Her fellow wardens were a mixed bunch. Miss Woolf, a retired hospital matron, was the senior warden. Thin and straight as a poker, her iron-grey hair in a neat bun, she came with natural authority. Then there was her deputy, the aforesaid Mr Durkin, Mr Simms, who worked for the Ministry of Supply, and Mr Palmer, who was a bank manager. The latter two men had fought in the last war and were too old for this one (Mr Durkin had been ‘medically exempt’, he said defensively). Then there was Mr Armitage who was an opera singer and as there were no operas to sing in any more he kept them entertained with his renditions of ‘La donna è mobile’ and ‘Largo al factotum’. ‘Just the popular arias,’ he confided to Ursula. ‘Most people don’t like anything challenging.’
‘Give me old Al Bowlly any day,’ Mr Bullock said. The rather aptly named Mr Bullock (John) was in Miss Woolf’s words ‘a little questionable’. He certainly cut a strapping figure – he wrestled competitively and lifted weights in a local gym as well as being the denizen of several of the less salubrious nightclubs. He was also acquainted with some rather glamorous ‘dancers’. One or two had ‘dropped in’ on him in the shelter and been shooed away like chickens by Miss Woolf. (‘Dancers my eye,’ she said.)
Last but not least there was Herr Zimmerman (‘Gabi, please,’ he said, but no one did), who was an orchestra violinist from Berlin, ‘our refugee’ as they referred to him (Sylvie had evacuees, similarly denoted by their circumstances). He had ‘jumped ship’ in ’35 while on tour with his orchestra. Miss Woolf, who knew him through the Refugee Committee, had gone to great lengths to make sure that Herr Zimmerman and his violin were not interned, or worse, shipped across the lethal waters of the Atlantic. They all followed Miss Woolf’s lead and never addressed him as ‘Mister’, always as ‘Herr’. Ursula knew that Miss Woolf called him thus to make him feel at home but it only succeeded in making more of an alien of him.
Miss Woolf had come across Herr Zimmerman in the course of her work for the Central British Fund for German Jewry (‘Rather a mouthful, I’m afraid’). Ursula was never sure whether Miss Woolf was a woman of some influence or whether she simply refused to take no for an answer. Both, perhaps.
‘A cultured lot, aren’t we?’ Mr Bullock said sarcastically. ‘Why don’t we just put on shows instead of fighting a war.’ (‘Mr Bullock is a man of strong emotions,’ Miss Woolf said to Ursula. And strong drink too, Ursula thought. Strong everything in fact.)
A small hall belonging to the Methodists had been commandeered to be their post by Miss Woolf (herself a Methodist), and they had furnished it with a couple of camp beds, a small stove with tea-making equipment and an assortment of chairs, both hard and soft. Compared to some posts, compared to many, it was luxurious.
Mr Bullock turned up one night with a green baize card table and Miss Woolf declared herself rather fond of bridge. Mr Bullock, in the lull between the fall of France and the first raids at the beginning of September, had taught them all poker. ‘Quite the card sharp,’ Mr Simms said. Both he and Mr Palmer lost several shillings to Mr Bullock. Miss Woolf, on the other hand, was two pounds up by the time the Blitz started. An amused Mr Bullock expressed surprise that Methodists were allowed to gamble. Her winnings bought a dartboard so Mr Bullock had nothing to complain about, she said. One day when they were clearing a jumble of boxes in the corner of the hall they discovered that a piano had been hiding there all along and Miss Woolf – who was proving a woman of many talents – was a rather good player. Although her own tastes tended towards Chopin and Liszt, she was more than game to ‘bash out a few tunes’ – Mr Bullock’s words – for them all to sing along to.
They had fortified the post with sandbags although none of them believed that they would be of any use if they were hit. Apart from Ursula, who thought that taking precautions seemed an eminently sensible idea, they all tended to agree with Mr Bullock that ‘If it’s got your name on it, it’s got your name on it,’ a form of Buddhist detachment that Dr Kellet would have admired. There had been an obituary in The Times during the summer. Ursula was rather glad that Dr Kellet had missed another war. It would have reminded him of the futility of Guy losing everything at Arras.
They were all part-time volunteers, apart from Miss Woolf, who was paid and full-time and took her duties very seriously. She subjected them to rigorous drills and made sure they did their training – in anti-gas procedures, in extinguishing incendiaries, how to enter burning buildings, load stretchers, make splints, bandage limbs. She questioned them on the contents of the manuals that she made them read and she was very keen on them learning how to label bodies, both alive and dead, so that they could be sent off like parcels to the hospital or the mortuary with all the correct information attached. They had done several exercises out in the open where they had acted out a mock raid. (‘Play-acting,’ Mr Bullock scoffed, failing to get into the spirit of things.) Ursula played a casualty twice, once having to feign a broken leg and on another occasion complete unconsciousness. Another time she had been on the ‘other side’ and as a warden had had to deal with Mr Armitage simulating someone in hysterical shock. She supposed it was his experience on stage that enabled him to give such an unnervingly authentic performance. It was quite hard to persuade him out of character at the end of the exercise.
They had to know the occupants of every building in their sector, whether they had a shelter of their own or whether they went to a public one or whether they too were fatalists and didn’t bother at all. They had to know if anyone had gone away or moved, married, had a baby, died. They had to know where the hydrants were, cul-de-sacs, narrow alleyways, cellars, rest centres.
‘Patrol and watch’, that was Miss Woolf’s motto. They tended to patrol the streets in pairs until midnight when there was usually a lull, and then if there were no bombs in their sector they would have a polite argument over who should occupy the camp beds. Of course, if there was a raid in ‘their streets’ then it was ‘all hands to the pumps’ in Miss Woolf’s words. Sometimes they did the ‘watching’ from her flat, two storeys up with an excellent view from a big corner window.
Miss Woolf also did extra first-aid exercises with them. As well as having been a hospital matron, she had run a field hospital during the last war and explained to them (‘As you will appreciate, those of you gentlemen who saw active service in that dreadful conflict’) that casualties in war were very different from the routine accidents that one saw in peacetime. ‘Much nastier,’ she said. ‘We must be prepared for some distressing sights.’ Of course, even Miss Woolf had not imagined how distressing these sights would be when they involved civilians rather than battlefield soldiers, when they involved shovelling up unidentifiable lumps of flesh or picking out the heartbreakingly small limbs of a child from the rubble.
‘We cannot turn away,’ Miss Woolf told her, ‘we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.’ What did that mean, Ursula wondered. ‘It means,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.’
‘And if we are killed?’
‘Then others must remember us.’
The first serious incident they attended had been at a large house in the middle of a terrace that had received a direct hit. The rest of the terrace was undamaged, as though the Luftwaffe had personally targeted the occupants – two families including grandparents, several children, two babes-in-arms. They had all survived the blast, sheltering in the cellar, but both the mains water pipe and a large sewage pipe had fractured and before either could be turned off everyone in the cellar had drowned in the awful sludge.