Authors: Jessica Francis Kane
It was obvious Ada had taken great care with her clothing, her best gray wool, a blue scarf over her hair. She had long legs, a round middle, and pitched herself forward when she walked, like a shorebird. Ross was standing when she came in, so she sat in one of the wooden chairs and wouldn’t move when Laurie indicated she might be more comfortable in the armchair. She was very nervous. Ross made a cup of tea; Laurie closed the window.
“How are you feeling?”
“A little better. I’m still very shaky.”
“It is Ada Barber?”
“Yes.”
“Three Jersey Street, Bethnal Green?”
“Yes, sir.”
“On the third of March, you went to the air-raid shelter with your daughters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long after the warning did you get there?”
“Soon after the warning left off.”
“How far is it from your home?”
“I should think it would take us five or six minutes.”
“There were a number of people hurrying along, too? Like you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I was going down the stairs, as usual, when there was a rush behind me. I was holding on to my two girls, and as I went down the rush dragged me along the wall. I got to the bottom, and a man pulled us out, on the right side, where there was a lane open for a moment. We were the last ones out before the accident.” Ada’s voice had started strong but now thinned to a whisper. “Have you talked to him?”
“Who?”
“The man at the bottom of the stairs.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. I just wonder, have you talked to anyone who said they helped out a woman and her girl before the crush?”
“In general, Mrs. Barber, I am here to ask you questions, but I can tell you that no one’s told us yet that they were able to pull anyone out.”
Ada readjusted herself on the chair.
“You said a lane was open for a moment?”
“Yes.”
“How, exactly?”
Ada swallowed. “A woman fell.”
“Yes,” Laurie said, “I’ve heard that. Do you know who she was?”
“No.”
Something made Laurie wait.
“I only knew her name. Mrs. W.”
“Mrs. W.?”
“Mrs. Wigdorowicz. We shortened it, everyone shortened it.”
“Mrs. W. Mrs. Four-by-Two,” Ross whispered to Laurie, illustrating for him the slang rhyme.
“I see,” Laurie said.
“She tripped,” Ada said. “It was awful. But I had my girls with me, so I had to keep moving.” She tucked her hands beneath her legs, trying to warm them between wool and wood.
“Perhaps you knew her a little from the area?”
“She came into our grocery sometimes, but they don’t make a regular practice of it. They shop around, sometimes as far as Stepney.”
“They? The Jewish refugees?”
“Yes.”
“How did she trip?”
“She was carrying something, a load of blankets and pillows. It was too much for her.” Her voice had been fast and bright. Now it went flat. “And some people say a baby. I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Did the infant survive?”
“I don’t know.”
“And this was on the right-hand side of the stairway?”
“Yes. The crowd was packed but on the move.”
“And the force swept you through to the other end?”
Ada nodded. “I have been going down to the shelter since the beginning and never take anything. I’m always careful.”
“Have you ever had any trouble before?”
“No.”
“What do you think of the entrance?”
“It is very dark.”
“But you have always got up and down all right?”
“Yes.”
“You have not known many people to tumble on the stairs?”
“No. And there wouldn’t have been any trouble this night if that first woman had stayed on her feet.”
“Did you see her fall?”
“It’s hazy now.”
“Of course. What do you remember?”
Ada hugged herself and rubbed her sleeves. “I don’t know. The stairwell was so dark; everyone was hurrying.” She began to rock and looked up suddenly. “I lost one of my girls, Mr. Dunne.”
“I’m so sorry. Mrs. Barber, it is our hope—”
“Too late for that!”
“Your surviving child. She was pulled out by this man you mentioned?”
“Tilly,” Ada said. “Emma is the one I lost.”
Laurie turned to Ross, who quickly produced a handkerchief.
“Would Tilly speak to us?” Ross asked.
“No,” she said. She looked scared.
Laurie frowned. He’d interviewed few children, finding them unreliable at best, but Ada’s reaction interested him.
“Why?”
“She hasn’t talked since the accident.”
“It’s a common reaction. I might be able to reassure her.”
“Could I stay with her?” Ada asked. “I wouldn’t want her to tell any stories.”
So is the girl mute or a liar? Laurie wondered. He told Ada she could remain when Tilly came.
At the door Ada turned around. “I remembered something. Mrs. Wigdorowicz’s name was Raisa.” She paused.
“I’ll make a note of it,” Laurie said.
“It means ‘rose.’ ”
On March 14, a Sunday, the inquiry did not meet. “Because the story should add up to more than the facts,” Laurie told Ross. “That’s faith, and our report is going to need it.”
But the sermon at St. James’s that day irritated and annoyed him. Concerned with the hierarchy of angels, it seemed more than unusually irrelevant. After the service he and Armorel walked back to No. 17 Bonner Road. The row of fine eighteenth-century houses had not been directly hit, but the street was suffering a slow dilapidation and looked shabby in the sunlight. Half the residents had gone to weather the war elsewhere; those who remained were understandably negligent. Only the Dunnes’ house, with its ruddy brown brick and painted red door, still had a winter wreath in place. Seeing it, Laurie took Armorel’s hand.
“It looks nice, doesn’t it?” she said.
After lunch, Laurie worked and Armorel read. He’d been listening to nothing but Bach since the inquiry started, mostly the Goldberg Variations but also the cello suites. The structure of these monumental works calmed the agitation he felt about the inquiry.
“What about a little Mozart?” Armorel asked when she joined him in the study with her tea and a book. “Wouldn’t that help?”
“No.” After a moment he relented and asked what she was reading.
“Wife to Mr. Milton,”
Armorel said, “by Robert Graves.” She turned the book around in her hand and examined the cover. “I thought it was going to be a biography, but it appears to be a novel about the life of Milton’s first wife.”
“Any good?”
“Very. Better, probably.”
In the late afternoon they went for a walk in Victoria Park and stood for a time on the bridge over the narrow end of the lake. Laurie said he was enjoying the Taverner and was eager to try some new flies in Scotland.
“When will we go?” Armorel asked.
“Oh, not until the inquiry’s over. And then, once the report is published, I’ll need to be in London, I should think. Autumn, probably.”
“Good. I don’t want to leave Elizabeth at the moment.”
“How is she?”
“Not well, but I’ve got her working again on the landscape. She’s quite good, and the RAF is eager for it.”
He patted his wife’s shoulder.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “From fifty feet up they give an accurate impression of what the landscape will look like from the cockpit.”
“But how? Where do they do this?”
“Hertfordshire. An airplane hanger there, apparently. They put all the parts together, and the pilots study them from scaffolding up to the ceiling. They told us there’s been a decrease in the amount of creep-back when the pilots have practiced with a landscape beforehand.” She pronounced “creep-back” with the solemnity befitting its new place in the language. The phenomenon—successive waves of bombers retreating from a target—was a national curiosity.
“I’m surprised it’s not Lord’s,” he said. “Or Wembley. Sounds like sport. Probably will be after the war.”
Armorel didn’t smile. Her expression told him that she’d moved on to something else. “I’ve done some research for you.”
“Oh?”
Armorel stopped walking. “How wide are the stairs at Bethnal Green?”
“Ten feet.”
“And how many handrails are there?”
“Handrails down both sides. Why?”
“When were they put in?”
“I assume they’ve been there since the beginning of the war.”
“Do you know how many staircases in London have a center rail?” She waited, but he didn’t have an answer. “All of them that are that wide. Except Bethnal Green.”
He looked at her. “What are you up to? Examining the staircases of London?”
She took his hand and smiled. “I can’t help it. I need to know what happened.”
He nodded, and they walked in silence for a while.
“I read in the
Evening News
that mothers were found crouched over their babies.”
He shook his head. “It took them three hours to remove the bodies, Armorel. The positions were countless, I’m sure.”
“No. You look into it. You’ll find those were the babies who were safe.”
At home a messenger was waiting for him with a note from Morrison:
Received a resignation yesterday from James Low. Seems he’s responsible for no light on the stairs. Says this caused the crush. The letter is dated March 4, but I’ve only just seen it. I’ll await word from you before releasing the news and taking the appropriate steps.
For several hours Laurie sat in his study and read through his notes. The accident was a mystery. He’d thought at first that the stories wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, but the coroner confirmed almost everything: some people on the bottom survived, while people on top did not. The coroner recorded changes in the victims’ blood caused by suffocation, and stomachs and intestines distended to a gross degree. In the injured the pathologist noted shock, concussion, and severe bruising in the muscle tissues, contusions of a kind usually associated with pinning by collapsed houses or other heavy debris. And yet there was only one fracture, a fibula, and this in a five-year-old girl on the very bottom—almost the last to be rescued—who got up and limped away by herself.
Mrs. Barber’s testimony was odd but hardly noteworthy. In his experience women like her often pointlessly distrusted authority. He hadn’t been able to locate any record of a Mrs. Wigdorowicz in the area and so couldn’t confirm if she was the first woman to fall. Constable Henderson undoubtedly should have reached the shelter entrance sooner and, in doing so, might have done some good. But would he have prevented the crush? Probably not. If Warden Low knew his constituency as well as he said, then perhaps he should not have increased the wattage of the stairway bulb. Was this the cause of the accident? Hardly. What about the shelterers who smashed it? Should he track them down and punish them? Magistrates all over the city had been doing that since the war began, with no appreciable change. The manager of the Museum Cinema seemed to have insisted after the alert that the people leave. Should this man be responsible for contributing to the crush conditions that night? Should the city now have a law that required cinema managers to keep their patrons in when there was a raid? Ridiculous.
Laurie had spoken to members of the local Home Guard and learned there was an experimental weapon in the battery in Victoria Park. It was one of the new rocket guns to be used soon in defense of the city. Could there have been a test that night? he’d asked. The Home Guard adamantly denied it. They had been told there would be a special warning before the first test. There had been no warning, therefore no test.
Frustrated, Laurie put off replying to Morrison’s latest correspondence and settled down with his Taverner. Just before dinner, he came across this:
No one knows why a salmon takes a fly. We cannot tell whether the fish takes it because he recognizes something which he fed on in the sea; or because he is annoyed by something darting before him.
The consequences of annoyance—this intrigued him. After all, who has felt the fullness of true rage? Not many, he thought. Mostly people move through life doing their best to calm the minor urges. It was worth remembering. Then, while he was eating leftover Woolton pie with Armorel, she spoke about the trouble she was having finding needles with which to work on the landscape and how frustrated she’d become with a shopkeeper who had sold out of the sudden small shipment he’d received by the time she got there.
“I actually slapped the counter,” she confessed. “I can’t believe it. And if a counter had not stood between us, I think I might have slapped him. It’s just too troubling that the best needles are German.
“The least emotion,” she said.
“What is?” he asked, surprised her thoughts aligned so well with his.
“Annoyance.”
When Morrison had not heard from Laurie by the next morning, he rang. The two exchanged pleasantries, though Morrison called Armorel “Armora.” Laurie reminded himself that Morrison was a man who would be, in all likelihood, principally remembered for giving his name to a steel coffee table, the Morrison shelter. Laurie put his foot on it while he spoke.
“The matter at Bethnal Green is not about a lightbulb,” he said.
“No?”
“No. Did the night begin without a light? Or was it smashed by shelterers worried it was too bright? Either way, it doesn’t matter.”
Morrison had a habit of ticking his tongue when he was thinking, putting Laurie in mind of a field in summer.
“But I have a resignation.”
“Low’s popular. No one wants this.”
“A resignation is only useful if it’s been demanded?”
“In my experience.”
“But if it’s his fault?”
“It’s not. His only crime might be expecting other people to do their best.”
More ticking, then Laurie heard him send someone out of the room. Laurie thought about mentioning the woman who’d fallen but held back. “I’d like to know more about the new rocket guns,” he said.
“Why?”
“I think the people heard something different on the third. Many have spoken about a strange sound, not the antiaircraft fire they’re used to.”