The Ford Motor Works was hit first, then the enormous Beckton Gasworks. The Woolwich Arsenal, the country’s largest, was also struck. After that the three Royal Docks, loaded with foodstuffs, were leveled; the stench of incinerated fruits and cheeses would linger for months. Barge tethers burned away, sending the freed boats gliding down the Thames, only to return later with the tide. Barrage balloons designed to entangle German planes instead simply burst from the ensuing heat of detonations and soaring fires. As the bombs went off, the very foundations of the city seemed to vibrate as explosion after explosion produced a tsunami of terrifying sound.
Disrupted dust settled over Charlie and his family. Windows cracked, roof trusses groaned, floorboards quivered. And each subsequent blast of concussive force seemed more powerful than its predecessors. They never heard the big ack-ack guns fire back, and had no idea it was because British gunners on the ground feared they would strike their own planes in the air.
The Germans returned that night and dropped still more bombs, using the fires caused by the first attack as handy illumination for the second. Wholesale evacuations by thousands of people from the stricken East End had some dub it “Dunkirk in London.”
After the all clear siren sounded around 4:30 on Sunday morning — one elongated note to distinguish it from its counterpart of short separate blasts — nearly four hundred and fifty Londoners had perished. Sixteen hundred more were seriously injured, and many would eventually die. And countless structures had been leveled, leaving the poor in the East End, who had little to begin with, with even less now.
Infernos raged along the obliterated docks as the Auxiliary Fire Services courageously battled them. The Thames became a pumping station of last resort when the hydrants ran dry. A conflagration fire meant that a hundred-plus pumps were needed to extinguish it. There were nine such fires that night.
The Isle of Dogs was mostly gone. Both sides of the river in the East End had been reduced to rubble. Bow Road Station no longer existed. Stepney Green looked like a blackened carpet, denuded of trees. People as far off as Reading thought they saw the sun set in the east that day, because the Blitz fires burned the sky just as brightly as did the descending sun.
By the end of the month more than six thousand Londoners were in premature graves. They had had ashes to ashes and dust to dust sprinkled over them by legions of religious men, who all looked stunned that their god would allow such devastation despite sincere prayers, thundering sermons, and the frenetic fingering of rosaries.
In his box in the cupboard, Charlie opened his eyes, and the sounds of death coming for them all vanished.
Gran
Right on schedule, Charlie listened to the dull dings of the battered windup alarm clock followed by the sounds of his grandmother lurching up from her hard mattress. The dings ceased, and her bare feet scuttled across the cold planks until he heard the bathroom door close. A minute after that the toilet gave a pathetic flush. Next the sink water began its feeble run.
She would dress as quickly as she could, having few items from which to choose: basically the one skirt and blouse or the spare, and the old, scruffy shoes, with the low chunk of worn heels, and stockings now so threadbare they were near transparent against her swollen, veiny calves. After that he would hear her trudge a few truncated steps to the small kitchen. The only other space was the front room, which held a chair for her, a wooden stool for Charlie, and a small square of faded Wilton rug. A chipped porcelain shepherd’s lamp with precarious wiring perched on a wobbly table. On the fireplace mantel was a pair of tarnished brass candlesticks, often minus any candles; and then there was the fireplace itself, a blackened brick opening about two feet square, that rarely had anything to do.
On twin pegs hung their respective gas masks. They were two of nearly forty million handed out by a government terrified that the Germans would continue their World War I tradition of deploying mustard and other poison gas, only this time dropped from the sky. Gran used to always carry her mask, but as memories of the Blitz receded, she, like many others, left it behind more often than not. She did carry her ID card, as did Charlie. They had been issued by the National Registry to every person living in all of the United Kingdom, and the Isle of Man. If people were to be blown into unidentifiable pieces, perhaps this bit of paper would survive to tell folks who had perished. Only Charlie couldn’t see how.
After a cup of lukewarm tea and bread with margarine and jam and perhaps a slice of fried Spam, she would be off to her job at a bakery shop one jarring bus ride away from here.
He firmly shut his eyes when she opened his door and leaned down to kiss him on the forehead, which she always managed to do despite her rheumatism. She touched his head and then brusquely cuffed him on the ear.
He sat up, annoyed. “Eh, what was that for, Gran?”
“Wet hair, Charlie,” she exclaimed, looking very cross. “You’ve been out again. Tell me, and no fibs now.”
“Had lice in my hair and ran the tap to get ’em out,” he said defiantly.
“Lice!” she gasped. Her fingers automatically started to search his head. “I best get the Lysol then.”
“It’s okay, Gran. The matron at school give me somethin’.”
He was pleased with this lie, since it not only explained the wet hair but also reinforced the equal untruth about his still attending school.
Her fingers left his hair as she straightened and looked down at him. “You worry me, Charlie. If only I could keep up with you. If only I weren’t so... old!”
“You ain’t so very old, Gran,” he replied kindly.
“Even if we do win this bloody war, there’s so much out there that can hurt you.”
“I’m strong, Gran.” He made a muscle with his arm.
“If you were fed proper, you’d be stronger still.”
“We’ll get by, Gran, we always do.”
She rubbed absently at her mouth where he knew she’d recently had a tooth out. She didn’t have the shillings necessary for the gas or cocaine used by the dentist to dull the pain. They pulled teeth for free so long as you could endure the trauma of having them forcibly yanked.
“You deserve proper parents, luv.”
Charlie’s still forming Adam’s apple quivered at this unexpected comment. “Well, I ain’t got none, whether I deserve ’em or not.” Before she could reply to that he added, “You’ll be late, Gran. And me too. Workin’ on some mathe-matics at school. Very interestin’.”
She looked him over. “You’re growing ever so tall, Charlie, like your father was, while your mum was such a wee thing.” She eyed the diminutive space. “This cupboard — you need something bigger.”
“Why, it’s more space than I know what to do with, really. And we got a kitchen, and a loo all to ourselves. We’re practically rich.”
“Well, you can thank your granddad for that. Many around here respected him. And we got this flat because of that respect. Your dad’s people lived in Whitechapel with six families to two rooms and no loo. Lord, I don’t know how they did it. Now, you’re quite sure you didn’t go out last night?”