Page 28 of Strangers in Time

T HE R EMAINS OF J ANE

T HE NEXT NIGHT C HARLIE ventured, as he sometimes did, to the sacred place. Several years had passed now, but the crater was still filled with rubble. And yet plants like hollyhocks, buddleia, and willow herbs, from fledgling straight on to robust, had reclaimed the land where the school had been, producing life from where once had occurred sudden, violent death.

It had been Charlie’s first day at the new school—they had moved to another neighborhood after their other home had been bombed. He and his mother had walked, holding hands, down the street. However, the closer they had drawn to their destination the more nervous Charlie had become, until he was tugging forcefully against his mother’s grip, pleading with her to let them stay together, and not to leave him in this strange place.

His mother had squatted down in front of him so they were eye to eye, smoothed down his hair and tidied up his clothes, and told him how the other children would welcome him as their new chum. They would read together and play together and learn so much that his head would be as full as his belly after a good meal, and how so very wonderful that would feel.

And because he loved his mother more than he loved anything else, and because she had never, ever spoken to him an untruth, they had continued on. A hug in the front corridor of the school and then they had said their final, tearful goodbyes.

Neither one at the time could have realized that an eager Bremen-born Luftwaffe bombardier riding in the belly of a Dornier 17, and following the distinctive line of the Thames, was about to end his mother’s life and transform her son’s future in ways unimaginable.

Charlie perched on a section of brick that had once been part of a wall of the school, slipped off his cap, rested his bony elbows on his slender thighs, and closed his eyes. He remembered the sirens, and then after that the whistle of the falling bombs.

Charlie thought a boy had been doing the whistling. He had no idea that it was the wind being pushed through a set of organ pipes riveted onto the bomb fins by the Germans to instill even more fear in the people down below. Jericho’s Trumpets, they would be dubbed.

For some reason, the warning sirens had been quite late in sounding, and thus they were told there was no time to go to a proper shelter. Wearing their gas masks, they had all frantically rushed back into their classroom and the teacher had shut the door. They crouched under their desks shaking with fear, as the sounds of the planes filtered through the ceiling.

When the wave of bombs struck, Charlie’s memory of the day vanished, but returned when his eyes opened. Above him was only darkness because he had been buried in the collapse of what had once been a safe haven for children. For the longest time Charlie had thought that he was dead and that this was what the Heaven promised by the vicar looked like. He could feel neither his arms nor his legs. His small chest was compressed; his lungs were full of things they shouldn’t be. His ears contained nothing but a piercing, dull hum that apparently no other sound could penetrate.

The darkness was finally lifted off him when anxious hands reached down and pulled him back into the light. One searing odor hit him intently, but he didn’t recognize it: cordite, ubiquitous in all explosives.

Charlie was carried on a stretcher to a bus with many other wounded because the ambulance fleet had been overwhelmed ferrying other victims to hospital. His injuries—a broken arm, a shattered collarbone, a wrenched ankle, bruises over his entire body—were relatively minor compared to those of other victims, he had been told. And his head wasn’t filled with horror from the ordeal because it had happened so fast. Sustained, suffocating blackness, then a burst of light, like being born all over again.

How he and some others at the school had survived was anyone’s guess. A miracle, the newspapers had said, no doubt thrilled to have something positive to report amid the tragedy.

Charlie forgot about everything else when two men in baggy suits came to visit him in hospital along with his grandparents that night. Gran looked like she wanted no more part of living, while his grandfather merely stared at his shoes. Sobbing, Gran had gripped Charlie so tightly all of his injuries screamed in protest. But Charlie’s sole focus was the men, who stared at him with an odd mixture of sincere sorrow and professional weariness.

It was they who had told him that his mother had been among those killed. When the late sirens had finally started, she had ignored her personal safety and rushed to the school to retrieve her son. Right before she got there, a bomb had landed barely ten feet from her, witnesses had said.

And then she, like the building, had ceased to exist. Jane Matters had been transformed into a mere memory, simply because she had wanted her son to go to a proper school and had walked him there on his first day because she loved him so.

Charlie had known his mother was dead long before he had been told. Else she would have been sitting next to him all that time, holding his hand, cooling his brow, and whispering things that would matter greatly to the only child she would ever bear.

And now, all this time later, the underlying shock remained such a part of him that Charlie didn’t even realize it was a part of him. Just as a heart thudded in synchronicity, lungs inflated, and kidneys filtered, the shock continually palpitated throughout him, as though he had grown a new organ, of unceasing, debilitating anxiety.

Charlie’s last image of his mother was her walking away down the hall. She had turned once and smiled, managing to calm, with just her look, the fear of her only child’s being left there without her. Then she had turned back around, and gone to her death.

He stared across the width of the road where lay the nearest Underground station, which had been miraculously undamaged by the bombing that had destroyed the school. There Charlie and his grandparents had slept, night after night, either on the tracks or on the platforms with hundreds of others as explosives dropped all over the city. Incendiary devices or parachute flares had often fallen first, in large clusters called breadbaskets, igniting buildings, and also lighting the way for the wave of long bombs that would do most of the damage and take most of the lives.

The incendiaries were nasty things, made of magnesium that burned hot enough to melt solid steel. They crashed into buildings and caused conflagrations that were nearly impossible to put out, because magnesium was impervious to water. The ingenuity of killing via warfare was often beyond belief, Charlie sometimes thought.

Lying on the tracks or suspended over them in a rude hammock made from a slit burlap bag, Charlie had closed his eyes and tried not to listen to what was going on overhead. Then came the shaking of the earth in a way that bled uncontrollable terror among all down there. Charlie would listen intently to the return fire from the ground and pray that every single British shell would find its mark.

Someone had set up a piano in the station, and the crowd would engage in singalongs each night. The Women’s Voluntary Services, or WVS, would also provide tea and sandwiches, which Charlie very much looked forward to, because it was often the most expansive meal he would have. And libraries donated books, so he would sometimes sit and try to read to keep his mind off the bombs. But it was not easy, because waiting to die like that was not natural, Charlie felt.

Along their way home, after the all clear had sounded, he and his grandparents had circumnavigated holes where something had once been, and averted their eyes from crumpled, blasted bodies that had, not too long before, been living. It was a field of debris spawned by the depravity of humankind, minus the human.

The new school Charlie had ended up going to after his mother’s death was a room in the basement of a disused and shabby government building. It contained a single chalkboard, a few chairs, and one weary teacher for forty children. Most students sat on the floor wearing their gas masks, which was a stark reminder to Charlie of what had happened to both him and his mother that day.

Every time he drew close to the basement his heart seemed to seize up, his muscles tensed, and his vision blurred. When he was actually inside the dank, gloomy room with his mask on, his mind shut down and the teacher would look at Charlie, who always sat hunched over in a little ball, with pity. Then she moved on to those children who could still learn.

Then one day Charlie had written out the letter in Gran’s hand and delivered it to the basement before anyone arrived there. And that was the end of Charlie’s formal education, and the commencement of his informal one.

Charlie’s thoughts returned to the present and he rose from the wall and left the place where his mother had died. He spent the rest of the Sabbath cleaning out a shed by the river for two bob and a soft apple. The apple constituted both his breakfast and his lunch, for Gran had had next to nothing to put in the icebox for his breakfast, or for his Sunday lunch. Her reduced wages had been late in coming—and besides which, the market shelves where she could shop with her ration book and few coins were bare.

After a meager supper that night, Charlie gave Gran his shilling and explained that on his way home from a walk, a man in a shiny hat had been inclined to be charitable.

Gran said, “Well, it does the heart good to know that there is still decency out there. That people do care. The rich and the poor in the fight together, eh, Charlie?”

Shortly after her gentle snores reached his cupboard that night Charlie had gone down the fire escape.

“Oi, Charlie.”

He turned to see Lonzo standing there, waiting.