Chapter 66
Cook stepped off the bus as it was pulling away, swaying as the momentum carried him forward.
People were streaming along the pavement towards a massive warehouse.
All carried bedding and baskets. Loaves of bread and flasks of tea.
Some were talking cheerfully, others trudged, faces downcast. Cook slipped into the crowd.
As they neared the warehouse, Cook got a sense for how massive it was.
Like filing into an ancient cathedral, the brickwork towering above them.
It seemed an odd choice of a shelter. Gathering together under what would be a mountain of falling bricks if the place was hit.
Perhaps there was some trick to it Cook wasn’t in on.
Some kind of structural integrity – maybe steel beams in the roof.
‘Who set this up?’ Cook asked the man next to him. ‘ARP?’
‘Dunno, mate,’ the stranger said. ‘Just heard it was where everyone was going.’
Cook nodded as if this was valuable information. He kept his place in the wave of people, all being funnelled into the great building through a loading door big enough to let a train pass through. Like livestock, walking up the ramp into the slaughterhouse.
The first thing Cook noticed was the smell. Human waste. Sweat. Fear. It was the smell of the trenches, but in this enclosed space it was worse – even more overpowering. He pushed his way to the side of the flow of people, found a spot by a brick arch where he could get his bearings.
They’d walked in on a set of train tracks, which now led away into the darkness.
To each side of the track, there was a series of brick arches, each about twenty feet wide and forty feet deep, filled at ground level with crates.
In the darkness, on top of the crates, where the roof curved over, Cook saw people.
Some were sitting, looking out at him. Some were lying down, huddled in blankets.
Shadows danced on the blackened brick arches from primus stoves.
Cook saw the man from the bus. He was being helped up onto the crates. Someone had built a staircase out of smaller cases, but it was precarious.
‘All right, Al. Got you a slice.’
Al was ushered through a mass of bodies into the darkness at the back of the arch. At least Al had someone saving a place for him.
The row of arches went on as far as Cook could see. He walked along the tracks, into the darkness. Follow your nose, Gracie had said. Cook did his best to breathe through his mouth, wondering if it would be rude to put his handkerchief over his face, filter out the worst of it.
He’d been walking for two hundred yards when he got to the turntable.
A cavernous open space, spiralling brick arches making a dome above a circular space, criss-crossed with train tracks.
It would be set on rollers, designed to turn a train around.
Leading off from the turntable, like spokes on a wheel, were seven more railway tracks, each leading into their own long tunnel of arches.
On his way in, Cook had passed about ten arches on each side.
Fifty people per arch. That would be about a thousand people along each spoke.
Eight spokes meant eight thousand people.
Cook looked up. He couldn’t see anything suggesting protection from a bomb.
No steel beams. Just thousands and thousands of tons of Victorian brickwork.
A distant explosion caused a shower of brick dust. A young boy sitting in the middle of the turntable, like the king of the castle, looked at the dust, then looked at Cook. The boy shrugged. Cook felt the same. If this place was hit . . .
‘Looking for a place, mate?’ the boy asked.
Cook squatted down, putting himself eye to eye with the boy, who regarded him with a sombre expression.
‘Looking for a person,’ Cook said.
‘We can help,’ the boy said.
‘We?’
The boy nodded behind him. Several pairs of eyes glinted in the dark.
‘A penny’ll get you somewhere to kip,’ the boy said, ‘if you’re not fussy.’
He studied Cook.
‘Can’t work out whether you’re fussy or not. Might be one of those blokes likes to look like he’s going up in the world when he’s not, or might be one of those blokes tries to look poor so he don’t get clobbered when he’s out and about.’
The boy was smart. Perhaps you had to be, to sit in the chair in the middle of the turntable.
‘What’s the going rate for information?’ Cook asked.
‘What’s in it for us?’ the boy asked.
‘I’m looking for Reynolds, from the island,’ Cook said.
The boy didn’t answer. He seemed to be thinking.
‘Call it a shilling,’ he said, eventually.
Cook reached into his pocket and came up with half a crown. He tossed it to the boy.
The boy whistled, and one of his mates shuffled forward. They conferred.
‘Ronnie’s going to take you,’ the boy said. ‘But not all the way. Reynolds and that lot don’t mess about.’
From where they stood on the turntable, some spokes were more inviting than others.
Laughter, flickering light, and the smells of hundreds of dinners being prepared and eaten – all these things converged at the hub.
But one spoke gave out none of these signs of human warmth.
The arched entrance was a dark hole, a blankness that repelled the eye.
Move on, it said, choose one of the other options.
Nothing good this way. Cook didn’t need a guide to tell him which spoke was the one he sought.
Cook’s designated helper stood at the entrance to the tunnel and looked up at him.
‘You sure about this, guv?’ he asked.
‘What’s the worst thing could happen?’ Cook asked.
‘You could get killed,’ the boy said, his matter-of-fact tone at odds with his age.
Cook listened to the sirens, and the distant crump of another bomb landing. Another small corner of the city turned to rubble.
‘We’re all going to get killed,’ Cook said.
‘You’re a barrel of laughs, ain’t you?’ the boy said. He winked at Cook. ‘Come on then, if you’re so eager to get it over with.’
The tunnel was as dark as the entrance had promised.
Cook stepped as quietly as he could on the gravel ballast beneath the tracks.
The boy was silent. Cook had known highly trained soldiers with less skill and stealth.
Cook kept his left hand out, alternately feeling the damp brickwork of the pillars supporting the arches, then rough crates.
As they passed the crates, he felt people stirring in the darkness.
He smelt the sourness of bodies and clothes unwashed for weeks.
This wasn’t just a wartime shelter, this felt like a place where people with no hope lived out their remaining time.