Ashes to Ashes (7 page)

I couldn’t see her face or even her body, just her hair. Long and blond and shiny, it danced about in front of my face – in front of the altar – like a puppet.

‘Blimey, little er . . . I’ve been looking all over for you!’ I said.

‘Why’s that?’ East End or no East End, this little’un was certainly no child from anywhere posh. This kid’s voice was husky as if she smoked Woodbines and the bolshie cheek behind it wasn’t difficult to find either. No wonder those ladies down in the crypt hadn’t taken to her.

‘What’s your name, love?’ I asked as I pushed myself up off the floor and tried to stand up.

The answer was not one I had expected. ‘Me boyfriends call me Milly,’ she said.

‘Oh, is that—’

‘Why? Want to talk when you fuck me, do you?’ Milly said and then she laughed. ‘You’ll have to wait your turn, you know, like a good boy!’

I’ve seen and done a lot in my forty-eight years, but I was shocked by this. If Milly was, as everyone said, ten years old at the most, what was she doing talking like this? Was it just devilment on her part or was she, poor kid, one of those little girls who did indeed earn money by immoral means? My lady friend, Hannah, provides for herself in that way. We met because I was lonely and ill and I couldn’t get the confidence to meet ladies in the usual fashion. Years on now, I care for Hannah and I think she cares for me. I’ve learned much about her life and the lives of others who live by that trade. Little girls are used more than people know or want to know. Now I could see her, just a little bit. Not her face, but her short thin body as she stood, laughing still, in front of me.

‘Milly,’ I said, ‘why don’t you . . .’

My words were drowned out by the sound of machine-gun fire from outside the building. Bloody bastard Jerries! Weren’t we suffering enough for them? I suppose I looked away from her for a second at the most, but it was enough time for the kid to hop it.

‘Milly?’

But she’d gone – if she’d even been there in the first place. But then although I see things that aren’t there probably more than anyone else I know, even I only tend to see certain things. Like the phantom voices in my head, the pictures are sinister. Blood and screaming men’s faces and mud are what generally push themselves unbidden in front of my eyes. Bits of body turn up, too, from time to time, but little girls especially with long golden hair are unheard of. I don’t and never have had any thoughts about little girls. Milly, or whatever her name was, had been there and she’d been as coarse as the shelterers in the crypt had said she was. What she was doing now and where she’d gone to, I didn’t know. I was cross at myself at the time for not managing to grab a hold of her and take her to safety. Loose in the cathedral at night, even without all the bombing, she was liable to have an accident or get into mischief of some sort.

My feet wobbled on the uneven floor as I went further on towards the high altar. It was only then that I thought, suddenly, how strange it was of Mr Andrews to think that Mr Ronson had been murdered. For Mr Ronson to have an accident was very possible, but murder . . . to my way of thinking murder under circumstances such as we were experiencing was very unlikely indeed. By his own admission, Mr Andrews had seen nothing, if he was in fact telling the truth. Also why, suddenly, did he want me to find the little girl? Not that I – stupid beggar – had managed to hang on to Milly. She’d gone somewhere and, apart from the gunfire up above, I was in an area of the cathedral that was very, very quiet. Maybe she had just been inside my head? Maybe just the wanting to find her had made her happen?

‘You mustn’t tell anyone, about the damage.’ It was young George who now, it seemed, had finished arguing with Mr Andrews and had a new torch in his hand which he shone up into his face so that I could see him. He said, ‘It happened before Christmas. A bomb landed on the high altar. It didn’t go off, thank God. But no one outside the cathedral is supposed to know. Mr Andrews shouldn’t have sent you up here.’

‘He said I could go wherever I wanted. He sent me to find the little girl who’s missing,’ I said. ‘And, and . . . George, I saw her!’

He frowned. ‘Here?’

‘A m-minute ago, at the m-most.’

George looked around, flashing his torch into corners that I could now see were splintered and damaged. Bad for morale, are scenes like that, which was why I supposed I wasn’t meant to tell anyone about what I’d seen.

‘Mr Hancock,’ George said, ‘the guns you can hear outside are not the Germans, they’re our RAF boys taking on the
Luftwaffe
over the city.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘We’re fighting for our lives! Tonight it could all be over, unless . . . Mr Hancock, we are in the hands of the Divine and we must trust that power to protect us. But we must also, all of us, do what we can for each other. You were right to go looking for this poor child. We have a duty to her, to everyone in the care of the cathedral tonight.’

‘S-she’s g-gone.’

‘You don’t know where?’

I shook my head. Outside, something, probably some previously untouched building close by, burst into flames which then roared up the side of the cathedral, the brightness of it even shining through the huge blackout curtains at the stained-glass windows.

I watched George sigh and then he said something that reminded me of that strange little conversation I’d had with Mr Andrews’s wife. ‘Sir Christopher’s building cannot fall, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘If it did, that would send the wrong message.’

Even through the gloom he could make out the confused look on my face.

‘To Hitler,’ George said. ‘Sir Christopher was a master. Hitler is nothing. Hitler must be shown his place.’ And then I saw him smile. ‘But maybe our RAF boys are doing that for us now. Let’s go and find the little girl, shall we?’

I don’t know how long young George and myself looked around the altar, treading lightly on that delicate, shattered floor. But we didn’t find Milly. With the fires from the incendiaries crackling around the building as well as the great clatters of machine-gun fire from the battling air crews overhead, it was like being in what I was told hell was like when I was a kid. Now, of course, I know that there is no hell beyond the one we’ve created here for ourselves on earth. That’s where I was.

George, I imagined, from what he’d said before, was only really concerned about the cathedral. He most probably had friends and family somewhere, but maybe that wasn’t in London. He didn’t in any case talk about people or places outside of St Paul’s. But his silence on these matters didn’t stop me from thinking. If the bombing was bad here, what was it like at home?

Plaistow, where I live, is just about bang in the middle of the borough of West Ham. To the north there’s Forest Gate and Stratford, but to the south we have the docks and the settlements around them – Custom House, Silvertown and Canning Town. Ever since the bombing began back in September, the
Luftwaffe
have been after the docks. Most nights have brought bombs and fire and death to the docklands. For us in Plaistow – my mother, my sisters and myself – it’s bad enough, but where my lady friend Hannah lives, in Canning Town, it beggars belief. When I go and see her, which isn’t as often as I’d like these days, I have to climb over piles of rubble so big they make me sweat. Piles which were once people’s houses, flats and shops, now collapsed and blasted under Hitler’s determination to destroy us. For me, who has to look smart and who has to dress in black, dealing with all the dust and rubble just in terms of clothing is difficult. People expect a certain standard from men in the undertaking profession. A level of cleanliness is required and is in fact a sign of respect. But it isn’t easy and, I have to admit, one of the reasons I don’t see so much of Hannah now is because I want to keep the one decent suit I do have, reasonably clean. There is also what she does for a living to deal with, too, and that doesn’t get any easier. I’ve offered to marry her, in spite of the differences in our religions – Hannah is Jewish – but she wants to keep herself, so she says. Something in her wants to keep on selling itself on the streets to drunken sailors and men who beat their wives. But whatever she was doing and whoever she was doing it with, I thought of Hannah on this night of fire. I wondered how she was. Was she all right? How were my mother, my sisters, my poor old horses stabled at the back of the yard? Sometimes the raids can nearly drive the horses mad. They neigh and rear and get very distressed indeed. What was happening in West Ham now?

I’d told George that the little girl was called Milly and so now, as I heard him move away from the high altar and make his way into the left-hand aisle, called the quire aisle, as I was told later, I heard him call her name. I was calling her name myself, but I wondered what, if any, good it would do. There are kids like Milly all over the place. Kids who swear and cheek their elders and who, for lots of different reasons, muck around and range about with no control from any grown-ups. Sometimes the parents of such children are drinkers, or the mothers are poor and alone and have to sell their bodies to support their kids. In Milly’s case, or so it seemed, she was giving herself to men either for money or for some other reason. All that, sadly, I could understand. Things just like it, and worse, happen all the time. What was strange was what this little kid was doing around St Paul’s Cathedral when the bombing began. Not many people live in the City, as in the actual Square Mile, and those who do, are not generally of Milly’s kind. Children of honest and respectable tradespeople live in the City, as do the offspring of clergymen, caretakers of firms of brokers, and bookkeepers’ kids. Milly, if I was right about her, was little more than a beggar. This Mr Phillips people kept talking about, the architect who was supposed to have brought Milly in, must have found her outside the cathedral somewhere and taken pity on her. But until I got to speak to Mr Phillips, I couldn’t know what Milly had been about. He seemed to be very elusive. And so it was lucky, I felt, when shortly afterwards I came across his partner, Mr Steadman, sitting on one of the quire pews. He’d just come down from Watch duty up on the roof and was taking a break to rest what he called his ‘gammy’ leg.

‘Got shot in the damn thing,’ he told me as he lifted his bad leg to cross it over the good one. ‘Gallipoli.’

‘I w-was in Flanders,’ I said. ‘Gallipoli was—’

‘Madness,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Running up beaches into the Turkish guns! I was only a lad at the time.’ He looked at me. ‘Much as I suppose you must have been.’

‘Yes.’

‘Leg’s never been quite right since. Gets tired,’ Mr Steadman said. I could’ve said the same for my mind, but I didn’t. People don’t want to know about things like that, with good reason. Given the problem with his leg it was marvellous to me that Mr Steadman made the terrible trip up to the Whispering Gallery and maybe even beyond so willingly. My legs were as stiff as boards from my one trip ‘up top’.

I asked him about Mr Phillips who, I discovered, was about the same age as Mr Steadman and myself. ‘I think Harold, Mr Phillips, was in Flanders,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Lost his face.’

For a moment I thought I’d misheard him, then Mr Steadman, seeing my confusion said, ‘You were in the trenches, Mr Hancock, you must have seen what happened to chaps who put their heads above the parapet?’

I had, and usually they died. If they didn’t, the mess a bullet or a piece of shrapnel made of their faces generally meant that they wished that they had bought it. I’ve a mate like that myself. He only goes out at night or when the smog’s really thick over the city.

‘Harold Phillips lost his nose and most of his mouth,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Not that you’d necessarily know. Mr Phillips wouldn’t mind my telling you that he wears a mask. A very good one, made by an artist. Very good it is. All you can see is a slight lopsidedness to his face, but apart from that there’s nothing.’

I’d heard of such things, although I’d never actually seen one. I imagined, maybe stupidly, that those masks were only available for the rich. The fact that Mr Phillips, an architect, had one of them, and my mate, who is unemployed, didn’t, seemed to bear this out. This had to be what people meant when they said that Mr Phillips was ‘distinctive’ in looks.

‘D-did you see M-Mr Phillips up in the Whispering Gallery?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Mr Steadman shook his head. ‘But then it’s chaos up there. No one can do more than twenty minutes on dome watch. Swinging about up there, running across rooftops and such like, it’s so dangerous it makes your head spin.’

Nobody had told me that before. No one had mentioned how disorientated a person could become that high up in the dark. I knew that it happened to me, but I wasn’t normal. Apparently others, who were sane, could feel that way too.

‘But I understand people have seen Harold and so I’ve no doubt he’s somewhere about,’ Mr Steadman continued. ‘He’s the most enthusiastic watchman I think there is. He’s always here.’

And yet, so far as I was concerned, he was always somewhere else. If only briefly, I’d seen little Milly, but Phillips was still a mystery. And that bothered me. I didn’t know why at the time. Maybe like my search for Milly, my search for Phillips was just an example of my mind wanting to have something to distract itself with.

Chapter Five

I
don’t know now whether I took my next trip up into the dome because I wanted to find Mr Phillips, or whether Mr Steadman’s words about blokes only being able to stand twenty minutes up there made me feel guilty. Not that I was about to ‘do my bit’; I knew that wasn’t my place. But I went. And given the state of my legs, it wasn’t lightly done. It hurt, and the claustrophobic feeling I got when I did it was as bad as the first time I climbed up there. But if Mr Steadman could do it with his bad leg, then I had no excuse. In fact, I could go on further than I ever had before. First to the Whispering Gallery and then up a further 119 steps, which brought me outside, to the Stone Gallery. I took it slowly, very slowly. But I did it and I was, I admit, a little proud of myself for it. I was just about ready to die, but I arrived in one piece, which was good enough for me.