‘Come on then,’ Mr Simms said, standing up and sighing heavily, ‘let’s get out there.’ By the time they were out the red alert had come through. Just twelve minutes, if they were lucky, to dragoon people into shelters, the siren at their back.
Ursula never used public shelters, there was something about the crush of bodies, the claustrophobia, that made her skin crawl. They had attended a particularly gruesome incident when a shelter took a direct hit from a parachute mine in their sector. Ursula thought that she would rather die out in the open than trapped like a fox in a hole.
It was a beautiful evening. A crescent moon and her bevy of stars had pierced the black backcloth of night. She thought of Romeo’s encomium to Juliet – It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. Ursula was in a poetic mood, some might have said, herself included, overly poetic, as a consequence of her mournful mood. There was no Mr Durkin to misquote any more. He had suffered a heart attack during an incident. He was recovering, ‘thank goodness’, Miss Woolf said. She had found time to visit him in hospital and Ursula felt no guilt that she had not. Hugh was dead, Mr Durkin wasn’t, there was little room in her heart for sympathy. Mr Durkin’s position as Miss Woolf’s deputy had been taken by Mr Simms.
The strident noises of war had begun. The boom of the barrage, the raiders’ engines overhead with that monotonous, uneven beat that made her nauseous. The gun discharges, the searchlights poking their fingers into the sky, the muted anticipation of dread – all soon spoiled any idea of poetry.
By the time they arrived at the incident everyone was there, the gas and water, the Bomb Disposal Squad, heavy rescue, light rescue, stretcher parties, the mortuary van (a baker’s van by day). The road was carpeted with the tangled hoses of an AFS unit as on one side of the street a building was well on fire, with sparks and burning embers spitting out. Ursula thought she had caught a glimpse of Fred Smith, his features briefly illuminated by the flames, but came to the conclusion that she had imagined it.
The rescue squad was as cautious as ever with their torches and lamps even though the fire was blazing away at their backs. Yet, to a man, they had cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, despite the fact that the gas men hadn’t cleared the area, not to mention that the presence of the Bomb Disposal Squad indicated a bomb that might go off at any moment. Everyone just got on with the job in hand (needs must), cavalier in the face of possible disaster. Or perhaps some people (and Ursula wondered if she included herself among them nowadays) simply didn’t care any more.
She had an uncomfortable feeling, a premonition perhaps, that things were not going to go well tonight. ‘It was the Bach,’ Miss Woolf comforted, ‘it was unsettling for the soul.’
Apparently, the street straddled two sectors and the incident officer in charge was wrangling with two wardens who both claimed dominion over it. Miss Woolf didn’t join this little fracas as it turned out that it wasn’t their sector at all, but as it was obviously such a major incident she declared that their post should pitch in and get on with it and ignore what anyone said to them.
‘Outlaws,’ Mr Bullock said, appreciatively.
‘Hardly,’ Miss Woolf said.
The half of the street that wasn’t on fire had been badly hit and the acid-raw smell of powdered brick and cordite struck their lungs immediately. Ursula tried to think of the meadow at the back of the copse at Fox Corner. Flax and larkspur, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. She thought of the smell of new-mown grass and the freshness of summer rain. This was a new diversionary tactic to combat the brutish scents of an explosion. (‘Does it work?’ a curious Mr Emslie asked. ‘Not really,’ Ursula said.) ‘I used to think of my mother’s perfume,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘April Violets. But unfortunately now when I try to remember my mother all I can think of are the bombs.’
Ursula offered Mr Emslie a peppermint. ‘It helps a little bit,’ she said.
The closer they got to the incident the worse it proved to be (the opposite, in Ursula’s experience, was rarely so).
A grisly tableau was the first thing to greet them – mangled bodies were strewn around, many of them no more than limbless torsos, like tailor’s dummies, their clothes blown off. Ursula was reminded of the mannequins she had seen with Ralph in Oxford Street, after the John Lewis bomb. A stretcher-bearer, lacking as yet any live casualties, was picking up limbs – arms and legs that were sticking out of the rubble. He looked as if he was intending to piece the dead together again at a later date. Did someone do that, Ursula wondered? In the mortuaries – try and match people up, like macabre jigsaws? Some people were beyond re-creation, of course – two men from the rescue squad were raking and shovelling lumps of flesh into baskets, another was scrubbing something off a wall with a yard brush.
Ursula wondered if she knew any of the victims. Their flat in Phillimore Gardens was a mere couple of streets away from here. Perhaps she passed some of them in the morning on her way to work, or had spoken to them in the grocer’s or the butcher’s.
‘Apparently there are quite a lot of people unaccounted for,’ Miss Woolf said. She had spoken to the Incident Officer, who had been grateful, it seemed, to talk to a warden with common sense. ‘We’re not outlaws any more, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
One floor above the man with the yard brush (although there was no floor) a dress was hanging on a coat hanger from a picture rail. Ursula often found herself more moved by these small reminders of domestic life – the kettle still on the stove, the table laid for a supper that would never be eaten – than she was by the greater misery and destruction that surrounded them. Although when she looked at the dress now she realized that there was a woman still wearing it, her head and legs blown off but not her arms. The capriciousness of high explosives never ceased to surprise Ursula. The woman seemed to have become fused with the wall in some way. The fire was burning so brightly that she could make out a little brooch still pinned to the dress. A black cat, a rhinestone for an eye.
Rubble shifted underfoot as she made her way to the back wall of this same house. There was a woman sitting propped up amongst the rubble, arms and legs splayed like a rag doll. She looked as if she had been tossed in the air and landed any old how – which was probably the case. Ursula tried to signal to the stretcher-bearer but there was now a stream of bombers passing overhead and no one could hear her above the noise.
The woman was grey with dust so that it was almost impossible to tell how old she was. She had a horrible-looking burn on her hand. Ursula fumbled in her first-aid pack for the tube of Burnol and smeared some of the ointment on to her hand. She didn’t know why, the woman looked too far gone to be cured by Burnol. She wished she had some water, it was painful to see how dry the woman’s lips were. Unexpectedly, she opened her dark eyes, her lashes pale and spiky with dust, and tried to say something but her voice was so hoarse from the dust that Ursula couldn’t understand her. Was she foreign? ‘What is it?’ Ursula asked. She had a feeling the woman was very near death now.
‘Baby,’ the woman rasped suddenly, ‘where’s my baby?’
‘Baby?’ Ursula echoed, looking around. She could see no sign of any baby. It could be anywhere in the rubble.
‘His name,’ the woman said, guttural and indistinct – she was making a tremendous effort to be lucid – ‘is Emil.’
‘Emil?’
The woman nodded her head very slightly as if she were no longer capable of speech. Ursula looked around again for any sign of a baby. She turned back to the woman to ask how big her baby was but her head was lolling limply and when Ursula felt for a pulse she found nothing.