Pat Barker - Noonday

“Kenny.” Paul put his hand on the boy’s shoulder but he squirmed away and burrowed his head deeper into his mother’s side. “Your mam’s right. I think you’d better come back with me, just till your mam gets a bit more settled.”

“I’m not going.” He looked up at his mother. “You can’t make me go with him, he’s been mucking me about.”

It took Paul a moment to realize what he meant. “You little toad. You know bloody well that’s not true.”

“Mam, it is, Mam. He’s been putting whisky in me orange juice and all sorts. Ask him. No, go on, ask him. And we slept in the same bed last night.”

“Kenny? No-o, Kenny, look at me, look me in the eye and say it, go on.” When there was no response, Paul looked directly at the mother. “It’s not true.”

“No, I know, it’s all right, he’s always making things up.” She leaned in closer. With a slight shock he saw the moist, puckered anemone of the baby’s mouth tugging at a huge brown nipple. Almost whispering, she said, “The thing is, he doesn’t get on with his stepdad.” She glanced over her shoulder, then made a sharp, sideways gesture with her free hand: hopeless.

The cadaverous man was starting to take an interest in the conversation — perhaps thinking there might be a fiver in it for him, if he played his cards right. And why not? Plenty of girls, and not a few boys, changed hands for a lot less than that. This was not quite the family reunion Paul had been expecting.

“Where are they taking you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked helplessly at a small crowd that was gathering a few feet away at the end of the alley.

“School on Agate Street!” somebody shouted.

“Is it far?” Paul called back.

“ ’Bout a mile.”

A hell of a distance for these shattered people — some injured, some with minor burns, many in pajamas and dressing gowns — to walk. He looked down at their feet. Not all of them had shoes; some limped over the cobbles, blood-shod.

He turned back to Kenny’s mother. “Look, I’ll help you carry.” He was desperate to do something, anything.

“I’ve got a suitcase packed,” she said.

So Paul followed her into the house and dragged it out of its hiding place under the stairs. God knows what she’d got in there. Lifting it almost wrenched his arm out of the socket, but he wasn’t going to give in. If they could bear this, so could he.

Air-raid wardens, white-faced with plaster dust, had already started shepherding the crowd along.

So they walked. And what a rabble they were. Red eyes stared out of gray faces; some ranted and raved, others were hysterical or mute with shock. He’d witnessed all these reactions in casualty clearing stations in France and Belgium, only he’d never thought to see them here. London’s burning, London’s burning …Bloody tune skittered round and round his brain as he lugged and tramped, try as he might he couldn’t get rid of it, so he made himself look outwards, to notice and remember.

They walked along rubble-strewn roads, through puddles of water filmed with oil, over fire hoses that lay across the black and glistening pavements as gray and flaccid as drowned worms. On their right, buildings blazed out of control; others, black and skeletal, wavered in the heat. Once, looking ahead, he saw the tarmac come to life and move. He thought it must be a trick of the light then realized it was a colony of rats, thousands of them, fleeing a burning warehouse. Sometimes the ground underfoot was hot and the people whose feet were lacerated or burned cried out as they limped across it. The really terrifying thing, the one he knew he’d never forget, was when the road behind them suddenly ignited in a long, slow, leisurely lick of flame.

The things people carried. An old lady’s wrinkled forearms covered in claw marks, beaded with blood. A tabby cat, its pupils wildly dilated, peered out from the neck of her dressing gown. A clock. Photographs — yes, of course you’d try to save those, but a black hand grasping a bunch of plastic lilies of the valley? Or an elephant’s tusk in a brown leather sling?

At last they reached the school. After twenty minutes’ hanging about, they were guided down into the basement. They found a place by the wall and Paul was finally able to relinquish the suitcase and chafe his hands to get the blood flowing again. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on.”

Pushing his way through the crowd, he saw how packed the basement was. The smell of hot human bodies mingled with the fumes from oil lamps snagged in his throat. Wardens were setting up latrine buckets behind a screen of blankets, men one end of the corridor, women the other, though how people were supposed to get to them through the crush…He spoke to one of the wardens, who said buses were coming to take everybody away that afternoon. “Where to?” The man didn’t know; nobody knew. But it was some consolation to know they weren’t going to have to endure these conditions for more than a couple of hours.

When he got back Kenny’s mother was sitting on the suitcase feeding the baby, a tiny, wizened little mite with a bright orange face and a shock of straight black hair. Two weeks old, apparently, and he hadn’t been due till mid-October. Looking away to give her some privacy, Paul caught the expression on Kenny’s face. Love? Yes, that certainly. But also the pain of exclusion. A gap of twelve years or more between him and these children, and that sallow-skinned, silent man was very obviously not his father. Had they sent him to the country for his own safety, or because the family worked better without him there?

All around them people were settling down, arranging bags and coats, staking out small territories, though as more and more people pushed down the stairs these fragile boundaries were being continually breached. “Where are we going?” was the question on everybody’s lips. “Where are they taking us?” But there were no answers from the wardens or anyone else, only offers of more tea. Nobody knew. People were guessing Kent, the hop fields, where there was accommodation for migrant workers. “I’ve had some good holidays there,” Kenny’s mother said. The thought of the hop fields seemed to cheer her up. She really didn’t look at all well.

More and more people crammed themselves into the airless space. Many people had lit cigarettes and a bluish pall of smoke hung on the stagnant air. The wardens shouted at them to put them out, but only a few did. Along with sweat, cigarette smoke, dirty nappies and latrine buckets were all the smells they’d brought with them on their clothes: burnt brick, charred wood, the carrion stench of high explosive. Paul’s chest was tightening all the time, but he didn’t feel he could just walk away.

He found the chief warden and offered to help with first aid, though with no clean water or bandages there was very little he or anybody else could do. Wardens and voluntary workers were everywhere, trying to help, but the press of bodies defeated them. By now, moving was almost impossible. No Underground train at the height of the rush hour had ever been as packed as this. He could see Kenny and his mother, who now had the grizzling toddler in her arms, at the other end of the main corridor, but there was no hope of reaching them. He pointed to the stairs, mouthing: Got to go. Kenny raised his hand to wave good-bye, then turned to his baby sister, who stopped crying and held out her arms.

At first, getting upstairs against the crush of people surging down seemed impossible, but then somebody at the top started organizing those coming down onto the left. Paul and another warden edged up step by step, persuading people to move to one side. At the top of the stairs Paul looked around for somebody in authority. An exhausted little man with a gray, bristly mustache bleated, “What am I supposed to do? They can’t stay up here, it’s not safe.”