I woke to bells. This is not unusual in London — the churches ring bells at all hours for all manner of reasons — but these bells had the quality of bells being rung by men who were running, fast and irregular, all of them going at once. I went to the window of the room I shared with two other apprentices and saw the sky to the southeast was orange.
My master, John Alleyn, kept a printing shop on Cheapside. I had been his apprentice for fourteen months, setting type and running errands and sleeping in the room above the workshop. The shop contained the press, four cases of type, a stock of paper that had cost more than I would earn in three years, and several dozen books in various stages of printing. Master Alleyn had spent his entire adult life accumulating those things. They were his life, concretely, in the way that a craftsman's accumulated tools and stock represent a life.
He was already up when I came downstairs. He was looking at the same orange sky and his face had the expression of a man doing arithmetic.
The Second Morning
On the first day, the fire seemed distant and manageable. Fires happened in London; they were put out. The fire brigades — private companies employed by the insurance offices — worked with hand pumps and buckets. The Lord Mayor had been called. There was an effort being made.
By dawn of the second day it was clear the effort was not working.
The wind had shifted in the night, and the fire was moving north and west now, through Cornhill and into the streets near Cheapside. The sky was dark during the day — dark and red and full of ash that fell on everything, on the windowsills and in the gutters and on your hair if you went outside without covering it. The smell was enormous: burning wood, burning pitch, burning cloth and leather and all the ordinary combustible materials of a city, but underneath those smells, and worse than them, the smell of stone heating from the inside, which is a smell that stones should never make.
Master Alleyn decided to move the type. The press was too heavy. The type we could carry — case by case, wrapped in oilcloth — to his brother-in-law's house in Moorfields, north of the walls, which seemed beyond the fire's likely reach. We began at first light, the two other apprentices and I, carrying cases through the streets.
The streets were extraordinary. Every person in them was carrying something. There were no carriages — the streets were too full — and so people were carrying beds, chairs, pots, silver candlesticks, rolled carpets, caged birds, everything that could be carried by a man or woman on foot. The rich were trying to hire carts, but the cart drivers had raised their prices to insane levels, and I heard of men paying fifty pounds — fifty pounds, a year's income for a working man — for a single cart. There were carts with furniture piled so high they could barely move through the mob, driven by men with the look of people who could not believe their luck and were afraid to stop in case the luck ended.
By the River
Between trips I went to the river to look.
The Thames was full of boats loaded with goods, hovering in the middle of the water away from the burning wharves. On the north shore, the fire was a continuous wall, broken by the outlines of structures still standing inside it — church towers, mostly, which were stone and lasted longer. As I watched, the steeple of a church collapsed inward, slowly, like a man sitting down, and a column of sparks rose where it had been.
Samuel Pepys, who worked at the Navy Office nearby and whom I had seen occasionally at the booksellers, was in a boat on the river. I did not speak to him. He was writing in a small book, squinting against the smoke, recording what he saw, which is a thing I have always remembered: the impulse, in the middle of a catastrophe, to write it down. As if the act of recording were a way of asserting that the thing being recorded had not destroyed you. As if the witness survived while the city burned.
The Third Night
By the third night, Master Alleyn had saved the type and some of the paper. He had not saved the press. The press was still in the shop when the fire reached Cheapside, and afterward there was only ash where the shop had been, and the iron fittings of the press melted into shapes that were not the shapes of a press anymore.
We slept in the fields north of the wall with thousands of others. It was not cold — the fire had changed the temperature of the air for a radius of miles; you could feel its heat like a second, larger fire somewhere underground — but the ground was hard and the air tasted of smoke and people who had lost everything were weeping in the dark, which is a sound that does not let you sleep.
The fire stopped on the fourth day, partly because the wind changed again, partly because the soldiers had blown up enough buildings in its path to create breaks it could not cross. When it was over, we walked through what had been the city. The stones of the buildings were still warm three days later. You could not walk on some streets because the ground was radiating heat upward through the soles of your boots.
Master Alleyn looked at the ruins of the shop for a long time. Then he said we would rebuild. He said he would find another press, raise the capital somehow, start again. He was fifty-three years old. He had been a printer his whole adult life, and his father had been a printer, and the shop on Cheapside had been his father's shop before it was his.
I believed him. People did rebuild — most of them, most of it. Within a few years the city was up again in brick and stone, wider streets, better built, more permanent. The new St. Paul's rose over twenty years and when it was finished it was larger and finer than the old one.
But Master Alleyn did not see it. He died of a fever the following winter. He left me the type cases, which I still have. Fourteen cases, heavy, the letters worn smooth from years of hands setting them one by one. I set type with them for another thirty years.
Narrator's note: Thomas Crale is a fictional figure. The events described — the wind shift, the behavior of Londoners during evacuation, the scene on the Thames, Samuel Pepys writing in his boat — are drawn from Samuel Pepys' Diary (the entries for September 2–5, 1666), John Evelyn's Diary, and modern historical scholarship on the Great Fire. Pepys did watch the fire from the river and recorded his observations in his diary.