Again we were speeding up the boulevard until, on our way to Newgate Street, the three of us were jolted forward. We’d hit erupted pavement in the street. I got out and Clive turned around to be certain Glynnis was unharmed, but she was a nurse and instinctively was trying to do the same for the two of us.
“Cover your eyes,” she said. “If you get an ember in there—” Clive grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop.
“Too late,” Clive said. He had an ember under his eyelid, and the air about us filled with so much smoke, Glynnis and I could see nothing.
We kept on by foot into the smoke storm. The only thing we could see were the burning buildings. We’d gone what I felt certain was a block or two when I began to feel the first bilious churnings in my stomach, which coincided with a shift in the direction of the wind. The breeze lifted the smoke and revealed the way before us to be a block where the fires were only intermittent. Up ahead a fire truck had parked and four men from the brigade were trying to subdue a raging fire in a tall building with a first-floor storefront just ahead.
“You can’t help here,” one fireman said when we reached them.
Another air raid siren. It was clear we’d better go wait it out in the Underground.
10.
Inside Leicester Station we discovered an alternate city to the one we’d just left above. All down the platform people went about their evening business, doing their best not to acknowledge the firestorm overhead. Stations had been hit by bombs and had caved in, crushing everyone within, but there was no circle below to descend to. Two young men were engaged in a game of cards, each of them seated on a wooden crate. An older man stood bare-backed, his head craned out over the tracks as if awaiting a train, brushing his teeth. The only sound was the contralto of voices reverberating up and down the tunnel. People looked up without acknowledging our presence, or our bodies, which were covered in black soot and streaks of sweat. Our clothes were soiled and carried the toxic reek of burning chemicals.
“What is it?” I said.
“Looks like you’ve been through some kind of inferno,” the man with the toothbrush said. He turned and spit the paste, then walked over a long row of bodies. It was ten minutes before we found an open space, during which time bombs shook the place each time they landed. Wails of infants echoed through the chamber. Clive couldn’t open his eyes. Glynnis and I did our best to get him through the crowd.
“Like walking on a tightrope,” I said to Clive.
Sight serves as tyrant to the senses, a fact made so clear now that Clive had temporarily lost the use of his. Joseph Conrad, like me an East European displaced to Anglophone lands, said his job as a writer was “to render with the greatest accuracy possible the visible world.” I have always held an affinity for that idea. Our path was made arduous as we attempted to lead blind Clive about. When we set down, we all began to recognize our fatigue, but the adrenaline of the night was pumping still.
Next to Glynnis’s nose was a large cake of wood ash. I reached to wipe it off. She jerked back, but I put my other hand behind her neck and held her head steady.
“You might as well do the rest if you can,” she said.
The fabric keeping Clive’s eyes shut tight was not so sullied by the soot as to need to be removed, so I asked him if I could borrow it. Glynnis sat still as I dabbed at her face. With this revelation of her features there arose in me a feeling long forgotten, one that hadn’t been at the surface since the onset of the bombing in September. I looked at Glynnis’s clear flat skin, pores small and youthfully taut to shut out even the heavy black mud that covered her face.
There hadn’t been another siren for some time. The groans of downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, resounded through the crowded tunnel. Glynnis wiped away the remaining grime. She sat with Clive’s head cradled in her lap, lightly rubbing the area around his eyes. Would that it were my head in her lap. As I’ve come to know far too well, sometimes jealousy is the most sensitive detector of love. The rhythmic breath of the tunnel was canceled out by the adrenaline coursing through my veins. At the end of an hour, Clive opened his eyes.
“How is it,” I said.
“Bloody hurts.”
“Maybe you ought to keep them closed.”
He looked down to where Glynnis had her eyes closed. It was the first time he had properly seen her.
“Lovely,” Clive said.
“Isn’t she.”
“I can’t say I’ll want to stay down here much longer myself,” Glynnis said. She didn’t open her eyes. I tried to look away from her but found I couldn’t, and when my eyes returned to her they found what I’m certain was a smile on her face.
It was a good deal easier getting back out of the station than getting in, with Clive’s eyes returning to him enough for him to walk under his own power. A different kind of tempest was roiling above. Smoke had been driven off by the wind. We walked a couple blocks into a pocket of cooler air. Just then we heard the long high cry of the siren, another air raid, and ducked back into the Leicester Square station until the all clear came again.
It was the last of the night. The bombing had ended.
The only sound was the tympanic crackle of fires burning and the low bass of their more distant roar. It had begun to rain, a gentle spitting from the clouds — the red, bloodred, and orange clouds were still giving off light, as if the entire sky had become a nearby star, its swirling hot core just above St. Paul’s Cathedral — and I took off my helmet. What damage had occurred was for the most part done, and what people there were in those buildings were saved or not saved. We were near delirium, and it was only after walking for a half hour that Glynnis said, “Fleet Street once more. We’re walking in circles.”
We were all quite lucky to be alive. Next to St. Bride’s Church, down that little alleyway, the voices of firemen came loud and cheerful out of a pub whose windows had been blown out. At two o’clock in the morning, on this night that our whole city was in flames, this public house was open for business.
“Here comes another rope and tackle team,” a fireman seated near the front of the pub said. “Friend — pull three more.” The publican stood us round after round, and joined us. We discussed what we’d seen with these men from the fire brigade — they were eager to learn that we’d been in Gough Square, not far from where they’d been.
“Let us all drink a round to Samuel Johnson!” the first fireman called out. An old woman walked into the bar carrying a large bag. She walked up to the firemen behind us and pulled out three turkey sandwiches with thick wedges of rationed cheddar. The old woman looked as if there was nothing more in the world she would like to see than for them to eat her sandwiches, so they took and ate them without a moment’s hesitation.
Clive got up to buy us another much-needed round. While he was gone, Glynnis turned and not looking me in the eyes said, “Guy’s Hospital. That’s where I am if you want to call on me.” Her eyes met mine for just long enough. Then she said we had better join the crowd. Outside, the city was burning.
11.
“A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones,” Roald Dahl, himself a former RAF pilot, once said. The period that followed the Blitz, those early days of 1941 into 1942, returns to me in the piecemeal memory of small incidents. Those early days during the Blitz, there were moments through the winter when we continued at our rescue work as squaddies and weeks when cloud cover was too thick for flight; nights with Clive at the pub and nights at home with Johana and Niny. Air raid sirens sounded and ack-acks fired and I rode my bike less and then more around London.