Ashes to Ashes (2 page)

‘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.

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

S
o 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 breathless 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.