All Fall Down Read online

  ‘Edie!’ Her door was locked. He ran at it with his shoulder, without success. It took a heavy blow from a piece of masonry, which he went down and salvaged from the street, to break the lock and burst in. The striped curtains blew wildly at the shattered window, flapping against the frame, smoke hovered in a room with the electricity cut off, the gramophone smashed by falling plaster, the walls dripped with water from fractured pipes. Tommy waded through the mess towards the bedroom then the bathroom, still calling her name.

  Only when he was sure that the ruined flat was empty did he back out. Yes, she’d gone to the shelter, she hadn’t risked it. Good for her. Sensible Edie. He ran downstairs, the siren filling his head, past his own shop, unmarked, by the bombs, down a couple of back alleys to Nelson Gardens.

  The shelter was jam-packed, Walter Davidson told him. He would have to head on to the tube station at Borough.

  ‘Where the hell have you been, Tommy?’ Walter surveyed his ruined suit, his smoke-blackened face.

  ‘On my holidays, where do you think?’ He gasped for breath, tried to peer over Walter’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right, she’s safe and sound.’ Walter put a restraining arm on his shoulder. ‘I’ll tell her where you’re heading, shall I?’

  Tommy’s momentary relief clouded again; he realized that Walter must mean his wife, Dorothy. ‘What about the girls from the shop?’

  ‘All here. All safe.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I’ll pass the message on to them all, if you like; that you’re all in one piece, just about.’

  Overhead the sky lit up with streaks of gunfire and the stick-like fire bombs. ‘Not for much longer.’ Tommy gave a wry grin. ‘Bight, mate, I’m on my way.’ Tomorrow would be soon enough to pass on the bad news to Edie about her flat.

  Tommy made it to the tube station. He had to step over people wrapped in blankets asleep on the stairs, old couples entangled in one another’s arms, children clutching teddy bears, until he found a cramped space. The airlessness, the stench were almost tangible. Lighting up, he huddled under the arched, tiled roof. At last, he was cut off from the sounds above. Sheer exhaustion overtook him, and soon he slept.

  Black Saturday, they called it. The sirens sounded intermittently for twelve hours, then came the all-clear. The Parsons family in their home-made shelter had spent a better night than most. But then they, who came up warm and dry, couldn’t have been prepared for the devastation all around.

  ‘No water,’ Annie reported from the taps behind the bar.

  ‘No electric’ Hettie tried the lights.

  ‘What about gas?’ They went from one appliance to the next, thankful that at least the building stood unharmed, its taped windows still in place.

  Further up the street, though, the story was different. As Sadie and her family retreated to the relative calm of Paradise Court, and Amy, Rob and Bobby found to their relief that their own flat above the ironmongers had escaped major damage, the reason for the power cuts was soon discovered. Hettie took a walk with Ernie up Duke Street towards the railway bridge, to find an enormous crater in the road and, in it, a heap of twisted tram tracks, burst mains, rubble and the sign from the side of a bus advertising ‘Swan Vesta, the Smoker’s Match’. The wardens had tried to rope off the area and the smell of gas seeped from the wreckage. Hastily erected fire hazard warnings were everywhere, people hurried by with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses.

  Hettie slipped her hand through Ernie’s arm. ‘At least Tommy’s place never copped it.’ They passed by his shop, then the milk bar, towards the post office. ‘Oh, my God!’ They stopped dead. Eager workers already dug at the pile of rubble lying against the front wall. Beside the post office lay the flattened ruins of the Reliant Insurance Office.

  Ernie frowned. Half a staircase led up the raw, open side of the building, a tattered curtain flapped against a bannister. He saw the need to dig out the bricks and twisted metal, understood that, the men with shovels were trying to put things right.

  ‘Yes, you go back home for the shovel in the cellar,’ Hettie told him. ‘You come back and lend a hand here, there’s a good chap.’

  He ran back, keeping wide of the reeking crater, soon lost in the swirling dust whipped up by the wind.

  Then Hettie saw Edie Morell standing by, head in hands, being comforted by Tommy O’Hagan. She went quietly to them. ‘How bad is it?’

  Tommy had his arm round Edie’s shoulder. He shook his head. ‘She can’t get in till they’re sure it’s safe, but I took a quick look last night. It ain’t a home no more, that’s for sure.’

  Edie sobbed. She’d put her heart and soul into making the place nice. She’d worked to turn it into a little palace, all due to her own efforts. When things got difficult with Bill, even before he signed up, it had been the flat that kept her going; a lick of paint here, a new mirror over the mantelpiece, saving up from her wages until she could afford a gramophone.

  ‘Maybe it’ll clean up all right.’ Hettie offered her a hankie.

  ‘They won’t even let me in.’ She blew her nose and managed to look up.

  ‘It ain’t safe,’ Tommy explained, ‘not until they’ve sorted out the gas leak.’

  Men dug, shovels scraped against concrete, dust rose. Ernie had returned with his spade and was putting his back into shifting the heap of rubble.

  ‘Then there won’t be no water, no light. She can’t go back, not straight away.’ Tommy began to get angry. ‘What’s she bleeding well supposed to do now? Sleep in the street?’ He couldn’t understand why the government hadn’t thought up a system of dealing with people in Edie’s position, suddenly homeless and with no one to turn to. ‘Her and thousands of others, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Edie was pulling round, however. ‘Never mind, I dare say I can stay at the shop until they sort things out here.’ She gazed up at the damaged frontage. ‘When will they put the windows back in?’

  ‘Soon as they can.’ Hettie was sizing things up. Even looking on the bright side, it would be a good few weeks before the flat was fit to return to. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you what, you come back home with me. We’ve got plenty of space. Ernie there will move out of his room for a bit and make way for you.’ She wouldn’t brook any argument. ‘We’ve all got to pull together, and I know you’d, do the same for us, Edie.’ She felt sorry for her in this predicament; a woman who never had a bad word to say about anyone, who naturally drew people to her with her cheerful warmth.

  Edie turned to Tommy for advice. He thought it through. ‘You’ll be safe at the Duke. And it’s still nice and handy for work.’ Normally he would have stepped aside, but this morning, what with the shock of it and the sense of relief that the bombers had done their worst but here they all were still standing, he kept his arm firmly round her shoulder.

  Hettie picked up the delicate situation. ‘That’s settled then. Why not wait here with Tommy till they let you in to salvage what you can? Clothes, a bit of make-up, whatever you might need. Then you come straight to the pub, you hear?’

  Edie agreed, too grateful to say many words.

  ‘And you make her stick to it,’ she told Tommy. ‘You’re the boss, remember. And if she’s not at our place by teatime I’ll send Ernie up to fetch her, no messing.’ She pretended to be stem, then gave Edie’s hand a quick squeeze. ‘Don’t worry, we’re all here to fight another day, ain’t we?’

  She sounded brighter than she felt as she left them, picking her way over bricks, past a burnt-out car. You put on a brave front, like everyone else, did your best to cope and not be overwhelmed by dread.

  Hettie walked up her beloved Duke Street and stopped at the corner outside the Duke of Wellington. She waved, to Dolly Ogden, out scouring her front doorstep; typical Dolly. You scrubbed and swept, ate cold food out of tins, listened in to Churchill and said no, you were not downhearted, that you would fight street by street to keep Hitler out. But deep down, you knew your world had changed utterly; every nerve st
rained for the sound of the Luftwaffe coming over again, droning low, drawing nearer.

  At dusk you prayed. As night fell, the planes came; on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and on into the following week, and into October, without let-up. And through it all you kept your chin up and smiled.

  Chapter Eleven

  The shelter at Nelson Gardens took a direct hit one Sunday evening in late October. As Dolly said later, ‘There was nothing but blood everywhere, and blackness.’ The door blew in, the corrugated roof shuddered then split apart, beams crashed, earth flew, and the screams of the dying were succeeded by the moans of the injured.

  ‘They was buried under all that rubble. All the lights went, so they had to work in the dark to get them out. I seen one young lady doctor, she looks twenty if she’s a day, crawling through to get at someone trapped down in the main crater. She won’t let nothing stop her. We’re all pushing to get out into the open; anything’s better than staying to be buried alive if the rest of the shelter caves in – as it could any second. And we pass her crawling on all fours right into the thick of it. She has to hang upsidedown from a metal girder to get near enough to give this poor bloke a shot in the leg for the pain, and she’s working by torchlight.’ Dolly shook her head, recovering at the bar in the Duke. Annie had turned it over to the WVS, who had called in the Council Canteen and, now, an orderly queue had formed and a huge pan of parsnip soup stood steaming by the beer pumps.

  ‘It’s a good job Jerry decided to call it a day.’ Annie sat for a moment, in between shifting trays of dirty dishes and spoons into the sink for Ernie to wash. The all-clear had sounded, the skies were silent.

  ‘Yes, and that’s only because he couldn’t see where he was meant to be dropping his bombs.’ Dolly was thoroughly rattled. She looked along the length of the queue for a sign of Charlie. ‘They say it was the cloud cover that saved us.’

  Amy finished serving the soup as Hettie took over. She came up to her mother’s table. ‘That’s it, Ma. From now. on you come down the cellar here with us.’ She sat opposite. ‘I’m not having you traipsing off to no official shelter no more, not after what happened today.’ She felt guilty for not putting her foot down sooner.

  ‘But I like the public places. I’ve got my pals, we have a sing-song and a laugh and a joke.’ Dolly didn’t want to give in straight away, though she would be secretly grateful to be bullied into changing her mind. She remembered that poor old man trapped deep in the earth, his wife already lying stone cold beside him.

  ‘Yes and you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face before too long.’ Amy was determined.

  ‘And what about Charlie? Don’t I have to keep an eye on him?’

  ‘Ma, he’s a grown man!’

  ‘And you’d never think it to look at him sometimes.’ Dolly hadn’t seen him since before the bomb blast. He’d been hunched in a corner with Dorothy as usual, playing gin-rummy and taking nips from a shared bottle of whisky. After the roof fell in, the table where they’d been sitting was squashed flat like a deck chair. Charlie and Dorothy were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You’ll never get him down the cellar with us.’ Amy knew he would stick with Dorothy and even Charlie must realize that the Parsons’ charity didn’t run to offering shelter to Dorothy O’Hagan, not now that Edie was treated like part of the family. ‘Anyhow, that ain’t the point. What makes most sense is for you to head straight here in future.’

  ‘Can’t make me,’ Dolly grumbled.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘You and whose army?’

  ‘Don’t need no army, Ma. I’ll send Bobby down the Court to fetch you.’

  Just as her resistance was about to crumble, Dolly spied the ostensible cause of their disagreement. Charlie swung in through the doors, alone, covered in dirt, with a crimson mark high on his left cheek. She jumped up to berate him. ‘There you are, Charlie Ogden. Here’s me thinking you was buried under that pile of rubble, dead as a doornail!’ Her cry attracted a wide audience of refugees from the shelter, all glad of a diversion. ‘And here you axe large as life, with hardly a scratch on you!’

  ‘Sorry about that, Ma.’ He came across and spoke under his breath. ‘Why don’t I go back and make a proper job of being done in?’ Hat on the table, white-faced, with a bleeding cut on his cheek, he sat down.

  ‘Ha-ha, very funny I don’t think. You know what I’m on about, leaving an old girl to get out of that hole all on her tod, not caring if I was alive or dead.’

  The force of the blast had rolled Charlie back off his seat and buried him under a sheet of corrugated iron, which had, in fact, saved his life in the roof-fall that followed.

  ‘But we all know who comes first with you, Charlie, and it ain’t your poor old ma!’

  It wasn’t Dorothy either, though this was the implication. Charlie had enough to do to save himself back there, as the soil pelted against the sheet of metal and he breathed in acrid smoke, scrabbling with his fingertips to dig free of the earth.

  ‘See, he don’t deny it.’ Dolly appealed to Amy.

  ‘Ma, calm down. We’re all safe, ain’t we?’

  ‘What’s the point?’ Charlie rounded on his mother and spoke quietly, fiercely. ‘Whatever I do or say, it ain’t right, is it? I can’t open my mouth without putting my foot in it, so I might as well not bother.’

  Amy laid a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘No, I’ve had it up to here. You can bleeding well say what you like, but from now on I won’t be around to hear it.’

  ‘He means it,’ Amy whispered. ‘Say sorry, Ma!’

  ‘Sorry – what for?’ When it came to it, she meant what she said. Lately, he’d taken up with Dorothy, he’d turned hard-hearted and never given his family a second thought.

  Charlie flashed Amy a look. ‘See, she shows me up and she don’t even see she’s doing it.’

  ‘You know what she’s like. It ain’t just you; Ma’s the same with everyone.’

  ‘Well, not with me, not any more.’ He stood up and fixed his hat firmly over his forehead. ‘From now on I ain’t gonna be there when you whistle, Ma. You hear me? I’ll pack my bag and you won’t see me no more. I’ll be out of your hair for good.’

  ‘He’s in a state,’ Amy whispered as he stormed off. ‘Give him a chance to calm down.’

  ‘He’s in a state?’ Dolly echoed. ‘And what about me? I’m the one who should be in a state, having a son like him, and his father dead and buried and no one to look out for me.’

  Stoically Amy stepped in to shoulder the burden. She sent for brandy, sat by and mopped up Dolly’s loud tears. ‘Anyhow, you’ll be down with us next time that siren goes off and no arguments.’

  Dolly wasn’t the only one to go to pieces that night. Amy watched as Edie Morell came in, wet through from the downpour that had just begun, looking, frantic. She dashed towards Hettie, who had served the glass of brandy into Dolly’s shaking hand.

  ‘No luck?’ Hettie caught Edie’s arm and held her to the spot.

  ‘No, I’ve been all the way to the Gardens and back. No one saw him in the shelter tonight.’

  Amy listened in. This must be Tommy they were talking about. She was all ears.

  ‘Well then . . .’ Hettie thought this was good news. ‘That means he must have taken cover somewhere else. He’s probably nice and snug down the tube station, or on his way home right this minute.’

  Edie’s hair dripped. She’d run from the pub without coat or hat through the rain, as soon as she heard about the direct hit at the Gardens.

  ‘Come on, come with me.’ Hettie took her upstairs out of earshot. ‘It ain’t good to rush out like that, not before the all-clear.’ She found towels and went to Edie’s room to fetch a dressing-gown. ‘Now you get out of them wet things before you catch your death.’

  Edie trembled by the gas fire, peeling off the wet clothes. ‘I can’t bear it when the siren goes off and I don’t know where he is,’ she confessed.

  Hettie wrapped the gown round
her shoulders. ‘I see you can’t.’

  ‘I love him, Ett, and I don’t know what to do!’ It was the first time she’d come out into the open over Tommy, though these past few weeks had proved an agony. With her flat in ruins and no privacy for Tommy and her to be together, their affair had turned into a series of snatched kisses in the basement office, of staged meetings in unfriendly pubs and cruel separations when the sirens sounded and he insisted that she go with Hettie and the rest while he found what cover he could.

  ‘And he loves you; anyone can see that.’ Hettie didn’t shy away from the intimate confession. She spoke kindly, from the vantage point of years.

  ‘Can they?’ Edie sounded surprised.

  Hettie smiled. ‘Yes, you don’t think you managed to keep it a secret, did you? Not round here. Tommy’s head over heels, it goes without saying.’

  She bit her lip. ‘Does Dorothy know?’

  ‘I haven’t asked her. Why, hasn’t Tommy told her?’

  ‘I won’t let him. It don’t seem fair, not with the war on.’

  ‘What’s fair got to do with it?’ Hettie’s Christian sense had struggled long enough over Edie’s all too obvious love for her employer. Rules were being broken left, right and centre. No – worse – Commandments, and these were what Hettie had lived by since her Sally Army days. On the one hand, she could see the bitterness between man and wife; two people who seemed not to have recognized the bargain they made at the altar, whose disappointment in one another wrapped a straitjacket around their lives, so that Dorothy drenched herself in perfume and chased other men, while Tommy soused himself in alcohol. On the other hand, there was Tommy and Edie together, blossoming into tenderness.