Coventry (6 page)

“Let’s stay to the centre of the road,” she shouts. “It will be safer there. We won’t be hit by falling debris.” She can see the charred ribs of the timbers sticking out from the smouldering heap of rubble.

“Wear my hat,” says Jeremy. He takes his tin helmet from his head and places it gently on Harriet’s. He then offers his arm, and Harriet takes it, and they step carefully down the centre of Broadgate, as though they are a couple strolling out after dinner to gaze at the stars.

They make it to the end of the block before Jeremy stops. “Look up,” he says.

Harriet looks up and sees four land mines drifting down under parachutes. They are lit from beneath by the fires, the soft, filmy hoods of light making the bombs seem like a school of jellyfish, not descending, but swimming up out of the darkness.

Just as the man at the police station predicted, the incendiaries are followed by bombs. The bombs in turn create fireballs. It is impossible to escape down Broadgate.

Harriet and Jeremy crouch in an alley between two buildings. They ran as fast and as far as they could before the land mines finished their dreamy drift down, but there was no time to get to a more secure place before one of them exploded. The noise is deafening and they can feel the rush of heat and air as it blasts through the street. The buildings on either side of them sway and tremble but do not buckle and fall.

Harriet feels detached, but when she adjusts Jeremy’s helmet on her head she notices her hand is shaking. Jeremy seems frozen.

“We need to get to a proper shelter,” she yells. A direct hit and the buildings they are crouched beside will collapse on top of them. “We’re not far from Owen Owen. There’s a concrete shelter in the basement there.”

Owen Owen is the new pride of Coventry, a massive department store in the centre of the city, right on Broadgate. It has one of the largest public bomb shelters in its basement.

The brick wall of the building Harriet is leaning against is warm against her back. The wood inside is starting to groan and creak.

“I think this shop’s on fire,” she shouts. “We need to get out of here. Keep your head down.” She grabs Jeremy’s hand and pulls him along the alley toward the street.

Owen Owen is burning. The acrid smoke rolling from the building makes it difficult to breathe. Harriet’s lungs burn with the effort. A small crowd stands helplessly on the road outside the department store, watching the flames dance around the oven that the brick shell of the building has become.

“What about the people in the shelter?” asks Harriet. The man beside her shrugs his shoulders.

The Anderson shelter at the bottom of her neighbour’s garden on Berkeley Road is too far. They need a place now.

“Where are the other shelters?” she asks the man. Jeremy has moved closer to the building to get a good look at the fire. Harriet can see his long, thin back up ahead of her. She is determined not to lose him.

“Where are they?” she demands.

“No need to snap at me,” says the man. “Try the churches.”

Harriet just wants to be off Broadgate now. The main street in the city is so obviously under attack as well. She pushes through the knot of people in front of her and grabs Jeremy by the collar.

“We’re off,” she says. “We’re going to try the church around the corner.”

Another bomb explodes. The ground rocks slightly beneath Harriet’s feet and she has to scream to make her words heard above the blast. “We have to get out of here.” She hauls Jeremy backwards, away from the burning shell of the building.

The sparrow man has started singing “Rule Britannia.” He has a thin, reedy voice that spirals through Maeve Fisher. All around her, people stumble into song. The candles stutter with the sudden bursts of breath.

The air-raid sirens have stopped. The bombing has stopped. There is no sound from above. Surely it would be safe to go up now, even if the all-clear hasn’t sounded? What about Jeremy? What if he has tried to come home rather than sheltering at the cathedral?

Maeve shifts on her pile of burlap. She feels damp from sitting on the floor. Just then there is an enormous thunder-clap and the building sways and settles, sways and settles. Dust trickles down from the cellar rafters onto Maeve’s face. The first explosion is followed by a second. Maeve can hear something tearing and splintering above her head.

“Looks like we’ll be here a while,” says the publican, and the whole room belts out the chorus of “Rule Britannia” all over again. This time, Maeve sings along.

After Maeve left the gamekeeper, she was hired as a domestic in a big country house. The lady of the house took pity on Maeve’s situation, and although Maeve didn’t want pity, it served her well enough to be on the receiving end of it.

Maeve was well liked in the country house. Her cheerfulness made her popular with both the servants and the family. Consequently, Jeremy was looked after by everyone, shuttled around the estate like a parcel, and though at first Maeve worried when she didn’t know where he was or whom he was with, she learned to trust that he was being properly looked after.

One summer a painter came to visit the estate and Maeve was asked to act as her personal assistant. The artist liked to paint from nature, but needed such a large amount of equipment to do this that Maeve ended up wheeling the easels, boxes, and brushes through the bumpy fields in the gardener’s wheelbarrow. The painter’s name was Marguerite, although later, after she’d left the estate, Maeve found out that her name was really just plain Margaret. She had long red hair that she kept tied up with coloured scarves. She smoked French cigarettes and swore as fitfully as the gamekeeper when things weren’t going well with her painting.

The summer as her assistant was the best summer Maeve ever spent. At first she read a book or picked wildflowers. But she soon tired of this and began to watch Marguerite. Then she began to ask questions. One day Marguerite gave Maeve a sketchbook and a set of pencils so she could draw. At the end of every day, as they walked back to the estate, she would critique Maeve’s attempts and offer advice on how to improve her drawings. Maeve hadn’t drawn since before Jeremy had been born and it felt such a relief to be able to take it up again.

Maeve found her fascinating, although a little frightening. But the walks back to the estate in the evenings, when Marguerite would open Maeve’s sketchbook and pronounce on what she’d done, were so important to Maeve that she can still remember, almost word for word, what the painter said.

No perspective,
Marguerite said tersely of a meadow sketch.
No feeling,
she said of a drawing of a tree.
No surprises,
she said about a portrait of herself. Sometimes she would stop suddenly and Maeve would bang into her with the wheelbarrow from behind.
Look at this,
she would say, pointing in the sketchbook to the stem of a flower or the rise of a hill.
That has movement. That sings.
She was not one to give praise easily, and those moments when she found something to extol in one of the drawings would carry Maeve through the rest of the day. The morning when Marguerite left, at the end of the summer, Maeve went into her room and wept right through the afternoon.

The church basement bomb shelter is damp and smells of wet stone. There are wooden benches set along the walls. When Harriet sits down on one she realizes that it is an old pew. People sit facing the opposite bench, as though they are travelling in a train carriage. There is an oil lamp in the centre of the floor and a couple of people have electric torches, but the lighting is too dim for Harriet to have a good look at the room. Opposite her is a woman with two small children, one nestled under each arm. The mother bows her head to one and then the other, never looking up.

There are roughly fifteen people in the bomb shelter, four to a bench. The corners of the room are in shadow so Harriet can’t be sure that the flaps of black she sees there are people or the dark tuck of the stone walls.

There’s a hollow booming sound above them, and the basement shudders. Harriet is exhausted, feels she can’t endure another blast. Her nerves are completely raw.

“I wanted to enlist,” explains Jeremy. “I wanted to fight the Jerries, but they won’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“I’m colour-blind.”

Harriet turns on the bench and looks at Jeremy as though she will be able to tell from staring into his eyes what they are capable of seeing. He has dark hair, eyebrows that are two black slashes across his face, lips that are pale. He appears older than he had on the roof of the cathedral.

“You don’t see red or green?” she asks because she knows that, like dogs, certain people can’t make out all the colours in the spectrum.

“I don’t see any colour,” says Jeremy. “It’s a severe sort of colour-blindness.”

“You only see in black and white?”

“Well.” Jeremy grins at her and Harriet can’t help but smile back. “I don’t think of it as black and white. It’s more like night and day.” He looks around the small underground room. “That wall opposite is night. That lamp is day. His hair is night. You.” He smiles at Harriet again. “You are a sunny day.”

“Flatterer,” says Harriet, but she is secretly pleased.

A man passes silently along the pews with a tin cup and bucket of water. Harriet and Jeremy take a drink. The water is soft and cool and tastes of stone.

On the bench beside Harriet are an elderly man and woman. The woman sits bolt upright, her hands curled around each other in her lap. The man has removed his hat. This is, after all, a church. They stare straight ahead, as though they are on a journey, are watching the countryside unfold before them.

We could die here, thinks Harriet. And worse, we are prepared for it.

Jeremy shifts on the bench, shifts again. “My mother will be worried about me,” he says. “There’s just the two of us. She relies on me.”

Harriet’s own mother never did a thing for her. A good thing. She sent Harriet out to root the potatoes, collect the eggs, bring in the coal. Once, she showed her daughter how to press flowers but later, in a fit of rage, she crumbled the dry, delicate blossoms into the fire. Harriet can’t imagine that her mother ever worried about her. She eventually went mad, trying to burn the house down with Harriet inside.

Harriet crosses her legs, uncrosses them on the hard wooden pew. Her mother remains a mystery to her, a woman full of alarming volatility. She always said she was full of passion, but Harriet now thinks she was just full of rage. When Harriet was brave enough to move away with Owen, her mother did burn the house down, with herself inside it.

For a long time Harriet thought it was her fault, and then one day she didn’t, and that felt worse because at least when it was her fault her guilt kept her tied to her mother. Being absolved freed her not just of responsibility but of connection. For a long time she had lain awake, imagining her childhood home ablaze, her mother’s screaming face at an upstairs window. The last time she made a visit to her father, at the start of this war, he was drunk for the entire three days she was there. He couldn’t drive her to the station to catch her train home because he had passed out in the potting shed. She had to walk, and then, because she was in danger of missing her train, she had to cadge a lift with the milkman.

“Do you have any family waiting for you?” asks Jeremy.

“No. I’m alone.”

One of the children opposite Harriet has begun to cry. Small, ratcheting sobs break from her body until the room and the dark are filled with the noise of her crying. Harriet wants her to stop, wants her to shut up.

“I’m unbelievably selfish,” she says to Jeremy, but he appears not to have heard her.

“I work at the Triumph plant,” he says. “I’m training to be a motor mechanic.”

At a time when the rest of the country faces massive unemployment, there is work to be found in vehicle production at Coventry. There are factories for the production of automobiles, Lancaster bombers, and tanks.

“It’s what they’re coming for, isn’t it?” says Harriet. “All the factories. It’s why we’re being bombed.”

The crying child will not shut up. The sobs are more frantic, quicker.

“You make it sound as though it’s my fault,” says Jeremy.

“I didn’t mean to.”

And then Harriet knows why the crying child is fraying her nerves. The noise of the sobs, their rhythm, reminds her of the ack-ack guns the Coventry defence is using tonight against the German bombers. Harriet can’t abide the noise of the guns, is glad she hasn’t been able to hear them over the noise of the bombing raid. The guns make her think of Owen, dying in that muddy field in Belgium.

Harriet can’t bear to think of Owen. “Tell me about your job,” she says to Jeremy.

“I’m apprenticing. And we only moved here this summer, before the raids started, so I haven’t been at it long.”

“Tell me anyway,” says Harriet.

Jeremy stretches his legs out. He has long legs, like Owen.

“I’m learning about engines,” he says. “I’m learning how things work.”

“What do you like about it?”

Jeremy hesitates for a moment. “I like to think that an engine is a system, like a heart. The hoses are veins; the oil is blood. The engine valves are the valves of a heart, opening and closing, producing energy for the engine to run.”

“What don’t you like about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There must be something,” says Harriet impatiently. The child’s cries seem to be increasing in volume with each breath it takes.

“I suppose,” says Jeremy, “what I don’t like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine.”

Just like us, thinks Harriet.

Underneath the child’s crying there is a new sound, the low keen of someone moaning. Harriet can’t tell who is moaning, but it sounds as if it’s coming from the dark fold in the far corner of the room. Farther away, muffled, but still distinct, are the thuds of the bombs landing, the crash of buildings falling.