Ashes to Ashes by Barbara Nadel

got their drinks from the cathedral ladies they spread their dolls and blankets out in front of them and began to settle. The bloke with the wooden leg offered me a fag, which I took gratefully, and he told me that his name was Mr Webb. I introduced myself to him and then we all, the families, the office workers and myself, sat in silence for a while. I was wondering what to do next. Young George, Mr Andrews and, I was led to believe by the Dean, the watchmen were all looking for Mr Phillips and young Milly now. Although I had been specifically asked to help, quite what I could do that would be of any good. I didn’t know. After all, I was no expert on the building as all the others had to be. And yet these people, as well as the Dean himself, had seemed to want me to continue looking. I would, of course; I’d recovered a bit from my second climb now and felt a little less unhappy about what I’d been asked to do. But I’d finish my cocoa and my fag first. I didn’t have any idea of what the time was but I knew that this fire bombing we were suffering had been going on for hours. I also knew that I wasn’t going to get home that night, if at all. I didn’t know if I, or any of us in that cathedral, would survive. The bombing never stopped, the fires, emptying shelters as they went, moved ever closer to us. I shut my eyes and listened to the sound of the little children’s talk.
    ‘Why’s your baby got no coat on her, Ruby?’ I heard one of the little girls say.
    ‘Baby dollies don’t have ordinary coats, they have matinee coats,’ another, rougher-voiced girl said.
    ‘All right, matinee coat,’ the first girl said. ‘Why hasn’t your baby dolly got its matinee coat, Ruby?’
    There was a pause then, during which I think I may have very briefly nodded off. When I woke the first girl was saying, ‘. . . took it. She’s a horrible girl!’
    ‘Well, if you will play with her!’ the smarter women said. ‘She’s too old for you! I’ve told you and told you!’
    ‘I know you don’t remember her, Mrs Hughes, but the girl’s mother was just the same,’ the other woman said. ‘My husband and me knew all that family. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mother’s mouth but what she got up to . . . well!’
    ‘All the same, them Chiverses,’ I heard the crippled bloke say. ‘I pity the day we moved into their flippin’ building! The old man’d sell his own mother for tuppence! That Milly, young as she is, ain’t no exception.’
    My eyes flew open and I chucked what was left of my fag on the floor. ‘Milly?’ I moved over towards the bloke and the women and looked into their faces. ‘What does she look like, this Milly?’
    It could’ve been some other kid called Milly, although it wasn’t very likely. Milly Chivers from Blackfriars was ten years old, blonde and pretty, and had the mouth of a navvy. She was also local, which meant that her coming into St Paul’s for shelter did make some sense. The crippled bloke, Mr Webb, and his family lived in the same building as the Chivers ‘tribe’ as he called them.
    ‘Nine kids and no mother to care for ’em,’ he said.
    I explained as best I could why I was interested in Milly, but the women looked at me strangely anyway. I could understand that if the kid was on the game as it were, they would look on me with suspicion. After a bit, Mr Webb asked me to help him stand up and then moved me away from his party. I gave him a fag this time and we both lit up.
    ‘Listen, mate,’ he said as we sat down, ‘it’s like this. Milly Chivers’s mum was . . . well, she was on the game, like . . .’
    ‘Oh.’ This wasn’t unexpected. A lot of kids follow their mothers on to the streets. A prostitute, just like my Hannah. Poor woman.
    ‘But she died,’ Mr Webb said. ‘Five years ago. Some say it was George Chivers, her old man, what done her.’
    I frowned.
    ‘Not actually, you understand,’ Webb said, ‘but ’cause she had to do what she