The Restless Sea

The older boys set up a football pitch, using their gas masks to mark the goal posts. ‘Only thing they’re bloody good for,’ says Jack.

‘And this,’ says Stoog. He takes his mask out and holds it over his face, making a loud farting noise. The boys laugh. Stoog is in charge again, and everyone is in their rightful place.

It has turned into a breezy day, and the ground has dried a little but it is still slippery. Jack soon warms up. It is good to be doing something physical, to be chasing his friends and to feel his heart pumping and to be thinking of nothing else but the ball. Soon they are caked in mud. Stoog forgets his attitude, and Carl belongs for a moment. They point and laugh at each other, and their cheeks glow as steam rises from their skin and dissipates into the cool afternoon air.

But their fun is short-lived. A man in a tin hat is making his way across the grass towards them. ‘Come on, lads,’ he shouts. ‘Time to get home now.’

It’s the ARP warden. The boys roll their eyes at each other.

‘Just a bit longer …’ says Tommy.

‘No,’ says the warden. ‘The dark’s coming in fast tonight and we’re expecting trouble.’

The other boys moan too, and then Stoog picks up the ball and flings it at Jack, who flings it at Tommy, who pretends to fling it at the man. The man reacts instinctively to catch it, but there’s nothing to catch. The boys laugh, and Tommy drops the ball on to the ground as if to start the game again.

‘Come along, now.’ The man’s cheeks have turned scarlet. ‘It’s time to be going home.’

‘All right, all right. Keep your hair on, old man,’ says Stoog.

‘Watch your mouth, sonny.’

‘Who’re you telling to watch their mouth?’

‘Who do you think?’ says the man, squaring up to the boy. The rest of the boys form a ring around them. Betsy and Eddy stop looking at conkers. The tension vibrates in the cool air.

Carl steps in. ‘Let’s leave it there. He’s only trying to help.’

‘Never thought a Jew boy would be on the same side as a fascist,’ says Stoog, spitting the words as he cranes his neck around Carl, trying to push him out of the way. The ground is soggy beneath their feet. The sky is darkening.

‘Don’t you call me a fascist,’ says the warden.

‘Why? What you going to do about it?’

‘Yeah. What you going to do?’ Vince says, the excitement high in his voice.

Stoog and the man circle each other like tomcats.

‘Jack?’ says Carl. ‘Don’t let this happen …’

Jack is torn between backing both boys. ‘Maybe we should go,’ he says. ‘It’s almost too dark to play anyway …’

Stoog snaps around, shoving his face close to Jack’s and saying, ‘That’d be just like you. Running away …’

And the warden says, ‘Now, now. I don’t want any trouble …’ But Stoog is already turning on him and he pulls his arm back and thumps the man in the side of the head with his bony fist, knocking his helmet on to the ground. There is a cracking sound and blood but Jack isn’t sure whether it’s from the warden’s ear or Stoog’s knuckle.

And Carl is yelling, ‘Stop it,’ but Stoog is already swinging again, and this time he is aiming at Jack and hissing under his breath, ‘This one’s for the docks,’ and he lands a punch right in Jack’s eye, and there’s a stinging pain and a mist descends and all Jack can think of is whacking him back.

Carl is still shouting at them to stop, but Jack doesn’t care. Stoog may be skinny, but he’s fast and he’s accurate. Tommy steps in to help Jack, and then Vince thwacks him in the mouth, and all of a sudden the game has turned into a brawl of fists and teeth and pulled hair and ripped clothes and no one is really sure who is hitting who but all Jack knows is he’s furious – furious at Stoog for hitting him, furious with curfew and blackout, furious with feeling hungry all the time, furious with his dad and his brother for going away, with Carl for getting out and doing something with his life, furious with the whole bloody lot of it. And he’s thumping and smashing and he can taste the blood in his mouth and hear the crunch of bone and the thud of flesh and it feels good to be in the moment, not to worry about where it’s all heading.

It is Carl who manages to stop him. He grabs Jack with the grip of a deal porter’s son, pulling him out of the fray.

‘Let me go,’ says Jack, twisting away from Carl, trying to scratch at his face, kick his shins, anything to release the hold. But it takes more than that to bring Carl down. ‘Let me go,’ says Jack again.

But Carl is furious. There is a vein throbbing in his neck and he is panting. ‘What’s bloody wrong with you all?’ he says as the other boys draw back sheepishly, spitting the blood from their mouths. No one has seen Carl lose his temper before. ‘Take a look at yourselves!’ He points at the warden. ‘He could be your father. Your granddad.’ And now he turns on Jack. ‘And you,’ he says, ‘you’re the worst of all. You had a chance to do something different, but you’re going to end up just like them. Well, I wash my hands of it. You go ahead and kill yourself. I’m out of here.’

He has finally released Jack. They stand chest to chest, eye to eye. Jack clenches his fists, the rage still pumping around his system. He hears a whimper, and a small, cold hand closes around his wrist. He glances down. Betsy. He looks at the warden, a grey-haired old man who is picking his helmet up with trembling hands. He takes a step backwards. The boys and the warden wait for the explosion. He takes another step backwards, and grabs hold of Betsy’s hand. ‘Fuck you, Carl,’ he says. ‘And fuck you, Stoog. Fuck the lot of you.’ And he turns and staggers away, dragging his sister with him across the muddy grass.

The other boys begin to disperse, and the warden doesn’t leave until the last boy fades into the twilight.

A month later, and the raids have grown steadily worse. London has now had nineteen consecutive days and nights of relentless bombardment, of noise and smoke, flame and dust. The docks have been obliterated, the mighty cranes are twisted and contorted into strange shapes, the warehouses flattened, the barges charred embers. Barrels of alcohol explode like gunpowder; paint melts and pours into the Thames, turning it into a river of fire. The deal porters’ timber went up on the first night of the raids. The firemen couldn’t get close enough to quench the inferno. It still burns, lighting the way for the next bombs.

The money from the bracelet is long gone. The only good that came of it was the sewing machine that Jack’s mother uses to make new clothes out of the old. But clothes don’t put food in their stomachs, so Jack has found new ways of getting by that inevitably involve Stoog.

He pulls a package wrapped in paper from his bag and offers it to his mother. Six fat sausages peep out. ‘Mostly gristle,’ he says. His mother takes the parcel. She’s given up asking where he gets these things. She places it on the side in the kitchen. She cannot bring herself to look at him.

Later, Jack lies on his back and stares up into the darkness, listening to his mother’s dry cough, the wail of next-door’s baby, the hollow thud of an air raid in the distance. They have moved their mattresses into the small front room. They sleep in their clothes. The shelter Jack so proudly built with his brother and father is useless. It is cramped and smelly, and most of the time inches deep in fetid water.

In the distance the sky is bright with flames. There is the whine of sirens. Probably another attack on the docks. He is so used to it, he feels himself begin to drift off. A floorboard creaks and a ghostly shadow moves from his mother’s mattress towards him. A small voice says, ‘Jack? You awake, Jack?’ Betsy climbs in next to him. She is so slight that she easily fits on to the single mattress.

‘Come here,’ he says, hugging her trembling body tightly. As he smooths her dark curls, Betsy’s breaths begin to lengthen. She scratches at her head. Lice. They’ve all got them.

Jack cannot remember what it was like not to feel hungry. Food is rationed, there are queues at the shops, and their mother doesn’t have time to wait in them because of her job. Jack has plenty more profitable things to do than wait for a slab of butter, and Betsy refuses to be separated from him. There are rats everywhere. Tommy says they’re as big as terriers down his street. Stoog has been catching them and selling them for meat.

There is a whistle outside the window. Speak of the devil. Jack and Betsy are immediately wide awake and scrambling out into the cool air of the streets. Stoog leers at them in the moonlight. ‘Got a good feeling about tonight,’ he says.

Tommy and Vince are here too, and other faces that Jack and Betsy recognise. They make their way through the park where they used to play cricket and football, now home to the anti-aircraft brigade. They hug the shadow of the tree line. Jack can just make out the pale wall of sandbags and the dark shape of the three-inch gun behind it, the movement of the men of the Royal Artillery, too tense and expectant to notice the youngsters who should be safely tucked up in a shelter.

They move in silence. There is no point in trying to talk above the squealing sirens that send everyone else scurrying under tables and staircases, deep down into the underbelly of the Tube stations. But not them. They know there will be rich pickings about.

They pause at Tower Bridge, lining up one by one to gaze at the river. The moon glitters in oily patches on the surface of the water. There are shapes down there: boats battered and sunk by the previous nights’ raids. Fuel and timber still burn, pale lights flickering among the ripples. Above them, searchlights criss-cross the sky, illuminating the trailing tendrils of the monstrous barrage balloons that float fatly there. Further away, black smoke curls up from the docks, blotting out the moon like a cloud.

They hear the German planes before they see them. They can identify each type as well as any anti-aircraft regiment. No British up there yet. They can just make out the bombers, flying wing tip to wing tip above the river, following the trails of moonlight flashing on the surface, searching for the small fires lit by the incendiary devices that exploded earlier, mythical birds seeking their prey. Betsy’s eyes grow wider. Time stands still. The sound of the engines roars in their ears, rumbles in their chests. Thud thud thud. Like a heartbeat.

The planes are almost on top of them. The rat-a-tat-tat of the anti-aircraft guns starts up. Suddenly the planes swing to the left, to their side of the river, the south side, over the docks again. They catch a glimpse of light in a cockpit. And then … Boom!

The noise slams through them. They are running again, this time in the wake of the planes. The searchlights try to pick out the bombers in their pale beams, but they fail. The drone of more bombers joins the battery from the ground. Shrapnel tinkles like metal rain on the roofs. The fire engines come clanging along the road.

And now the Allied planes come swooping in to try to fight them off. But the boys aren’t interested in dogfights these days. They are running over rubble, and the air is full of dust and bangs and wails – human and inhuman. Fires rage across the city. Boy Scouts run from warden to warden, shouting above the din. But relaying messages won’t fill empty bellies.

Jack and Betsy stay together, but the others fan out, looking for the butchers and the grocers, anywhere for a bargain. ‘You all right, Bets?’ says Jack. She nods. Her teeth shine white among the smudges of dirt on her face.

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.