Pat Barker - Noonday

A handful of men was edging warily onto a scree of rubble. Nothing was visible of them but dark backs and bent shoulders; they were all hunched over as if that could protect them from falling ceilings. Elinor pushed to the front, trying to see what was going on. She noticed the mean, sneaky smell of domestic gas, mixed with the stench of high explosive. Paul said it was very like the stink of decomposing bodies on a battlefield, and she wondered what it did to him to smell that here. At home. In London. And then she thought: Bugger Paul. Everybody was coughing and covering their mouths. That smell got into your lungs, irritating the mucous membranes of nose and mouth, and then there was the fine dust that repeated blasts sent swirling invisibly into the air.

One of the men on the scree raised his hand, calling for silence. Everybody stood and listened, they hardly seemed to be breathing. Nothing. They started to look at each other, shoulders beginning to slump, but then it came again. Somebody inside the ruined house, from under the collapsed floors and ceilings, was crying out: a thin, reedy wail; an old woman’s voice, by the sound of it, although fear and weakness could make anybody sound old.

Work began again, with renewed vigor. Elinor and Dana ducked underneath the tape and stood on the opposite pavement from the wrecked house. Elinor looked at the bent backs of the men heaving away at the rubble; they were working more methodically now, loading buckets with bricks and lumps of fallen plaster, passing them down a chain. As one of them turned to hand a bucket on, she caught a glimpse of his face and recognized Kit. Somebody touched her arm. She turned and saw Violet, looking haggard, wisps of gray hair escaping from under her tin hat. The gutter was running with water from a burst main, turning plaster dust into a claggy paste that would set hard on every inch of exposed skin. “They’re alive,” Violet said. The tension of that knowledge, the need to work harder and faster, was in every face you saw. At intervals, the rescue-squad leader raised his hand and everybody stopped what they were doing and strained to listen. Violet was right: the frail voice under the rubble had been joined by other voices. One was crying: “My daughter, my baby, where is she?”—edging up into hysteria. They couldn’t afford to let it affect them. The hand fell and they got back to work. The burst water main had turned the road into a slick of slimy mud. A rescue-squad worker, running up to help, slipped and fell.

Bombers went on droning overhead, bursts of orange light obliterating the stars. The men were sawing through a beam that had fallen across a mound of rubble and was impeding progress. Another voice started up inside — not the child’s voice though — they hadn’t heard the child. It was impossible to go on doing nothing. Elinor ran across the road and, clambering up the lower slope, began to talk to the women inside. She felt rather than saw Kit turn at the sound of her voice. She was telling them they’d be all right, they’d soon have them out, no need to worry, not long now…It was what you always said, what you had to say, though in the time she’d been standing there no visible progress had been made. But at least they were alive, or the women were. “My baby, my poor baby,” the mother kept calling out, and the child’s name: Libby? Lizzie? No, Livvy, Livvy, that was it, she remembered now: the little girl was called Olivia. “Livvy, are you there? Where are you, Livvy?” And then again: “My baby, my poor baby.” On and on it went. Unbearable, you’d have said, except that they all bore it.

“All right, love, we’re getting there,” the rescue-squad leader called out. “Not long now.”

Once the beam was out of the way, they were able to start tunneling into the rubble, but it was slow, arduous work since the tunnel had to be shored up and made safe every few yards or so. Elinor thought — she couldn’t be sure — that the rescue workers had managed to pass bottles of water through a gap. If true, it might help the women go on a bit longer, but there was so much rubble to shift, tons of it, she didn’t see how the old woman could possibly survive the night.

At one point, she and Dana were sent to answer another call. One incident led to another, through the long hours of darkness — she could never afterwards remember the precise sequence of events — though there were flashes of acute clarity. Her and Dana leaning against the ambulance, shoulders shaking, bent double, laughing till they whooped for breath. And the joke? They’d been asked to deliver four bodies to a mortuary, but when they got there — after rather a difficult journey — the attendant refused to take them: no death certificates. Off they went to the nearest hospital, where an exhausted doctor who’d been toiling all night in an overcrowded, badly lit basement flatly refused to stop work and sign death certificates for corpses that were nothing to do with him. Back to the mortuary. “Not without a death certificate,” the angry little man insisted, trying to impose his own order on the chaos that was descending from the skies. “He’s going to have a heart attack,” Elinor said, as they left. “Oh I do hope so,” Dana replied. In the end, they appealed for help from a couple of passing air-raid wardens and unloaded the bodies in an alley that ran between two department stores. There they lay, lined up on the cobbles, at a decent distance from the dustbins. There was nothing to cover them with, but Elinor and Dana closed their eyes, and the wardens did the best they could to straighten their remaining limbs.

As she turned to go, Elinor was half embarrassed, half grateful to see one of the wardens do what she couldn’t do — cross himself and say a prayer.

Dana had stayed behind to thank the wardens. Elinor waited by the ambulance for her to come back, saw her shoulders shaking as she approached and reached out to comfort her, only to realize she was laughing. “What? What? ” Elinor said. “ ‘Not without a death certificate.’ Oh my God, that is so funny.” Tears were streaming down her face, making rivulets in the beige dust.

By four in the morning, they were back outside the house in Bedford Square. Not long after their arrival, a bomb fell on the other side of the square and the buried women, hearing the crash and feeling the rubble above their heads begin to slide, screamed in shock and fear. Elinor half thought she’d cried out herself, only the bulge in her throat convinced her the cry was still trapped inside. A burst of flame from the fresh bomb site sent shadows fleeing across the square. A third rescue squad arrived, and then a fourth. Kit relinquished his place in the chain that was passing buckets of rubble from the tunnel to the pavement, and came and stood beside her. “Who’s in there?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“Dorothea Stanhope. Do you remember, her husband was viceroy, no, he wasn’t viceroy, something like that…Daughter, daughter-in-law. And a little girl, the granddaughter.”

“How old?”

“Six.”

He said nothing, merely turned to stare at the rubble and the bent, laboring backs. There was nothing they could do now except wait for the rescue squad to break through and start pulling people out. The old woman’s cries were growing weaker, but the voices of the two younger women were still strong, and seemed — unless this was wishful thinking — to be getting louder. The chief rescue-squad leader held up his hand. “Careful. Slow down now.”

Elinor craned forward, as the workers paused. For a long moment nobody moved, but then the teams began inching forward again. A hole had opened at the center of the rubble and the two halves of the beam had been used to reinforce the sides. Then came another long, familiar, shrieking descent. The ground shook and a cataract of loose bricks and mortar cascaded down the sides of the slope. One of the rescue workers threw back his head and yelled, “FUCK YOU!” at the sky. Then he caught sight of Violet standing there. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you, love.” “Oh, please don’t apologize,” Violet said, in her daughter-of-the-vicarage accent. “My sentiments precisely. ”