The Fire Fighter Read online

  ‘I’m still in the service, Albert. Get me kitted out. Please. You know I can help.’

  If Cooper hesitated, it was only for a beat. Then he nodded and the two men sprinted across the fire-station yard and into whatever the night would deliver them.

  The skin of Grey’s face was tight with rage. He paced the linoleum in front of the single armchair in which Finlay sat. The Immaculate Major stood against the door. Finlay picked horsehair from a hole in the arm of the chair. Grey paced. The Major stared into disdainful space.

  ‘You stink of smoke,’ Grey said to Finlay. ‘Your clothes are still smouldering, for God’s sake.’

  Finlay sat forward and laughed softly into his hands.

  ‘He’s broken,’ the Major said to Grey. ‘Absolutely broken. The chap is of no use to us at all.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Grey said, wheeling on the Major. ‘The man is perfectly all right. He needs a bath and then a few hours of sleep. After that he will require a vigorous debriefing. And then he will be as good as new.’

  Finlay was rocking back and forth in his chair with his head in his hands. It was unclear whether he was laughing or crying. And then a thin dribble of black snot escaped from between his fingers and the sight of it made his sobbing suddenly audible.

  ‘He’s gone to pieces,’ the Major said. ‘The fellow is an absolute waste of time.’

  ‘He is fine,’ Grey said, quietly. ‘Mr Finlay is indulging in a show of grief. That’s all.’

  Grey pulled something from his overcoat pocket. It was evenly shaped, like a pebble, and wrapped in greaseproof paper. He walked across to Finlay and dropped it into Finlay’s lap. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘That’s a bar of Palmolive soap requisitioned from the Royal Automobile Club. Take it, Finlay. And for pity’s sake, use it.’

  Three

  The fire had been beyond containing by the time the tenders reached the school. Because the Lambeth station was on the river, there was always abundant water in their tanks and the water pressure looked impressive enough in the play of hoses on the burning building. But the incendiaries had gone through the roof and detonated on the ground floor, spreading across parquet floors and igniting brittle classroom furniture. Flame blossomed about the panelled corridors and devoured tarpaper partitions. Flames licked and curled around the school roof and lolled in yellow and orange tongues through the shattered glass of the upper-storey windows. Wardens tried to usher onlookers back to safety through the gate in the high wall surrounding the playground. Fire auxiliaries winced against the heat in their shabby tunics and tin hats, waiting to be told what to do. Seeing their faces in the fierce illumination and stark shadows cast by the burning building, Finlay realized with a deflating suddenness that Albert Cooper did not command a man under fifty.

  Cooper was holding an old man hard by the lapels of his coat and shouting and then listening intently to what the man had to say. Finlay saw that Cooper’s men were trying the twin strategy of dousing the building and attacking the seat of the fire. The play of the hoses was precise but futile. They seemed well drilled and disciplined men. But their task tonight was hopeless. He ran across to Cooper. Cooper cupped his hands over Finlay’s ear to counter the roar of fire and the bombardment, which had now moved on to tumble death over Vauxhall, Battersea and beyond.

  ‘He says there were kids in there rehearsing their nativity play,’ Cooper said.

  Finlay looked incredulous. ‘How many?’

  ‘A dozen of them.’

  Finlay turned to where the old man had been standing but he had gone, merged once more with the milling crowd of silhouettes braving bombs to watch the spectacle of the school visited by destruction.

  Inches apart, Finlay and Cooper had to huddle and scream to be heard.

  ‘Who is your most experienced man?’

  ‘I am,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Then I’ll go,’ Finlay said.

  Cooper looked around quickly. His crews were doing all they could. ‘We’ll both go,’ he said.

  Finlay fetched two fire blankets from the nearest tender and took the axe from his belt and used its wetted edge to hack an eighteen-inch slit at the centre of each of the blankets. Both men removed their oilskin waders. Cooper ordered the water pressure reduced on one of his hoses and then fiddled with the aperture of its nozzle. They needed to be doused, not knocked unconscious by the power of the jet. He gave the hose back to a fire fighter, who played it over both of them. Thoroughly soaked, they put on their makeshift ponchos, Finlay gasping at the sudden coldness of the water in the heat blast from the burning school. The fire fighter aiming the adjusted hose doused them again. Cooper gave a hand signal and the man nodded, running back to his tender to increase the water pressure once more. He would play the hose in an arcing deluge over both men until they were inside the building.

  Cooper and Finlay were fire fighters familiar enough with the layout typical of South London’s late-Victorian schools. The rehearsal would be held in the assembly hall. They would reach the hall through a side entrance put there as a fire precaution. They would get to it through a cloakroom with walls Finlay prayed to a God he did not believe in would be tiled, as they sometimes were, and not panelled in a parched inferno of cheap timber.

  Cooper swung his axe and the door shuddered and crumpled inward. The two men flattened themselves to either side of the opening to avoid the explosive, oxygen-searching outreach of flame. Then they were in, running blind through the burning benches and empty coat hooks of the cloakroom and through its swing door, into the hissing floor wax, the blistered walls, the hungry, feeding flames devouring the hall.

  They knew instantly that they would anyway have been too late. But there were no bodies burning in the hall. Cooper and Finlay turned to look at one another and the ceiling seemed to sigh above them. And then it fell, engulfing them. Finlay lay on his back. His back was burning on the blistered floor and he spat hot embers from his mouth and used the back of his hand to prevent embers from blinding him. He tried to twist and found he could do so. He lay under lathe and plaster, winded, scorched, alive. Struggling to his feet, he turned and saw Cooper. Cooper’s head was unrecognizable, only the brilliantine crackle of sparse hair on a livid spread of matter to signal that this had ever been the skull of a man. Finlay fled. He had reached the outer door and felt the breath of the night and seen rainbow arcs of falling water when a smouldering vision abducted his mind.

  In the corner of the cloakroom, through the smoke: gabardine. A scrap of blue gabardine and, above it, something a deader yellow than flames, like a scarf. He pulled one, long, fugitive breath of air out of the night and turned back, stumbling, his hands in front of his face, to the far corner of the cloakroom. It wasn’t a scarf. Her hair was yellow on the collar of her school raincoat. She seemed to be sleeping and Finlay picked her up and held her bundled to his chest and begged his faithless God to let her be living still. His hands blistered, his hair on fire, Finlay wheeled about and bulled, bellowing, for the door.

  There were far more cracks in the panes of glass than there had been when Finlay had last been summoned. The lengths of brown sticky tape did not appear to be equal to the task of keeping the panes intact. Fissures and hairlines provided a whole new sub-stratum of blast damage.

  ‘They’re trying to flatten the Abbey,’ White said from behind the steeple of his fingers, reading Finlay’s thoughts. ‘And they’ve made an educated guess as to where Winston sleeps.’

  ‘If someone hasn’t told them,’ Grey said. Today, Grey and the Major sat flanking White. They reminded Finlay of the promotion board he had faced when his rank had been Chief Fire Officer (Acting). His eyes drifted again to the windows. A barrage balloon had shed its moorings and was canted in the sky at an angle that made it look more than ever like a cartoon cigar. It was raining outside and enough of the atmosphere seeped through the cracks in the window panes to make the room feel damp. Finlay ached from his unaccustomed gymnasium work of two days ago. He ached too from the bruises collected
at the fire on Kennington Road. His hair had been cropped close to his skull to get rid of the singeing. A patch of gauze covered his blistered cheek and both his hands were salved and bandaged.

  ‘How do you feel?’ White said.

  ‘Never better.’

  ‘She died,’ Grey said. ‘The little girl? Already stiffening when you got her body out.’

  Finlay took this in. ‘Where did the rehearsal story come from?’

  ‘The bombing appears to breed rumour,’ Grey said. ‘There’s a weighted corpse at the bottom of every water-filled bomb crater. A captured German spy. Ask anyone. Though nobody will own up to having seen him put there.’

  ‘Truth,’ White said. ‘First casualty of war.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ the Major said. ‘I was motoring back from Biggin Hill one day and my own driver told me that the Arsenal football stadium had been flattened. Transpired he got the information from a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.’

  ‘Winston says that there were twenty thousand Nazi sympathizers in this country at the outbreak of war,’ White said. ‘Some harmful lies are no doubt told deliberately. But rumour festers in a situation such as this. We have to live with that.’

  ‘Or, like Albert Cooper, die with it,’ Grey said. ‘What in heaven’s name did you think you were about?’

  ‘Are you aware that Babcock is a Communist?’ Finlay said.

  Grey and the Major stretched forward and looked at each other around White. Then Grey snorted with laughter.

  ‘Nonsense. Babcock is a dyed-in-the-wool anarcho-syndicalist. He told me so himself.’

  ‘None of you is sane,’ Finlay said.

  Grey looked serious. ‘I have known Babcock since the autumn of nineteen-fifteen, Chief Fire Officer, and I would trust him with my life. Frequently have, in fact.’

  ‘He thinks we have lost this war.’

  ‘We are certainly losing this bloody war,’ White said.

  ‘Babcock is entitled to some leeway,’ Grey said. ‘He lost his boy last year when the Glorious was sunk. Robert was eighteen. And my godson.’ He cleared his throat. ‘None of which answers the question. What in hell did you think you were doing at that school?’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘Can any of you gentlemen tell me why there are children still in London?’

  ‘Chap wants a lecture in dispersal theory,’ the Major said. ‘Shall I do the honours?’

  White turned his eyes towards the ceiling.

  ‘Evacuation was always recognized as the safest and best way of avoiding child casualties,’ the Major said. ‘But no government could risk the mandatory removal of children from their parents. When war broke out, we suggested and facilitated the evacuation programme and achieved close to ninety per cent compliance. But then we waited for over eleven months for Jerry to start bombing London. Indignant parents, thinking they’d been misled and missing their children, began to bring them home. By the time the air raids started, almost all of them had returned.’

  ‘Dispersal does continue,’ White said. ‘But there are those who insist on taking their chances.’

  ‘Fatalism,’ Grey said. ‘A disturbing tendency.’

  Finlay looked at him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because fatalists don’t win wars,’ White said.

  ‘I’d like to ask you a question, Chief Fire Officer, the Major said. ‘Why did you make a pass at Rebecca Lange?’

  Finlay was bewildered for a moment. ‘I wasn’t aware of her name.’

  ‘You didn’t ask her name.’

  ‘She didn’t offer it.’

  ‘You didn’t introduce yourself.’

  ‘She has a way of sidestepping introductions.’

  ‘You made a pass at her. Why?’

  ‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Finlay said.

  White picked up the receiver of one of his desk telephones and ordered tea. He replaced the receiver and, like the two men flanking him, stared at Finlay.

  ‘It wasn’t me who sent a foul-mouthed detail of prison convicts to carry out half the work I wanted done at Absalom House and a truculent bunch of conchies to do the rest,’ Finlay said.

  ‘The contents of Absalom House are sensitive,’ White said. ‘We felt that security was unlikely to be breached by Quaker pacifists or the residents of Wormwood Scrubs. And the work was supervised by a very good chap from the Royal Engineers.’

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t them she took exception to,’ Grey said. ‘It was you.’

  ‘Her and her fucking atrium,’ Finlay said.

  There was a knock on the door and a tea trolley was wheeled in.

  ‘I’ll be mother,’ Grey said.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone know what that little girl was doing in the school?’

  ‘Emily Green,’ the Major said. ‘Eight years old. Her father is aboard a merchant vessel avoiding U-boats somewhere in the North Atlantic. Her mother was doing an overtime shift in the machine-tool shop over which she presides as foreman in Camberwell. They manufacture gunsights. Emily was nervous of the family’s Anderson shelter. Didn’t like being down there alone. School was apparently where she felt safest.’

  Finlay lowered his head into his bandaged hands and groaned.

  ‘Let’s get back to Rebecca Lange. She is the daughter of Frederick Lange, the architect?’ White said.

  Finlay looked blank.

  ‘The atrium is the distinguishing feature of his only British building.’

  ‘He can always build another one somewhere they aren’t dropping bombs,’ Finlay said.

  ‘As he hasn’t been sighted since boarding a train in Berlin in nineteen-thirty-eight, that’s unlikely,’ White said.

  Finlay shrugged. White sipped tea. Grey stared. The Immaculate Major coughed. ‘What is it you want, Chief Fire Officer?’ he said.

  ‘To fight the scum you lot call Jerry. To kill Germans and anyone who helps them. To stop them. To end it.’

  ‘The work we have asked you to help us with will achieve that far more effectively than anything you could do as a gunnery sergeant,’ White said.

  Finlay reached for the tray on the desk and his tea, which was cold.

  ‘I regret that we can’t tell you more about the value of your task. I have to ask you to trust us.’

  Finlay sipped cold Ministry tea.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You can start by apologizing to Miss Lange,’ Grey said.

  Finlay had walked through rain almost to Trafalgar Square when the car whooshed to a stop at the kerb beside him. The door was pushed open. ‘Get in,’ the Major said. ‘I’ll take you as far as Aldwych.’

  ‘Emily Green did not die,’ the Major said. They motored along the empty Strand. ‘I can understand why Grey should tell you that she did, but she did not.’

  Finlay said nothing.

  They were at Aldwych. The car stopped at the junction with Southampton Row and Finlay climbed out.

  The Major said, ‘Do you understand why the man would deliberately choose to lie to you like that?’

  Finlay smiled. ‘Because of what happened to him. Because of what Captain Grey saw on a summer morning at a place called Gommecourt Wood.’ He closed the car door carefully and walked the wet pavements of London to Liverpool Street.

  Babcock had brought him a letter from Tom. It sat on his draftsman’s table, which Babcock had lowered to the horizontal, along with tins of cocoa and condensed milk and half a bottle of Bell’s whisky. He wondered why he had been given this peace offering. Then he remembered Babcock’s boy and the fate of the Glorious. Babcock, of course, would have recognized and identified Tom’s as a service letter. Maybe he had read it. Maybe he had been told to read it and to inform Grey of its contents. Maybe Tom’s letter had arrived yesterday, or the day before, and they had all read it, gathered around the big, leather inlaid table under the taped windows, Grey volunteering to be mother when the tea was fetched. Finlay poured a whisky and held it up to the light. Its butter
y colour sat unadulterated in the glass.

  ‘Here’s to you, Albert Cooper,’ he said, toasting the small mirror above his sink. ‘And to old times.’

  He took a sip. The whisky delivered fire to his belly. Then Finlay unbandaged his hands and washed them carefully with his bar of Palmolive soap. He rinsed and shook his hands dry rather than risk the friction of a towel on still-tender skin. He sat in his armchair with his Scotch to one side and thumbed open his brother’s letter. The envelope appeared inviolate. The letter itself was written on flimsy, punctuated here and there by the thick strokes of a censor’s pen that Finlay, knowing his brother and his brother’s predicament, had little trouble reconstituting into words.

  Dear Jack,

  All is as well as it could be in circumstances that I can’t pretend don’t try myself and the rest of the lads. It is often said that we are all in this together. And that is nowhere truer than in the perculiar conditions in which my branch of the navy operates. All the same, it can get you down. So the sooner this is over, and we are all back enjoying Sunday roast with Mum again of a special weekend in Stanley Road, the better.

  We play a lot of what the navigation officer calls cat and mouse. Though I have some trouble deciding sometimes which of these we are. I am learning morse code, with a view, in due course, to taking the radio operator’s course (of course!)

  I write to Mum regularly, but have no way of knowing if my letters get to her. I suppose the more I write, the better the chance that she will receive at least some of them. My letters to Mum are cheery, of course, but I do worry about her living so close to the docks. There is so much talk and rumour, among the crew, of air raids. Nobody can tell me if Liverpool is being bombed.