Coming Up, 13th October 1940

The littluns were crying. They were always crying, even when nothing had happened yet. It was like Year of the Tears or something. Even the foreigners, those Belgians, their littluns were crying and it sounded much the same as English crying. If you thought they didn’t have no reason to cry then it’d probably drive you barmy.

But they did have reason. Hell’s bells, even we adults had reason, but it didn’t stop us from being stiff upper-lipped. It didn’t stop us from being English about it.

I spoke to this one lad. Quite young, he was; only about thirty-something. Randal…Mandall…Something like that. Him and his littluns were bunking down with the refugees. That’s where they were allocated. They’d been blasted out of two houses in the last forty-eight hours. Two! Imagine that!

Anyways, he was a pleasant sort. His littlest—Pauline, I think he said—couldn’t have been no more than a year, year and a half, chocolate-coloured hair, big eyes that were red-rimmed from crying, she clung to his leg and smudged his trousers with tears.

We was all squashed in, no room to move—least not if you didn’t want to fall over the edge onto the tracks. I got my space and I made the most of it, hunched on the floor under a Potato Pete poster. The SM was wandering up and down, making sure everyone was doing good, counting heads and saying ‘evening’ and ‘are you quite comfortable there, miss?’ No one was comfortable, but everyone said they were.

Even down here, on the platform, above the wailing sound of the sirens, we could make out the grunting engines of a plane that had to’ve been circling for near on half an hour. It was making people nervous. A couple of the lads halfway down the platform started singing some forces’-sweetheart songs to try to cheer people up. They started off with A Star Fell out of Heaven and by the time they were doing We’ll Meet Again, more than half the folks were singing along.

That’s when everything kind of went a bit silent. Just for a second, like. Not even a second. Hardly noticeable, really. And then there was a whistling sound and a crash and a bang and the roof came in, right down over the top of those Belgians and the others.

You didn’t have no time to process the information. You were on your feet, half from your own desire to stand and half from the force of the blast up the north end of the platform, sort of lifting you off your rump and onto your feet.

The roof came in. The walls came in. The little tiles from the walls went shooting off in all directions when the plaster torqued and cracked and crumbled. One of them smacked me right on the temple, spun me round, and I went down to meet the floor, or the floor came up to meet me.

Everything went black, like I had gone blind or something. I might’ve passed out, probably. And then there was silence again. I had gone blind and deaf. I turned onto my back and shook my head but I still couldn’t hear. My vision cleared from black to blood-red to normal and I saw feet stomping this way and that. I could have been crushed.

I rolled back against the wall, got my bearings, shook my head again. The silence was the worst thing; if I could hear what was going on it’d be all right, probably. I sat up, felt my temple, my ear, where the tile had punched me. At first I thought my ear was missing, but it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess.

The top end of the platform was gone, obliterated. The SM was running down the platform, pushing people out of the way, waving at them to move back. A man helped me to my feet. He opened his mouth and said something to me but I couldn’t hear what. ‘What?’ I said—and I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I held my hand to my ear and felt blood squishing through my fingers.

The man pushed me down the platform—towards the rubble, I thought, but he was pushing me to the exit. Everyone was clambering over the top of each other to get out. ‘You can’t go out there,’ I shouted, and either everyone was as deaf as I was or they were too busy panicking to listen. ‘You can’t go out there, they’ll shoot you down!’

The SM was running back along the platform towards the exit. I got him by the arm. ‘You can’t go out there, they’ll kill us!’ I shouted in his face. I don’t know what he said in reply. He could have called my old mother a loose woman for all I knew. He pushed forward, shouting something or other, and then got swallowed up by the horde of people trying to get out, to get free, to get blown up on the outside of the station.

I shook my head again. My hearing was coming back, a faint buzz at first, then a loud roar of everything all at once—the sirens wailing, the people screaming, the children crying, the walls crumbling, the wind whistling down the tunnel, the SM shouting, ‘Let me out, I need to get help.’

And then I heard someone shouting above all the others. ‘Henry!’ the voice called. ‘Pauline!’ it screamed.

I looked around, saw that man—Mandall; whatever he was called—half buried in the rubble, half sticking up like a candle in a cake. And I thought about his little girl, the chocolate-haired girl. I thought about her buried under all those bricks and mortar. I thought about her, unable to breathe, trying to shout for her daddy, lost in the wreckage, not knowing where she was, maybe not knowing who she was.

I think Mandall looked at me, but maybe he couldn’t see me well, what with all the blood and all.

And then I was being pushed on out through the platform exit and up the wooden escalator towards the ground level.

‘Where’s your mask?’ someone shouted at me. Everyone was shouting; you had to or you wouldn’t be heard.

‘What?’ I said, and then realised I’d left it back down on the platform. I turned to go back.

‘Too late now,’ someone said and pushed me forward. I was practically lifted off my feet in the crowd and carried outside, through the iron gate and round the blast-proof wall.

Everyone was coming out, coming out into the open, coming out into the battlefield, coming out and looking up at the sky.

The bomb had gone down through the building at the right of the station, torn through three storeys and down onto the platform.

I thought about the people who were now homeless because of it. I thought about Mandall and the others, the Belgians and whoever else was stuck down there.

‘Is this the stuff of Life?’ someone next to me said.

And I thought maybe it was.

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In memory of the 17 people who lost their lives in the bomb attack on London’s Bound’s Green tube station on the evening of 13th October, 1940.