The Fire Fighter Read online

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, after an attempt at scrubbing.

  ‘Technical hitch?’

  Towelling his hair, in only his vest and trousers, Finlay sat on the cot, opposite Grey, and picked his glass up off the floor. ‘I was told, but had forgotten, about the soap.’

  ‘Ah,’ Grey said. He swilled whisky in the tooth glass, sipped, savoured, swallowed.

  ‘What do you do to get into that sort of shape, Finlay? If you don’t mind my asking. Last time I saw muscle like that it was on two darkies contesting a British Empire title at White City.’

  ‘I did gymnastics at Borstal,’ Finlay said. ‘Parallel bars and so on.’

  ‘Competitively?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Win anything?’

  ‘It kept me away from peeling potatoes.’

  ‘You don’t do it any more?’

  ‘I grew,’ Finlay said. ‘I got too tall for it. The power-to-weight ratio changes.’

  Grey nodded. ‘Any thoughts on what you saw today?’

  ‘On the streets, or at the facility?’

  ‘The latter.’

  ‘Only that water won’t put it out,’ Finlay said. ‘Hoses will only spread the fire, make the damage worse, inflict higher casualties among the fire fighters. The stuff we saw today has been designed that way. But I think you know all this already.’

  ‘We want you to think about it,’ Grey said.

  Finlay looked at the whisky in his glass. ‘You must have scientists better qualified than me.’

  ‘Oh, we have,’ Grey said. ‘And we’ve got them working night and day on perfecting something even more frightful for us to drop on Jerry. We have the boffins, Finlay. But none of them has quite your experience or record of achievement in the actual business of extinguishing fires. We have the scientists, all right. But they don’t quite have your power-to-weight ratio.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

  Grey concentrated his gaze on his glass. ‘Let me pose a question. Would you, in an air raid, follow a chap in a white lab coat into a burning building?’

  Finlay sipped whisky.

  ‘You are the fellow who put out the fire at Pimlico Rubber.’

  ‘For the loss of five men.’

  ‘When the Empress of India caught fire at anchor—’

  ‘An engine-room fire. All I did was close the watertight doors, starve it of oxygen.’

  ‘The fire aboard the Empress was first believed to have started in the coal hold.’

  ‘But it hadn’t,’ Finlay said. ‘That much was bloody obvious from the smoke.’

  ‘Just as well it was obvious,’ Grey said. ‘Wasn’t the Empress berthed next to a cargo vessel brim-full of petroleum?’

  ‘You know it was,’ Finlay said, tiredly. ‘It’s in the file with my picture attached.’

  ‘What was obvious about the smoke?’

  ‘Copious. Greasy. Billowing. Black. Does everyone have a file?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Grey said.

  Finlay awoke with a thick head, unable to remember Grey’s departure or much of their conversation. It had been a long day, the sort that concertinas night into something rushed and sudden and entirely without significance. Today he was to go to the Mile End fire station and meet some of the men instructed to obey him. He shaved as best he could with cold water and latherless whale soap and washed and dressed, all the while thinking of what he had been shown the previous day. The latter half of the day, at what Grey had called the facility, had tested rather than dismayed him. He had seen incendiaries before; murderous, stubborn, all but ungovernable. He had seen far worse things in peacetime than the emergency aboard the Empress of India, or the blaze that charred five good men to blackened bone at Pimlico.

  The Empress had been a difficult emergency. Ships containing volatile cargos of glue, saltpetre, industrial alcohol, sulphur, magnesium and crude oil had flanked its berth in the bustling dock. The decision had been whether to close the watertight doors, with the seamen who had been fighting the flames with fire blankets and bilge water still in the engine room, not knowing whether those men were alive or dead. And that had been Finlay’s decision to take.

  It was not so much the composition of the German fire bombs that disturbed him, or their size, as the quantities in which they were being dropped. They spilled out of the sky in massive, careless clusters, capable of spreading acres of flame. Finlay understood the momentum of fire, what it fed on, how it could succour itself on the surrounding air to nourish its source and to spread. He appreciated its greedy protection of itself and its devouring impetus. These fire bombs would burn fiercely enough to melt steel, smelt iron, turn monuments of brick to powder and proud stone edifices to brittle carbon husks.

  He shook his safety razor in the water and saw to his surprise that it had changed colour with rinsed blood from a cut he had not felt himself inflict. In the sunless light of his cell, the water appeared not pink, but violet.

  The first part of the day had shaken Finlay very badly. The streets of East London were a catastrophe for which he had tried and failed, between bouts of nausea aboard the boat, to prepare himself. As he climbed through them, he knew it was a failure more fundamental than mere lack of imagination. His mind had failed him. His mind had imposed order on what was insane. He had imagined ruin, but was confronted by something more terrible and profound in the mad upheaval of London after the bombing. A milkman capered, whistling something familiar, over the brick rubble and spilled furniture at the end of a charred terrace to put two pints on the step of a house with no door or windows. From its blasted interior, a seated woman waved to him from a soot-blackened parlour and then returned, rocking in her chair, to the knitting on her lap. Further on, a man in a carpenter’s apron sang like a ventriloquist through the nails gripped between his teeth as he hammered a coffin together from the panels of a wardrobe. Beside him was a sack, the blood soaked through it giving definition to the body parts within.

  ‘’Aven’t found ’is ’ead yet,’ the carpenter said to Finlay, or to Grey, as the two men passed him, looking. ‘Daresay ’e won’t be needing it now.’

  They were walking through Whitechapel, headed towards Wapping and Shadwell and the river. On an approaching corner, a fire crew manned a hose pointed at a burning timber yard. The flacid loops of the hose told Finlay that the crew did not command sufficient water pressure to contain the blaze. The fire fighters were old and tired-looking, gaunt with fatigue in uniforms filthy with soot, brick dust, singeing. Finlay looked up. The sky above their heads was spangled black with soot.

  ‘They come up the Thames, using the river itself to navigate by,’ Grey said. He flicked ash from the shoulder of his overcoat. ‘The black-out tends to be pretty much absolute throughout the city. By contrast, from altitude the river shows silver under moonlight and the stars, even through cloud. Captured air crew describe it as a truly beautiful sight.’

  ‘I’m surprised captured air crew aren’t lynched before you get to them,’ Finlay said.

  Grey ignored this remark. ‘They do have strategic targets. They go for the docks, the power stations, the railway termini and any buildings their intelligence tells them might house important personnel. Beyond that, they attack the symbolic targets. St Paul’s, the House of Commons and the Tower have all been hit, though none of them has been significantly damaged. When the bomber crews turn for home, desperate to lighten their load, gain altitude, increase air speed, they dump anything left in their bomb bays along the Thames. So life is no picnic these days if you live in Bermondsey or Rotherhithe. If it ever was.’

  ‘Is there air pursuit?’

  Grey sniffed. ‘There is. Where the night raids are concerned it is almost totally ineffective. We can’t see them to shoot them. It isn’t even good for morale, since those a show might reassure are sheltering under ground. Waste of aviation fuel, really.’

  ‘Then why do we do it?’

  ‘Indicates to Jerry that we haven’t thrown in the towel.’ />
  Someone had hauled a piano, its case rent, its innards exposed, on to the pavement. The two men shuffled around it. That was it, Finlay decided. The antimacassars flapping across rubble, the fragments of plaster hurled into the street with bits of pelmet and wallpaper still attached; the blue enamel washing-up bowls and broken-spined books and bits of body wearing gabardine and floral cotton print. It was the combination of familiar domesticity and martial destruction that jarred. It was the horrible unreality of this encounter between civilian people cowering in their civilian properties and the bombs nightly delivered them. The war he had seen so far had been so neatly choreographed. The armies might have been painted soldiers shuffling across a painted board for all their organization and neatness. For a moment, Finlay was intensely nostalgic for Baxter and Baxter’s desert batteries of make-and-mend guns. ‘You can forget all about calibration,’ Baxter had said to him. He remembered then what Baxter had said about medals.

  There was a sudden tearing of the air and a boom behind them and Grey was on the ground. Holding on to his hat, he looked up at Finlay, who was still standing, looking down at him. ‘Petrol engine,’ Finlay said, smiling. ‘Probably a lorry in that timber yard back there. Some poor bleeder just lost a full tank.’

  Grey climbed to his feet brushing dust, disgustedly, from his elbows and knees. ‘You hit the ground pretty fast, Mr Grey,’ Finlay said, still smiling. ‘I think you may have done that once or twice before.’

  Grey said nothing in response to this remark. He adjusted the angle of his hat brim. He sniffed. In the aftermath of the explosion the air smelled bitter with creosote and burn.

  Suddenly the river lay curved in a broad bend before them. It was still not long after sunrise and in the chill a pall of mist hung above the water. The tide was low, the current slack and the only river sound was its soft lap against pilings emerging from the mist. Cranes and gantries, twisted, broken, formed forlorn geometries in front of the warehouse buildings staggered among ruins on the far bank. The superstructure of a sunken tug was visible above the water in one of the deep channels towards the centre of the river. Debris gathered in grey swags, like ghostly bunting, from its ship’s rail and blown portholes. Looking up and down the river, Finlay saw that the tug was not the only wreck. Half a dozen boats had been sunk at anchor. At the edge of his vision, almost on the river’s bend, a coke barge burned in a rudderless circle under a still column of smoke. There was a sound like a cough and a building with the name of its proprietor lettered large across its edifice sagged and sank on the far bank in a spreading pillow of dust. Dust loured across the water towards them. Grey tapped Finlay on the shoulder.

  ‘Seen enough?’

  Finlay nodded.

  ‘There’s a pub along here does a decent lunch. Least, it was here yesterday. What say we call a late breakfast an early lunch and I have the car fetched?’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. The cloud of dust tumbled over itself across the river towards them.

  ‘Feel better with a bit of grub inside you,’ Grey said.

  The night raid had left the pub intact. It was an inn rather than a pub and Finlay guessed that it had remained pretty much intact for centuries. It was called The Prospect of Whitby. It offered a prospect only of wharves, water, ruin. They sat in a nook to the rear of the pub with a view out over the river through a leaded window. The pub had its own moorings and a Thames barque was tied up there. Its black sails gave the barque the sinister appearance of a pirate vessel. Then Finlay realized that the black was just soot staining the canvas. There were whorls of soot in the grain of the barque’s teak deck. The old boat was filthy with spent fire.

  Grey ate kedgeree, sucking flakes of fish through a gap in his teeth. ‘Why am I obliged to live in a hole in the ground, Mr Grey?’

  Grey tutted.

  ‘You were in the artillery. Let me ask you an artillery question. Suppose a tank takes a hit. Shell isn’t armour-piercing, just explodes, gouges a bit of plate, tank wheels along on its merry way. What happens to the crew?’

  ‘The crew is dead.’ Finlay said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Trauma. The shockwave from the explosion causes the tank crew’s internal organs to rupture and collapse. Superficially, their bodies will be intact. But they are dead.’

  ‘Jerry has an item of ordnance called a blast bomb. Detonates when it reaches a specific altitude. Say a hundred feet above the target. Sends a massive shockwave. Designed to kill personnel and leave property intact. Designed really, we think, to damage morale. It isn’t just you, Finlay. We are all living in holes in the ground.

  ‘Our logistical friends refer to human resources. Experts, they tell us, as if we didn’t know, are a scarce human resource. We lost too many valuable people to the first period of the bombing. Can’t afford to lose any more. Even Winston sleeps in a hole in the ground. And Winston’s bomb-proof. Aren’t you going to eat something?’

  ‘White,’ said White. He sat back down behind his desk. Finlay sat in one of the chairs arranged in a semi-circle facing the desk. The Immaculate Major sat in a chair to Finlay’s right. In the big window behind White, the same barrage balloons he had seen that last time he had been here sat plump, suspended in the Westminster sky. Now, though, the view was diminished by a large crack extending across one of the window’s panes. The panes wore crisscrosses of brown tape.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ White said.

  ‘Just that it must be terribly confusing for your secretarial staff. All these people from the Ministry, named after neutral colours.’

  The Major coughed.

  ‘What do you make of Grey?’ White said.

  ‘He is the first homosexual I’ve liked.’

  ‘I suppose you must have met your fair share in Borstal.’

  ‘No. I came across plenty of sodomites. But on reflection I think that was a consequence more of availability than choice.’

  The Major coughed again. ‘Grey was at Gommecourt Wood,’ he said. ‘Have you the remotest idea of what that means?’

  ‘I am afraid I haven’t,’ Finlay said, addressing his reply to White. ‘Geography was never my strongest subject.’

  There was a pause in the conversation. Finlay was aware of the absence of traffic on Whitehall. Everything on the roads of London had been freight since his return. Except of course for the bicycles. The only cars he had seen so far had been that allocated to Grey and the one that had brought him from Southampton. To his right, he could hear the Major breathing in measured breaths and feel the heat of the anger in his face.

  ‘Armstrong,’ said White, swivelling in his chair. He looked at Finlay. Finlay did not respond.

  ‘Carter,’ White said. ‘Eagan. Gaines. Lampetter. And of course, Tooley.’

  Finlay just sat.

  ‘Do you think of those names often, Chief Fire Officer?’

  ‘Never alphabetically. Not until now, anyway.’

  ‘Grey tells me you blame yourself for what happened to the men you led into the blaze at Pimlico Rubber. Just as Grey of course blames himself for what occurred at Gommecourt Wood. But blame is of no use to us. Guilt, remorse; these are crippling handicaps for someone from whom we expect as much as we expect from you.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have left me in the desert, Mr White.’

  Beside Finlay, the Major coughed. He has a cough to cover his entire emotional range, Finlay thought. That one signified disgust.

  ‘Grey had you tour the stations?’

  ‘We visited Mile End and Shoreditch and Hoxton and Moorgate stations yesterday afternoon. We would have visited Bethnal Green, but every available man was clearing fire breaks around a lightbulb factory on Old Ford Road with an unexploded thousand-pounder in its goods yard.’

  ‘What was your impression?’

  ‘Excellent men overwhelmed. Where are our ground-to-air defences?’

  White looked momentarily lost.

  ‘I saw them in a Pathe news film they showed us in Egypt. Batterie
s of anti-aircraft guns revolving on plinths.’

  The Major laughed. ‘Oh, those. Those batteries are at Borehamwood,’ he said.

  Now Finlay looked confused. White appeared, for the first time, uncomfortable.

  ‘There is a film studio at Borehamwood,’ the Major said. ‘Very good people. Marvellously sophisticated lighting and camera work. Most of our films are edited there. It’s where some of them have to be faked.’

  ‘The ground-to-air batteries are a cinematic trick?’

  ‘They call them special effects,’ the Major said.

  ‘“Good men overwhelmed” was the phrase you just used,’ White said. ‘It is regrettably apt. We can’t tell our men in the field that we are not able adequately to defend their families at home. We are losing this war and if we admit that to our troops, we will have lost it. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Biscuits?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I would have done nothing differently at Pimlico Rubber,’ Finlay offered finally. ‘I would give a great deal not to have lost those men. But I would have done nothing differently.’

  ‘I see,’ White said, nodding.

  ‘Perhaps now you can tell me truthfully what it is I have been brought back to England to do.’

  And with that, the Immaculate Major went to find tea. And White did tell Finlay.

  Two

  We were not actually invited into the Underground stations,’ Babcock said. ‘But I don’t suppose there were enough rifles left in London to stop us once we decided to invite ourselves.’ He frowned at the top of his step-ladder and twisted his screwdriver between dextrous hands. ‘If you give it proper thought, mind, there probably were enough rifles.’

  ‘But nobody wanted to fire them,’ Finlay said. He was seated on his cot, shining the buttons on his new tunic with Brasso. His uniform belt lay stretched out on the cot beside the tunic, its buckle dull with polish that he would shortly buff to a brilliant sheen with the cloth he was using on the brass, embossed buttons.