A man had no control over his life. It was daft to think otherwise.
Five months ago the navy had placed Stoker 2nd Class Joe Levin on the corvette, HMS Polyanthus, on North Atlantic convoy duty. The Polyanthus had already survived a number of transatlantic crossings, cheating death, avoiding—somehow—the U-boats that roamed the northern oceans. The odds were against you. But a stoker spent his life in the ship’s engine room shovelling coal. He did not calculate probabilities, he did not plot positions on a chart. That was for other men.
In September of ’43 the Polyanthus set off from Liverpool, part of a convoy of sixty-five merchant vessels escorted by nineteen warships bound for New York and Halifax.
At the end of his first shift the sun emerged over the stern and Joe smoked a cigarette, gazing at the line of ships that stretched as far as the horizon, and he wondered how the U-boats, patrolling a line south of Greenland and directly in their path, could possibly miss them. The Germans had a new type of torpedo, one that homed in on the sound of a ship’s engine and its propeller. What could you do? Turn off your engine and drift? Or plough on and trust to luck? The stoker was the first to die when a torpedo struck, the last to make it to a lifeboat. And yet some convoys did make it through. He himself had crossed the Atlantic and he had returned. A line of sixty-five ships in an ocean this big was like trying to locate a single star in a galaxy full of stars.
And so it was. Day after day there was no landfall and no sign of anyone or anything. The lashing grey waves merged with the low grey skies so that the war might have ended, the land might have been swallowed up by the ocean, and you would not know it.
Some convoys did make it through.
But not this one. On the sixth day, at a point somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, the U-boats found them. A Canadian ship, the St. Croix, was the first to be sunk. The Polyanthus, turning back to pick up survivors, was struck next. She broke up and sank so quickly barely a handful of men survived. Clinging to the scorched remnants of their ship through the night, some of the survivors froze to death. The remaining few were picked up at dawn by HMS Itchen.
All but two. Two men in a lifeboat were missed. In the darkness and the rough seas, in all the chaos, and as their shipmates were pulled aboard the rescue ship, a stoker and a petty officer watched helplessly as the current took them further and further away. The petty officer, mortally wounded in the explosion, died quite soon after. The stoker, who had been blown clean out of the vessel when the torpedo had struck and who remembered nothing at all of the explosion, now salvaged the dead man’s clothes in an effort to keep warm and pushed the man’s corpse overboard.
Then he waited to die.
A day later the Itchen was hit and sank, along with most of its crew and the few survivors from the Polyanthus who had been plucked from the ocean the day before. Stocker 2nd Class Joe Levin, after three days adrift, was picked up by a passing Polish merchant vessel and a week later was recuperating in a Liverpool hospital suffering nothing worse than hypothermia, dehydration and frostbite.
He spent a fortnight in the Liverpool hospital, and while he lay in his bed on the ward with his fingers and toes in bandages, watching the nurses pad softly back and forth and listening to the seaman in the bed opposite scream for his mother, he found himself thinking about the lack of control a man had over his life and the futility of thinking otherwise. He thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who worked the night shifts and who smelled of carbolic soap and whose uniform rustled with starch so that he knew she was coming seconds before she entered the ward. At night he dreamed about the dead petty officer whom he had stripped and tipped overboard. He saw the man’s bloated corpse lying on the seabed in utter darkness many fathoms beneath the sea, then he saw the corpse picked clean by all the various creatures of the ocean until only a skeleton remained, but the skull still had eyes that watched him, accusingly.
On his last night, as the rest of the ward slept and the seaman in the bed opposite wept quietly, the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent came to him in the still of the night. She crept into his bed and gave him what he had waited a fortnight for. It did not surprise him that she did so. He was a man who had cheated death and he had done so not with any great skill or prowess, but simply by dumb good fortune and the nurse recognised this. She gave herself to him, in part, as a reward but in some other, almost indefinable way, in the hope that his good fortune would rub off on her, would permeate her. She said nothing whatsoever to suggest this but Joe felt it and he did not question it.
After two weeks in the hospital the navy had sent Joe home to recuperate and after more than three years at sea, after nearly four years away, he had had to learn how to live in a house with a wife and a small child. And they had had to learn how to live with him.
An explosion somewhere to the south-east—the docks maybe—caused a low rumble and the air lit up a brilliant yellow and Joe dived for cover. The last thing he needed was a sky lit up like Guy Fawkes Night. He had found a narrow passageway between two buildings, barely wider than the breadth of a man’s shoulders, and he crouched there, swallowed by the shadows, until the sky turned black once more.
It was the first time he had stopped running since he had left Nancy in the Underground station and he leaned his head back against the brickwork and closed his eyes, drawing in slow, deep breaths. He still wore the buff-coloured seaman’s duffle coat he had purloined from the warehouse he had taken refuge in and now he stuffed his hands into its pockets for warmth, feeling the coat stretch across his shoulders and ride up at his wrists, feeling his own stocky frame fit uneasily inside another man’s clothes. He pulled up the hood of the coat, wishing he had taken a hat. He was making his way south. He was, he believed, though it was difficult to be sure, in Three Colts Lane.
He didn’t pause for long. Even in the air raid people were out and about. He eased himself to his feet and set off once more, moving in a low crouching run with both hands thrust out, partly for balance, because the ground was uneven at best, partly in case he ran slap bang into something or someone, because he could see no more than a yard or so in front of his face. The clouds that had blanketed this part of the city for some hours shifted and a pale moonlight now illuminated his way. Joe stopped dead. This wasn’t Three Colts Lane. He had missed his way in the blackout.
Where, then, was he? He stood quite still, his heart hammering under his ribs, the boom of distant explosions rippling through the air and making the earth beneath his feet vibrate. There were buildings on both sides, warehouses perhaps, and a large structure a little way ahead that stretched up and over the road. A railway bridge. He listened for footsteps ahead or behind him but could make out nothing. You’d have to be crazy to be out in this—crazy or desperate.
What was to be done? Go back and try to retrace his steps or press on and trust he’d find himself somewhere familiar soon enough?
A train rattled over the bridge in the darkness, making a terrific sound in the deserted lane, and Joe realised the bombing had stopped, for a time at least. The train showed no lights but it was going east. This was the overground line that took you north-east through Walthamstow and Wood Green as far as Chingford, or north to Seven Sisters and Edmonton and Enfield. Only a goods train would be travelling at this hour. Carrying munitions, perhaps, or armaments. He stood quite still, waiting for it to pass, wincing every time the wheels sent sparks spraying into the darkness. It would make a good target for any stray passing bomber.
The last railway truck rattled nosily overhead and was gone and the laneway shuddered into silence. Not silence: a rat scurried over his foot, distant sirens, shouts, the bells of emergency vehicles testified to the continuing chaos of the raid. But it was to the south, over towards the docks, wasn’t it? There had been no bombs behind him, from the direction in which he had just fled, had there?
Joe turned, his fingers clenched tightly in his coat pocket, feeling every muscle, every nerve tense and ready to spring forward. He wanted to go back, to run full pelt back to the Underground station to find Nancy and Emily. In his head he was already running and his heart was racing and he was gulping down breath after breath to fill his aching lungs. But he had not moved.
He mustn’t go back.
He bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing deeply. He searched for a cigarette then stopped himself—the flare of the match would advertise his presence as accurately as a searchlight or the blast from a police whistle.
After a moment he straightened up, feeling his alarm slowly dissipate.
Behind him was the unmistakable crunch of a man’s footsteps on broken glass, a heavy step in boots, perhaps a fireman, policeman, serviceman. He didn’t wait to find out but set off once more, moving swiftly, under the railway bridge, keeping close to the side of the street, a shadow among shadows, finding his way not by memory or starlight but by instinct. This way was south and now this way and now this. When at last he swung into Whitechapel Road he stopped as though as he had walked into a wall. It was dark, of course, but his eyes had adjusted by now. He could sense the broad east–west thoroughfare before him and a little to his left the giant edifice of the London Hospital, black against a black sky.
Thank God. Here was a place he had left behind when he had met Nancy, but here was a place he fled to now when he needed help. Something welled inside him. It was the same feeling he had had adrift in the lifeboat when the Polish ship had appeared out of the mist and his life had been saved.
He waited a few minutes in the shadow before venturing to cross the wide road. Even in a blackout, with a raid going on half a mile away, Whitechapel Road was never entirely deserted. And there were plenty of men out tonight simply because there was a raid on, and each one of them was every bit as desperate as he was and would not hesitate to cut his throat and rob him if it advanced their own position. It wasn’t just men. Out of the darkness a girl emerged, shivering in a summer dress, her thin arms wrapped around herself, pacing the roadside. She turned to stare at him, her face was as white as the whites of her eyes. You’d have to be desperate to ply your wares in a raid, in the blackout, on a night this cold. But there was always someone more desperate than yourself, that was what war taught you.
The girl saw him, called out to him, but her words were lost in another explosion. This time it was to the west, towards the City, and under its cover Joe darted over the road and plunged down the first side street he came to, and then another. He heard the drone of an enemy aircraft right overhead and he dived into a doorway, crouching, his hands covering his head.
After his three days adrift in the North Atlantic he had spent three months at home recuperating. One month for each day—that had seemed the least the navy could do; three months for the entire ship’s company lost, eighty-five men, roughly one day for each man. Two or three days each, he reckoned, for the few who had survived and been picked up by the Itchen only to be torpedoed a day or so later, and a day or two for the petty officer whose body he had tipped out of the lifeboat and who lay now at the bottom of the ocean. And with each day of his leave some part of him had thought, The navy has forgotten about me, they have forgotten I am here. If I just keep my head down they will let me be. For, by then, he had learned how to be at home with his family, and they had learned how to be with him.
It had not been easy. He had been married so short a time before his call-up that all he wanted on his return was to be alone with his wife, to remember who she was, to learn what it meant to be a husband. But they were not alone. There was Emily, who had grown up in a house with only her mum and the Rosenthals upstairs, who had no place in her world for a dad, had no use for one. She had screamed when he had arrived home in his uniform with his sun-blistered skin and his bristly chin and smelling of the sea. Nancy knew how to handle her and he did not. He learned, quickly, to resent how much of his wife’s time, his wife’s energy, the kid gobbled up.
It was not a happy house that first week or two.
Then Harry turned up.
He appeared one evening at Joe’s local when Joe had not even told his brother he was home with an offer of work down the docks. It was extra money, Harry said, and Joe welcomed the idea, though Nancy, when she found out, was furious.
But a convoy had come in and after his first shift Joe arrived home with two tins of peaches in syrup and a tin of Carnation milk and his wife and child fell on him like he had won the Victoria Cross. The kid ran to him, screaming with delirious excitement. After this they had got along just fine, he and the kid. He took her to the park, though it was all dug up for the war effort. He carried her on his shoulders through the stalls on market day and sat with her on his lap at his local letting her lick the froth from his beer. He marvelled at all the things she could do and say, this tiny perfect creature that was a part of him and a part of his wife, at times almost a miniature of Nancy the way she became cross in a moment just as his wife did, the way she would shrug her tiny shoulders with contrary stubbornness.
She tripped one Sunday evening after tea on the hard kitchen tiles and split her lip and he felt his insides turn over. He scooped her up and felt the world a hostile place closing in around them.
It had not been easy with Nancy either, and her love had required more to coax it than a tin of peaches and a can of Carnation milk. In a world of rationing and bombs and blackouts his wife had learned to survive on her own. And then he wondered, had she already been that person when he had met her, orphaned and alone, brought up in a Shoreditch boarding house? He did not know. The person he had written frantic, bored, yearning letters to from his bunk on board his ship seemed not to exist except in his own head. His wife was strong. She hardly seemed to need him. Her beauty and her strength overwhelmed him, it frightened him. The two of them, she and the kid, had grown to fill the space he had left and he felt clumsy in her presence, a grotesque giant of a thing, too large for the furniture, too tall for the room, always crashing into things. He blamed his sea legs for this; he had been at sea three years, it took a while to learn how to be on dry land.
At night he thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who had crept into his bed on the ward and made love to him as a stranger would. His wife made love to him in the same way, like a stranger, and that disturbed him. And it bewitched and transfixed him. The evening she had told him she had gone with another man he thought he would go mad. But he did not go mad. Instead he crossed the space that had separated them and woke the next morning beside her in their bed. It turned out his wife knew him better than he knew himself.
He had not let her out of his sight or out of his heart since that morning.
The enemy aircraft had flown right overhead and a searchlight tracked it across the sky, followed a second or two later by a burst of fire from an AA gun. He looked up, watching the tracer bullets from the gun create a flickering red trail before fading away. The first greyish tinge of dawn glowed faintly in the east. The night was ending and he needed to be further away than this by daybreak.
He had taken a stupid risk going to the tube station to find Nancy, but she needed to be warned, for there was every chance the police would go to the house, might even arrest her. And he had needed to tell her his plan, which had appeared to him, laid out like a map, as he had sat with her: they would go to Dublin, and from there to America. He had been to America, to New York. A man could get lost there. They could start a new life. He had sat with Nancy and remembered the coves and inlets and endless beaches of Long Island and the wharves on the dockside at Brooklyn, the ferries hopping to and from Staten Island, the statue that overlooked the city at the point where the East River met the Hudson. If he could just have explained it to her he knew that Nancy would understand, would feel the excitement, the hope that he had felt when he had seen these things. But he had been unable to explain it and she had been filled with dismay, not hope, at leaving London. He was unsure if he had convinced her or not. But she would come, he knew, because it was better to be far from home in a strange place with your man than it was to be safe at home without him.
But so far his journey had got him only as far as Whitechapel, and America was as far off to him now as it must have seemed to Nancy a few hours earlier.
He left the doorway in which he had taken refuge, moving silently, and there was silence now, the AA gun had fallen still, the enemy aircraft gone. It was quiet enough that he heard the bells of an ambulance suddenly loud dead ahead and he realised he had become disorientated and was much closer to the hospital than he had supposed. He followed the sound when he ought to have gone in the other direction, away from it, and he saw the ambulance pulling up at the front of the hospital, a second one close behind. And then two more—four ambulances, one after another, their bells ringing, and into the emerging dawn nurses, porters, a doctor streamed from the hospital and moved from one to the other opening doors, pointing, shouting, directing.
Something had happened, something had taken a direct hit.
And now a fifth ambulance appeared but this one had no bells ringing and it drew up not at the main entrance but at a side door where the mortuary was. No one ran to open its doors.
This was the moment to leave. The darkness was fast disappearing and all around him people in uniforms were shouting and running. It was not a time to be standing around waiting to be observed, waiting to be questioned, although in the chaos no one did observe him, no one did ask questions. All the same, it was time to leave. A young woman stood at the bottom of the steps in a volunteer nurse’s uniform madly checking a clipboard, flipping over one page after another as though she could save a life simply by finding a name on a list. Joe went over to her.
‘Miss, what’s happened?’
She looked up, peering at him through round spectacles with the bewildered expression of someone who had worked through the night. ‘A bomb went off. At the Underground station where people were sheltering. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to move. We’ve got a lot of injured.’
‘Which underground station? Whitechapel?’
But Joe could see Whitechapel Station. It was just the other side of the main road. He could see it had not taken a direct hit. Shoreditch then. Aldgate. Stepney—
‘Bethnal Green,’ said the woman. And she hurried away.
The seams of her stockings were crooked and little spots of mud were caked on the back of her legs as though she had been splashed though it had not rained for days. Joe turned away. In the cab of the first ambulance a woman driver sat with the door open, smoking a cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers and watching her ambulance being unloaded in her rear mirror and he approached her.
‘I say, don’t stand there,’ she called out, waving him away. ‘We’re about to take off. You’ll be mown down.’ She had a clipped voice, like the voice of the woman program announcer on the BBC.
‘How many hurt?’ he asked, ignoring this.
‘About a dozen I should say, but really you must—’
‘Any dead?’
Before she could answer her colleague jumped in beside her and she tossed away her cigarette and started up the engine.
‘Please, miss—any dead?’
‘Two,’ she called out. ‘Mother and child, I think.’ And they moved off and he leaped out of the way.
He was quite calm. There had been a hundred, two hundred mothers and children in that shelter. There was no reason to think it was them. He watched the stretchers being unloaded and followed behind, moving from one to another, peering at each face. When they had all been unloaded and the last ambulance had gone he walked around to the side entrance and it was still there, the fifth ambulance. No one had bothered with it. But at that moment the mortuary door swung open and a porter emerged, followed by a second man, and they walked over and cranked open the rear doors of the ambulance. They disappeared inside, re-emerging a moment later with two lifeless forms on stretchers, one an adult—he could see a single uncovered foot sticking out of the end of the blanket, no shoe, no stocking, clearly a woman’s foot, and the porter twitched the blanket to cover it. The other form was much smaller, a child. Joe watched. He was calm. Somewhere in the distance he heard a low drone, becoming louder. An aircraft.
‘Move aside, please,’ said the porter as they manhandled the first stretcher up a short ramp and through the door. The man paused then, glancing up and scanning the dawn sky, seeking out the source of the sound.
‘Are they from the tube station?’ asked Joe, pointing. ‘A mother and child? Please, mate, let us take a look, I need to know if—’
‘Just let us do our job,’ the man interrupted tersely. He seemed anxious about the droning, which was louder now.
‘Blimey, let the man look if he wants to,’ cut in his colleague, who was fat and wheezing and pink in the face and seemed glad of an excuse to stop. ‘These two ain’t going anywhere, are they? Here.’ And he pulled back the blanket from the remaining body, the child.
Joe stood and looked down. He saw a dark-haired little girl with a red hairband and a very white, still face. It wasn’t Emily. It was some other child. He looked at her and felt his heart would break because a little girl had died. He had thought he would be relieved, that the relief would make him faint, sick, but there was no relief. Though he did feel faint and sick.
‘Let me see the other one,’ he pleaded, turning away from the lifeless form before him. ‘Let me see the mother.’
But the AA gun started up then with a sudden, short burst, and the gun emplacement must be right here on the hospital roof, for the noise made him reel and clap his hands to his ears. It made sense to put the AA gun on the roof of the hospital, which was the highest building for miles around, though it was crazy too, a gun on the roof of a hospital—you would think it made the hospital a target for enemy bombers. As he thought this, the enemy bomber flew right overhead, filling the whole sky, turning dawn back to night-time, and Joe flung himself to the ground, covering his head because the aircraft was surely going to fly right into the hospital, and the AA gun burst into life again. He curled into a ball and his fingers dug into the concrete.