The People on Privilege Hill (5 page)

J
im Smith, not yet eighteen, had won an interview for a place at a London medical school, one of the great hospitals of the world. He was jubilant and at first unbelieving. The year was 1941. The London blitz was in full swing. Jim lived in the north-east of England and had not been south in his life. When the telegram came his mother flew into high hysterics, and ran up and down the street knocking on doors to inform the neighbours. Pale yellowish-orange, the telegram flapped in her hand.

How could he possibly go to London next week? There was no time to think out where he could stay, for London was too far for anyone to go and return on the same day. The furthest he'd been was Scarborough as a child, when they'd taken rooms for a summer holiday, the landlady cooking so long as they did the shopping and were in bed by ten. Two pounds ten the week.

And London now! The evening vigil round the wireless for the BBC News confirmed whispers and rumours, reading between the lines in the newspapers, and letters from the south: most nights London was end-to-end ablaze. The solemn voices of the newsreaders—Alvar Liddell, Bruce Belfridge—were echoed in the voices of the millions who talked together in fish queues across the nation.

It was midwinter. Blackouts were ritually fastened to every window by four o'clock. Fires were small, for coal was short and the only heat-giving flames were the infernos of the great cities and, above all, of London, blasted by each fall of masonry as streets came tumbling down. In the Vale of York, Jim Smith's old father, wounded over twenty years earlier in the war before, wheezed in his chair, set his chin against his chest and ruminated. That morning he had read the
Daily Sketch
from cover to cover. It had not taken long for it was so thin. Some columns had been partly blacked out and others left white because of the mysterious Fifth Column always over one's shoulder. Smith had sat on, saying nothing. Jim, his only child, was clever and good, solidly northern and up to now untried by life.

“I'll write to Nell,” said Mrs. Smith. “After all, she's my first cousin once removed. She lives at London somewhere. I have the address for Christmas cards, not that there are any any more. Yes, Nell. She was always very nice. I expect she'll still be alive.”

But there arrived another telegram in reply to Mrs. Smith's carefully written, perfectly spelled letter, neatly blotted and signed “Your affectionate cousin Mrs. Elizabeth Smith,” crossed out and rewritten “Betty.”

REGRET, said the telegram, IMPOSSIBLE STOP CISSIE VERY POORLY STOP NELLY.

“Who the hell is Cissie?” asked Mr. Smith, lifting his gaze from the hearthrug and the parchment drum near the poker, which was decorated with hideous barbola work, lashed through punched holes with slanted leather laces and filled with paper spills to light cigarettes and save matches. “Cissie who?”

“Well, it'll be Nell's father's sister's girl. His side somewhere. I can't place her quite. She must be a hundred. Unless she's the other side altogether, married to the dentist, but he must be dead. Must be. Bobbie, he was, with a flickering eye. Yes, I suppose he could have married a Cissie. She had something wrong with her reactions.”

“Bugger them both,” said Mr. Smith. “Bugger them all.”

But the next day came the third telegram of the week.

CISSIE BETTER STOP CONVENIENT FOR VISIT.

The Smiths considered the obvious dismay the request for a bed must have caused, the great discussion, the reluctant retraction. And Mrs. Smith all at once recalled Cissie's mingy little face, lace handkerchief to nose and brimming stupid eyes. “Nelly's had to work hard at them,” she said. “Out of pure shame. To think they said no! We haven't seen them for years and I'm sure I don't want to, but to say no! You never say no to a relation! Well, I'll send them some ham. Under the counter from Ramshaw's farm. That'll shame them some more.”

 

Jim Smith in his world apart listened to all this with little interest. He had already made his arrangements for the night in London. His Maths teacher had given him an address near King's Cross Station, which was apparently very central, B&B, three shillings. The sheets would be pea-green flannelette, he was told, and he might not be the first to sleep in them since they last saw the wash tub and he'd probably have to share the room with several more, but there'd be two eggs for breakfast.

“Two eggs? Whoever can get two eggs? Not even my mother—”

“Some can,” said the Maths master. “Those with connections. In King's Cross there's plenty of comings and goings.”

Jim Smith had thought that King's Cross was merely a railway station. He hadn't imagined that people lived in it. The Maths teacher had flat feet and spectacles heavy enough to absolve him from the armed forces. He was teaching PE, Religious Knowledge (Scripture) and Woodwork as well as Maths but still had time for meditation. “Some give and some receive,” he said. “You'll notice that soon. There are the getters and the givers. You can see it from birth—which child stretches out to share its rusk, which grabs. Never changes.”

“But,” wailed Mrs. Smith, “you can't! I've arranged everything with Nelly now. Look at me when I'm speaking to you, Jim Smith, and not over my head. You're not a doctor yet. I still say what goes in this family and I'm doing my best. It's a safe address outside the East End of London and the bombs, along the railway line south-west. Nelly's a lodger in the house. The house is Cissie's and the dentist's. She never had any money, Nell. She's always been a tenant somewhere. Lived by her wits. She's a great organiser. She lost her fiancé in 1916 like many another. She hates rows. And she'd never have made illness an excuse. She's shamed them into having you. Shamed them. I always liked Nell. Oh, I feel better now.”

 

So the pea-green sheets and two eggs faded, never to be experienced, and Jim Smith monosyllabically set off, to find that King's Cross was more than a railway station and the station itself heavily disguised by sandbags bulging high and grey, like every other serious building around it. A taxi took him to the historic hospital, also sandbagged and so shabby it looked as if it was being closed down, its windows painted black, its corridors dirty and rubble in the drab grass outside. He found the interview room where five tired-looking men questioned him for a not very taxing half-hour. They said that his written papers and school results had struck them as outstanding. Was he about to be called up?

He said he was waiting to hear but had been told it was very unlikely and they all politely looked away from the thick glasses that had bonded him to the Maths teacher. The five tired men could see themselves, grey and old, reflected in Jim Smith's glasses in what in the London afternoon passed for light. They asked him if he had applied to other hospitals. Perhaps nearer home?

“No, sir.”

“Why is that?”

“I don't know. All up my way say Edinburgh's the place for Medicine but I've always fancied London.”

Silence. Thought.

“You are truthful,” said one of the five great men of the selection board. “We are flattered.”

Jim wondered whether he was being mocked.

“You are, then, serious about coming here? Maybe quite soon? Hospitals stay put, you know. They don't get evacuated like ministries and boarding schools.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “As soon as possible. Well, naturally, very proud indeed,” and his glasses flared.

Good.

The blitzkrieg on London was in its twenty-third night and the great men all lacked sleep. Their hospital overflowed. To find his interview Jim had had to sidle round rows of patients lying in corridors, along landings and in what looked like cupboards. He had come to the place through what must be the City, whose black ruins smouldered. Fearful dark cisterns the size of bungalows were filled with stinking standing water covered by broken nets thick with ash.

Outside the hospital all this was now dark and the sirens began to wail. Jim Smith winced.

“You haven't heard sirens?” one man asked.

“No. At home we get a phone message and my father or Mr. Parsley goes round the village on his motorbike blowing a whistle.”

“Ah,” said the central figure behind the desk. “Now you are hearing our Angelus. It's time to go.”

They were gathering up their papers. They shook hands with him. “We look forward to seeing you next term. Congratulations.”

“You mean I've got in? Can I tell people?”

They were hurrying into their coats. “Yes, yes, indeed you can.” They were making for the door. The more distant howls of the sirens began to be joined by nearer ones, like wolves across snow. Insolent and chilling, they ululated up and down.

“Off you go,” said the last of the great men in the doorway, fastening a briefcase. “Getting home tonight I hope? Not too wise to stick about round here perhaps.”

“I'm going to ... out to the suburbs. To family.”

“Excellent. We wouldn't want to lose you just as we've met. Off you go. Au revoir.”

In a moment he stood alone in the room. “I'll be back,” he told it. “You'll see.”

 

It took time to find his way out of the great grey place, at first down the crowded corridors lit only along the floor with blue lights, then across courtyards, into corridors lined with stretchers, running people, slamming swing doors muffled by hard asbestos sheets. He pushed on and into the inferno outdoors.

But outside there was no inferno. All was quiet as the country at home. The sirens had stopped and the white moon shone down on empty streets.

Where had everyone gone? The whole of London must be inside the hospital. The milky moonlit streets were white except for the arches behind the water tanks, which were black. Hardly a soul to see it. Hardly a soul except in the distance voices shouting about lights: “Turn that bloody light off!,” “... light off ...,” “... lights.” Shepherds across the meadows. The sky was scattered with stars.

He found an Underground station. The ticket office was empty. The escalators were not working and were blocked, and he set off down metal stairs that corkscrewed into the dark. As he clattered down deeper, down a second fire-escape stair, and a third, a sharpness about him turned into a smell that lapped him from far below, and grew stronger and sourer. He became aware of a distant starling chatter from some pit in the dark. Light began to filter up from below. It spread and the noise grew louder.

He stepped off the metal stair at last on to what must be an Underground platform; but none of it was to be seen for the confusion of bundles and bodies and blankets. Talk, talk. A shout or two. A crying child. Laughter. Away towards the blackness of the tunnel mouth someone was playing a squeeze-box. Jim Smith, after standing still a while, began to pick his way among the bundles and the shadows dotted with the red points of lighted cigarettes. Smoke from a thousand gaspers hit his throat. Black lips shining, red-black lips. Turbaned blonde heads with chunks of hair in boxy curlers, lumpy like Christmas stockings. Somebody knitting. A child desperately crying on and on. Tonight with all these unknown people might be the last of his life.

The stench of the blanketed bodies was sweetish, smelling of sweat and fry. Jim Smith clattered around kerosene stoves and pans, knocking over a squat whistling kettle. Somebody squawked at him but nobody swore. Jumping the hippo bundles, he began to be afraid and a scrawny arm stretched up from a bed roll, like a feeler. “Lie here with me, boy.”

He shook her away, leaned his back into the concave white wall and a warm blast of wind puffed out of the tunnel mouth followed by a roar and he was pinned against the slippery tiles. The squeeze-box stopped. Several people stood up and a lighted train sprang out of the tunnel like a dragon arriving in hell.

When it stopped quite ordinary clean people stepped out, wide awake and carrying briefcases and gas masks on strings across their shoulders. All the men wore hats, the women gloves. There were no children. They stepped down among the permanent residents along the platform, like bathers into a shoal of fish, and nobody paid any attention until three airmen emerged, two with pilot's wings. A cheer went up, at first faint, then vigorous, and drifted in waves about the platform, louder then softer, louder then softer, like the sirens. The airmen gave the V for Victory sign and tried looking jaunty. One had bandaged hands and Jim Smith wondered if he was on the way to his hospital.

On the front of the train, miraculously, had been the word Wimbledon, and Wimbledon was Nell's address. Jim Smith stepped in.

Fore and aft he was pressed into a host of silent people pointedly looking away from each other and clinging to leather nooses that hung down from the roof. The people all rocked with the train. Within six inches from Jim Smith's face an old Jewish-looking man was observing him. He had never met a Jew, but he knew them from films. The horrors of the build-up to the war in Germany had almost passed Jim Smith by—he had been at school, minding his books—but he knew from somewhere that we must be nice to all Jews because of their rejection in this country over history when Jews could not ever own land. His father had said, “How can we judge? In the Vale of York we have never met one. We have never owned land ourselves.” Jim Smith, looking so intimately now into the eastern face, asked politely of the old man if he knew how many stops there were before Wimbledon. The Jew told him (his breath was spicy). “And,” he said, “I think you are from the north of England? Are you staying down here? Have you somewhere to go?”

“Only tonight. Then I'll get home. I'm staying with some relations.”

“Be glad of your relations, my boy. But one night here, with or without them, will suffice. You—in Wimbledon, down the hill, not up on the Common—you will be on the flight path.”

“I don't know whether it's up or down. I'll be O.K.,” said Jim Smith and the Jew held out his hand. Jim took it.