The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 23

There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.

There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young man not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you. Secondly there is the slow erosion–a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit. It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child’s nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no name. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees’ faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business.

And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock. It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that. People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

It seemed perverse for 1st July 1940 to be such a pleasant day. Without the wind, it would have been too warm; without the sun, the wind would have been too cold, but today these elements seemed to have combined into perfect harmony. The sky was baby-blue, the moon was going to be full that night, and so the men and women passing briskly through the square had a rather downcast look, cursing the heavens under their breath and praying for fog and rain. I sat on the north side of the square above the steps down to the fat, shallow fountains and waited. I had come early–nearly an hour before the specified 2 p.m.–to scout the area for whatever signs of danger I hoped I would be able to recognise. I was a deserter. My call-up had come in 1939 and, aware of my appointment with Virginia, I had fled, to the shame of Patrick and quite possibly my father. Like many of our kin, I had taken care in my fourth life to note one or two useful events, including the clichéd but essential winners of races and sporting events. I didn’t make indiscriminate money off this knowledge, gleaned from a sports almanac in 1957, but used it as a basis to achieve that level of outward comfort and stability that was so important if you were to be considered for a comfortable and stable job. I chose an accent that was almost as parodied as Phearson’s received pronunciation, letting a little of my natural voice drop into it whenever I wished to impress potential employers with how hard I’d worked at my social status. Indeed, that thing I loosely described as my “natural voice” had become so distorted by travels, time and languages learned that I often found myself verging on a parody of my colleagues, unconsciously acquiring their syntax and tone. To Patrick I talked as a northerner, to my grocer as a cockney and to my colleagues as a man dreaming of working for the BBC.

Virginia, it transpired, made no such allowances.

“Hello, dear boy!” she exclaimed, and at once I recognised her, though it had been twenty-two years since she had slipped me a penknife in a house in the north. She was younger, a woman in her forties, but still dressed for a soirée where the jazz was cool and the men were willing, no concession made in any aspect of her being for the nannying concerns of the present.

I stood at once, an awkward formal gesture, which she immediately dispelled by grabbing me by the shoulders and giving me a kiss on either cheek in recognition of a fashion yet to come. “Harry!” she exclaimed. “My goodness but you are young at the moment, aren’t you?”

I was twenty-two, dressed to convince the world that I was a rather youthful twenty-nine and worthy of consideration in all things. The effect was more of a child playing in his father’s clothes, but then I have never truly mastered my own body. She had her arm hooked into mine and was leading me towards Buckingham Palace–not yet damaged by the Dornier bomber that would eventually hit Victoria station, but that event was only a few months away. “How was the last one?” she asked brightly, sweeping me off down the Mall like a country cousin come to town for a family holiday. “The femoral artery is such a gusher once it gets going, and far fewer little nerve endings round there. I did try to bring you something chemical but it was all done in such a hurry–terrible fuss!”

“Was death the only option?” I asked weakly.

“Darling!” she exclaimed. “You would only have been hunted down and interrogated more, and frankly we couldn’t be handling that. Besides–” a surreptitious nudge that nearly knocked me off my feet “–how would we have known you were really one of us, if you didn’t make this meeting?”

I took a slow, steadying breath. This meeting–this already rather strange meeting–had cost me my life and twenty-two years of expectation. “May I ask, are you going to walk away rapidly in the next fifteen minutes? I only enquire because I have several hundred years of questions, and need to know whether I should start prioritising.”

She gave me a playful slap on the arm. “Dear boy,” she replied, “you have many centuries left in which to ask whatever you like.”