Ashes to Ashes (3 page)

‘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.

All around me men were passing buckets, running and shouting in what was, to me, such a dodgy and dangerous place. It seemed that an incendiary bomb had become lodged in the fabric of the dome and was starting to burn a hole. Because the Watch were mainly architects they spoke about what was happening in terms of how it was affecting the structure.

One said to another, ‘If those timbers inside the dome are already alight, the air cavity underneath will turn that into an inferno. The dome will be completely kaput! It’ll drop down into the cathedral like a ruddy stone!’

I didn’t know at the time, but St Paul’s dome is actually two domes, an inner one that you see from inside the cathedral, very ornate and decorative, and an outer one, seen from the street, made of wood and lead. Between the two is a brick funnel construction with air spaces all around it. So if the outer dome burned strongly enough to release the air from the cavity the whole thing would go up and, in the worst possible case, send the lantern and the Golden Ball and Cross on top of the dome crashing down into the cathedral. I was to learn a lot about architects and architecture that night.

‘Get up to the Stone Gallery!’ I heard someone shout as I stood at the top of the stairs, my heart still banging like a steam hammer.

The Stone Gallery is on the outside of the cathedral, about a hundred more stairs above the Whispering Gallery. I may have been away from the crypt, but I was quickly realising that being above ground in the cathedral came at a price to someone as unfit as I was. How could these blokes even think about going up to the Stone Gallery just after they’d climbed up so high already? I lit a fag to help calm myself down. It helped a bit.

‘What are you doing up here?’

Mr Andrews was obviously someone who had the knack of appearing and disappearing at will. Looking as he did – and not in the slightest bit out of breath either – was unnerving.

I don’t know whether it was because I couldn’t hear any actual bombing then or because for some reason I’d lost my fear all of a sudden, but my words didn’t stumble this time.

‘I’m looking for Mr Phillips,’ I said. ‘He’s a watchman.’

‘Phillips?’ Mr Andrews frowned. ‘What do
you
want with Mr Phillips? The watchmen are trying to save the cathedral, he—’

‘Mr Phillips brought in a little girl, to the crypt,’ I said. ‘Now she’s missing.’

‘Mr Phillips wouldn’t have had anything to do with anything improper!’ Mr Andrews said. ‘Our own true watchmen are good men! No one is or will go missing. No one will be sacrificed!’

What he’d said was odd even though it didn’t strike me so at the time. I said, ‘Mr Andrews, the little girl is only about ten. She could’ve easily wandered off on her own. Mr Phillips won’t have had anything to do with her taking off, I don’t suppose. It’s just that he brought her in, so it’s said, and so he might know her name. I can’t even call for her if I don’t know her name, can I?’

A flash of red flame from outside illuminated his face for just a second. It showed me that thin skull shadowed by suspicion.

‘Mr Andrews—’

‘Mr Phillips is out on the Stone Gallery, I believe,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘Some of the watchmen are actually inside the dome. There’s a fire bomb, stuck—’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Then you’ll also know that no one involved with it is going to have time to answer any sort of questions until that fire is seen to.’

‘No . . .’

‘Dean! Dean!’

Down in the cathedral, doors from the outside were flung wide open and men came streaming in from the west. I couldn’t see how many there were but I heard their voices clearly.

‘We came as soon as we heard!’

‘Dean, we’ve got to save the cathedral, we—’

‘Thank you, thank you so much!’ a posh voice said. ‘We’ve only stirrup pumps, but . . .’

Unlike me, this new group of watchmen thundered up the spiral stairs. When they finally passed me, breathless and sweating, it was as if I wasn’t even there. They didn’t so much as tip their tin hats in my direction.

‘You’re not doing any good here,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘It would be better if you went back down.’