St. Saviour’s School
S T . S AVIOUR’S S CHOOL
A S THE RAIN PICKED up, Charlie felt drops of it creep inside his threadbare coat, which was missing half the material and associated warmth it had started out with. He passed by a building where the facade was gone, revealing a twisting staircase leading to an upper floor that was no longer there. He glanced at a sodden newspaper lying on the street. There was a blurry photo of a stocky, balding man with burned bits of coal for eyes and a pugnacious jaw. He was holding a fat cigar, his waistcoat fronted by a stout timepiece on a chain.
Charlie knew that this man was the prime minister. He had told his people to be strong, and calm and patient, while the world fell apart all around them. And they had, for years, mostly done just as he asked. Yet there were limits to people’s willingness and ability to sacrifice, and for Charlie and many like him, these limits were growing steadily nearer.
For tonight’s task Charlie had reliable information that St. Saviour’s rear door had a lock that could be defeated with the right tool and skill, both of which Charlie possessed. Just inside this door was a till with the money students paid for their meals. Maybe a few quid. Maybe many pounds. Certainly it would be enough to purchase secondhand bin shoes.
He calculated the timing of his operation. His grandmother would not be up until five. Each morning she left him his school lunch tin, and the food in the icebox for his breakfast. Then she went to work at the bakery shop. She believed that Charlie awoke, ate his breakfast, and then hurried off to school with his lunch tin and a heart eager to learn.
Instead, over a year ago, he had forged a letter in her hand, informing his teacher that his grandmother and he had moved to the country. The woman had freely accepted this because many people had traded dirty rubble and wretched loss for trees and open green fields, along with a centuries-old drafty stone church in which to pray for something better than what was currently available in London. He had been afraid that he might run into his former teacher at some point, which would reveal his lie. However, Charlie had learned that she had died in a bombing a month later. It was emblematic of the world they lived in now that Charlie had not been devastated by the woman’s violent passing. There were simply too many people dying all around him, from bombs and even more from sickness, to dwell long on any one of them.
Yet it was not the same experience for everyone. Rich people’s shelters weren’t in coal cellars, tube stations, an Andy bomb shelter, or under-the-stairs cupboards. They went to the Ritz or the Dorchester or the Savoy for pampering and full English breakfasts before being whisked off to country estates in chauffeured motorcars. At least that was what Charlie had often heard, including from his gran, and therefore fully believed.
He nimbly clambered over the school’s low gate and dropped quietly inside the darkened grounds.
St. Saviour’s was two stories tall and built of only the finest forged brick and quarried stone. For some inexplicable reason, as with St. Paul’s, no bomb had ever scored its hardened, noble hide.
Imperious white columns fronted the entrance. Dramatic moldings soared horizontally overhead. An elegant fanlight topped the pair of imposing solid oak front doors. A statue of a solemn-looking gent clad in a frock coat and gripping a walking stick and a book stood as weathered guard outside. Whether this chap was St. Saviour, Charlie didn’t know. He did manage a smile at the thought of a hallowed saint in a ridiculous coat destined to stand in the rain and muck for all of eternity.
Charlie would not be going in the front door. For East End blokes like him, the tradesman’s entrance would be the expected one for all their natural lives.
Unfortunately, he found the rear portal had two locks fronting it, stacked one on top of the other. This was an unexpected dilemma.
Charlie took out a sturdy piece of metal with a precise bend at the end and a protruding bit of blackened iron on its top side shaped in the form of a rectangle. He had been given the tool by his mate Eddie Gray. Eddie said his father had claimed it could defeat 90 percent of the locks in all of England. One like it had passed to Eddie when, years before, his father had died during a botched armed robbery. Eddie, who was good at making things, had fashioned a second lockpick and given it to Charlie. Eddie had also patiently instructed him on how to overcome a lock with it.
Charlie worked away intently, twisting the metal this way and that, while feeling through his fingers the guts of the lock moving around. It would be easier and simpler to pinch things from the open stalls of Brick or Petticoat Lanes back in the East End. Yet he didn’t like stealing from his own kind, and they had no spare boots there anyway.
He finally heard a soft click. Charlie turned the knob and it rotated freely. However, when he tried his instrument and skill on the top lock, Charlie could make no progress. After a few minutes of concentrated effort, he withdrew the pick in despair. This must be one of the 10 percent of the locks his tool couldn’t conquer.
Bloody well figures.
The high-set windows on the sides of the building were iron-barred. There was no iron left in the East End; it had all been stripped and melted down for the war effort. But this wasn’t the East End. One ventured “up” to the West End, but “down” to the East End, and those terms were literal in all possible senses. He had been told by one constable that in Charlie’s world you had your costermongers, fish curers, and thieves, with the latter adding up to about nine in ten of the population, the bobby reckoned. And he had included Charlie in that criminal group, although the lack of hard evidence at the time had sent Charlie on his way with only a stiff caution instead of the darbies put on with a swift ride to the clink to follow.
Charlie clutched the bars, hoisting himself up and peering through the glass. Looking in instead of out was his lot in life, it seemed.
Then he let go and fell to the damp earth.
He’d been lied to. There was probably no money in the till here. There was probably no till. The two boys who had told him about this opportunity didn’t have parents and had stayed with a hodgepodge of distant relatives, friends, fosters, and child minders. Recently, they had been sent to an orphanage just outside of London, but had broken out, they had informed Charlie, after telling him how awful it had been.
“You ain’t even got a name in there, Charlie, just a number,” said Lonzo Rossi. “I was bloody T207 or some such, but I always just been Lonzo.”
Eddie Gray, Lonzo’s best mate, had said nothing, but had looked off into the distance with an expression that spoke to Charlie of traumatic experience.
Charlie jogged back to the east and soon found himself in the heart of Covent Garden. A minute later the rain was bucketing down so hard that he could barely see; his sore feet felt encased in stone. And he still had a four-mile trek ahead of him to Bethnal Green. He stumbled along until he saw a bit of light coming from an alley. He peered down its mouth, conscious of the silence all around him, except for the drum-drum of the falling rain. In the drench, he saw a glimmer of light from a shop. At this hour that was truly remarkable. And it drew Charlie like metal to a magnet.