The Fall (34 page)

That night they bombed Bethnal Green. A high-explosive bomb hit the cemetery and threw old coffins and tombstones around the
place in unthinking irony. Bombs also hit residential streets, rows of houses that were little more than slums, two-up two-down
terraces with outside privies and inside squalor. High explosive swept the houses into rubble, and one bomb scored a direct
hit on a surface shelter, one of those death traps that the borough councils had erected in unseemly haste at the start of
the war. Twenty-five people were killed in the shelter. Incendiaries clattered across the wreckage of the houses and started
fires. They called in ambulances from other sectors, from Hackney and Holborn and Stepney, and firefighters from all over
the City. Hoses snaked across the tarmac and the sidewalks. Ladders slanted upward against the smoke, exclamation marks and
oblique strokes punctuating the flames.

The ambulance was called from Diana’s post at three in the morning. A doctor climbed on board at the last minute; they didn’t
usually carry a medic. “Thought I might be more use in the front line,” he said. He was a Scotsman called Dewar. He had pale
ginger hair and freckles, and eyelashes so light they were almost transparent. Behind them, red-rimmed and innocent, were
childlike blue eyes.

“You can drive the bloody thing if you’re so keen,” Bert suggested.

“I’m sure we’re safer with you.”

Antiaircraft guns were firing from near Spitalfields Market, their reports dull and flat against the heavy concussion of bombs.
You could see the explosions up there in the sky, the smudged flash of the shells going off in the cloud, uselessly probably,
probably quite without effect.

They drove through the black streets and the orange light of conflagration, Diana in the front between Bert and the doctor.
It was strange, Diana thought, how the wreckage of an affluent middle-class home or a squalid working-class slum looked much
the same: beams and joists and bricks and plaster and the thick fog of dust together achieving a kind of democracy. Like the
way that a laid-out corpse is classless.
We bring nothing into the world, and we take nothing away from it.
Where were those words from? They rang in her mind as they drove. And another line:
Man, thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.
Bethnal Green was returning to dust that night.

Shrapnel rattled down onto the roadway. High above the clouds, the bombers droned. There was that curious rise and fall to
the sound of their engines, like an old car straining at a hill. “Beats,” Bert told her as they drove. “Technical term, darling.
They desynchronize their engines, and that makes the sound go up and down. Interference. Know what I mean?”

She didn’t. She didn’t know what anything meant, really. She just thought of the babies dead within the rubble and the baby
alive within her womb.

“I’ll bet you fought that
interference
meant something else, didn’t you?”

“Thought,”
she corrected him.

“There you go again. Just ’cos I don’t speak la-di-da. I’ll bet yours is all put on, in’ it? I’ll bet if I woke you up in
the middle of the night, you’d speak natural, like me.”

“You’ll never get an opportunity to wake me in the middle of the night,” she said tartly.

“I can hope though.”

The doctor looked away from them, out into the lurid night. There was a sound above the noise of the engine—a noise like coal
being dropped down a chute—and he flinched against Diana. “Incendiaries,” said Bert, peering through the windshield. He prided
himself on deciphering the noises of the Blitz, the oil bombs, the high explosive, the incendiaries, just as Diana had learned
to decipher the injuries.

A yellow diversion sign pointed them toward Commercial Road. “We don’t want to go that fucking way,” Bert protested. “If we
can get a bit farther down Brick Lane we’ll be all right.” He leaned forward over the steering wheel, looking for one of his
shortcuts. The end of Brick Lane was obscured by a dense cloud of yellow fog. There were figures in the fog, vague shapes
shifting through the murk like shadows dimly perceived in a nightmare. “Someone else’s fucking problem,” he said, pulling
the ambulance down a side street. They passed a pub with its windows boarded up. There were vacant windows and open, empty
doorways. Narrow, mean streets shuttered against the world. Where had all the people gone? Diana wondered.

“Jack the Ripper country this,” Bert said. “D’you know that, Doc? Of course, the Ripper was a doctor like you, wasn’t he?”

The doctor laughed at Bert’s words. “Was he indeed? Like me?”

“Well, he must have been a doctor, you see. Because he had an intimate knowledge of a woman’s
innards
.” Bert gave the word emphasis, making it sound like something inside a chicken: giblets or gizzards.

“Perhaps he was just an enthusiastic amateur.”

Bert shook his head. “All the indications are that
he knew what he was looking for
.” The ambulance trundled along, crunching over broken glass. There were railway arches on their left, with figures huddled
against the cold and the bombs. “How are you on women’s innards, Doc?”

“Is this the kind of conversation one should have with Nurse Sheridan present?”

“Oh, she’s used to it.”

“I’m not sure that I am. And I’m an orthopedic man not a gynecologist.”

“That children is it? Orthopedics?”

The doctor laughed again. “Rugby injuries more like.”

“Rugby.” Bert’s voice was laden with despite. “Bloody typical. Rugby. Come the revolution we’ll
ban
bloody rugby.” He peered ahead. “Here we are. Just round the Jack Horner and we should be there.”

“Do you really say that?” Diana asked.

“What?”

“Jack Horner.”

Bert sniffed and glanced across at his passengers. “Just for Scottish tourists,” he said. He turned the ambulance into a residential
street and brought it to a halt beside a group of helmeted figures. On the other side of the road, rubble had spilled out
across the tarmac like the spoil from mine workings. A heavy-rescue squad was at work by the light of a burning warehouse
in the street behind. Men clambered up and down the rubble, teetering on planks, lifting beams, pulling bricks away with their
hands, and passing baskets of debris down the line to the street. The scene was like something on a stage, complete with backdrop
and curtain and lighting. Despite the efforts of the wardens to get them away to the shelters, there was even an audience
of ragged extras watching from the other side of the street—half-a-dozen wide-hipped women, a few anemic-looking children,
a couple of old men.

Diana, Bert, and the doctor climbed down from the ambulance. Pompous and puffing, an air-raid warden came over. He wore a
blue cover over his helmet. “It’s
my
incident,” he said, as though the fact had been disputed. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I had a fare for the Café de Paris,” Bert said.

“We don’t need your lip, mate. We’ve got people trapped, about half-a-dozen by all accounts. And there are some walking wounded.”

At that moment someone shouted down from the pile of rubble: “Silence!”

In view of the racket all around, the drone of bombers overhead, the concussion of the antiaircraft fire, the roaring conflagration
behind, the throb of the firefighters’ pumps, it was a ridiculous command. Nevertheless, everyone on the heap of rubble stopped.
They seemed like puppets whose strings had been abruptly cut. They didn’t merely stop; they became inert, almost lifeless,
their arms hanging. At the top of the heap, a hel-meted man was kneeling down and talking to someone out of sight below him.
He looked back. “Is that a doctor?”

“I’m right here. What’s the problem?” The doctor’s Scottish accent sounded incongruous among the sounds of London. As he scrambled
up the narrow walkway that the rescue squad had constructed, Diana had a sudden, absurd image of him in a kilt, scrambling
up some Scottish hillside.

The debris formed a kind of cone, like a volcano. Standing on the lip, they could see down into the shallow crater. From the
depths came a smell that was like the stink of a volcano, a smell of gas and drains and the sulfurous stench of explosive.
“We’ve got someone trapped down there,” the rescue man said. “She’s conscious, just about. Looks like we’ll have her out soon.
She’s in a lot of pain. Something broken probably.”

There was a stir of interest among the onlookers behind them. “It’s Ma Philips,” a child’s voice called. “That’s who it is.”

It was impossible to relate the mess to the house that it had once been, impossible to resolve the chaos of joists and pipes
and bricks into walls and floors and window frames, but down at the bottom of the crater was a leg. Diana recognized it with
a start of surprise. It was the color, exactly, of the dust that coated everything, but it was, nevertheless, a leg, with
a slipper still on it. There was a wooden beam with a dark slot beneath it, and the leg emerged from one end of this slot.
One of the rescuers was crouched down beside the leg, talking into the darkness. You couldn’t hear his words but could make
out the tone of them—a low murmuring, a comforting crooning such as a mother might use with her baby. And behind this sound
was another one, a moaning, inarticulate animal sound that was the sound of pain.

The doctor slithered down into the pit. “Nurse, I’ll need morphine,” he called.

Another rescuer was trying to maneuver a piece of wood into the hole, lying on his side and pushing and shoving. The wreckage
shifted and the man stopped. “Keep it steady, George,” his companion warned. He called into the darkness, “Don’t you worry,
darling, we’ll soon have you out.”

Diana loaded a syringe and went down to where the doctor crouched. There was a moment of awkward scrabbling, the cleaning
of a patch of flesh somewhere on the vast and dusty thigh that belonged, it seemed, to Ma Philips. From within her tomb, the
woman moaned. She was calling for someone; she was crying someone’s name. Edith or Edie or someone. Maybe it was Eddy. The
doctor took the syringe and held it upright for a moment, the liquid beading on the end of the needle. It was a moment of
strange and ritual calm. Then he slid the needle into her exposed thigh and pushed the plunger home.

“Righto, Doc,” the rescuer said. His face was black with grime. In the light from the fire, his eyes shone like those of a
Halloween mask. “We’ll get her out as quick as we can. Give us fifteen minutes.” He turned back to the task, reaching in to
pull bricks out of the gap, his mate trying to work a prop into the space to take the load. Diana and the doctor climbed gingerly
back to where Bert waited at the top with the stretcher. The doctor held out his hand to help her up. “Well done, Nurse,”
he said.

That was the moment when there was noise at the heart of the wreckage below them. They looked around. There was a groan from
the rubble, as though the pile of debris were an animate being breathing out its last: it groaned and its rib cage deflated
and a small cloud of dust spewed out of the narrow mouth like foam bubbling up from its lungs, and when the dust cleared,
nothing was there that had been there before, neither the two heavy-rescue men, nor the narrow space, nor the single, dusty
leg.

Someone shouted. The man in charge of the rescue began yelling orders. Men pushed their way past Diana and the doctor. Overhead,
but somehow detached from all this sudden movement, there was the rushing wind of a falling bomb, the noise rising in pitch
to a shriek, the thing falling three or four streets away, falling not with an explosion but in a sudden and incongruous silence.

Diana made her way off the rubble. At one point she slipped on something and fell. Exhaustion covered her like a blanket.
Perhaps she could just stay there in peace, lying on the ruins of this anonymous house with the rescue men shouting and struggling
down in the pit. Perhaps she could sleep.

Doctor Dewar pulled her to her feet. “Come on, Nurse, gird your loins.” He might have been calling the Picts to war. With
his arm around her for support, they went on down the pile of debris to the street, where injured people were waiting beside
the ambulance. There was one old man lying on a stretcher and a few others with lesser wounds. It was like a scene from the
First World War, like those photos you saw of shattered houses on the western front. Except these ragged figures were not
soldiers who had just staggered back from the shelling, they were women and children and old men who had been pulled out of
their own houses.

“Get this lot out,” the warden shouted. “There’s another ambulance on its way.”

They loaded the ambulance with the wounded. “You’ll be all right,” Diana assured them. “We’ll have you in hospital in no time.”
She could hear the men tearing at the ruins of Ma Philips’s house. Antiaircraft guns were firing. Shrapnel clattered on the
asphalt farther down the street. She was trying to immobilize a woman’s broken arm and bandage a child’s gashed head. They
smelled. The injured people smelled, a foul blend of sweat and urine and feces. They probably had lice. They certainly had
scabies. “You don’t look well, Nurse,” the doctor said as he climbed in after her.