We reached Fleet Street. A couple hundred yards a head, a fire truck pulled up alongside the narrow entrance to Gough Square. A tendril of smoke lifted toward the lighted sky from inside the column on the other side of the buildings. A fireman was getting out of his truck and gearing up.
“A fire by Dr. Johnson’s,” the fireman said. In Gough Square was the house where Samuel Johnson had lived. “You’d do best to find shelter until this ends,” he said, pointing up around us. Every third building was afire.
“We’re rescue squad,” I said.
“Do your work and leave me to mine, then,” the fireman said.
We put on our coveralls and helmets. Fire burned on the top floor of Dr. Johnson’s House, and another across the way. The wind died and a great cloud of smoke obscured our view. There were four firemen standing outside the house — Throughout the war, AFS firemen were billeted at Dr. Johnson’s house, and there were still a few back at the station. Our attention went to the two small factories opposite. A bomb had landed in the middle of these two ten-story factory buildings. A second had landed on the façade of a residence on the far row across from where we had entered the courtyard, between these factories and Dr. Johnson’s House.
While the rest of our crew went to help the firemen, Clive went at the front of the smoldering mess with his pickax. Another air raid siren sounded and along with it the noise of Messerschmitts and Spitfires dogfighting overhead. Capricious winds from the two factories carried noxious chemical furies that burned our eyes.
“What do you suppose it is?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Clive said. “Looks like a chemical factory. Who knows what’s burning.” Clive continued to work at the rubble. The macadam was so hot the rubber soles of my shoes sucked with each step. A long beam fell inside the front of the building, casting a line across Clive’s leg. Red embers blew all around his head, tracers that now combined with red-hot bullets like those I would watch years later as they emitted from the machine guns on the Messerschmitts that tracked our Lancaster down over the Ruhr Valley.
“Suppose we’ll need to get up there with some sandbags, then,” the fireman who had led us into Gough Square yelled to them. Another large beam collapsed. It opened a large hole in the first floor, floorboards sucked down.
“We’ll just leave it for tomorrow’s cleanup,” Clive said.
We were ready to rejoin the rest of our crew over at Dr. Johnson’s when we heard a voice so small amid the cacophony of the men at work we shouldn’t have heard it at all. Even with the greatest city in the world burning, one’s ears heard first the sound of a human voice coursing through the night like electricity through wire.
Clive called out. From the open front of the building came a more insistent voice. Clive called to me to go to back to the truck where there was another coil of rope.
Fleet Street was twice as bright as when we’d entered Gough Square — fires burned so bright I was forced to shield my eyes. I was coming back with the rope when two nurses came up the block.
“In here, in Gough Square,” I said. “We’ve found someone in need of help.” I led the nurses into the square. Clive crouched close to the burning building. Firemen had doused the place and the flames had been subdued.
“His legs’re pinned by a beam,” Clive said. There was a life in his eyes I hadn’t seen in all the time we had worked on rescues together.
“Must be in pain,” the taller of the two nurses said. Clive just looked at her. “Well, ask him!”
Clive called down into the gaping hole. “He thinks one of his legs is broken.”
“You’ll get down there and see if you can get him out, but first we’ll make him comfortable.”
An air raid siren started up again but no one made a further move to seek shelter. The concussion of heavy explosives just blocks away shook the ground. Wind shifted and chemical smoke exhaled its noxious breath. The smaller nurse, who hadn’t yet said a word, walked a step or two away and vomited.
“You’d best be off,” the taller nurse said. “Won’t be much help to anyone in this state.”
The shorter nurse hurried to Fleet Street and the taller nurse turned to me.
“If you’ll tie that around me,” she said. She pointed to the rope in my hand. “I’ll go down to make sure he’s comfortable.”
I pulled it around the nurse’s thin waist. It was the closest I’d been to a woman’s thin waist since Rotterdam. Since Françoise. I put my hands on her hips and she said, “That’s a bit familiar, then, isn’t it?”
“We should make sure you’re going to get back up.”
“I’d like that,” the nurse said.
Her face bore a constellation of brown freckles alternately hidden and picked out by the light of the growing fires. Clouds stood bright as daylight in the night sky.
“Watch your head on the way down there,” Clive yelled. Before the nurse took another step, Clive said, “I suppose before we lower you into a building we’d best know your name.”
She said her name was Glynnis. We helped her to the front of the gaping hole at the face of the house. She stepped over three or four solid joists to the edge of the building. We lowered her down. Glynnis held three syringes of morphine in her right hand and the rope with the left and just before leaving our eyeshot, she said, “Remember, two tugs means hoist me up.”
The rope stayed taut a long time. Then Clive began pulling. Glynnis’s hand came up at the edge of the floor and while Clive held her straight with the rope I jumped in front of him and pulled her up. Her uniform was stained the color of dishwater from the dripping line. Her hair was mussed, its tendrils plastered flat against her face, hiding some of the brown spots I’d observed upon it. She was gaunt-cheeked, slender-nosed, and beautiful.
“He’s sedated,” Glynnis said. “The leg’s trapped by a large beam.”
She lifted her arms. I untied the rope. Then Glynnis tied the rope around Clive’s stomach. His hands were calm at his sides when he tested it. Just then a new groaning emitted from the building. A spray of sparks flew up against the window. Then we heard the tinkle of the glass as it broke with the heat.
“On with it, then,” Clive said. We let him down into the open face of the building. A few minutes later, we had him up, the victim with him.
9.
Now it was almost ten o’clock. Streets asphyxiated with smoke. On our way toward Ludgate Hill we passed a tall thin man covered in black soot. He might have been a Giacometti sculpture, drawn and spindly and given life like Hermione. He might have been my father, who in his peripatetic bolt from the Nazi takeover in Czechoslovakia might have been anywhere or nowhere in the world. We pushed on.
Clive was determined to see for himself what was intact in central London. By the time we reached St. Paul’s, every building around the churchyard was in flames. A light rain had begun to fall. Christopher Wren’s masterpiece appeared to have been set ablaze. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, the inscription in the cathedral reads: “If you seek his monument, look around.” A look around us suggested it must be doomed.
It is hard to overstate the sense of defeat that came in those moments when we thought we saw St. Paul’s burning. At times symbols really were symbols, and to see that church burn to the ground might have felt like a particular kind of defeat. Frankly, the effect it would’ve had on all of London the next morning might have been the kind of sight that turned the whole war. But that feeling no sooner gripped us than it passed when we came close and saw the cathedral was essentially unscathed, merely reflecting the orange and red of the fires all around it, seeming to rise up to the low-slung clouds.