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Authors: Barbara Nadel
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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
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
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