Ashes to Ashes Read Online Free Page A

cathedral roof tops above. If I joined their ranks, I’d probably be in the way.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    I looked around and saw, through the gloom, a familiar tin hat above a cherub’s face. It was not, however, a face at rest. It was strained, older-looking than it really was and the eyes were shining with something I must admit I found alarming.
    ‘Er . . .’
    ‘Listen, Mr . . .’ George said. ‘There are hundreds of these fire bombs hitting our roof, we’ve no actual water supply, and so the Watch are having to soak the dreadful things using stirrup pumps. We’re being attacked, Mr . . .’
    ‘H-Hancock.’
    ‘Mr Hancock, I think that Hitler wants us this night!’ George said. ‘I think he wants the cathedral!’ One of his arms shot out towards me and briefly grabbed my shoulder. ‘We have to stop him! We are stopping him!’
    And then as quickly as he’d arrived, he left, running towards the stairs I felt I should be going up. George, whatever his position in the cathedral, was going to go and do his bit to protect it. I was, if I were honest, just getting away from the crypt and my own fear of being buried alive. Christ Almighty, I didn’t even have a torch to help me look for this little girl! I stood by the red lamp underneath the dome, stock still as if I were waiting for a bus.
    But then what was I supposed to do? What could someone like me even think about doing? I bury the dead. Sometimes, these days, I don’t even do that properly, by which I mean that I don’t always tell the truth as I once did back in the good old days. I lie to relatives. I say things like, ‘Here in this coffin, love, is the body of your old dad. Peaceful and at rest he is, dressed him to meet his maker myself, sweetheart.’ I know there’s only a hand, a burst torso and nothing to even tell me whether the stuff the rescue lads pulled out of the rubble is male or female. All I know is that the woman’s father is dead and that his family need a funeral. They need the dignity the Luftwaffe took away from their father when their bombs reduced him to atoms. Not all the victims of the bombing can be found and so people like me tell lies. We tell lies for the best of reasons, but we still tell them and, barmy or not, that doesn’t sit right with me. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, I even killed back in the Great War, the First Lot as us old soldiers like to call it. But mad and bloodstained as I might be, I was never a liar before now. As I stood there next to that dim red lamp, with the sounds of brave men putting out fires all around me, I could have wept if I hadn’t known it was only self pity. What a sad sight I would have made – had he really seen me – for the screaming man who rushed past me and up the stairs to the Whispering Gallery now. As it was he just glanced at me and shouted as he went. ‘It’s the dome!’ he yelled. ‘We’ve had a telephone message telling us the dome is on fire!’
    Sometimes you don’t think, you just do whatever it is that needs doing – even if you can’t really know what that is. I followed the shouting man up the stairs – he was running, and I ran for a bit until my lungs gave out. I’m not a lover of spiral staircases anyway, and the one up to the Whispering Gallery is narrow, like a corkscrew. Dark at the best of times, the few windows in the stairwell were blacked out. I groped my way forwards, chest bursting from lack of air, stumbling on every other stair as my legs began to give up. I counted the steps to distract myself, not that it helped in reality, nothing would have done.
    I’d been up to the Whispering Gallery once before, as a child, and had no memory of it being as bad as all that. In fact, my recollection of the stairwell had been of something quite wide. But then I’d probably been about seven years old at the time and so it had seemed wide to me then. I’m a good six foot tall now and so the narrowness of the stairwell,