Blitzed

Chapter Six

Hell on Earth

Wednesday, 16 April 1941

London

It had been two hours since Neal had sent the small boy off to Russell Square to try to get Neville Chambers to come rescue him. The note had said Phillip Talbot’s house had been blown away, Neal’s wound from Dunkirk had been opened again, and Neal didn’t think he could walk away on his own. They were in a lull in the blitz bombing. No one had come to him. He couldn’t wait, exposed like this on Starcross Street, with fires going on all around him, negating any effect of blackout measures to deny the attackers in the sky a view of London below them.

An air raid warden, running by Neal and seeing him collapsed to the pavement in a pose he’d arranged to attract Neville Chambers’s attention and sympathy, which included opening the area of his leg wound himself to make the damage look more serious than it was, stopped and called out, “Can you not make it to the shelter yourself, lad? I’ll help you there. Come lean on me. It’s beginning again. All who will go need to be in the shelters.”

Neal began to demur, saying, “No, thank you, I’m waiting for a specific person to save me and take me to his home,” but he realized how idiotic that sounded, so he hauled himself up, with help from the air raid warden, and let the man help him to the nearby Euston Square Underground tube station entrance and down the stairs into the air raid shelter there.

The warden helped Neal settle on the tube station platform tiles, propped up against a wall, while other local residents, many still in their nightclothes, joined those already there since the first wave of bombers of the night went through. Already looking down the platform to gauge the needs, the warden said, “Rest here, sonny. I’ll find a medical worker to come dress that wound for you before I go back up to bring others down.”

Neal barely had time to voice a weary “Thank you,” before the warden was gone. He was frustrated, but the man had just been doing his job—fearlessly and well, and with admirable patience in view of how long the bombardment had been going on. They’d had nights like this since the previous September. This was what Neal was going through with this farce for—to help relieve the embattled people of London and of the rest of England beyond them.

The sounds of the bombs going off and the slight shudder of the shelter walls broadcast that the blitz had resumed. This day would be registered in history as “The Wednesday,” the worst raid of London by the Germans of the war. Some 2,000 civilians would die this night in London and more than 100,000 homes would be destroyed in addition to the military-related targets that were hit.

That the bombing would be so brutal on this night had not gone into the planning of trying to put Neal in Neville Chambers’s house, but it would bolster the plan. At least it would do that much to further the Allied efforts in the war.

Looking around the shelter, Neal could see the weariness and the fear—and the justifiable anger—in people’s faces, but he also saw the resolve, patience, and the care and regard everyone was giving each other just as the woman crouching beside him and dabbing away at the reopened wound on his leg was doing. No one was in hysterics—after seven months of this, the hysterics had dissolved. No one was fighting for space or arguing with anyone else. They had come down into the shelter in all stages of dress and undress but none were shirking away from anyone else or being aggressive. Some had brought bedding and some had brought paperwork to work on. One woman had her family gathered around her and she was boiling water on a makeshift burner for tea and chattering away cheerily to distract her young children. Others were settling in for the night, able after all these months to sleep even with bombs raining down on their heads, just waiting for a direct hit.

None of them, though, Neal thought, were feeling the frustration and anger that he felt, knowing there was something he could do about this, something he must do about this with no thought to his own degradation in the effort.

When it had been fifteen minutes since the last bomb blast had been heard, Neal pushed away from the wall, stood, and went to the stairs that would take him back up to the surface.

The devastation of over half a year of bombardment had been evident when Neal had gone down into the Euston Square tube station, but it slapped him in the face when he came back up onto the surface and started stumbling down Gower Street, trying to reach Russell Square before the blitz started up again. Already the sky was abuzz with fighter planes, both German and British, battling each other while waiting for the next wave of bombers to arrive.

The whole area was alight. As Neal looked down Gower Street, it looked like every fourth building on each side of the road had been hit or had been obliterated. The first horror to accost him was a row house that had had its façade peeled off by a bomb hitting in the forecourt. The rooms were exposed up three levels much as with a Victorian doll house. Getting a view of the furniture and the contrasting wallpaper and a sense of the layout of the building brought the gaze upward to the horror of seeing a woman’s bloodied head and an arm dangling over the side of a bath tub, a beam from the ceiling having come down on her in the impact of the bomb. Firefighters were raising a ladder to her, but it obviously was a futile effort. She wasn’t moving. There was too much blood trailing down the side of the tub for her to be alive.

In earlier months, perhaps Neal would have wondered what a woman was doing taking a bath during an air raid, but, after half a year of bombardment, he knew that some people had given up on panic and were risking refusing to let the war brought to their homes dictate their lives anymore. Not all went for shelter in the raids these days. Even some of those who did had the roof collapse on them there. There was virtually no place to hide in London.

On the other side of the street and down, a child was being carried out of a smashed building by a fire warden. She was alive, if scuffed up, but she was looking dazed and a rag doll dangled from her hand. She was dressed for sleep. It was clear that she wouldn’t have been alone in the building, which looked more like a pile of bricks than a house, and was smoking. There must have been other family members in there with them. None of them were coming out of the building.

Neal passed a body in the street, incongruously covered by an expensive-looking full-length fur coat. The arm extending from it was that of a man, in workman’s clothes. It was evident the coat wasn’t his but had been draped over him to give him some dignity until the firemen and police had exhausted their search for the living and could attend to the dead, not likely to happen until sometime in the light of the next day.

Neal stumbled on, but only as far as the Canadian soldiers’ and sailors’ home, a large four-story building. It had taken a direct hit and a fire was smoldering in one of its wings, a fire that surely would consume the rest of the building before firefighters could get to it. Bodies, in all stages of dress for the evening and dress for the night—expired, dying, wounded, and just in shock—were strewn around on the small lawn in front of the building and out onto the street, as firemen, policemen, fire wardens, and anyone else nearby, fought to bring men out of the building before it imploded. It was evident that the building had been hit before any of the men could seek shelter.

Instinctively, Neal went to the building rather than further down the street. The fire warden who had helped Neal get to the Euston Square air raid shelter was struggling to bring a man twice as heavy as he was out of the doors. The warden and his burden were made a shadow by the fire in the building behind him. Without further thought, Neal went to them and helped the warden carry his burden out into the street. It wasn’t clear then whether the elderly man was alive or dead.

Neal stayed and helped, making three trips into the building himself to find and bring out the wounded until those in charge of the evacuation declared the building was clear, which came mere seconds before it collapsed within itself.

They hadn’t noticed, but the bombing had resumed. There was nowhere to go to be safe, so Neal joined the others in checking the men lying out on the street out and called medics to those who were still alive but were the most critical of the wounded. Mercifully, the bombing wasn’t concentrating on this area of Bloomsbury anymore, but there was a particularly loud explosion further along on Gower Street, and Neal looked up to gauge that it was at University College, the current offices of the Ministry of Information—where Neal worked. Where Sir Neville Chambers was a senior unit chief.

He rose and was on the move down Gower Street again, toward what was a major fire. His thoughts immediate went to Neville Chambers, and contrasting emotions flashed through Neal’s brain. Was Chambers at the ministry? He shouldn’t be. Neal spent longer hours there, working for Chambers, than the civil servant spent there himself. Neal’s brain went through the emotions of euphoria that perhaps he didn’t have to kill the traitor himself—perhaps Chambers had met an ironic end—to anger that Neal might have been cheated of putting the man down himself, to anger with himself for considering putting personal satisfaction over the mission. Phillip had said the head of the German spy cell needed to be taken alive. They needed for Chambers not to be in the burning ministry building.

When Neal got there, he could see that it had been just one wing of the building that had been hit, not one near where Chambers’s unit was housed. Nonetheless, he wanted to go in to check for himself. But firemen were there and they held him back.

“I work there. I have to make sure that none of my coworkers are there,” he declared.

“You don’t work there today, lad,” one fireman said.

“We don’t believe anyone is still in there,” another one said.

Neal turned to the east, headed down Montague Place, toward Russell Square. All of the buildings on the square were intact, including the Chambers house, a large, three-story Georgian-style brick house on an English basement. The house was dark, surely employing the required blackout curtains as well as minimizing the light burning inside, but Neal could see that the blackout curtain had drawn partially open on one of the sunken story windows. A flickering light was going inside. He moved as silently as he could to check that out before he tried knocking at the front door, even though anyone inside surely was in the subbasement shelter. Chambers had said that he had his own air raid shelter below the English basement.

But at least some of the house residents, including Neville Chambers, had not withdrawn to the shelter. Peeking into the window, Neal could see that the room inside was a large kitchen, but the area immediately on the other side of the front wall was a dining area for the servants, with a rough wooden table and chairs, and a bank of china closets on the side wall. Gathered around the table with their heads together were Neville Chambers; his butler, Otto; and, surprisingly, the refugee Austrian cardinal, Heinrich. Neal drew away from the window immediately; retired, exhausted, to the front steps leading up to the double-door entry; and waited.

He didn’t have long to wait before the light in the basement was extinguished and he could hear voices—Chambers’s and Otto’s—in the front hall. He went up the stairs and pounded on the door. He knew what to do from here. He just hoped that it worked.

The door opened. Otto was at the door, with Chambers, holding a torch, standing behind him. The door only opened half way, though, and it was evident that Otto was on the brink of closing it again, even in seeing that it was Neal and that he looked like he had traveled through hell to get here, which, in fact, he had.

The bombing had stopped again, and the blue of the sky was becoming more pale. There was hope that the longest, the most destructive night of the London blitz was over—for the day.

“Neal!” Chambers exclaimed from behind Otto’s shoulder. “What’s happened: You look like you were caught up in the bombing.”

“I was. He’s gone,” Neal said in a choked voice, staggering forward, beyond where Otto could close the door and leave him outside.

“Who’s gone? What’s happened?” This was spoken by Chambers again. Otto looked like he was sorry he’d opened the door.

“I sent a boy to tell you.”

“I received no message. What has happened?”

“Phillip. Phillip Talbot. Phillip’s gone. And his house. I stepped out to see what had been hit up the street, and a bomb landed on Phillip’s house. He’s gone. There was nothing left to go into. I didn’t know where to go. I came here. To you.” Neal looked pleadingly at Chambers and then collapsed into a faint on the entrance hall floor.

Neal was awake, more awake than he was letting on an hour later, when the men carried him upstairs in Chambers’s house, and Chambers had taken him to a bathroom, with a tub, and had drawn water, put him in it, and bathed his bruised body and his reopened leg wound. Chambers had suggested that Otto prepare a room for the young man and, with a sigh of disapproval and resignation, the butler had left them to do that.

Later, as he lay, naked, in a bed, on his side, in a well-appointed bedchamber, Chambers stole into the room, stretched out beside Neal, and ran his hands all over Neal’s body, eventually penetrating him with a finger. The man’s breathing became heavy and he was kissing Neal on the throat.

“It was good at Stedham Hall,” Chambers whispered. “Are you going to open to me . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t too tired.” It wasn’t a question.

“No.” Neal sighed, relaxed, turned on his back, parted his legs, and let his body move against the exploring hands, still seeming not to be completely awake, still dozing in total exhaustion, or so he wanted Chambers to think. Chambers folded Neal good leg up into his chest and turned the young man’s body a bit toward his stomach. The older man scooted down a bit, bringing his pelvis in under Neal’s buttocks. He embraced the young man’s body close to his, wrapping one arm under Neal’s waist and palming his lower belly. Chambers’s other hand moved his erect cock into position at Neal’s hole, and Chambers pressed his body upward, his shaft penetrating Neal’s passage and stretching the young man’s channel as it moved deeper inside him.

Neal moaned softly and deeply, seemingly still in an exhausted doze, yielding to the man in every way. As the older man began a languid-movement fuck, the younger man moved his pelvis into a coordinating rhythm.

Neal was in the house and in the man’s bed—or in one of the man’s beds, hopefully one that now would be Neal’s bed. Now he had to ensure that he could continue to be there until he had found all that MI5 needed to know about this man and the German spy cell he was running here in London.

God, the man was thick. Neal shouldn’t be enjoying this—not from this traitor—but he was. He let out a deep moan, whispered, “Yes, yes. Like that. Fuck me.” Chambers began to hum, enjoying his work.

TO BE CONTINUED