The Report (2 page)

The boy on the step had olive skin that blushed copper. When the door opened, he clenched his jaw, which he knew to be square and handsome. He didn’t look English—he knew that too—but he prided himself on his nearly perfect Oxbridge accent.

“Sir Laurence,” he said. “I’m Paul Barber. I wrote to you about the thirtieth anniversary of the Bethnal Green report?”

The man in the doorway stood firm.

“I hope you won’t mind the effrontery. Just showing up on your doorstep.”

“I believe it can be said I always mind effrontery.”

Paul knew he was not a particularly good interviewer. His strengths as a filmmaker (if he could be said to have strengths, with only one produced film to his name), were in bringing the right people together and the framing of certain shots and sequences. But when Laurence Dunne had not responded to his letter about making a retrospective for the 1973 anniversary of the tragedy, Paul decided to take a chance and visit him. He feared his letter had not been very compelling, just some obvious points about history, the significance of the Bethnal Green report, the importance of recording the memories of the aging survivors. He’d assumed, actually, that Dunne would be eager to revisit the subject. The report was his best-known achievement, and so Paul had not anticipated having any trouble getting him to participate.

“Of course. I should have phoned.”

“Probably.”

Dunne looked over Paul’s head and waved to someone on the street behind him. The gesture seemed designed to dismiss Paul, but Paul stood fast. He had a three-day leave from his job in London and was staying at a relatively cheap B and B in Stockbridge, where Dunne lived. He told himself he had time. He also had something to tell Dunne that he hadn’t put in the letter. He studied Dunne’s face and decided it would be best to wait until he knew the man better. Dunne had aged well: smooth skin, thick white hair. But the eyes gave him away. They were blurry, somehow older than the rest of him.

Dunne looked back at Paul and sighed. “Where are you from?”

“Bethnal Green.”

He gave Paul an old magistrate’s squint. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

Dunne considered a moment. “Old enough to make tea.
Come in.”

Ada passed Constable Henderson and kept on toward the shelter. She wanted the girls to speed up, but they were getting tired. She glanced around, more and more surprised at the number of people. The waistband of her skirt was pinching her side; her bag had slipped off her shoulder and was pulling her coat along with it. She walked faster, and the tiny bones of Emma’s hand moved and cracked in hers. Emma didn’t seem to mind, but Ada tried to hold her hand more loosely.

She was sure she’d once been a more patient woman. Watching her children grow thin, explaining over and over why there wasn’t more to eat, why there weren’t warmer clothes, that it wasn’t her fault, was exacting a toll. Victory was inevitable, the government promised. Peace and plenty would return. But when? How long would they have to wait?

At the next corner Tilly bent down to tie her shoe. She hopped as she did so, trying to keep up with her mother and sister, but Ada looked back and yelled, “Come on!” At the same moment, she saw a young woman she knew back in the crowd, one of the refugees she and her friends called Mrs. W. What was she carrying? Ada could make out the pretty bag—it was the same one Mrs. W. often brought into the shop—but she also had something across her chest. When Ada had been going to the shelter more regularly, she’d noticed how well Mrs. W. managed. She was registered for a bunk, and her bundle always included a pillow and sheets and extra blankets for privacy.

Blankets! Ada had left theirs by the door when they’d argued about food. All they had now for the night were the extra jumpers. She looked back again at Mrs. W. How did she do it? How did a refugee manage the dual existence so well?

The crowd was growing tighter, and suddenly a man’s elbow bumped Emma’s head. He turned immediately and said “Sorry” in a Yorkshire accent, but Ada frowned and pulled Emma close. Many more people than usual were going to use the shelter tonight, she realized. Of course. She should have thought of it sooner. She was both scared about what it meant—a terrible raid; everyone sensed it—and furious with herself for not planning better. She told the girls she’d get a bunk. What if she couldn’t?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Mum?” Tilly asked. “Is everything all right?”

Ada looked at Tilly. Her daughter’s face was not beautiful, but it combined all the best features of hers and her husband Robby’s. His cheekbones, her brown eyes and pretty lips. Emma was actually the lovelier of the two, with blond hair and a set of features that seemed to be of her own invention or from generations long ago. Ada loved the two of them more than she ever said and was terrified the war wouldn’t end before they were grown. She’d told no one that she was haunted by a recurring nightmare in which she hovered over her girls in their last seconds, their faces perfect, their eyes appealing to her for help, the backs of their heads crushed by something she hadn’t seen.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course. Just keep moving. We’re almost there.”

The shelter in Bethnal Green was adapted from an unfinished Tube station. It opened officially in October 1940, though the East Enders had been using it, in desperate and chaotic fashion, from the start of the war. At first the makeshift space was dark and overcrowded. Criminals and rodents plagued it. Then the government, recognizing a disaster in the making, whitewashed the walls, put in bunks, assigned wardens, and turned the station into a model unit of deep shelter. It had only one entrance, however, in the corner of the public garden at the intersection of Bethnal Green and Cambridge Heath roads. The Church of St. John’s stood opposite, and the superstition, left over from the early days, was to turn and look over your left shoulder at the church’s blue doors before descending the shelter steps. A prayer for safety from any number of horrors.

Rev. McNeely, the young rector of St. John’s, often stood on the church porch and watched the shelterers descend. He’d come to Bethnal Green from the country, a small village church, and many in the area had had their doubts, particularly as he was half-Scottish and, rumor was, homosexual. But in 1939 he’d cleared the St. John’s crypt to give them a safer communal shelter, before the government even acknowledged what was happening in the Tube. They never forgot that when they needed shelter, he—a fresh young recruit from Bury St. Edmunds—had found it for them, without sermonizing on the sanctity of the space. In a neighborhood moving away from the stringencies of faith and tired of plans and pamphlets from the government, this established him as being appealingly unorthodox.

An iron roof covered the wooden gates of the shelter entrance. Just inside, nineteen steps led down to a small landing; then a second flight of seven steps turned at a right angle into the circular booking hall. This design allowed for the possibility, should a rush occur, of a straight line of pressure from the crowd outside to the people on the stairs. However, the most vulnerable feature, according to the borough authorities, was the escalator bank that led from the booking hall down to the tunnels. It was here that the authorities feared a bottleneck, so shelter protocol called for wardens to man the top of the escalators at all times in order to control the flow.

The crowd moved around the knot of Constable Henderson and the boys with torches, very orderly, as always, and comfortably unconcerned. This was the population of London that had been the enemy’s initial target; these were the East Enders, whom the Queen could look in the face only after Buckingham Palace was hit; these were the subjects who best understood that the war plan required courage at home. They had always done their part.

The clerk lost the green soles in the crowd. He was walking alongside Bethnal Green Gardens now, and, as the railings between pavement and park had been removed for scrap some time ago, he drifted in and found an empty bench near the water. The siren wailed, but Bertram thought he might wait it out. Some thought the park was lucky because no bombs had ever fallen there. He assumed the German pilots understood the richer darkness of fields and trees as well as he did. The poles dotting the field, put up to deter enemy planes from landing, were more ominous to him. All the noise startled from sleep a family of ducks in the reeds at the edge of the pond. They rustled and flapped their wings as they tried again and again to settle. One of them finally broke away and headed out for a solitary paddle.

He remembered early in the war when Clare found him wandering in the street after a raid. It was only their second meeting, but she walked him home. The house next to his had been hit, and to his surprise she came in and helped him clean up all the dust and broken plaster. When everything was in order, she turned off the lights, opened the blackout curtain, and sat all night watching for planes. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. The chestnuts outside his window, too near the bomb, had lost all their leaves. Down the street, the trees were unharmed, thick summer foliage rustling in a breeze.

After that she found some yellow muslin, too hideous even for wartime clothes, and cut shapes from it for the inside lining of the blackout curtain. Flowers, moons, stars, and snowflakes. She began opening and closing the curtain, the daily rhythm of it a comfort: Bertram had lived with it closed for six months. She’d moved in, Bertram realized, and he was enormously glad. Now he couldn’t even remember what it had felt like to sleep alone.

The following spring, willow herb, clover, and yarrow began to grow over the bomb site next door, and the makeshift meadow became the base for a thuggish family of sparrows. Clare said they must have lived in the ruined building’s eaves and been too stubborn to leave. One seemed able to fly only short distances; two others lacked an eye, a tuft of loose feathers where the shiny black bead should have been. They veered and glanced around, suspicious. When Clare brushed her hair in the morning, she pulled the soft brown tangles from her brush and left them on the outside windowsill. A week ago one of the sparrows had finally used a bit in her nest.

It seemed impossible to Bertram that his feet would be the reason he was home watching sparrows instead of fighting. He’d heard of others who’d been refused for bad teeth, bad eyesight, lower-back pain. The decisions of high command were inscrutable. How could any of these conditions be grave enough to keep him at home? He’d volunteered for every bit of civil-defense training—gas, fire, rescue—and heard that his youth and strength would be valuable on the home front. When the Home Guard formed, he joined a company. In his group of twenty-five men, one had a withered arm, one was mentally deficient, one had a glass eye that fell out whenever he leaned over, and two were in the advanced and most obvious stages of venereal disease. Bertram didn’t pity them; most were veterans and pitied him.

As he sat in the park, Bertram kicked his boots against the ground. It had been a long winter, and he hoped spring would come early. The next season was always anticipated—a warm summer, a crisp autumn—as if better weather would somehow ease the burden of war.

Two hours before the alert, chief shelter warden James Low reported to his post. He expected large numbers in the shelter that night and wanted to make sure everything was in order. He had four wardens on duty: Edwards, Bagshaw, Clarke, and Bryant, plus his deputy shelter warden, Hastings. He trusted them to follow their standing orders, posted on the wall in the office, but he reminded himself to check later if Clarke was in uniform. In the absence of regular enemy raids, he’d noticed his wardens growing lazy about wearing their white tin hats.

Low watched the early arrivals from his desk in the booking hall. He spoke briefly to the many he knew, nodded to the faces he recognized. The calm and methodical manner of his charges routinely impressed him. It was not hard to imagine them a population attending a concert or a festival, instead of preparing to spend the night underground during a bombing raid. He had a note from the first-aid post that they were short one nurse, so when he saw Clare Newbury come in with her drawing supplies, he asked if she would be on call.

“Of course.”

A few minutes later pensioner Bill Steadman approached and asked, as he always did, whether it might be all right for him to help in the booking hall instead of descending to the shelter proper.

“Yes, Bill. We could use you tonight. Why don’t you take your post at the bottom of the stairs.”

Bill clutched his chest with his left hand. “My heart thanks you.” He suffered from a weak heart, supposedly, but had served often and well as an unofficial part-time warden.

Walking Bill to the stairs reminded Low that he wanted to check the bulkhead light above the stairway. If it needed to be replaced, he wanted to do it himself. He’d tried several times to persuade the regional authority to change the entrance, either by redesigning the approach or putting in a center rail, but his efforts had failed. The best he could do now, he thought, was make sure there was always sufficient light. He changed the burned-out twenty-five-watt bulb. He didn’t need a stool. He could easily reach it from the twelfth step down. He removed the partly blacked-out glass covering, screwed in the bulb, then adjusted the light as far as possible to strike the edge of the first step down. He shook his head. The stairway was still extremely dim, but for every complaint he received about the stairs’ being too dark, he also got one about the spill of light showing on the pavement outside.

Low had been chief warden since the Bethnal Green shelter opened. Before that he’d been an air-raid warden, volunteering as early as the summer of 1938. That autumn he’d worked almost every night with several dozen other wardens in the Bethnal Green Gardens, their exercises accompanied by loud gramophone recordings of exploding bombs, except on those nights when the lady wardens attended. Then they turned the records down so that the bombs sounded like gentle pops, a precaution that made little sense to him or anyone else, but before the war it had felt civilized to indulge in these niceties. The enemy, they thought, didn’t have such refinement.

In 1939, Low and the other early volunteers filled sandbags, put up the antiaircraft poles, and dug trenches in the parks. They dug the trenches in straight lines, and they dug them again in zigzags for greater safety. Low learned to identify poison gas, administer first aid, call out rescue or medical services in the event of an incident, and direct people to street shelters. In one exercise he’d driven around the borough at dusk, tossing colored tennis balls out the window—red for gas, yellow for incendiaries, green for an unexploded bomb—instructing people on the relative safety procedures. Most people just tossed the balls right back, though never the refugees, he’d noted. They listened—always wide-eyed—and did not make jokes of his directions, he told his wife.

He remembered her response. “If that surprises you, you’re not paying attention.”

After the first rush of regular shelter users, people trickled in for a time. Then at ten past eight Low heard the deputy warden’s relay wireless go off, a sure though unofficial sign of an alert. At 8:17 p.m., the sirens began.