“Yes,” Lucinda replies without inflection. Most have settled into feisty defiance or resigned resolve. Lucinda has made a deliberate effort to remain nonchalant. The biggest fear for many British is to spread unnecessary panic. “Eight million people cannot become hysterical,” Lucinda tells her girls when they refuse to match their mother’s sanguine disposition.
“Our mum’s way of dealing with the war is to ignore it,” Kate says to Julian. “She acts like war is a terrible but temporary inconvenience that must be tolerated until it ends—in about a fortnight.”
Sheila adds to her sister’s description, “Mum contributes to the war effort by refusing to take part.”
“Must be nice to have your mum with you,” says Mia with a melancholy sigh.
Boom boom.
Thud thud.
The air shakes with the drone of planes. Little black things fall out of the sky. Every minute he is awake, Julian hears the rat-tat-tat of the anti-aircraft guns, even when they’re not being fired. But the black things keep falling. White caps open over them. Parachutes. The black things drift through the air, harmless, aimless, in slow motion, until they hover above a row of terraced houses. Then they explode.
The day they explode, Julian finally learns what Frankie does for the war effort. Mute medical student Frankie sifts through the brick and glass and pulls out pieces of ripped-apart bodies. She puts them back together in her deep-freeze laboratory called the morgue. She and her team of assistants search for fragments of arms, legs, feet, bits of torso, partial skulls. They place all the remains they can find into an open wagon lined with plastic. In the hours it takes Finch to itemize lost belongings, Frankie fastidiously, slowly, patiently sifts through the dust and recovers parts of lost human beings. The medical truck leaves, the Incident Officer leaves, the refreshment truck, the fire brigade, the police, Finch and the Rescue Squad all leave, only Frankie is still there, lifting up window frames and torn apart mattresses, making sure she hasn’t left a stray bone behind.
Back in the morgue, she spends days assembling. When she deems the jigsaw pieces of the body are put together with sufficient respect, then and only then does she sign off and release the body to the waiting family.
Some of them remain partials.
Frankie won’t release those. Day after day, she returns to the bomb site and sifts through the mortar, poking with her spear and her spade, digging mute and unhurried until she finds the parts that are missing.
“Frankie wasn’t always so quiet,” Mia tells Julian. “When the war began, she smiled, sometimes even talked. But then she found a woman’s arm, still in her overcoat, lying in the dirt. That arm has been torturing Frankie. She can’t make peace with not finding the rest of the woman. Where did the body go? The arm has been catalogued and left in the mortuary at Royal London. Frankie checks on it every time she’s there, to see if it’s been claimed.”
It’s still unclaimed.
That’s why no one has abandoned London. They are all fragments of a city. They’re part of something, they belong to something whole. If they leave, pieces will go missing.
Most of the days Julian has no time to think about it, but sometimes when he’s walking and has time, he doubles over under the weight of London pressing down on him. The enormity of what’s happening kicks him in the heart.
This can’t be London!
London whose roar never stopped, not even after the Black Plague, lies deserted and silent at night. This black plague falling out of the sky, drifting down on white parachutes, has muted the mighty city. This London is more silent than the countryside in Clerkenwell in 1603 when the rustling of rodents and the chirping of crickets could still be heard at night. It’s more silent than the dank cellar room in which Julian lay in a heroin haze, more silent than the cave with vertical ice walls hundreds of feet thick, more silent than the Southern Ocean in the ebony stillness of pack ice.
It is dead silent.
It’s a black hole, except for the droning of enemy planes, except for the wailing of relentless sirens.
The Strand is burning.
Cheapside is burning.
Paternoster Row, the historic publishing street next to St. Paul’s, is gone, gone like it never existed, wiped out, five million books destroyed.
Winter. Snow, then rain. The city is a muddy wreck.
Cold nights in heavy fog, visibility three feet. Mia, Mia!
In Battersea, no ceilings, no glass, no light.
Doors are torn off, doors they bring underground and fashion into stages.
The destruction of the doors above them means that in the caves below, they can put on a skit and dance, and maybe even laugh.
Mia, Mia.
It doesn’t seem right for people to stay in a city where bombs fall daily.
And yet they stay.
It doesn’t seem right to put themselves in harm’s way.
And yet they do.
They are surprised in the mornings that buildings still stand like mountains. Nothing seems to be that permanent. Not the buildings, not the people.
And yet they remain.
London, the most lit up nighttime city in the world, has been plunged into darkness. The metropolis has vanished. Two thousand years thriving, and in two months it’s a clutter of wattle and daub shacks, made of sticks and bricks, burning and crumbling. And they can’t see any of it until the next morning when the streets are gone. Holborn, Tottenham Court Road. All the roads are misshapen. Dust, dust everywhere in the great dead city.
Parts of the city are ashes. The history of London is laid waste, made without meaning. If its tangible relics can vanish overnight, if London’s physical manifest glory can disappear, what’s left?
Mia, Mia.
She paints the fake buses red.
Fire engines are painted gray.
And policemen wear hats painted blue.
And yet they stay.
They get up and go to work, take buses and cabs, they walk, and the pubs are still open, and beer is terrible because sugar is rationed, but at least the terrible beer is not rationed.
And in the caves, there is life.
There’s a stage and a boxing ring.
Unreality weighs upon Julian.
He wants to tell his friends, brightly colored flowers will grow in the ashes come spring. On Bread Street and Milk Street ragwort will bloom, lily of the valley, white and purple lilac, London pride. For seven hundred years, the earth near Cripplegate has been tamped down by stone. But underneath, it’s still fertile soil. In it, leaps and bounds of asphodel will grow. The wounded city will see the immortal flowers return.
But not in the dead of November. In November, the kingdom will fall for a song.
Julian has picked up some new things for Mia on the black market. He got her a Brodie, a tin hat. Does she wear it? Of course not. Discarded it lies at the foot of her bunk. He bought her high heeled shoes, not patriotic wedges, bought her garters and nylon stockings, not patriotic lederhosen, acquired for her a long pink fake-fur scarf, some red lipstick, a garland for her hair, and a black velvet dress with a silk red trim.
Mia cries when he opens his hands full of offerings. “Why are you bringing me these?” she whispers so Finch doesn’t hear. “These are the most wonderful things anyone’s ever given me.” She tries to act composed,