Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  The Brownings made it back to their house in safety, and, once quiet had descended, Alice mustered together her family and ventured back home too. Dinner had been left uneaten when the raid started eight hours before, and Alice’s first priority beyond safety was to feed her daughter. Once inside, Alice soon discovered that the gas was cut but, luckily, electric service was not disrupted. She breathed a sigh of relief for her electric cooker – an appliance for which she often expressed gratitude in the coming days.

  Ignoring the ruined dinner, she quickly heated up some sausages and the family sat down for a quick bite. In the lull, a warden came by to check on them. He told them the devastation was ‘pretty awful’, but at least there weren’t many casualties. From the front door, where she talked with the warden, she could see hundreds of night workers streaming home from the factories and warehouses nearby. The respite was punctuated by one more violent barrage that morning, so close that it lifted Bridges off her bed and sent her flying once more towards the shelter. Later that day, after she’d recovered a little, she sat down to write in her diary. ‘Oh God, what a night,’ she wrote, ‘10¾ hours of anguish, misery, hunger and sleeplessness’.

  The next two nights, Wednesday and Thursday 20 and 21 November, the Luftwaffe appeared again, but the waves did not last as long. Rain began to fall on Thursday, slowing down the raiders, but swamping the shelter once again. Water ‘came in like a river’, and all night they baled out the shelter, but the damp settled into Jacq’s chest and brought on bronchitis.

  On Friday morning, Alice pulled sixty buckets of water out of the shelter and nearly fainted from the strain. Yet she was thankful for the work, because the shelter once again became their refuge for what would become Birmingham’s largest onslaught. ‘The fun started’ once again at dinner. Within minutes, incendiaries had started fires several houses away. Across the road and on the corner, more homes burned. While Les went out to help fight the fires, Alice and Jacq dressed and got two suitcases ready for evacuation. When Les came in, they retreated to the shelter, for Alice said she could ‘stand the idea of blast but not being roasted alive’. ‘The gunfire was hot and the effect of the fires … was terrifying because of the thought of it. All those houses were on fire, and we in the centre …’

  Alice bundled up Jacq and soon her daughter drifted off to sleep. Meanwhile, what seemed like a thousand planes came over, delivering death and destruction. The neighbour, Mr Browning, came down during gunfire, carrying with him a cup of tea for Alice and her husband. She was thankful for the refreshment, and ‘It was quite a relief having a chat to someone,’ she told M-O. Soon, the raid got so hot that Les couldn’t leave the shelter to get rid of the buckets of water flooding in. He could only open the door and throw the water as far out as possible, creating a huge muddy quagmire round the entrance. From inside, Alice listened apprehensively to the raid, and when a landmine exploded nearby she felt her legs and feet go cold, ‘like lumps of ice’.

  In the distance, she heard voices intermingled with screams and fire engines. Alice would later learn that the chaos occurred only a block away from her: incendiaries, landmines, high-explosive bombs, time bombs and a ‘huge torpedo bomb’ had been dropped. People were rushing out of their shelters barefoot, half-naked and dazed as ARP wardens shouted instructions to ‘Throw yourselves down, get up, run, keep calm.’

  It was 4 a.m. by the time Alice felt she could shut her eyes and sleep, but then a stray bomb would drop and wake her ‘with a horrible tight feeling round my heart’. It was useless. The night seemed interminable; all she wanted to do was see the light of day, for then, she knew, the bombers would be gone. The All Clear finally went at 5.45, and the Bridges emerged from their shelter like ragged troglodytes. ‘I felt like a person dead and devoid of feeling,’ Alice scribbled in her diary.

  She flicked on the radio in time to hear the BBC state, a ‘raid over Midland area’. No mention of Birmingham. No one to sympathize with their plight. It was as if the nightmare never occurred. But when she went out the next day to check on her mother, it was all too clear that hell indeed had been let loose upon her world. Shattered shop windows lay in shards about the streets, a car had been swallowed up in a huge bomb crater, dazed people walked the streets with suitcases, hoping to board buses out of town. In one section of town, Alice was so overwhelmed by the destruction that she felt she ‘could have stood in the road and howled’: all around her, rows of houses had been laid waste, ‘nothing but dust and debris’ was left. Walking through this wasteland, she may have experienced what John Strachey (a socialist intellectual who sometimes wrote for the New Statesman and who served as an ARP warden in Chelsea) described as the ‘harsh, rank, raw smell’ of a bombed street,

  [The] torn, wounded, dismembered houses … For several hours there was an acrid overtone from the high explosive which the bomb itself contained; a fiery constituent of the smell. Almost invariable, too, there was the mean little stink of domestic gas, seeping up from broken pipes and leads. But the whole of the smell … was the smell of violent death itself.13

  On her way home, Alice met a man who was looking for water for his car radiator. He said he was off to Stourbridge and offered Alice a ride – an escape from the large-scale devastation she’d witnessed on her excursion through town and from facing another night of carnage in which her luck might not hold up. ‘Well, my spirits soared,’ she confided to M-O, ‘I thought it was the answer to a maiden’s prayer.’ She ran up to the house to pack, only to learn minutes later that her hopes were dashed. Les informed her that the deal was off; the Bridges were staying in Birmingham. All Alice could do was ‘shrug my shoulders and carry on’. ‘What is to be, will be,’ she thought. Alice exuded calm in front of her family as she waited for the night to fall, but inside, she confessed, nothing could be further from the truth. And once again, with the darkness came the sirens. But this time, she was armed with lemonade and Nut Brown Ale: ‘I wasn’t going to be without a pick-me-up tonight.’

  The eleven-hour raid of 23/24 November was the largest of the Birmingham Blitz. Hundreds of fires were started and fire crews came from as far away as Cardiff to help fight the blazes. Through a friend, Alice heard of the disaster that occurred at the Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) factory at Small Heath that night. Bombs came down on the heavy machinery and crushed the workers below. Those who escaped the collapse ran out into the street and were machine-gunned. ‘The carnage was ghastly,’ she wrote, ‘the fellows and girls to escape the machine gunning threw themselves over the side of the canal and committed suicide.’ Over 800 people were killed and 2,000 injured across Birmingham. A further 20,000 were made homeless. Alice was one of the lucky ones. Her family was safe and her house remained standing after the raid.

  Since August, when the first bombs fell on Birmingham, Alice had agonized over evacuating Jacqueline to safer destinations in the countryside and even entertained sending her to America. At the beginning of the war, official government evacuation schemes encouraged parents living in congested inner cities likely to be bombed to send their children out of the city for safety’s sake (and, more importantly, from the government’s point of view, to avoid mass panic when bombs fell). In the first days of September 1939, millions of children streamed out of urban areas, boarding trains destined for supposedly safe reception areas (Folkestone and Eastbourne were among the destinations), some with their mothers, but most accompanied only by brothers and sisters, classmates and teachers. Overall, 1.5 million children were resettled that first September of the war; 25,000 children and 4,500 teachers from Birmingham embarked for the Cotswolds and Wales. Alice decided at that time that Jacq was too finicky about her food, so Jacq stayed at home. As it was, since the expected bombs didn’t fall that autumn or winter of the Bore War, most of the evacuees came home anyway after the initial exodus.

  After the fall of France, the government created a scheme to send children overseas to Canada, America, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. Some well-to-do fami
lies had already made arrangements to send their children abroad, but the standard £15 fare was nearly a month’s salary for many workers. To ease this financial burden, passage under the plan would be free, except for some fees to cover regular needs, such as clothing and shoes. Offers poured into Eleanor Roosevelt’s United States Committee for the Care of European Children to provide homes for thousands of British ‘seavacuees’.14 About 2,500 children headed to homes overseas under the official scheme before it ended in October. The overseas exodus was not without its dangers. On 20 September 1939, a large torpedo struck a ship headed for Canada carrying ninety evacuees: seventy-seven children perished.

  Such tragedies weighed heavily on Alice’s mind as she turned over the options available for Jacq’s safety. America was out of the question: ‘Hitler and Musso couldn’t withstand the pleasure of sinking our children.’ No, she thought, ‘If my child has to face war, then she shall face it under my care, not be sent to face a watery grave and God knows what horrors.’ But with every wave of planes that passed overhead and the growing fear she could see in her child’s face, the conviction to keep Jacq close weakened.

  After the raid on 23/24 November, Alice was finally convinced she needed to get her daughter away from Birmingham. She went round to the school and learned that a new evacuation scheme was underway, and for the next week, she worked to find Jacq a suitable billet. It was not easy and she suffered many ups and downs – one day things looked promising and the next, her hopes were dashed. Alice feared not only for Jacq’s safety, but also for her character. Alice worried that if Jacq was shipped off with one school, she might come back rough. As it was, the evacuated East Enders up the street had taught her daughter to say ‘Blast’. Eventually, a respectable middle-class family in Retford, east of Sheffield, was found.

  While she waited for Jacq’s school to be evacuated, Bridges scoured town for clothes and other necessities to send with her daughter. Laundry had to be done too. This task was made even more onerous than normal, since water mains had been cut in the Blitz. Alice pulled up buckets of shelter water, boiled it, put soap in and then stirred a small handful of clothing or towels in the saucepan on the hot plate. Afterwards, she put the laundry in the sink, rinsed it with one cup of disinfected shelter water, and placed more clothes in the saucepan. Still, she found time to cook for neighbours and friends, who she knew went without. She sent a mince-meat suet pudding to one family and a hearty meal of creamed potatoes, cauliflower au gratin, salmon steak, one chop and mince-meat pudding to her ARP friend, Mrs Empson.

  Birmingham had another raid on the night of 3 December, which sent stabs through Bridges’ heart, and once again made her legs and feet feel like blocks of ice. Her daughter turned white with fear and couldn’t sleep, a response that reinforced Bridges’ determination to evacuate Jacq to a safer place. On 10 December, Alice and Jacq loaded themselves on an early-morning bus and made a seven-and-a-half hour journey, through Nottingham and up to Retford. Alice was delighted to meet the billeting family and Jacq was equally thrilled to learn the family had a terrier named Queenie and to see that the farm nearby had ponies. Bridges couldn’t have got her daughter out of Birmingham at a more propitious time; the next night the city endured its longest raid ever.

  On 11/12 December, Nazi bombers buzzed like angry hornets over the city for thirteen hours. An incendiary dropped in the Bridges’ garden that night, but Les and Mr Browning made quick work of it by digging up Alice’s cabbage patch and throwing the dirt over it. Several times the bombs heated up the neighbourhood, but by the end of the night, with random planes flying over, gunfire cracking away and time bombs exploding sporadically, everyone was fed up. Alice couldn’t sleep and everyone was cold. ‘Blast Hitler and Blast the men who have allowed our country to become impoverished to the extent of putting us in the position of this bombardment,’ she fumed in her diary. By 7 a.m., everyone was ‘beyond caring’. Despite the raid still going on overhead, Les went up to get ready for work and the Brownings went back home.

  According to Mrs Empson, Bridges’ ARP warden friend, 11/12 December’s was much worse than any others, but with less loss of life. Mrs Empson had been patrolling in Acock’s Green when a ‘packet’ of bombs came down. Six houses were demolished, and when she arrived at the scene the situation was dire. Wires were down, the water main had been hit and ice-cold water gushed into the road. Mrs Empson was left to administer first aid while her partner grabbed a constable’s bike and rode to Central Control for help. As he rode off, an incendiary dropped just behind him and bounced along after him. Turning his head constantly to check on the bomb’s progress, the ARP warden hadn’t noticed a wire down in his path, and was thrown headlong over the handlebars. He only narrowly escaped being decapitated by another telegraph wire. When he returned with help, Mrs Empson had stories to tell that didn’t end so well. Several wardens had gone into houses, never to return, and the injuries she saw were horrific. After hours aiding bomb victims and wading through the frigid water, Mrs Empson finally managed to drag herself to Central Control, where she gladly gulped the tea and toast they made for her.

  The rest of the Christmas season was relatively quiet for Birmingham. Almost too quiet. On 19 and again on 23 December, Alice and her friends wondered if an invasion was afoot. It may have been quiet enough in Birmingham to entertain the possibility of a stealthy invasion, but those in Sheffield, Merseyside and Manchester were under no such illusion. Sheffield lost over 600 people in its 12/13 and 15 December raids, over 700 people perished while the docks of Merseyside burned on 20 and 21 December and Manchester burned out of control on 22 and 23 December, as many of its firefighters had been sent to help Liverpool.

  Though only two miles from Sheffield’s city centre, Edie Rutherford escaped the worst of Sheffield’s December 1940 raids. On 12 December, the first wave of German bombers dropped thousands of incendiaries, creating a ‘ring of fire’ around Sheffield to act as a target for subsequent raiders.15 The gas works north of the city was hit early in the raid and, ‘with a terrifying “whoo-oo-sh”, sent two hundred feet of flame … into the air’, blasting a wall of heat that could be felt up to a mile and a half away, near Rutherford’s flat on the northern edge of town.16 Edie’s flat suffered a few cracked and blown-out windows, which – out of ‘patriotism’ and an unwillingness to be ‘difficult’ – she held off applying to have fixed until 1946.

  As bombs whistled relentlessly to the ground, the city’s barometer jumped up and down wildly from the rush and suction of continual blasts playing havoc with the air pressure. The greatest disaster that night occurred when a bomb hit the Marples Hotel on the High Street, causing its seven floors to fall into the cellar where seventy-seven people were sheltering. Only seven survived. Most of the damage done to the city, however, was in the southern corridor that the Germans used to approach the city and in the industrial areas east of the centre. That night, in her farmhouse north of Leeds, Natalie Tanner and her family saw ‘a lot of gunfire (at least a lot for us) and … three flares and some shells bursting’ in the distance, but they were too far away to feel the impact of any of the 355 tons of bombs dropped on Sheffield that night.

  Though Edie was not writing for M-O at the time, she later told M-O that she’d never forget sweeping up shards of glass the morning after, dressed in a top coat, bonnet and boots to stave off the bitter cold December morning streaming undeterred through the holes where windows once stood. Later that morning she may have picked her way into town and experienced the poignant ruins and varieties of dirt that the official account of the raid describes: ‘Whole sides of sturdily-built, expensive Victorian houses fell away and crumbled,’ wooden doors and plaster walls shredded by splinters of glass flung at high speed, and the long, deep channels that flying metal gouged through solid stone.

  Light flakes of ash flew everywhere near the fires. Dust from broken pavements and little gardens swirled in clouds … explosions near craters sodden with the overflow from burst water pipes spatt
ered mud in all directions.

  A thin dirty ice formed around the smouldering ashes and charred timbers left in the wake of the bombing. In the end, all that was left was ‘mud and mess and desolation’.17

  While Sheffielders cleaned up the morning after, the Tanners inched their way through gale winds over rain-swept icy moors to James’ school in Glossop. James had a role as one of the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Natalie proudly reported to M-O that he remembered all his lines and brought the house down three times with his performance. On their return home, Natalie and her husband, Hugh, stopped in Leeds for dinner and a movie. When the Germans came back to Sheffield on 15 December, Natalie didn’t hear the ack-ack fire from her seat at the Civic Theatre in Leeds, but those in the balcony did.

  Alice Bridges spent the waning weeks of December entertaining guests at her house, picking through the wreckage caused by Birmingham’s recent raid to visit friends and family, buying Christmas gifts to send to Jacq, tidying her house and securing their Anderson shelter – Les laid some concrete to stop the rain from coming in.

  For Alice, the season was a bust. Christmas Eve was her thirteenth wedding anniversary, but the couple had forgone their usual party and she felt miserable and lonely. Jacq wasn’t home, and Les only mirrored Alice’s mood, making her even more depressed. She had asked Mrs Empson if there was anyone she might invite to Christmas dinner who was bombed-out and had nowhere to go, but it seemed everyone was settled. Christmas was ‘peaceful’ in more than one way: the night skies were quiet and the normally sociable Bridges had no visitors. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were quiet for Alice, and for Britain. On Hitler’s orders, there were no raids on British soil over the holiday.

  The Blitz of 1940 was punctuated, however, by raids directly following the Christmas lull. On 29 December St Paul’s Cathedral in London narrowly escaped the fate of its predecessor in 1666 and thereafter stood evocatively among the flames to uplift the spirit of the people, and remind them that the popular song, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ had some substance in its hopeful message. In the following year bombers would not visit the capital with such regularity, but the intensity and devastation of the raids ratcheted up steadily until 10 May 1941, when London experienced its worst and its last major raid of the war. Across Britain that winter and spring of 1941, other cities also suffered the wrath of the bombers.