Small Island by Andrea Levy

Author:Andrea Levy [Andrea Levy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780755359714
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2012-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-seven

Queenie

Sometimes they were still smouldering like a burnt pie pulled from an oven. The pungent stench of smoke, the dust from rubble steaming off them. Shuffling in or being carried. Some wrapped in blankets, their clothes having gone flying off with the blast. Blackened, sooty faces, red-rimmed, sunken eyes with whites that suddenly flashed, startled, to look around them agog like they’d stumbled on to another planet. And shivering, there was so much shivering.

Population, we called them at the rest centre. The bombed-out who’d had the cheek to live through the calamity of a world blown to bits. Leaving the cardboard coffins empty but filling up the classrooms of the old school building with their tragic faces and filthy clothes that made miners fresh up from the pit look like Christmas fairies. They came in as a crowd like you’d wade through on the Underground or elbow during a department-store sale. And that’s how some saw them – population, not people. Not mothers called Mavis who, stunned speechless, clutched two small children crying for their mum to make the banging stop so they could get to sleep. Not a ten-year-old son called Ralph, trousers soggy with wee, who tried to save bunks with carefully placed socks, jumpers and a fierce face. Not a husband called Sid, whose bloodstained arms held each one of his family in turn to tell them he’d go back to recover what he could from their bombed home. Not a young woman called Christine, who clawed at a warden’s back begging him to find her fiancé who was lost under a toppled wall. Just population. A mass whose desperation made them seem like the feckless, and whose drab presence drained the classrooms of all colour until even the white potties in the corner glinted like diamonds. I would never forgive Hitler for turning human beings into that.

And it was my job to find out who they had once been and where they had once lived. Even the ones who couldn’t remember or couldn’t hear because a blast was still ringing in their ears. It was raucous some days at the rest centre, me straining to hear those weary fragile voices. Other days were so frighteningly silent I wished someone would scream or even start a chorus of the dreadful ‘Roll Out The Barrel’. And sometimes when there were just too many – when even I had to fight my way in – I’d forget a queue, just turn round to the first person I saw and say, ‘Do you need helping? Good, then I’ll start with you.’

Twelve-hour shifts, fourteen sometimes, I had to do at Campden School rest centre. And when I got home Bernard would complain that there was nothing on the table except dust. It wasn’t for himself that he was worried, he took an unusually long time explaining, it was for me. ‘I’m just worried that this job is proving too much for you, what with everything . . .’

Meanwhile at the rest centre two women were sitting there grinning gratefully at me.

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