Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) by John Lawton Page B

watched the Blut und Eisen versionofJuly 4th light up the sky and shake the earth around him. Away in the
south, London burnt fiercely. Closer to home he could see incendiaries bursting in buildings in the little streets of Mayfair, feel the weight of the nearmisses as high explosives crashed around
him. He felt oddly free from fear. The rational part of his mind told him that the next bomb after a near miss could well be a direct hit, and while the hotel was a relatively sound structure,
‘steel ribs an’ all’, he was in a most exposed position – and the rest of his mind overruled, in thrall to nothing more cerebral, nothing less visceral, than the thrill of
it all.
    Each part of the spectacle had its own colour. Ack-ack shells burst white in the night, little puffs of man-made cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky – and if they were close enough they
showered shards of metal rain on to the streets below, adding atonal, clattering, tinkling music to the show. Tracer bullets fired by night-fighters shot across the sky, a dozen differing shades,
like a pool rack dispersed by the cue ball, shooting red, shooting white, shooting green. Incendiaries burst blue and orange and then took on their hue from whatever they consumed. Oil and rubber
burnt black. Wood burnt red and orange. And the searchlights roved like giant’s fingers, crossing and criss-crossing and reminding him pointlessly of the opening of every Twentieth Century
Fox movie he’d ever seen.
    It was the English’s own ack-ack drove him in. He watched a random pattern of shards hit the roof some thirty feet away, a hard rain, striking sparks, bouncing back, dancing like
fireflies, racing towards him to stop only six or seven feet clear. He fell into bed in the small hours, curtains wide, to be woken by the light three hours later. For a moment he could not
remember where he was. He had been dreaming of an Appalachian journey he had made with his father when he was ten, along the borders of Kentucky and the Carolinas, through the Cumberland Gap. He
opened his eyes and could not place the cream walls and the chintzy furniture. Where the knotty pine boards, the Shaker chairs? Then the smell focused him – cordite and burning, everything
burning – paint, wood, rubber – and flakes of ash fluttering by his sixth-floor window. London burning.
    He opened the windows and stretched out a hand. A wisp of ash landed on the palm of his hand, like catching an autumn leaf. It was paper, charred and weightless. The print still legible. The
ghost of message and meaning. He blew gently on it as though on a dandelion head and watched it fragment to nothingness before his eyes, and as the tiny specks of grey wafted out over London he saw
the city under a haze of ash, every breeze eddying by with the dust of a night’s destruction, and over in the south the orange glow of sunrise. Sunrise? In the south-west? London burning.
    He dressed quickly, skipped bathing and shaving, and went out. It was as though he had wandered into the art gallery of the half-waking mind. At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning London was a
hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of the half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped,
the living, the dying and the dead – wires and pipes bursting from the ground like the spilt entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke
rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines of pumping, engines of rescue, engines of demolition, all the machinery of antiwar – and it was as though
Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban-pastoral.
    He drifted across Mayfair, down Half Moon Street, southwards, across Piccadilly and the Royal Parks,