Murder on the Home Front (22 page)

That was our first p.m. on D-Day: the young soldier who was cut up in Wanstead mortuary while his erstwhile comrades were landing in Normandy.

The rest of that day we did less topical postmortems. In the evening came the news that the landings had been, so far, successful, and there were the voices of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle on the radio.

Chester Wilmot, in
The Struggle for Europe
, describes how Hitler’s plans to launch a gigantic V-1 bombardment of Southern England and especially of London went astray. On the night of June 12 one lone bomb, out of an intended salvo of 128, landed in London. It claimed only one or two victims and on the following morning, June 13, CKS was asked to do a p.m. on one of these, a woman.

The V-1 had landed in the Shoreditch neighborhood, and Doughty, the coroner’s officer, was terribly hush-hush when he telephoned me.

“The Home Office wants Dr. Keith Simpson to do a postmortem on the victim of an incident.”

“What kind of an incident?” asks the ever-inquisitive Miss L.

“Enemy action, Miss Molly.”

“Yes, but what sort of enemy action, Doughty?”

Doughty hummed and ha’d and at last said that so far as he could make out it had been some “sort of a rocket-bomb.”

“The Secret Weapon?” I asked him.

“Don’t know, Miss Molly. I suppose it might be.”

As events soon proved, it was the Secret Weapon all right, but on that first morning of the offensive we didn’t know any more about the matter than what Doughty had told me over the phone. The woman on the p.m. table at Shoreditch mortuary had died of a blast from a high explosive of some kind or the other, and her injuries were ordinary blast injuries.

On the night of June 15–16 the offensive began in earnest. A woman surgeon friend of mine in North London spent all June 16 operating on casualties brought in from a Kentish Town incident, while I sat typing in Keith Simpson’s flat, listening to the explosions going off, spasmodically, around us. We were informed that we were being attacked by pilotless rocket-bombs, and a few days later one which had landed intact was put on view at Leicester Square, and I went along to look at it—I think I paid sixpence to see it. But soon I was seeing an excess of them, doodling across the sky, and I wondered why on earth I had wasted sixpence to look at a V-1.

The Londoner’s pet name for them was “doodle-bombs,” with less decent variations on the theme. They were, frankly, nerve-racking. They were also, I thought, so completely German; a form of death utterly mechanized, completely lacking the human touch, deriving from those masterminds that invented mobile gas chambers for killing Jewish children, and human-soap factories. Yes, the doodle-bombs made dying a completely ignoble process. A rather ridiculous little airplane buzzing across the sky, drooling and lurching like a besotted bumblebee, finally to cut off into silence and plunge in a top-heavy, helpless dive onto streets and houses and people, sending everything and everybody up in fragments, with a bang!

It was so inhuman it verged on the farcical. A little airplane, flying by radio, traveling so far and then automatically going off with a bang and killing you. What a bloody silly way to die!

We soon all got used to the business of hearing a bomb boombling nearer and nearer and wondering, “Is it going to pass over, or is it going to cut out and land on me?”

Hitler, of course, was meantime optimistically assuring his chiefs of staff that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, because the British civilians, under the impact of this fearful onslaught, would panic and ask for an armistice.

But although most people found the V-1s a much more grueling ordeal than the Blitz, there was no panic, because everybody at home knew that this attack was all part of the German counterattack against the Allied Invasion, and it was as much the civilian’s duty to stand up to the doodle-bombing as it was the soldier’s duty to do the fighting in France. Therefore the Londoner’s watchword “Grin and bear it” once again became a battle cry, although the grinning was, by this time, somewhat dour.

The doodle-bombs seemed to have a definite timetable, and this timetable coincided wonderfully neatly with that of Dr. Keith Simpson. He liked, if possible, to work south and west in the mornings and east in the afternoons. The doodle-bombs chose the same system. Mornings they plumped around Hammersmith, Wandsworth, moving toward Southwark at midday—when we too moved over to Southwark. By the time we reached Shoreditch at two o’clock or so they were also flocking down upon Shoreditch, traveling farther afield to Stratford, Leyton, Walthamstow, Ilford, and East Ham as we went.

I suggested, a little timidly, that we might change our routine around a bit. But CKS greeted this proposal with a frigid look. “Certainly not. We really cannot allow these wretched bombs to interfere with our work, Miss L.”

One afternoon, as Doughty of Shoreditch and I picked ourselves up from the floor from under his office desk, where we had been taking inadequate emergency cover while a flying bomb exploded a few blocks away, I said, “Doughty, if I come here often enough these afternoons I know I’ll cop it.”

He gave me a rueful grin. “Why, Miss Molly, d’you think we’ve got one labeled for us here?”

“I do.”

Next afternoon we didn’t go to Shoreditch, but about four o’clock Doughty phoned us to say that a bomb had landed just outside the Coroner’s Court, damaging the place severely—fortunately he had been in the basement of a neighboring building—and quite destroying the funny little old Victorian mortuary and, what was infinitely worse, the wonderful old fifteenth-century weavers’ houses the other side of the churchyard. As for the beautiful old church, that was still more or less standing, but blown through and through, so that it was merely a shell.

How often I had said I would go in that church some time when I had the afternoon off, to see the ancient registers with the names of Shakespeare’s original players inscribed in them, and the Elizabethan plate, and the other wonderful things in there. But I hadn’t hurried to visit these marvels, and now they had been blown into dust, to whirl around desolate street corners and pile on deserted bomb sites and make the gritty pavements more gritty and more bitter.

All Londoners nurse memories of those days. The street shelters where some of the women and old folk would sit all day, talking in the sun, ready to dodge under cover when the sirens sounded. The Underground at night, crowded with people come to sleep down there, all sociable as field mice, cheerfully retiring for the night in improvised bunks, which the occupants modestly fixed up with curtains. (My sister got a kick from peeking around these curtains at people and saying, “Hello.” Some of the things said to her in return were not quite so friendly.) The constant boodle-oodle-oodling and the rending crashes, every incident immediately followed by a stream of people hurrying forth on bicycles and on foot to give whatever assistance was possible at the scene of disaster. The innumerable cups of tea that were made, the narrow-squeak stories that were swapped, the Union Jacks that appeared—as in the old Blitz—stuck on the piles of wreckage.

There was one afternoon in particular that I remember. It started at Stratford with a doodle-bomb which went around three times. We were all in the mortuary of Queen Mary’s Hospital: CKS; Tiny, the giant mortuary keeper, formerly of the Guards; Cook, the coroner’s officer; the hospital superintendent; and myself. Suddenly we heard the thing coming and we all froze: CKS with his knife in his hand, Tiny clutching the sponge he was swabbing with, Cook with an eye on the window (to see if he could see), the superintendent holding a sheaf of notes on the postmortem case, and myself seated at my typewriter. The doodle-bomb hum-bummed over and droned into the distance, cheered by Tiny. Then its engine started growing louder again. “It’s not coming back?” shouted Tiny—I think he would have added more if I had not been there. Cook ran out to see and returned, “Yes, it’s gone around in a circle. The town clerk’s up on the roof next door, watching it.” Back it came and we all froze again. Over it went and drooled away, as before. We listened. Yes, it slowly veered around and began the tedious approach for the third time. “It’s ours,” said Tiny. “Twice was a blooming miracle but three times is too much to hope for. Well, here goes.” “The town clerk’s still up there watching,” reported Cook. “Thinks it’s firework night, maybe,” murmured Tiny. With baited breath we listened to our old gallivanting friend the doodle-bomb taking a third look down on Queen Mary’s Hospital, Stratford. To our astonishment he passed over once more, but crashed a short distance beyond on the railway yards. “I never want to go through an experience like that again,” said Tiny, “and, by God, I’ve had some.”

Just as we left Stratford for Leyton another doodle-bomb passed over, going in the same direction as ourselves. When we reached Leyton mortuary Miles greeted us with the news that this bomb had dropped on the bus garage at the Baker’s Arms. We left Leyton for Whipps Cross Hospital and another bomb went over, apparently aiming for Whipps Cross Hospital. We had to make a detour because of the damage around the neighborhood of the bus garage. When we reached the hospital we found the doodle-bomb had crashed a short distance from the hospital gates. A wrecked truck lay in the roadway; trees were shattered as if by a gale, and their green leaves covered the pavement as if torn down by a premature and violent autumn. We drove to the mortuary in the hospital grounds. The ambulances with the casualties from the bus garage incident were driving up to the door of the Casualty Department all the time. Stretchers were carefully lifted out and borne into the hospital building. But sometimes the stretchers were brought over to the mortuary instead.

In the mortuary already lay the driver of the wrecked truck. The windscreen had been shattered in his face and his throat was widely cut from ear to ear, as decisively as if he had been a fanatical suicide. Goodwin was standing thoughtfully staring down at him.

Other cases were brought in, among them a woman, obviously a housewife, from one of the small houses near the bus garage. She was laid gently on the floor. CKS fetched out his thermometer and took her temperature. Apparently there was a theory that immediately after death the temperature of the body shoots up to an unprecedented height. CKS decided to put this theory to the test, and during the flying-bomb era he took several temperatures of persons just dead, but so far as I remember found nothing very remarkable about their temperatures.

While he bent over the dead housewife I stood by with my notepad, contemplating the woman who had just been killed in a front line which was no less a front line because it was in London. She was just a plain, ordinary London housewife in a shabby dress and flowered apron. Perhaps when the bomb crashed she had been peeling the potatoes for her husband’s supper, I thought. And when the husband, and maybe a grown-up daughter or two, arrived home that evening it would be to find their little house a pile of laths and mucky plaster and mother taken to the mortuary. And that story was being repeated daily, all over London.

I thought of my own mother in our house in North London and wondered, for a brief moment, whether she was still intact. But what was the point of wondering that? As she herself would say, “Kismet.”

Kismet was kind to me and my family. A few days later when I was at Leyton another bomb, all in key with the Simpson daily round, went off just across the road; it was an occasion to be remembered, because while Miles and I heaped on top of each other for shelter under the sink—a silly place, really—Dr. Simpson crouched for shelter under the p.m. table, which was complete with a body, and the sight of one who hoped to live crouching under a corpse was rather striking. It seized my imagination even though I was shaking with fright, and CKS commented upon his sheltering place with a rather crooked smile as soon as he had scrambled out again after the explosion. Then we went out into the street, with our ears zinging from the blast, to watch the great black coils of oily, stinking smoke undulating overhead, while what appeared to be fragments of charred paper showered down groundward. As we watched, the inevitable stream of people came hurrying; first the ARP squads, then the cyclists, and then the running neighbors, all frantically rushing to the rescue of the people in the wrecked little houses. And then came the ambulances…

At Whipps Cross, one morning, we obtained our best close-up view of a bomb. It was chugging along, approaching the end of its flight, and CKS stopped the car and we both jumped out. I began making a beeline for some bushes, but my companion shouted at me to pull myself together. “You’re perfectly safe, Miss Lefebure. It’s traveling away from us. What a magnificent view of the thing! And what an extraordinary color it is!”

Envying my pathologist’s Anglo-Saxon calm I struggled to master my Gallic twitterings, meanwhile peering upward at the little demon above us. “Oh, isn’t it pretty! In a nasty sort of a way” was my feminine comment. A delicate shade of bluey-green, with a beautiful long plume of vivid scarlet and orange flame spurting out behind it like a dragon’s breath in reverse. So small, so mechanical, it went into a glide and flew lower and lower, to dive suddenly over the houses of Walthamstow—landing, I afterward discovered, on a candy shop I had often patronized when I was a reporter, and blowing the place to bits.

One day MacKay phoned us to say that the Home Office had an identity job for us at his mortuary. Identity and reconstruction. A special job.

We went along next morning and found MacKay waiting in the sunny little mortuary yard. He had two big trestle tables out there, too, the sort of tables one associates with Sunday school treats, only instead of being loaded with goodies these tables were loaded with bits and pieces of people.