The Report (4 page)

For hours the borough bellowed. Sirens arrived, departed, returned. The nearly one thousand people already inside the shelter awaited word, filtered rumors: there was an unexploded bomb, a woman had dropped her baby, an enemy plane had crashed. The most persistent rumor: the entrance had taken a direct hit. This had happened most recently at Bank, where fifty-six people had been killed. But in the odd currency of war, the evaluating and calibrating that went into surviving, fifty-six felt lucky. Everyone wondered how many would be dead tonight.

Listening to the unruliness above, everyone inside began to hush. How easy when you were safe! Two nurses took care of them, while all other rescue workers tried to quell the misery at the entrance. People arranged blankets; families settled down.

Outside, constables ran about, tapping people with their batons, pushing and pulling, trying to move people away from the stairs. Not until the all clear sounded and the pressure from the top of the steps finally eased could any sense be made of the scene. The bodies of the few still alive and the many dead formed a tangled mass of such complexity that the work of extrication was interminably slow. Warden Low lifted the last casualty from the stairway just before midnight. He put Emma Barber on a stretcher himself.

After a roll call of the shelter’s registered users, Low told his staff to go home. The roll call had been the idea of Hastings, the deputy warden, and it might have been better to have canceled it. Silence followed the calling of name after name.

“Go home,” Low said. He wanted to say more. He thought he should try to organize them, remind them of their responsibilities, because with work came order and with order, hope. But sending his staff home seemed the only just and reasonable thing to do. They were disheveled and demoralized beyond sense. He thought he and the nurses could look after the shelterers already in for the night.

“There’ll be a public inquiry in the morning,” he added. “I’m sure the prime minister will call for it himself.”

When everyone had dispersed, Clare Newbury told him he didn’t look well.

“Where’s Bertram?” he asked. He knew Clare took care of Bertram, and he was glad of it. He worried the boy would not make it through the war.

“Fine. Shaken, but fine. I sent him home, and now I’m going to ask you to sit.” She moved him toward a chair near the escalators. “You will not serve this shelter by collapsing,” she said kindly. He wondered why she didn’t take him to his desk, but when he looked over, he saw Constable Henderson, still in uniform, slumped there.

Clare gave him a cursory exam. His pulse and blood pressure were fine; his temperature was up a bit.

“Warden Low,” she said, though he heard her voice as if from a great distance, “you have a fever. It’s not high, but I suggest you go home. The deputy warden can finish the night.”

This was correct procedure, but he’d never left his post early. He looked around the hall. In the yellow light of several dim bulbs, the cement floor and walls of the shelter looked damp, sickly, feverish, themselves. Bill Steadman, his unofficial warden, was sitting on the floor, shaking his head so slowly, Low thought that he must be asleep. Then he realized the man was wide-awake. Several wardens brought up a few of the curious from the platforms below. There wasn’t much to see—all the dead were gone. There were just the seven dirty stairs leading up to the landing. These were blocked by police barriers, so the group huddled to the right to peer up the first nineteen steps. Not much to see there, either. Just more concrete stairs, with a wooden insertion on the edge of the tread soaked with fluids he didn’t want to think about.

“Where is Hastings?”

“Outside. The police are taking statements.”

He nodded. “Check on Steadman there, will you? I’m afraid he’s in some kind of shock.”

“Not much of a remedy for it,” she said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

He thanked her, then picked up his coat and squeezed by the police barriers. In a few hours the shelterers would have to leave by the emergency exit half a mile down the tunnel, but he hugged the right-hand wall of the stairwell and stepped quickly, leaving the shelter the way so many thousands had come and gone safely before that night. At the top he skirted a second set of police barriers and joined the disorganized crowd. No one saw him, or he was sure he’d have been asked for a statement. There was Hastings, talking to a constable. He started walking but stopped in front of St. John’s. He almost shook his fist at the dark cross against the sky, but it was a gesture too full of defiance for the defeat he felt. Instead he sat on a step. He thought about going back—he would put something right before morning—but he knew it would be impossible to look at the staircase again. Just the thought of it made him gag. He stood, stumbled, and nearly fell. Then he shoved his fists in his pockets and aimed for home.

Later the events of March 3, 1943, would be examined and reexamined, but mainly regretted, for innumerable reasons, yet one stood out above all: not a single bomb had fallen on the city that night.

Laurie thought the would-be filmmaker had been sitting strangely. Had he needed to use the lavatory? All through the interview it had looked to Laurie as if the boy were about to spring out of the chair. What was this? Some new, ill-fitting garment that didn’t allow one comfort in sitting? But when Barber stood to leave, Laurie looked at his trousers and thought them fine, if a bit worn.

It certainly was odd to have been contacted by someone named Barber, though it was clear he couldn’t be from the family Laurie remembered. His skin was too dark. Laurie had talked to him for the better part of the afternoon, just long enough to determine that the boy knew very little about angling. Laurie had neither agreed nor disagreed to participate in the film project. He told Barber he needed time to think, and that’s what he was doing. He always thought best on a riverbank.

The Test was overstocked this year, and, despite the good weather, Laurie wasn’t enjoying the afternoon. He wanted to be in Scotland, angling alone. Instead he had various club members all around: Clarkson on the opposite bank, Vane some way down; and a minute earlier, Smith and Headley had trudged past, heading to a beat upstream, where Smith would no doubt stir up the silt and weeds by wading, a regular habit of his, although it was against the river rules.

People can move on land and through air and even reach the depths of the ocean, Laurie marveled. What they can’t do—inhibited by nature and temperament—is find a good lie and stay there. Though he’d tried, God knows.

A minute later, Laurie’s line went taut, and after a good race upstream and down, he had a fifteen-inch rainbow in the shallows. While he was reeling it in, a second, larger rainbow nipped at the fly. He looked toward the clubhouse with disgust. “Why don’t we just scoop them out with nets?” he said aloud.

On the opposite bank, Clarkson turned, but Laurie lowered his head over the fish. He would speak to Mortimer, the river keeper, at lunch.

As he cast again, he reflected on the history he’d studied, a sort of general sweep. Egypt, Rome, the roiling Dark Ages. The Renaissance, of course, then the Industrial Revolution, and the wars. He saw paintings and shadows and costumes; himself, too, in the libraries of Eton and Magdalen, studying the books that had informed him of these things. The review lasted a minute or two, time enough for him to score another trout and cast again, and afterward he decided crowded places were a nuisance.

He rubbed a hand across his eyes. He was thinking of crowds because of Barber. He might have been happy never to have discussed them again, until the boy showed up on his doorstep. Was that true? He couldn’t be sure. He was aware of an eagerness seeping in, a desire to talk about the incident that made him uncomfortable.

He started back to the clubhouse. Crowds, as far as he could tell, had rarely done any good. Where they did succeed, and perhaps the rural riots in Wales were an example, they offered only temporary support for a dying way of life. Crowds were blinded by their credulity, he thought, their exaggeration of good and evil. Yes. He would propose the idea later and hoped the subject might just make his friend mighty William forget his bloody grandchildren for one afternoon.

Lunch was grilled salmon with a maple glaze, and the group ate outside under a white tent on the lawn. Most of the older members disliked eating outside, but the younger ones insisted on it, so this season the club’s twenty-four members had voted to hold several of these “garden lunches” as an experiment. Laurie did not oppose eating outside, but he found several of the younger members insufferable in their determination. Why join a club and then immediately try to change it? For nearly one hundred and fifty years, the members had eaten in the oak-paneled grill room, the sun reduced to liquid through its lead glass windows. He had a dozen memories for every table: he’d dined in the corner with Andrew when he’d come down from Oxford; he’d celebrated there with friends when he became chief metropolitan magistrate; the whole place had been filled for his retirement party. He knew what the room felt like dressed for morning tea and how it behaved when cigar smoke hung in folds from the rafters at midnight.

Now the club owned a bright white tent with poles of questionable strength. It came from an American company, and the staff were still assembling various parts when the salad course arrived. Lanyards thrashed about in the wind, putting Laurie in mind of the coast, and a piece of the tent at Laurie’s end—a door-shaped bit with clear plastic parts that were meant to suggest windows, he feared—flapped about like a leeward sail. The younger members looked worried, their experiment failing, while many of the older members were too busy trying to align their white folding chairs on the uneven grass or dodging bees to notice much of anything.

Laurie turned to mighty William, engaged in spearing a tomato. “Crowds, Will. I don’t like them.”

William looked up, his fork in midair. He glanced around the tent, shook his head briefly at the staff’s effort with the ropes in the far corner. “Crowds? Surely it isn’t crowded today. Hamilton and Warren aren’t even here.”

“In a general sense. Demonstrations and such.”

William looked blank.

“Any crowd-driven idea. Human slavery! Tulip mania! The war!”

“Oh, no. I suppose not.” William rested his fork on the edge of the plate. “What made you think of it?”

“The river today.”

“Overstocked.”

“Certainly. Did you mention it to the river keeper?”

“I thought you had.”

Laurie could not remember if he had or not. “I will,” he said quickly, confidently.

“Good.”

Laurie studied William. He couldn’t believe how old he looked, but then William would probably have said the same thing about him. He could recall William as a younger man, famous for his wit, throwing comments at a conversation like a hunter throwing spears. Laurie couldn’t remember where the “mighty” joke had come from, if it had had to do with banking, conversation, or angling. Maybe all of them. Suddenly he thought he might ask William what to do about the boy’s documentary; he would probably understand the problems. Laurie reached for his water, but his hand shook, and the glass, perspiring in the June heat, slipped out of his hand. The mighty William righted it before anyone else at the table noticed.

Grateful, Laurie smiled. “How are the grandchildren?” he asked.

Drying his hands with Laurie’s napkin—the settings were all askew—William beamed. “Oh, the devils!” They were coming to visit, all five of them, and he had no idea where he was going to put them.

The next morning, Bethnal Green woke to a quiet dawn, a city going about its business, geese flying overhead, the fire department pigs snuffling as they moved to their pen in the Museum Gardens. A cold front had come in behind the warmer air and sent all hope of an early spring skittering away like the petals and feathers in the gutters. There were no angry mobs or fiery newspaper headlines. No outraged prime minister calling for an inquiry, no monarch full of compassion and remorse. The king was on a short holiday in Northumberland, actually, due back on a train sometime Saturday. The only evidence of the tragedy was the presence of two constables posted by the entrance to the shelter and the battered police barriers they stood behind. There was not even a list of the dead posted, as usually followed a raid.

Overnight, some authority had made a decision: the accident would be kept secret. The large number of dead was difficult to hide, however, so after a few hours the authorities announced that the shelter had, in fact, taken a small, direct hit. The population of Bethnal Green, puzzled by the total absence of any bomb damage, remained unconvinced. Then it began to rain, the perfect climate for rumor: it was Fascist incitement, a Jewish panic, an Irishman holding the gate against the crowd. There’d been a land mine, a new German weapon, a gas leak.

In the afternoon a crowd gathered at St. John’s. The people were hesitant about inquiring after friends and relatives but could not resist gathering where chance might deliver the news. Many were nervous and helpful while they waited but then collapsed or dissolved in fury when they learned the one they’d hoped for was dead. Some wandered inside to the church pews, and some sat in the drizzle on the front steps, the temperature difference between the two not significant enough to inspire religious devotion in those not already so inclined. Rev. McNeely worked tirelessly, silently, bringing blankets and handkerchiefs to those inside and out. He was sleepless and pale, poorly clothed and obviously cold, but he moved with such conviction, no one thought to slow him down.

Ada sat on a corner of the porch, wrapped in a brown coat, rocking. Her chin-length hair was ragged from rain. There was a raw spot on each palm where she’d dug in her nails when they pulled her away from the stairs. She kept thinking about Emma’s birth. Wasn’t that a severing followed by a reunion? This had been a severing, so wouldn’t Emma be returned to her? Birth, death, reunion—the ideas grew confused in her mind.

She knew she should go home. She kept thinking she had, so well could she picture the walk up the road to their house. Over and over again she thought she’d got up and was walking—she could feel just how to do it—but then she’d look down and discover her legs were still bent, her hands wrapped around her ankles, her cheeks pressed into her knees.

“There was room along the right for an instant,” she said, then waited for the church bells to finish chiming the half hour before continuing. “That’s how Tilly and I, and I thought …”

“Hush,” the women nearest her said. “Hush.” They patted and petted her.

In the streets around the church few people spoke. Those who did shook their heads and whispered. Approaching and offering help seemed too loud an action in the boroughwide stillness. The mourners on the church steps were not the usual bombed-out homeless; they were not the disconnected victims of indifferent bombs. An awkward feeling grew: these mourners had survived a tragedy in which they’d somehow played a role, and no one knew what to do.

Every now and then someone pointed at the shelter entrance, then up the road, tracing lines of approach, recounting what had happened. It was said that an off-duty constable had hoisted himself over the fallen people and in this way climbed from the top to the bottom of the accident but was still unable to do any good. Someone else said they’d heard about a woman who arrived late. She’d got in, but over ground she thought unusually soft. Later she knew she must have walked on bodies.

The people stared, listening to the same stories again and again. They shook their heads. The impossible idea: the victims (no one knew how many—some said one hundred, others five hundred) had died for nothing. There had been no bombs.

Without anyone asking him to, before anyone had any idea of the nature and extent of the accident at Bethnal Green, while the crew organized by the Regional Commissioners in the early morning hours after the disaster was still sweeping and scrubbing the steps, Warden Low resigned from his position at the shelter. He simply wrote a letter and posted it to the home secretary, Herbert S. Morrison. Warden Low would have written to the king if he’d known how. Then he sat in his kitchen and waited for dawn, for Sarah, for her help once again in making sense of the world.

How would he tell her? They’d never had children, never conceived. This was the great disappointment of her life. Early in the war, they’d heard a baby crying in a collapsed building, and she’d dug in the broken cement for hours until she found the boy, alive.

Low felt Sarah’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes. “James?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“I thought we needed more light and that it would be all right.” He gulped from his mug, but the coffee he’d made and poured for them was cold.

“What would be all right? James, what’s happened?”

“It rained,” he started. “The stairs were slippery.” When he didn’t continue, Sarah pressed a bobby pin into the back of her upswept gray hair and put the coffee away. Tea and coffee each had a place: tea for comfort, coffee for courage. But what James needed now, she thought, was brandy. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink.

“Sarah,” James said, so quietly she barely heard him. “Something terrible’s happened.”

Sarah didn’t turn. “I know, and you’re going to tell me. But wait a minute while I get us settled.”

She set out the brandy, two small glasses, and started peeling the potatoes for breakfast. Serve potatoes for breakfast three times a week, the Potato Plan advised. Lord help us, Sarah thought. She switched on the wireless so that their neighbors wouldn’t be able to hear whatever it was James had to say. She’d been married to him for thirty-five years, and if he’d done something wrong at the shelter, he was still the best man she knew.

While she was moving about the kitchen, he began to tell her that he’d replaced the bulb above the stairs in the shelter, the one in the ceiling above the first flight down. It was the first item he’d taken care of after checking in. But he’d replaced the standard twenty-five-watt bulb with a higher-wattage bulb.

“That shouldn’t matter, should it?”

“They smashed it, but I knew we needed more light.” He shook his head.

“Why would they smash it?”

Low made a sound of disgust in his throat. “They worry about the bit of spill up on the pavement, that it will be seen in the blackout. It terrifies them.”

“How do they do it—smash the light? With their hands?”

“I don’t know. It’s happened five times, at least. We’ve replaced the glass covering five times.”

She tied her robe closed, then scooted her chair around the corner of the table and pulled his glasses off.

“You’re tired,” she said.

“Yes.” His eyes, unshielded, were watery and large.

“I bet they’ll say the bulb was burned out,” James said. “It was the night before, but I replaced it. First thing.” Then he repeated what he’d already said about the rain, the slippery steps. Sarah pushed the brandy closer. He sipped, then mentioned his desk at the shelter, how fond of it he was, how its sturdy Victorian legs, so incongruous in the modern, straight-edged station, pleased him. They seemed a reminder of all they were fighting for.

“James,” Sarah interrupted. “Please. There’s enough of that on the BBC. Tell me what happened.”

Her husband blanched a shade whiter and told her about the crush. Afterward they sat in silence, holding hands, Sarah wondering about the dead, who they were; James, how death had come to them.

“You know,” he started after a time. “Some of the people trapped on the stairs yelled at us to put our light out even while we were trying to help them.” He swallowed and shook his head.

“Let me see your resignation.”

“You can’t, Sarah. It’s done, sent.”

“What will you do?”

He nodded, expecting the question. “I’m a fire watcher,” he said. “I imagine they’ll still have me.”

“There are the allotments on Russia Lane,” Sarah said. “You could do good work there with all you know about gardening.”

“Yes,” James agreed.

“The light couldn’t have been the only problem.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” he said.

“If they smashed it, there will be glass on the stairs. They’ll see that it wasn’t your fault.”

James stared.

“It wasn’t your fault. James?”

He hit the table with his fist. “Quiet!” His sudden anger surprised them both. When Sarah stood, she made a pot of coffee.

At the town hall Bertram was given the job of documenting the dead, recording what was in their pockets, and returning the items to the families. The mayor and deputy mayor, senior clerks and wardens—even some of the more capable members of the Home Guard—were all preoccupied with petitions from the borough council, the Regional Commissioners, the London City Council, the Ministry of Civil Defense, and the Ministry of Information. Even the Ministry of Food was concerned, about the victory gardens and window boxes that might now lie fallow if the number of dead proved to be as high as was thought. A campaign to sustain the gardening effort was suggested, with “Save the Green in Bethnal Green” proposed as a motto. Mr. Wycomb, senior clerk—a friendly man who blinked and swallowed frequently, sending his Adam’s apple up and down—guffawed.

“Someone’s got us confused with the West End, mate,” he said.

There were also the editors and reporters, borough engineers, city engineers—all concerned with matters more critical than the contents of pockets. What had gone wrong? What could be done to prevent it from happening again? Would there be a public or a private inquiry? These questions were compelling because still unclear.

The dead, however, were clear enough. They needed to be counted and identified; their personal items, returned. Mr. Wycomb put his hand on Bertram’s shoulder and handed him a notebook.

Bertram’s expression must have worried him. “Whatever you want, Bert. It isn’t going to be easy.”

“Where are they?”

“All over, I’m afraid. You might start at the hospital. Best I can tell, some are there and some are at the morgue. The maternity ward got a few of the women and children, apparently.”

“And Regional Commissioners want to know what’s in their pockets?”

“That’s right. And bags and purses. You know. Whatever they were carrying.”

“Why?”

“Not sure, mate.”

“But what do they expect to find?”

Wycomb rubbed his eyes. “Who knows.”

Bertram took the notebook. “Do I have to use this?” The cover was green, reminding him of the girl’s shoes that night. That the job had fallen to him seemed preordained.

“Of course not. I was just trying to get you started. Do whatever you like. Maybe they want incriminating evidence. Maybe it’s an assignment from those eavesdroppers, Ministry of Information. Maybe they just want to return the belongings to the families, ‘who have already lost so much’ ”—he parodied Herbert Morrison. “I’m sure that’s what we’ll read in the papers. Can Clare go with you?”

“I might see.”

“I would.”

But when Bertram asked the next morning, Clare said she couldn’t. She had an assignment from Mass Observation, for whom she volunteered.

“They’re sending me into Stepney. They want to know what the Jews are saying about the accident.” She was making him breakfast, and when she saw his face, she helped him gather what he’d need and pack his bag. She even walked with him part of the way to the hospital. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded, but they both knew it was a lie.

“Bring everything home tonight, and I’ll help you sort through it.”

He nodded. “I don’t think I can do this.”

She kissed his forehead. “I’ll help you tonight.”

Alone, Clare’s kiss drying on his skin, Bertram could think of nothing but the accident, how he’d been sitting in the park, watching the poplar leaves across the water. Then what? He couldn’t recall, exactly. Did he walk or run? Speak or scream? He did remember the feeling of his hands on someone’s back, someone else’s hands on him. He’d heard a siren, a child’s cry, everything enfeebled by the wind that came up suddenly around them. A shop awning flapped white above the crowd. He remembered thinking that he’d never seen so many people on the Roman Road, all converging on the shelter, streaming out of shops, climbing out of buses. The night was clear—he remembered that—but the pavement damp, amplifying the slap and grind of so many people rushing. The crowd had grown thick fast. The faces Bertram remembered were confused but not frightened. Most people were moving quickly, not talking, he thought, except for one man deep in his pints, belting out the national anthem as he ran.

And when was that? How close had Bertram been to the entrance then?

In front of the hospital gates, Bertram could smell a coal fire and damp earth, two seasons in the air on the same day. A gentle rain fell over the street, the raindrops steady enough to set the leaves all around to nodding. He tried to see it as encouragement, but it looked more like shock. He adjusted his umbrella, then crossed the street for the café next to the boarded-up Red Lion.

The shopkeeper asked how he was feeling; did he need a roll with his tea?

He shook his head.

“Are you sure? I’ve some left over from yesterday.”

He took the roll—it seemed easier than refusing again—then sat by the curtained window and watched the street through the large holes of cheap lace. He saw a boy of eight or nine walking with his mother. They were making slow progress, and it wasn’t until they were closer that Bertram realized it was because the boy’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be trying to impress his mother with his intimate knowledge of the street, naming every place as they passed with his eyes tightly closed. In front of the bombed sites, he would throw his arms up and make noises with his mouth. She remained unperturbed. Bertram saw her pause only once, when she pulled her hand out of the boy’s to brush something from her cheek. Her boy’s eyes popped open then, and he waited.