The Report (6 page)

Emma’s funeral was at St. John’s, and Rev. McNeely did the best he could. He hadn’t known Emma well, and there was not much to say about the life of a four-year-old, he was discovering, that didn’t fall into the category of innocence lost or adult regret. In his moth-bitten robe he spoke of her smile. He spoke of her devotion to Tilly. He spoke of her likeness to Ada. He did not mean to say how much her father, Robby, had wanted a boy when Emma was born, only how much he had loved his younger daughter, but this was his tenth funeral for a child under five, and, even with Psalm 23 read at each, he was having trouble keeping his mind clear. Anyway, the family was too far gone in grief to find fault with his words.

Ada and Robby stood in the front pew, Tilly between them. On March 3, Robby had made it to the shelter. He’d been waiting for his family on the platform when the accident occurred. Ada had blamed him at first, said that if he’d come back for them instead of heading straight for the shelter from the Plots & Pints, everything might have been different. But Tilly had not agreed. Several times during the service, Ada reached for her shoulder. The girl didn’t complain, but the stillness with which she greeted the pressure worried Ada.

They buried Emma in the churchyard of St. John’s, a privilege granted by parish law to all families within the parish, regardless of religious affiliation. Three small graves, covered with fresh flowers, ended the row just behind Emma’s. The flowers were the same—blue violets and white snowdrops, gathered from bomb sites—although the ceremonies had been quite different, two Jewish and one Catholic. When the service for Emma ended, when Rev. McNeely had said all the words the prayer book required, plus a few more of his own, and Tilly had tossed down the pouch of red checkers pieces she wanted Emma to keep, the rain started. Everyone noted it, the way people always do when nature appears to take an interest in their lives.

At home Robby uncovered the sandwiches, and no one made jokes about that not being a man’s work. The women took the cloths from him, put on the kettle, opened the back window, in spite of the rain, for air. No one had properly tended the flat since the accident. Ada, from a chair in the corner of the kitchen, asked her friends to sit and not worry. Ignoring her, they dampened cloths and went at the rooms with the energy of the lucky. “We’ll put things right,” they said.

In the small flat, Tilly didn’t know where to go. The kitchen made her nervous. The lounge, where her father and his friends were drinking and growing loud, confused her.

“There are more refugees in the neighborhood than ever before, aren’t there.”

“Where was the bloody light?”

“You can bet they have a center handrail at Kensington.”

“They won’t have a public inquiry because they know they’ll be found out.”

“When they say ‘Jewish panic,’ do they mean they panicked or we did, about them?”

“I liked Mrs. W.,” Tilly said abruptly. “She smelled like lavender.”

Everyone stared. Then a neighbor, Mrs. Chase, knelt down. “That’s nice.”

Tilly looked at Mrs. Chase, unblinking. She had seen Mrs. Chase make faces many times behind Mrs. W.’s back.

“I didn’t mind when she picked out her own vegetables,” Tilly said. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? If we were too busy to help her?”

Mrs. Chase turned to Robby. “Tilly has such beautiful skin,” she said.

The men had brought pints from the local, and Robby’s empty was being swapped for a fresh one. “Takes after her mother,” he said.

Mrs. Chase saw no resemblance whatsoever but continued to smile agreeably. She turned back to Tilly and, suddenly inspired, attempted to match her demeanor. She dropped her smile.

“How brave you were, Tilly.”

“We weren’t brave. We—”

“Tilly,” her mother interrupted from the kitchen. “Come here.”

Mrs. Chase struggled to her feet while Tilly turned away.

“I heard Max Keeler was carried right along, his feet off the ground, his arms raised,” one of the men said.

“Remind Keeler when he’s out of hospital,” said Robby. “Might inspire him to raise his wallet more often!” A burst of laughter filled the room.

In the kitchen, Ada pressed Tilly into a hug. Tilly tried to resist but couldn’t. She sank to the floor with a sob, her head in her mother’s lap. “I want Emma,” she said.

Ada didn’t speak but smoothed Tilly’s hair with her palms.

Someone in the kitchen sloshed soapy water on the floor. Someone else threw a sponge at the back of a man who came in for more glasses. Tilly closed her eyes and pushed her forehead hard into her mother’s leg, hard enough that Ada shifted. “Ouch. Tilly, stop now.”

Tilly looked up.

Ada held her daughter’s cheeks and wiped her tears with her thumbs. “What happened?” Tilly asked. Ada shook her head.

That afternoon Robby joined the mourners at St. John’s. Many of his friends were there: Burnley, who’d lost both his children; Hunt, who’d lost his wife, sister, and brother-in-law. Part of the group was talking about starting a petition for a public inquiry. Everyone was angry about the government’s assumption that they’d accept a mass funeral. Thinking of that, Robby’s knees nearly buckled. He swayed on the front steps, his cheeks streaked with tears the beer had released. The porch was fairly clean, given the constant gathering of people since March 3. Someone had collected some fish and chip wrappers and stacked them in a corner beneath a stone. A dozen small bouquets lay soaked in the rain.

Some were saying that Max Keeler hadn’t just raised his arms but had been passed over the heads of the crowd in the stairway so that he might help remove people from the bottom of the accident. His strength was legendary on the docks. Others said someone had climbed over the pile, but it wasn’t Keeler; it was an off-duty police officer who’d done nothing to get the people out. The question rose again of a land mine, the sound that night, the missing bulb.

“Was it missing?”

“Yeah!”

“Burned out and never replaced!”

“What about a center handrail? They’ve got them at Kensington.”

“Bloody iron ones!”

Would a center rail have helped? It didn’t matter. It was compelling enough that the West End had them and the East End didn’t.

“Where were the bloody wardens?”

“And the police? There was no constable at the entrance!”

Then someone mentioned the Gowers report, which had come hand in hand with the mass-funeral offer, and that was it. The crowd sparked. People jumped to their feet, swearing.

“They hushed up the inquiry!”

“The shelter’s shit!”

“Why’d they tell us to bring the children home!”

“Emma!” Robby yelled. “Emma!”

His posture, slightly pitched forward, elbows out for balance, suggested determination to the largely inebriated gathering. The group rose behind him, mourners turned protesters turned organized crowd. All Robby had to do was raise his fist to elicit cheers of his name and Emma’s. This was tantalizing, and he did it again and again. He led the crowd up Cambridge Heath, past the public baths and cinema, past the children’s hospital, left on Old Bethnal Green Road, to the police station. As they arrived in front of the dreary brick building, the sound of his dead daughter’s name in the thick, damp air suddenly made him so angry, he kicked his foot through a car window. Then he fell backward and knocked his head on the curb.

Just before dessert, the club’s tent collapsed, the far end, away from Laurie and William. It happened slowly and softly, the two end poles falling away from the tables, so that the white tent settled over the luncheon like a blanket over a cradle. There were quite a few whoops and hollers. The men at the collapsed end scrambled quickly to escape; those at the other end stood and walked out relatively calmly. With the exception of Smith, who banged a knee against a chair while temporarily blinded under the tent, no one was hurt.

The members stood in groups about the lawn while the work of cleanup began. Some had emerged with their drinks. New glasses appeared quickly for everyone else. Many told jokes about American manufacturing. Others discussed the relative merits of oak paneling versus white sailcloth as a form of shelter. One older member evaluated the experience against that of his in the RAF during the war; a younger member questioned what the debacle implied for the empire.

Without saying anything, the older members came to the same conclusion: the garden lunch had failed. Long live the grill room!

And the younger members decided they should give the tent another try but that in the long run the club would need an addition, a covered veranda of some sort. They proposed various fund-raising ideas.

Laurie and William stood together in the sun, mostly silent. The mishap had neither improved nor diminished Laurie’s humor. He felt remote, numb. When he did speak to William, saying something about how small the space looked with the tent down, William was preoccupied with his shirt collar. It turned out a beetle was crawling there; he removed it and tossed it into the grass.

Once they were seated again inside, Laurie decided he would phone Paul Barber when he got home. He was staying at the B and B on High Street, poor chap. He wouldn’t find much to eat, Mrs. Loudon having become enamored recently of the idea (and low cost) of the continental breakfast. But Laurie would cooperate with his film. That would feed the boy’s enthusiasm, at any rate.

Had it really been thirty years? Laurie couldn’t believe it. His fingers counted out the decades against his leg—’53, ’63, ’73. It was a habit, a dismal summary of the bulk of his life passing in a feathery movement of his fingers against his leg. He couldn’t resist the chance to tell the story again, or at least play a role in what would inevitably be its new iteration. And that morning he’d done something new: he’d broken a rule of the Test and used more than one fly. His last cast before lunch, he’d tried Barber’s clumsy lure and caught his biggest trout of the morning. His excited yelp had made Smith, that river muddier, lose his footing.

The tragedy does not remain the story. As with any other public property, it is transformed by use. What you want is a loved one, child, friend, to be found, safe, alive. That’s not possible now. A few days earlier you might have accepted an apology from the government, or an explanation of what happened, or a promise that it would never happen again. But none of these things came about, and now you want someone humiliated, forced to resign. You want someone to admit responsibility, someone held accountable. Desperate for these things, grief hot in your blood, you stand on a cold curb in front of the town hall, chanting with the others who are there every day, “The light, the light,” because to the crowd, the light is at the heart of the matter, the accident, the disaster, the catastrophe, whatever today’s papers are calling it, the event that ended the lives they had and gave them new ones they never wanted and never will. All their misery, all their unmitigated despair at what their lives have become, reduced to two words.

As the inquiry began, winter rallied. Temperatures sank, and the radiators in the room were not up to the task. That first morning, a crowd gathered and watched Laurie arrive by cab the way, he imagined, defeated villagers awaited their conquerors. They looked wary, but when Laurie stepped out and waved an arm in greeting, he needed the help of several constables to move through the sudden surge. They were not angry or violent, just insistent. Men called his name but were mute when he turned to listen. Women begged him not to forget the shelter orphans. They pulled back rough sleeves to show him their bruises, their children’s bruises.

Laurie strove to be warm and cordial yet noncommittal.

The second-floor room he’d reserved for the inquiry was charmless, high ceilings and a wall of windows opposite the door its only attributes. Borough residents called it the marriage room because it was often used for civil ceremonies. Now, under a rolling chalkboard, a pile of gas masks huddled like a small clan of burrowing animals. Stacked in a corner, several crates overflowed with donations for the shelter library, the pride of Bethnal Green. The room had burgundy carpeting and white walls splotched gray with damp. Cracks ran through the plaster ceiling, here and there a seam widening into a hole the way a stream feeds a lake. The place was freezing and dusty and in general smelled like a church.

“Quakers and conscientious objectors,” explained Ian Ross, the Bethnal Green constable appointed Laurie’s messenger for the duration of the inquiry. “They’ve held a few meetings here. With candles.”

A small stage, just a foot and a half high, also carpeted in burgundy, anchored the far end of the room. Between Laurie and this stage stood a small sea of chairs. Most were wood, but a few upholstered ones, like royalty among the masses, had been dragged in as well. The uneven rows gave the room that first morning, Thursday, March 11, the air of an amateur theatrical or a children’s story hour rather than that of the site of an official inquiry. The lights were dim, the curtains heavy, though someone had tied them back to let in what light there was from the street. The walls all around displayed hand-lettered signs about where families should go to collect the clothes and pocket items of the victims.

“Where was Gowers’s inquiry?” Laurie asked.

“Police station, sir.”

Laurie walked to the windows and looked down. From here, the distance reduced the crowd, so animate and visceral when he’d arrived, to a nearly continuous layer of trembling black umbrella. Where there were gaps in the fabric, he saw a stoic, dripping face; pale, damp skin. He thought they had every right to be angrier than they seemed, and years later Laurie would say that the accident at Bethnal Green cried out for a more eloquent report than he thought he could write.

“These chairs,” Laurie said, turning.

“A protest, sir,” Ross said.

“Protest.”

“It is the hope of the clerk who brought them in that the borough residents might storm the doors.”

“And then be pleased to find a place to sit?” he said, smiling at Ross.

“Yes, sir. I believe there’s one chair for every victim.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bertram Lodge.”

“Ah.” Laurie turned from the windows. “Well, they don’t seem to mind standing out there.” A few people had made signs.

“Also, sir, I’m to give you this.” Ross held up a sealed envelope.

“Tell me.”

“It’s a letter from the Relatives’ Committee. As you know, they’re not being allowed to attend, so they wanted to submit to you a list of witnesses willing and able to testify on various points.”

“Thoughtful.”

Ross began stacking chairs. Laurie had written back to the home secretary, saying he wanted the authority to hold a public inquiry, and Morrison had responded favorably by morning post. By second post, however, after Laurie had already begun to make arrangements, Morrison insisted that the inquiry be private. The reason: secrets of home defense must not leak to the enemy. Laurie knew the real concern was morale. The War Office made nearly all decisions under its dull gray shadow. People like the antiaircraft guns? Gives them a feeling of fighting back? Then it doesn’t matter that the shrapnel fallout kills more Londoners than German pilots. Morale was the altar on which reason was daily sacrificed. The assumption of victory was one of the government’s cleverer tactics, most evident in the newspaper’s daily reminders about the need to plan for peace. The officials would not accurately report the number of dead in the Bethnal Green accident, and they remained absolutely opposed to a public inquiry.

But Morrison wanted information.
How do the people behave? What is the nature of their trauma? Surely many will leave the area. Note the patterns of retreat and return.
Laurie had a letter in his briefcase outlining a dozen such queries. In their last conversation, Laurie had pointed out the irony of the shift. At first the accident hadn’t happened; now they wanted to study it? Morrison made no comment.

“No,” Laurie said, stopping Ross. “Leave the chairs. It will give the papers something to write about. They won’t have much else.”

Like a machine thrown into reverse, Ross immediately began unstacking the chairs, but something in his motion told Laurie he was pleased. Laurie needed an ally in the borough to call witnesses. Ross was tall and fit and looked well in his uniform; Laurie put a hand on his shoulder and assigned him the job. Then, clapping and rubbing his hands—partly for warmth, partly to test acoustics—Laurie walked to the front of the room.

He ordered a small table to be brought in. “Not a desk, not a dining table,” he specified, and within the hour two constables found something appropriate in the mayor’s office.

“Is the room sufficient?” the mayor asked, trailing behind her confiscated table.

“Indeed,” Laurie replied.

The mayor looked fondly at her side table. “I use it for tea,” she offered, and then, as if this were perhaps too selfish for the times, added, “—the clerks, too, borrow it now and then.”

“Very good,” Laurie said.

The mayor stood uncertainly. Morrison had not yet announced whether she would be permitted to attend the proceedings.

“Do you want to submit a written statement?” Laurie asked. He held up the envelope from the Relatives’ Committee as precedent.

The mayor looked shocked. “Oh, no! No,” she said, shaking her head. She would never be so much trouble. Then she appeared to reconsider. “Well, perhaps. Could I?”

“The sooner the better,” Laurie said.

The mayor smiled but did not leave.

“Well,” Laurie said, “if we need anything else, we’ll know where to find you.”

“Indeed,” said the mayor. “With tea in my lap!” Then, fearing she’d been misunderstood, “Because of the table, of course.”

“Of course,” said Laurie.

After the mayor had gone, Ross discovered that the table had a wobble. “Perhaps the mayor has had tea in her lap on other occasions,” he suggested.

“Our mission,” Laurie said, “is to create an encouraging atmosphere. Everything different from what Gowers started. An inquiry at the police station. Imagine.” He looked around the room. “A wobbly table shows we’re making do, just as they are.” He put a hand out and pressed the table’s edge. One of the legs clunked obligingly against the floor. “We want to be official in tone, helpful in mood. It’s a powerful combination. We will sit here and here.” Laurie pulled two wooden chairs forward and placed them on one side of the small table, angled as if for a fireside chat. “The witnesses will sit here.” He pulled a soft armchair forward from the front row and set it facing the table, close enough that the witnesses could put their feet up if they wanted to.

“But I won’t always sit across from them,” Laurie said. “I’m going to move around a bit, and so are you.” He pushed back some chairs in the front row of invisible demonstrators, gestured at the stage to indicate that it, too, was a seating option, and the arrangements were done. He wobbled the tea table again for good measure.

“No food,” he said. “But let’s have tea.” Laurie turned to Ross.

“Now?”

“No. This afternoon, when we start.”

“Right.”

Laurie stared at Ross and waited a moment. He gave the impression of choosing a course from several available options. He had, as always, only one in mind. “Let’s go to the shelter,” he said.

They left the town hall and walked down Cambridge Heath Road. A low fog skirted the trees and buildings and seemed to make the sounds of a still-stunned community ring louder. Laurie was surprised by the amount of antirefugee graffiti he saw: various statements about the manners and vices of “four-by-twos.” Crude opinions on “the Jewish problem.” It made him quiet, but Ross talked all the way there.

“The shelter entrance is parallel to the line of the street, sir, but the stairs leading down lie at an angle.”

Laurie would no doubt see that for himself. But the accident had occurred in a corner of Bethnal Green he didn’t know well, and so he was willing to listen. His life tended north, along the eastern end of Old Ford Road and toward Approach Road, which led into Victoria Park. Although their house was closer to St. John’s, he and Armorel had been attending St. James’s, off St. James’s Avenue, for years. Their butcher and greengrocer lay north. And when Laurie went for a walk, he was more likely to head north to Victoria Park than south to Museum Gardens or the Bethnal Green Gardens, even though both were closer to him. He simply preferred the winding lanes and large lake of Victoria Park to the simple circle paths and paddling ponds that filled the parks of Bethnal Green.

“Hard to imagine such a thing happening next to the church, sir,” Ross was saying.

They arrived at the shelter, and Ross showed him the steps, pointed out how the first one, because of its relation to the pavement, was not of uniform width. “Could have been a contributing cause.”

Laurie looked at Ross with an expression calculated to impress upon him the value of circumspection. Then he glanced quickly at the wooden gates, the corrugated iron roof, relieved to find no graffiti. Still, the flimsiness of the structure depressed him. There were more of the hand-lettered signs about collecting the victims’ belongings, their black ink streaked with rain. In another hand, someone had written that tea and small sandwiches would be available.

Laurie and Ross descended to the landing at the turn in the steps to the booking hall. This was where the crush had occurred, and although the concrete had been scrubbed, there hung about the place a disturbing odor of urine mixed with damp and the smell of the garden above. Laurie quickly paced out the space and found it to be roughly fifteen feet by eleven. As he moved about, the gritty shuffle of his soles on the concrete bothered him. He found he could not escape an image of the fallen, interlocked bodies. He was a religious man and an orderly one, and he believed in the necessity of war, but death like this at home? He knelt by the steps and pulled out his measuring tape.

“Twelve inches, sir. Five and a half high.”

Laurie swiveled and looked up at Ross.

“I took the liberty of measuring the stairs this morning, sir.”

Laurie swiveled back. Plain concrete steps with a wooden insertion at the edge, he noted. Fairly even, though the wood dipped slightly below the level of the concrete. Ross’s numbers were exact. “Well done,” he said, standing, and Ross, embarrassed, shrugged.

Laurie pointed at the light socket above the steps.

“Empty,” said Ross.

“Obviously,” said Laurie.

“I mean, it’s a bit of a controversy, sir. It was always dim. Some wanted it brighter, others wanted it dark until a more protected entrance could be built. I’m not sure, sir. I’d have to reserve judgment on that.”

Laurie gave him a nod. “In general, a good idea.”

In half an hour they made a cursory review of the rest of the shelter. Laurie was impressed by the library, built on cement slabs over the tracks. A small mullioned window gave it the appearance of an eighteenth-century shop, right there underground. Beyond it was a recreation hall, and at the other end of the platform, a nursery painted with bright murals. It was all quite extraordinary. He’d had no idea. Farther on, Ross showed him a canteen selling hot soup, cocoa, sandwiches, and cakes; two sick bays, one with a bathroom for delousing, the other with a rack of several dozen toothbrushes donated by the Junior Red Cross of America; and several nurses’ stations. The whitewashed tunnels were fresh and surprisingly bright, triple-tiered bunks lining the walls on both sides as far as the eye could see. Well-posted signs gave polite directions and instructions to shelterers of all ages:
You are requested to be in your bunk by 11 p.m., as the floodgate closes at that time.
Laurie found himself nodding in approval. The underground life was better than he’d imagined, though when he looked at Ross, he saw him scowling.

“Very sad, sir,” Ross said, “if you remember why most people come here. Many have lost a home, and a family member or two with it.”

They walked back to the town hall in silence, Laurie watching the people on the streets, wondering which of them had been in the crowd that night. He thought of how afraid they must have been, their passage to the shelter mysteriously impeded. But with that fear, there must have been annoyance, mounting to anger, fueled by exhaustion. He saw sleeplessness on every face.