Ashes to Ashes by Barbara Nadel Page A

done to keep him in drink! He’s a boozer, George Chivers. His missus, Milly’s mum – not a bad girl in spite of what the women say – she was always out getting money for him.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Would go with anyone, it was said. Then one night one of ’em, a bloke, like, beat her to death, poor cow – or so it’s said. It was rumoured that perhaps old George had done it. You say Milly is here, in the cathedral like?’
    ‘Y-yes.’ I said. ‘But now she’s missing and—’
    ‘Probably with someone, if you take my meaning,’ Mr Webb said.
    I did. Ten she might be, but just Milly’s way of talking had made me think she had been making her living out of men. Hannah knows plenty of grown women on the game who started their trade as kids. It’s always gone on, and it always will, especially around and about hard drinkers.
    ‘B-but her father . . .’
    ‘George Chivers, so it’s said, had a good trade before the drink took him,’ Mr Webb continued. ‘Speaks nice, he does, educated. But he’s been on the drink for fifteen years to my knowledge. Come from out Stoke Newington way, people said. Moved in to our building because it was all he could afford.’ He smiled and shook his head grimly. ‘People think it’s all bowler hats and bookkeepers in the City, but there’re some right places, I can tell you! Rooms left over from when poor people lived in Rookeries, you know? Ain’t the Ritz where we live. It is a Rookery to be truthful. Only Mrs Herbert over there, the florist lady, only she’s got a proper flat on our street.’
    If indeed this Milly was ‘my’ Milly, then her prostitute mother had died when the child was five. She had one older sister, who also worked the streets, five brothers and two younger sisters. All but one of the brothers had, apparently, left home years ago. Milly and her older sister, it seemed, kept the younger children and their alcoholic father with the sale of their bodies. Once apparently a man of some substance, Mr Chivers’s drinking had reduced his family to living in a bloody rookery, a collection of filth- and crime-ridden rooms that had been standard City accommodation for the poor in Victorian times. I had in my ignorance thought they’d all disappeared years ago. Thinking about what a grown man like Mr Phillips might have been doing with this girl from a rookery when the raid began and he brought her into the cathedral, made me feel a bit sick. But then maybe a man without a face does things that men with faces can’t understand. Speaking as a man without a mind, I can see that. Not that that’s an excuse for doing things with a child; there’s never any excuse for that in my opinion.
    ‘The Guildhall’s on fire! Took a hit!’ I turned away from Mr Webb and saw young George the chorister flop down beside me. ‘Looks like it’s had it!’ He coughed on the smoke from the hundreds of fags people were puffing as well as that from the fires that burned outside. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I later found out that getting water to put the fires out was becoming a problem all over the City. There just wasn’t enough of it and high tide on the Thames was still hours away. It wasn’t just the ancient Guildhall that was going to ‘have it’ this night. Monuments were, to me, the least of it, really. People’s homes and businesses were already in ruins, and although there wasn’t a lot of crying in the crypt that night, there were a lot of worried and just plain sad-looking faces.
    Not that ordinary homes and businesses were on the mind of our Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, according to George. ‘Mr Churchill telephoned Mr Matthews our Dean,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Mr Churchill has told the LFB to save the cathedral at all costs. Nothing else matters, not even to Mr Churchill!’
    ‘Mr Churchill himself spoke to the Dean?’
    ‘On the telephone, yes!’
    Mr Smith, who I hadn’t seen for some while and who looked as if he’d spent