Warlight(61)

I watched the programme, unable at first to compare the Olive Lawrence I saw on the box to the one I’d known as a teenager. To be truthful I no longer remembered what she looked like. She had been mostly a presence for me. I remembered how she moved, as well as the no-nonsense clothes she wore, even when arriving for a night out with The Darter. As for her face, the one I saw speaking to me now had the same enthusiasm, and this quickly became the face I attached to my earlier memories of her. Now she was clambering up a rockface in Jordan, now rappelling down while still addressing the camera. Once again I was being offered specific wisdoms about water tables, the varieties of hail across the European landmass, how leaf-cutter ants could destroy whole forests—all this data about the complex balance of nature was being handed with clarifying ease to us in that same small female palm of hers. I had been right. She could have knitted together my life wisely, not avoiding the complexity of distant rivalries or losses that were unknown to me, in much the way she was able to recognize a tempest preparing itself, or the way she had recognized Rachel’s epilepsy by some gesture or quiet evasion in her. I had benefited from the clarity of female opinion in this person who had no close connection to me. In the brief time I knew her, I believed Olive Lawrence was on my side. I stood there and was perceived.

I read her book, watched the documentary in which she hiked across ravaged olive orchards in Palestine, stepped on and off Mongolian trains, bent over and diagrammed the figure-eight path of the lunar sky on a dusty street using walnuts and an orange. She was unchanged, still constantly new. A long time after my mother told me of Olive’s war work, I’d read the terse official reports of how scientists recorded wind speeds, preparing for D-Day, and how she and others had risen into a dark sky infested with other gliders that shuddered in the air brittle as glass, in order to listen to how porous the wind was and search for rainless light, so they could postpone or confirm the invasion. The weather journals she had shown me and my sister, full of medieval woodcuts depicting varieties of hail, or sketches of Saussure’s cyanometer, which distinguished the various blues in the sky, were never just theoretical to her. She and others must have felt like magicians at that moment, conjuring up what generations of science had taught them.



Olive was the first to reappear out from that half-buried era when we all had met at Ruvigny Gardens. As for The Darter, I still had no clue as to where he lived. It was years since I had seen him, and I could not even remember his real name. He and The Moth and the others existed now only in that ravine of childhood. While my adult life had been spent mostly in a government building, attempting to trace the career my mother had taken.

Now and then there would be days in the Archives when I’d come across information from distant events that overlapped with my mother’s activities. I would in this way glimpse details of another operation or place. And so one afternoon, following a tangent to her activities, I came upon references to the transportation of nitroglycerine during the war. How it was transported secretly across the city of London and, because it was dangerous freight, how this needed to be done at night, with the public unaware. This had continued even during the Blitz, when there was just warlight, the river dark save for one dimmed orange light on bridges to mark the working arch for water traffic, a quiet signal in the midst of the bombing, and the barges ablaze, and shrapnel frapping across the water, while on the blacked-out roads the secret lorries crossed the city three or four times a night. It was a thirty-mile journey from Waltham Abbey, where the Great Nitrator produced nitroglycerine, to an unnamed underground location in the heart of the city, which turned out to be on Lower Thames Street.

Sometimes a floor gives way and a tunnel below leads to an old destination. Barely pausing I made my way to the large room of hanging maps. I pulled down various charts, searching out possible routes the nitro trucks might have taken. I knew, almost before my hand traced their path, the indelible names: Sewardstone Street, Cobbins Brook Bridge, a jog west from the graveyard, then south, until it reached Lower Thames Street. The night route I used to take with The Darter, when I was a youth, after the war was over.

My long-forgotten Darter, that smuggler, a minor criminal, had possibly been a hero of sorts, for the activity was dangerous work. What he’d done after the war was just a consequence of the peace. That familiar false modesty of the English, which included absurd secrecy or the cliché of an innocent boffin, was somewhat like those carefully painted formal dioramas that hid the truth and closed the door on their private selves. It had concealed in some ways the most remarkable theatrical performance of any European nation. Along with undercover agents, who included great-aunts, semi-competent novelists, a society couturier who’d been a spy in Europe, the designers and builders of false bridges on the Thames that were meant to confuse German bombers who attempted to follow the river into the heart of London, chemists who became specialists on poisons, village crofters on the east coast who were given lists of German sympathizers to be killed if and when the invasion came, and ornithologists and beekeepers from Kew, as well as permanent bachelors well versed in the Levant and a handful of languages—one of whom turned out to be Arthur McCash, who continued in the Service most of his life. All of them abiding by the secrecy of their roles, even when the war was over, and receiving only, years later, a quiet sentence in an obituary that mentioned they had “served with distinction in the Foreign Office.”

It was nearly always a wet, pitch-black universe when The Darter drove the cumbersome nitroglycerine lorries, passing gardens with their Anderson shelters, his left hand at the gears, shifting them in the dark, aiming the missile-like vehicle towards a warehouse in London. It was two in the morning, there was the map in his head, so he could travel at ridiculous speeds through the night.