Coventry by Helen Humphreys Page A

“I’m training to be a motor mechanic.”
    At a time when the rest of the country faces massive unemployment, there is work to be found in vehicle production at Coventry. There are factories for the production of automobiles, Lancaster bombers, and tanks.
    “It’s what they’re coming for, isn’t it?” says Harriet. “All the factories. It’s why we’re being bombed.”
    The crying child will not shut up. The sobs are more frantic, quicker.
    “You make it sound as though it’s my fault,” says Jeremy.
    “I didn’t mean to.”
    And then Harriet knows why the crying child is fraying her nerves. The noise of the sobs, their rhythm, reminds her of the ack-ack guns the Coventry defence is using tonight against the German bombers. Harriet can’t abide the noise of the guns, is glad she hasn’t been able to hear them over the noise of the bombing raid. The guns make her think of Owen, dying in that muddy field in Belgium.
    Harriet can’t bear to think of Owen. “Tell me about your job,” she says to Jeremy.
    “I’m apprenticing. And we only moved here this summer, before the raids started, so I haven’t been at it long.”
    “Tell me anyway,” says Harriet.
    Jeremy stretches his legs out. He has long legs, like Owen.
    “I’m learning about engines,” he says. “I’m learning how things work.”
    “What do you like about it?”
    Jeremy hesitates for a moment. “I like to think that an engine is a system, like a heart. The hoses are veins; the oil is blood. The engine valves are the valves of a heart, opening and closing, producing energy for the engine to run.”
    “What don’t you like about it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “There must be something,” says Harriet impatiently. The child’s cries seem to be increasing in volume with each breath it takes.
    “I suppose,” says Jeremy, “what I don’t like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine.”
    Just like us, thinks Harriet.
    Underneath the child’s crying there is a new sound, the low keen of someone moaning. Harriet can’t tell who is moaning, but it sounds as if it’s coming from the dark fold in the far corner of the room. Farther away, muffled, but still distinct, are the thuds of the bombs landing, the crash of buildings falling.
    I can’t stand this, she thinks, we could be buried alive, and when Jeremy says, “What?” she realizes that she has said it out loud.
     
     
    It amazes Harriet that she stayed in Coventry; though it wasn’t so much that she has stayed as that there never seemed a good time to leave. At first she couldn’t go because it was the last place she’d been with Owen. It had been their first place together—the small flat on Berkeley Road—and how could she leave those last traces of him that rivered through those rooms? Then she’d stayed for his family, but she and Owen hadn’t been married long enough for her to have become close to his parents, and after a few years they seemed to forget all about her. But by this time she had the job at the coal merchant’s and a routine to her days that brought her comfort. She bicycled to work, walked out to the shops at lunch, cooked herself an egg for dinner or a bit of mackerel or some potted meat on toast. And by this time she had begun her discovery of Coventry, had started to research the history and explore the city and surrounding countryside. She had become attached to a place where she’d never imagined living by imagining life there before her.
    At the library she discovered that Coventry was once part of a Roman road that went from Leicester to Mancetter. She spent a day walking up and down the old Roman riverbed of what had become Cox Street and wrote her description of it that evening.
Water running underground sounds like a woman crying.