David Storey - Saville

Across the backs other voices were calling out and in a doorway someone else had begun to laugh.

‘Well, that was a quick raid,’ the mother said. ‘Let’s hope the all-clear goes soon.’

‘That water,’ Saville said. ‘I can’t understand it.’

‘All that work,’ the mother said. ‘For nothing.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Saville said. ‘We’ll be as safe as houses.’

‘Where? In here?’

‘No.’ He shook his head, shivering, and pointed towards the shelter. ‘When I’ve drained it.’

‘Drained it?’ she said. ‘Tonight?’

‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘It’ll be too late tomorrow.’

Saville shook his head, standing in his wet pants and vest before the fire. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no bombing tonight. I’ll have it drained by the time it starts.’

A few days later he brought a pump home from work. It was shaped rather like a pudding basin, and was made of heavy metal. Colin could only lift it with his father’s help. From one end ran a metal tube perhaps a yard long. It was this his father rested in the water. Then, panting, his face flushing at the exertion, he worked a little handle at the side. It was made of wood and as he jerked it to and fro there was a sucking noise inside the metal basin and out of a long rubber hose attached to the other side emerged a jet of water.

It came out in little spasms and starts, draining off across the garden.

His father worked it for an hour.

‘Is it empty, then?’ his mother said when they went in.

‘Empty?’ His father sat at the table, spreading out his arms. ‘It hasn’t shifted an inch.’

‘I told you buckets would do it faster.’

‘Buckets,’ he said and banged the table with his fist.

At the end of the week, however, Colin was helping to carry the buckets himself, his father kneeling by the door and stooping inside the shelter to fill them and he carrying them, half-spilling, across the yard to empty in the drain the other side. ‘Don’t empty them in the garden,’ his father said the first time he did so. ‘It’ll drain straight back. God damn and blast, it’ll be weeks before we’ve finished.’

The next raid, when the sirens went, they spent in a cupboard beneath the stairs. As on the previous raid they heard no sound at all. After a while his father got up to go to work. ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t come out. You wait there until you hear the all-clear,’ shutting the door quietly and moving on tiptoe across the kitchen, breathing heavily as he wheeled his bike out into the yard. They heard the rasp of the tyres on the ashes, then the sound of his boot as he pushed himself off. Then, for a while, they sat in silence.

At last the mother got up. ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘I’m not waiting here any longer,’ opening the cupboard door but turning back when he followed her and adding. ‘No, you stay there, Colin. I’ll tell you when to come out.’

He sat alone then with the lamp re-trimmed, heating up the tiny space, staring at the white walls of the cupboard, the odd boxes, the spare tyre from his father’s bike, the ribbed, zinc tub out of the top of which poked the week’s washing.

Outside he could hear his mother moving about, lighting the gas and, a little later, catching her foot against a chair.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said through the door.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He heard the clinking of the cups and the water being poured into the pot.

When his mother opened the door he said, ‘Can I come out?’ before taking the cup.

‘No, you better stay there,’ she said. ‘If anything happens I can rush inside.’

When the door had closed again he watched the steam rising from the cup in the lamplight and saw the waves of heat distorting the shape of the tyre as they came out of the little holes round the top of the lamp.

When the all-clear sounded his mother opened the door. She stood listening, her head to one side, gazing at the ceiling, then said, ‘Well, then, it should be all right.’ He climbed back up to bed with the smell of the washing still about him, and the smell of the burning oil from the lamp.

Eventually they dispensed with the cupboard. When the sirens sounded he would go down to the kitchen and sit with his mother and with his father if he were home from work, the door of the cupboard open and sometimes the lamp lit in readiness inside.

Finally, when the bombing started in earnest, his father would take him out on to the step to watch.

The planes came from the east, flying high above the houses, with just the dull throbbing of their engines to indicate their passage, like some low moaning inside the head. Almost every night the sky to the west would be lit by flames, silhouetting the houses of the village, lifeless but for the odd whispered cries from the other doors and windows. It was as if the horizon burned, a dull, aching redness flung against the sky. Across it, intermittently, waved the beams of searchlights and occasionally came the crackle of gunfire, like some vague tapping overhead.

One day his father took Colin with him on a bus to the city. It took them almost an hour to get there, making detours up narrow lanes to tiny farms and hamlets, the bus cresting a hill finally to reveal the city still some distance off perched on a steep and rocky outcrop, its various spires and towers shining in the sun.

Only when they’d passed through the suburbs and crossed the river did they see the damage. The factories were still there, the mill chimneys: it was the houses alone that had been hit, street after street of rubble, the bus occasionally brought to a halt while gangs of men dug with shovels or signalled it through some narrow gap.

Smoke rose from the debris: small crowds of people stood about gazing at the fractured beams and the guttered windows of what had once been their homes.

In the centre of the city the cathedral and the old brick buildings surrounding it were still intact. The tall, black spire stood at the very summit of the escarpment, open on every side. Only its stonework, however, had been chipped, the soot-encrusted surface laid open to the yellowish texture underneath. It was as if it suffered from some huge infection, yellow spots gaping from the black. Some of its windows had been broken. Inside several women were picking up the glass

‘That’ll never be hit,’ his father said. ‘It’s as safe as houses. They need have no worry over that.’

Colin followed his father through the crowds. Saville stopping here and there, before a guttered shop or house, talking to the people, nodding his head, his small, stocky figure swelling with indignation.

‘By God, when it comes to bombing women and children it’s come to something. It has that.’

‘Ah, well, there’s no providence in bombs, one way or another,’ a man had said. He had, it seemed, been bombed out already. ‘The place they put me in got bombed out the night I was sent. They’re chasing me from one hole to another.’

When they reached home his father sat at the table, drinking his tea, describing what he had seen to his mother. ‘One row of houses we saw: perfect. Not a stick out of place. The only thing was that not one of them had a window. Blast: it had removed every bit of glass.’

‘They say there are ten thousand homeless,’ his mother said.

‘More,’ Saville said, ‘if I had a guess.’

Sometimes, on a morning, Colin would tie a magnet to a piece of string and pull it through the gutters of the village. He seldom found anything but old bolts and nails. Once, however, he picked up a piece of greyish metal, torn at the edges, like paper, and slightly burned. He put it in a box, along with the war medals, the foreign coins, the cartridges, and the.303 bullets.