Full Dark House(8)

5

SANDWICHES ON THE BRIDGE

On the morning of Monday, 11 November 1940, after a weekend of sirens, booming anti-aircraft guns, distant bombs and droning aircraft, nineteen-year-old John May was most concerned about getting to work early, because it was his first day in a new job and he was anxious to make a good impression.

He jumped from the rear platform of the bus as it slowed on its turn from the Aldwych, and searched the ashen pavements of the Strand, wondering if he had somehow missed an air-raid warning. It was still quite dark, too early for a daylight assault. The blackout ended half an hour before sunrise, when the greatest danger to commuters was the ‘silent peril’, trolley buses that glided by with a whisper of sheened steel. The clear weather of the last two days had allowed heavier bombing raids than usual, but the morning was mild and overcast, a healthy sign; German bombers were unable to follow the river into London’s heart when the cloud base was so low.

May wasn’t sure where the nearest shelter was, and had yet to make his way to Bow Street. He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force.

The shops and restaurants of the Strand had been boarded up from the Kardomah to the Coal Hole, but a sign nailed beneath a shirtmaker’s ‘Business As Usual’ banner pointed the way to a shelter. May made a mental note of it. The street lamps were off, and only strips of white paint on the kerbs marked out his route. He passed a large branch of Boots fortified with sandbags and, near the top, when those had run out, old telephone directories.

May wondered if he was over-keen, turning up so early on his first day. There had been several raids the previous night and few Londoners had managed more than four hours’ sleep, despite the protestations of patriots who insisted that their slumber was undisturbed by falling bombs. This morning it seemed as if the entire city had decided on a late start. He passed a pair of sleepy-eyed girls walking arm in arm, their matching homemade hats pinned with luminous brooches. An ARP warden paused in a shop doorway to draw guiltily on a thin roll-up. An elderly man in a cap and a heavy wool coat checked the gutter for dog-ends. The grey street smelled of rolling tobacco and charred wood.

Sixty years later, John May would amble along the same route and see more people sleeping rough than he had during the war, but at the moment, on this anaemic Monday, all he cared about was reaching his office before someone decided that they had made a terrible mistake and didn’t actually need a new recruit to work in an experimental police department, especially not a kid who had been prematurely thrust into his profession by the outbreak of war.

He found the police station at Bow Street with ease—he’d spent enough mornings in Covent Garden with his father to know his way around—but could not locate the entrance he had been instructed to use. Carfax, the bulldog-faced desk sergeant, sent him out of the front door, past the hand-printed sign to the public that read: ‘Be Good—We’re Still Open’, and into a side alley where he discovered the unmarked blue door. Failing to find a bell, he was about to knock when it suddenly opened.

‘Are you the new chap?’ asked a statuesque young woman whose cockney accent emerged through carmine lips. ‘Blimey, you’re a bit eager, aren’t you?’ She opened the door wider. ‘You’d better come in, you’re making the street untidy.’

May pulled off his cap and stepped into a narrow corridor. The young woman’s protuberant bust was alarmingly close to his face in the darkness, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Go up the top of them stairs and take the first right. Mind you don’t trip on the treads, some of the rods are gone, and there’s textbooks everywhere. We only just moved in.’

May reached the linoleumed landing and found himself standing before a faintly lit office door. Radio music played inside. On the panel in front of him was tacked a sheet of paper reading: ‘KNOCK AND WAIT’. He did so, lightly, and when nothing occurred, more heavily.

‘You don’t have to bash the thing in,’ called an irritated voice. ‘Just open it.’

May entered a cluttered sepia room with a sloping floor. A pair of green glass desk lamps threw cones of light against the blackout curtains, where a young man with chestnut hair and a purple scarf knotted round his throat was trying to see something through a magnifying glass. ‘The Home Office insists on the “Knock and Wait” signs,’ he explained, not looking up. ‘They’re meant to give us time to clear away sensitive papers. As if we had any in the first place. Here.’ He thrust the glass at May, together with a sheet of butcher’s paper covered in hand-drawn illustrations of butterflies. ‘See if you can spot a hidden message on that.’