Life After Life (47 page)

November 1940

MISS WOOLF WAS treating them to a little piano recital. ‘Some Beethoven,’ she said. ‘I’m no Myra Hess, but I thought it would be nice.’ She was correct on both counts. Mr Armitage, the opera singer, asked Miss Woolf if she could accompany him if he sang ‘
Non più andrai
’ from
The Marriage of Figaro
and Miss Woolf, particularly game this evening, said she would certainly have a go. It was a rousing performance (‘unexpectedly
virile
’ was Miss Woolf’s verdict) and no one objected when Mr Bullock (no surprise) and Mr Simms (quite a surprise) joined in with a rather ribald version.

‘I know this one!’ Stella said, which was true of the tune but not the words as she sang enthusiastically, ‘Dum-di-dum, dum-di-dum, dum-didum-
dum
,’ and so on.

Their post had recently been augmented by two wardens. The first, Mr Emslie, was a grocer and had come from another post, having been bombed out of his house, his shop and his sector. He, like Mr Simms and Mr Palmer before him, was a veteran of the previous war. The second addition was in possession of a more exotic background. Stella was one of Mr Bullock’s ‘chorus girls’ and confessed (readily) to being a ‘striptease artiste’ but Mr Armitage the opera singer said, ‘We’re all artistes here, darling.’

‘What a bloody fairy that man is,’ Mr Bullock muttered, ‘put him in the army, that would sort him out.’ ‘I doubt it,’ Miss Woolf said. (And it did rather beg the question why the strapping Mr Bullock himself had not been called up for active service.) ‘So,’ Mr Bullock concluded, ‘we’ve got a Yid, a pansy and a tart, sounds like a dirty music-hall joke.’

‘It is intolerance that has brought us to this pass, Mr Bullock,’ Miss Woolf reproved him mildly. They had all been decidedly tetchy – even Miss Woolf – since Mr Palmer’s death. They would be better off saving their grudges for peacetime, Ursula thought. It wasn’t just Mr Palmer’s death, of course, but also the lack of sleep and the relentless nightly raids. How long could the Germans keep it up? For ever?

‘And, oh, I don’t know,’ Miss Woolf said quietly to her as she made tea, ‘it’s just the general sense of
dirtiness
, as if one will never be clean again, as if poor old London will never be clean again. Everything is so awfully
shabby
, you know?’

It was a relief, therefore, that their little impromptu concert party was good-natured, everyone seemingly in better spirits than of late.

Mr Armitage followed his Figaro with an unaccompanied and impassioned rendition of ‘
O mio babbino caro
’ (‘How versatile he is,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I always thought that was a woman’s aria’) that they all applauded wildly. Then Herr Zimmerman, their refugee, said he would be honoured to play something for them.

‘And then are you going to strip, sweetheart?’ Mr Bullock asked Stella, who said, ‘If you want,’ and winked in complicity at Ursula. (‘Trust me to get stuck with a load of bolshie women,’ Mr Bullock complained. Frequently.)

Miss Woolf said, looking worried, ‘Your violin is
here
?’ to Herr Zimmerman. ‘Is it
safe
here?’ He had never brought his instrument to the post before. It was quite valuable, Miss Woolf said, and not just from a monetary point of view, for he had left his entire family behind in Germany and the violin was all he had from his former life. Miss Woolf said that she had had a ‘harrowing’ late night ‘chat’ with Herr Zimmerman about the situation in Germany. ‘Things are terrible over there, you know.’

‘I know,’ Ursula said.

‘Do you?’ Miss Woolf said, her interest piqued. ‘Do you have friends there?’

‘No,’ Ursula said. ‘No one. Sometimes one just
knows
, doesn’t one?’

Herr Zimmerman produced his violin and said, ‘You must forgive me, I am not a soloist,’ and then announced, almost apologetically, ‘Bach. Sonata in G Minor.’

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula’s ear, ‘how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too. Think of the Choral Symphony –
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
.’

Ursula didn’t answer as Herr Zimmerman had raised his bow, poised for performance, and a deep hush fell as if they were in a concert hall rather than a rundown post. Some of the silence was due to the quality of the performance (‘Sublime,’ Miss Woolf judged it later. ‘Really beautiful,’ Stella said) and some out of respect perhaps for Herr Zimmerman’s refugee status, but there was also something so spare about the music that it left plenty of room for one to engage deeply with one’s thoughts. Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh’s death, his absence more than his death. It was only a fortnight since he died and she was still expecting to see him again. These were the thoughts she had put away for a future time and now the future was suddenly on her. She was relieved not to be embarrassed by tears, instead she was plunged into an awful melancholy. As if sensing her emotions, Miss Woolf reached out and gripped her hand firmly. Ursula could feel that Miss Woolf herself was almost vibrating with emotion.

When the music finished there was a moment of pure, profound silence, as if the world had stopped breathing, and then instead of praise and applause the peace was broken by the purple warning – ‘bombers within twenty minutes’. It was rather odd to think that these alerts were coming from her own Region 5 War Room, sent by the girls in the teleprinter room.

‘Come on then,’ Mr Simms said, standing up and sighing heavily, ‘let’s get out there.’ By the time they were out the red alert had come through. Just twelve minutes, if they were lucky, to dragoon people into shelters, the siren at their back.

Ursula never used public shelters, there was something about the crush of bodies, the claustrophobia, that made her skin crawl. They had attended a particularly gruesome incident when a shelter took a direct hit from a parachute mine in their sector. Ursula thought that she would rather die out in the open than trapped like a fox in a hole.

It was a beautiful evening. A crescent moon and her bevy of stars had pierced the black backcloth of night. She thought of Romeo’s encomium to Juliet –
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear
. Ursula was in a poetic mood, some might have said, herself included, overly poetic, as a consequence of her mournful mood. There was no Mr Durkin to misquote any more. He had suffered a heart attack during an incident. He was recovering, ‘thank goodness’, Miss Woolf said. She had found time to visit him in hospital and Ursula felt no guilt that she had not. Hugh was dead, Mr Durkin wasn’t, there was little room in her heart for sympathy. Mr Durkin’s position as Miss Woolf’s deputy had been taken by Mr Simms.

The strident noises of war had begun. The boom of the barrage, the raiders’ engines overhead with that monotonous, uneven beat that made her nauseous. The gun discharges, the searchlights poking their fingers into the sky, the muted anticipation of dread – all soon spoiled any idea of poetry.

By the time they arrived at the incident everyone was there, the gas and water, the Bomb Disposal Squad, heavy rescue, light rescue, stretcher parties, the mortuary van (a baker’s van by day). The road was carpeted with the tangled hoses of an AFS unit as on one side of the street a building was well on fire, with sparks and burning embers spitting out. Ursula thought she had caught a glimpse of Fred Smith, his features briefly illuminated by the flames, but came to the conclusion that she had imagined it.

The rescue squad was as cautious as ever with their torches and lamps even though the fire was blazing away at their backs. Yet, to a man, they had cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, despite the fact that the gas men hadn’t cleared the area, not to mention that the presence of the Bomb Disposal Squad indicated a bomb that might go off at any moment. Everyone just got on with the job in hand (needs must), cavalier in the face of possible disaster. Or perhaps some people (and Ursula wondered if she included herself among them nowadays) simply didn’t care any more.

She had an uncomfortable feeling, a premonition perhaps, that things were not going to go well tonight. ‘It was the Bach,’ Miss Woolf comforted, ‘it was unsettling for the soul.’

Apparently, the street straddled two sectors and the incident officer in charge was wrangling with two wardens who both claimed dominion over it. Miss Woolf didn’t join this little fracas as it turned out that it wasn’t their sector at all, but as it was obviously such a major incident she declared that their post should pitch in and get on with it and ignore what anyone said to them.

‘Outlaws,’ Mr Bullock said, appreciatively.

‘Hardly,’ Miss Woolf said.

The half of the street that wasn’t on fire had been badly hit and the acid-raw smell of powdered brick and cordite struck their lungs immediately. Ursula tried to think of the meadow at the back of the copse at Fox Corner. Flax and larkspur, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. She thought of the smell of new-mown grass and the freshness of summer rain. This was a new diversionary tactic to combat the brutish scents of an explosion. (‘Does it work?’ a curious Mr Emslie asked. ‘Not really,’ Ursula said.) ‘I used to think of my mother’s perfume,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘April Violets. But unfortunately now when I try to remember my mother all I can think of are the bombs.’

Ursula offered Mr Emslie a peppermint. ‘It helps a little bit,’ she said.

The closer they got to the incident the worse it proved to be (the opposite, in Ursula’s experience, was rarely so).

A grisly tableau was the first thing to greet them – mangled bodies were strewn around, many of them no more than limbless torsos, like tailor’s dummies, their clothes blown off. Ursula was reminded of the mannequins she had seen with Ralph in Oxford Street, after the John Lewis bomb. A stretcher-bearer, lacking as yet any live casualties, was picking up limbs – arms and legs that were sticking out of the rubble. He looked as if he was intending to piece the dead together again at a later date. Did someone do that, Ursula wondered? In the mortuaries – try and match people up, like macabre jigsaws? Some people were beyond re-creation, of course – two men from the rescue squad were raking and shovelling lumps of flesh into baskets, another was scrubbing something off a wall with a yard brush.

Ursula wondered if she knew any of the victims. Their flat in Phillimore Gardens was a mere couple of streets away from here. Perhaps she passed some of them in the morning on her way to work, or had spoken to them in the grocer’s or the butcher’s.

‘Apparently there are quite a lot of people unaccounted for,’ Miss Woolf said. She had spoken to the Incident Officer, who had been grateful, it seemed, to talk to a warden with common sense. ‘We’re not outlaws any more, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

One floor above the man with the yard brush (although there was no floor) a dress was hanging on a coat hanger from a picture rail. Ursula often found herself more moved by these small reminders of domestic life – the kettle still on the stove, the table laid for a supper that would never be eaten – than she was by the greater misery and destruction that surrounded them. Although when she looked at the dress now she realized that there was a woman still wearing it, her head and legs blown off but not her arms. The capriciousness of high explosives never ceased to surprise Ursula. The woman seemed to have become fused with the wall in some way. The fire was burning so brightly that she could make out a little brooch still pinned to the dress. A black cat, a rhinestone for an eye.

Rubble shifted underfoot as she made her way to the back wall of this same house. There was a woman sitting propped up amongst the rubble, arms and legs splayed like a rag doll. She looked as if she had been tossed in the air and landed any old how – which was probably the case. Ursula tried to signal to the stretcher-bearer but there was now a stream of bombers passing overhead and no one could hear her above the noise.

The woman was grey with dust so that it was almost impossible to tell how old she was. She had a horrible-looking burn on her hand. Ursula fumbled in her first-aid pack for the tube of Burnol and smeared some of the ointment on to her hand. She didn’t know why, the woman looked too far gone to be cured by Burnol. She wished she had some water, it was painful to see how dry the woman’s lips were. Unexpectedly, she opened her dark eyes, her lashes pale and spiky with dust, and tried to say something but her voice was so hoarse from the dust that Ursula couldn’t understand her. Was she foreign? ‘What is it?’ Ursula asked. She had a feeling the woman was very near death now.

‘Baby,’ the woman rasped suddenly, ‘where’s my baby?’

‘Baby?’ Ursula echoed, looking around. She could see no sign of any baby. It could be anywhere in the rubble.

‘His name,’ the woman said, guttural and indistinct – she was making a tremendous effort to be lucid – ‘is Emil.’

‘Emil?’

The woman nodded her head very slightly as if she were no longer capable of speech. Ursula looked around again for any sign of a baby. She turned back to the woman to ask how big her baby was but her head was lolling limply and when Ursula felt for a pulse she found nothing.

She left the woman there and went in search of the living.

‘Can you take Mr Emslie a morphia tablet?’ Miss Woolf asked. They could both hear a woman screaming and swearing like a navvy and Miss Woolf added, ‘To the lady that’s making all the noise.’ A good rule of thumb was that the more noise someone was making the less likely they were to die. This particular casualty sounded as if she were ready to fight her way out single-handed from the wreckage of the house and run round Kensington Gardens.

Mr Emslie was in the cellar of the house and Ursula had to be lowered down by two men from the rescue squad and then had to worm her way through a barricade of joists and bricks. She was aware that an entire house appeared to be resting precariously on this same barricade. She found Mr Emslie stretched out almost horizontally next to a woman. Below the waist she was completely trapped by the wreckage of the house but she was conscious and extremely articulate about the distress she was in.