The Bethnal Green tube disaster was, for many decades, one of England’s greatest and least-known catastrophes. It happened on the night of 3 March, 1943, when, in an attempt to rush down the steps into the London station for cover, a woman tripped and caused the descending crowd to topple, resulting in a mass crush that killed 173 people. It was the single biggest loss of civilian life during World War II in Britain. When it was discovered that government negligence was to blame for the station’s unfinished and dangerous entrance, the full details of the disaster were suppressed, and the huge loss of life was quickly forgotten. That is until now.
Millie Bobby Brown, star of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Kathleen McGurl, author and pioneer of the Women Facing Away genre, have teamed up like Woodward and Bernstein to finally write the definitive account of this tragedy. Nineteen Steps is Millie’s first foray into almost writing a novel. Over the course of 372 large print pages, we are introduced to Nellie Morris, her younger sister Flo, the handsome lad who lives next door, Billy, as well as a rambunctious cast of “Oi, mista! You me dad?” Cockneys. When she isn’t busy working as an assistant to Bethnal Green’s mayoress, Nellie longs for the war in Europe to end; for brave, heroic Churchill to give that green meanie Hitler what for, so we can all sit down with some tea and crumpets and sing “The Man Who Broke the Bank At Monte Carlo”. The rest of the novel traverses through Bethnal Green in wartime, where Nellie falls madly in love with an American G.I. and, along the way, the real-life deaths of 173 people enters the plot.
Millie claims that the spark for Nineteen Steps came from her grandmother, Nanny Ruth, who survived the Bethnal Green tube disaster; her account of the night becoming part of her family lore. In a blog post (that is now mysteriously inaccessible but quoted in the Guardian), Kathleen McGurl wrote that she had been provided with “a lot of research that had already been pulled together by Millie and her family, and plenty of ideas.” After which the pair had “a couple” of Zooms before Kathleen penned the novel’s first draft. It is something of a rarity for a ghostwriter to admit that a whole novel was written by them and that the name on the book’s cover basically just made a couple of video calls, but this isn’t anything that couldn’t be derived from simply reading Nineteen Steps.
The first page opens with the clunker: “It was hot — the kind of heat that makes you long for the weather to cool down.” This is followed by about 150 pages of walk-on characters ominously pointing out just how dodgy the steps down to Bethnal Green station are. “While the entrance is adequate for normal usage,” some random engineer tells the Mayor, “I think it’s very likely unsafe if there are crowds of people all trying to enter at once.” It’s a bit like setting a novel on the Titanic and having guests randomly come out with, “oh, I sure do hope we won’t see any icebergs on our journey.”
Look, nobody is going into Nineteen Steps expecting a masterpiece. Personally, I wasn’t even expecting it to be good. It’s a curiosity piece: a young actor branching out into (albeit ghostwritten) fiction. But even as a curiosity piece, it’s pretty tasteless. It’s a goodies vs. baddies account of World War II that uncritically praises figures such as Churchill and Montgomery. But even excluding the historical weirdness, Nineteen Steps is a queasy affair that, at best, uses a less complex vocabulary than Where’s Spot?
Now, I can sit here forever and lament the state of the modern publishing industry in which this gets published while talented young authors don’t or… wait, what’s that? Millie Bobby Brown is already making a movie of it? And she claimed on Lorraine that adapting the story into a film was “the intention behind [the novel]”? Great! Can’t wait to see it.
Nineteen Steps is out now and available to purchase here