The Skeleton Army, page 15
As we got nearer to the wide-open entrance of the barracks, I could hear singing. The tune was ‘Champagne Charlie’, but the Salvation Army’d put new words to it.
At my side, Thea started to sing softly.
‘Bless his name, he sets me free,
Bless his name, he sets me free,
Oh the blood, the precious blood,
I’m trusting in the cleansing flood…’
‘You’ve been quick to pick up the hymns,’ I said.
‘We always sing this one at the beginning of a public meeting. It makes people who haven’t been before feel more comfortable.’
That ‘we’ made it sound as if she’d been sucked as deeply into the Salvation Army as her brother had. And Arthur Langridge wasn’t just trusting in the cleansing flood, he was swimming in it. Trouble was, I had a feeling he was well out of his depth.
As we walked into the barn of a building, the singing filled the place to the rafters. I looked about, surprised at the number of men in the crowd – maybe half the congregation. At home, as a rule, I’d found that revival meetings appealed more to women.
While Thea carried on singing next to me, I watched a pack of little boys dashing up the rickety steps to the balcony. I looked up. Ernie Ayott’s funeral had been well attended but there’d been nobody upstairs. Now, the balcony was groaning under the weight of spectators.
Actually, ‘balcony’ made the accommodation overhead sound grander than it was. In fact, it was pretty makeshift. The central portion of the upper storey’s floorboards had just been cut away to make a wide half-loft all the way around the hall, supported by pillars and with a wooden balustrade to stop people falling onto the floor beneath.
At the far end of the hall, on a low platform, were the performers we’d seen outside. They were properly dressed, now, in the Salvationists’ usual, unshowy clothes. The contortionist was even wearing a hallelujah bonnet.
Thea uncoupled our arms. ‘Non and I will sit here,’ she told her brother. ‘You and Mr Rice and Mr Askew will have to find seats where you can.’
We sat down on the end of a bench where there was just enough room for the two of us while the men looked around the packed hall for seats.
‘I think it’s the balcony for us,’ Arthur said. He sounded a lot more relaxed than he had done at Benjamin Jowett’s dining table. He was in his element here and still glowing with his success on the rope.
Just then a trumpet and drum struck up. The meeting was beginning.
Suddenly, for no good reason, I felt apprehensive.
‘You just don’t like revival meetings,’ Hara said.
But I didn’t think it was that. It was something to do with the number of people packed into the building and the kind of overheated atmosphere that can easily lead to hysteria.
I bent down and took my notebook and pencil out of my satchel. Whatever was about to happen, I was going to record it as best I could.
* * *
The Salvationists loved to sing. And because most of the congregation was illiterate, the Salvation Army hymns had choruses that could be repeated over and over again so even the slowest on the uptake could learn the words and join in with the endless repetition.
We’d heard testimonies from the conjurer and the juggler, and we’d sung several hymns with endless choruses when a new tune struck up and a change came over Thea. She closed her eyes as she sang the words from memory, hands clasped to her bosom, as if she was pleading with a lover, not singing to God. I looked away.
When we reached the chorus, Thea unclasped her hands and raised her arms in the air as she sang:
‘Power, power, power divine,
Power, power, Lord, be it mine,
Power thy promise, power my plea,
Lord, let thy power descend upon me.’
All around me, people were singing the same words over and over again. Some, including Thea, were swaying. Some had their eyes closed. Others had their open hands lifted up as if they were waiting to catch something descending from Heaven. And the chorus went on, repetition after repetition.
I didn’t join in. This wasn’t just singing, it was something more like mesmerism. People were singing themselves into a kind of trance.
Suddenly, Thea stopped singing, dropped her arms and, without warning or sound, collapsed against me.
She almost knocked me over and I had to work hard to steady the pair of us so we didn’t fall to the ground, but nobody around us reacted in any way at all. They all carried on singing as if nothing had happened. What was I supposed to do?
I looked about for help and two people standing behind us – a couple who looked like husband and wife – stepped forward over the bench that separated us.
‘It’s all right, lovey,’ the woman said, ‘nothing to worry about. Just a glory fit. We’ll take her to the back so she can be with the Lord in peace.’
Her husband took Thea’s shoulders and the woman stooped to put her arms under Thea’s knees, then they manoeuvred her out from behind the bench and carried her up the aisle towards the back of the hall.
‘She’ll be fine,’ the husband told me. ‘She knows the drill. You stay there. We’ll make sure she’s all right.’
I was watching them make their way to the back and wondering whether I should go with them when a shout came from the direction of the stage. I spun round.
At last, something was happening.
Chapter 27
Basil
As we entered the Salvation Army barracks, I must confess to feeling a certain apprehension. A natural unease at attending a meeting which was not intended for somebody like me, or a premonition? I wasn’t sure, but some atavistic instinct put me on my guard.
Among the Salvationists, only Captain Lyall and Lieutenant Hammond wore anything like a uniform, so, apart from the occasional woman in a hallelujah bonnet, it was impossible to tell who was a confirmed soldier of the Lord, who might have come out of curiosity, and who was here to make trouble. The Skeleton Army might not have paraded their banners through the Salvation Circus, but that didn’t mean they weren’t present.
I looked around the barracks, asking myself why I was here. Perhaps the truth lay in a remark Miss Langridge had made earlier. ‘Church of England Christianity is so milk-and-water,’ she’d proclaimed. ‘What’s offered at the barracks is spiritual intoxication – the Good News of Jesus coursing through your veins like fire! No wonder drunkards give up the bottle, they don’t need it once they’ve got the power of the Spirit!’
Since Teddy’s departure, I had been sorely in need of that kind of blood-stirring intoxication.
I pushed painful thoughts of Teddy aside. As I had expected, he had not responded to my last note. He had never been one to take rejection well.
Those already seated on the balcony made way for Askew, Langridge and me without discussion. Such unquestioning deference made me uncomfortable; and yet, perhaps it wasn’t our good suits and well-barbered hair that prompted their moving aside, but the gospel imperative to welcome the stranger? I found myself wanting to believe that.
From our seats three or four rows back from the front of the balcony, we craned our necks to see the stage where brass instruments and a drum now led the full-throated singing. Hymn after hymn was sung, the refrains repeated several times, and, as I wretchedly mouthed words which I was afraid to mean, it struck me that Salvationists didn’t sing with glib tongues like Anglicans; they weren’t simply giving voice to words from the page while they thought about the delights of Sunday lunch or the vicar’s irritating affectations. They were singing from the very core of their being.
The meeting progressed in a steady rhythm, hymn singing punctuated by speeches from the stage as, in turn, each of the circus performers rose to their feet to tell their own tale of how the Salvation Army had saved them.
Eventually, the last of the acts – the contortionist – rose to her feet. Earlier in the afternoon, we had watched as, clad in a figure-hugging costume which exhibited the entire length of her near-naked legs, she bent her body into seemingly impossible poses; now she stood demurely upon the stage to give her testimony in a modest, dark plum dress and a Salvation Army bonnet.
‘I used to do an aerial act as well before I was saved,’ she told the rapt audience. ‘And, if the crowd was up for it, if you know what I mean’ – she gave a salacious wink – ‘I’d do a striptease on the trapeze. I ’ad no shame. None. Di’n’t even know God ’ad told Adam an’ Eve to cover ’emselves up. No one’d taught me me Bible. I was a proper ’eathen till the General and Mrs Booth come to talk to us.’
Then, as the subsequent hymn reached its refrain, my apprehension was finally justified. With a sudden speeding up of my pulse, I identified something peculiar happening on the opposite side of the hall. An object was descending, slowly, from the balcony immediately above the stage towards the performers beneath. As the rest of the congregation noticed the slow descent of a white shape, eyes that had been closed opened at the urging of neighbouring elbows, the singing became ragged, then sputtered to a stop as people began calling out.
‘Look! Look up!’
‘It’s the dove of peace!’
As if the shouts had caused the indeterminate object to resolve into a real form, I saw that it was, indeed, a large white bird, its wings fully extended as if in flight. However, although it was twenty yards or so away, it was clear that this was not a living bird. Lifelike as it was, instead of beating its wings to keep it in the air, it was frozen in the act of hovering. Somehow, it must be suspended from above.
I shifted my gaze from the bird to the spectators opposite me in the gallery above the stage. The bird appeared to be dangling from wires or cords held by two young boys who were leaning over the balustrade, watching the effects of the apparition on the congregation below.
A voice below us shouted ‘It’s coming down!’ and, as if this had been a call to action, a man leaped up from the front row onto the low stage, directly under the descending bird.
‘Fall afresh on me, Holy Spirit!’ he shouted. ‘Fall afresh on me!’
A few moments of absolute silence followed his words. Then a voice cried out, ‘Don’t be a fool, Blenny! It’s a joke!’
‘Tsk!’ A voice behind me tutted. ‘Typical Joss Blenny.’
‘Hah!’ Came a response. ‘Short-sighted as a mole, he is – they could’ve ’ung a herring over ’is ’ead and ’e’d’ve been none the wiser!’
The opportunist Blenny, resplendent in an embroidered jersey, was unabashed. ‘Doesn’t matter!’ he answered his heckler. ‘The Holy Spirit isn’t a joke!’
But his words were largely lost on the spectators, who were now looking up at the balcony where the two boys were making the bird dance from side to side. There was laughter, but also cries of ‘Shame!’, and a move was made to remove the lines controlling the bird from the boys’ grasp.
But Blenny was not to be so easily thwarted. Signalling to the strongman to lift him onto his shoulders, Blenny was swiftly hoisted into a position from which he was able to grab the bird, which he proceeded to pull down and clasp to his breast.
‘What shall we do with the Holy Spirit?’ he sang, his strong tenor voice taking up the tune of ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’.
‘What shall we do with the Holy Spirit?
What shall we do with the Holy Spirit?
Take him where he’s wanted!
Preach, ho! And up he rises!
Preach, ho! And up he rises!
Preach, ho! And up he rises!
In the gutters of Oxford!’
The song was quickly taken up and seemed as popular amongst those who’d come just to gawp as amongst those accustomed to the recruitment of tavern songs for the Lord’s cause. The strongman, quickly gauging the mood of his audience, began processing Blenny and the dove up and down as the singing grew louder and louder.
As they came back down the aisle for the second time, the band onstage struck up a new tune, presumably to signal an end to Blenny’s performance, but before the crowd could adjust to the new tune and seek abandoned hymnals, the hall was silenced by a scream from directly beneath us.
All eyes turned and then one word rang out, again and again.
‘Fire!’
‘Fire!’
‘Fire!’
Chapter 28
Non
When I heard the first shout of ‘Fire!’ I thought it must be a Skeleton trick.
But, like everybody else, I turned around to see.
The back of the hall was filling up with smoke.
I shoved my notebook into my satchel and stumbled into the shouting, pushing, neck-craning crowd that had started surging up the narrow aisle.
I couldn’t see any flames, but the smoke was thick and dark, and people were desperate to get out while they still could.
Behind us, I could hear Captain Lyall shouting to the congregation to keep calm, to use the door at the side of the stage if they were near the front, but people were taking no notice. They were pushing and shoving, fathers lifting children onto their shoulders, mothers clasping infants to them, eyes fixed on the wide-open doors and safety.
It wasn’t a stampede yet, but at the first sign of a flame, it would be.
‘Slow down!’ Hara was sharp.
I took a deep breath.
‘Think, Non. Stop panicking and think.’
Where were the others?
I took another breath.
The men were up in the balcony. They’d be a while getting down. I couldn’t wait for them. And there’d be no point anyway.
I had to get out.
‘What about Thea?’
Thea.
Thea was by herself.
I’d let them take her away while I watched Joss Blenny cavorting with a stuffed bird.
I craned my neck to look through the crowds and the smoke to the back of the hall. On the way into the barracks, I’d noticed doors to two rooms on either side of the entrance which formed a short, wide corridor into the hall. Thea’d been taken to one of those rooms.
With the smoke billowing as it was, it was difficult to tell, but it seemed to be coming from the room on the right.
Which one had the couple behind me taken Thea to? I didn’t know. I’d turned away when I heard that shout at the front of the hall.
‘Think!’ If Hara could have, she’d have shaken me. ‘It doesn’t matter which one they took her to. Anybody in those rooms would’ve been the first to hear the shouts of “fire”. Thea will be out already.’
Hara was right. I just needed to get out of the building. Thea would be waiting outside.
By now, I was more than halfway to the back of the hall. Through the billowing smoke, I could see people spilling out into the street. We’d soon be out and safe.
As the crowd pressed and pushed, I tried to listen for any cries coming from the room where the fire was. Nothing.
‘If anybody’d been trapped inside, they’d be screaming blue murder by now,’ Hara said.
She was right. Thea must have escaped, along with anybody else in there.
‘Non! Rhiannon!’
I turned.
Tarley. With Basil and Arthur.
When Arthur saw me, he put his head down and started burrowing his way through the crowd. People shouted and hit out at him, tried to push him out of their way, but he had the strength of desperation.
‘Where’s Thea?’ he shouted as he got closer.
I opened my mouth to reply but smoke caught in my throat. ‘Glory fit,’ I coughed.
Arthur looked at the door holding the fire back. The roaring on the other side was terrifying.
He started moving against the crowd again, towards the door. I grabbed his jacket and was pulled along in his wake. Then, as he reached out for the handle, I yanked him back. ‘No!’ I yelled. ‘You can’t let the fire out!’
‘But she might be in there!’
‘No!’ I shouted, eyes streaming now. ‘She won’t be.’ I coughed and coughed. ‘Outside,’ I croaked, and pointed. ‘She’ll be outside!’
‘I have to make sure!’
But it was already too late. The press of bodies had carried us beyond the door towards the street.
We staggered out of the building into a seething horde of shaken, confused people. Some had been separated from their families and were grabbing at children and spouses as they stumbled about in the smoke.
Thea was sensible. She’d have moved away from the doors. She’d be standing somewhere safe, out of the way.
The flow of people pushed me further away from the burning barracks and I let it. My eyes darted around, looking for her.
‘Thea!’ Arthur was turning this way and that like a madman, yelling his sister’s name. ‘Thea!’
There was no answer, no slim figure came rushing towards him.
What had Thea been wearing? I forced myself to remember. A navy blue dress and a grey shawl. Small grey and blue hat.
The stumbling, coughing, milling crowd was hundreds strong. I couldn’t see her.
It didn’t help that most of the Salvationist women were wearing sober-coloured dresses. In the smoke and confusion, everybody looked the same.
‘Think, Non!’
With all these terrified people pouring out, Thea would’ve got out of their way. She’d have moved right away from the barracks. I stumbled further up Dale Street, out of reach of the smoke, and looked around.
‘Thea!’ I shouted.
Basil and Tarley came towards me, coughing and wiping their eyes.
‘No sign yet?’ Basil asked, then succumbed to another coughing fit.
I didn’t reply because I saw Arthur running towards the window. Tarley and I went after him, hitting out at hands that tried to pull us away. Ahead, through the window, all I could see were flames. Tarley caught Arthur round the chest and pulled him back. If he touched the window, he’d be burned. And the window would probably shatter which would make the flames leap towards him.
