She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.
A Long Hard War
September 1940
‘SEE WHERE CHRIST’S blood streams across the firmament,’ a voice nearby said. ‘In’ the firmament, Ursula thought, not ‘across’. The red glow of a false dawn indicated a massive fire in the east. The barrage in Hyde Park cracked and flared and the anti-aircraft guns closer to home were doing a good job of keeping up their own cacophony, shells whistling into the air like fireworks and crack-crack-cracking as they exploded high overhead. And beneath it all was the horrible throbbing drone of the bombers’ unsynchronized engines, a sound that always made her stomach feel pitchy.
A parachute mine floated down gracefully and a basket of incendiaries rattled their contents on to what was left of the road and burst into flowers of fire. A warden, Ursula couldn’t make out his face, ran across to the incendiaries with a stirrup pump. If there had been no noise it might have seemed a beautiful nightscape but there was noise, brutish dissonance that sounded as if someone had thrown open the gates of hell and let out the howling of the damned.
‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,’ the voice spoke again as if reading her thoughts. It was so dark that she could barely make out the owner of the voice although she knew without a doubt that it belonged to Mr Durkin, one of the wardens from her post. He was a retired English teacher, much inclined to quoting. And misquoting. The voice – or Mr Durkin – said something else, it may still have been Faustus but the words disappeared into the enormous whump of a bomb falling a couple of streets away.
The ground shook and another voice, that of someone working on the mound, yelled, ‘Watch out!’ She heard something shifting and a noise like displaced scree rattling and rolling down a mountain, the harbinger of an avalanche. Rubble, not scree. And a mound of it, not a mountain. The rubble that comprised the mound was all that was left of a house, or rather, several houses all ground and mashed into each other now. The rubble had been homes half an hour ago, now those same homes were just a hellish jumble of bricks, broken joists and floorboards, furniture, pictures, rugs, bedding, books, crockery, lino, glass. People. The crushed fragments of lives, never to be whole again.
The rumble slowed to a trickle and finally stopped, the avalanche averted, and the same voice shouted, ‘All right! Carry on!’ It was a moonless night, the only light coming from the masked torches of the heavy rescue squad, ghostly will-o’-the-wisps, moving on the mound. The other reason for the immense, treacherous dark was the thick cloud of smoke and dust that hung like a curtain of vile gossamer in the air. The stink, as usual, was awful. It wasn’t just the smell of coal gas and high explosive, it was the aberrant odour produced when a building was blown to smithereens. The smell of it wouldn’t leave her. She had tied an old silk scarf around her mouth and nose, bandit-style, but it did little to stop the dust and the stench getting into her lungs. Death and decay were on her skin, in her hair, in her nostrils, her lungs, beneath her fingernails, all the time. They had become part of her.
They had only recently been issued with overalls, navy blue and unflattering. Until now Ursula had been wearing her shelter suit, bought almost as a novelty item by Sylvie from Simpson’s soon after war was declared. She had added an old leather belt of Hugh’s from which she’d strung her ‘accessories’ – a torch, gas mask, a first-aid packet and a message pad. In one pocket she had a penknife and a handkerchief and in the other a pair of thick leather gloves and a lipstick. ‘Oh, what a good idea,’ Miss Woolf said, when she saw the penknife. Let’s face it, Ursula thought, despite a host of regulations, they were making it up as they went along.
Mr Durkin, for it was indeed he, resolved himself out of the gloom and foggy smoke. He shone his torch on to his notebook, the weak light barely illuminating the paper. ‘A lot of people live on this street,’ he said, peering at the list of names and house numbers which no longer bore any relation to the surrounding havoc. ‘The Wilsons are at number one,’ he said, as if beginning at the beginning would somehow help.
‘There is no number one any more,’ Ursula said. ‘There are no numbers at all.’ The street was unrecognizable, everything familiar annihilated. Even in broad daylight it would have been unrecognizable. It wasn’t a street any more, it was simply ‘the mound’. Twenty feet high, maybe more, with planks and ladders running up its sides to enable the heavy-rescue squad to crawl over it. There was something primitive about the human chain they had formed, passing debris in baskets from hand to hand, from the top of the mound to the bottom. They could have been slaves building the pyramids – or in this case, excavating them. Ursula thought suddenly of the leafcutter ants that used to be in Regent’s Park zoo, each one dutifully carrying its little burden. Had the ants been evacuated along with the other animals or had they simply set them free in the park? They were tropical insects, so perhaps they would not be able to survive the rigours of the climate of Regent’s Park. She had seen Millie there in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the summer of ’38.
‘Miss Todd?’
‘Yes, sorry, Mr Durkin, miles away.’ It happened a lot these days – she would be in the middle of these awful scenes and she would find that she had drifted off to pleasant moments in the past. Little slivers of light in the darkness.
They made their way warily towards the mound. Mr Durkin passed the list of the street’s residents to her and started giving a hand with the chain of baskets. No one was actually digging on the mound, instead they were clearing the rubble by hand, like careful archaeologists. ‘A bit delicate up there,’ one of the rescue squad near the bottom of the chain said to her. A shaft had been cleared, going down the middle of the mound (a volcano then, rather than a mound, Ursula thought). A lot of the men in the heavy rescue squad were from the building trade – bricklayers, labourers and so on – and Ursula wondered if it felt odd to them to be scrambling over these dismantled buildings, as if time had somehow gone backwards. But then they were pragmatic, resourceful men who were not much given to this kind of fantastical thinking.
Occasionally a voice would call for quiet – impossible when the raid was still going on overhead – but nonetheless everything would stop while the men at the top of the mound listened intently for signs of life within. It looked hopeless but if there was one thing that the Blitz had taught them it was that people lived (and died) in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Ursula searched in the gloom for the dim blue lights that marked out the incident officer’s post and instead caught sight of Miss Woolf, stumbling purposefully over broken bricks towards her. ‘It’s bad,’ she said matter-of-factly when she reached Ursula. ‘They need someone slight.’
‘Slight?’ Ursula repeated. The word, for some reason, was devoid of meaning.
She had joined the ARP as a warden after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March ’39, when it suddenly seemed horribly clear to her that Europe was doomed. (‘What a gloomy Cassandra you are,’ Sylvie said, but Ursula worked in the Air Raid Precautions department at the Home Office, she could see the future.) During the strange twilight of the phoney war the wardens had been something of a joke but now they were ‘the backbone of London’s defences’ – this from Maurice.