Small Island (30 page)

A drowning man could breathe easier. I went to take the paper from him but his grip was so tight I had to rip it from his hands. And he was left with fists still clenching bits of torn paper. ‘Calm down, Bernard.’

He was gasping now, his chest jumping hiccups, ‘We’re going to die . . . die . . . here . . . Father . . . that was the house . . .’

‘Bernard, listen, calm down. It’s not our house. It wasn’t that close. Listen, let me have a look,’ I said.

I was on my knees and only turned round to open the curtain at the entrance when he howled a mighty, red-blooded, full-bodied ‘
No!
’ He lunged for me, flinging his arms round my waist to drag me back, then he swaddled me in his arms popping any last breath out of me.

‘No . . . no . . . not you . . . no, never . . .’ He buried his head in my neck, shuffled his knees up round me until I was totally captured by him. And I could see the house as he held me there. A hulking black mount against the sky. Intact. I ran my eye over all its corners – every one present and correct. Arthur was under the bed – probably dirty, scared, but all right.

‘I can see the house,’ I said. His gasps were pumping warm breath into my neck. ‘Arthur’s all right. It’s still there, Bernard, the house. Look – look for yourself.’ But he wouldn’t lift his head up, he just clung to me for safe-keeping like a toddler. And there I was, protecting my husband against those big bad incendiaries, that nasty flying shrapnel, and the horrid, horrid bombs from the naughty, naughty German planes. And the funny thing was I felt so peaceful being embraced by him and gently whispering, ‘There there, Bernard, there there.’

It was quieter outside by the time I felt his grip slowly release me. He shuffled away like he had shuffled towards me – sitting on his backside, his knees up. He didn’t look at me. Wiped his nose. Gathered up the paper from the floor, folded it and placed it on the table. He righted the toppled chair. Coughed, cleared his throat, smoothed his hair and sat down. And all the while I was watching him. There was a bitter smell of burning and whiffs of smoke were foggy inside the shelter. From outside there was shouting, feet running, crunching along on broken glass. And water was trickling somewhere. Bernard at last looked at me and I nodded to say, Hello, so you’re back. But his eyes didn’t hold my gaze for long. He looked to his hands, to his slowly intertwining fingers, and he licked his lips twice before murmuring, ‘I want you to know, Queenie, I do love you.’

Number thirty looked like a blinking skull. The bomb had come in through the roof of the house, down through the floors to explode on the inside. All the windows were gone, so was the front door. Which just left the shell, an empty head in the middle of a terrace. This skull was crowned with the crumbling jagged walls of what was left of the attic rooms. Open to the sky with the green wallpaper of one room and the brown paint of the other, the skull looked to be wearing a gaudy Christmas hat. Everything that was on the inside was now on the outside – the smashed wreckage of this home spilling over the pavements in great mountains of rubble, blocking the road and crunching underfoot. ‘You’ll be safe as houses,’ Auntie Dorothy had been very fond of saying. Anything solid she thought to be safe. Even Bernard. I was glad she wasn’t alive to have to face the fact that even solid can crumble.

Everyone was out to stare. Enraged at the devastation but relieved it wasn’t them and theirs. ‘Lucky they were in the shelter . . . Lucky no one was at home . . . Lucky no one’s buried alive in there.’ Mrs Newman, whose house it was, was left uncharacteristically speechless. Shock, the warden said, as someone took her away. It was only number thirty, nowhere else was touched. What the hell did that house have to do with this war? Was Hitler sleeping easier now he’d turned it into a heap of junk? Like all the other houses either side, we’d lost a few windows and some little bits of number thirty’s chimney went through our roof. But that was it.

‘That bomb had their name on it,’ Mr Todd decided.

We were all being kept back by a tin-hatted warden shouting, ‘It’s not safe to come too close. That lot could come down at any minute.’ While firemen with black faces and dreadfully tired eyes were gingerly peering inside, pushing at walls, looking up, looking down, looking around.

‘Oh, fucking ’ell!’ That’s what the Rotherhithe woman said when she came home to see her tiny attic room now open to the sky.

‘There’s no need for language like that,’ Mr Todd said.

‘It’s understandable,’ I told him. ‘She’s just lost her house.’

‘It was not her house, Mrs Bligh.’

‘Oh, how would you like it?’

‘Could be me tomorrow and, let me assure you, I won’t be using language like that.’

The woman took no notice, slumping down to sit on a wall saying, ‘Has anyone got a fag?’ After more silent, disdainful rolling of eyes she was given one. She only had the two little mites with her, the others were still down in the Underground. And these two kids, scuttling like rats, disappeared over the rubble and into the house with the warden chasing them, shouting, ‘Get out of there, it’s not safe.’ The next minute the little boy, still in his overlong trousers, was being dragged out of the house by the warden who had him by the ear. His feet were nearly off the ground. And the warden was telling him, ‘Give that back. I saw that. That’s not yours.’

The mother was on her feet, ‘Oi, put ’im down.’

‘He’s got something, saw him pick it up. He’s put it in his mouth.’

‘Get off ’im.’

‘Not until I know what he’s got in his mouth. You shouldn’t be round here.’

‘They live here,’ I told him.

‘Here? They live here? You sure?’ the warden asked, while the mother was still shouting at him, ‘Let ’im go or I swear I’ll land you one. I’ve had enough – all right? Jus’ let ’im go.’ The little boy puffed out his cheeks then spat something on to the ground. It was a brooch.

‘There – little thief,’ the warden said, triumphantly.

‘He ain’t a thief!’ the mother shouted. She picked up the brooch.

‘Oi, leave that. That belongs to this house.’

‘It’s mine,’ she said.

‘Give me that. I’ll keep it until we’ve cleared this lot up.’

‘It’s mine – it belongs to me,’ the woman was shouting. It was just a little brooch, no better than one you’d find in a Lucky Bag. The woman was pitifully pleading now – a kid clinging to each of her legs. ‘It’s mine. I swear, honest. It’s mine.’

‘Give it to her,’ I said to the warden.

‘Not until I have ascertained whose property it is,’ he said.

‘What does it matter? It’s just a little tuppenny-ha’penny brooch,’ I whispered to him.

‘It is my job to make sure . . .’ he began, for all to hear.

‘She’s just lost everything. And this is not her first time. Can’t you just give her the benefit of the doubt?’

‘It is my responsibility to see no looting takes place in this . . .’

So I said to him, ‘Oh, fuck off.’

Bernard didn’t say, ‘Over my dead body,’ because we’d all become a little superstitious during the past year. Instead he said, ‘Under no circumstances . . . it’s out of the question . . . Queenie, have you gone quite mad?’

‘They’re people,’ I said. ‘They’ve got nowhere to go.’

‘They’re not our sort.’

‘But they need helping.’

‘They can’t stay here. There are places that will take care of them.’

‘They’ll be no bother.’

I wished the little mites were being quieter at this point. But they weren’t. They were running round our living room, jumping off furniture, playing planes and bombs and making the appropriate racket. Their mother, feet up on a chair, sipped tea and smoked Bernard’s cigarettes.

‘Just for a few days.’

‘I’ve made myself perfectly clear.’

‘Oh, come on, Bernard. Have you no pity?’

‘They’re filthy, Queenie,’ he whispered. He had a point. Their heads were infested. If I turned the little boy Albert on his head the lice would have carried him away.

‘We’ve got all this room. How can we when so many have nowhere?’

‘The authorities will deal with them. You can’t help everybody. There’s a war on.’

‘I know – that’s what I mean.’

I took that poor bombed-out family to a rest centre. We collected the other two kids and the baby from the Underground. And when I came back to our house later, I walked in to tell a thunderstruck Bernard that I didn’t care what he said, I didn’t care what he thought – I had got myself a job. So there!

Twenty-seven

Queenie

Sometimes they were still smouldering like a burnt pie pulled from an oven. The pungent stench of smoke, the dust from rubble steaming off them. Shuffling in or being carried. Some wrapped in blankets, their clothes having gone flying off with the blast. Blackened, sooty faces, red-rimmed, sunken eyes with whites that suddenly flashed, startled, to look around them agog like they’d stumbled on to another planet. And shivering, there was so much shivering.

Population, we called them at the rest centre. The bombed-out who’d had the cheek to live through the calamity of a world blown to bits. Leaving the cardboard coffins empty but filling up the classrooms of the old school building with their tragic faces and filthy clothes that made miners fresh up from the pit look like Christmas fairies. They came in as a crowd like you’d wade through on the Underground or elbow during a department-store sale. And that’s how some saw them – population, not people. Not mothers called Mavis who, stunned speechless, clutched two small children crying for their mum to make the banging stop so they could get to sleep. Not a ten-year-old son called Ralph, trousers soggy with wee, who tried to save bunks with carefully placed socks, jumpers and a fierce face. Not a husband called Sid, whose bloodstained arms held each one of his family in turn to tell them he’d go back to recover what he could from their bombed home. Not a young woman called Christine, who clawed at a warden’s back begging him to find her fiancé who was lost under a toppled wall. Just population. A mass whose desperation made them seem like the feckless, and whose drab presence drained the classrooms of all colour until even the white potties in the corner glinted like diamonds. I would never forgive Hitler for turning human beings into that.

And it was my job to find out who they had once been and where they had once lived. Even the ones who couldn’t remember or couldn’t hear because a blast was still ringing in their ears. It was raucous some days at the rest centre, me straining to hear those weary fragile voices. Other days were so frighteningly silent I wished someone would scream or even start a chorus of the dreadful ‘Roll Out The Barrel’. And sometimes when there were just too many – when even I had to fight my way in – I’d forget a queue, just turn round to the first person I saw and say, ‘Do you need helping? Good, then I’ll start with you.’

Twelve-hour shifts, fourteen sometimes, I had to do at Campden School rest centre. And when I got home Bernard would complain that there was nothing on the table except dust. It wasn’t for himself that he was worried, he took an unusually long time explaining, it was for me. ‘I’m just worried that this job is proving too much for you, what with everything . . .’

Meanwhile at the rest centre two women were sitting there grinning gratefully at me. Violet and her sister Margery. Both husbands were away. One in North Africa, the other in Northampton. They’d got three children between them – twelve, eight and another who, they told me, was a bit slow.

‘The house is completely gone,’ Violet said. They’d lost everything but they giggled. Hysterical euphoria, I was warned, what with the relief of them all being safe. Dug out of their Morrison shelter when Margery tapped on the ceiling rose, which was just in reach, with a teaspoon. ‘Our ration books are still there in the sideboard, you see.’ Another chuckle. ‘It’s under there somewhere but it’s not a priority, they told us, to find things like that. People and persons, that’s their job, they said.’

‘Right, well, to get replacement ration books,’ I began, ‘you’ll need to apply to the administrative centre at the town hall. Or your local food office. Just go to one of those places – I can tell you what bus to get – and fill in a form for yourselves and each of your children . . .’ Both of them were staring vacant as shop mannequins.

‘Shall I write that down?’ I asked.

‘Write what down?’

‘What I just said.’

‘What was that?’

‘About the ration books.’

‘We lost them with the house. They’re in the sideboard, you see. We need to get new ones.’

I should have been asleep on my days off. Lulled drowsy by ordinary daytime noises I’d thought so loudly disturbing before the war – postmen, delivery lorries, kids playing cricket in the street. But as often as not those precious days were spent craning my neck trying to calculate how long a queue could go on. Six sausages and a loaf of bread later and I’m still trying to work it out. If I cooked the dinner and Bernard and Arthur ate it sharpish, I could wash the dishes, and a few clothes from the basket, iron my dress for work, a shirt for Bernard, then maybe get an hour and a half sleep in my feather-pillowed, clean-sheeted, highly sprung bed before they started – the bombers – and I had to go to the Anderson to kip in Armageddon.

Didn’t seem any point being at home for just a few hours when in the morning I had to fight my way through an upside-down world. Roads that should have been familiar turned to wastelands strewn with mountains of wreckage, the displaced intestines of buildings spewing everywhere. Coughing in the fog of rubble dust. Stepping lightly over this, teetering over that. Forced round corners to avoid a factory still ablaze. Gushing streams of water lapping at my heels. Glass crunching under my feet. One morning, looking up a road near home, I recognised nothing. I was a foreigner to this newly modelled place. I had to ask a warden, ‘Have you seen Longbridge Road?’ And even the warden was puzzled, looking around him as if he’d mislaid his hat. ‘It used to be around here somewhere,’ was all he could offer. I had to start spending nights in the rest centre, too, because those few miles to work were taking me hours! But Bernard didn’t like it. He turned up at the centre more than once, standing in the doorway on tippy-toes, scanning the classroom until he’d found me.