Charlie had shaken his head. “What’s that?” he’d said, with dread in his voice.
She had settled her despondent gaze on him. “Well, Charlie, it’s hard to describe. It’s... it’s when folks have been so beaten down by life and all the hardships that go with it, least for our kind, that... that all that sadness and, well, anger too, just comes out of your mouth and you howl away, like some poor, suffering beast. Because that’s what folks can become who haven’t ever had a decent turn in life. You still see it often round here,” she’d added bitterly.
“Have... have you ever had to howl like that, Gran?” he’d asked.
She had hurriedly changed the subject and didn’t answer him.
Charlie knew he never wanted to go to the workhouse. And he never wanted to be so sad that he howled, though some days he could see it happening.
He tugged a single tattered sheet over his wet self, felt in his pocket for the biscuits, and broke off a piece. He pushed it into his mouth and quickly chewed. He wanted to eat slowly, but he was too ravenous for that.
With his other hand, he felt for the paper money and coins. Food and proper money, instead of a shilling or mere pence. His prospects had gone up quite nicely with a single night’s larcenous labor.
He lit a candle stub, angled it into the crevice between the wooden box and several old pillows that constituted his mattress, and pulled the money out. His soiled fingers rubbed over the countenances of the august royal images imprinted on the notes and then touched the coolness of the coins. On the penny farthing was the image of Britannia on one side and George the Sixth on the obverse.
In total there was thirty-eight pounds in paper, plus an assortment of coins adding up to around another four quid. He had never held such a fortune. He slowly put it all back in his pocket and turned his contented attention to the book. In the dim light Charlie noticed for the first time that there was nothing printed on the cover or the spine. When he turned to the first page his hopes of more bounty from this stolen article fell. He quickly flipped through all the pages; every single one was blank.
“Bloody useless,” he commented to the darkness. He hid it under the pillows, snuffed out the candle with moistened fingers, and listened to the quiet outside. It was interrupted only by the occasional passing of a sputtering car belching dodgy petrol, or the sharp strike of regulation boots on pavement, heralding a weary constable or an air warden performing their important rounds.
As time passed, there came the frail echoes of a wireless from the flat next door. Charlie and his gran had once had an Ekco brand radio, but it had gone to pay bills. Charlie missed listening to the BBC. The radio broadcasts reported the war-related news, certainly. But there were also programs that made him laugh, and Children’s Hour, one of his favorites, which came on every day. Sometimes, he would sit out in the hallway at night and listen to the wirelesses of other people, hoping to hear well enough to chuckle at something — anything, really, to take him away for even a few moments from the desperation of his daily life.
At three in the morning he heard the gong of a tower clock. A minute later this was followed by a bullhorn blast from a ship, either navigating up or down the long, winding thread of the mud-coated Thames. The 215-mile-long river essentially defined Charlie’s world, becoming tidal at Teddington, and sliding into Greater London at Thames Ditton. It fanned wider and ever more winding as it headed east. All the fine bridges were to the west because of that. The unmistakable loop around the Isle of Dogs made the East End and the all-important docks easily visible from the sky for German bombers, especially on moonlit nights. And the Luftwaffe had taken advantage of that unique topographical quirk, with devastating results.
A moment later the sharp cry of a train whistle cut right through him. Charlie tried to think of which station it could be but then gave up. And when would he ever be on a train? He had been born in this city and he felt quite certain that he would perish here as well without ever once traveling anywhere else; the only unknown was how many years from now. Or days. And whether his end would be natural or violent. These thoughts were not the result of an overactive imagination. Charlie had seen much that was unthinkable and terrible in every conceivable way.
Yet nothing, for him, could ever take away the horror of that late summer’s day.
The Day the Bombs Came
Black Saturday, Charlie had often heard it called afterward. Before that, sirens had sounded for many months with few German planes accompanying the warnings. Because of that folks had started calling it the “Bore,” or “Phony War.” But that had not been the case on that first Saturday in September 1940.
It was a lovely warm, sunny day, fairly rare in England.
At 4 p.m. British radar stations picked up a fleet rendezvous between German bombers and fighters above the French coast. About fifteen minutes later the frontal edge of the twenty-mile-wide Luftwaffe armada, which rode over ten thousand feet in the sky, crossed the English coast and was spotted by an Observer Corps post. The RAF was then scrambled.
By then, it was far too late.
It was around five when the city’s bomb warnings went off, building in volume. The sirens sounded to Charlie like high-pitched screams from the sky. Charlie and his gran, and his mother and his grandfather, for they had been alive back then, had hurried to their agreed-upon shelter, a cupboard in the windowless back room of their old flat. Folks with rear yards often fled to their hardy Andy bomb shelters, half dug into the ground with their thin hides of corrugated arched aluminum set next to flower beds that had been turned into Digging for Victory gardens. However, many poor folks without yards went to public shelters; others headed to the Underground. Most, like Charlie and his family, ventured straightaway to the cupboard.
Gripped in his mother’s hand was her gas mask, a device they all had been issued. She helped Charlie to put on his, then aided her parents, and, finally, donned her mask.
At first, there had been no sounds other than people rushing here and there outside, and the warbly sirens. Then Charlie looked up at his mother.
“They’re coming,” he heard her say, and in a tone that captured her son’s full attention. She helped Charlie tighten his mask. In her skirt pocket was a tube of No. 2 Anti-gas Ointment. It was supposed to help burns on the face and relieve the eyes of the gas’s sting, and perhaps return one’s mustard gas — stolen sight, though even young Charlie was highly doubtful that any cream could actually accomplish that.
Plymouth and Cardiff had already been struck by the Luftwaffe, but not London. The city had seemed protected by some divine power that kept great metropolises from the inconvenience of wholesale destruction.
That delicate fantasy was about to come to an end.
First came the unnerving drone of plane engines as they neared Dagenham, Rainham, and Barking. Charlie would learn later there were three hundred and fifty Junkers, Heinkels, and Dorniers massed in this particular Luftwaffe fleet, escorted by six hundred fighter planes. Next came the scream of bombs, high-pitched walls of wails that brought a terror to Charlie far greater than any nightmare he’d ever endured. The target was the East End around the U-shaped bend in the Thames. Known as Silvertown, it was a collection of massive warehouses, and workers’ homes, all muddled topsy-turvy together next to the labyrinth of docks that were critical to the war effort.