INDIFFERENT HEROES Page 8

  Londoners, it seemed, accepted the blitz and were resolved that it should interfere as little as possible with their lives. Alice’s parents slept under the dining-room table; Louise and the children in the basement; while Irene and her parents, after a brief, unsatisfactory spell in a neighbour’s shelter, went up to bed as usual.

  Alice hoped she would show equal phlegm during her first leave in London. Before that, however, on November 14th, she went on forty-eight-hour leave to stay with a Wren friend whose home was near Kenilworth.

  It was evident from her conversation that Felicity Naismith came from a superior background. Her life before the war seemed to have consisted of one endless hunt ball; only the fact that men had changed their habitat had driven her to pursue her hunting activities in the WRNS. While other girls went to some trouble to establish the fact that they were the pursued. Felicity nonchalantly claimed to be the biggest manhunter of the Western World. Felicity liked Alice because she was not puritanical, which was a revelation to Alice, who had always thought she was puritanical. Alice hoped she would be able to live up to Felicity’s expectations, whatever these might be.

  The Naismith house was just outside Kenilworth. It was a Tudor building, rambling and uncomfortable, with stone floors and not much heat. There was a pervasive smell of damp. Alice was given a bedroom to herself, which presented problems as there were servants, and she was not sure whether she should make her own bed. Mrs Naismith, a sharp-featured, aloof woman, seemed totally preoccupied with the problem of finding a four for bridge. ‘Do you play?’ This was the only remark she addressed to her guest during Alice’s stay in the house. Felicity telephoned several men, but it seemed the Army had claimed them all. ‘This is getting serious! I shall apply for an overseas draft.’ She went off to the stables and left Alice to her own devices, which resolved itself into an attempt to keep warm.

  After a meagre lunch. Felicity went riding – presumably in pursuit of such men as the Army might have overlooked. Alice walked into Kenilworth in the interests of keeping warm. The golden retriever, McGregor, accompanied her. He was quite the nicest thing about the Naismith household.

  It was getting dark when she returned, and she hurried because she did not like being alone in the country lanes. A mile from the house, the siren went.

  Mr Naismith was away seeing a client in Gloucester. He did not return until the afternoon of the 15th. He was in a furious temper. This appeared to be a more or less permanent condition. Anger had consumed the flesh leaving a scarecrow body, and a face the features of which were moulded into a perpetual snarl. Any major misfortune which affected him, however marginally, was regarded as having been engineered with the express purpose of causing him inconvenience. He had only to spend twenty-four hours in Gloucester for the Germans to bomb Coventry! As soon as he set foot in the house, he announced that he must go to his office to get the Akroyd file.

  ‘Lady Akroyd can hardly blame you for the raid,’ Mrs Naismith pointed out.

  ‘I don’t give a damn whether she blames me or not. That file represents ten years of my time.’

  ‘You’ll have to have a cold supper if you go, otherwise we shall have trouble with Ellen.’ Mrs Naismith put this forward as a consideration to be weighed in the balance against ten years of time.

  ‘To hell with Ellen! She doesn’t run this house.’

  ‘She runs the kitchen. And it’s not hell she will go to, but the Connaught Hotel.’

  ‘At her age!’

  ‘Because of her age. The factories take all the younger staff.’

  They went on arguing over tea. It was obvious that nothing was more important than convenience to either of them. The war represented a series of inconveniences, some grosser than others.

  Felicity said, ‘It must have been rather dreadful, Pa. The horses were terrified. I had to go down and soothe Emelda.’

  ‘You will have to come with me.’ Emelda’s condition alerted Mr Naismith to other complications. ‘I expect there will be all sorts of obstructions.’

  Felicity brightened at the prospect of encounters with uniformed authority. ‘Alice will come, too.’ She acknowledged her friend for the first time since their arrival. ‘Alice is game for anything.’

  Alice, cold and hungry, felt anything preferable to staying in the house with Mrs Naismith.

  It was getting dark when they set out, and what enthusiasm Alice had for the expedition soon dwindled. Felicity talked to her father about local people. ‘That’s the Plunketts’ Farm. What happened to Ralph? The Army can’t have taken him, surely? It needed a crane to hoist him into the saddle. And what about Desmond Pusey – him with the one glass eye and the other roving?’ Mr Naismith took no notice. He drove crouched over the wheel, his lips drawn back carnivorously as though he was eating into the oncoming landscape.

  It never grew completely dark. What had seemed a sunset glow in the sky grew fiercer as they neared Coventry. They were now passing people getting out of the city in whatever conveyance they could find. They saw one family trudging wearily with some of its possessions piled on a wheelbarrow. Alice thought that Mr Naismith would turn back, but he only said, ‘Bloody place is on fire!’

  ‘Should we be doing this?’ Alice asked when they reached the outskirts of the city. Even for this situation, unfamiliar as it was, rules must by now have been formulated.

  ‘What do you mean – “should we be doing this?” ’ He turned his head, the better to direct his impatience at her, and the car swerved across the road. It didn’t matter, by now there was no other traffic. ‘We are doing it!’ He hauled savagely at the wheel; the car skidded, and then – disappointingly from Alice’s point of view – righted itself within inches of colliding with a lamp-post.

  They came across a makeshift barrier of planks placed across chairs obviously intended for infants. This enraged Mr Naismith. ‘Hitler hasn’t taken over this country yet! Move those damn things out of the way.’ Felicity got out and moved the barrier, which proved only too portable. Alice, who had spent so much of her childhood eagerly anticipating the moment when she would find herself in forbidden territory, looked around in desperation for a figure of authority to emerge from the buildings, which now began to rear up like huge pieces of charred coal. But the chaos was such that had Adolf Hitler elected to view his handiwork in a car travelling from the Kenilworth road, he might well have got into the city unchallenged. They passed groups of men in steel helmets digging in the rubble, while others lifted bundles about which Alice did not care to speculate. This was something which was happening to other people, like a picture show; only in this situation, you were moving and the show was static. The tunnel of horror at a fairground, that was it! As long as you kept moving, you left the horror behind. Mr Naismith understood this much at least – he kept the car moving.

  They were near the centre before they were stopped by a young soldier who appeared in front of the windscreen, waving his arms.

  ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t go back, though. You’ve just driven past an unexploded bomb.’

  ‘Then where do you suggest I go?’

  The soldier didn’t care. ‘You’ll have to go ahead. Take the first turning that seems possible.’ He walked away, and they could hear glass breaking under his feet.

  Smoke and grit had blackened the windscreen of the car. Mr Naismith drove hanging out of the side window; this, and the rubble, made for erratic progress. Ahead, there was a burning building; they could see firemen standing high up on a ledge but there was no sign of the fire engine. As they came nearer, the wall buckled and fell inward, taking the firemen with it. Mr Naismith said, ‘How am I supposed to tell which way to go now?’ The car bucketed over charred wood and broken glass; the air was full of bits of flaming rag, some of which blew into the car. Mr Naismith closed the window; and Felicity and Alice used gloves and scarves to extinguish the sparks.

  ‘It won’t set the petrol alight, will it?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Fire certainly
does ignite petrol. Petrol, in fact, is a very inflammable substance, if not the most inflammable.’ Mr Naismith wrenched at the wheel, and the car skirted a cavity and lurched into a side road. There were buildings still burning on either side. For a hundred yards they were driving in a maze of flames. Then they came to a clearing where buildings – mercifully for their purpose – had been completely flattened.

  Mr Naismith stopped the car in order to wipe grit from his eyes. ‘Disgraceful!’ he said, glaring back at the burning buildings. Until this moment, Alice had been so absorbed in the matter of her own survival that even her terror had been kept in check. Now that they had stopped the process of identification automatically began. In the light of the car’s headlamps she could see a tricycle lying on its side and an up-ended swivel chair. These objects affected her more than the bundles removed from the debris and the vanishing firemen. The rubble began to move, cascades of brick and dust bounced into the road. Alice screamed and Felicity shouted, ‘It’s all going to come down on us! We’ll be buried!’

  Then, out of the dust and smoke, there appeared the figure of a woman, a shawl around her shoulders, picking her way delicately as though anxious not to get her feet wet on a rainy day. She waved to them and came slowly alongside the car. They saw a thin face with a beaky nose and hatchet chin. The eyes were remarkably bright. Mr Naismith got out of the car. She said, ‘I suppose, in these circumstances, we can dispense with introductions.’

  ‘Madam, if you want an introduction, I am Leslie Naismith of Naismith and Hurrell, solicitor and commissioner of oaths. I should be greatly obliged if you were able to indicate where in all this debris I might find my office.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you are experiencing difficulty.’ She spoke in the amused voice in which she might have addressed a foreigner who had lost his way in Harrods. ‘I am afraid none of the premises in the centre of the city are standing. Nor any people, either, I would imagine. In fact, I think I am probably the only person left in Coventry. They told me that I must go – but they wouldn’t wait for me to fetch my cat.’ She twitched the shawl aside to reveal the trusting face of an old tabby. ‘You, sir, as a solicitor, will appreciate my position. We had entered into a contract. He agreed to keep me company, while I, for my part, promised to take care of him.’

  Mr Naismith said, ‘Madam, I am prepared to take you and your cat out of Coventry, provided you will kindly show me the way to my office.’

  ‘Out of Coventry!’ she echoed disdainfully. ‘But I intend to stay. They won’t come again. It would be a waste of their munitions. What else is there for them to do?’ She turned away.

  Alice watched her making her way over the mounds of rubble, carrying her cat. Where was she going? Had she been searching for the cat, and, now that she had found him, was there a home for her to return to? Even if there was, would she have food or water? When Mr Naismith started the car, Alice had an urge to jump out and go after the woman; but she did not do anything so foolish.

  They passed a pillar-box half buried in smashed wood and glass. Beyond was a section of a house, the staircase still standing. Then, suddenly, a huge wall broken by gaping windows loomed above them; and, rising above its fallen walls, the great spire of the cathedral thrust into the lurid sky. Beyond the cathedral was another blasted church. Out of this devastation appeared words, seeming, in this weird light, to hang in the air: ‘It all depends on me: and I depend on God’. It was only subsequently that Alice found out that the words had been painted on a board nailed across a broken window. She gazed at them in awe, thinking, the gates of hell shall not triumph! Mr Naismith felt otherwise. ‘First that lunatic woman and now this mumbo-jumbo! It’s unhinged their minds.’ This particular piece of ‘lunacy’ seemed to convince him of the hopelessness of his search. In a city which had so lost its sense of proportion, there was unlikely to be sympathy for his quest. ‘At least I know where I am now,’ he dourly acknowledged this debt of gratitude to the cathedral. After which, in spite of diversions, he drove out of the city.

  Although they opened all the windows when they were in the country lanes, it was impossible to get rid of the stench of burning. The condition of the car tyres probably contributed to this.

  ‘Mama will never forgive you if you wreck the car,’ Felicity said. ‘She won’t be able to get to her bridge parties.’

  Mr Naismith drove on, emitting a tuneless dirge through clenched teeth, as though finding sardonic pleasure in being himself engaged in destruction of a minor order. He only spoke once. ‘Damn fool woman! Crazy, of course, God damn and blast her!’

  ‘I don’t suppose she did feel she could leave her cat,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t think I could leave Rumpus.’

  She did not see the woman as foolish, but as standing for something defiant and human amid the wreckage. She wrote this and more in her diary that night. Then, when she had put the diary away, she fell almost at once into a troubled sleep. She dreamt that a huge tidal wave was bearing people past her; and as she stood on the bank, she was being asked to jump, urgently, not to safety but into that very torrent which was hurling people to what must surely be their destruction.

  The blitz became as much a part of London life as queueing for food and scrap metal collection. Alice was never in London long enough to get used to it. ‘Is there a raid on?’ she would ask, nonchalantly, as she showed her pass to the ticket collector.

  ‘Just a firework display, love. There’s an old German geyser puts one on every night for us.’

  Whether the raid had started or not, there would be people bedding down for the night in the tube station. Their world was quite distinct from that of the people who waited for the trains. They chatted to one another, but they never spoke to the train users who manoeuvred around them, nor did they ever look at them. The train users paid no attention to them. It was as if they were people of different races, irreconcilable as settlers and nomads.

  Alice enjoyed the camaraderie of the train journeys, the jokes and occasional songs. The dramas could be amusing, too, in retrospect. In the darkness, it was difficult to see the platform. Once, when the doors on both sides of the carriage were opened by mistake, she got out the wrong side. She was hauled to safety, shaken and dishevelled, by a burly Petty Officer who shouted to the guard, ‘Whoa! Jenny overboard.’

  But as soon as she left the shelter of the tube station at Shepherd’s Bush, it was a different matter. The bus service had become highly idiosyncratic. ‘Any more for the mystery tour?’ the conductor would say cheerfully, as the bus set off on a long detour through unfamiliar areas. It was only too easy to get on the wrong bus – one which had never had the intention of arriving anywhere near your destination. There could be nothing worse than being lost in a strange neighbourhood in the blitz. Alice went home on foot.

  There was relief if the raid had not yet started. But this was immediately followed by intense anxiety to get home before the siren went. She did not go down the Uxbridge Road, but took a quicker, more lonely route, through the residential area. As she hurried along, she would tick off the stages of her journey – Derwentwater Road and no siren yet, Saddlers Way coming up . . . She made targets. If she got as far as the high wall of Kashmir before the siren went, she would be all right. It was that staple ingredient of all good thrillers, the race against time. How she had enjoyed it in the cinema, had longed for such excitement in real life: and how unpleasant was the actuality!

  Usually, the siren sounded before she reached home. The gunfire would start immediately; and then would come the drone of the engines with their broken rhythm, like a missed heart beat. If she had been in a shelter with others to share the experience, she could have borne it better. It was the necessity of going on alone through the empty streets which gave the experience that quality of the personal which was so terrifying. She ran and the planes hunted her down. Sometimes, before she was due to come on leave, she had a nightmare. In the nightmare, the planes hunted her down; she ran, and Katia ran beside her through unfamiliar
streets.

  She did not admit her fears to her parents, and she refused to telephone on her arrival at the main line station. Her father would insist on coming to meet her if she did that. She was determined to see this through on her own. The night journey, the threat to her safety, the need to break from her parents were, in some obscure way, all one.

  Yet now that the bombs were falling around them, her parents were more dear to her than ever. Unfortunately, as so often happens with our imperfect loving, they were also more irritating. They asked the wrong questions about service life, made the wrong assumptions and, worst of all, the wrong jokes. Her father would insist on using service slang, and talked about pilots coming down in the drink. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. This was not his war.

  Then there was the matter of her new personality. The attitudes and language of service life were different from those of civilian life. She had changed beyond recognition, but they seemed not to notice. They expected to see the old Alice; and the maddening thing was that the old Alice was there, waiting just inside the front door every time she came home. The fight with the old Alice was as bitter as any. She left exhausted at the end of her leave. Then, as soon as she turned the corner and could not see the house any more, she realized how dear her home was to her. The further she travelled from it, the more it increased in value.

  Her father found less to displease him now that Churchill was Prime Minister; with the affairs of the country in good hands, he could devote himself to local matters. ‘I have insisted that while I am on ARP duty there shall be no reference to “Huns” or “Bosche”.’ He appealed to Alice, ‘I hope you don’t find people using that kind of language?’