Ashes to Ashes Page 2

  Around the market the incendiaries appeared to thin out. Such an enormous number of them wasn’t what we were used to. Normally if they hit the ground a bucketful of sand thrown over the top of each one will finish the little blighter off. But hundreds all falling at once meant that, especially in a thinly populated area, those not put out immediately, continued to burn and then set fire to whatever was around them. Caught on top of roofs or in gutters the buggers are nearly always lethal. Getting up there to hook one or more down is very dangerous. Buildings were beginning to catch fire around me and although I could see and hear fire fighters and others doing their best to put them out, there was a sense that something unstoppable was beginning to take hold even at that early stage.

  From what I later learned from the people in St Paul’s crypt, the girl with the long blond hair and the not so savoury mouth arrived shortly after the bombing raid began. She came in at the same time as a Mr Phillips, one of the architects who acted as fire watchers to the cathedral. They used architects because the building is complex – lots of hidden corridors, an inner ‘skin’ beneath the famous dome, and lots of very flammable material. Mr Phillips, it was said, went off about his business fairly quickly. People thought the girl had just happened to come in with the man at the same time. The young posh lady, however, begged to differ. She saw, so she claimed, something in the child’s eyes that seemed to find the architect familiar. The others disagreed.

  ‘“Effin’ ’ot” is what I heard her say,’ the Jewish woman said. ‘“Effin’ ’ot!” Blimey, we was all horrified at that! The man with her just turned tail and went! Disgusted, if you ask me!’

  The child, whose name no one had bothered to find out, had made quite an impression. She was rude and coarse but with a face and colouring that most people seemed to think belied her behaviour. Like me she’d come in to the cathedral to shelter from the fires that were beginning to melt London’s streets. Not many people, let alone children, actually live in the Square Mile or City of London, so where she’d come from was anybody’s guess. After all, as I later pointed out to my fellow shelterers, it’s not just East Enders who swear. And it isn’t just little girls who don’t necessarily want to talk about their experiences when they’ve just come through something that looks like the fires of hell.

  It was after Smithfield, as I headed east, that things started to go really wrong for me. London is still, in the way it’s laid out, a medieval city. There are big roads like Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street, where Lloyds of London has its elegant offices. But much of the City consists of little roads, courts and lanes that date from God alone knows when. They have some strange and clearly very ancient names. ‘Stew Lane’ down by Southwark Bridge is one; ‘Bleeding Heart Yard’ off the jewellery quarter at Hatton Garden is another. As someone who was brought up a Catholic, even if I haven’t been to Mass since well before the Great War, I recognise ‘Bleeding Heart’ as a name that must have come from before the Reformation. The Sacred and usually Bleeding Heart of Jesus is an image that I don’t see every day in this mainly Protestant England of ours. But on Sundays, when I was a child, there it was, in a side chapel of our church; Jesus pointing to his exposed red and bleeding heart, frightening kids like me rigid. I don’t believe in him any more than I believe in Father Christmas, but I called out to Jesus and the Virgin Mary as I ran from one dead-end court or alleyway to the next. I say ‘dead end’, but they weren’t always blocked by actual buildings; sometimes where a house or a pub had been there was just a fire, huge white-hot flames lapping up into a sky filled with ack-ack noise and drowning in an ever widening sea of smoke. Everything looked the same after a bit. I ran from one tiny lane to the next identical, melting and disintegrating place. The bloody incendiaries had come down in such numbers that everything was burning. In my head the voices left over from the Great War told me I was sure to die. Sometimes when I’m in trouble and they do this, I get angry. But not this time. This time I believed every word they said. This time I invited the buggers to come and get me if they wanted to! When a window exploded almost in my face I fancied that it was some sort of devilish answer and I screamed.

  Whether I was actually on Ludgate Hill or in some tiny, disintegrating court just off it, I don’t know, but at some point I saw the cathedral from the front. Because St Paul’s is at the top of Ludgate Hill, I must have been near it because when the smoke around me cleared for a moment, I saw the whole of the western façade with its two great towers shining down at me. It was the only thing, the only thing that wasn’t crashing down or melting around me.

  Two blokes, firemen holding on for dear life to a dirty great hose they had trained on what had once been a warehouse, saw where I was looking and one of them shouted, ‘Get up there, mate! It’s your only hope!’

  I looked again, through eyelashes caked with soot and air flooded with smoke and what little water the firemen were hurling into the fire. White, in spite of everything against the blackened screaming sky, St Paul’s was all I could see, all I felt even a papist like me could trust. I began to make my way towards it as the paving stones fractured and went liquid beneath my feet. I thought I would be safe in the cathedral. I was right in a way, but I was also more wrong than I could ever have imagined.

  Chapter Two

  So once I was, as I thought, safe inside St Paul’s, why did I volunteer to go off and look for a child I hadn’t even seen? I’d only been in that crypt for fifteen minutes at the most, I was exhausted, and getting in there in the first place hadn’t been any sort of picnic.

  Once I’d decided to head for the cathedral, that was it. Wheezing like a pair of broken old bellows, I’d stumbled up to that great double door at the front and I’d hammered and screamed for what seemed like hours. No one came. Some ‘sanctuary’ this was, I thought! Typical bloody religion, all show and no do! I didn’t, to be truthful, think I would die at that point. Behind those enormous columns in front of the entrance you can get a feeling of solidity and even safety. That the screams and curses from the Somme were jabbering in my head was nothing new, and I just kept on fighting to get into the building in spite of them. It was, however, still a shock when something tapped me on the shoulder. Turning, I saw what I thought was a skeleton looking at me. I did, I will own up, scream.

  ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ the skeleton said. It was, I could now see, wearing a long black cassock and its face, though moulded closely on a skull, was covered with skin.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The stuttering when the bombing starts is bad enough on its own, but my lungs were full of smoke and soot too, and so I was completely speechless.

  ‘Well, you can’t come in here!’ the skeleton said. ‘We’ve a job to do and we’ve enough people to look after here already!’

  I could just make out where he’d come from so quickly. On each side of that entrance, the Great West Door, are two smaller entrances. The one on the left was, I could now make out, open. The skeletal priest, or whatever he was, wasn’t alone either. A bloke, little more than a boy, in a tin hat – which looked comical along with his cassock – was behind him.

  ‘Oh, we can’t turn people away, Mr Andrews!’ the young lad said. ‘Wouldn’t be Christian.’ He then leaned in towards me to get a better look at my face. ‘Looks like one of those poor refugees. You know, from Czechoslovakia and Poland.’

  ‘George, my dear boy, we can’t have all and sundry—’

  A whole canister of incendiaries burst on to the ground about halfway down Ludgate Hill. We all turned to look at the soft, almost silent bouncing of the things as they split up to do their evil business. I’d been where they were only minutes before. Nothing but silence and darkness at first and then, as we all knew they would, they began to burn brightly with that greenish glow they have and with the menacing promise of what we all knew was to come. The men fighting the fires that were already raging down there screamed at each other to ‘put them bastards out!’.

  In the brea
thless semi-darkness the young lad George looked at the older man and said, ‘“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come and sup with him…”’

  ‘George, we can’t just have any old Tom, Dick and—’

  ‘“. . . . and he with me.” Revelations, Chapter Three, Verse Twenty, Mr Andrews,’ George said as he looked down at me now. ‘Jesus would let this man—’

  And then the first fire from that canister of incendiaries began. It must have landed on something that was very easy to burn. Halfway up a building, on a ledge of some sort, a fire began. The flames must have reached a good eighteen feet or so as we looked on. It took only seconds. There were screams.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ young George said.

  The frightening-looking Mr Andrews began to tell him off but when the whole street in front of us disappeared, or, rather, was eaten by the hungriest flames even I had seen so far, he helped the boy pull me inside the building. As the door slammed behind us the screams from the street had solidified into one terrifying howl. Exhausted, I hit the floor. God, but it was dark in that cathedral! Of course once I looked up I could see light from both the fires outside and the traces from our guns shining through some of the windows up in the dome. But down in the cathedral it was black save for a dim red lamp that glowed beneath the dome on the floor. I could still feel young George’s hands on my jacket once the door to that hell outside had closed behind us. As I lay on the floor I also felt the swish of a cassock against my face as Mr Andrews disappeared off somewhere or other. I heard him speak just once as he went. ‘Take him down to the crypt with the other waifs and strays,’ he said as the cathedral echoed emptily behind him.

  ‘He – er – h-he s-sounds cross,’ I said once I’d managed to get my wits together enough to speak.

  ‘Oh, you’re English,’ George said. He was shining a dim torch into my face now which also meant that I could see him too. His cheeks were chubby, and he looked more like a cherub than a young lad.

  ‘Y-yes…’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you might be a refugee,’ he said as he pulled me up to my feet. ‘There are so many about nowadays. I feel so sorry for them, don’t you? There are some other people sheltering in the crypt. I’ll take you down to them.’

  Something fell down from somewhere and hit the cathedral floor with a crash. George tugged on my arm and so I followed him down to where the small group of other shelterers from outside the cathedral were sitting with the ladies who provided first-aid support to the Watch – wives of those who worked in the church. There were also, the vocal Mr Smith included, members of the Watch itself taking rest breaks down there too.

  St Paul’s Fire Watch is mainly made up of men from the Royal Institute of British Architects. It was formed originally in the Great War to protect the cathedral from Zeppelins. But in 1939 it was reformed to deal with this latest bloody madness. Mr Smith, Mr Neeson and two others were resting on cots when I entered the crypt. One or two of them looked at me and I think the other shelterers, too, with not very well disguised contempt. What they thought we might be able to do out amongst the fires I couldn’t even imagine. But then for me personally being in the crypt, though safe from the flames for the time being, quickly proved to not be a good idea. I don’t know what, even now, St Paul’s Cathedral weighs, but it’s heavy, there’s a lot of it, and in my head all I could hear was the sound of it caving in and crushing me. Burying me alive, just like the mud of Flanders had buried so many of my mates, smothering the last bit of life out of them. I knew as soon as I sat down next to the Jewish lady that I couldn’t be there for very long. As the young lad George left, so the noises in my head grew louder, voices describing how it would be to drown in dust and mud and rubbish. After Mr Neeson had said hello and I’d exchanged a few words with him, I began to hum, tunelessly. I sometimes do this particularly if I’m with other people I don’t know. It stops me answering the voices back. But the lady by my side didn’t like my humming.

  ‘Can you stop that, please, sir,’ she said. In her eyes, I could see her disapproval of me quite apart from the humming. She was Jewish, but I was a ‘darkie’ and I noticed that she shuffled just slightly away from me as I sat down. I shut up. Words kept on wanting to burst out of my mouth, especially when there were very big explosions outside, but I held them in. I held them in until the subject of that young girl came up. I’ll be honest, the disappearance of the girl with the blond hair and the dirty mouth was the perfect excuse for me to get out of there and up above ground once again. So I volunteered for it. I would have crawled across glass and fought anyone else who might have wanted to do it instead of me, and so what happened afterwards was in a way, my own fault. I have only myself to blame for young Milly and the story of her, me and the night of 29 December 1940.

  As soon as I got to the top of the stairs up into the body of the cathedral I knew I was going to have my work cut out for me. From the sound of it incendiaries were falling in their hundreds, on to the roof. There was noise, if not light, everywhere.

  A bloke’s voice said, ‘The dry riser’s packed up! Dean, we’ve got no water!’

  ‘Thank the good Lord that we have reserves!’ a flustered but nevertheless posh voice replied. ‘We will have to use the stirrup pumps, sand bags…’

  There was water, but apparently the main supply had failed. The Dean, the man in charge of the cathedral, had sounded to me confident of what he called his reserves, but in the meantime, men were running in the direction of the cathedral’s many roofs. Every part of the building has its own roof – the nave, the dome, the Great West Door. So many places for incendiary devices to lodge their evil selves!

  I’d been told that Mr Phillips, the watchman who had apparently brought the little blonde girl into the cathedral, was up in the Whispering Gallery. Unless I came across the child by chance in the church itself, it seemed to me a good first step in locating her was to talk to Mr Phillips. But then a lot of other people, if the sound of the boots on the stairs to the upper parts of building were anything to go by, were going up there too, the Whispering Gallery being a first step, as it were, to getting out on to the cathedral roof tops above. If I joined their ranks, I’d probably be in the way.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I looked around and saw, through the gloom, a familiar tin hat above a cherub’s face. It was not, however, a face at rest. It was strained, older-looking than it really was and the eyes were shining with something I must admit I found alarming.

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Listen, Mr…’ George said. ‘There are hundreds of these fire bombs hitting our roof, we’ve no actual water supply, and so the Watch are having to soak the dreadful things using stirrup pumps. We’re being attacked, Mr…’

  ‘H-Hancock.’

  ‘Mr Hancock, I think that Hitler wants us this night!’ George said. ‘I think he wants the cathedral!’ One of his arms shot out towards me and briefly grabbed my shoulder. ‘We have to stop him! We are stopping him!’

  And then as quickly as he’d arrived, he left, running towards the stairs I felt I should be going up. George, whatever his position in the cathedral, was going to go and do his bit to protect it. I was, if I were honest, just getting away from the crypt and my own fear of being buried alive. Christ Almighty, I didn’t even have a torch to help me look for this little girl! I stood by the red lamp underneath the dome, stock still as if I were waiting for a bus.

  But then what was I supposed to do? What could someone like me even think about doing? I bury the dead. Sometimes, these days, I don’t even do that properly, by which I mean that I don’t always tell the truth as I once did back in the good old days. I lie to relatives. I say things like, ‘Here in this coffin, love, is the body of your old dad. Peaceful and at rest he is, dressed him to meet his maker myself, sweetheart.’ I know there’s only a hand, a burst torso and nothing to even tell me whether the stuff the rescue lads pulled out of the rubble is male or female. All I
know is that the woman’s father is dead and that his family need a funeral. They need the dignity the Luftwaffe took away from their father when their bombs reduced him to atoms. Not all the victims of the bombing can be found and so people like me tell lies. We tell lies for the best of reasons, but we still tell them and, barmy or not, that doesn’t sit right with me. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, I even killed back in the Great War, the First Lot as us old soldiers like to call it. But mad and bloodstained as I might be, I was never a liar before now. As I stood there next to that dim red lamp, with the sounds of brave men putting out fires all around me, I could have wept if I hadn’t known it was only self pity. What a sad sight I would have made – had he really seen me – for the screaming man who rushed past me and up the stairs to the Whispering Gallery now. As it was he just glanced at me and shouted as he went. ‘It’s the dome!’ he yelled. ‘We’ve had a telephone message telling us the dome is on fire!’

  Sometimes you don’t think, you just do whatever it is that needs doing – even if you can’t really know what that is. I followed the shouting man up the stairs – he was running, and I ran for a bit until my lungs gave out. I’m not a lover of spiral staircases anyway, and the one up to the Whispering Gallery is narrow, like a corkscrew. Dark at the best of times, the few windows in the stairwell were blacked out. I groped my way forwards, chest bursting from lack of air, stumbling on every other stair as my legs began to give up. I counted the steps to distract myself, not that it helped in reality, nothing would have done.

  I’d been up to the Whispering Gallery once before, as a child, and had no memory of it being as bad as all that. In fact, my recollection of the stairwell had been of something quite wide. But then I’d probably been about seven years old at the time and so it had seemed wide to me then. I’m a good six foot tall now and so the narrowness of the stairwell, together with the lack of height underneath each spiral, made me feel as if I was being crushed. Shaking with fear, I knew that once I’d counted a hundred steps I had to be at least near to the top. But I’d really underestimated the climb and I’d reckoned without the passageway. Just underneath the Whispering Gallery there is a passageway of such claustrophobic narrowness it really does make you wonder about just how small people must have been in the old days. Christ knows why it’s there! But as I shuffled, whimpering, along its length, my head scraping against the ceiling, I felt as if I were in some sort of mausoleum. When the stairs up to the actual gallery at the end began, I was almost relieved. By the time I got to the top, a combination of lack of air, exhaustion and fear about how I was going to get down a pitch-dark spiral staircase once I’d finished whatever I was doing, made me incapable of speech. Standing in the doorway at the top of the staircase, I shook and sweated and wondered whether my heart would stop. The Whispering Gallery, even in darkness, is awe inspiring. It runs around the base of the great dome on the inside and is, like the rest of the cathedral, made of stone. Or rather, it is mostly made of stone. As I leaned forward to look as far as I dared at the vast space in front of and below me, I saw that just underneath the railings around the inside of the gallery is a wide wooden platform. Logically, if wood is cared for properly, it’s as safe as stone to step upon. But my barmy mind reeled away from this wooden part of the gallery in horror.