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go and find out what was happening. The Watch are very well organised with telephones in the crypt and up in the Whispering Gallery. These instruments are connected to each other and to control rooms across the City. The message this time was about another incendiary on the roof. It seemed to me, ear-wigging as I knew I really shouldn’t to Mr Ronson’s conversation, that on this occasion the Watch had failed to control the flames.
    ‘Call the Fire Brigade,’ I heard Mr Ronson say to Mr Smith. ‘I’m going up top to see what I can do.’
    ‘All right.’
    Together with Mr Smith, I watched Mr Ronson go. By ‘up top’ he’d meant the Whispering Gallery. As far as I could see he went on his own.
    I’ve always found the idea of the Whispering Gallery to be a little bit disturbing. Like most London schoolchildren I was taken to visit St Paul’s when I was a nipper and, as boys will, I mucked around. I ran about in the cathedral, took the mickey out of the staff who patrolled the place and I was very uncomplimentary about a couple of the choristers I saw walking up the front steps. Maybe it was the long climb up to the Gallery that silenced me, but I do recall being far more sombre up there. I was also, so an old mate told me, struck dumb by it. But then that would make sense given my reaction to the Gallery now. To hear something whispered by a person to someone else can be exciting, but to have your own whisperings listened to, isn’t. It is or has the potential to be very frightening indeed. After all, if you whisper something to somebody, you only mean for them to hear, no one else. The whole place breaks your confidences and sometimes more than that, too, as we were all soon to learn. I was glad, at the time, that it wasn’t me going back up there again. I hoped at that point, to never have to face the Whispering Gallery’s cruel stairs or the potential its walls hold for treachery ever again.
    Once Mr Ronson had gone, Mrs Andrews came over and spoke to me.
    ‘You’re the gentleman who was looking for that little girl, aren’t you?’ she said.
    ‘Yes, madam.’ I put my hand up to my head in order to raise my top hat to her, then realised that I wasn’t wearing any sort of head-gear. I hadn’t worked that day and so I’d been in ‘civvies’ over at my great aunt Annie’s. I’d had a hat, a flat cap, but that was long gone. It had blown or fallen off my head somewhere after Smithfield Market.
    She put a hand, old and heavily veined, on my arm. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much if I were you,’ she said. ‘The cathedral is packed, what with the clergy and the watchmen. They’ll find her. My husband’s looking.’
    I wasn’t so sure about that. I know I’d asked Mr Andrews to do so, but I was also very aware of the fact that the clerics and the watchmen had a lot of other things on their minds too. Even down in the crypt I could hear yet another wave of bombers come over. The ack-ack was furious, loud as I didn’t recall ever hearing the like of it before. I could, I was sorry to admit to myself, imagine what it was like up on the roof for the lads fighting the fire. Most old Great War soldiers have fought against fierce enemies with only very minimal equipment at one time or another. The Fire Brigade had been called for a very good reason. The dry riser still wasn’t working and the water the cathedral staff had hoarded for just such an eventuality as this, was running out. There was so much activity in the skies above us that it had to be only a question of time before we suffered a direct hit and I didn’t want to be in the crypt when that happened. I didn’t want to be in the cathedral at all.
    ‘You know that if I thought that death was actually the end, I couldn’t be here?’ Mrs Andrews said. ‘I’d be a coward and get out of the cathedral now.’
    Were I the fanciful sort, I might have wondered whether she could read my mind.
    ‘No one is comfortable here,’ she said. ‘The Nazis