The Old Lady (1992)

THE OLD LADY / Henry Green IHAD BEEN READING The Arabian Nights at the fire station. At the turn of a peg in his side, no, with no more than a cut with a golden chain over the neck this marvellous black horse would rise to take his rider into the skies. His manger was fiUed with well-winnowed sesame and barley, his trough held fresh water perfumed with roses. As I read these words, I heard two heavy explosions close by. It is hard sometimes, as hard as it is easy in the Tales on my lap, to teU between friend and enemy, between the old lady who brings trouble and the one who is to lead the storyteller to unimaginable deUghts, between high explosive and the concussion of a heavy gun. On this occasion it was impossible to mistake the way we were shaken in our shelter, as though, by incurring displeasure, we had been changed to walnuts from Damascus, rattled in an iron box. A fireman remarked ironicaUy that the bombs must have been two of ours. Three minutes later we had the call. As inevitably as any young man is wafted away from delights to trials which he is able, later, to recount between sobs in those fables, I was carried not long after, in charge of a pump and tender, as near as we could get to where the bombs had fallen. I found we were next to a statue which stands in the centre of a London Square. Two great streets came in ahead, they converged so that we could see up both, and were Uke twin approaches to the sultan's palace. As though at the word of an angered ifrit a gas main had been set alight up each street, one hundred and twenty yards away. The forty-foot-high flames were out of sight up side turnings, but on the face of ornate, tall blocks at the corners, we could pick out details of brickwork and stone facings more easUy, in colours more natural, than would have been Ukely through fuU spring daylight. Now, against a livid light, an incandescence of white hot lemon, this old pitch-black war horse stood, his bronze rider up, both, as always, facing south to Mecca. I knew the officer in charge. His orders were that, for the time being, my crew was to be in reserve. We stood aside by a surface shelter, whistling. The Missouri Review · 243 Then we helped another crew lay out a Une of hose to one of these fires. As we came along over small debris, which lay like a vast slumped-down load of coal, I could see wreckage burning up the side street, black hacked-out house fronts flickering above mounds of broken wood and stone, aU of which looked much as usual except that the damage was on a larger scale, and also, because of the Ughted gas main, easier to seize, that is to apprehend. But, most deadly, the glare was wide enough to attract more bombers, as though summoned, such was the expanse of Ught, by a secret word to which they answered, the 'creatures of King Nasr.' Having laid out the hose there was no more we could do. We went back to stand by the surface shelter, among the pumps. One after the other they were started up. They made a shattering, roaring noise. And there we waited. Having nothing to do was awkward. We had time to feel afraid. The row was too great to hear them, but there must have been a couple overhead. Two groups of searchlights moved steadily along two invisible paths converging at a point above, towards the glare of the gas mains. The guns near were not firing. A good shot wUl take a phoenix always at the same angle. I had come to know the point at which I must expect a bomb from a plane, the fatal angle, within about ten degrees. The minute or so the bomber takes to cover that distance is unpleasant, and it was worse this night because the pumps were so close that I knew I should not be able...