The Report (19 page)

The night of the retrospective, many people place phone calls to their parents or grandparents. “Do you remember this?” they ask. “This terrible accident at Bethnal Green? Why have you never mentioned it?”

“I did. I have! Don’t you remember?”

“No. Tell me again.”

On-screen, Bill Steadman is saying, “I remember one young man, a clerk at the town hall.” He sat thinking. “An event like that”—he shook his head angrily—“it changes you. He came back to us, but he was never the same.”

It is the series of interviews with Sir Laurie that mesmerizes. He is, England thinks, the diminished man of power, the bleak future of all once-bold men. He sits before the camera painfully straight, staring hard into the lens, denying he was out of touch with the tenor of his times. After the war, when the report was finally published (thanks to the relentless efforts of Clare Newbury and Sarah Low), it was briefly a success, though it revealed no great secrets. Instead the document presented a riveting narrative of the crush and showed an empathy for the terror and confusion of the night of March 3 that surprised and impressed many. The next year Dunne was knighted and made chief metropolitan magistrate, an honor and a burden on a broken man. He’d lost his son, and his daughter had died of a respiratory ailment. What the program does not say (thanks to Paul, who felt the reassessment of Dunne was harsh enough) is that Sir Laurie’s only other significant contribution after the report was a redesign of the London police uniform in the mid-1950s. He railed publicly against the trousers, cut in a manner too flattering of the buttocks, he said. A disaster, in his opinion, at a time when the force was having so much trouble with the public toilets and baths. The emergence of homosexuality as cultural entertainment irritated and confounded him. He fixed the trousers and closed the baths at night, all in the same week.

The program closes instead with survivor Bill Steadman. “We say it’s different now, that one man alone couldn’t write such a report, but I don’t see our investigations today doing much better. Ada Barber may have been responsible, but she wasn’t to blame. A distinction without a difference to some, but not to me.”

Tilly checks on her boys again, her blood running hot with the old anguish and grief. She’d hoped never to feel this way again. She’s already turned herself inside out once.

“I did not suppress the cause of the accident,” Laurie had said to the interviewer. “I simply downplayed a contributing cause to save the people from relying on blame.”

“Do you still believe that was right?” the interviewer probed. Tilly didn’t know who he was, though Paul had said he was famous. “Didn’t the people have a right to know what really happened?” The man’s voice had energy and tenacity and just the slightest edge suggesting disbelief. “With hindsight, what do you say?”

Dunne cringed at the word “hindsight.” “I did tell them what happened. I told them a version of the story that would give them hope. I still feel that was the right thing to do. I didn’t punish anyone.”

“No? What about James Low?”

Dunne didn’t answer, but you could tell he thought the question unfair. Tilly did, too. She wishes she’d known more about the program before it aired, but Paul had never wanted to discuss it.

She closes the boys’ door and runs to her bed, trying but failing to outrun the memory of the last time she’d seen Dunne. Her mother had fled upstairs, leaving Tilly alone at the counter. The baby had been home just a few days by then, and Tilly still didn’t know what it meant. She was nervous but proud of the way she was able to talk to Dunne. She told him Emma had never seen the moon. When Ada came back down, the baby in her arms, Tilly was helping another customer. Dunne had left.

Ada ran to the front of the shop and looked out the door. “Didn’t you tell him to wait?” she cried. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,” Tilly said. “He bought some potatoes.”

Ada looked up and down the street. “But didn’t you tell him I was coming back down?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not what you said.”

“I said I was going to get the baby!”

Backing into the stockroom, Tilly nodded. “Yes.”

“But I wanted him to see Paul! Didn’t you know that?”

Tilly was strangely still. “Why?” she asked.

Ada froze.

“Why? Why did you want him to see Paul?” Tilly asked, repeating the question again and again, some part of her hoping Ada could surprise her with a different truth. “What happened? What did we do? Why did you want to show him the baby?”

Under the covers Tilly curls on her side and tucks her knees up for warmth. She’s cradling a space, a hollow, that she imagines for Emma or Paul. The air grows warm with her breath, and she’d like to fall asleep but can’t. She can’t forget that she stood in that doorway and refused to accept the greatest thing her mother could do to make amends.

What could her mother say? What had she wanted her to say? That when Raisa had seemed to pause on the steps, she—Yes! They both knew it. She’d let go of Tilly and pushed Raisa, hard, in the back. Raisa had turned as she stumbled. Ada yelled, “Go on!” and—here was the crucial thing—kept moving. Raisa might have caught her balance otherwise. But Ada gave her—this refugee who seemed to know so much—an order and then walked right over her. Anyone could have seen that it pleased her to do so.

But why hadn’t Raisa righted herself? Why hadn’t everyone proceeded into the station as they always had, safe? How could Ada have known Raisa was carrying a baby? How could she have known what was coming behind?

“What did we do?” Tilly said to her mother. “What did we do?”

“You didn’t do anything,” Ada finally answered.

Tilly stared, then bolted outside. Ada ran after her until she was out of breath—not far, with the baby in her arms—then called her name, over and over, but Tilly had kept going until she reached the end of the street, rounded the corner, and was gone.

In many ways, she never came back. They’d lived together half a dozen more years but never spoke of the tragedy again. Never hugged or touched. Tilly clutches her stomach, keening with tears, trying to keep all the sound under the blanket so that she won’t wake her boys. Her mum. Her darling mum. By the time Tilly relented and named her second child for Ada’s father—the best she could do, having a second boy—her mother was dead. Hadn’t Ada just been trying to keep them safe? But that night, that push, whatever it was, had taken away both her girls. Tilly will try to tell Paul in the morning.

That night a storm blows over London, with a surprising amount of snow, and the young people on the phone to their parents and grandparents begin to say good night. They peer out at the city. “Traffic will be slow in the morning.”

“Of course. Good night,” the old people say. Thunder booms, marking the night for meteorological interest, a perfect cusp between winter and spring.

Do they think the children will remember the story this time around? Not really. Well, perhaps just enough. They open their curtains before going to bed so that light will fill the rooms first thing in the morning. All over London people who lived through the blackout years do the same.

She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone. When the crowd flowed into the stairwell, she stumbled. Her right knee hit the step, but she kept the baby tight against her left side, her torso upright. With her right hand she groped and was almost up when a body brushing past took her balance and forced her all the way down.

Why did they presume to know how a traumatized person should behave? Their eyes told her she was not doing what they expected, what they wanted. It made her nervous but she could not address it. All her energy went to the baby, to organizing a day around a single errand. That’s how much time everything took. She imagined a future after the war, when life might be simpler, but she was not there yet.

She met the pavement with the right side of her body and head, then instinctively curled around the baby and knew that he was fine. In the darkness she heard gasps, groans. Sobs and thuds, one after the other, coming very fast.

Every night she’d used the shelter, she’d watched these people. They were all accustomed to living in close quarters, as was she. She’d seen annoyance, even rage, but time and again the spirit of common disadvantage took over, and nothing happened. Today, though, she’d felt in the air a potent mixture of worry and exhaustion. Everyone seemed to be moving fast, making mistakes. She’d seen a man on a bicycle nearly hit a child, a woman steal a bag of groceries. Everyone was tired and burdened, unable to absorb any more shock. That afternoon she’d searched in her pocket for something to give the scared child. She had a button, two hairpins, a broken silver earring. The button delighted him, and he added it to the marbles and beads already in his pockets. As the sweet boy walked away, she thought, What happens now?

In the last possible moment, she rolled left and found herself facing the inside of the station, the dim lights of the booking hall. People were running to help, dark shapes against the light, but she knew something terrible was happening. She could not fill her lungs. Anger rose in her, and she bucked and kicked and screamed. The lining of her throat felt scraped raw, but she heard no sound. Hair filled her mouth; wool covered her eyes and nose; something pressing on her head muffled all sound. Terror overwhelmed her, and she stopped fighting and curled around her child. She still could not fill her lungs, but she felt him breathing, stirring, beneath the arm she kept cantilevered over his tiny frame. She was conscious, still, and saw the man who reached for him. She felt his arms. Then people tugged on her hands, her legs, her arms. She heard voices far away and, closer, the choking sound of people trying to breathe, all of them in various states of struggle. It was incredible to her that she had come so far yet could not make it to safety. She closed her eyes and remembered how her baby had felt under her coat these last few winter months. Soft and warm. Hers. The only thing that was, until he wasn’t.

I am indebted to a number of books and sources for giving me historical background for this story.
Family and Kinship in East London
by Michael Young and Peter Willmott is a fascinating sociological study of community and family life in Bethnal Green. For a sense of what it was like to live in London during the war,
How We Lived Then
by Norman Longmate and
London at War
by Philip Ziegler were both invaluable. Also, Mary Lee Settle’s essay in the
Virginia Quarterly Review,
“London—1944”; Paul Fussell’s
Wartime;
and the BBC’s WW2 People’s War online project were very useful. The shelter drawings of Henry Moore as gathered in Julian Andrews’s book
London’s War
were provocative and inspiring, and the following books provided useful information about the behavior of crowds:
Among the Thugs,
Bill Buford;
The Crowd,
Gustave Le Bon;
The Crowd in History,
George Rude;
Panic and Morale: Conference Transactions,
the New York Academy of Medicine and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.

I will be forever grateful to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in London for making a copy of the report of the original inquiry available to a modern audience through the series Uncovered Editions, historical official papers not previously available in a popular form. Discovering their
Tragedy at Bethnal Green
in the bookshop of the British Library one day in 2000 was the start of this story in my mind. Later, Malcolm Barr-Hamilton of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library was helpful in providing me with wartime photographs of the area and newspaper articles about the tragedy, and eventually I read the full historical transcript of the inquiry at the National Archives, Kew Gardens. A crush did happen the evening of March 3, 1943; news of it was kept secret for days; and a private investigation was ultimately led by a magistrate named Laurence Dunne. The government suppressed his report until after the war. The rest of the story, as I’ve told it in this book, is fiction.

A plaque in the Bethnal Green Tube station commemorates the incident. It reads:

This book was written in many libraries: the British Library, the London Library, the University of Virginia Law Library, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bobst Library at New York University. Thank you to all of these institutions for granting me reading privileges and thus giving me a place to write. I owe a special thanks to Kent Olson at the University of Virginia for finding the 1942 map of the Borough of Bethnal Green. I carried that map with me everywhere I worked on the book.

Fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts came at critical times and were absolutely inspiring. Thank you, also, to all the people who looked after my family when I was away: Claudia and Peter Kane, Ann Canavan, and Linda Ahlen.

I am grateful to all the people who read the book, in some cases several times, and offered indispensable support in the form of conversation and good advice: Rosecrans Baldwin, Rachel Cohen, Liz Darhansoff, Michael Downing, Katie Dublinski, Emmanuelle Ertel, Margaret Hutton Griffin, Elizabeth Kiem, John McNally, and Janice P. Nimura.

My editor, Fiona McCrae, expertly guided this book in its final stages, and it is indescribably better for her attention. I’d also like to thank Laura Barber, my editor at Portobello Books in London. Her early and strong embrace has meant a great deal.

My parents, Anthony and Marion Francis, never doubted that I would one day write a novel, even when I was sure they were mistaken. Their confidence was encouraging, to say the least.

Both of my children, Olivia and Simon, were born during the writing of this book. They may have slowed my pace, but taking care of them taught me what I needed to finish the story. And finally, but actually first and always, Mitchell. He was this book’s first reader, and it is dedicated to him with all my love.