Page 4 of Strangers in Time

In total there was thirty-eight pounds in paper, plus an assortment of coins adding up to around another four quid. He had never held such a fortune. He slowly put it all back in his pocket and turned his contented attention to the book. In the dim light Charlie noticed for the first time that there was nothing printed on the cover or the spine. When he turned to the first page his hopes of more bounty from this stolen article fell. He quickly flipped through all the pages; every single one was blank.

“Bloody useless,” he commented to the darkness. He hid it under the pillows, snuffed out the candle with moistened fingers, and listened to the quiet outside. It was interrupted only by the occasional passing of a sputtering car belching dodgy petrol, or the sharp strike of regulation boots on pavement, heralding a weary constable or an air warden performing their important rounds.

As time passed, there came the frail echoes of a wireless from the flat next door. Charlie and his gran had once had an Ekco brand radio, but it had gone to pay bills. Charlie missed listening to the BBC. The radio broadcasts reported the war-related news, certainly. But there were also programs that made him laugh, andChildren’s Hour, one of his favorites, which came on every day. Sometimes, he would sit out in the hallway at night and listen to the wirelesses of other people, hoping to hear well enough to chuckleat something—anything, really, to take him away for even a few moments from the desperation of his daily life.

At three in the morning he heard the gong of a tower clock. A minute later this was followed by a bullhorn blast from a ship, either navigating up or down the long, winding thread of the mud-coated Thames. The 215-mile-long river essentially defined Charlie’s world, becoming tidal at Teddington, and sliding into Greater London at Thames Ditton. It fanned wider and ever more winding as it headed east. All the fine bridges were to the west because of that. The unmistakable loop around the Isle of Dogs made the East End and the all-important docks easily visible from the sky for German bombers, especially on moonlit nights. And the Luftwaffe had taken advantage of that unique topographical quirk, with devastating results.

A moment later the sharp cry of a train whistle cut right through him. Charlie tried to think of which station it could be but then gave up. And when would he ever be on a train? He had been born in this city and he felt quite certain that he would perish here as well without ever once traveling anywhere else; the only unknown was how many years from now. Or days. And whether his end would be natural or violent. These thoughts were not the result of an overactive imagination. Charlie had seen much that was unthinkable and terrible in every conceivable way.

Yet nothing, for him, could ever take away the horror of that late summer’s day.

THEDAY THEBOMBSCAME

BLACKSATURDAY, CHARLIE HADoften heard it called afterward. Before that, sirens had sounded for many months with few German planes accompanying the warnings. Because of that folks had started calling it the “Bore,” or “Phony War.” But that had not been the case on that first Saturday in September 1940.

It was a lovely warm, sunny day, fairly rare in England.

At 4 p.m. British radar stations picked up a fleet rendezvous between German bombers and fighters above the French coast. About fifteen minutes later the frontal edge of the twenty-mile-wide Luftwaffe armada, which rode over ten thousand feet in the sky, crossed the English coast and was spotted by an Observer Corps post. The RAF was then scrambled.

By then, it was far too late.

It was around five when the city’s bomb warnings went off, building in volume. The sirens sounded to Charlie like high-pitched screams from the sky. Charlie and his gran, and his mother and his grandfather, for they had been alive back then, had hurried to their agreed-upon shelter, a cupboard in the windowless back room of their old flat. Folks with rear yards often fled to their hardy Andy bomb shelters, half dug into the ground with their thin hides ofcorrugated arched aluminum set next to flower beds that had been turned into Digging for Victory gardens. However, many poor folks without yards went to public shelters; others headed to the Underground. Most, like Charlie and his family, ventured straightaway to the cupboard.

Gripped in his mother’s hand was her gas mask, a device they all had been issued. She helped Charlie to put on his, then aided her parents, and, finally, donned her mask.

At first, there had been no sounds other than people rushing here and there outside, and the warbly sirens. Then Charlie looked up at his mother.

“They’re coming,” he heard her say, and in a tone that captured her son’s full attention. She helped Charlie tighten his mask. In her skirt pocket was a tube of No. 2 Anti-gas Ointment. It was supposed to help burns on the face and relieve the eyes of the gas’s sting, and perhaps return one’s mustard gas–stolen sight, though even young Charlie was highly doubtful that any cream could actually accomplish that.

Plymouth and Cardiff had already been struck by the Luftwaffe, but not London. The city had seemed protected by some divine power that kept great metropolises from the inconvenience of wholesale destruction.

That delicate fantasy was about to come to an end.

First came the unnerving drone of plane engines as they neared Dagenham, Rainham, and Barking. Charlie would learn later there were three hundred and fifty Junkers, Heinkels, and Dorniers massed in this particular Luftwaffe fleet, escorted by six hundred fighter planes. Next came the scream of bombs, high-pitched walls of wails that brought a terror to Charlie far greater than any nightmare he’d ever endured. The target was the East End around the U-shaped bend in the Thames. Known as Silvertown, it was a collection of massive warehouses, and workers’ homes, all muddled topsy-turvy together next to the labyrinth of docks that were critical to the war effort.

The Ford Motor Works was hit first, then the enormous Beckton Gasworks. The Woolwich Arsenal, the country’s largest, was also struck. After that the three Royal Docks, loaded with foodstuffs, were leveled; the stench of incinerated fruits and cheeses would linger for months. Barge tethers burned away, sending the freed boats gliding down the Thames, only to return later with the tide. Barrage balloons designed to entangle German planes instead simply burst from the ensuing heat of detonations and soaring fires. As the bombs went off, the very foundations of the city seemed to vibrate as explosion after explosion produced a tsunami of terrifying sound.

Disrupted dust settled over Charlie and his family. Windows cracked, roof trusses groaned, floorboards quivered. And each subsequent blast of concussive force seemed more powerful than its predecessors. They never heard the big ack-ack guns fire back, and had no idea it was because British gunners on the ground feared they would strike their own planes in the air.

The Germans returned that night and dropped still more bombs, using the fires caused by the first attack as handy illumination for the second. Wholesale evacuations by thousands of people from the stricken East End had some dub it “Dunkirk in London.”

After the all clear siren sounded around 4:30 on Sunday morning—one elongated note to distinguish it from its counterpart of short separate blasts—nearly four hundred and fifty Londoners had perished. Sixteen hundred more were seriously injured, and many would eventually die. And countless structures had been leveled, leaving the poor in the East End, who had little to begin with, with even less now.

Infernos raged along the obliterated docks as the Auxiliary Fire Services courageously battled them. The Thames became a pumping station of last resort when the hydrants ran dry. A conflagration fire meant that a hundred-plus pumps were needed to extinguish it. There wereninesuch fires that night.

The Isle of Dogs was mostly gone. Both sides of the river in the East End had been reduced to rubble. Bow Road Station no longerexisted. Stepney Green looked like a blackened carpet, denuded of trees. People as far off as Reading thought they saw the sun set in theeastthat day, because the Blitz fires burned the sky just as brightly as did the descending sun.

By the end of the month more than six thousand Londoners were in premature graves. They had had ashes to ashes and dust to dust sprinkled over them by legions of religious men, who all looked stunned that their god would allow such devastation despite sincere prayers, thundering sermons, and the frenetic fingering of rosaries.

In his box in the cupboard, Charlie opened his eyes, and the sounds of death coming for them all vanished.

GRAN

RIGHT ON SCHEDULE, CHARLIElistened to the dull dings of the battered windup alarm clock followed by the sounds of his grandmother lurching up from her hard mattress. The dings ceased, and her bare feet scuttled across the cold planks until he heard the bathroom door close. A minute after that the toilet gave a pathetic flush. Next the sink water began its feeble run.

She would dress as quickly as she could, having few items from which to choose: basically the one skirt and blouse or the spare, and the old, scruffy shoes, with the low chunk of worn heels, and stockings now so threadbare they were near transparent against her swollen, veiny calves. After that he would hear her trudge a few truncated steps to the small kitchen. The only other space was the front room, which held a chair for her, a wooden stool for Charlie, and a small square of faded Wilton rug. A chipped porcelain shepherd’s lamp with precarious wiring perched on a wobbly table. On the fireplace mantel was a pair of tarnished brass candlesticks, often minus any candles; and then there was the fireplace itself, a blackened brick opening about two feet square, that rarely had anything to do.

On twin pegs hung their respective gas masks. They were two of nearly forty million handed out by a government terrified thatthe Germans would continue their World War I tradition of deploying mustard and other poison gas, only this time dropped from the sky. Gran used to always carry her mask, but as memories of the Blitz receded, she, like many others, left it behind more often than not. Shedidcarry her ID card, as did Charlie. They had been issued by the National Registry to every person living in all of the United Kingdom, and the Isle of Man. If people were to be blown into unidentifiable pieces, perhaps this bit of paper would survive to tell folks who had perished. Only Charlie couldn’t see how.

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