Dad was a Blitz Rat

So long as we swore to keep mum, not even to tell our Pup pals in the Bug Hole picture house, Dad let me and my little sister Liz keep bits and bobs on good nights, big brag nights like March 8th. Saddlebags, socks and pockets stuffed full of Objet d’blitz, trolleying our treasures back and forth took eight trips before we got home. Cranberry vase, Napoleon’s brass mug we mistook in the dark for a decapitated kid, rolls of soiled ration books, old silver coins, a gold ring, French perfume, admiralty shirts and on a mantlepiece in King’s Street two lucky China monkeys survived a blast that’d pulverised everything else to fine dust.

This was the Westminster Windfall of 1941.

Dad was already waiting for us at home after the all-clear. Stripped down to pants, socks and anti-stoop brace, he smoked at the kitchen table, still giddy from carting boodles of Selfridges furs. Silver wicks twinkled in his eyes, meaning it’d been a good night, turned out a great night, so me and Liz crossed our hearts and hoped to die, not to tell a soul, and he pulled a mangled saxophone out of his bag for me, for Liz a pair of tap shoes saved from Café de Paris.

The sax farted a noise deranged by dents, which got us giggling. Dad said squeeze a tune out every day for luck, so holding it between my bloody knees I blew a Stuka. Liz’s shoes weren’t any old clogs, he said they’d belonged to a now sadly departed star of the stage, but as long as she danced in his shoes twice a day, danced with heart in those dead star’s shoes, Snakehips would rub off on her and she’d be twice the star.

Mum’s spirit often appeared in his Players pall. Look at our Star and Shar Mother, he said. He put a necklace of lovely dud pearls onto the pile of her shrine on a shelf above the stove, where a framed photo of Mum as Pitti-Sing hung above Southend pebbles and other pretty things we’d added. Liz laid dried pansies and I sprinkled Mum’s shelf with the French smell that’d stuck to me all night.

After New Burlington Street Blitz Rats Firewatchers sent us to Chester Mews, where a wardrobe of perfume bottles exploded. Just two bottles hadn’t shattered. Butchering my hands, knees and elbows crawling on a bed of scented glass to get at a silver lampstand, Soir de Paris seared my blood. Talented Liz didn’t leave with a single scratch, wriggling under slabs, squeezing into holes, picking up gems and jewellery like shells at the beach. I’d mastered invisibility using a pitch-black tin hat and tarpaulin, held a record take jimmying metres and was famous in the Bug Hole for withstanding flabbergasting heat. Hauling to the Bishop’s friendly stash shelter, Mr Bishop said I smelt like Lady Godawful. Mrs Bishop dabbed my bloody hands and as usual wouldn’t let us leave until we’d had bread and tea.

Putting his hands inside the tap shoes, Dad danced them across the kitchen table singing Run, Rabbit, Run. Little Liszt played her toy piano and I bled the sax and we had our own Café de Paris cabaret on Piggot Street. Dad could sing, he sung half his old revue repertoire until light goaded the blinds and it wouldn’t be long before he had to be out moonlighting as a rubble-shoveller on the same daylight streets we’d been busy with Blitz Rats business by night. But it’d been a big night, so Dad got out the budgies for a bird Mikado rehearsal and arranged their painted perches, rings, tightropes and trapezes. Liz knew all the tunes. I helped shepherd AWOL budgies back into position on stage. He was hoarse from singing so hummed. Of living things, Dad loved us, his birds and the Eel best of all.

Liz wanted to keep the lucky China monkeys as charms. We’d already had a third and fourth wind by the time Blitz Rats Firewatchers sent us to King’s Street. She whistled me over to see sticking out of heavy rubble a pudgy blue finger. Blue and metallic under matchlight, it moved feebly like a salt slug when we held the match closer. I guessed it’d been wedged there awhile. We listened for groans. Crouched beside the blue finger, I tried reading its twitches in Morse Code but nothing it said made any sense. I worked hard twisting the gold ring off with Vaseline and seeming relieved the blue finger flopped.

While Liz rooted through the blue finger’s bedroom wreck, I shooed off a little limping dog sniffing around the kitchen crater. Liz always sided with damaged animals, she couldn’t have let the mutt fend for itself and if I hadn’t hurled it into the street we’d have lost time. Before the raids she made tiny gas masks out of gauze and cardboard, some small enough for a sparrow. The dog limped off into the blowing dust. Liz hatched holding a pristine cranberry vase that’d fetch more than a few bob in the Eel’s Underground Emporium.

Had the all-clear never sounded we’d not be done.

Birds reached their finale as light sneered through the blackout blinds of our basement flat. Dad had to be ready for rubble-shovelling. Breakfast was vital to give him strength in daylight on little more than a bromide catnap. He began with Yeast Vite tablets, antacids, stomach powder and milk of magnesia to wash down liver pills, Curicones for sciatica and Fynnon for muscular rheumatism. My job was brewing and keeping fireweed tea hot. Iron jelloids, Elasto wonder tablets and Cephos followed, while he chewed a constant cud of palm toffees, sipping tea between courses and switching at breakfast from Players to Potters asthma cigarettes. The main breakfast course was Vikelp tablets, which we all took devoutly. Containing the equivalent of 7lbs beef, 73lbs apples, 98lbs bananas, 7 pints of milk and 9 essential mineral salts, he took two and gave us one each. Letting all this settle, he applied foot paste which came before toothpaste—he didn’t think much of teeth, as he’d lost six in the blitz and those he didn’t miss—and rubbed Zam-Buk into his elbows and heels. Breakfast ended with swigging fig syrup and the bog. That March morning though he rushed two courses together, budgie fluff in his stubble, and I sometimes feared what Dad would’ve returned from rubble-shovelling if he hadn’t swallowed so many invigorators and revitalisers, he might simply succumb to the air above, I thought, if he hadn’t carried two iodine diffusers. Blitz Rats work didn’t do him in, it was rubble-shovelling caused his joints to ache and all the pain, not only physical work after nightlong digs but seeing so much waste, the sin that made him livid was wastefulness. Come afternoon, instead of silver wicks, abysses of Objet d’blitz filled his eyes, gramophones hardly scratched and folded linen and solid radios and gilt picture frames and Bakelite brushes and kitchenware, the foreman ordered it all chucked in tips, antiques, jewellery, glasses without a crack, things not even singed, things in perfect nick, tossed in rubbish heaps. He hurt seeing what Blitz Rats broke their backs salvaging, being binned by dormice paid a pittance to waste. Daylight strain demanded a lunch like breakfast supplemented with Vinotonic and phosferine before bed.

Dad’s deep industrial snore out back was our all-clear. Liz had a stowaway China monkey charm for Saturday’s Bug Hole show-and-tell. She danced with heart in her shoes on the bed before falling asleep. I’d pocketed a green glass eye from a heap in Monce Street, worth two nosecaps trading in the backrow. Lighting Dad’s dogend, holding the glass to the matchlight I watched the magic lantern show on the kitchen tiles and saw Mum’s spirit flickering in the green dogend fog, urging me in her silent way to use Germolene on my cuts. Slathering our cheeks and chests every morning before school in the Phoney War, Mum swore Germolene would save us from jerry’s gas.

I smeared Germolene thickly but couldn’t get rid of the burnt Soir de Paris pong.

Liz’s dreaming feet jitterbugged under her blanket. Ear pressed to the arse of the sprained saxophone, I heard seaside Stukas, slept soundly but didn’t dream. I’d never dream for days after a raid. Even the craziest dream can’t outmatch a night like the Westminster Windfall.