Ashes to Ashes Read Online Free

first-aid support to the Watch – wives of those who worked in the church. There were also, the vocal Mr Smith included, members of the Watch itself taking rest breaks down there too.
    St Paul’s Fire Watch is mainly made up of men from the Royal Institute of British Architects. It was formed originally in the Great War to protect the cathedral from Zeppelins. But in 1939 it was reformed to deal with this latest bloody madness. Mr Smith, Mr Neeson and two others were resting on cots when I entered the crypt. One or two of them looked at me and I think the other shelterers, too, with not very well disguised contempt. What they thought we might be able to do out amongst the fires I couldn’t even imagine. But then for me personally being in the crypt, though safe from the flames for the time being, quickly proved to not be a good idea. I don’t know what, even now, St Paul’s Cathedral weighs, but it’s heavy, there’s a lot of it, and in my head all I could hear was the sound of it caving in and crushing me. Burying me alive, just like the mud of Flanders had buried so many of my mates, smothering the last bit of life out of them. I knew as soon as I sat down next to the Jewish lady that I couldn’t be there for very long. As the young lad George left, so the noises in my head grew louder, voices describing how it would be to drown in dust and mud and rubbish. After Mr Neeson had said hello and I’d exchanged a few words with him, I began to hum, tunelessly. I sometimes do this particularly if I’m with other people I don’t know. It stops me answering the voices back. But the lady by my side didn’t like my humming.
    ‘Can you stop that, please, sir,’ she said. In her eyes, I could see her disapproval of me quite apart from the humming. She was Jewish, but I was a ‘darkie’ and I noticed that she shuffled just slightly away from me as I sat down. I shut up. Words kept on wanting to burst out of my mouth, especially when there were very big explosions outside, but I held them in. I held them in until the subject of that young girl came up. I’ll be honest, the disappearance of the girl with the blond hair and the dirty mouth was the perfect excuse for me to get out of there and up above ground once again. So I volunteered for it. I would have crawled across glass and fought anyone else who might have wanted to do it instead of me, and so what happened afterwards was in a way, my own fault. I have only myself to blame for young Milly and the story of her, me and the night of 29 December 1940.
    As soon as I got to the top of the stairs up into the body of the cathedral I knew I was going to have my work cut out for me. From the sound of it incendiaries were falling in their hundreds, on to the roof. There was noise, if not light, everywhere.
    A bloke’s voice said, ‘The dry riser’s packed up! Dean, we’ve got no water!’
    ‘Thank the good Lord that we have reserves!’ a flustered but nevertheless posh voice replied. ‘We will have to use the stirrup pumps, sand bags . . .’
    There was water, but apparently the main supply had failed. The Dean, the man in charge of the cathedral, had sounded to me confident of what he called his reserves, but in the meantime, men were running in the direction of the cathedral’s many roofs. Every part of the building has its own roof – the nave, the dome, the Great West Door. So many places for incendiary devices to lodge their evil selves!
    I’d been told that Mr Phillips, the watchman who had apparently brought the little blonde girl into the cathedral, was up in the Whispering Gallery. Unless I came across the child by chance in the church itself, it seemed to me a good first step in locating her was to talk to Mr Phillips. But then a lot of other people, if the sound of the boots on the stairs to the upper parts of building were anything to go by, were going up there too, the Whispering Gallery being a first step, as it were, to getting out on to the