Fireweed (7 page)

‘For me?' she said.

‘What sort is it?' I asked her. ‘Do you remember?'

‘A Spitfire,' she said. ‘Thank you, Bill.'

‘What's this?' I asked, taking the disc on her bracelet into my fingers.

‘My identity disc, with my number on. Haven't you got one?'

‘I've got a number, but I keep it in my head.' And yet, now, after all these years I can only remember my number with an effort, but I remember hers easily. It was ZKDN/74/8. She slipped off to sleep again with the little plane held in her hand.

Some while later there was a dull thump. I felt the ground beneath me tremble for a second, and the exit sign, hanging over our heads, rattled briefly on its wires. All around us heads were raised from the platform.

‘Other side of the river,' said someone.

‘By the Shot Tower,' another voice agreed. Two more bumps came quickly, one after another. ‘Nearer,' people murmured, ‘much nearer.'

‘Safe here, though, ducks,' said the doughnut woman, ‘Not to worry.' Heads were lowered to rest again.

Then I too fell asleep.

In the morning we bought tea from a trolley brought round by the shelter wardens; we waited for the people nearer the exits to go so that the crowd was not too pressing, and then we packed our rucksack, Julie lifted it onto my back, and we made our way up to the open air, and went to have breakfast at Marco's.

And that's how we managed together.

We decided straight away that we would go on working the street markets, in spite of the wad of notes rolled up in the bottom of the rucksack. After all, when that was gone there would be nothing we could do but go and give ourselves up to some adult authority. And working gave us something with which to fill our days. When we weren't working we walked a lot, endlessly round and round, covering London from the Tower to Hyde Park, over and over as the days went by. I still know London like the back of my hand, better than a taxi-driver sometimes; I'll bet she does too. When it rained we rode about on buses.

We weren't the only ones. There were hordes of other children, playing around in the streets. As before, a lot of parents had brought their children home after a week or two, and the schools were all closed so they roamed the streets. We played football, and even tag and hopscotch with them in the side streets, when we got tired of the costermongers' stalls. Some of them sold black-market sweets to us, too.

We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn't all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold, and fell off, while Hitler's bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone's life was changed, and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.

People were different then, too. They were tired, nearly all of them, from having so little sleep, from being woken every night, from being frightened. But they were friendly. They talked to each other on buses, in the streets, in the shelters. At first we were alarmed when people spoke to us; we thought they were all going to jump on us, and report us to someone (Heaven knows whom), for being on our own. But we soon stopped feeling like that. They weren't in that mood, somehow.

‘Where's your mum 'n dad?' someone asked us one night, in a big street shelter near Hyde Park.

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Cheer up, son,' she said. ‘Things happen. Perhaps they'll turn up.'

I realized she thought I meant they were bombed. I felt a bit ashamed then, as though I had told a mean sort of lie.

‘Are you all right?' she was asking. ‘Got food and money? Know where to go?'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘But yes, thanks, we're all right.'

‘That's plucky,' she said. ‘As long as we've got enough like you.'

In some of the shelters people had sing-songs, drank beer, even danced. An old man played the accordion, and everyone sang, ‘Oh, Johnnie, oh Johnnie, how you can love!' and ‘We'll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line' and ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye!' That was fun, but it went on so late we felt very limp the next day, so the following night we went somewhere else, to get some sleep.

Then there were always some people who told endless jokes, raising a laugh somehow. After all this time I can still remember a toothless old man saying, ‘Talk about laugh! She paid into the insurance for years to be buried proper, and it took them three days to dig her out!' They did laugh, too.

We saw men digging. They had black tin hats, with R painted on them for rescue. They were always dirty, covered with powdered plaster and mud. We would see them scrambling on piles of debris, or from the top of the bus glimpse them down a hole in the rubble, and always there would be a stretcher party standing by, and an ambulance parked somewhere near.

I remember us working a stall once, selling oranges. It had been trundled onto a pile of rubble at a street corner, and it boasted a huge notice saying, OUR ORANGES HAVE COME THROUGH MUSSO'S LAKE! They sold well, too. There was an air-raid going on, but we weren't taking much notice, and neither was anyone else near us. They happened too often. They lasted too long. One just got tired of it, just couldn't react for every one. So there we were selling oranges, brought past Mussolini's destroyers, and eaten under Hitler's Luftwaffe. Suddenly there was a terrible racket a little way off; sirens, and fire-bells, and a roar of flame so fierce we could hear it where we stood. The sky over towards St Paul's filled with billowing smoke, and then the underside of the black smoke-cloud lit up a lurid yellow. Cinders the size of saucers fell around us. And out of the doorway of the Paradise Buildings, opposite our stall, a bloke came running like a maniac. He had a helmet on, and an Auxiliary Fire Service jacket, which he was still buttoning as he ran, and he was wearing his pyjama trousers. Poor devil must have been snatching a bit of sleep. He was stout, I remember, and a large triangle of hairy belly showed through where the pyjamas tied. Panting for breath he ran off towards the fire.

‘Go on Charlie!' cried a delighted crowd of onlookers.

‘Had enough shut-eye?'

Cupping his hands to his mouth the barrow boy beside us bellowed after him, ‘Where's your trousers?'

He disappeared into the foul-smelling wall of smoke at the far end of the street. Fire-fighting must take guts at the best of times, but the fires caused by incendiary bombs were like acres of hell itself. And he was such an ordinary sort of bloke, fat and hairy, and a bit red in the face …

‘You know what, Bill,' said Julie beside me. ‘His pyjamas are like the Lionheart's sword.'

Then there was Little Bert. Big Bert and Little Bert kept a stall in Leather Lane market. Big Bert wasn't very big, but he was Little Bert's dad. He was too old to go into the army, and Little Bert was too young. They had a stall that sold bits and pieces, plugs, coils of wire, things for making crystal sets, simple wireless receivers, light bulbs, all that sort of thing.

‘Wireless. That's a larf,' Big Bert used to say, showing us the back of one. We often worked beside them, taking a turn at selling fruit and veg for an enormous woman called Ma Johnson, so that she could ‘Go and 'ava cuppa'.

‘You know, Bill,' said Julie. ‘I'm awfully ignorant. Really. I never knew they sold tea in pubs.' I laughed at her till I could hardly stand straight, I got such a stitch.

‘Oh, yes, Julie, you are!' I told her.

‘Well, no need to rub it in!' she said, crossly.

Anyway, one day when we were keeping Ma Johnson's stall a bomb fell right in front of us. Just like that. No siren had sounded, and what with the traffic down in Holborn I hadn't even heard the plane. It was an incendiary, and it came with a swish and a thump, and immediately a loud hissing noise, and flame began to come out of a nozzle on the top. There was a lot of noise, people diving into doorways, running, women screaming … and then Little Bert walked right up to it, and picked it up. It was quite a weight, so he had to hold it tight to his chest, and duck his head sideways a bit, out of the way of the jet of flame. The jet of flame was acting like a firework, getting taller and louder, working up to something.

‘Oh, Bert!' cried Julie, and she flung herself into my arms, and buried her face in my jacket. Bert looked around, and his eye caught a great big water tank that stood on the street corner. It was a reserve supply for fire-fighting. They kept it topped up, using a hydrant from the pavement in case the mains supply got cut off in a raid. Bert walked over to it, staggering a bit under the weight of the thing, and people shrank away on either side as he carried it past them. He just heaved it over the top, into the water tank. There was a big splash, soaking him from top to toe, and a brief sizzle … and that was it.

We all stood there, dazed, staring at him. There was so little sign of what had just happened that some newly-arrived shoppers began to get angry and shout at us because we weren't jumping to serve them.

‘Cor lumme, son!' yelled Big Bert. ‘Do us a favour, will yer? Gimme time to look away next time!'

Little Bert was looking a bit blank, and vaguely brushing at his clothes, to get rid of the wet. A very angry woman was yelling, ‘You gonna sell me this bulb, or ain't yer?' at Big Bert.

‘I'm
not
,' said Big Bert. ‘Come and have a snifter, son, and get yerself dry.'

‘Well, what do you want me to do with it, then?' bawled the woman, waving her thirty-watter under Big Bert's nose.

‘Stuff it up yer jumper!' he said, going off down the road with his arm round Little Bert's damp shoulder. Someone started singing ‘For he's a jolly good fellow!' and the whole lane joined in, stamping their feet and clapping. Little Bert went very red. Then, as soon as they rounded the corner everyone was talking at once, ‘Did you see that? Nasty great thing … Could have killed someone … Cool as cucumber, 'e was …'

The woman beside us put the light bulb into her shopping bag, and quick as a flash Julie was round behind Bert's stall, saying, ‘That'll be a tanner, please, Mum. Can't let her get away with it,' she muttered to me.

Some men came and fished the bomb out of the tank, and put it on a lorry, and drove it away. We kept the two Berts' stall all day, while they celebrated somewhere. We had even half packed-up for them by the time they came back. They invited us to supper with them.

Mrs Big Bert opened the door, and they pushed us in ahead of them, saying, ‘Guess what happened to our Bert, Ma!'

Ma listened, unwrapping fish and chips, and tipping it onto plates as she did so, saying, ‘Gawd. Oh Gawd,' every now and then as the story unfolded. She sent her small girl down the road to get more fish and chips for us, and we had a good time with them that evening.

In fact we had a good time all the time, all through those days. Julie made me laugh a lot, and I kept making her laugh too, without quite meaning to; it just happened. Laughter seemed suddenly to blow up around us, like the swirling wind-borne leaves. It caught other people too; they smiled at us, suddenly, when they saw us, for no reason at all. Yet all around us death and ruin rained out of the sky. We saw it everywhere, and we were afraid like everybody else, and yet it cast no shadow in our hearts.

Every autumn takes me back to it now. Every year, when the light softens, and the mists come blurring the edges, and the colours glow and fade, I am back there again, walking the London streets. When the wind lifts the leaves along the Embankment I can even imagine I see her, in an old brown mackintosh seven sizes too big, which we got from the Salvation Army Mission.

‘Ugh! Ugh, Bill, it stinks here! Why does it stink?'

The roadsweeper looked up, and said, ‘Bomb broke the outfall from the main sewer, that's why.'

The next day, I remember, it stank of disinfectant.

We got so used to seeing houses collapsed in piles of rubble halfway across the street we took no more notice of them than of lamp-posts. Yet many of the sights we walked past without a second glance stand out clearly now in my mind's eye. When the roofs were blown off the houses one could see daylight falling through into the upstairs rooms; one could see the pattern of the wallpaper on the inside walls up there. Shrapnel made shallow, conical holes in the pavement and walls, with cracks running outwards from them. Often the whole of a street, from side to side, would be covered with a light layer of broken bits and pieces, as though it had fallen like hailstones from a great height. And once we walked down a street with shops on either side, and there was a big window broken, knocked inwards most of it, but a little glass across the street. And then a little way further down, there was another, on the other side, and all the windows between were all right. Then on our own side again, another window gone, about fifteen yards further down, and then on the other side, and so on like that all down the street. At the bottom of the street was a great yawning bomb crater; the blast had ricocheted, zigzag down the road.

I suppose we must have known, somewhere down inside, that we ourselves might get hurt. We can't really have believed that it could go on for ever, all that freedom, that we could go drifting through the city for ever, like birds. We must have known there would be trouble coming. But I don't remember knowing. I remember running, playing hide-and-seek in St James's Park, eating at Marco's and other places, sleeping in shelters, selling oranges, and laughing.

And when trouble came, I hardly recognized it at first, and wasn't on my guard at all.

It came with a young man in a brown tweed jacket, who came and sat beside us at the foot of the escalator at the Strand, when we were settling down for the night. Of course, I should have known it was odd; there were not many new faces down there, and almost no young men at all. He kept looking sideways at us, as we got rolled into our blankets, and got more or less comfortable. I picked up my copy of
Kidnapped
, to read while I fell asleep.