Plaistow, where I live, is just about bang in the middle of the borough of West Ham. To the north there’s Forest Gate and Stratford, but to the south we have the docks and the settlements around them – Custom House, Silvertown and Canning Town. Ever since the bombing began back in September, the Luftwaffe have been after the docks. Most nights have brought bombs and fire and death to the docklands. For us in Plaistow – my mother, my sisters and myself – it’s bad enough, but where my lady friend Hannah lives, in Canning Town, it beggars belief. When I go and see her, which isn’t as often as I’d like these days, I have to climb over piles of rubble so big they make me sweat. Piles which were once people’s houses, flats and shops, now collapsed and blasted under Hitler’s determination to destroy us. For me, who has to look smart and who has to dress in black, dealing with all the dust and rubble just in terms of clothing is difficult. People expect a certain standard from men in the undertaking profession. A level of cleanliness is required and is in fact a sign of respect. But it isn’t easy and, I have to admit, one of the reasons I don’t see so much of Hannah now is because I want to keep the one decent suit I do have, reasonably clean. There is also what she does for a living to deal with, too, and that doesn’t get any easier. I’ve offered to marry her, in spite of the differences in our religions – Hannah is Jewish – but she wants to keep herself, so she says. Something in her wants to keep on selling itself on the streets to drunken sailors and men who beat their wives. But whatever she was doing and whoever she was doing it with, I thought of Hannah on this night of fire. I wondered how she was. Was she all right? How were my mother, my sisters, my poor old horses stabled at the back of the yard? Sometimes the raids can nearly drive the horses mad. They neigh and rear and get very distressed indeed. What was happening in West Ham now?

  I’d told George that the little girl was called Milly and so now, as I heard him move away from the high altar and make his way into the left-hand aisle, called the quire aisle, as I was told later, I heard him call her name. I was calling her name myself, but I wondered what, if any, good it would do. There are kids like Milly all over the place. Kids who swear and cheek their elders and who, for lots of different reasons, muck around and range about with no control from any grown-ups. Sometimes the parents of such children are drinkers, or the mothers are poor and alone and have to sell their bodies to support their kids. In Milly’s case, or so it seemed, she was giving herself to men either for money or for some other reason. All that, sadly, I could understand. Things just like it, and worse, happen all the time. What was strange was what this little kid was doing around St Paul’s Cathedral when the bombing began. Not many people live in the City, as in the actual Square Mile, and those who do, are not generally of Milly’s kind. Children of honest and respectable tradespeople live in the City, as do the offspring of clergymen, caretakers of firms of brokers, and bookkeepers’ kids. Milly, if I was right about her, was little more than a beggar. This Mr Phillips people kept talking about, the architect who was supposed to have brought Milly in, must have found her outside the cathedral somewhere and taken pity on her. But until I got to speak to Mr Phillips, I couldn’t know what Milly had been about. He seemed to be very elusive. And so it was lucky, I felt, when shortly afterwards I came across his partner, Mr Steadman, sitting on one of the quire pews. He’d just come down from Watch duty up on the roof and was taking a break to rest what he called his ‘gammy’ leg.

  ‘Got shot in the damn thing,’ he told me as he lifted his bad leg to cross it over the good one. ‘Gallipoli.’

  ‘I w-was in Flanders,’ I said. ‘Gallipoli was—’

  ‘Madness,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Running up beaches into the Turkish guns! I was only a lad at the time.’ He looked at me. ‘Much as I suppose you must have been.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Leg’s never been quite right since. Gets tired,’ Mr Steadman said. I could’ve said the same for my mind, but I didn’t. People don’t want to know about things like that, with good reason. Given the problem with his leg it was marvellous to me that Mr Steadman made the terrible trip up to the Whispering Gallery and maybe even beyond so willingly. My legs were as stiff as boards from my one trip ‘up top’.

  I asked him about Mr Phillips who, I discovered, was about the same age as Mr Steadman and myself. ‘I think Harold, Mr Phillips, was in Flanders,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Lost his face.’

  For a moment I thought I’d misheard him, then Mr Steadman, seeing my confusion said, ‘You were in the trenches, Mr Hancock, you must have seen what happened to chaps who put their heads above the parapet?’

  I had, and usually they died. If they didn’t, the mess a bullet or a piece of shrapnel made of their faces generally meant that they wished that they had bought it. I’ve a mate like that myself. He only goes out at night or when the smog’s really thick over the city.

  ‘Harold Phillips lost his nose and most of his mouth,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Not that you’d necessarily know. Mr Phillips wouldn’t mind my telling you that he wears a mask. A very good one, made by an artist. Very good it is. All you can see is a slight lopsidedness to his face, but apart from that there’s nothing.’

  I’d heard of such things, although I’d never actually seen one. I imagined, maybe stupidly, that those masks were only available for the rich. The fact that Mr Phillips, an architect, had one of them, and my mate, who is unemployed, didn’t, seemed to bear this out. This had to be what people meant when they said that Mr Phillips was ‘distinctive’ in looks.

  ‘D-did you see M-Mr Phillips up in the Whispering Gallery?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ Mr Steadman shook his head. ‘But then it’s chaos up there. No one can do more than twenty minutes on dome watch. Swinging about up there, running across rooftops and such like, it’s so dangerous it makes your head spin.’

  Nobody had told me that before. No one had mentioned how disorientated a person could become that high up in the dark. I knew that it happened to me, but I wasn’t normal. Apparently others, who were sane, could feel that way too.

  ‘But I understand people have seen Harold and so I’ve no doubt he’s somewhere about,’ Mr Steadman continued. ‘He’s the most enthusiastic watchman I think there is. He’s always here.’

  And yet, so far as I was concerned, he was always somewhere else. If only briefly, I’d seen little Milly, but Phillips was still a mystery. And that bothered me. I didn’t know why at the time. Maybe like my search for Milly, my search for Phillips was just an example of my mind wanting to have something to distract itself with.

  Chapter Five

  I don’t know now whether I took my next trip up into the dome because I wanted to find Mr Phillips, or whether Mr Steadman’s words about blokes only being able to stand twenty minutes up there made me feel guilty. Not that I was about to ‘do my bit’; I knew that wasn’t my place. But I went. And given the state of my legs, it wasn’t lightly done. It hurt, and the claustrophobic feeling I got when I did it was as bad as the first time I climbed up there. But if Mr Steadman could do it with his bad leg, then I had no excuse. In fact, I could go on further than I ever had before. First to the Whispering Gallery and then up a further 119 steps, which brought me outside, to the Stone Gallery. I took it slowly, very slowly. But I did it and I was, I admit, a little proud of myself for it. I was just about ready to die, but I arrived in one piece, which was good enough for me.

  From the Stone Gallery you can see the whole city and if the smog’s not settled over London, even the fields of Middlesex and Essex beyond. As I came out into the burning air, I didn’t even know whether there were any other blokes out there with me the air was so thick. Everything was being incinerated – wood, cloth, and, I’ve no doubt, people. The smell, though slightly sweet, it has to be said, was enough to make you heave. The drone of the bombers up above rattled and reverberated in my chest like a dickey ticker. Down below, everything was on fire. Everything: churches, warehouses, shops, graveyards. I couldn’t see one patch of ground that wasn’t burning and the smoke notwithstanding, my eyes wept tears. Bloody hell, this was my home they were destroying here! My mind had gone a long time ago and now my city was going with it!

  I just stood and looked and looked and said, ‘Christ!’

  Back in the trenches, blokes used to call where we were ‘hell’ – as in endless torment – just like the place the priest had said we’d all go to if we were bad, when I was a kid. But what I was looking at from the Stone Gallery as my city burned below my feet, that was real bible-bashing hell. The Devil himself could be ranging around in such huge red and golden flames. In fact, atheist as I am, I felt that if I just reached a hand out into the conflagration, maybe I could touch his evil, pointed chin. Maybe it was just lack of oxygen to my brain, who knows, but that image was very real to me at that moment.

  ‘Excuse me, but who are you?’ A posh voice I had heard before said. ‘Are you with the LFB film unit?’

  The group of firemen I’d seen earlier were filming all of this for posterity. I turned away from them and looked at my interrogator.

  ‘N-No. I’m um, er, F-Francis H-Hancock.’

  With the flames hurtling up into the sky from the burning buildings below it was all too easy to see the bombers overhead – great black masses of them. My stomach lurched and I was grateful, not for the first time, that I hadn’t eaten and that the ruddy thing was empty.

  ‘I’m the Dean,’ the posh man, the Very Reverend W. R. Matthews, said.

  ‘Yes, I er…’

  ‘That chap’s all right. I saw him advising Mr Andrews about Mr Ronson, Dean,’ a man I recognised as being one of those who had come in with Mr Steadman said. ‘He’s looking for that young girl Mr Phillips is supposed to have brought in with him.’

  ‘Oh?’ Revd Matthews put his head on one side, making the left-hand part of his face disappear into an eerie darkness.

  A blithering idiot as usual, I just stared. Luckily the other chap was much more chatty. ‘I heard you found the kid and then you lost her again,’ he said.

  ‘Y-yes,’ I said. ‘S-she’s called M-M-Milly.’

  ‘Milly,’ Revd Matthews frowned. ‘We will all keep an eye out for Milly then, Mr Hancock. People other than cathedral staff watchmen, and the fire service shouldn’t be anywhere outside the crypt. It’s far too dangerous. However…’ He moved his head and his face came into the full glare of the fires once again. ‘With Mr Ronson and his er, his accident, plus this child… Mr Hancock, we have much to contend with here, as you can see, but I am also aware that things are happening in my cathedral that are additional to the bombing.’ He smiled just slightly. ‘Opponents inside and out, as it were.’

  What he seemed to be saying was very close to something that Mr Ronson had said to me earlier, about fighting enemies both outside and inside the cathedral. We shared a look of what I supposed was understanding. I knew something was up and so, I thought, did he, and then he said, as if to confirm this, ‘I haven’t seen Mr Phillips myself, although I am told that he signed in downstairs.’

  I wanted to tell him what I’d heard Mr Andrews say to his wife about Mr Ronson’s death, but I had the feeling the Dean knew about this already.

  ‘The Devil has many faces and they do not all wear Nazi uniforms,’ he said. In spite of the heat from the fires I felt cold. If anything, this confirmed what Mr Ronson had said. Dean Matthews leaned in towards me and said, ‘When you find young Milly, bring her to me, won’t you? She needs looking after.’

  Terrified, although exactly what of I didn’t know, I nodded my head. While London was being destroyed, with St Paul’s clearly the Nazi’s main target on this occasion, something extra, something disturbing, was happening inside the cathedral. Somehow Mr Ronson’s death and the sinister appearance of what was not a nice little girl were connected – or so I felt at the time. I was also not at all comfortable about the elusive Mr Phillips either. Was he, in fact, still about or even still alive? He’d come in with Milly, and then he’d vanished. Everyone had been so caught up with where the child had gone, that Mr Phillips had been almost overlooked. Was he, maybe, laying dead or injured somewhere in the vastness of the cathedral? The strange Mr Andrews, whose position in the cathedral I didn’t understand, had said that I could go and look for Milly anywhere I wanted. The whole place was open, was what he had said.

  Now the Dean, too, was asking me to continue to look for the girl. He seemed to be placing some trust in me, although I couldn’t for the life of me think why. Neither the Dean nor Mr Andrews knew me from Adam. Mr Andrews hadn’t wanted me here at all when I’d first fetched up at the cathedral doors. Now it seemed that I was important in some way, and this was peculiar. I have never been, nor wanted to be, important. Important people, in my experience, do far too much harm to others.

  I went back to the crypt. I didn’t want to look for kids or have anyone ask me to do anything. I wanted to be what I usually am, nothing special to anyone except my own family and friends. It wasn’t like me to want to be under the ground but at that moment I just needed to be with people. Anonymous, but amongst people. When I arrived I found that there were a lot more of them in the crypt than there had been before. Some of them were even trying to get some kip amongst the monuments.

  Hitchcock, Williams and Co., the textile wholesalers in St Paul’s churchyard, was now burning furiously and all the fire watchers and employees from the shelters over there now decamped to the crypt. They came with as much as they could carry in the way of records and ledgers. Would I be that conscientious if my shop was on fire? I don’t know. But my office girl Doris probably would be. These women who keep companies running to a large part these days are marvellous. Doris Rosen is a young widow with a sad past and an uncertain future, but in spite of all that she’s always there for Hancock and Co. Maybe our little firm is what helps to keep her going? Maybe these ladies from Hitchcock’s with their arms full of hot, smoking ledgers were of the same type?

  The wives of the cathedral staff gave the newcomers, and me, cups of cocoa. It was actually Mrs Andrews who handed my cup to me and I caught her eye, but she said nothing even though I tried, and failed, to speak to her. Up above, on the cathedral floor, Mr Ronson’s body lay hidden underneath a tarpaulin and I wondered as yet more men, women and children came in from other shelters nearby that were no longer safe, whether any of them wondered what was covered up underneath the dome as they passed. I decided that they probably didn’t, and I knew that the shelterers who did know had been asked by Mr Andrews not to talk about it. People in general do as they’re told in situations like this. The newcomers were just grateful to be safe and, as they all took their cocoa and sat down wherever they could, I listened to some of their conversations.

  ‘It’s creepy, isn’t it?’ one very young, very smart-suited clerical sort of bloke said. ‘Down here with all the dead!’

  The girl he was sitting next to on the floor, a pleasant dark-haired little thing answered. ‘Well, I think it’s quite a privilege to be sheltering with the likes of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson.’

  ‘Yes, but Mabel,’ her companion continued, ‘they’re dead. Their bodies are underneath the floor right here!’ He pointed to a place just in front of him. ‘Just here!’

  ‘Lord Nelson, so they say,’ an old bloke with old-fashioned mutton chops who settled down slowly beside the couple said, ‘had to be carried home from the Battle of Trafalgar in a huge barrel of brandy.’

  Mabel put her cocoa cup down and said, ‘You what?’

  ‘To preserve the body so it could lie in state when they got it home,’ the old chap said. ‘Alcohol stops things from decaying.’

  I didn’t involve myself in their conversation, even though I particularly, out of everyone there, could have spoken with authority on this subject. I know about alcohol and its properties. Formaldehyde is what embalmers use to preserve corpses and, although people in our poor manor of West Ham don’t have the money for such luxuries, I’ve met embalmers and I know what they do. Lord Nelson was an early and very primitive example of embalming, as the old man now told the horrified youngsters.

  ‘Keeps a body fresh, alcohol does,’ he said. ‘Mind you, it’s said that some of the men transporting Lord Nelson did have the odd nip from the barrel from time to time!’

  The girl put her hand up to her mouth and squeaked.

  The young man put a protective arm around her shoulders and said to the old bloke, ‘Mr Wilkins! I do think that was a bit strong!’

  ‘You’ll have to get used to a lot stronger than that when you’re in the army, Ted!’ the old man said. ‘Can’t be too squeamish when you’re fighting the Hun.’

  A couple of families came over then; two women, one bloke with a wooden leg, and five children – three girls and two little boys. They were neighbours, I heard them say, and they came from the Friday Street shelter in Blackfriars. The bloke had apparently decided to move to the cathedral because he felt it was probably safer than the shelter. Not many families actually live in the square mile but the few that do are generally business people, like one of these women, who had a florist shop. Her friend and neighbour, by the look of her, was that rare type you occasionally find who live right in the City, the very poor person. The man with the wooden leg was, I gathered, her husband. Whether either of them worked, I didn’t know, but their thin, patched-up clothes seemed to suggest that they didn’t. The bloke’s Trilby hat had a hole in the crown that hadn’t just been made by the fires – it had been there for years. One of the girls and both of the little boys belonged to this couple. The two other girls, who had ribbons in their hair and warm gloves on their hands, were the florist lady’s daughters.

  At first the children whined a bit as their parents made them sit down and behave themselves. But once they’d got their drinks from the cathedral ladies they spread their dolls and blankets out in front of them and began to settle. The bloke with the wooden leg offered me a fag, which I took gratefully, and he told me that his name was Mr Webb. I introduced myself to him and then we all, the families, the office workers and myself, sat in silence for a while. I was wondering what to do next. Young George, Mr Andrews and, I was led to believe by the Dean, the watchmen were all looking for Mr Phillips and young Milly now. Although I had been specifically asked to help, quite what I could do that would be of any good. I didn’t know. After all, I was no expert on the building as all the others had to be. And yet these people, as well as the Dean himself, had seemed to want me to continue looking. I would, of course; I’d recovered a bit from my second climb now and felt a little less unhappy about what I’d been asked to do. But I’d finish my cocoa and my fag first. I didn’t have any idea of what the time was but I knew that this fire bombing we were suffering had been going on for hours. I also knew that I wasn’t going to get home that night, if at all. I didn’t know if I, or any of us in that cathedral, would survive. The bombing never stopped, the fires, emptying shelters as they went, moved ever closer to us. I shut my eyes and listened to the sound of the little children’s talk.