One of the women had managed to claw her way up and cling on to one of the cellar walls, they could see her through a gap, and Miss Woolf and Mr Armitage had held on to Hugh’s leather belt while Ursula had dangled over the lip of what remained of the cellar. She reached out a hand to the woman, thought for a moment that she might actually manage to grasp hold of her, but then she simply disappeared beneath the feculent water as it rose to fill the cellar.
When the fire brigade finally arrived to pump out the place they recovered fifteen bodies, seven of them children, and laid them in front of the house, as if to dry. Miss Woolf ordered them shrouded as quickly as possible and stowed away behind a wall while they awaited the arrival of the mortuary wagon. ‘It doesn’t do morale any good to see sights like that,’ she said. Ursula had vomited up her supper long before then. She vomited after nearly every incident. Mr Armitage and Mr Palmer too, Mr Simms before. Only Miss Woolf and Mr Bullock seemed to have strong stomachs for death.
Afterwards, Ursula tried not to think about the babies or the look of terror on that poor woman’s face as she had grasped in vain for Ursula’s hand (and something else, disbelief perhaps that this could be happening). ‘Think of them being at peace now,’ Miss Woolf counselled stoutly afterwards, dispensing scalding-hot sugary tea. ‘They are out of all this, just gone a little sooner.’ And Mr Durkin said, ‘They have all gone into the world of light,’ and Ursula thought, they are all gone into the world of light. Ursula wasn’t convinced that the dead went anywhere, except into a void, black and infinite.
‘Well, I hope I don’t die covered in shit,’ Mr Bullock said, more prosaically.
She thought she would never get over that first terrible incident but the memory of it had already been overlaid by many others and now she barely thought about it.
‘It’s bad,’ Miss Woolf said matter-of-factly. ‘They need someone slight.’
‘Slight?’ Ursula repeated.
‘Slim,’ Miss Woolf said patiently.
‘To go in there?’ Ursula said, looking up in horror at the summit of the volcano. She wasn’t sure she had the gumption to be lowered into the very maw of hell.
‘No, no, not there,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Come with me.’ It had begun to rain, quite hard, and Ursula blundered with difficulty in Miss Woolf’s wake over the jagged and broken ground, littered with every kind of obstacle. Her torch was next to useless. She caught her foot in a bicycle wheel and wondered if anyone had been riding it when the bomb struck.
‘Here,’ Miss Woolf said. It was another mound, just as big as the last. Was it another street, or the same street? Ursula had lost all sense of direction. How many mounds were there? A nightmarish scenario flashed through her mind – the whole of London reduced to one gigantic mound.
This mound wasn’t a volcano, the rescue squad were going in through a horizontal shaft at the side. More robust this time, they were hacking at the rubble with picks and shovels.
‘There’s a kind of hole here,’ Miss Woolf said, taking Ursula’s hand firmly in hers, as if Ursula were a reluctant child, and leading her forward. Ursula could see no sign of a hole. ‘It’s safe, I think, you just need to wriggle through.’
‘A tunnel?’
‘No, it’s just a hole. There’s a bit of a drop on the other side, we think there’s someone down there. Not a long drop,’ she added encouragingly. ‘Not a tunnel,’ she said again. ‘Go head first.’ The rescue squad stopped hacking at the rubble and waited, rather impatiently, for Ursula.
She had to take her helmet off in order to wriggle into the hole, her torch held awkwardly in front of her. Despite what Miss Woolf said, she had been expecting a tunnel but was immediately confronted with a cavernous space. She might have been potholing. She was relieved when she felt two pairs of invisible hands attach themselves to Hugh’s old leather belt. She moved the torch around trying to see something, anything. ‘Hello?’ she shouted as she shone the torch into the drop. It was screened by a haphazard lattice of twisted gas pipes and wood, splintered like matchsticks. She concentrated on a gap in the chaotic mesh, trying to make out anything in the gloom beyond. An upturned face, a man’s, pale and ghostly, seemed to rise out of the darkness like a vision, a prisoner in an oubliette. There might be a body attached to the face, she couldn’t be sure.
‘Hello?’ she said, as if the man might reply, although now she could see that part of his head was missing.
‘Anyone?’ Miss Woolf said hopefully when she crawled backwards out of the hole.
‘One dead.’
‘Easy to recover?’
‘No.’
The rain made everything even more foul if that were possible, turning the wet brick dust into a kind of glutinous grit. A couple of hours of toiling in these conditions and they were all covered from head to toe in the stuff. It was too disgusting to give any thought to.
There was a shortage of ambulances, traffic had been snarled up by an incident on the Cromwell Road, as had the doctor and nurse who should have been there, and Miss Woolf’s extra first-aid training was put to good use. Ursula splinted a broken arm, bandaged a head wound, patched an eye and strapped up Mr Simms’s ankle – he had twisted it on the rough ground. She labelled two unconscious survivors (head injuries, broken femur, broken collarbone, broken ribs, what was probably a crushed pelvis) and several dead (who were easier, they were simply dead) and then double-checked them in case she had labelled them the wrong way round and had posted the dead to the hospital and the living to the mortuary. She also directed numerous survivors to the rest centre, and walking wounded to the first-aid post being manned by Miss Woolf.
‘Catch Anthony if you can, will you?’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘Get a mobile canteen down here.’ Ursula sent Tony off with this errand. Only Miss Woolf called him Anthony. He was thirteen, a Boy Scout and their civil defence messenger boy, hurtling around on the rubble-and-glass-strewn streets on his bike. If Tony were her child, Ursula thought, she would have sent him far away from the nightmare instead of plunging him into the depths of it. He loved it all, needless to say.
After she’d spoken to Tony, Ursula went back through the hole again because someone thought they had heard a sound, but the pale, dead man was as quiet as before. ‘Hello, again,’ she said to him. She thought it might be Mr McColl from the neighbouring street. Perhaps he was visiting someone. Unlucky. She was dog-tired, you could almost envy the dead their eternal rest.
When she emerged again from the hole the mobile canteen had arrived. She swilled her mouth out with tea and spat out brick dust. ‘I bet you used to be a real lady,’ Mr Palmer laughed. ‘I’m affronted,’ Ursula said and laughed. ‘I think I spit in a very ladylike way.’ The rescue on the mound was still going on with no sign of any result but the rest of the night was winding down and Miss Woolf told her to go back to the post and rest. Up on the mound a rope had been called for, to lower someone down, Ursula supposed, or pull someone up, or both. (‘A woman, they think,’ Mr Durkin said.)
She was all in, could barely put one foot in front of the other. Avoiding the debris as best she could, she had gone only ten yards or so when someone grabbed her by the arm and yanked her backwards so hard that she would have fallen over if the same person hadn’t kept his tight grip on her and kept her upright. ‘Watch it, Miss Todd,’ a voice growled.
‘Mr Bullock?’ In the confines of the post Mr Bullock alarmed her a little, he seemed so unassailable, but, curiously, out here in this benighted place he was harmless. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’