Coventry (8 page)

The horses are gone now, disappearing into the smoke and the dust, into the frantic darkness. Perhaps their stable burned down and they escaped; or perhaps the horses were set free by their owner. On their own they have a better chance of surviving. Their flight is swifter than human flight. Their instincts are sharper.

The Old Palace Yard, where Harriet has sometimes come to concerts with Wendell Mumby, is a heap of rubble. She remembers the untidy Tudor beauty of the building, how the upper storey leant out over the lower storey, how the panes in the upper storey windows shivered with age. It was a building full of sombre wood and streaky light. Harriet remembers the smooth feel of the stair railing, how it slid under her hand as she ascended to the second floor.

“Look,” cries Jeremy. He seems to be less afraid now, to have taken on new energy.

There are two men stumbling along in front of them. Each holds on to an end of a door. Lying on the door is a woman. Her clothes are torn and her head is twisted unnaturally on her body. They disappear into the smoke up ahead.

Now that Harriet has seen one body she suddenly begins to notice that all around them are the dead and injured. In their flight down High Street they pass the bodies of dead men and women, limbs visible, soft shapes beneath the hard shift of the collapsed buildings. They see a child’s body lying in the road, thrown there by the blast of a bomb. Even though she has lived through the other, earlier raids, Harriet can see that this one is much worse. She never saw bodies before. Those raids were over quickly, leaving their targets destroyed but much else intact. This raid seems intent on destroying everything.

At one point Harriet hears an ambulance siren, but never sees the actual vehicle. The rescue services don’t seem to be able to push through the wreckage.

“This is worse than the other raids,” yells Jeremy, echoing her thoughts.

The farther they stumble through the centre of the city, the more Harriet understands how catastrophic is the damage. Buses are on their sides. The tramlines are ripped up, the steel rails twisted as easily as the wire of a coat hanger.

Harriet’s mother used to recite something about the trams. Harriet remembers how it frightened her when she was young, the sight of her mother’s face leering over her bed in the dark.

Mama, Mama, what is that mess

That looks like strawberry jam?

Hush, hush, my dear, ’tis just Papa,

Run over by a tram.

 

Is she losing her mind?

“Over here,” yells Jeremy. He’s kneeling down beside a pile of bricks. Harriet hears the high-pitched whine of a bomb falling, cringes and covers her head, but the bomb explodes a few streets over. She coughs from the dust, scrambles over to Jeremy, who is frantically digging through the bricks. “I saw his hand move,” he says, and Harriet looks down and sees a man’s hand, palm open to the night, and the rest of the man covered in debris.

She gets down on her hands and knees and begins pulling rubble off his body.

He’s a man not much older than Harriet, but by the time they get him free, he’s dead.

“Look at that,” says Jeremy, pointing to the medals that the man wears pinned to his chest, perhaps in an effort to save them. “Mons. Ypres. The Somme. He went through all that and he died like this.”

Harriet thinks of the medals she was given after Owen died; the medals he had earned but never received. It felt, at the time, as though she was being awarded the medals for sacrificing her husband to the war. She gave the metal stars and ribbons to Owen’s parents.

A man emerges from a lane supporting another man. “Help me,” he says when he sees Harriet and Jeremy. “I can’t carry him much farther.”

Jeremy rushes forward and hoists the injured man up against his shoulder.

“Where can we take him?” asks Harriet. She is sure the hospital has been flattened by now.

“I don’t know,” says the able-bodied man. “But I can’t leave him. He’s my friend.”

The injured man appears to be unconscious, his head is slung down against his chest. Dragging him through the streets will make them more vulnerable to being hit. Harriet doesn’t want to risk her own life to save a stranger’s. She knows this is selfish, but she doesn’t care.

The two men carrying the door appear again. This time there is a young girl lying on the wooden stretcher. What happened to the first woman? Harriet rushes back to her little group.

“Hurry up,” she says. “We need to follow those men with the door.”

The would-be ambulance attendants do not go far. As they disappear down a passage at the end of a row of shops, Harriet follows them. At the back of the shops, sitting on the bare patch of land beyond the dustbins, is an Anderson shelter with perhaps half a dozen people sitting or lying on the ground in front of it. The men with the girl on the door tip her off onto a bit of clear ground and then shuffle back up the passage.

Harriet runs back to the others.

“It’s a bomb shelter,” she says to Jeremy. “Just behind the shops. Looks as if it’s been turned into a kind of aid station.”

The Anderson shelters have been given out by the government to anyone in Coventry who has wanted one. They are made of curved pieces of corrugated sheet metal that bolt together and are meant to protect against flying debris but they are not sturdy enough to survive a direct hit.

A young woman strides out of the shelter. She has her hair tied up in a kerchief and a first-aider’s satchel slung across her shoulder. She looks up at Harriet and Jeremy, at the man Jeremy is helping to drag toward the shelter.

“Oh, god,” she says. “Not another one. All right. Lay him down. Make sure he’s breathing. Keep him comfortable. I’ll get to him when I can.” She kneels by the girl who has just been dumped off the door, looks up at Jeremy and Harriet in their fire-watcher uniforms. “Could you help me carry her inside? I’m all by myself here.”

“Sorry.” The man who is helping Jeremy to carry the injured man untangles himself from his burden. “I left my family. I need to be getting back to them,” and he grimaces apologetically as he scuttles off.

“Of course we’ll help you,” says Jeremy. He gently lowers the injured man to the ground, lays him on his back, and takes off his own coat to use as a pillow under the man’s head.

“Are you a doctor?” asks Harriet.

“Nurse,” says the woman. She stands up, offers her hand, first to Jeremy and then to Harriet. “Marjorie Hatton. I was taking shelter here and a bomb fell on those shops. Some people managed to drag themselves out and I salvaged some of the bolts of fabric for bandages.” She waves her hand toward the length of cloth wound tight around a man’s chest. “Chintz,” she says. “Not sure he’s going to think much of those pink flowers when he wakes up.”

Harriet is always suspicious of people who seem unnaturally cheerful.

Another wave of bombers passes overhead and Marjorie Hatton ducks through the doorway of the shelter.

“We can’t stay here,” says Harriet. “What about your mother?” She doesn’t want to go inside the shelter. She doesn’t want to help the wounded. She can’t explain this to Jeremy without sounding cruel. She has had enough of death. One of the injured reaches out in his pain and delirium and grabs hold of her ankle. She has to shake hard to dislodge him.

“My mother can take care of herself,” says Jeremy. “She’s good at that. It’s me she’ll be worried about.” He moves to follow Marjorie into the shelter, looks back at Harriet. “And you don’t need to stay here on account of me.” He leaves her standing alone. Harriet follows Marjorie and Jeremy into the bomb shelter. She is annoyed that Jeremy could so easily dispense with her.

Inside, two lanterns hang from the ceiling, illuminating the makeshift hospital. On each of the two benches set along the side walls of the shelter are two patients, stretched out, covered in blankets, one patient quiet and one moaning and moving her head about. On the dirt floor of the shelter are bolts of fabric and several saucepans of water. It is impossible to stand up straight, and even in the few moments she has been inside the shelter, Harriet feels that she’s getting the beginnings of a migraine from stooping over.

“Here,” says Marjorie, leading them to the woman who is tossing her head from side to side. “She’s cut her leg badly and needs stitching. I need one of you to help hold her down while I sew her up.”

Jeremy immediately moves forward to help. He avoids looking at Harriet, and she can’t tell if he cares or not that she came after him. She can’t bear to think of sewing up the young girl’s leg without anaesthetic. I’m selfish, she thinks. I’m selfish and inflexible and so used to being alone that I no longer know how to relate to people. But she is still hurt. She has brought him this far through the burning city. She feels responsible for him.

Marjorie is trying to thread a needle by the dim light of one of the lanterns. “God,” she says. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of tea.”

“I’ll go,” says Harriet. “I’ll go and get you one.”

“Don’t be mad,” says Jeremy. “You’ll be blown to bits out there.”

“No,” says Harriet, “I can see it’s what’s needed. Tea. I’ll go and get you a cup.” And before Jeremy can say anything more, she backs out of the shelter. It was a noble gesture, but now that she is back outside again, she has no idea where in hell she will be able to find anything that resembles tea. If the water mains have been hit, then there will be no such thing as hot water. There will be no boiling a kettle, even if she manages to find one.

She creeps along the back of the shops instead of returning to the main street. There’s a crater where the last shop in the row used to stand. She can see the tatters of dark cloth waving about inside, like streamers from the deck of an ocean liner. It looks blue in the moonlight. Coventry blue. The cloth made in Coventry was once prized for the lasting qualities of its blue dye.

Harriet kicks at a brick in her path. She can feel the smouldering heat of it through her shoe. But there seems to be a lull in the bombing.

She passes half a house, the front half—the back half is blown off. In the maze of charred beams a man is wearing a bowl on his head and is standing in front of a broken mirror. He is stripped to the waist and holds a razor. A steady stream of water drips from over his head, from the open floor above his head, into another bowl set on a strip of wood before him. He dips the razor into the bowl, raises it to his face. He is shaving.

He waves at Harriet when he sees her. “Have to keep up my good looks,” he says. “Might be back at work tomorrow.”

Harriet looks at the stream of water falling from above. “Is that hot water?” she asks.

“It is indeed. The bomb heated up my rainwater tank. It’s as hot as though it came fresh from the boiler. That’s why I’m shaving now.”

“Do you think I might borrow some to make tea?”

“Help yourself.” The man waves his razor toward the wreck of his house. “I’m afraid my crockery is crocked, and I don’t know where the tea has got to, but you’re welcome to the water.”

Harriet is cheered by finding what surely must be the most elusive component in the tea-making process. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll be back.” She moves a few feet on, stops, cocks her head to one side. She can hear something else. “What’s that ringing?” she asks.

“Doorbell,” says the man. “The bomb gave me hot water and it also burned through the wires, fused my front and back doorbells permanently on. And,” he says, dipping his razor back into the bowl of water, “it destroyed pretty well everything in my house, except for the half-dozen eggs I bought yesterday, and of those not a one is broken.” He shakes his head. “What madness. You’re welcome to have an egg with your tea if you like.”

“I’ll be back,” says Harriet again, and she continues her slow walk over the bomb debris.

She finds a pot standing upright on a pile of bricks as though it had just been placed there by an unseen hand. The lid is missing and there is a dent on one side, but it’s fit enough to make tea in.

The air is smoky, but the moon is so bright that it is easy to see where she is going. Harriet moves slowly on. She wishes she hadn’t been so snide to the nurse at the shelter.

The bombing starts up again. Harriet crouches on the ground, puts her arms up to cover her head. The ground shakes and there is dust in her eyes and mouth. Something glances off her arm and she feels the sting on her skin that means she has been scraped to bleeding. She reaches up and puts the saucepan she’s holding on her head. It fits her better than the fire-watcher’s helmet did.

Ahead not a building is standing. She will have to go back.

The shaving man is gone, along with what was left of his house. Harriet wades through the wreckage. Water is still dripping from the ceiling. She puts up her hand and feels the heat of it slide through her fingers, rubs her hand across her eyes. The man is lying under a wooden beam. At first she can’t see him, he is so covered in debris. His eyes are staring open, but his chest has been crushed in. Harriet pushes aside bits of wood, twisted pieces of metal, the shattered mirror; tugs at his arm, but she can’t get him out. He’s wedged in too securely. She reaches down and touches his cheek, still warm and smooth from shaving, then she looks to see if he still holds the razor in his hands. His fist is closed around something. She kicks through more wood to clear some space, and then she kneels down, uncurls the dead man’s fingers, and finds the twist of tea cupped securely in the palm of his hand.

She crouches beside him for a moment. His kindness has touched her, and she doesn’t want to leave him alone. But it is foolishness to remain out in the open, keeping the dead company. Harriet pockets the twist of tea, puts her hand up to the dead man’s face, and gently closes his eyes.

There was a day a few years ago, a cold day, when the wind snapped in the trees, and Harriet walked out with a cloud of breath slung above her. She wandered over the snowy fields outside Coventry, following the weave of old stone walls across the landscape. She was trying to write a description of the walls, had become obsessed with them, how they were made by human effort though they looked so natural. Harriet remembers that day as joyful, a rarity in her days. Somehow the walking and the cold and the weave of the walls and her foggy breath pulled her back to early childhood, to a feeling of being wholly present and wholly purposeful.