London - Edward Rutherfurd [576]
Only once had he come out on a big strike and that was the General Strike of 1926. The whole Trades Union movement had done so in sympathy for the coal miners who they felt, with justification, were being shabbily treated. “We’ll come out, of course,” he told Ruth. “I mean you have to.” But he had a feeling it wouldn’t do any good. He had been a bus conductor on the 137 route then, that went south from central London all the way out to Crystal Palace. The day before the strike he had taken a pair of brothers down from there. Respectable working men, he remembered, one a tailor and one a clerk.
“If you stop working, we shall walk to work,” they had told him. “You won’t stop us.” If the tailors and clerks and the rest of them were against the strikers, he didn’t think they’d get far. The bright young things of the upper classes also did their bit to break the strike. He had been walking with another busman up on Clapham Common when they had seen a 137 bus careering around it, driven by a young man and with a fair-haired girl conductor hanging gaily out of the back. “There’s no passengers,” his friend had remarked. “People are expressing solidarity with the working class.” But Charlie was not so sure. Would anyone get on, with that young idiot driving, he wondered?
The General Strike collapsed in less than ten days. Slowly, however, there were some signs of improvement. Modern factories like the Hoover factory, or the huge Ford Motor works east of London had been bringing jobs and steady wages to the capital. Houses had electricity, country roads were properly surfaced, people were driving cars – though as the smell in any London street would tell you, there were still plenty of horses and carts about. Progress was being made, inch by inch. There was still a Union Jack, and an empire, and a king, a good and modest fellow on the throne. “It’s not all bad, is it?” Charlie would say.
On this September morning they turned west at the southern end of Tower Bridge and drove along the line of the Thames. They passed Westminster and looked across at the comforting sight of the great tower of Big Ben. As they came to Lambeth they could see the four huge chimneys of Battersea Power Station a mile ahead of them across the railway lines and goods yards of Vauxhall.
And the vehicle that these gallant firemen were driving was, like the majority of fire vehicles in the Blitz, a London taxi.
In shape and dimensions it was actually a motorized version of the old horse-drawn hackney cab: roomy inside and highly manoeuvrable. Fitted up with ladders on the roof and pulling a trailer pump behind, it dodged about the burning streets rather effectively. Anyway, it was all that the Auxiliary Fire Service had. AFS volunteers like Charlie had been given a rigorous training by the London firemen so that, when the war began, a number were taken on at once as full-time members at three pounds a week. There had been teething problems: Charlie and his fellow recruits had been stationed for a while in an old building near Vauxhall where they had all caught fleas and scabies. More hurtful to morale had been the suggestion, in the early months of the war, that the auxiliary firemen had volunteered to dodge the army, and many had actually left. But the last few days were giving the despised firemen the chance to show their mettle. For in September 1940, a year after the war was officially declared, Hitler began his famous offensive to bring England to its knees: the Blitzkrieg upon London.
Charlie could remember the Kaiser’s war very well. There had been some Zeppelin raids on London