The Last Flight of Poxl West (13 page)

I stopped the truck and got out. A huge spray of sparks spilled up from a single glowing rod like an enormous novelty sparkler. Sparks sprayed off. They landed, white-hot, on the pavement. The rest of the crew held back near the truck until Townshend called out, “We're off to the Underground shelter to wait it out.” Clive motioned that we'd be along.

Phosphorous at the center of the sparks was so white we couldn't look at it straight on. If an incendiary touched you it could burn through to bone. The bomb sat in the road like something not entirely sure of itself. It threw shadows across the buildings around us—we were just south of the Thames, where long rows of dun brick buildings rose into the night. Here, near the river, were cobblestones laid with the perfect precision of an expert mason's hand. Buildings around us were beginning to show the scarring from months of bombing. The restorative darkness of night left them glowing, shadows brushing over the flat stones. Bottoms of lampposts along the curb reflected a white glow back at the light.

If you lit so much as a match in the streets after the sirens sounded, a Home Guardsman would demand you put it out. But in the quiet dark of this night, here was a foot-long quiddity of light melting into the macadam and no one to chastise us. In the sky, a thin layer of clouds glowed like the exposed intestine of some primordial beast.

“Suppose we ought to find shelter ourselves, then,” Clive said.

We'd been advised, ahead of the dropping of these incendiaries, not to pour water on a bomb, but to put sand on it, or cover it in woolens, as the white-hot phosphorous at its center would explode when doused. They were harmless if you didn't set them off with water, and if they didn't find their way to fuel: wood, paper, buildings. Before we could begin to put the bomb out, hundreds more incendiaries were falling. The sky lit up and seemed to flex over our heads.

We found a shelter at the end of the block with the rest of our crew. Heavy bombs rocked buildings all around. At last the high solid tone of the all-clear came. When we turned back, the truck was in the middle of the street, where we had first seen the bomb. We got to the end of the block where now there must have been two or three dozen incendiary bombs littered all the way up to the bridge—there were far too many to try putting them out. Sparks up by the bridge lit the dim lip of the riverbank where the water receded, slimy black in the bright light of the incendiaries. Rooftops glowed, seared through by the incendiary bombs sliding hot and deadly through the roofs, instinctively seeking fuel to continue their insuperable burning.

I drove on. Clive said, “I think you've meant to take a right a ways back.” He wasn't looking at me but up at the sky, which reflected the hundreds of small white lights battering up to the clouds. We passed London Wall. No new siren, only incendiary after incendiary smoldering on the macadam. Searchlights traced the underbelly of the sky, ack-acks seeking viable targets.

We whizzed up streets almost entirely devoid of people. Almost every man and woman had taken to the country for Christmas, enjoying a true holiday for the first time since the bombing had begun.

Another air raid siren sounded.

I pulled off and we ducked into the nearest Underground station. We stood midway down the steps. Explosive bombs began to fall again alongside the rain of incendiaries somewhere to the north of the city. That jarring bolt was much more familiar than the odd silence accompanying the incendiary strikes. As soon as the all-clear sounded we were all back out to the truck.

We reached Fleet Street. A couple hundred yards ahead, a fire truck pulled up alongside the narrow entrance to Gough Square. A tendril of smoke lifted toward the lighted sky from inside the column on the other side of the buildings. A fireman was getting out of his truck and gearing up.

“A fire by Dr. Johnson's,” the fireman said. In Gough Square was the house where Samuel Johnson had lived. “You'd do best to find shelter until this ends,” he said, pointing up around us. Every third building was afire.

“We're rescue squad,” I said.

“Do your work and leave me to mine, then,” the fireman said.

We put on our coveralls and helmets. Fire burned on the top floor of Dr. Johnson's House, and another across the way. The wind died and a great cloud of smoke obscured our view. There were four firemen standing outside the house—throughout the war, AFS firemen were billeted at Dr. Johnson's house, and there were still a few back at the station. Our attention went to the two small factories opposite. A bomb had landed in the middle of these two ten-story factory buildings. A second had landed on the façade of a residence on the far row across from where we had entered the courtyard, between these factories and Dr. Johnson's House.

While the rest of our crew went to help the firemen, Clive went at the front of the smoldering mess with his pickax. Another air raid siren sounded and along with it the noise of Messerschmitts and Spitfires dogfighting overhead. Capricious winds from the two factories carried noxious chemical fumes that burned our eyes.

“What do you suppose it is?” I said.

“Don't know,” Clive said. “Looks like a chemical factory. Who knows what's burning.” Clive continued to work at the rubble. The macadam was so hot the rubber soles of my shoes sucked with each step. A long beam fell inside the front of the building, casting a line across Clive's leg. Red embers blew all around his head, tracers that now combined with red-hot bullets like those I would watch years later as they emitted from the machine guns on the Messerschmitts that tracked our Lancaster down over the Ruhr Valley.

“Suppose we'll need to get up there with some sandbags, then,” the fireman who had led us into Gough Square yelled to them. Another large beam collapsed. It opened a large hole in the first floor, floorboards sucked down.

“We'll just leave it for tomorrow's cleanup,” Clive said.

We were ready to rejoin the rest of our crew over at Dr. Johnson's when we heard a voice so small amid the cacophony of the men at work we shouldn't have heard it at all. Even with the greatest city in the world burning, one's ears heard first the sound of a human voice coursing through the night like electricity through wire.

Clive called out. From the open front of the building came a more insistent voice. Clive called to me to go back to the truck, where there was another coil of rope.

Fleet Street was twice as bright as when we'd entered Gough Square—fires burned so bright I was forced to shield my eyes. I was coming back with the rope when two nurses came up the block.

“In here, in Gough Square,” I said. “We've found someone in need of help.” I led the nurses into the square. Clive crouched close to the burning building. Firemen had doused the place and the flames had been subdued.

“His legs're pinned by a beam,” Clive said. There was a life in his eyes I hadn't seen in all the time we had worked on rescues together.

“Must be in pain,” the taller of the two nurses said. Clive just looked at her. “Well, ask him!”

Clive called down into the gaping hole. “He thinks one of his legs is broken.”

“You'll get down there and see if you can get him out, but first we'll make him comfortable.”

An air raid siren started up again but no one made a further move to seek shelter. The concussion of heavy explosives just blocks away shook the ground. Wind shifted and chemical smoke exhaled its noxious breath. The smaller nurse, who hadn't yet said a word, walked a step or two away and vomited.

“You'd best be off,” the taller nurse said. “Won't be much help to anyone in this state.”

The shorter nurse hurried to Fleet Street and the taller nurse turned to me.

“If you'll tie that around me,” she said. She pointed to the rope in my hand. “I'll go down to make sure he's comfortable.”

I pulled it around the nurse's thin waist. It was the closest I'd been to a woman's thin waist since Rotterdam. Since Françoise. I put my hands on her hips and she said, “That's a bit familiar, then, isn't it?”

“We should make sure you're going to get back up.”

“I'd like that,” the nurse said.

Her face bore a constellation of brown freckles alternately hidden and picked out by the light of the growing fires. Clouds stood bright as daylight in the night sky.

“Watch your head on the way down there,” Clive yelled. Before the nurse took another step, Clive said, “I suppose before we lower you into a building we'd best know your name.”

She said her name was Glynnis. We helped her to the front of the gaping hole at the face of the house. She stepped over three or four solid joists to the edge of the building. We lowered her down. Glynnis held three syringes of morphine in her right hand and the rope with the left and just before leaving our eyeshot, she said, “Remember, two tugs means hoist me up.”

The rope stayed taut a long time. Then Clive began pulling. Glynnis's hand came up at the edge of the floor and while Clive held her straight with the rope I jumped in front of him and pulled her up. Her uniform was stained the color of dishwater from the dripping line. Her hair was mussed, its tendrils plastered flat against her face, hiding some of the brown spots I'd observed upon it. She was gaunt-cheeked, slender-nosed, and beautiful.

“He's sedated,” Glynnis said. “The leg's trapped by a large beam.”

She lifted her arms. I untied the rope. Then Glynnis tied the rope around Clive's stomach. His hands were calm at his sides when he tested it. Just then a new groaning emitted from the building. A spray of sparks flew up against the window. Then we heard the tinkle of the glass as it broke with the heat.

“On with it, then,” Clive said. We let him down into the open face of the building. A few minutes later, we had him up, the victim with him.

9.

Now it was almost ten o'clock. Streets asphyxiated with smoke. On our way toward Ludgate Hill we passed a tall thin man covered in black soot. He might have been a Giacometti sculpture, drawn and spindly and given life like Hermione. He might have been my father, who in his peripatetic bolt from the Nazi takeover in Czechoslovakia might have been anywhere or nowhere in the world. We pushed on.

Clive was determined to see for himself what was intact in central London. By the time we reached St. Paul's, every building around the churchyard was in flames. A light rain had begun to fall. Christopher Wren's masterpiece appeared to have been set ablaze.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,
the inscription in the cathedral reads: “If you seek his monument, look around.” A look around us suggested it must be doomed.

It is hard to overstate the sense of defeat that came in those moments when we thought we saw St. Paul's burning. At times symbols really were symbols, and to see that church burn to the ground might have felt like a particular kind of defeat. Frankly, the effect it would've had on all of London the next morning might have been the kind of sight that turned the whole war. But that feeling no sooner gripped us than it passed when we came close and saw the cathedral was essentially unscathed, merely reflecting the orange and red of the fires all around it, seeming to rise up to the low-slung clouds.

Again we were speeding up the boulevard until, on our way to Newgate Street, the three of us were jolted forward. We'd hit erupted pavement in the street. I got out and Clive turned around to be certain Glynnis was unharmed, but she was a nurse and instinctively was trying to do the same for the two of us.

“Cover your eyes,” she said. “If you get an ember in there—” Clive grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop.

“Too late,” Clive said. He had an ember under his eyelid, and the air about us filled with so much smoke, Glynnis and I could see nothing.

We kept on by foot into the smoke storm. The only thing we could see were the burning buildings. We'd gone what I felt certain was a block or two when I began to feel the first bilious churnings in my stomach, which coincided with a shift in the direction of the wind. The breeze lifted the smoke and revealed the way before us to be a block where the fires were only intermittent. Up ahead a fire truck had parked and four men from the brigade were trying to subdue a raging fire in a tall building with a first-floor storefront just ahead.

“You can't help here,” one fireman said when we reached them.

Another air raid siren. It was clear we'd better go wait it out in the Underground.

10.

Inside Leicester Station we discovered an alternate city to the one we'd just left above. All down the platform people went about their evening business, doing their best not to acknowledge the firestorm overhead. Stations had been hit by bombs and had caved in, crushing everyone within, but there was no circle below to descend to. Two young men were engaged in a game of cards, each of them seated on a wooden crate. An older man stood bare-backed, his head craned out over the tracks as if awaiting a train, brushing his teeth. The only sound was the contralto of voices reverberating up and down the tunnel. People looked up without acknowledging our presence, or our bodies, which were covered in black soot and streaks of sweat. Our clothes were soiled and carried the toxic reek of burning chemicals.

“What is it?” I said.

“Looks like you've been through some kind of inferno,” the man with the toothbrush said. He turned and spit the paste, then walked over a long row of bodies. It was ten minutes before we found an open space, during which time bombs shook the place each time they landed. Wails of infants echoed through the chamber. Clive couldn't open his eyes. Glynnis and I did our best to get him through the crowd.

“Like walking on a tightrope,” I said to Clive.

Sight serves as tyrant to the senses, a fact made so clear now that Clive had temporarily lost the use of his. Joseph Conrad, like me an East European displaced to Anglophone lands, said his job as a writer was “to render with the greatest accuracy possible the visible world.” I have always held an affinity for that idea. Our path was made arduous as we attempted to lead blind Clive about. When we set down, we all began to recognize our fatigue, but the adrenaline of the night was pumping still.