Ashes to Ashes

  Copyright © 2008 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8643 7

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Author’s Note

  To my grandfather, who ran through the flames.

  Resurgam

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to the staff of St Paul’s Chapterhouse for their assistance and for showing me around some of the areas not normally accessible to the public.

  Prologue

  The girl had already gone when I arrived. I don’t remember seeing her. People described her to me; they described her to each other, too.

  ‘Long blond hair down to her waist. Like an angel,’ one bloke said.

  ‘You think?’ The speaker, a middle-aged woman who had just a hint of old Russia, via the Mile End Road, in her voice, looked a bit disgusted. ‘You can’t’ve heard the language she was using. A child like that!’ She shrugged. ‘Terrible!’

  ‘Probably from the East End,’ another, much younger and extremely posh-looking woman said.

  The East End is my home, and so whatever was going on either inside or outside the great cathedral, I wasn’t having that. We’re not all toe-rags and shysters.

  ‘I – er – I – um…’ The stuttering that comes upon me when the bombs begin to fall drives me barmy. ‘Just because she might be from the East End, d-don’t m-mean the kid’s a bad’un,’ I blurted.

  Something heavy and packed with high explosive detonated somewhere nearby and the whole building shook. Thin spirals of loose plaster threaded down from the ceiling of the crypt and on to our heads.

  ‘Bleedin’ ’ell!’ the Russian-via-the-Mile-End-Road woman said. Then she said something I recognised, even if I didn’t understand it, in Yiddish.

  ‘Excuse me!’ the posh woman responded. ‘Madam, you are in a house of God, you know! I know it’s not your house of God, but…’

  From the look on the older woman’s face, Jewish-Christian relations were about to take a turn for the worse. I would have intervened myself if I’d been able, but I had the pictures in my head by that time, of men and horses drowning in seas of mud, buried alive. The bombing happening these days makes me go back in my mind to the Great War. I went to that war a young man and came back a lunatic. While I whimpered at the images that terrify me, another bloke said, ‘Look the important thing is that the little girl was in here when all of this bombing began and now she isn’t!’

  ‘Well, she must’ve gone outside or something then,’ the posh woman said.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ the man who had described her as an angel – probably a volunteer fire watcher – said. ‘It’s hell out there!’

  We all looked up towards the blackened ceiling of the crypt and I felt a shiver go down my back. The volunteer wasn’t wrong. It was hell. I didn’t know how long it had taken me to get to the cathedral through the fiery streets of London. The experience of so many attempts to pass this way or that only to be blocked by burning or collapsed buildings had shattered me and I was exhausted. I’d finally fetched up here because the cathedral was the only place I could see. The smoke was thick and the heat was so intense that lesser buildings were melting in it. I’m not religious, I hadn’t come to the cathedral out of some sort of need to be closer to Jesus; I’d come because I was terrified. I’d have walked into the arms of the Devil if he’d have said he’d deliver me from the flames. As it was, I ran into something that had been built to last – or so I hoped.

  ‘Anyway, why are we even talking about the whereabouts of a child none of us know?’ another volunteer continued. ‘She can’t be outside, I can’t believe that even a stupid kid would go out there. And if she’s inside, then she’s all right for now. What’s important at the moment is that those of us who can, save the building.’

  ‘You’re saying that a place is more important than someone’s life?’ a smart man, a city type by the look of him, asked. Already shaking his head in disapproval he, like me, knew the answer anyway. Some volunteer fire watchers can get very funny about the buildings they’re detailed off to protect – especially the blokes on the big, famous places.

  ‘No,’ the second volunteer said. But then he pulled a face. ‘People are important, of course they are! Some more than others, but buildings are important too. This place is very important, as I think we all know.’

  ‘That is appalling,’ the city type said flatly. ‘To even consider equating a human life with bricks and mortar! Appalling!’

  ‘Listen, sir,’ the volunteer said as he began to move towards the city bloke, ‘this place is everything! The cathedral is the heart of this great capital!’

  The city type cringed – which was not surprising, seeing as the volunteer was as keyed up and red in the face as he was.

  ‘Calm down, Wally!’ the first volunteer said, putting a hand on the second bloke’s shoulder as he stood up and walked towards the stairs that led up out of the crypt. ‘I’m going to have a look up top.’

  Outside, the sound of ack-ack fire and the dull thud of landing incendiary devices joined the crackling of the fires that I knew were all around us.

  ‘And anyway, you’re not even supposed to be here!’ Wally continued. ‘No one from outside the cathedral is meant to be in here.’

  One of the ladies, who was, apparently, part of the cathedral’s little first-aid post, intervened. ‘It’s all right, Mr Smith,’ she said to him. ‘On a night like this, people must shelter where they can. It’s our Christian duty to—’

  ‘What’s that to me? I care about the building!’ Wally said. I could see that there were tears in his eyes now – the tears of strain and of obsession. Men get like that in war, when their nerves have shredded to nothing. ‘The child’s gone, she—’

  ‘Well, we can’t just forget about her!’ the city man said. ‘She’s a little girl.’

  ‘With a dirty mouth,’ the Jewish lady put in.

  ‘Yes, well, with a dirty mouth and… Look, what are we going to do about her?’

  Maybe if someone else had spoken, I would have kept schtum. But I didn’t like the idea of a little kid being out and about on her own in the middle of what could be the biggest bombing raid on London in history. It was certainly the worst one I’d ever seen and I’ve seen a lot. ‘I n-never saw her,’ I stuttered. ‘W-what did she l-look like? T-tell me again.’

  ‘Blonde, dirty mouth,’ the Jewish woman said.

  ‘Dirty face too, as I recall,’ the city bloke added. ‘She came in with someone…’

  ‘Mr Phillips,’ Wally said. He was calm again now, no longer squaring up to the other gent.

  ‘Mr Phillips?’

  ‘He’s another volunteer. Up in the Whispering Gallery now.’

  ‘She’s probably ten years old at the most,’ the posh woman said to me. ‘Very soiled clothes. Very dirty face, but quite pretty, I suppose, underneath it all.’ She frowned. ‘What exactly are you… Mr – er…’

  I stood up. ‘I – er – I’ll go and l-look for her,’ I said.

  ‘Look for her?’

  ‘Up in the er…’ I pointed upwards to where small pieces of plaster still drifted down from the ceiling.

  Mr Smith was not amused. ‘Up in the cathedral?’ he said. He moved towards me now in, I felt, a threatening sort of way. ‘Don’t you go getting in the way of the chaps protecting the building, will you? What they’re doing, what we’re all doing, is vital for the war effort! If Hitler and his Luftwaffe raze this place to the ground…’

  Everyone knew how much Adolph wanted St Paul’s Cathedral reduced to dust and ashes – even me. ‘I won’t m-make a b-bother,’ I said. I couldn’t say ‘nuisance’, which is what I’d wanted to say, it was just too hard. So many things are, when the bombs begin to fall.

  Mr Smith, who was a short, stocky bloke, looked up at me with suspicion on his face. Obviously an educated man, I ima
gined that he was probably a city architect like most of the St Paul’s fire watchers; it wasn’t every day he met a tall, skinny bloke with skin as brown as a nut. It crossed my mind that he probably thought I was a Jew; a lot of people do. But I said nothing.

  ‘Just you make sure that you don’t get in the way, Mr – er…’ he said as he watched me walk towards the stairs that led out of the crypt and up into the cathedral.

  I stopped and turned. ‘Name’s H-Hancock,’ I said. ‘F-Francis H-Hancock.’

  I don’t know why I wanted to see the look on his face when I told him my very un-Jewish name, but I just did. As it happened, he didn’t look surprised at all, but then who I was and what I was doing, didn’t mean much to him – or anyone else, for that matter. London was burning and I was off to find a little girl with a nasty mouth. I, it was quite clear, wasn’t quite right.

  Chapter One

  29 December 1940, 18.08, Public Warning

  What follows here is a mixture of what is known by everyone and what is secret. Whether the full facts of that terrible night as I experienced it will ever truly be revealed, I do not know. This is a tale told by a madman, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t signify anything. Quite the opposite.

  I heard the air raid sirens whine into life at around ten past six. I was just about to leave my great aunt Annie’s flat in Clerkenwell when both of us heard it go. Annie, who is my late father’s aunt, is nearly a hundred years old and, as a consequence, isn’t too bothered about sheltering or any of that nonsense. She also knows me better than to suggest that I do something like that too.

  ‘You’d best get going, Frank,’ she said as she pushed herself out of her battered old button-back chair. ‘Get out while all the silly buggers are getting in to their horrible dingy old shelters.’

  I smiled. For some reason Annie seemed to understand my need to be out and running the streets every time the bombing started better than most. A lot of people know why I do it, but not many of them sympathise with me. My mum, for instance. I know she feels it’s selfish and in a way it is; I could very easily be killed out on the street. I can’t help doing it, though. It’s not an excuse, but I’m not what anyone would call sane.

  Francis Thomas Hancock, that’s me. Undertaker, old soldier and lunatic. On and off I spent four years fighting for king and country in the Great War of 1914–18. Unlike most of my mates who also went, I got out of it with my life – or, rather, a life of sorts. Everything frightens me – dark places, confined spaces, losing those I love, falling bombs and the potential they have for bursting bodies open, for vaporising people, for burying men and women alive. I’ve never been ‘right’ ever since the trenches, but I was better than this. Now, ever since all of this bombing started back in September, I haven’t been sure about anything. Horror is an everyday, or night-time, thing. I conduct a funeral at any of the graveyards in my home manor of West Ham, and I’m not sure that any of the stranger things I’m seeing are real or not. Burying a coffin full of something that once lived down by our great Royal Docks, I look about me and I see a human bone in a tree, a bit of a rank shroud hanging off a bush or a flower. Our graveyards as well as our homes and businesses are bombed on a nightly basis. But is the bone really there? Is the shroud? Is what I’m seeing ‘now’ or maybe bits of ‘back then’ when all of my young life was given over to the ripping apart of human bodies and the indignities of their so-called burials? My father was an undertaker, and his father before him, and so giving the dead a decent send-off is in my blood. The Great War denied our poor servicemen that, our stupid generals threw them away like worn-out tea leaves.

  ‘It was good of you to come over and see me,’ Annie said as she walked with me towards her front door. ‘Give my best to your mother and the girls.’

  We, my mother, my sisters and myself, live above our undertaking business which is in the middle of the borough, in Plaistow. My mother, a Christian Indian lady from Calcutta, is largely responsible for the colour of my skin and that of my older sister Nancy. Aggie, my younger sister, takes after our late father. Just as Annie once was, Aggie is a true blonde, a Hancock girl and it’s Aggie who married and has kids. Not that her husband proved to be any good. He hopped off with another woman years ago, leaving my sister with two nippers, who have, of course, been evacuated to the country. I’m the only man in our house now, God help me.

  ‘Goodbye, A-Annie,’ I said as I reached the door and the reality behind the drone of this particular group of bombers from above hit me for the first time. ‘What will you, er… Are you going to the s-shelter this time?’

  I don’t know why I asked. I knew she always just sat by her range and drank tea when the raids were on. Perhaps I had a premonition of what was about to happen. Perhaps because of it I needed some sort of assurance that Annie was going to be safe.

  ‘Frank Hancock, when did you ever see me go into any shelter? No, no, no!’ Annie waved a tiny, blue-veined hand at me and said, ‘Can’t stand either the company or the smell!’

  As well as, for me, the problem of being buried alive in a shelter, there are other worries, too. Sometimes whoever you are sitting with isn’t very nice; some people do some very strange things in shelters – it isn’t all knitting and playing games of Monopoly! Babies are conceived in shelters, believe you me; men and women burp and break wind and die in them every day. And as for the toilets, where there are toilets…

  ‘It was good of you to come, Frank,’ she said as she opened the door and let me out into the gloomy, blacked-out street. Annie lives almost in Finsbury, just to the north of Mount Pleasant Sorting Office on Wilmington Square. We’d been visiting Annie all my life, but in spite of knowing her for forty-eight years, I realised that evening, as I began to run away from her flat as if the Devil was on my heels, that she was actually quite a mystery to me. She’d never married or, in my lifetime at least, had a job, and yet she owned her flat outright. There was a rumour in the family that Annie had once had some sort of career on the stage, scandalous when she’d been young. But she’d never said anything about that to me and I wasn’t about to ask. I might be nearly fifty, but even at my great age you don’t ask about old people’s private business. It’s not done.

  I don’t know where the first bomb landed, but it felt as if it wasn’t very far away. Usually if I’m away from home during a raid, I try to move myself in the general direction of Plaistow. In the blackout it’s never easy to see where you’re going and quite often I lose my way in the panic of the moment, but I remember thinking that what I should be doing was going south on the Farringdon Road. I also remember, because I looked up and saw it hanging in the sky like a huge silver rivet, that there was a full moon. Whether or not I thought at the time this was a bad sign, given what was to come, I don’t now recall. Our own guns started up then, ack-ack fire lighting up the sky and those great fat-bellied barrage balloons. But none of that made any difference to what was coming down from the bombers up above. Our shells were bursting without apparently making contact with anything. I looked up at one point and saw against the light from the guns and the radiance from the moon what looked like great bundles of sticks falling down on London. Incendiaries.

  Incendiary bombs are small. They don’t make much noise when they hit the ground. In fact, to my way of thinking, they sound rather gentle. After the initial metallic clunk on the pavement their cases sound a bit like leaves scuttling across the ground, when they land. But then they burst into flame and some of them don’t stop there. Some of them catch fire and then they explode. Within seconds, or so it seemed, there were hundreds of them, all around me. As they fell, I danced to avoid them, skipping and hopping along the pavement like a crazed ballerina. Windows behind, to the side and in front of me burst as the heat from the incendiaries melted them. As well as skipping I also threw both my arms across my eyes so I didn’t get blinded by flying glass.

  I don’t remember doing it, but I came off the Farringdon Road at some point. I remember Smithfield meat market because there were a few people around and about and in the City at this time of night, on a Sunday, that was unusual. But, as I and millions of other Londoners were soon to learn, that emptiness was the whole point behind this raid. The City was quiet and vulnerable just the way Adolph and his mates knew it would be.