Behind No 26 and its neighbours were tiny, concrete back yards filled with mangles, bicycles, tin baths -
all rusted now - piles of coal and outside lavatories, the yards themselves backing onto a bigger compound where some of the traders from the big bustling street market called Petticoat Lane kept their stalls and barrows. Sally had brought me here one Sunday morning, not ashamed of showing me a rougher part of her town, and I'd remembered Tyne Street and the usefully positioned No 26 after my first run-in with the Blackshirts when I was looking for safe havens. Sure, I had my pick of thousands of such places, but all my eventual choices had something to do with Sally.
The back windows of No 26 - and oddly, there were only two, both over the house's creaky wooden staircase that twisted up from the end of the short, ground-floor corridor to the bedrooms at the top -
overlooked the yards, the lower one providing a handy exit should the enemy come pounding on the front door.
Most of the family furniture was packed into the ground floor's only room, making it the parlour/kitchen/dining room and (because it had the only sink in the whole place) bathroom. It was about sixteen feet square and its single window looked out onto the street. In one corner, close to the deep enamel sink with shelves overhead, cups and pans hanging from them, stood a cast-iron gas stove and, instead of a fireplace, in the wall opposite the window there was a huge black range built into the chimney breast, with ovens at the sides and a fire grate in the middle; an oversized kettle, more saucepans, along with a small camp cooker I'd brought here myself, cluttered its flat surface. Next to it was a lumpy armchair with frayed armrests, a flower-patterned sofa, where I'd dumped some of my clothes, taking up most of the wall on that side of the room; sitting on a veneered hardboard sideboard under the window was a Bush wireless set and a stoneware vase filled with shrivelled flowers I'd never bothered to throw out. Just behind the door to the corridor was a plyboard kitchen cabinet, its pull-down worktop closed, and nestled between this and the gas stove stood a tall lampstand with a tasselled shade, an arrangement imposed by jumble rather than design.
The wall here was nothing more than a wooden floor-to-ceiling partition separating the room from the corridor, painted cream and brown like the door, window frame and sill, and the mantelshelf (these days loaded with cigarette cartons) over the range. Deep brown, patterned linoleum covered the floor, almost worn through in places, and at the room's centre, with barely enough space between it and the surrounding furniture, was a steel Morrison shelter substituting for a table, the wooden chairs around it pushed tight against the wire mesh sides. All I'd found on it when I'd first entered No 26 were a half-empty jar of furry lemon curd, a split packet of dried Weston Biscuits, a can of Keating's bug, beetle and flea powder, and a yellowed copy of the Daily Sketch dated 24th March 1945, the very day the Blood Death rockets had fallen.
Mercifully, the house had been empty of corpses and it hadn't taken long to collect those on the cobblestones outside and transport them to the stadium; as Tyne Street was to become an occasional home I figured this was the least I could do for its dead residents. After that I'd moved in with my own comforts and weaponry (the bedroom above was stashed with canned food and guns, as well as a few hand grenades I'd picked up from a depot not too many miles from there, just south of the river). I didn't mind that this place didn't have the comforts of my other refuges; fact is, its shabbiness made it less of a target for the Blackshirts -they'd never expect me to hole up in a shack like this - and I'd always felt pretty secure here.
I kept the front-door key on the inside sill of the ground-floor window, the window itself left open a couple of inches, so while Cissie propped Stern up by the door I went and got it. She didn't make a sound as I pushed the long key into the lock, but I knew she was all in; even in the moonlight her face looked haggard, her eyes full of skittish nervousness and concern for the injured German.
Pushing open the heavy front door, I took Stern over my shoulder again and carried him straight to the end of the short corridor. The bare wooden stairs creaked and groaned under our weight, the sounds exaggerated in the close confines of the tall house. The bedroom door was open and moonlight streaming through the two windows helped me work my way through the boxes and stacked cans towards the bed.
I laid him down carefully and even before I'd drawn the curtains and lit the oil lamp on the mantelpiece with matches lying next to it Cissie had removed Stern's jacket and was unbuttoning his shirt
'I'm gonna boil some water,' I said to her. 'Use something to try and check the bleeding.'
She stopped me as I reached the bedroom door. 'Hoke. The bullet...'
I tried not to think about it 'Yeah. It'll have to come out. That's why we need lots of hot water.'
'You'll do it?'
That's what I hadn't wanted to think about 'Unless you want to volunteer.'
She didn't reply and I shrugged. 'I'll do what I can.'
I hurried downstairs and lit the camp cooker on top of the range. I'd never risked lighting a fire here, nor anywhere else unless out in the open, because chimney smoke could attract the wrong kind of attention, and I wasn't going to light one tonight. After adjusting the circle of flames, I worked my way round the Morrison shelter and pulled the curtains tight together, then lit the lantern on the makeshift tabletop. The room brightened, but the shadows became more intense. I drew the pistol and laid it next to the lantern.
Pipes clanked before water gushed in spurts from the tap over the sink and I had to wait for a steady flow before filling a saucepan; the pressure was weaker than the last time I was here and it took a couple of minutes to fill the container to the brim. Once the saucepan was on the burner I washed my hands with a rock of carbolic soap from the sink's drainer, repeating the process when I was done, and shaking them rather than use the stiffened rag passing itself off as a kitchen towel on a hook nearby. I needed a cigarette badly, but decided to wait. Cissie's call came from over my head, followed by a loud thump on the ceiling.
Holding my hands close to my chest to keep them clean, I made my way back upstairs, glancing out the window opposite the tiny landing as I went by. There wasn't much to see through the weather-stained glass, save for shadows and the odd shapes of stalls and trestles down in the bigger yard, but I was confident that no one had followed us here. As I turned away I stumbled on the last step to the landing and my shoulder bumped the opposite wall; like the partition downstairs, it was made of wood and the cracking sound that came from it was like a gunshot. Through the open doorway I saw Cissie react sharply and I mumbled an apology as I approached the bed.