Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

“We’ll just leave it for tomorrow’s cleanup,” Clive said.

We were ready to rejoin the rest of our crew over at Dr. Johnson’s when we heard a voice so small amid the cacophony of the men at work we shouldn’t have heard it at all. Even with the greatest city in the world burning, one’s ears heard first the sound of a human voice coursing through the night like electricity through wire.

Clive called out. From the open front of the building came a more insistent voice. Clive called to me to go to back to the truck where there was another coil of rope.

Fleet Street was twice as bright as when we’d entered Gough Square — fires burned so bright I was forced to shield my eyes. I was coming back with the rope when two nurses came up the block.

“In here, in Gough Square,” I said. “We’ve found someone in need of help.” I led the nurses into the square. Clive crouched close to the burning building. Firemen had doused the place and the flames had been subdued.

“His legs’re pinned by a beam,” Clive said. There was a life in his eyes I hadn’t seen in all the time we had worked on rescues together.

“Must be in pain,” the taller of the two nurses said. Clive just looked at her. “Well, ask him!”

Clive called down into the gaping hole. “He thinks one of his legs is broken.”

“You’ll get down there and see if you can get him out, but first we’ll make him comfortable.”

An air raid siren started up again but no one made a further move to seek shelter. The concussion of heavy explosives just blocks away shook the ground. Wind shifted and chemical smoke exhaled its noxious breath. The smaller nurse, who hadn’t yet said a word, walked a step or two away and vomited.

“You’d best be off,” the taller nurse said. “Won’t be much help to anyone in this state.”

The shorter nurse hurried to Fleet Street and the taller nurse turned to me.

“If you’ll tie that around me,” she said. She pointed to the rope in my hand. “I’ll go down to make sure he’s comfortable.”

I pulled it around the nurse’s thin waist. It was the closest I’d been to a woman’s thin waist since Rotterdam. Since Françoise. I put my hands on her hips and she said, “That’s a bit familiar, then, isn’t it?”

“We should make sure you’re going to get back up.”

“I’d like that,” the nurse said.

Her face bore a constellation of brown freckles alternately hidden and picked out by the light of the growing fires. Clouds stood bright as daylight in the night sky.

“Watch your head on the way down there,” Clive yelled. Before the nurse took another step, Clive said, “I suppose before we lower you into a building we’d best know your name.”

She said her name was Glynnis. We helped her to the front of the gaping hole at the face of the house. She stepped over three or four solid joists to the edge of the building. We lowered her down. Glynnis held three syringes of morphine in her right hand and the rope with the left and just before leaving our eyeshot, she said, “Remember, two tugs means hoist me up.”

The rope stayed taut a long time. Then Clive began pulling. Glynnis’s hand came up at the edge of the floor and while Clive held her straight with the rope I jumped in front of him and pulled her up. Her uniform was stained the color of dishwater from the dripping line. Her hair was mussed, its tendrils plastered flat against her face, hiding some of the brown spots I’d observed upon it. She was gaunt-cheeked, slender-nosed, and beautiful.

“He’s sedated,” Glynnis said. “The leg’s trapped by a large beam.”

She lifted her arms. I untied the rope. Then Glynnis tied the rope around Clive’s stomach. His hands were calm at his sides when he tested it. Just then a new groaning emitted from the building. A spray of sparks flew up against the window. Then we heard the tinkle of the glass as it broke with the heat.

“On with it, then,” Clive said. We let him down into the open face of the building. A few minutes later, we had him up, the victim with him.

9.

Now it was almost ten o’clock. Streets asphyxiated with smoke. On our way toward Ludgate Hill we passed a tall thin man covered in black soot. He might have been a Giacometti sculpture, drawn and spindly and given life like Hermione. He might have been my father, who in his peripatetic bolt from the Nazi takeover in Czechoslovakia might have been anywhere or nowhere in the world. We pushed on.

Clive was determined to see for himself what was intact in central London. By the time we reached St. Paul’s, every building around the churchyard was in flames. A light rain had begun to fall. Christopher Wren’s masterpiece appeared to have been set ablaze. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, the inscription in the cathedral reads: “If you seek his monument, look around.” A look around us suggested it must be doomed.

It is hard to overstate the sense of defeat that came in those moments when we thought we saw St. Paul’s burning. At times symbols really were symbols, and to see that church burn to the ground might have felt like a particular kind of defeat. Frankly, the effect it would’ve had on all of London the next morning might have been the kind of sight that turned the whole war. But that feeling no sooner gripped us than it passed when we came close and saw the cathedral was essentially unscathed, merely reflecting the orange and red of the fires all around it, seeming to rise up to the low-slung clouds.

Again we were speeding up the boulevard until, on our way to Newgate Street, the three of us were jolted forward. We’d hit erupted pavement in the street. I got out and Clive turned around to be certain Glynnis was unharmed, but she was a nurse and instinctively was trying to do the same for the two of us.

“Cover your eyes,” she said. “If you get an ember in there—” Clive grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop.

“Too late,” Clive said. He had an ember under his eyelid, and the air about us filled with so much smoke, Glynnis and I could see nothing.

We kept on by foot into the smoke storm. The only thing we could see were the burning buildings. We’d gone what I felt certain was a block or two when I began to feel the first bilious churnings in my stomach, which coincided with a shift in the direction of the wind. The breeze lifted the smoke and revealed the way before us to be a block where the fires were only intermittent. Up ahead a fire truck had parked and four men from the brigade were trying to subdue a raging fire in a tall building with a first-floor storefront just ahead.

“You can’t help here,” one fireman said when we reached them.

Another air raid siren. It was clear we’d better go wait it out in the Underground.

10.

Inside Leicester Station we discovered an alternate city to the one we’d just left above. All down the platform people went about their evening business, doing their best not to acknowledge the firestorm overhead. Stations had been hit by bombs and had caved in, crushing everyone within, but there was no circle below to descend to. Two young men were engaged in a game of cards, each of them seated on a wooden crate. An older man stood bare-backed, his head craned out over the tracks as if awaiting a train, brushing his teeth. The only sound was the contralto of voices reverberating up and down the tunnel. People looked up without acknowledging our presence, or our bodies, which were covered in black soot and streaks of sweat. Our clothes were soiled and carried the toxic reek of burning chemicals.

“What is it?” I said.

“Looks like you’ve been through some kind of inferno,” the man with the toothbrush said. He turned and spit the paste, then walked over a long row of bodies. It was ten minutes before we found an open space, during which time bombs shook the place each time they landed. Wails of infants echoed through the chamber. Clive couldn’t open his eyes. Glynnis and I did our best to get him through the crowd.