Life After Life (43 page)

‘We cannot turn away,’ Miss Woolf told her, ‘we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.’ What did that mean, Ursula wondered. ‘It means,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.’

‘And if
we
are killed?’

‘Then others must remember
us
.’

The first serious incident they attended had been at a large house in the middle of a terrace that had received a direct hit. The rest of the terrace was undamaged, as though the Luftwaffe had personally targeted the occupants – two families including grandparents, several children, two babes-in-arms. They had all survived the blast, sheltering in the cellar, but both the mains water pipe and a large sewage pipe had fractured and before either could be turned off everyone in the cellar had drowned in the awful sludge.

One of the women had managed to claw her way up and cling on to one of the cellar walls, they could see her through a gap, and Miss Woolf and Mr Armitage had held on to Hugh’s leather belt while Ursula had dangled over the lip of what remained of the cellar. She reached out a hand to the woman, thought for a moment that she might actually manage to grasp hold of her, but then she simply disappeared beneath the feculent water as it rose to fill the cellar.

When the fire brigade finally arrived to pump out the place they recovered fifteen bodies, seven of them children, and laid them in front of the house, as if to dry. Miss Woolf ordered them shrouded as quickly as possible and stowed away behind a wall while they awaited the arrival of the mortuary wagon. ‘It doesn’t do morale any good to see sights like that,’ she said. Ursula had vomited up her supper long before then. She vomited after nearly every incident. Mr Armitage and Mr Palmer too, Mr Simms before. Only Miss Woolf and Mr Bullock seemed to have strong stomachs for death.

Afterwards, Ursula tried not to think about the babies or the look of terror on that poor woman’s face as she had grasped in vain for Ursula’s hand (and something else, disbelief perhaps that this could be happening). ‘Think of them being at peace now,’ Miss Woolf counselled stoutly afterwards, dispensing scalding-hot sugary tea. ‘They are out of all this, just gone a little sooner.’ And Mr Durkin said, ‘
They have all gone into the world of light
,’ and Ursula thought,
they
are
all gone into the world of light
. Ursula wasn’t convinced that the dead went anywhere, except into a void, black and infinite.

‘Well, I hope
I
don’t die covered in shit,’ Mr Bullock said, more prosaically.

She thought she would never get over that first terrible incident but the memory of it had already been overlaid by many others and now she barely thought about it.

‘It’s bad,’ Miss Woolf said matter-of-factly. ‘They need someone slight.’

‘Slight?’ Ursula repeated.

‘Slim,’ Miss Woolf said patiently.

‘To go in there?’ Ursula said, looking up in horror at the summit of the volcano. She wasn’t sure she had the gumption to be lowered into the very maw of hell.

‘No, no, not there,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Come with me.’ It had begun to rain, quite hard, and Ursula blundered with difficulty in Miss Woolf’s wake over the jagged and broken ground, littered with every kind of obstacle. Her torch was next to useless. She caught her foot in a bicycle wheel and wondered if anyone had been riding it when the bomb struck.

‘Here,’ Miss Woolf said. It was another mound, just as big as the last. Was it another street, or the same street? Ursula had lost all sense of direction. How many mounds were there? A nightmarish scenario flashed through her mind – the whole of London reduced to one gigantic mound.

This mound wasn’t a volcano, the rescue squad were going in through a horizontal shaft at the side. More robust this time, they were hacking at the rubble with picks and shovels.

‘There’s a kind of hole here,’ Miss Woolf said, taking Ursula’s hand firmly in hers, as if Ursula were a reluctant child, and leading her forward. Ursula could see no sign of a hole. ‘It’s safe, I think, you just need to wriggle through.’

‘A tunnel?’

‘No, it’s just a hole. There’s a bit of a drop on the other side, we think there’s someone down there. Not a long drop,’ she added encouragingly. ‘Not a tunnel,’ she said again. ‘Go head first.’ The rescue squad stopped hacking at the rubble and waited, rather impatiently, for Ursula.

She had to take her helmet off in order to wriggle into the hole, her torch held awkwardly in front of her. Despite what Miss Woolf said, she had been expecting a tunnel but was immediately confronted with a cavernous space. She might have been potholing. She was relieved when she felt two pairs of invisible hands attach themselves to Hugh’s old leather belt. She moved the torch around trying to see something, anything. ‘Hello?’ she shouted as she shone the torch into the drop. It was screened by a haphazard lattice of twisted gas pipes and wood, splintered like matchsticks. She concentrated on a gap in the chaotic mesh, trying to make out anything in the gloom beyond. An upturned face, a man’s, pale and ghostly, seemed to rise out of the darkness like a vision, a prisoner in an oubliette. There might be a body attached to the face, she couldn’t be sure.

‘Hello?’ she said, as if the man might reply, although now she could see that part of his head was missing.

‘Anyone?’ Miss Woolf said hopefully when she crawled backwards out of the hole.

‘One dead.’

‘Easy to recover?’

‘No.’

The rain made everything even more foul if that were possible, turning the wet brick dust into a kind of glutinous grit. A couple of hours of toiling in these conditions and they were all covered from head to toe in the stuff. It was too disgusting to give any thought to.

There was a shortage of ambulances, traffic had been snarled up by an incident on the Cromwell Road, as had the doctor and nurse who should have been there, and Miss Woolf’s extra first-aid training was put to good use. Ursula splinted a broken arm, bandaged a head wound, patched an eye and strapped up Mr Simms’s ankle – he had twisted it on the rough ground. She labelled two unconscious survivors (head injuries, broken femur, broken collarbone, broken ribs, what was probably a crushed pelvis) and several dead (who were easier, they were simply dead) and then double-checked them in case she had labelled them the wrong way round and had posted the dead to the hospital and the living to the mortuary. She also directed numerous survivors to the rest centre, and walking wounded to the first-aid post being manned by Miss Woolf.

‘Catch Anthony if you can, will you?’ she said when she saw Ursula. ‘Get a mobile canteen down here.’ Ursula sent Tony off with this errand. Only Miss Woolf called him Anthony. He was thirteen, a Boy Scout and their civil defence messenger boy, hurtling around on the rubble-and-glass-strewn streets on his bike. If Tony were her child, Ursula thought, she would have sent him far away from the nightmare instead of plunging him into the depths of it. He loved it all, needless to say.

After she’d spoken to Tony, Ursula went back through the hole again because someone thought they had heard a sound, but the pale, dead man was as quiet as before. ‘Hello, again,’ she said to him. She thought it might be Mr McColl from the neighbouring street. Perhaps he was visiting someone. Unlucky. She was dog-tired, you could almost envy the dead their eternal rest.

When she emerged again from the hole the mobile canteen had arrived. She swilled her mouth out with tea and spat out brick dust. ‘I bet you used to be a real lady,’ Mr Palmer laughed. ‘I’m affronted,’ Ursula said and laughed. ‘I think I spit in a very ladylike way.’ The rescue on the mound was still going on with no sign of any result but the rest of the night was winding down and Miss Woolf told her to go back to the post and rest. Up on the mound a rope had been called for, to lower someone down, Ursula supposed, or pull someone up, or both. (‘A woman, they think,’ Mr Durkin said.)

She was all in, could barely put one foot in front of the other. Avoiding the debris as best she could, she had gone only ten yards or so when someone grabbed her by the arm and yanked her backwards so hard that she would have fallen over if the same person hadn’t kept his tight grip on her and kept her upright. ‘Watch it, Miss Todd,’ a voice growled.

‘Mr Bullock?’ In the confines of the post Mr Bullock alarmed her a little, he seemed so unassailable, but, curiously, out here in this benighted place he was harmless. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’

He shone his torch in front of them. ‘Can you see?’ he said.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘That’s because there’s nothing there.’ She looked harder. A crater – enormous – a bottomless pit. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty feet,’ Mr Bullock said. ‘And you nearly walked into it.’

He accompanied her back to the post. ‘You’re too tired,’ he said. He held her arm all the way, she could feel the strength of his muscles behind the grip.

At the post she dropped on to a camp bed and blacked out rather than fell asleep. She woke up when the all-clear sounded at six o’clock. She felt as if she’d slept for days but it had only been three hours.

Mr Palmer was also there, pottering about making tea. She could imagine him at home, slippers and a pipe, reading his newspaper. It seemed absurd that he should be here. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing her a mug. ‘You should go home, dear,’ he said, ‘the rain’s stopped,’ as though it were the rain that had spoilt her night rather than the Luftwaffe.

Instead of going straight home she returned to the mound to see how the rescue was proceeding. It seemed different in the daylight, the shape of it oddly familiar. It reminded her of something but for the life of her she couldn’t think what.

It was a scene of devastation, more or less the whole street gone, but the mound, the original mound, was still its own little hive of activity. It would have made a good subject for a war artist, she thought.
The Diggers on the Mound
would be a good title. Bea Shawcross had been at art school, graduating just as the war started. Ursula wondered if she was moved to depict the war or if she was trying to transcend it.

Very gingerly, she scaled its foothills. One of the rescue squad put out a hand to help her up. A new shift had come on but, from the look of them, the old rescue squad was the one still labouring. Ursula understood. It was hard to leave an incident when somehow you felt you ‘owned’ it.

There was a sudden buzz of excitement around the volcano’s crater as the fruits of the night’s delicate drudgery finally became apparent. A woman, a rope tied under her armpits (nothing delicate about this stage), was extricated by simply hauling her out of the narrow opening. She was passed by hand down the mound.

Ursula could see that she was almost black with dirt and drifting in and out of consciousness. Broken but alive, if only just. She was loaded into an ambulance waiting patiently at the bottom.

Ursula made her own way down. On the ground, a shrouded body lay waiting for a mortuary van. Ursula removed the cover from the face and found the pale-faced man from last night. In the light of day she could see that it was definitely Mr McColl from number ten. ‘Hello, you,’ she said. He would soon be an old friend. Miss Woolf would have told her to label him but when she looked for her message pad she discovered she had lost it and had nothing to write on. Searching in a pocket she found her lipstick.
Needs must
, she heard Sylvie’s voice say.

She thought about writing on Mr McColl’s forehead but that seemed undignified (more undignified than death, she wondered?) so instead she unshrouded his arm and then spat on a handkerchief and rubbed off some of the dirt, as if he were a little boy. She wrote his name and address on his arm with the lipstick. Blood red, which seemed fitting really.

‘Well, goodbye,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.’

Skirting the treacherous crater from last night, she discovered Miss Woolf sitting behind a dining table salvaged from the wreckage, as if she were in an office, telling people what they should do next – where to go for food and shelter, how to get clothes and ration cards and so on. Miss Woolf was still cheerful, yet heaven knows when she had last slept. The woman had iron in her soul, there was no doubt about that. Ursula had grown enormously fond of Miss Woolf, she respected her almost more than anyone else she knew, apart from Hugh perhaps.

The queue was made up of the occupants of a large shelter, many of whom were still emerging, blinking in the daylight like nocturnal animals, and discovering that they no longer had homes to go to. The shelter was in the wrong place, the wrong street, Ursula thought. It took her a few moments to re-orientate her brain and realize that all night she had thought herself in a different street.

‘They got that woman out,’ she told Miss Woolf.

‘Alive?’

‘More or less.’

When she finally got back to Phillimore Gardens she found Millie up and dressed. ‘
Went the day well?
’ she said. ‘There’s some tea in the pot,’ she added, pouring it and handing Ursula a cup.

‘Oh, you know,’ Ursula said, taking the cup. The tea was lukewarm. She shrugged. ‘Pretty awful. Is that the time? I have to go to work.’

The following day she was surprised to find one of Miss Woolf’s log entries, written in her clear matron’s hand. Sometimes a buff folder would prove to be a mysterious ragbag and Ursula was never clear how some of these things turned up on her desk.
05.00 Interim Incident Report. Situation Report. Casualties 55 to hospital, 30 dead, 3 unaccounted for. Seven houses completely demolished, approximately 120 homeless. 2 NFS crews, 2 AMB, 2 HRPs, 2 LRP, one dog still operating. Work continues
.

Ursula hadn’t noticed any dog. It was just one of many incidents across London that night and she picked up a sheaf of them and said, ‘Miss Fawcett, can you log these.’ She could barely wait for the tea-trolley and elevenses.

They ate lunch outside on the terrace. A potato and egg salad, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, even a cucumber. ‘All grown by our mother’s own fair hand,’ Pamela said. It really was the nicest meal Ursula had eaten in a long time. ‘And to follow there’s an apple charlotte, I believe,’ Pamela said. They were alone at the table. Sylvie had gone to answer the doorbell and Hugh hadn’t returned from investigating an unexploded bomb that had, reportedly, fallen in a field on the other side of the village.