HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (25 page)

Above all, the old grey-haired couple – the man snuffling in the cold air, the woman shivering and clasping her hands – seemed especially distracted by this waiting period, and unable to meet it with any normal reaction; and their few remarks were so disjointed and inconse-quential that it was difficult to answer them without drawing attention to their nervousness. Godden, observing the state they were in, thought suddenly, in an odd moment of awareness: these are the sort of people we’ve got to help on this job ...

But not this time. The All Clear brought the scene and the tension to a close, on a heartening note which made them all foolishly optimistic again. Jerry must have been scared off after all … The old woman, turning to go back into the house, said: ‘Was that an air raid, then?’

‘No,’ said Godden. ‘It was a warning.’

‘Oh ...’ Clearly she understood hardly anything about it. ‘Do you think there were any bombs?’

‘No,’ said Godden again. He waved a hand vaguely towards the south. ‘We must have driven them off before they got here.’

The old woman shook her head and, abandoning the mystery, stumbled back into the house.

After handing over to Horrocks, Godden went down to the control room, a small shored-up office with a big wall map of the borough, where Watson was talking to the officer-in-charge and to an intent telephone operator. They all looked up when he entered, and Watson asked: ‘OK outside?’

‘Yes,’ answered Godden. ‘What was the warning?’

‘Don’t know,’ said the officer-in-charge guardedly. ‘South coast, maybe. We’ll get a lot of those before we’re finished.’

‘Who’s outside now?’ asked Watson.

‘Horrocks.’

‘Pal of yours, eh?’

‘Yes. Last war.’

Watson smiled. ‘Where you got that medal?’

‘Yes.’ Godden smiled back, feeling ridiculously elated. He was back now in a world he understood, a world that had a use for him and didn’t mind telling him so. Medals and old soldiers had been out of fashion for a very long time. Now they seemed to be climbing back into their place again.

He said good night, and crossed to the canteen hatch in search of a final cup of tea. Cuthbert, hollow-eyed, but still the tattered life and soul of the party, said: ‘What cheer, ducks! How are the horrors of war?’

‘All right,’ said Godden.

‘I feel like one of them myself at the moment.’

Godden did not contradict him.

The second warning, which came towards dawn, roused the depot from something like a normal night-time silence. Someone had got the idea of using the stretchers in place of beds, and the main hall was a dark carpet of sleeping figures, laid out in sprawling rows, with their kit close at hand. Once more there was a sudden burst of noise and movement as the alarm went. Godden, collecting his helmet and gas mask, joined the others in the roughly sandbagged shelter; but it was hot and stuffy, and presently he slipped away and went out into the street. Wilensky, who was now the sentry, greeted him, and they stood side by side at the street corner.

It was just getting light: the air had a crisp freshness, the houses, emerging from the darkness, were solid and comforting. There were two cats staring at each other on one of the doorsteps. Somewhere a cock was crowing. It was the first wartime dawn, and a good one.

The same old couple, still shivering, still talking disjointedly, joined them on the corner.

‘Are they coming again?’ asked the old woman.

‘Perhaps,’ said Godden.

‘I think too light,’ said Wilensky.

‘What’s he say?’ asked the old man.

‘It’s too light – too near daytime,’ explained Godden quietly. He looked at the old woman: her wispy hair seemed almost transparent, the skull showing through. ‘Why don’t you go in, mother? We’ll look after you.’

‘Eh?’ said the old woman. She was staring up at the sky. ‘This terrible night,’ she mumbled. ‘They oughtn’t to allow it.’

‘You’ll be better inside.’

‘I thought we had to come out when the warning went,’ said the old man. ‘Didn’t the newspapers say that?’

The All Clear siren sounded its long cheering note.

‘What’s that?’ asked the old woman nervously. ‘Are they coming again?’

‘No,’ answered Godden. ‘That’s the All Clear.’

‘Eh?’

‘It’s all over. You can go in now.’

‘This terrible night,’ she repeated. ‘If we have much more of them I don’t know what I’ll do.’

The old man led her away. Wilensky shook his head: there was compassion and anger in his face.

‘Better that she was dead,’ he said harshly. ‘Like many others. War is too much for the old people.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Godden, rather shocked. ‘Got to get used to it, that’s all.’

He went off duty at eight o’clock, strolling home slowly in the fresh morning sunshine, feeling the stiffness of his cramped body melting away gradually. The first night of the war, and Jerry hadn’t come after all … But he felt no sense of anticlimax; if not last night, then tomorrow or the next one: there’d be plenty to do, and the right sort of people to do it for. He’d been dead right to take this job, and he was going to make something of it. They all were: they’d be the best squad in the best depot in London.

He was happier that morning than he had been for many years.

The depot was now a going concern, disciplined, organized, and settled down to its job. A routine for the day-to-day timetable was now properly worked out – so much time for drill, so much for practices and lectures, so much for the slightly unpopular fatigues, such as sweeping the mess hall or swabbing out the lavatories, which they shared with the stretcher-bearers. The first process of shaking down together, as a body of men, was over: it had been aided by a change in the hours worked (now twenty-four hours on duty and twenty-four hours off), which allowed them time to know each other better and gave them a sense of solidarity. Actual physical conditions within the depot, too, had been much improved since the discomfort of that first makeshift night: there were now beds and blankets for every man on the shift, and some of the upstairs rooms had been taken over and converted into dormitories, so that the squads which were off-duty could get a reasonable amount of quiet and sleep.

The canteen, with a proper full-time staff, also showed a distinct improvement, the unvarying fried bread, egg, and chips which was the sole menu for the first few weeks had been superseded by a full midday meal and a choice of supper dishes which went a long way towards brightening the evenings. The nightclub singer, Cuthbert, had moved out with the egg and chips; he was rumoured to have gone down to one of the Chelsea depots, where they had murals, titled volunteers, and a better class of stretcher-bearer altogether.

He was not the only one to move on: there had been a certain amount of judicious weeding out which, after the come-one-come-all system of the first days of the war, had become glaringly necessary. The drinking types were the first to go: there were not many of them, but in this small close-knit organization they stuck out a lot – slipping out to the corner pub when they should have been on sentry duty, raising hell when they returned, keeping the off-duty squads awake, and initiating a slightly scandalous pile of empties in the mews. They did not last long … Then there was an outbreak of petty thieving, which led to the dismissal of two more men, ingenious fellows, who built up quite a line in stolen gumboots and bottles of iodine from the first aid kits before they were traced. Another malefactor, more ambitious and more socially prominent, was taken off by the police: he adorned the headlines a few days later as a ‘Mayfair Man’, with a mink coat on his conscience and a background of bouncing cheques and straying diamond bracelets, which made life at the depot seem very drab by comparison.

Isaacs also had been sacked, after a final collision with Watson over fatigue duty – his method of cleaning out the lavatories was to lock himself in with a newspaper for several hours on end, and his excuses were a blend of argument, protest, and straightforward lying, which could not hope to succeed more than a certain number of times. Wilensky’s comment, when he heard of it, was: ‘I am a Jew, too – but not such a one,’ one of his few remarks on any subject which did not directly concern the job in hand.

Wilensky, indeed, was turning out to be one of the best workers in the depot. He picked up the technicalities of the job very quickly: he was willing and entirely trustworthy; and Godden, working alongside him on many occasions, felt all the time the force of a single-minded purpose, which would not let the other man rest until whatever they were doing was properly finished and rounded off. Obscurely, Godden knew what it was that drove Wilensky on, that made him concentrate all his abilities no matter how trivial the job. It was Poland – Poland by now submerged in a wave of horror and destruction, which seemed to have engulfed the whole country. Wilensky, the exile, was working to stem that wave and ultimately to drive it back; and as he wedged a shore in position, or made a competent job of rigging a derrick, he was thinking of it as a tiny part of the future’s huge struggle to rescue and to reconstruct.

But they were all working hard, that Christmas time, in the bitter weather, which turned the depot into a drab and draughty barracks. Though there was surprise at the continued respite from bombing, there had been no appreciable relaxing of the tension: the job still seemed a vital one, with the possibility of sudden action at any hour of the day or night, and after the initial period of learning and sorting themselves out they remained tuned up and on edge, ready and waiting to meet what lay ahead.

With their eye on that meeting the whole depot, rescue men and stretcher-bearers alike, was caught up in an intensive effort to prepare itself, not to be found wanting when the time came. The breathing space could hardly last much longer, and there was a lot to learn and to perfect; so all through those weeks and months, while the Western Front hung fire and the troops in the Maginot Line wondered what it was all about, they set to with a will. For the heavy and light rescue squads (the difference lay in the type of equipment they used rather than in any personal attributes) there were daily exercises, among themselves and in competition with the other depots: rigging various kinds of lifting gear, practising quick demolition work to get at the heart of a building, sending down a loaded stretcher (with no great rush to be the first patient) from the roof of the depot to the street level. They were given their grounding in first aid, shorn of some of its terrors in the form of Latin technical terms, which occasionally defeated the stretcher-bearers, but not the less useful for that. At times some of it seemed a trifle irrelevant. ‘It is important,’ said one lecturer, who was ploughing through the whole syllabus, whether applicable or not, ‘to distinguish carefully between the measures necessary to counteract the two main forms of bite – the bite of the dog, and the bite of the snake.’ (‘Blimey!’ said one awed rescue worker, ‘What does he think Jerry’s going to drop on us?’)

The stretcher-bearers had a full programme of training also. First aid certificates had to be won before their jobs were confirmed: ‘incidents’ were organized, with six or seven patients to be dealt with by each squad, and marks given for diagnosis, treatment and handling of them: many of the stretcher squads attended at nearby hospitals, which were evacuating their patients to the country as soon as they could safely be moved, and lent a hand there. They kept the same hours as the rescue squads, so that the whole personnel of the depot, divided into two shifts, spent twenty-four hours at a time working together: when they went off-duty at eight in the morning, feeling tired, looking ‘rough’ and untidy after a night spent in their clothes, there was a sense of comradeship and communal purpose among them which made the tiredness and the discomfort seem worthwhile.

Nor was this community spirit confined only to the work they shared. Several football matches were organized that winter, with the other shift or with other London depots: the rules about drinking were relaxed so that a small proportion of them could visit the local pub at some time during their twenty-four hours on, and within the depot darts, dominoes, and a wave of shove-halfpenny tournaments all contributed to this solid sense of unity. For all of them, at this stage, it was not quite an ordinary life, and not quite an ordinary job: the long hours, the ‘disciplined’ atmosphere, the very nature of what they were waiting for, together gave it a special quality. Above all, it was worthwhile, as a safeguard and an insurance against danger; and it might become of paramount importance at any moment.

Godden felt this quality more than ever, after three months on the heavy rescue side. He had worked hard, done his share and a bit more, made a success of the novelty of finding himself part of a team again. Since that first night, and the old couple he had tried to look after (they were in the country now, and the house was shuttered and empty), he had never ceased to find in the job the same special attribute that Wilensky felt, and the pacifist stretcher-bearer too: that it was part of something much larger, tremendously worth doing, and linked in some subtle fashion with the way people ought to behave towards each other, if the world was ever to be a decent place. To the depot, and the work he did there, and his ambitions for the future, he transferred all the love and care which would, ordinarily, have been centred on his own family and friends.