Damned Good Show by Derek Robinson

Author:Derek Robinson [Robinson, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

2

In place of the invasion came the Blitz.

The raiders came by night in wave after wave. London was so near the Luftwaffe airfields in Belgium and northern France that sometimes the Heinkels and Dorniers and Junkers made two trips, returning to stoke up the fires they had started. Next morning, cameramen roamed the smoking streets. Rollo was in bed, asleep. He had been up all night, catching the action.

Nobody at Crown asked him to do it. He went out because he couldn’t resist it, and because he reckoned someone should record the death of a great city, even if nobody survived to see his film. All the experts had calculated that the bombers must kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been flattened like sandcastles; why not London? Each evening, as he left his Chelsea flat, Rollo was reconciled to the thought that, if and when he came back, there might be no flat and no Chelsea.

It didn’t happen. London was not obliterated. It was thoroughly spattered with high explosive, and sometimes the spatterings merged to destroy whole streets, but more often the bomb-strikes were as thoughtless as raindrops. It was no safer to stand in Hyde Park than it was to sit in the Café de Paris. There were stray craters in the park, and one night the Café de Paris got blown to blazes, along with the band, the singer and the customers.

Random havoc.

The phrase come to Rollo Blazer at the end of a long night of wandering devastation, when he realized that this military operation had no plan, no system, no shape. The bombers might skip one street and strike the next: kill here, spare there. Or neither. Or both. Or some other witless combination. All these shuddering blasts and blazes added up to an idiot tantrum: random havoc. He was on his way home when he turned a corner and saw a doubledecker bus standing on its nose in a hole, quite upright. He filmed it and thought: You could bomb every bus route in London every night for a year and this wouldn’t happen again. Two years. Ten. A church clock began to chime and it could not stop. The bell was cracked. It sounded old and weary and touched with despair, and it made a perfect soundtrack. In fact it was beyond perfection, the sort of cinema you wouldn’t dare put in a script in case it looked corny. This wasn’t corny, it was heartbreaking, it was the world turned upside down and tolling its own death. What made it utterly heartbreaking was the knowledge that it wasn’t even cinema, because Rollo wasn’t shooting with sound.

His boss at Crown was an ex-advertising man called Harry Frobisher. Frobisher hadn’t slept much, he’d had to walk most of the way to the office, and when he arrived Rollo Blazer was waiting, asking for a sound recordist to work with him.

“I don’t need your sound,” Harry said. “Shoot mute, I’ll dub in my own sound.

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