Diana heard a loud bang that sent a wave ripping through her body with a force that seemed to blast apart every molecule and simultaneously suck the air out of her and she screamed, though her scream was heard by no one, not even herself. Then came a terrifying whoosh as a cloud of smoke and dust and debris plummeted from the ceiling in such a rush the world must surely have ended.
And then nothing. Silence.
Diana lay face down on the ground. She waited to die and the shaking of the ground and the roar of the world ending made her wonder if she had, in fact, already died, if this was death. In that instant she could not be sure. The difference between life and death seemed arbitrary.
And then it stopped, for the most part. The roaring in her ears continued but the world was no longer ending. There was a stillness, there was a silence—aside from the roaring in her ears; an eerie silence of many people listening, waiting, or many people dead. Diana became aware of herself lying face down on the ground, could taste dust in her mouth. She could not be dead, she reasoned, if she could taste dust in her mouth, and she lifted her head. Others lifted their heads. For they were still here, the station was still here. The world had not ended. And those who had done it all before and knew how these things were stood up on wobbly legs and brushed themselves off and said it was not a direct hit, for had it been a direct hit they would none of them be here, or not in one piece at any rate, and the station itself would be a large crater filled with molten, smoking rubble and body parts. But it had seemed, at the time, to be a direct hit.
All that had happened was that the roof had partially fallen in.
Diana Meadows had seen it fall in as it had fallen directly onto the woman with the headscarf who had been returning to her child and the tired policeman who had at just that moment approached her. Diana had had a perfect view of the two of them standing only a few yards away from one another and in another moment they had vanished in the whoosh of smoke and dust and debris that had plummeted from the ceiling. Afterwards, Diana lifted her head, others lifted their heads, but these two did not. The woman and the young policeman had gone and Diana, in the moments that she realised she had not died, that she tasted dust in her mouth, knew with a strange clarity that they were both dead.
She had survived when others had died. And her child was still cradled in her arms. She hugged her, she talked to her, she reassured her, though her words made no sound and Abigail offered no reply.
Ghostly figures began to move about in the choking dust, making no sound at all, their faces covered by handkerchiefs, but moving silently, talking to each other silently, and that was odd, before it occurred to her she could hear nothing but the roaring in her ears. But I am not frightened, thought Diana. She did not know why she was not frightened. It was inexplicable. She had survived when others had died. And her child was still cradled in her arms. She sat on the ground and held Abigail tightly to her breast and rocked her back and forth, talking to her as all around them the ghostly figures moved silently and futilely. A short distance away was Teddy, whom they had thought lost, turned quite white by a coating of the thick, choking dust and just out of reach. But Teddy had survived too.
The woman and the policeman were dead. But the woman’s child was alive, she saw. The child had not died. The little girl stood a little distance away, her mouth open. She was clearly screaming but she made no sound, or none that Diana could hear. And no one came to her. Diana closed her eyes and stroked Abigail’s hair and for once Abigail did not object.
Time passed. She didn’t know how much time. And sometimes she saw herself from very high up, which was odd, and she had a sensation almost of vertigo as she gazed down at herself, very small and insignificant a long way below. And other times she felt a great crushing weight pressing against her chest so that she could not get enough breath, though there was no weight that she could see. But still it pressed. And the people around her emerged then melted away though they did not move, it was simply her ability to sense them that came and went.
The station was to be evacuated. It was no longer safe. She wondered how she knew this when no one spoke. She could see rescue workers and firemen newly arrived from the surface appearing out of the cloud of thick dust in their uniforms and helmets, their faces covered, clambering over the debris. She could see an ambulance crew with stretchers. They were up above her on the platform. No one had made it down here below the platform yet. She studied the people all around her, the people she had shared this night with, and saw that many were trapped, and others were milling about dazedly, bleeding from cuts and abrasions, nursing injured limbs. But she herself was not trapped, Diana saw, her legs were perfectly free, she had no cuts or abrasions, or none that she could see, none that she could feel. There was just this pressing weight. She could not see her own face so she put up a hand and touched her cheek, her nose. It felt quite as it should. She had survived when others had died. She studied Abigail’s face which was perfect, flawless, untouched.
And meanwhile the poor wretched child, motherless now, had made its way to the place her mother had last been and began to pick at the pile of rubble and debris. It was pitiful. Someone would help her, surely, sooner or later. They would not leave the child, someone would come and claim it. The man in the seaman’s duffle coat would come for her.
But the man did not come.
Instead two firemen reached them and jumped down, faceless and anonymous men who gently moved the little girl aside and set about removing what debris they could. They moved methodically, expertly, gloved hands pulling piece by piece until a body emerged. They stopped at one point and waved then started moving the debris with more haste and a stretcher was called for. There was a long moment of frenzied activity when Diana became aware that one of them was alive, or might be alive. A body was pulled out and put on the stretcher and wrapped in a blanket and taken away, a body with a pulse, alive, or not yet dead at any rate. The firemen continued their work and a second body was found and this one too was placed on a stretcher and covered with a blanket but this time the head was covered and there was less haste and no one came to take the second stretcher away in the ambulance; instead it was laid out on a clear space on the platform, a human form covered with a grey blanket, and the two firemen were called away to search for other bodies elsewhere.
One dead, one not quite dead. Diana had seen the shadowy stubble and the short brown hair of the policeman on the first stretcher. And from beneath the blanket on the second stretcher a single foot protruded, a foot bare of stocking or shoe but still recognisably a woman’s foot, perfect and unblemished and very white, very still. Diana stared at the foot.
No one had remembered about the little girl. She had crept over to the lifeless form on the stretcher and now she lay down beside it, beside her dead mother. The horror of this image struck Diana but at some remote level. She pulled Abigail closer to her as though this might shield her from the appalling sight.
A rescue crew began pulling people up onto the platform and leading them away. But still Diana did not move. Really, they were quite safe, she and Abigail, right here in their little spot near the tunnel entrance. They would stay here. The debris had fallen all around them but had not touched them. They had survived.
‘Come on, luv.’
Diana looked up into the blackened face of a fireman, his eyes red-rimmed and very white in his smoke-blackened face, his helmet and boots and waterproof suit massive beside her. ‘Time to go,’ he said, and it was odd that she knew that this was what he had said when she couldn’t hear his voice. Perhaps he had in fact said something completely different; perhaps he had said, ‘Sorry, missus, you’re sitting on a mine and if you get up it will go off.’ But that didn’t seem likely for his face was gentle, his eyes were gentle, odd for such a hulking brute of a man in boots and a fireman’s helmet. Water coursed in rivers off his shoulders and dripped from the rim of his helmet. He held out a grimy hand to help her. He seemed to want to take Abigail from her.
‘WE ARE QUITE ALRIGHT,’ Diana assured him, and she wondered if she had shouted this because the fireman started slightly. She had heard the words quite clearly inside her own head but not in her ears, which was an odd sensation.
The fireman made some reply. He held out both arms as though he would take Abigail from her but Diana clasped her child tighter to her and after a moment the man appeared to be called away to help elsewhere as he stood up and left. But they were quite alright, she and Abigail, and after a time Diana got unsteadily to her feet, for they could not remain here. And why had the fireman ignored the poor, stricken little girl? she wondered. Perhaps he had not seen her, for she lay quietly beside the stretcher. She was oddly still. Surely the poor child could not believe her mother was alive?
It was time. Awkwardly, stiffly, Diana got to her knees. Her legs quivered beneath her, as feeble as cardboard, but did not give way. She took a tentative step then another before turning back and reaching down to scoop up Teddy: he had survived; she would not abandon him now. Abigail would never forgive her. They made their way, scrambling and uncertain, up onto the platform. From here they made their way to the stretcher and Diana kneeled down beside the lifeless form covered by the grey blanket where the single bare foot protruded. She wanted to say a prayer—it would be a prayer not just for the dead woman but for them all, the dead woman’s child and herself and her own child—but in the end she said nothing as she didn’t know what such a prayer might sound like.
It was time. She lowered her gaze to Abigail’s face, which was perfect, flawless, untouched, just as though the explosion had sucked the breath out of her, had sucked the life from her body. So still. She could be sleeping. No sign of an injury, nothing to show that she was gone, just an absence of life. Diana kneeled. Another Diana, watching from very far above, saw her take the lifeless form that was at her breast and lay it beside the dead woman. Saw her bend over and for the final time kiss her child’s smooth, white face. Saw her get calmly to her feet. Her child was dead.
She turned to the little girl who had lost her mother and who was crouching, senseless in her grief, beside her mother’s body, and she picked the child up in both arms and walked out of the station with her.
Outside the dawn had come. Brilliant sunlight blinded them. A dozen, two dozen people milled about. Rescued shelterers sat on the floor with blankets wrapped around them. First-aid crews handed out steaming mugs, men from a fire crew stood silently sipping drinks. Hoses and buckets and shovels and axes lay in piles at their feet. Stretchers were being loaded into waiting ambulances, a young woman with a limp was being led away. A man was having his head bandaged, his face and hands bloodied. The entrance to the station was blackened and smouldering, many of the bricks charred where a fire had broken out. It had rained in the night so that everything was shiny with that damp after-rain smell, and after the shouts and cries and screams and the crash of falling rubble there was now the silence of a sky free of bombers and searchlights and flak, the silence of an English winter morning.
Diana saw all this and saw none of it. The roaring continued in her ears but she could make out other sounds now, too, though they were muffled and that was fine. The great pressing weight had gone, right at the very moment that it had overwhelmed her. A woman in a maroon apron reared into her line of vision to thrust a mug of tea into her hands, to place a blanket around her, but Diana veered away from the woman. She tasted dust and ash on her lips. She swallowed and ash coated her tongue and her throat. She picked her way over the debris, passing piles of rubble and the twisted girders of smouldering metal and the skeletons of houses that had been hit during the night. Hoses were strewn across the streets and huge puddles of water were everywhere. A column of thick black smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, covering everything with a choking, seared smell that grabbed at the windpipe and sucked the air out of her lungs. Many of the buildings had been cordoned off. On the ground were strewn pieces of furniture, items of clothing, a doll’s head. Odd shoes. A hat. On the corner of Bethnal Green Road someone had hung a Union Jack and it fluttered limply in the chill winter air.
Diana picked her way carefully, maintaining her balance with difficulty as she held the little girl in both arms, though unhampered by the little blue travelling case, which she had not brought with her nor even given a thought to. They made their way to a bus stop. Surprisingly they did not have to wait long. London had been bombed and people had died but this morning the birds were singing and the buses were running. A number 8 bus came along and they got on and the bus pulled away and left.