Coventry by Helen Humphreys Page B

People often mistake streams beneath their houses for ghosts. The land on which St. John’s Church is built is right where a lake used to be and the church is prone to flooding. There is a word I remember from my childhood—guzzle—a low, perhaps damp spot on an estuary or inland from a beach, as far inland sometimes as to be a field, where the sea can enter if it chooses. It is a place that is really a ghost, because it exists only under certain conditions, when water remembers where it has gone and what it has touched; when it imagines what shape it once filled and held. When it remembers who it used to be.
     
    There is a sudden crash and clatter, and a large metal object, smoke and dust spilling from it, skids to a stop at the bottom of the stone stairs.
    “It’s a bomb,” cries one of the men. “Don’t move.” And then, realizing as everyone in the shelter is realizing, that it is an unexploded bomb, he yells, “Get out. Get out before it goes off.”
    “Don’t panic,” says Jeremy to Harriet and then to the roomful of people.
    The bomb blocks the section of floor in front of the basement steps. The cylinder has been dented by the tumble down the church stairs. Harriet can see the crumple of metal in the muted light of the oil lamp and thinks she can hear a hissing coming from the interior of the bomb. She stands up slowly and treads carefully, pressing herself against the damp stone wall of the basement in order to get past it.
    She is one of the first to get out, to emerge into the cacophony of the city, which suddenly seems, absurdly, like a safe place. Jeremy is right behind her, and behind him follows the rest of the group. There is no explosion. The bomb must be defective or has simply refused to detonate on impact. No matter, everyone who was in the church basement disperses. In the shelter, they were in it together. In the chaos of the bombed city, they return to being strangers.
    For a moment Harriet thinks that Jeremy will leave, will scatter with the others, but he stays with her. And then she remembers that he doesn’t know how to find his way through the city without her.
    The air is so filled with dust it is hard to breathe. Harriet inhales and chokes. She can smell something strange, the odour of cooked meat. It is the smell of roasted pork. There must be a butcher shop burning nearby.
    Barrage balloons, huge and whalelike, are tethered just above the remaining roofs of the buildings. She hears the clang of fire engine bells but no engines. They must be stuck behind the rubble that is starting to crowd the streets.
    Wires are down and flames leap like dancers in the empty window frames of bombed shops. A river of fire runs down the street.
    “Look out!” yells a man near Harriet. “It’s from the dairy.”
    Harriet realizes that it’s a slick stream of burning butter. To her left is a crater with a double-decker bus in it.
    “Stay away from the buildings,” says Harriet. She has to yell to be heard above the noise of the bombing. “Stay with me.”
    They need to get out of the middle of Coventry. They have a better chance of survival on the smaller streets, the ones farther away from the centre of the city. Harriet reaches for Jeremy’s hand and they run, lungs full of smoke and dust, lungs full of the dead air of the city, down the middle of Bayley Street.
    The bombing shakes the ground so that the people fleeing through the streets stumble as though drunk. The trembling earth shifts them one way, and then another, and Harriet finds herself reaching out to steady herself on walls that are no longer standing. She falls in the street, picks herself up from the shaking ground, and falls again. Her leg is bruised. The combination of debris, noise, and the shaking ground makes her lose her bearings. The hot waves of air pull her hair straight back, push the air out of her lungs.
    She tightens her grip on Jeremy’s hand. We are the lucky ones, she thinks. The ones who have escaped. The