Ashes to Ashes (4 page)

‘I’m not going back to the crypt!’ As soon as I said it I knew that I’d betrayed far too much fear in my voice. What would this man, what would any normal man, make of such a silly fear, especially under these circumstances?

‘Go back down into the cathedral,’ Andrews said calmly. ‘I’ll come and see you once I’ve spoken to Mr Phillips.’

‘Or send him to me?’ I asked. ‘What does he look—’

‘I will take care of it.’ He put one thin, almost weightless hand on my arm. ‘Go back down.’

As I knew that it would be, the descent to the ground was a nightmare for me. In the dark I had to feel my way along the outside walls where the spiral stairs are at their widest. Although there’s just enough room for your feet on each stair, you have to feel the edge with your toes before you go down to the next one each time you move. The stairs feel even steeper going down than they do coming up and so each one pulls the muscles at the front of your thigh something rotten. And if you don’t like heights, as I don’t, you feel unsafe all the time. It was cold but I was sweating again, especially when I had to pass through that blessed passageway. I also had the feeling, quite without any proof for it, that there was somebody following me down for some reason. It couldn’t have been Mr Andrews because when I left him, he went off towards the Stone Gallery. But someone was there and it wasn’t a person I felt had good intent towards me. In fact, although I couldn’t see anything much, I kept stopping and listening and staring into the blackness behind me. But not once did I see or hear anything. What I had was a feeling which I expected to disappear once I reached the ground. But it didn’t. As the shouting and the panic from the levels above my head increased, I became even more afraid than I had been on the spiral staircase. I stood by the red lantern underneath the dome, my legs shaking, my thighs in particular aching like hell. Above me brave men conquered their fears and ran with stirrup pumps up steep, blacked-out staircases, swung about on roof tops, and fought with every ounce of their strength to save this place Herr Hitler was showing such an interest in. Mr Smith had been right in his belief that the cathedral meant something. Some buildings are more than just bricks, some buildings mean something or represent an idea that can stand for a whole country. I know that for us, by which I mean Londoners, if not all English people, that building is St Paul’s. I also believed then, as I do now, that the feelings we all have for it don’t necessarily have anything to do with religion. What we all experience, that cold shiver down the spine when we think about the place, is far, far older than anything Christian. Underneath that dome, where I stood, something made me uneasy. I wasn’t alone . . .

‘Little girl?’ I called out. I don’t know why I thought it was her who had been following me, it just came out. But I still didn’t know her name and so what could I call? ‘Little girl, just let us know you’re safe! People are worrying . . .’

There was no answer. In spite of all the noise and even a few splashes of water from above, the silence in the cathedral remained. It washed around me, stranded as I was by the little red lamp, like a vast, black sea. Then I heard the sound of an evil laugh somewhere about. It could have been in my own head, I know, that. But in view of what was to happen later, I still don’t know to this day whether or not it was only in my mind.

No little girl came walking out of the blackness that was all around me. The noise up above of men’s feet and voices and the crackle of incendiaries burning God knows what, was terrible. But in a way I was glad of it, I must be honest. Lamp or no lamp, I was now rooted to the floor by my fear as the darkness of the grave seemed to reach out towards me from all sides. My breathing became shallow and shaky and, although I knew absolutely that the thickness around me wasn’t earth or anything like it, I heard myself whimper with the strain my mind and my body were both under. This is how I am if I go into a shelter. It’s why I can’t go into the Anderson with my mother and sisters and let them see it. The stuttering’s bad enough without the mad look I know comes on to my face, and the horrible grey pallor my skin takes on.

Over in some distant corner of the building there was a scuttling noise.

‘L-little g-girl?’

Nothing save a bit more scuttling just after I’d stuttered. Mice. So many people had their cats put down at the beginning of the war, fearing the poor things might suffer during the bombing, it’s like a bloody dance hall for mice in some parts of London now. I don’t mind them. I’ve eaten a fair few in my time, back in the trenches. Rats too, or rather a rat; I only ate one of those blighters once. The look of a rat puts you off, the sharp teeth, the tail you know has probably just brushed against the corpse of one of your comrades. I felt tears begin to trickle down my face as I remembered my old mates yet again. They were dead and I was in a church being pounded into the ground and I was so, so frightened of joining them. I was so scared!

For a long time the noises from the roof and dome above got louder. The running, the spraying of water, the clanking of metal buckets and the shouting voices all mixed up so you couldn’t make out any human sense in any of it. Fighting up there, battling with an enemy using fire as a weapon, those watchmen weren’t facing anything that could be controlled in the way that a man’s hands and actions can be held or directed. Fire will, like water, do as it wants and so whether it is beaten, whether those fighting it live or die, is largely up to how it, and any wind behind it, might behave. I knew then that I should move. If the fire really did take a hold up above, the whole dome, as I’d heard one of the watchmen say earlier, could crash down into the cathedral. Everyone in the cathedral would die. People ask me sometimes whether being an undertaker makes you less frightened of death than the average person. It doesn’t. Of course my thoughts on death are coloured by my memories of the Great War, but I fear death nevertheless. I fear the unknown that faces every unbeliever in religion, I fear the darkness and the grief of others I’ve seen so many, many times in my forty-eight years on this earth. My mother, the Duchess as we all call her on account of her bearing and good manners, would be so sad. To lose my old dad was bad enough and then to have her only son return from the last war just a ghost of what he had been had nearly killed her. But if I died? And what of my sisters, Nancy and Aggie, my lady friend, Hannah . . .

The noises from above had decreased. I knew this because I could actually hear my panicky breathing. If the noises had stopped, did it mean that the watchmen had given up their battle against the fire in the dome? Had I been able to move my rigid neck to look upwards, I would have done so, but my muscles were like wood. From where I knew the high altar was, I heard the sound of running feet. I don’t know how I knew it, but I was just certain that the sound was that of a child.

‘The incendiary bomb that was burning the dome fell out into the Stone Gallery. Just fell out and a chap extinguished it immediately! Just like that!’ Mr Andrews said. He had a genuine look of wonder on his thin, old face. ‘It was a miracle. God has not deserted His children yet.’

Where the bloody hell he’d come from so quickly and quietly, I didn’t know. He must have just come down the stairs from the Whispering Gallery, but he was neither sweating nor shaking which, to me, was decidedly odd. But then suddenly there was a massive thud followed by screams from what sounded like the crypt. The sound of childish footsteps running flew past me and Mr Andrews on the smallest gust of wind.

Chapter Three

A
huge explosion nearby, possibly in Paternoster Row, knocked out all the lights in the underground chamber. The watchmen in charge of what they called the Occurrence Book, or book of incidents for the crypt, said, too, that the whole cathedral was now ringed with fire.

‘Off-duty watchmen will come from all over now, you’ll see,’ Mr Smith said as I helped him and a couple of the other blokes light small lamps in and around the crypt. ‘We’ll save this place. We have to.’

I’d come back down with Mr Andrews just after all the lights went out. The dome was safe for the time being and I wasn’t doing any good just standing in the middle of the cathedral floor, imagining – as I thought – running children. Mr Andrews hadn’t seen or heard anything.

‘If there is a child running and hiding inside the cathedral then I haven’t seen it,’ he’d said when I tried to explain what I’d felt and heard. I asked him if he’d spoken to Mr Phillips, but he told me that he hadn’t. He told me he hadn’t seen him. They must have missed each other by seconds.

Mr Smith had a different view of the little girl problem. ‘If you didn’t see her anywhere in the cathedral, then she must have gone outside. Seems ridiculous, I know, but that has to be the way of it,’ he said. ‘Mr Phillips would never have taken her up to the Whispering Gallery with him anyway. It’s not safe for children up there, not now.’

I lit another lamp whilst thinking that the Whispering Gallery wasn’t, in my opinion, safe for any bleeder.

I said, ‘B-but d-don’t you thinks s-she, the girl, she could be h-hiding or—’

‘Mr Hancock,’ Mr Smith said patiently, ‘you have to know this building to know where to hide, especially in the dark.’

‘Y-yes but kids—’

‘She’s gone outside and that’s that!’ the posh young woman said with no patience in her voice at all. Like all of us, she didn’t like being plunged into darkness and was ratty as Gawd knows what until all the lamps really got going. Her sort weren’t used to waiting, I thought. ‘Good heavens, isn’t there enough to worry about without going on about an unpleasant little girl!’

‘Here! Here!’ the Jewish woman put in her twopenn’orth.

‘But—’

‘Unpleasant or not, if a kid’s missing, we should pull together to find her,’ a woman I hadn’t seen before said. ‘Mr Churchill says we have to pull together to defeat Adolph.’

I looked at her and smiled. It didn’t mean anything apart from the fact that I was pleased that someone was agreeing with me. But she avoided my eyes by looking down at the floor. I reckoned she was about thirty – it’s not always easy to tell by lamplight – a little, mousy woman wearing a large and very misshapen hat. Poor and honest, as my Hannah would say.

Mr Smith looked at me, shook his head, and then sighed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we can’t have people running around the cathedral in a raid in the dark. Even you, Mr Hancock, have to agree that that’s just silly.’

Of course it was and I said as much. But I also reminded him that someone needed to speak to Mr Phillips. It was then that the bloke in charge of the Occurrence Book looked up and said, ‘Mr Harold Phillips? From Phillips, Steadman and Rolls?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Smith said. ‘There’s only one Phillips on the Watch as far as I’m aware, Mr Ronson.’

Mr Ronson, ‘on the Book’, said, ‘Well, I haven’t seen him tonight, have you?’

‘He came in with this little girl we’ve been talking about,’ Mr Smith said. ‘You were here when she came in, Mr Ronson. I remember you being here distinctly.’

Even through the floor of the cathedral we could hear the thick drone of yet another wave of German bombers. This lot it would seem were dropping bombs as opposed to incendiaries. The bombs were just making the fires get even bigger which was of course, all part of Herr Hitler’s plan. We all looked up, just for a second, all at the same time.

‘I’m not doubting your word, Mr Smith. I must’ve missed Mr Phillips,’ Mr Ronson said as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I remember the little girl. Blonde and noisy.’

‘Mr Phillips went straight up to the Whispering Gallery,’ Mr Smith explained. ‘Then, a little later, the girl went missing. You were busy, Mr Ronson. I know you didn’t speak to Mr Phillips.’

Underneath his tin hat, Mr Ronson’s dirt-smutted face frowned. ‘I know Harold Phillips quite well,’ he said. ‘As you know, Mr Smith, I worked for him before I started my own firm. I think I would’ve noticed if he was in or not, even if I didn’t speak to him.’

‘He didn’t say much himself and, as I said before, Mr Ronson, you were busy,’ Mr Smith replied.

‘Mmm.’ It was said doubtfully, I felt.

Mr Andrews hadn’t been able to find Mr Phillips in the Whispering Gallery. I told this to Mr Smith and Mr Ronson. If anything it made Mr Ronson doubt whether Mr Phillips was in the building even more. Everyone else, the other shelterers as well as the cathedral first-aid ladies had gone off about their own affairs just after our conversation started. No one, it seemed, except me actually wanted to find this kid. Even the poor but honest woman had buried her head in a magazine of some sort by this time, although what she could see in the dim light from the lamps was hard to imagine. In truth they were all only doing in their way what I was trying to do in mine – take their minds off the bombing. I said something about wanting to go and look for the girl again then.

‘You mustn’t go outside the cathedral,’ Mr Ronson said. ‘Everything’s on fire out there. Guy’s Hospital is burning to the ground, Lombard Street has taken a massive hit.’ He shook his head in what was not defeat, but was a measure of his own tiredness, I felt. ‘We’re in contact with centres all over the city. This place is a target for the
Luftwaffe
, we all know that, but we’re still here. It’s safer in here than it is outside. If we manage to avoid taking a direct hit or having an incendiary set the dome on fire, we’ll be all right. I know this building, it’s very resilient.’

‘Would any of you gentlemen like a cup of hot Bovril?’

The lady who was asking, clearly a cathedral first aider, was elderly with fluffy, thinning grey hair underneath her felt beret.

‘Oh, no thank you very much, Mrs Andrews,’ Mr Smith replied.

Mr Ronson turned her offer down as well. Once she’d gone, I asked the others who she was. I assumed she was connected to the Mr Andrews who was some sort of priest.

‘Andrews is a chaplain,’ Mr Ronson said. ‘The lady who offered us the Bovril is his wife.’