The Rescue Man Read online

  He ducked inside the door and moved towards Richard – he could now recognise his outline – standing on the lip of a small crater and stabbing his finger downwards. Baines peered into the hole, and discerned a chaos on two levels, the upper one of shattered joists and plasterwork, while on the cellar floor below it a figure lay motionless. He looked back at Richard, who in dumbshow was indicating that he would lead the descent. Baines nodded, and watched as his friend manoeuvred himself down the broken limb of a door frame to the level of jagged timber about fifteen feet above the sprawled man. Richard moved cautiously but confidently; for a heavy man he revealed a surprising agility in negotiating the unreliable footholds that offered themselves to the climber. There was a kind of fearlessness in him that Baines had first witnessed when they were at the Sailors’ Home last August. It was as though he had divined by some unearthly intuition that, whatever the danger, he could not be harmed. Baines wondered where this apparent conviction sprang from, and whether there might be some way he could acquire it for himself.

  He had begun his own rather less nimble descent, and had already pincushioned his palm after grasping too eagerly at the splintered door frame. Landing awkwardly from his jump on to the ledge, he had a horrible foreglimpse of embarrassment, wherein Richard would be required to rescue not only the man below but his inadequate partner. Richard had taken off his helmet and gas mask; sweat had dampened his hair and was beading his face. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and blew out his cheeks.

  ‘Blimey. I’m melting under this stuff.’

  Baines struggled out of his mask, and was looking down into the crater. ‘So what do we do about our friend?’

  Richard wrinkled his nose appraisingly, and trained his torch beam over the far side of the wall. ‘Easy. We crawl round the edge and shinny down that length of pipe.’

  It didn’t look at all easy to Baines, but he had resigned himself to doggedly following Richard’s lead, and when the moment came for him to climb down the exposed pipe he did so without even testing it first for support. He reached the bottom with a little leap that Richard acknowledged with a clap on the back.

  ‘Well done, old boy,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s get our man some medical attention.’ He was about to put the whistle to his lips when the man raised himself on one elbow and called through the gloom, ‘Ey, ’ave one of yous gorra ciggy on yer?’

  Richard sighed and looked at Baines, and then they both burst out laughing.

  Later, queueing for tea at the mobile canteen, they agreed it was the most lifelike of all the practice responses they had been involved in so far. The cumbersome gear, the heat from the fires and the wide blast area had contributed a certain degree of realism. But, lacking the genuine component of fear, it still seemed to Baines an unsatisfactory substitute for the actual thing – whatever that might be. Around them medical auxiliaries and bomb ‘victims’ swathed in bloodless bandages now sat smoking, chatting. The day had begun with a huge detonation at a clearance scheme in Bootle, the high explosives intended to simulate a scene of devastation following an air attack. Then a blanket of fake mustard gas was laid down over the area, fires were lit in what remained of the buildings and a posse of volunteers were sent out to secrete themselves in the wreckage: they were instructed to assume a prone position as realistic as possible without endangering themselves, and were asked not to talk to their rescuers. Most dress rehearsals so far had used only dummy casualties, but months of practice had engendered a sense of anticlimax, and the authorities were worried that the stretcher-bearers and ambulance teams dispatched to the bomb scene would become complacent at the prospect of yet another shop dummy to retrieve.

  For Baines the anticlimax had passed into a mood of confused agitation. The sense of relief he had felt last September had dissipated in the months that followed – it was now the beginning of May – and the waiting he had initially believed over had merely entered a new phase of rumour and uncertainty. The swirling current of memory carried him back to the week following the declaration of war, and that prickling sense of terrified excitement as he prepared for his enrolment into the defence of his city – his country. He had turned up on the Wednesday morning, nine o’clock sharp, at Municipal Buildings on Dale Street, and been directed through bustling corridors to a long room laid out in rows of individual desks, as if for an exam. A blackboard stood expectantly at the front. Seats were already being occupied, mostly by men of his own age, and he hurriedly found a vacant one at the back. It made him feel like the class dunce. Some minutes later an army officer strode in, accompanied by a nondescript older man who might have been anything from an accountant to a church alderman.

  The officer waited for the murmur of conversation to subside and then introduced himself as Major Andrews. His brisk, booming tones resonated so confidently around the room that even from the back row he could be heard loud and clear. It was a voice that reminded Baines of Richard. Andrews began by presenting the War Office’s intelligence on the principal types of aircraft used by the Luftwaffe – the Heinkel He 111, the Dornier Do 17, the Junkers Ju 88 – and jotted details of their maximum speeds, ceiling heights and bombloads on the blackboard. He then sketched out ‘possible scenarios’ of destruction following air attacks on a major port such as Liverpool. Baines felt oddly relieved that Andrews could maintain a level, impassive tone while describing the precise effects of concerted bombing on the city – it seemed there would be at least one man, and perhaps others, who would face these cataclysmic horrors without panicking.

  ‘… but I repeat, these casualty figures are only estimates,’ he said. ‘At this point there are still many variables to be considered. They may be lighter and, of course, they may be heavier.’ Baines could hardly believe his ears. How could they be heavier? No wonder they were hurrying along the evacuations. Andrews concluded his lecture and handed over to his companion, Pryce-Jones, who turned out to be a special adviser on the Liverpool Air Raid Precautions Committee. He talked in the same matter-of-fact way as the Major, explaining each of the volunteer services that would have to be at the ready in the event of an attack: street wardens, auxiliary firemen, road repairers, demolition and decontamination squads, first-aid parties, stretcher-bearers, ambulance drivers. The inventory was methodical, the delivery unemotional. Baines’s attention was beginning to drift when the man broached the subject of ‘heavy rescue’. Training for this service, he said, was still at a provisional stage, since there had been little opportunity to make a scientific study of burrowing for bodies in ruined buildings. ‘Essentially, we’re still learning how buildings behave under pressure from high explosives.’

  A deadpan voice piped up, ‘They fall down,’ and a ripple of laughter followed. Pryce-Jones smiled tightly, but continued without any further acknowledgement of the wag. ‘A house can collapse,’ he said, ‘in three different ways. One – by total disintegration into fragments of rubble. Two – by the curving fall of roofs and floors, held at one side while the other swings downwards. Three – by the collapse of floors in the middle while their sides hold’ – here he drew a large V inside a square on the blackboard – ‘beneath the arms of which people on the floor below might be preserved alive. Once any fires have been extinguished, it will be the job of the heavy-rescue man to begin the search. This will mean assessing the strength of a broken building and the means of entry, tunnelling through masses of rubble and creating, as it were, a corridor by which he may reach survivors and return them, and himself, to safety. I hardly need add that this will be laborious, and highly dangerous, work. Above ground, there is the risk of a collapsing wall or staircase. Underground, as well as the possibility of the building’s entire disintegration from above, one faces the additional hazards of burst water mains, gas leaks from fractured pipes, exposed cables and the all-too-likely recurrence of fire. Working quickly in such conditions will, of course, be absolutely imperative. One’s survival – and that of others – may depend on split-second decisions.’

  P
ryce-Jones, with a quick glance around the room, sat down again. Andrews, sober-faced, rose to his feet and nodded his thanks. He turned to his audience. ‘Any questions?’ There was a pause, then a hand went up: ‘What are the hours?’ The laughter was much louder this time, and carried in it, Baines thought, a note of nervous bravado. The reverberations of an attack had just been dialled up to unprecedented levels of intensity, and the safety valve of hilarity was all that could defuse it. Once the questions were done with, they began filing towards the exit, where lists of each volunteer service were pinned to a board, waiting to be signed. Baines, among the last to leave, put his name and address beneath the column marked Heavy Rescue. He noticed there were considerably fewer names in this column than in any of the others.

  From Bootle they caught a bus back into town. Richard’s face was still streaked with dirt and sweat, and Baines presumed his own looked much the same, but nobody on the top deck gave them a second glance. Men reeking of smoke in dark overalls and steel helmets had ceased to be remarkable during the last eight months. Perhaps the sight of them even gave people heart: they were a walking reminder of a city ‘at the ready’. They smoked pensively as the bus jolted through the rush hour.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Baines, ‘was what we did back there of any real value?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Richard, with a yawn.

  ‘Well … I don’t imagine they’re going to bomb us during broad daylight. How will it be, searching through rubble in the dark?’

  ‘Harder, I reckon, but not impossible. You should try rescuing men from a shell-hole while a sniper’s trying to pick you off.’ He spoke without bitterness, as was his habit whenever he mentioned his time at the front. Baines had sometimes been on the verge of asking Richard about the bombardments and the shelling – that obliterating payload screaming down on you – and hitherto had always held back. But now that it had been raised he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘I suppose it must have been terrifying.’

  Richard drew on his cigarette and gazed straight ahead. ‘Pretty much. And when you weren’t terrified you were just bored to sobs. There wasn’t a great deal in between.’

  There was a pause while the conductor collected their fares, then Richard spoke again. ‘Strange thing, when we found that chap lying in the ruins today, I thought of the first time I ever saw a dead man. We were on the march, but a glance was enough. Half of his face had been terribly mauled and burnt, and his body was twisted in odd ways, like a rag doll. There was this awful smell coming off him, blood mixed with the fumes of the shell that had killed him. I was really that close to throwing up, but somehow I kept walking. Then I looked at one or two of the men, and I suppose my face must have been as sick and grey as theirs were.’

  Baines waited, holding back for fear that any interruption might snap this delicate thread of reminiscence. Richard’s voice seemed to be coming from a long distance. ‘That was the difficult thing, especially when zero hour approached. The men would get this glassy-eyed look, as if they were in a trance, and I felt they were looking to me for comfort – even though I was trembling like a leaf. I just hoped my voice wouldn’t quake when I gave the order to fix bayonets. Eventually I got lucky, I was assigned a sergeant named McKendrick – he came from Liverpool, as a matter of fact. He must have been at least ten years older than me. Hard as nails, and his language was appalling, but quite wonderful with the men. He looked after them in a way I never could, kept them going in spite of everything. By the time of Third Ypres I would have staked my life on him, mine and the whole company’s. Well, the order had come for an attack – we had to capture a place called Kitchener’s Wood – and this indescribable noise was falling around us, shell after shell bursting over the trench. I’d blown the whistle and was climbing up the ladder when I felt a tug at my elbow. I looked round and saw that McKendrick was trying to say something, I had no idea what, the barrage was so deafening it tore any other sound away. But then he put his mouth to my ear and yelled, “Till the very last, sir.” I think I patted him on the shoulder, and then we were up and over.’

  He fell silent. Baines felt he had been holding his breath for the last two minutes. ‘Till the very last,’ Richard repeated, as if in a daze. ‘For some reason, I knew at that moment I wasn’t going to see him again. And I never did.’

  Baines bowed his head, and nothing else was said for the rest of the journey.

  They alighted at Lime Street, and walked past an Echo news-stand blazoning the headline: GERMANY INVADES LOW COUNTRIES.

  Richard turned to Baines. ‘No hiding from it now.’

  Baines was still pondering the story of Sergeant McKendrick and Richard’s presentiment of doom. He suddenly needed the anonymous comfort of a pub. ‘Have a drink?’

  Richard shook his head. ‘I’ve a few errands to do. But we could meet later – or better still, come round for dinner.’

  ‘Grand.’

  ‘See you about eight o’clock.’

  Time was when Baines would have felt awkward about such an invitation, but in the months since they had met last summer he had become very thick with Richard and Bella. They had a large circle of friends, he’d discovered, gained either through the studio or else the university, where Bella did some part-time teaching. He assumed that he had been adopted by them, but gradually came to realise that the condescension he had first imagined was in fact a vigorous conviviality. He wouldn’t have minded either way. He had never known people with such an appetite for parties and dinners, and he could smile at the irony that wartime had coincided with the most sociable period of his life so far.

  Their enthusiasm for the Liverpool book had also had a galvanising influence on him. By the end of October they had finished annotating and photographing most of the city’s significant architecture. All that remained to be covered was the seven-mile stretch of docks ranged along the shore, a prospect that once would have daunted him; yet with their help he had taken on this final leg of the study with a renewed purpose. Richard in particular had been a tireless spur, and on his days off would cycle down to the docks to meet him. Needing to work quickly he had even lent Baines a camera and between them they set about recording the brooding mass of warehouses, embankments, swing bridges and gates. Towering castles of brick warehousing stood impassive and apparently indestructible; Baines seemed to be forever craning his neck upwards to identify the names and dates projected high along the line of parapet.

  There was one photograph from these dockland ventures he especially cherished. He had been walking past the Goree Piazzas early one winter morning when through the mist that had drifted off the river he heard the sound of hooves ringing on the cobbles. He turned to see an old shire horse pulling a dockload alongside the eighteenth-century arcade that gave the place its name. Something about the animal caught at his heart; he looked down into his viewfinder – it was an old Rolleiflex of Richard’s – and clicked the shutter. He hadn’t thought of it again until Bella was looking through a sheaf of developed prints a few weeks later.

  ‘You’ll like this one,’ she said, handing it to him.

  The phantasmal light, the mournful heaviness of the horse’s movement, the oblivious driver and his load, the rusticated arcade in the background. It was a fluke, he knew, one of those beautiful accidents of composition and timing, but more than that, it was the strange elision of past and present that struck him. There was nothing, not one detail, to suggest the scene might have looked any different fifty or even a hundred years ago.

  As the limbo of the phoney war stuttered into January Baines became increasingly absorbed in the book: if it went on any longer he might even finish it! Then a few weeks later came a letter from Plover Books informing him, ‘with regret’, that due to the war and the spiralling production costs, all projects that were not deemed absolutely essential – that meant his – would be indefinitely postponed. Given that it was his laggardly ways which had delayed it in the first place, he felt unable to work up a sense of rig
hteous indignation. The book would to have wait.

  But the photographs were again on his mind when he arrived for dinner at Slater Street that evening. Richard and Bella lived on the top two floors above the office. He felt his way up the stairs, their very tread and creak familiar to him, so regular a guest had he become. He paused on the half-landing, where the skylight had spilt a small illumination, to look at the painting of Bella, signed at the bottom left-hand corner: Nicholson. He was still undecided about it. Perhaps the chartreuse green of her cardigan was unfortunate – it gave her complexion a sickly tint – and he had got the jaw wrong, too, it made her look horsey. But there was something there, the sense of quizzical amusement in her eyes, the confident way she held herself, that Baines found somehow more truthful than the photograph of her in the office below.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ Through the gloom he could see Bella at the top of the stairs and, surprised in front of her portrait, he endured the queer sensation of having been caught spying on her. ‘Come up, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

  He followed her into the living room, where Richard was talking to a gangly, dark-haired youth dressed in RAF uniform. Bella strode over to the boy, who submitted with a blush to her coddling embrace.