by Anne Bennett
Outside the church was a cluster of people all talking about the raids. ‘There will be more than a few that hasn’t a place to live this morning,’ one woman said.
‘I know,’ said Gloria. ‘I was amazed at the devastation as we were making our way here today. Each mound of bricks and debris we passed represented someone’s life. Where do the people go? What do they do?’
‘I don’t know,’ the first woman said. ‘But I’d take a bet the government haven’t put anything in place.’
‘And they will have to do summat, and quick, if that raid is one of many,’ another said.
‘As it’s likely to be,’ the first woman said. ‘That was just a taste of what is to come.’
Gloria caught the look of sheer terror on Ben’s face and wished she could reassure him that the woman was spouting nonsense, but she couldn’t. She felt worn down by foreboding and hoped the Mass would help lift her mood.
It didn’t do much for her, though the priest did speak of the raids and the need to have courage. Gloria didn’t know what to pray for. Peace? How could there be peace when an evil man had to be stopped before peace could be secured?
She was glad when the Mass was over, and didn’t linger because she was anxious to get back to Joe. He was stirring when she and Ben went in. He peeled his eyelids back slowly and immediately wished he hadn’t bothered for a pain beat in his temples. However, far, far worse were the images of events of the previous night that flooded across his brain. He accepted the fact that he had seen and heard things that no man should ever see or hear, and that none of his training had prepared him for.
The charred bodies haunted him, and those burned black, some of them children younger than Ben. The first time he had carried a child so badly burned he was unrecognisable, Joe was sick into the gutter. He was never sick again. It was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself when so many people needed help, so when the nausea rose in his throat, he swallowed it and carried on.
He had gone into buildings searching for people, feeling that any minute his lungs would burst with the heat. The blackness and swirling smoke often meant he could see nothing, and his hand would come into contact with a body burned almost to cinders, which crumbled at his touch. Far worse than this, though, were the screams of the dying in blazing houses that the firemen were unable to reach because of the intensity of the fires, which the hoses seemed to have little effect on.
Through it all the bombs would continue to hurtle from the sky. The smell that lodged in Joe’s nose and throat, over the smell of burning buildings and smoke and cordite, was the stinking and nauseous reek of burning human flesh. He didn’t think that he would ever be free of that smell – that it would live with him for ever.
He was certain of one thing: he would never bring the things he had had to do, and he knew he would do again, into the life he shared with Gloria and Ben.
Gloria, seeing him awake, said, ‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Never better,’ Joe said, and he smiled at her.
But Gloria was no fool. She had seen the haunted look on his face and the desolate look in his eyes, even through the dirt. She wondered what harrowing scenes he had witnessed the evening before. She wouldn’t ask him, and certainly not in front of Ben, but later, if he wanted to talk, she would make it clear that she was ready to listen. So she said, ‘You’re one hell of a bad liar, Joe Sullivan. What d’you want to do first, eat or wash?’
Ben’s eyes opened wide, for his mother would never let him sit down at the table looking half as bad as his dad did. She was forever going on about him washing his hands. Sometimes he thought he would have them washed away before he was grown up.
Joe saw Ben’s face and guessed his thoughts. ‘I think I’d better have a bath first, and I am sure that Ben would agree with me, wouldn’t you?’
Ben nodded. ‘Not half, and I’ll say what Mommy says to me sometimes. You are so mucky make sure you don’t block up the plughole.’
Joe laughed, glad he was still able to do so, glad of his son for lightening the atmosphere and chasing some of the demons away.
The bombers returned that night, and Gloria managed to grab just two and a half hours’ sleep after the raid had finished. It was hard enough work even getting out of bed the next morning, never mind the thought of putting in a full day at the factory. However, she forced her reluctant body out from under the covers because she knew Joe had had even less sleep than she had, and he had already left for work.
Ben was dead to the world and when Gloria roused him he was crotchety and bad-tempered. ‘I don’t want to get up,’ he said mulishly. ‘I’m still tired.’
‘I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning either,’ Gloria admitted. ‘And I am more than just tired – exhausted, in fact – but we still have to get up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that is the way life is at the moment.’
‘I’m too tired to go to school.’
‘You know, Ben,’ Gloria said, ‘I could take a bet that a lot of children in London feel as you do now, and a lot of parents feel as I do, but say all the woman I work with didn’t come in today, then there would be no parachutes made for the airmen who need them. Or just suppose no one turned up to drive the buses, or the lorries? Where would we be then?’
Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t care,’ cos I’m too tired.’
‘Come on, Ben,’ Gloria urged. ‘You’ll be late if you don’t hurry up, and so will I.’
Ben still lay in the bed with his eyes shut, and Gloria said through gritted teeth, ‘Hop out of bed now, there’s a good boy.’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Haven’t you learned yet that you can’t always have what you want?’ Gloria said impatiently, stripping the covers from Ben’s bed as she did so. Ben gave a yelp of surprise and Gloria said almost fiercely, ‘If you don’t get out of bed this minute I will come in with a jug of water to tip over you.’
Ben wasn’t sure that his mother was joking. She didn’t look like she was, and though she had never even hinted at anything so drastic before, everything had changed because of this war. With a sigh he slid out of bed and began to dress.
Even then, he didn’t seem to have a hurry bone in his body. Gloria did feel sorry for him, but she wasn’t at her best either, and so it took her all her time to keep her temper because she feared that she would be late for work.
In the end she made it by the skin of her teeth. Elsie was just the same, and as they hurried to the tram stop she said to Gloria, ‘They say four hundred and thirty were killed that first night, and sixteen thousand injured.’
‘God, such numbers,’ Gloria breathed. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. Such tragedy and sadness, and more homes destroyed.’
When they reached work, everyone was discussing the air raid.
‘So many were killed ’cos there ain’t enough shelters,’ Maureen said. ‘Fancy declaring war when you haven’t enough shelters to keep the people safe.’
‘I thought you’d be coming down the shelter in St Ann’s Road with me,’ Gloria said to Elsie.
Elsie shook her head. ‘You know we live with our mom?’ she said. ‘Well, she won’t leave the house. We had to sit it out under the stairs.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ Maureen answered. ‘Mind you, I couldn’t find a shelter for love nor money that first night. They was all full up by the time I got there, but by the second night we found out about a deserted warehouse and we bedded down there. There were a fair few of us using it in the end, and it’s half underground, see, and feels safer, like.’
‘How come they’re deserted, these warehouses?’ Gloria asked.
‘Oh, well, that’s the best yet,’ said Maureen. ‘There are hundreds of these places scattered around London if you are in the know, but this one we were in last night, this geezer was telling me used to house dray horses and they moved the horses out to a place they consider safer. Priceless, ain’t it? They did sod all for the peo
ple and now we are bedding down each night in places they didn’t consider safe enough for their precious horses.’
‘Huh, think Churchill cares about the likes of us?’ Winnie said. ‘Like hell he does. We got to look after our own.’
‘I took my lot down the Tube last night,’ Violet put in.
‘And didn’t the authorities try to stop you first, Vi?’
‘They did and all, but they gave up in the end,’ Violet said with a grin. ‘Had to really ’cos there were just so many of us. I mean, it ain’t as if they’ve done anything for us, and all we’re doing is trying to keep our families safe. For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with that?’
The Blitz, Hitler’s promised Lightning War, continued night after night, and Gloria prepared for it. Joe had got hold of a vacuum flask – Gloria didn’t ask from where – and each night she filled it with hot sweet tea as soon as she got home from work, then made up sandwiches to pack in the shelter bag, including biscuits, if she had any.
Each time the siren shrilled, she felt as if a lump of lead had landed in her stomach, but she had to cover her fear for the sake of her terrified son. The sound seemed to lend wings to their feet, and often before the strains of the siren had died out, Gloria, Ben and sometimes Joe would be hurrying through the streets where they usually didn’t need the torch, for search lights would be streaking across the sky.
Gloria always felt better, though, when she was in the shelter, in the company of others. The stale air, stuffiness and the often clamorous noise now didn’t disturb her as much as it had done. Instead, she began to feel a camaraderie with the others because they were all in this together.
She wasn’t the only one either to feel better when the drone of planes and crash of bombs were answered by the ack-ack guns barking into the night sky. ‘Go on. Give it to them, the dirty buggers,’ was the general consensus voiced. Gloria could understand that perfectly because it was like they were not just sitting there, putting up with it, but hitting back.
It was usually hours later when the all clear would shrill out its reassuring sound. Gloria would then have to rouse Ben, whose eyes would be glazed with fatigue. He was too heavy for Gloria to carry any more, and so if Joe wasn’t there he would stumble in weariness as he filed out of the shelter. Outside, as they hurried home, they would see the blazing fires licking the black night with orange and red flames. They would lend a rosy glow to the sky, and the air would smell of smoke and cordite and brick dust with sometimes the merest whiff of gas.
Gloria felt sorry for Ben, who would be so tired the next morning he was either like a bear with a sore head, or prone to tears, and Gloria found him hard to deal with; she too had never felt as tired in the whole of her life. However, she knew she wasn’t the only one to feel such utter exhaustion and it was just one more thing she had to learn to cope with.
As October drew to a close, the papers were estimating that two hundred and fifty thousand Londoners were homeless.
‘God!’ breathed Gloria. ‘It’s hard even to visualise that number of people without anywhere to live.’
‘It affects us all,’ Violet said. ‘After a raid we don’t know if we will have our house left standing when we come out. ‘What would I do with the kids if that happened? It’s them I worry about most.’
‘I know,’ Gloria said. ‘My son is scared to death nearly all the time. Joe even brought up the subject of evacuation again, and he was dead against it at first, same as I was. He said he didn’t think the raids would be as heavy, nor go on so long.’
‘Did any of us?’ Violet said. ‘But I ain’t sending mine away.’
‘Nor me,’ said Maureen. ‘I mean, I tried it the once, didn’t I? God, I missed him so much. When we fetched him back we promised him that we wouldn’t send him away again.’
‘How do they know these areas are so safe anyway?’ Gloria said. ‘Joe once said that there were few places in the whole of Britain that could be deemed safe.’
‘Yeah,’ Elsie said. ‘Look at all them kids that were sent down to the South Coast that had to be brought back after Dunkirk when everyone thought we might be invaded.’
‘Well, Ben is not going anywhere,’ Gloria said. ‘And I told Joe that. I reckon being separated from us would upset him even more. He is staying here with his family, where he belongs.’
At home that night, Joe had a letter waiting for him from Tom. Since Molly had arrived at the farmhouse in 1935, he always asked after her in his letters, and since the war had begun, and particularly when the bombs started falling in Birmingham, he had also asked after her little brother, Kevin, as well. And so Gloria, seeing the frown on Joe’s face as he read the letter said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Tom writes that Molly hasn’t heard from them in Birmingham for a while. Here, read it for yourself,’ and he passed the letter over.
It’s been three weeks now since Molly has had any letters from Birmingham, though they usually write every week. She is worried, naturally, with the pounding the city is having. I said that we don’t know the state of play there at all and it is best to have patience, but you can’t blame her for being anxious.
‘What d’you think has happened?’ Gloria asked.
Joe shrugged. ‘There’s a hundred and one reasons why letters won’t have arrived from a city getting almost nightly bombardment, but I will write and reassure Tom. Then I will just hope and pray that Molly hears something soon and that nothing awful has befallen her grandfather and her brother.’
Then towards the end of November, Joe had word from Tom that Molly, fearing for the safety of her loved ones in Birmingham, had left the farm and travelled to Birmingham to find them. Joe knew just how naïve and inexperienced she would probably be, and she would have nothing to prepare her for a city in the throes of a desperate and violent war, and he hoped and prayed that she would be all right.
He remembered the ferocious attack on Birmingham on the 19 November, which was the very day that Tom said Molly had left, and he hoped that she had reached Birmingham safely and found shelter. However, when later Tom confessed he had heard nothing from her, Joe imagined that Molly had become just one more casualty of war and wrote and told him this.
On 29 December London suffered another stupendous attack. The first wave of planes dropped incendiaries, thereby lighting the way for the bombers that followed them. The next morning, even seasoned Londoners reeled under the assault, which had destroyed eight churches designed by Christopher Wren, Paternoster Row, the Central Telegraph Office and the Guildhall. The bombs had also seriously damaged five mainline stations, sixteen underground ones and nine hospitals.
St Paul’s Cathedral was spared, and the papers printed pictures of it standing straight and tall in a sea of rubble like a beacon of defiance, only its beautiful stained-glass windows lost. When the papers claimed by New Year’s Day 1941 that 13,339 Londoners had been killed and 17,937 seriously injured since the blitz had begun in September, Joe and Gloria were stunned by the enormity of such tragedy.
ELEVEN
The war trailed on through 1941. There were a few skirmishes that amounted to very little, and then a massive raid in March and another in mid-April, but from then there was nothing more.
‘If Hitler is finished with us at last,’ Elsie said one day as the women sat in the canteen, ‘then all we’ve got to worry about is the blackout and rationing.’
‘Rationing! God,’ said Violet, ‘they will ration the air we breathe soon, no doubt, and trying to feed a family on what they allow us is a joke.’
There was a murmur of agreement, because now jam, marmalade, treacle and syrup were on ration, joining tea, margarine, cooking fat, cheese, meat, bacon, ham, sugar and butter, and every housewife, especially those with families, was finding it a struggle.
What they had a lot of was home-grown vegetables. ‘What we need is tips on how to make carrots, swede and turnips into some rivetingly exciting dish to feed the family,’ Elsie said.
‘Well, there
is always Woolton Pie,’ Winnie said. ‘Lord Woolton says it’s patriotic to eat that and things like it.’
‘Ugh,’ Maureen said.
Violet put in, ‘Oh, yeah, I wonder how many times a week he has it served up to him. Mind you, this is little better.’ She poked her dinner with her fork. ‘Poor man’s goose, this is supposed to be.’
‘And there’s no goose been anywhere near it,’ Maureen said. ‘It’s liver.’
‘And not much of that,’ Winnie added, ‘but stacks of potatoes and swede and turnip.’
‘My mum heard of a recipe on the wireless the other day called vegetable and oatmeal goulash,’ Elsie said. ‘The meat ration was gone and so she wrote it out and that’s what was waiting for me when I got home.’
‘Sounds terribly exciting,’ Winnie commented drily.
‘Tasted worse,’ Elsie said, making a face at the memory. ‘I ate it, though. We all did because there wasn’t any choice.’
‘That’s it,’ Violet said. ‘And that Charles Hill bloke on the wireless, going on about Potato Pete and Dr Carrot doesn’t make any of them taste any better.’
‘Still, it’s better than having nothing at all,’ Gloria said. ‘Believe me, I had a touch of that in New York and it wasn’t pleasant.’
‘Yeah,’ Elsie said. ‘There might be no danger here of actually starving to death, but the peril of being bored to death is very real.’
About this time, Joe received a very confusing correspondence from his brother, which he told Gloria about.
‘So this woman said Molly had been around asking questions about her brother and granddad a few weeks before,’ Gloria said. ‘So she isn’t dead after all.’
‘Well, she wasn’t then, anyway,’ Joe said. ‘Tom reckons that it was probably about February that all this happened.’
