The Restless Sea

There is a flash of light to their right. Jack is sure they haven’t been hit, but a split second later they are lifted clean off their feet. They slam back into the wall of a house, whose windows are blown in at the same time. The air is knocked right out of Jack’s chest and it takes a good few seconds for him to realise what has happened. All he can hear is a high-pitched ringing. Betsy is lying next to him. She has hit her head, and for a moment he isn’t sure whether she’s alive or dead. There is a trickle of red on her forehead, but then her eyes flicker open, and relief rushes through him and he leans over to grab her bony body in a hug, her wiry little arms gripping him back.

Around him, the world seems different, as if he is looking through a prism: the objects are crystal clear yet haloed with coloured light. He blinks and shakes his head, trying to clear the outlines that are seeping into a haze. The piercing echo of the blast is beginning to subside in his ears, but the sounds are still distorted. There are groans coming through the blown-out window next to him. He struggles to his feet and squints into the yawning hole. There is glass and splintered furniture and smashed crockery everywhere, dust settling over it like snow. He cannot locate the source of the moaning.

Jack tells Betsy to wait where she is. He takes off his coat and lays it over the windowsill where jagged glass still sticks up from the wooden frame. He climbs carefully into the house. The pictures have been blown clean off the walls, and a large dining table has been thrown on its side, and now he sees there is a man sitting on the floor next to it. Jack stops, unsure whether to climb straight back out. The man is ghostly pale, covered in dust. He appears unharmed, but confused: ‘Have you seen her?’ he keeps saying. ‘Have you seen her?’

There is no sign of anyone else.

Jack stands there for a moment. Behind him the torn curtains flutter and flap in the breeze. It is the perfect opportunity to grab something, before the man comes to his senses. Jack’s eyes flicker across the room. He is quick to recognise the objects of value. He snatches up a bent photograph frame and a twisted silver candlestick.

On the floor, the man is still moaning as he starts to dig into the pile of plaster and brick with his bare hands. Jack knows he could recover at any moment. He starts to back away, towards the window, clutching his loot in one hand. At the sound of glass crunching beneath Jack’s feet, the man suddenly stops digging and stares up at Jack with eyes large as saucers. Jack is ready to run, every muscle tense. But the man doesn’t seem to be able to see anything through the tears that are making dark tracks down his pale cheeks. ‘I know she’s here,’ he says. ‘Have you seen her?’ And he turns back to his scrabbling in the debris.

Jack is almost out of there. He allows himself one last glance around the place, in case he’s missed anything. It is then that he spots the headscarf. It is hidden from the man on the floor by the great broken back of the dining table. The horror hits him like a blow to the chest. The scarf has the same pattern as his mother’s favourite one. He cannot help taking a step forward. His eye picks out the arm, the legs, the body of a woman who, apart from a light dusting of ash, seems untouched, as if sleeping peacefully among the ruins. His gaze is drawn back to the familiar headscarf, the sprinkling of pale flowers on a blue background. It is exactly the same as his mother’s, except the pale flowers of this one are being swallowed up by the dark stain that is spreading, and he knows that the head beneath it is crushed and that this woman will never get up.

The man has noticed the look on Jack’s face. He has stopped digging and is staring at Jack again. ‘She’s here,’ he says. ‘I know she is …’

Jack tries to swallow, to clear his throat, but the words choke with the dust in his mouth. The man turns back, attacking the rubble even more frantically, and Jack wants to reach out to stop him, and he crouches down and puts a hand on the man’s shoulder, but the man carries on scratching, and Jack can see that the rubble is turning black and the man’s fingers are turning black, and Jack realises it is blood: the man’s hands are bleeding as he scrapes and scratches at the rubble. And Jack wants to say sorry, sorry for the body in the rubble, sorry for taking the picture frame and the candlestick, but he just doesn’t know how.

Suddenly, bizarrely, there is a knock at the front door, and a voice calls out, ‘Mr Knightley? Mrs Knightley?’ Jack stands as an ARP warden comes into the room. She too is smeared with dirt and dust. ‘Mr Knightley?’ She peers into the gloom, shines her torch across the ruins of the house until the beam lands on Jack, dusty and wild, a scavenger on the prowl.

‘Who are you?’ she asks. Then, spotting the silver still clutched in his hand: ‘Put those down! How dare you …?’

‘I was going to …’ but Jack’s voice tails off. There’s no point in explaining. He is what he is. He does not have the kind of bravery or even the kind of words it takes to turn a life around.

‘Get out!’ she is saying. ‘Go on! Out, you animal!’ He dodges her blows, and scrambles to the window, dropping the frame and the candlestick as he climbs back out the way he came in, his cheeks burning with humiliation. He shakes his coat out and grabs hold of Betsy’s small hand, and they’re off again. He suddenly has an urgent desire to reach home.

Jack tries not to look at the things that loom out of the night. Is that an arm or a foot? An ARP warden picks it up. His eyes have a faraway look, as if he’s trying not to see it either. Jack blinks, and through the swirling clouds he sees Tommy – or it might be Vince – rifling through the outer garments of a legless piece of flesh. How has he never noticed this horror before? He closes his eyes, and the broken body of the woman, her head crushed in his mother’s scarf, swims there. When he looks again, there is a lady without any skirt or shoes or stockings on. She is stumbling along the road, naked from the waist down, her charred skin lit by the flames of a thousand fires. And there, behind her, is Stoog, and he is rattling the bent and broken doors, searching high and low for whatever he can lay his hands on. Jack trips on, over a baby squashed and pulped in the gutter; beneath a bare tree, its branches adorned with limbs instead of leaves. And all the time the jangling bells of the fire engines and the crunching of the rubble underfoot and the cries for help and the dust filling their lungs so that he is choking on death.

Jack squeezes Betsy’s hand tighter, pulling her on. They are nearly at Southwark Park Road when they catch sight of Stoog and the others again. Stoog is grinning. He has got what looks like a haunch of meat and some new boots. The other boys’ bags are full, and they are carrying things too: Jack glimpses a stiff chicken, its feathers dull, its neck thin and long, a pair of gentleman’s silk dressing gowns.

The all-clear siren is sounding, calling out across the city that the danger has passed. All over London people will be coming out of their shelters, wondering what they will find.

‘What you got?’ says Stoog.

Jack shakes his head.

‘Nothing? But …’

Jack holds up his hand. ‘Don’t,’ he says. A terrible, morbid feeling has settled in his bones.

Stoog grins disdainfully and moves off. The other boys follow. Their faces are speckled with grime; they are camouflaged soldiers fighting their own battles. They melt away into the war-torn city before anyone can ask questions. Jack watches them go and is filled with disgust at what they have all become.

He and Betsy make their way home. Ash floats through the air, settling in their hair. Small flames still burn around them: wisps of light in the dark. The fires cast a creepy guttering light across Jack’s broken neighbourhood. The high street is unrecognisable. Walls are missing. You can see right in to people’s bedrooms. Clothes flap across the ground. Twisted metal lies everywhere. The moon is reflected in a mirror on someone’s wall. A bed half hangs from a first storey.

The pub on the corner that marks where they turn for their road is a furnace, flames burning in every window. Clouds of black smoke billow from the roof into the sky. There are fire wardens everywhere, clutching their stirrup pumps, aiming their hoses at innumerable streaks of flame. Boys and girls younger than Jack, many of whom he knows, fill buckets of water for them. Others race around with wheelbarrows full of sand, which they tip on the flames. Girl Guides in their blue uniforms soothe the injured and carry water and blankets to the shell-shocked.

They almost stumble into a deep crater halfway down their neighbouring street. Jack starts to jog. Broken glass crunches and crackles beneath his feet. Betsy runs to keep up. But it is all right. The houses at their end are untouched. Their home is still there. The front door is still on its hinges.

His mother is behind it, chewing her lip. ‘Where have you been?’ she shouts as soon as they fall into the hall.

Jack hesitates for a moment. The relief that surges through him is quickly replaced by defensiveness. ‘Down the Underground,’ he says. No need to look at Betsy. She will always back him up. But their mother doesn’t question them; that they are here and alive is enough. She kneels down and opens her arms and clings to them in the dark.

Outside, sirens still scream and bells still ring. The clean-up will continue all night. Inside, the three of them slump on the floor. Betsy is a ghost, her face and clothes so pale with ash, the dribble of dried blood a dark scar across her forehead.

Their mother leans her head back against the wall, a knot of exhaustion. ‘Enough is enough,’ she says. She picks something out of Betsy’s hair. She does not catch Jack’s eye. ‘It’s just us left,’ she says.

‘Don’t say it.’ Jack clenches his fists.

‘They’re gone. Both of them. They’re not coming back.’ There has been no news of his dad or Walt. They did not return with the men from Dunkirk.

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ says Jack.

‘I do.’

They stare at each other.

‘There’s a special train leaving in the morning. Another round of evacuations. I’ve booked her on it.’ She doesn’t need to carry on. Jack’s shoulders sag. He cannot fight any more. His mother is right. He cannot keep his sister safe. No one left in this smouldering city is safe.

Betsy’s eyes widen as the news sinks in. She shakes her head and inches back towards the door. ‘You promised,’ she says. Jack cannot stand the accusation in her voice, her eyes. He stops her, clasping her tightly, smoothing her smoky hair, filled with the dust of the dead. He feels her knobbly shoulders shiver beneath his sore hands, and he feels the piece of glass from Cherry Garden Pier burning like a hot coal in his pocket.

They wake early to the scratch of metal on rubble as London clears away debris on top of debris. Jack’s mother dresses Betsy in her only coat. Her shoes are so threadbare now that Jack shoves some cardboard into them to cover up the holes. He can barely look at his mother. He can barely look at himself.

His mother has written ‘Betsy Sullivan, Drummond Road, London SE17’ on a large white label. She ties it to Betsy’s coat, as if she’s a piece of lost luggage. ‘I’ve done you lunch, my love,’ she says. Her voice is almost a whisper. A tremor runs through it, but she has no more tears to cry. ‘Jam sandwiches. And I made your favourite biscuits.’ She has used their week’s ration of butter and sugar for these instead of the stale bread she usually tries to get away with.

Betsy holds the bag with her food in it. Jack holds her little suitcase. His sister has been polished and scrubbed. She looks as tidy as if she is off to church. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he clears his throat. He must be strong for her. He takes her hand. Their mother hovers in the background. ‘Right, you,’ he says, struggling to force the words out as they scratch and catch in his throat. ‘Let’s go.’

They pass walls teetering on the edge of collapse, hosepipes and buckets of sand, burning gas pipes, curtains flapping in the wind in buildings that look like dolls’ houses with their fronts left open. They pass the posters telling mothers to send their children away, people who look like they haven’t slept for weeks. They look out for live wires, particularly where the streets are waterlogged. Everywhere there is the smell of sewage, and wet, charred wood.

At Paddington Station, Betsy is pushed and pulled into one of the many groups of children. They all have the same wide, staring eyes. Some of them are crying. Betsy bites her lip and swallows, but she won’t cry. Jack feels his heart break. It actually breaks in two right there. He stands next to his mother. He feels her coldness. She is their mother, but she’s a shell. She steps forward towards her daughter. ‘Betsy love, I’m sure you’ll be back by …’ She cannot finish her sentence. The word ‘Christmas’ is too gay and bright and precious to exist at this moment. She tries to bend down and kiss Betsy’s pale cheek, but she is split from her by the ample figure of a buxom woman in a tweed suit.

‘Where are they going?’ Jack asks the woman, who is checking off a list.

‘We’ll tell you when they get there,’ she says, without looking up.

Jack smacks her clipboard, making a sharp sound. Now he’s got her attention. ‘Tell me now,’ he says.

‘You’ll find out in due course,’ she says, glancing at him as her lip curls. She is not intimidated. ‘Now hurry along. You’re only making it more difficult for your sister.’ She is right. He can see that Betsy’s bottom lip is quivering. He lets her usher Betsy towards a group of children who are then herded down the platform by more women in tweed suits. Betsy doesn’t even turn to wave goodbye, she just lets herself be carried away on the tide of other bewildered children. The battered gas mask box bumps against the back of her legs.

His vision blurs as she is ushered up into the train. The platform is an empty space, devoid of life as he is devoid of feeling. His fingers close over Betsy’s piece of glass, and he feels the familiar rage trickle into his bloodstream. The woman with the clipboard is still here, ticking things off her list. He grabs hold of the top of her arm. ‘You can’t just send them off and not know where they’re going,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘You wouldn’t do it to your own kids …’ He wants to crush her. He feels so impotent. The woman struggles to shake herself free, but Jack won’t let go, and she makes a strangled yelp for help, and suddenly there are people descending on him from all sides, and his mother cries out and there is a policeman, his helmet bobbing above everyone’s heads, his buttons a neat, shiny row down his front, and Jack’s mother has a hold on the policeman and they are talking and pointing, and Jack’s rage turns to fear. Would his mother turn him in? She has sent her only daughter away. Perhaps she will do the same to him. And he cannot take it any longer – the relentless inevitability of it all.

Jack does not stop running until he reaches Carl’s door. He hammers and hammers, and eventually it opens, a narrow crack through which Mr Mills is peering. The man is not happy to see him, but Carl is there in the corridor, and he whispers quietly to his father, who eventually moves aside.

Jack does not care that his eyes are red and his grubby face is streaked with tears. He reaches out to Carl. ‘Can I come?’ he asks. ‘Can I still come with you?’

And Carl pulls him inside, where it is bright and warm and he feels the weight of his friend’s arm across his shoulder.

CHAPTER 3 (#u63a52a62-342e-5051-9a05-0d67ffaaa350)

Charlie (#u63a52a62-342e-5051-9a05-0d67ffaaa350)