey. You're all right,' Peggy said over and over again, chafing the child's cold limbs as she carried her to the waiting ambulance. ‘We've got you out, see. You're all right.'

‘Shock,' a nurse explained, enveloping the little girl in a red blanket. ‘Is there anyone else?'

There must be, Peggy thought, but until that moment she hadn't thought of any others. She hadn't even considered how terrifying it would be to be lowered into a hole in the ground, where they could both have been buried alive. All her emotions and energies had been caught up in the rescue of this child. Now her mind started to function again and she realized the danger they were all facing and her legs began to tremble.

‘We'll wait five minutes,' the driver said.

Mr Goodall was organizing a team on the far side of the ruin, and she could see Mr MacFarlane lying on the bricks with his ear to the mess, listening. So she controlled her stupid legs and went to join them.

‘There's someone groaning,' Mr MacFarlane said as he stood up. ‘If we could just get this ceiling lifted.'

The lifting gear arrived, more rubble was shifted and the woman was finally located, smeared with dirt and streaked with blood, unconscious but still alive.

‘Two,' Mr MacFarlane said with satisfaction. ‘How long did that take us, Charlie?'

It was nearly two hours, which surprised them all. Nearly two hours and the raid still going on all round them. But as the ambulance team were strapping the woman onto a stretcher, the all-clear sounded and after a few minutes people started to emerge from their shelters. Soon an anxious group of neighbours had gathered on the remains of the pavement.

Mr Goodall was still searching the wreckage where the kitchen had been. ‘Easy, lads,' he warned, as the rapid removal of a piece of broken timber brought a landslide of bricks and plaster tumbling. ‘Listen again, Mr Mac. Go and talk to the neighbours, Peggy. See if you can find out who's supposed to be at home.'

The neighbours were too shocked to have much idea. ‘Being it's Saturday,' one woman explained, ‘they could be anywhere. Old Man Terry'll be at Catford. I can tell you that. Up the Greyhounds.'

Peggy wrote down what little they could tell her and turned to climb back over the bricks to Mr Goodall. Directly in front of her, rising above the shattered roofs was an immense cloud, thick, grey-white and billowing. At first she thought the weather had changed but then she realized she was looking at the smoke from a fire and she was stupefied by the size of it. It was the biggest fire she'd ever seen and very close, just over the river. Now that her mind was functioning again she remembered hearing fire-engines racing past them all the time they'd been rescuing the little girl.

‘It'll be the docks, Miss,' a man in a cloth cap told her. ‘Rotten bleeders!'

‘They've set fire to the docks,' she told Mr Goodall when she'd climbed back to his perch on the brick pile.

‘I know,' he said shortly. ‘Cop hold a' this.'

They worked on at the site until the rescue teams were satisfied that no one remained under the rubble, and by that time the smoke cloud had grown so big they couldn't
see the top of it. It stretched for miles on either side of the river and now they could see red and yellow flames licking up into the base of it.

‘They'll be back tonight with a marker like that to aim for,' Mr Goodall said. ‘Cut off home, have something to eat, get some kip. We shall all be needed tonight.'

So Peggy went home, to a street frantic with rumour, a mother prostrate with nerves and no sign of Mrs Geary or her parrot.

‘Oh Peggy, whatever are we going to do?' Baby said. ‘She could have been blown to bits. We've been in the cellar all afternoon at work and when we came out and saw the fire …'