‘I did? Well, I’m sure I had a reason.’
He chose not to remember the reason and scanned the night sky once more.
“Three thousand feet, you say? I’m never gonna get to hit one, am I?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Pity. In the last war I got three German biplanes over France. I was a young sharpshooter in those days. Took a shot at Von Richthofen, tore a piece out of his fuselage, but I couldn’t bring him
In the ear of the mind Cal heard Reggie’s voice telling him to remember the Lusitania.
‘Perhaps, sir, you should wait for the declaration of War?’
Gelbroaster considered this.
‘That’s a technicality, son. We haven’t declared war, that’s just a matter of time. But we’re here. And there’s a war on. Seems a mite unfriendly to our hosts not to lend a hand. If you’re invited to a neighbour’s house for dinner and the kitchen goes up in a whole mess of burning chicken fat, you help out with the buckets, don’t you? Of course we could cut and run, like Joe Kennedy did. Moved his wife and kids out of London when the first bombs fell, got himself recalled at the first opportunity, and told all America that England was done for. Or we could stay and fight. Which is it to be? You a runner or a fighter?’
‘I’m a fighter, sir. But as we’ve only the one gun between us I’d be happy to load for you.’
Gelbroaster rose up. Five foot eight inches of pure belligerence. No fool like an old fool. He pointed the gun skyward. Cal heard a whispered ‘Geronimo’ and then the boom of the gun ringing out like a hand-held howitzer.
‘Sonsovbitches,’ Gelbroaster said softly, and slipped the rifle into the crook of his arm. ‘Glad to have you aboard, son,’ he said to Cal, patted him on one shoulder and set off to the roof door.
The whine grew and grew. Cal had heard it the second the report of Gelbroaster’s shot had died away. Still it grew. Stopped Gelbroaster in his tracks. He turned. They stared up. A German bomber bursting red and yellow flames-a billowing trail of black smoke-spiralling out of control, spinning down to earth somewhere in the region of Hyde Park. Then a huge, woolly ‘whumpff as the plane and its unspent payload of bombs exploded.
Gelbroaster looked at the gun. Incredulity fading fast. Looked out at the orange glow on the western skyline where the plane had crashed.
‘Maybe I’m younger’n I thought,’ he said wistfully, then, lungs full and spirits rallied, he bellowed to the heavens, ‘Root hog or die!’
Cal stayed. The bombers came in waves. He sat in Gelbroaster’s chair and watched the Blut und Eisen version of July 4th light up the sky and shake the earth around him. Away in the south, London burnt fiercely. Closer to home he could see incendiaries bursting in buildings in the little streets of Mayfair, feel the weight of the near-misses as high explosives crashed around him. He felt oddly free from fear. The rational part of his mind told him that the next bomb after a near miss could well be a direct hit, and while the hotel was a relatively sound structure, ‘steel ribs an’ all’, he was in a most exposed position-and the rest of his mind overruled, in thrall to nothing more cerebral, nothing less visceral, than the thrill of it all.
Each part of the spectacle had its own colour. Ack-ack shells burst white in the night, little puffs of man-made cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky-and if they were close enough they showered shards of metal rain on to the streets below, adding atonal, clattering, tinkling music to the show. Tracer bullets fired by night-fighters shot across the sky, a dozen differing shades, like a pool rack dispersed by the cue ball, shooting red, shooting white, shooting green. Incendiaries burst blue and orange and then took on their hue from whatever they consumed. Oil and rubber burnt black. Wood burnt red and orange. And the searchlights roved like giant’s fingers, crossing and criss-crossing and reminding him pointlessly of the opening of every Twentieth Century Fox movie he’d ever seen.
It was the English’s own ack-ack drove him in. He watched a random pattern of shards hit the roof some thirty feet away, a hard rain, striking sparks, bouncing back, dancing like fireflies, racing towards him to stop only six or seven feet clear. He fell into bed in the small hours, curtains wide, to be woken by the light three hours later. For a moment he could not remember where he was. He had been dreaming of an Appalachian journey he had made with his father when he was ten, along the borders of Kentucky and the Carolinas, through the Cumberland Gap. He opened his eyes and could not place the cream walls and the chintzy furniture. Where were the knotty pine boards, the Shaker chairs? Then the smell focused him-cordite and burning, everything burning-paint, wood, rubber-and flakes of ash fluttering by his sixth-floor window. London burning.
He opened the windows and stretched out a hand. A wisp of ash landed on the palm of his hand, like catching an autumn leaf. It was paper, charred and weightless. The print still legible. The ghost of message and meaning. He blew gently on it as though on a dandelion head and watched it fragment to nothingness before his eyes, and as the tiny specks of grey wafted out over London he saw the city under a haze of ash, every breeze eddying by with the dust of a night’s destruction, and over in the south the orange glow of sunrise. Sunrise? In the south-west? London burning.
He dressed quickly, skipped bathing and shaving, and went out. It was as though he had wandered into the art gallery of the half-waking mind. At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning London was a hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of the half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped, the living, the dying and the dead-wires and pipes bursting from the ground like the spilt entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines of pumping, engines of rescue, engines of demolition, all the machinery of antiwar-and it was as though Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban-pastoral.
He drifted across Mayfair, down Half Moon Street, southwards, across Piccadilly and the Royal Parks, eastwards, and found himself an hour later upon one of the Thames bridges. The one by the Houses of Parliament that led to the big hospital on the southern bank. He could not remember its name, if he ever knew it.
Parliament had been hit. It was smouldering and smoking fiercely. He wondered what the English felt. How would he feel if the Capitol had been blasted, the White House burnt? An Englishman told him. Just when he needed a native there was one ready to hand, drifting along the bridge from the opposite direction, pinstripe suit hastily pulled on over inch-stripe pyjamas-he could see the red and white flannelette sticking out from the cuffs, draped over sockless shoes like ludicrous spats. He too had neither washed nor shaved, and maybe not slept, he was eye-bleary and chin-fuzzy. He stared about him, another man in or out of the dream. He and Cal all but collided, back to back.
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open to the fields and to the sky.
Cal took a stab at it. ‘Byron?’
‘Wordsworth. Upon Westminster Bridge. 1802. I don’t think he meant “open to the sky” to sound quite so vulnerable as it does today, what?’
‘I guess not,’ Cal replied.
‘You’re an American?’
‘I’m not wearing the uniform for fancy dress.’
‘Eh? What? No. I mean, yes. Of course not. Sorry, there are so many uniforms in London these days. ARP, Home Guard, Heavy Rescue, Free French, Free Poles…’