Bombweed

In the early ‘50s I went for a walk with my mother. It was heatwave hot, and she wore a pastel blue tea dress.

We lived in Vauxhall, and when we took that walk, and for many decades afterwards, the capital was hollowed out by the blitzkrieg. It’s fair to say the Germans made a mess. I remember that her hands were sweaty, and all those cockney sparrows scavenging in the rubble, sweating in their unseasonal winter rags, reminded me what a mummy’s boy I was. I remember trying to slip out of her grasp, but in the end, she just let me go.

We were walking along Kennington Lane, and on the corner of that road was a plain, bombed chapel which might formerly have been mistaken for a shoe shop. It was here that she released my unwilling hand and began to cry. We’d passed it before without drama but this time something unsettled her, and it was another ten years before I found out what it might have been.

She bent down, with tears streaming down her face, and picked a handful of pink flowers that were growing out of the lower walls of the ruined chapel. And she said, ‘Mikey, we’ll go home now. I’ll get the shopping when your father gets back.’

I don’t know if she put them in a vase or how long they lasted. I just remember her crying, and that it was so hot, and all the air-blown rubble dust was thick in the burdened opal sky.

We lived in tenement flats when I was a kid. My parents moved in when they got married and both left it in a coffin. We were on the first floor, and it’s hard for people to imagine the living conditions in those days. We had one single brick shit-house in the back yard, and that was for all the tenants. Most times we wiped our arses with newspapers that people used to cut up and hang on a hook by the cistern. The sick flowers in the backyard failed to thrive under the deluge of surreptitious piss whenever the toilet was occupied. Even the earthworms went elsewhere.

*****

On the ground floor lived a man called Piggy Palmer. Not the done thing nowadays, but he’d always been a Piggy and that’s how it stayed. He was a fat old hound, a Bunter-esque man, with wrists like ham hocks and eyes that disappeared into his cheeks at the ghost of a smile. But I loved that fella. He was the finest raconteur in London Town.

He wasn’t fit enough for active service, but he did something secretive with the SOE. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to talk about that, but after the war he was given a decent pension and he returned to the flat he was born in. His looks and innate low-birth counted against him in peacetime, but he was happy enough doing the pub circuit and getting people to buy him drinks.

Piggy was a high-impact man happy in his own extended skin. I don’t think there’s much more you can ask out of life than that. So, I used to go and shoot the breeze with Piggy when my parents’ constant coughing threatening to pick the threads of my sanity apart. My older siblings had already left, so those were lonely times for me, wondering which bus stop I needed to stand at to get to life.

Piggy’s flat exuded what Horace Walpole described as gloomth. There was a steampunk darkness about the decor which was also deeply comforting; which spoke to a part of your soul that always wanted to follow Alice down the rabbit hole.

He never got dressed unless he was going out. He wore cotton pyjamas, and in the winter months, a smoking jacket over the top. On his head he wore one of those cloche caps with a tassel on the top, which for some reason was seen as an aid to smoking.

*****

When I was sixteen I was accepted as an apprentice at the forensics museum attached to Guy’s Hospital, a place only medical staff could access. It would be my job to look after the gruesome exhibits and eventually progress to other aspects of forensic work. And I spent a lot of time with Piggy in the run up to my start date, because I was nervous and doubtful, and he was the kind of man who could brush all of that away.

He once showed me a mechanical device used for trepanning. Handling it carefully, I made some comment about how far we’d come since those days. And he said, ‘Mikey, people don’t change. The toys we play with change, but never the players. Things are going to get sticky from now on. The speed of technology is going to be so rapid people will be lost in it, and trust me, these changes are coming. But …’ (and he held up a stubby finger …) ‘five thousand years from now, give a child a bucket and spade and they’ll still make a sandcastle.’

Piggy had a female skull in his rooms which he called ‘Lady Beauregarde’. He said he found it poking out of the rubble close to the Baptist Chapel where my mother unaccountably cried that day. It wasn’t unusual in those times. In October ’40 they dropped nine high-explosives nearby, killing over a hundred. Not all of the bodies were found or identified, and some of the body parts were picked up with tweezers. Whatever the truth of her provenance, she made a useful paperweight, and he often stroked her bald head as he wondered about his rooms, like a pantaloon’d Hamlet.

During one of these lazy summer evenings, when my dad was in the hospital and my mother was losing her wits upstairs, Piggy picked up the thread of what he’d previously said; that people don’t change. He said that the war generation will always be seen as the best of us, and I said that was a good thing, surely?

Piggy sat down, releasing a heavy puff of dust, placing Lady Beauregarde on the side table next to him, her sockets staring at him in a strange conveyance of fondness. That’s when he told me that during the war there were just as many bastards around then as there were now. Spivs and looters dodging conscription, selling their knock-off goods on street corners, girls whoring themselves for a trinket, and some people secretly agreeing with Hitler.

‘And if you think about it, Mikey,’ he said, ‘if you wanted to kill your wife during the blitz, what’s to stop you? Eh? Chop her up, burn her, strangle her and dispose of her body in the cellar of a burned-out building, or hope another bomb drops and renders her so incomplete that no one would ever know. No point being squeamish, Mikey, not if you want to work with corpses.’

It’s not something I’d thought about, but it made sense. And it made more sense when Piggy told me what happened to my mother’s sister, Rachel.

‘It might help you to know,’ he said, ‘why she cries.’

*****

It all comes back to that chapel. After the direct hit, what remained of the building was looted. The spivs stripped everything they could, including the organ pipes. So, they locked it up and there it rotted, while all around it the bombs kept dropping, over and over again. Then in ’42, when Hitler got bored of bombing Britain and turned his sights on Russia, London sent in the demolition men, whose job was to clear up the debris. And one such man, hand-balling the basement floor of the chapel, found an incongruous paving slab covering a hole in the floor. And when he peered into the hole, he saw a mummified body.

Turns out it was my aunt, whose remains eventually ended up in the same place I was later to serve my apprenticeship.

St Guy’s.

I knew I had an aunt who was dead, but my mother had said she was lost in the blitz. I don’t know, and I never will know, why the whole truth never once threatened her lips.

The Home Office pathologist took one look, and knew that she wasn’t a bomb victim. It was clear that she’d been murdered, because her head and limbs had been severed with a blade. A lot of her was missing and, bizarrely, never found. What remained of the skull, (the lower jaw was gone), showed a clump of brown hair embedded in a crush wound. Her upper jaw had four teeth and no more. She’d been sprinkled with builder’s lime. Attempts had been made to set her alight, and although the police thought it was strange that a small fire should start in a damp, bombed-out building on the last day she was seen alive, they were soon distracted by another bombing raid in the area, which took a thousand lives.

Some soft tissue remained; a clot in her voice box, (strangling) and a fibroid on her uterus, (previously diagnosed).

He calculated the height of the full skeleton and searched the missing persons’s register using the clues at hand. Eventually he came up with my aunt. To be sure, they used her wedding photograph and superimposed it over what remained of the skull. A perfect match. So, amid the chaos of war, a murder was afoot. One of many.

*****

Six years before her death, Rachel married a jug-eared shyster called Harry. Piggy met him several times on the stairs when the couple went up to visit my parents. ‘He was an uncommon type of wanker,’ Piggy mused. ‘Shifty, work-shy and violent. I have to say, Mikey, that your aunt was no looker - and marriage to him made it worse. She was twenty-six going on fifty-six. They had a baby, a little lad as I recall, but he didn’t make it, and after that the marriage became a pointless contract. They shared a pokey flat in Shoreditch, where they tried to put as much distance between themselves as the floor space allowed, and Harry would frequently go missing, leaving Rachel to pay the bills.’

‘The three motives for murder,’ he said, counting them off on his sausage fingers, ‘are love, money and revenge - and the only one you can’t live without is money. So, Rachel’s badgering him for cash, and he’s under all sorts of pressure that his inadequate character couldn’t cope with.’

‘Anyway, he was one of those spivs, and although they were mostly separated at the time she went missing, he’d promised her a pound of onions, which he’d give her over a cup of tea in a downbeat cafe. Witnesses said they were arguing at the table. She’d recently come out of hospital following a beating he’d given her, and she was short of money, not onions. Four times he was brought before the magistrates for violence, and four times they let him off. Rachel just didn’t garner the sympathy vote, and the police were dismissive because they were sick of intervening in all their countless arguments and vexatious claims. It was concluded that they were both ‘persons of low mentality.’

‘At the time, Harry was casually employed as a firefighter-cum-nightwatchman. And it just so happened that his main employer was a firm of solicitors who’d vacated the premises for safer ground but had left some of their papers and deeds inside due to lack of space in their new premises. It was Harry’s job to ensure those papers didn’t burn.’

‘This business was right next door to the shell of the chapel where she was found. Motive, means, opportunity.’

‘Why the hell has my mother never told me all this?’ I asked, feeling another link between us fall away. Piggy said that she’d probably used it all up at the time. It was her who kept going to the police station and wouldn’t let it drop, insisting that Harry had killed her. They didn’t take her seriously.

Piggy furnished me with all the details as the evening got dark and the lamps were lit, throwing shadows on Lady Beauregard. But the takeaway is that my mother was not believed until her sister’s body was eventually found and matched against records of missing persons. Most of them were women, and many of them had not been bombed but murdered. How many more were there, buried in the convenient rubble?

Back then, what they had was circumstantial. But the jury didn’t take to the jug-eared shyster, and they concluded that only he could have done it. I’m sure he did, too, but I doubt it would pass the criteria we demand today.

It took them twenty minutes to record a guilty verdict with no recommendation for mercy. For fifteen months, my mother had been pursuing justice for her sister, but her efforts were not mentioned at all.

In January ’43 my Uncle Harry took the long drop at Wandsworth Prison.

*****

When Piggy’d had enough of company he always emptied the ashtray, so I took that as my cue and went back upstairs to my mother. At the time, I was meaning to have it out with her, but when I saw her asleep in her chair, a bottle still clutched in her hand and snoring like a crake, I just went to bed. My father came home from hospital the next day, and he died in bed that same night. With all that was going on, the questions I meant to ask her got lost in funeral preparations and tearless grieving. He wasn’t much of a man, but even he left a hole. Soon afterwards, my mother took her own life with a combination of alcohol and sleeping tablets. To this day, I don’t think people realise the damage of war, all those years living on your nerves only to take a long drop of your own when peace comes around.

*****

In the early 80s, Piggy got too old to look after himself, so he booked a nice spot in a home where he regaled the inmates with his tall tales. They wouldn’t let him keep Lady Beauregarde, so I became her custodian. My wife, God rest her soul, never really took to her. Women get jealous over the oddest things.

There are times when I look at her and wonder who she was. Who loved her and who missed her. I once asked my boss if we could make a facial reconstruction, but he denied me on financial grounds. He was right, but even so, I feel an elusive pity whenever I look into her sockets, wondering what colour her eyes were, and where the rest of her had got to.

My eyes have never been attuned to plants, and so it took me some time to realise that the pink flowers which grew in the scrubbier areas of his care home were the same plants my mother had cried over when I was six. I picked a handful and took them up to his room, where he had a vase which didn’t generally fulfil its purpose.

I reminded him about my mother and that blazing day on the corner of Kennington Lane, and even then, the old dog knew how to finish a story - the one he’d first started when I was sixteen, when my mother’s mind was already calculating the end of thinking.

‘Rosebay willowherb,’ he pronounced, like he was emphasising the start of a sermon. ‘In the war we called it bombweed. The yanks call it fireweed, because it thrives in ashes. During the blitz this stuff was everywhere, like a pink carpet all over London, and the women would pick them in armfuls just to lighten up their miserable lives for a day. Something that wasn’t gunmetal grey or utility brown. When your aunt was eventually laid to rest, in a child’s coffin due to her scant remains, your mother had the funeral conducted in a drab corner of a chapel. By that time it didn’t matter which denomination you were, you just took what was still standing. She got up at dawn on the day and filled an entire corner with bombweed. It was dank and grey in there, but the colour of them against that dreary backdrop was startling.’

He picked one up and brought it to his nose. ‘They smell,’ he said, ‘like our old backyard in the flats.’ And then .. ‘I don’t know why she chose that particular day to cry by the chapel and to carry those flowers home again, Mikey, but grief is not linear. It’s a messy scribble, a pissed-up doodle.’

That was the last time I spoke to Piggy. He died a couple of days later, and he must have known his end was near, because when I was at the door he said, ‘You’ll miss me too when I’m gone, Mikey. But under no circumstances do I want those fucking weeds at my funeral.’

*****

All my professional life I’ve been investigating corpses, trying to figure out what happened to them. And it must have been something innate, something my mother possessed but couldn’t explore. All through those terrible years, when people were being blown to pieces and people just when missing without resolution, my mother didn’t give up on her sister. Not once. And who knows what drives us, because when all’s said and done, Rachel ended up in a child’s coffin with just my parents and Piggy to mourn her passing.

These days, except for when the family come around, it’s just me and Lady Beauregarde watching the TV. On days when old age puts the heebies up me, I rest my hand on the top of her skull and still wonder what colour her hair was, what colour her eyes were, and who died still missing her and wondering where she’d gone.