by Anne Bennett
‘Does no harm to look,’ she remembered Violet saying one day. ‘Even that snobby lot can’t charge us for just looking.’
Well, they would look no more, and Lizzie felt desolation seep through her. She wondered if at the end of it all there would be any of the city left, for after that one raid the papers reported one hundred and eightynine major fires had begun.
The next night was another of Hell. Kent Street’s baths were hit and fires burned in Barker Street, Summer Hill, Constitution Hill and Holloway Head. As the ‘All Clear’ sounded, Lizzie gave a yawn. She shook Niamh awake, for both children had dropped asleep on the bunk. She then took Tom in her arms, though he was a weight, and Niamh scrubbed at her eyes and stumbled sleepily to her feet. Lizzie looked at her face, white with exhaustion, and knew she was doing the children a disservice keeping them with her. Both of them deserved better than this. They stepped into a night that glowed with the flames of many fires and stank with smoke that swirled around them, and Lizzie said to Violet, ‘I’m not letting the weans stand any more of this. I’m taking them to Mammy.’ But she said it in a whisper, for Niamh had ears on her like a donkey.
‘I don’t blame you, girl,’ Violet said. ‘By Christ, it gets to you after a while. Will you stay there yourself?’
‘No,’ Lizzie said firmly. ‘I won’t run away. I’ll come back and take a job some place. Do my bit, like everyone’s saying.’
‘Good on you, girl,’ Violet said warmly. ‘I could get you set-on at my place if you like?’
‘Oh that would be good,’ Lizzie said as they reached the entry. ‘I’ll see about the trains and things in the morning and we’ll go from there.’
‘Will you send a letter?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘I won’t take the time, I’ll send a telegram. One thing I know, Mammy won’t refuse. She’s been dying to get her hands on the weans since it began.’
With Violet at work, Ada willingly minded Tom while Lizzie went into the town to book their passage to Ireland. No one blamed Lizzie for her decision; in fact, Gloria said if she had relatives in the country, regardless of where it was, she would have hers away there like a shot, and the others agreed with her.
‘It’s sending to strangers I couldn’t abide,’ Minnie said. ‘But one of your own, especially your mother, that’s different altogether. I know this is no place for kids and babbies, but how would I know they was being looked after proper if I was just to send them away. Now yours…’
‘Will probably be spoilt rotten, knowing my mother,’ said Lizzie with a laugh. ‘She’s much softer as a grandmother than she ever was as a mother.’
‘That’s usually the way of it,’ Minnie said. ‘Anyway, better that way than the other, and you’ll soon knock them back into shape when this little lot is over and they can come home again. And at least this way they will be safe.’
Safe, thought Lizzie, as she scurried through the city centre later, and she decided to go along Colmore Row to see the destruction for herself as she had taken the tram to Steelhouse Lane. She was delighted to see the Gaumont still stood, but behind it the whole area was a sea of blackened, scorched rubble. The front of Snow Hill Station was there, but behind that was a blistered landscape of brick, masonry, glass, and twisted and buckled train lines.
Along the road there were gaping potholes and craters and piles of rubble where there had once been shops and offices, but the sandbagged structure of the Grand Hotel still stood, and St Phillip’s on the other side of the road. She went down through Chamberlain Square and Paradise Hill, taking in the top end of New Street where the scale of the destruction was so apparent. Burst and sodden sandbags lay bleeding onto the pavements; here and there, snaking hosepipes still dribbled into gutters, and blackened mounds were everywhere. Here, the smell that she’d noticed as soon as she’d alighted from the tram was stronger, a scorched and acrid smell of burning and smoke, mixed with the stink of cordite and a definite whiff of gas.
Oh yes, Lizzie decided, her children were better out of this for a while, and she hurried on to New Street Station to make the arrangements.
Catherine was delighted to have the children, but couldn’t understand why Lizzie couldn’t stay there too. ‘It’s a good enough place to land your children in, but not good enough for you. Is that the way of it?’
‘No, Mammy. It’s…’
‘Tressa seems happy enough.’
But Lizzie wasn’t Tressa. ‘Can you understand why I feel I have to go back, Johnnie?’ she asked her brother.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘though I hate to think of you in danger. But you’re right. Everyone can’t just run away, and I’d say for now the weans are better here.’
‘What will Steve say about you going back to that place?’ Catherine asked.
‘You forget, Mammy, his own family are in the thick of it too,’ Lizzie said. ‘He’ll be fine about it.’
And Steve was fine about it. He knew as well as any that although three hundred thousand French and British soldiers had been rescued from Dunkirk, masses of equipment had been left to rot on the roads and beaches of France. There was an even greater need for more bullets, tanks, lorries and planes, and he was aware of the recruitment drives to encourage women to join the workforce. Lizzie was only one of many doing her bit. He was proud of her stand and wrote telling her so.
Lizzie hated the job, but was pleased with the little nest egg she was building up for herself in the Post Office. She was often more than tired, exhausted from the raids, which were virtually every night. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she was able to grab a couple of hours’ sleep, and sometimes she wasn’t. The raids weren’t always that close, but she’d lie awake, waiting and tense, knowing they could be overhead in minutes. Other nights they had a respite, but Lizzie, like many others, would still lie awake or doze fitfully, waiting for the sirens’ strident wail. Everyone was feeling the strain, but most women turned in at the factory the next day, knowing the work they did was essential for the war effort.
On 15th November there was a memorial service for Neville Chamberlain at St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, though his funeral had been held in London. ‘I ain’t going,’ one girl stated. ‘Stupid bugger, anyroad, to be led up the garden path by bloody Hitler.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ Violet said. ‘My Barry says he knew all the time and it was a ploy cos we wasn’t nearly ready, was we?’
‘No? And why not?’ another put in. ‘Cos Hitler made no secret of it, did he? I mean, that Olympic Games in 1936 was nowt but showing off, what he had and that, and his bloody goose-stepping army, and still we did nowt about it.’
‘I bet some of them poor buggers in Coventry wish we’d acted sooner,’ another girl said.
Everyone knew what she meant. News had been filtering through all day of the terrible raid that had been inflicted on Coventry the night before, where the destruction and loss of life was said to be colossal, and all the women fell quiet thinking about it.
Lizzie and Violet had bought a paper on the way home and later spread it out over Violet’s table and looked at it horror-struck. Within a square mile, eighty per cent of buildings were destroyed and five hundred and sixty-eight people killed, with thousands more injured. A new word had been coined in Germany, the paper reported: ‘Coventration’ which meant razing to the ground.
‘Well,’ said Violet, looking at the photographs of destruction. ‘They’ve done that all right, ain’t they?’ She folded up the paper and looked at Lizzie grimly. ‘Next it will be our turn.’
‘What do you mean, Violet?’ Lizzie snapped. ‘Our turn. It’s been our turn since bloody August. That raid we had last night was scary enough for me.’
‘It weren’t nothing like Coventry,’ Barry put in. ‘And Violet’s right, Lizzie. Mark my words, we’ll suffer summat similar. We make too much for the war for the Luftwaffe to pass us by.’
It began four nights later, on Tuesday, 19th November, and the hooter for the end of the day in the munitions fact
ory hadn’t gone. Those who lived near set off for home, but Violet and Lizzie, along with many of the workforce, made their way to the cellars underneath the factory.
‘If it goes off, we’ll make a dash for it if you like,’ Violet said.
Lizzie nodded.
But it didn’t go off. Lizzie had experienced many raids, but few as fierce or furious as this. The bombs seemed to hurl themselves from the droning aircraft above, one blast or explosion following another, shaking the cellar walls and the ground she’d sank down on to in utter weariness. The noise, even muffled as it was, seemed incredible and relentless. Together with the boom and burst of the bombs and the crash of disintegrating buildings, they heard the frantic ringing bell of the emergency services tearing through the blitzed city, and the tattoo of anti-air-craft fire, and this was over the chatter and forced laughter and shouts of terror from the sheltering people.
This is what the people of Coventry must have felt like, Lizzie thought, as the blood ran through her like ice. The walls shook so hard with each crash that mortar was dislodged and dribbled down the bricks, and Lizzie tried not to panic, but she did wonder if the cellar she’d fled to shelter in might turn out to be a tomb. She imagined the factory being hit—surely it couldn’t escape the mayhem outside, and then it would fall in on them, crushing them, trapping them.
People said if your number was up then that was that. Christ! Fear was etched on everyone’s face, and in the stale and fetid air it was almost tangible. Violet’s hand, which sought Lizzie’s, was shaking.
Then there was a massive explosion. It lifted people off their feet and shook the entire building and plunged it into darkness. Those with torches in their shelter bags used them, and pencils of light pierced the gloom to see people shouting, crying, praying. Lizzie played her torch on the walls, expecting to see plaster seeping from the ceiling prior to it descending on them, and saw it seemed as solid as ever. But that bomb had landed somewhere close.
One of the men, torch in hand, went up the cellar steps to look. ‘It wasn’t us,’ he said minutes later. ‘It was The Fountain pub. People are trapped in the cellars, I’m going to give them a hand getting them out.’
Other men detached themselves and followed the first into the teeth of the raid that went on as fast and furious as before.
The rescuers had not returned by the time the ‘All Clear’ went, and Lizzie was quite surprised that she had survived the night. Upstairs, the blast had broken all the windows in the factory and covered everything with dust and ash, and the stink in the air made her feel sick. ‘Take tomorrow off,’ the supervisor told them. ‘We’ll have to get this lot cleaned up and the machines checked for safety before we can set up again.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Violet said as they set off for home. ‘God, I’m so tired I could sleep on a washing line.’
‘And me,’ Lizzie said with feeling.
They knew they’d have to walk, no buses or trams would run so early in the morning, but they skirted the city centre. Much of it was impassable anyway, for even as they cut up Jamaica Row they could see the tongues of orange and yellow sparks spitting into the night sky. They heard the roar of the flames and smelt the stink from the charred buildings, mixed with dust and smoke, cordite and gas. And neither woman spoke of it. It didn’t need words.
They walked along streets annihilated by bombs. There were gigantic mounds of rubble, all that was left of a terrace of houses or shops. Often those mounds still smouldered, grey smoke curling into dull, dusky dawn sky. At others, people clambered over them, painstakingly removing bricks to release those trapped beneath, with the help of the glowing orange sky and shielded flashlights.
Lizzie and Violet stepped over sandbags, often seeping and dripping wet, and dribbling hosepipes that littered the pavements, and which often ran with water. They saw roads with gigantic craters in them, others where the tar had melted and slid into the gutters, leaving the tram lines warped and distorted.
They went up Bristol Passage and stopped dead, for one side of Bell Barn Road and all of Grant Street was one massive sea of rubble. People were moving over it, searching for survivors.
Please God, let Flo be dead! As soon as the sentence popped into Lizzie’s head she disregarded it and prayed for forgiveness, but Violet, guessing her thoughts, said to one of the rescue workers, ‘Where were the injured taken?’
He shrugged. ‘Into town, but the General was hit too. People say Lewis’s has opened its basement.’
And there they found Flo and Rodney, though there was no record of Neil. Lizzie and Violet weren’t allowed to see them as they were heavily sedated, but the nurse told the women to come back the following day when the doctor had seen the injured and they’d have a better idea of the state of their injuries.
They were nearly home again when they came upon the woman. They knew her: her name was Sandra Hearnshaw and she’d lived above Flo in Grant Street. Her girls Dianne and Dora had often played out in the street with Niamh, being of similar ages, and they had a wee brother, William, just six months old.
Even in that light, Lizzie could see how bedraggled the three were. Sandra’s arms were ominously empty and the girls trailed behind her. ‘Can I help you?’ she said.
Sandra looked at her with vacant eyes. ‘Help me?’ she said, as if she’d never heard of such a thing. ‘No, no one can help me. Blown right out my arms he was. I couldn’t do owt.’
Sudden fear clutched Lizzie. Surely to God…But this wasn’t the time or place to stand firing questions. ‘Come on,’ she said as she reached her entry. ‘Come in and have a drop of tea and something to eat.’
The woman allowed herself to be led down the alleyway and followed Lizzie into the house. Violet lit the gas lamps and Lizzie saw the little family clearly for the first time. Their clothes were in tatters and not really suitable for the elements, and over everything was a film of dust and ash, ingrained into their skin and coating their hair. Down the girls’ faces were cleaner tear trails, but it was in their eyes that Lizzie saw the panic and petrified terror.
The story came out slowly as the children drank the cocoa Lizzie made and munched the toast. ‘I was sheltering under the stairs,’ Sandra said, ‘cos Billy, he’d had a touch of bronchitis, like, and I didn’t want to risk the shelter. People say under the stairs is the next safest place, don’t they?’
Sandra was asking for assurance and Lizzie said gently, ‘Aye, they do.’
‘Anyroad, there was this bomb, like,’ Sandra went on. ‘And Billy, he was pulled from my arms, like, and flung across the room, and the house collapsed on him, on us all. I couldn’t get to him, me and the girls was trapped. They dug us out like, but the babby…he never stood a bleeding chance. Warden wouldn’t even let me look. He said…he said I wouldn’t want to see him like that. I mean, Lizzie, what harm’s a baby done, anyroad?’
Lizzie, the tears seeping from her own eyes, shook her head helplessly. She held Sandra’s shuddering body against her own for a minute, but practicalities had to be discussed. ‘Have you anywhere to go?’
Sandra shook her head. ‘There’s only me and the kids. I mean, there’s Malcolm, like, but he’s away in the army.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Both died of TB,’ Sandra said. ‘I was brought up by my gran. She died the day war was declared. She remembered the Great War, see. Said it killed my granddad. Now everything’s gone. The house I worked for and my little babby. God, I don’t feel I want to go on any more.’
‘Come on, Sandra,’ Lizzie urged. ‘You can’t give in. Think of the two wee ones you have left.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You must,’ Lizzie said firmly. ‘Look at them, for Christ’s sake. Who have they got now if you give in?’
Sandra looked at the poor, suffering children, as if seeing them for the first time. She was suddenly smote with pity, and got up from the chair and, bending down, put her arms out. The relief on the girls’ faces as they rushed into their mother’s ar
ms brought tears to Lizzie’s eyes again.
‘What are you going to do?’ Violet asked her quietly.
‘Put them to bed. What else?’
‘I mean after?’
‘They can stay here. I’ve the room an’ all.’
‘Have you thought about this? Your mother-in-law…?’
‘Has somewhere to go,’ Lizzie said. ‘If she survives, she has a sister Gladys who’s as mean-spirited as she is herself. She nagged her husband to death, Steve always said. Anyway, she rattles about by herself in a big house on the Pershore Road. Plenty of room for the in-laws, and Neil if he survived it all. I couldn’t have them all here, anyroad.’
‘What about Steve?’
‘I’ll square it with Steve,’ she said. ‘You know how he loves kids? I’ll stress the fact that Sandra hasn’t a soul belonging to her and neither have the children.’
Lizzie found out the next day that Flo was in fine fettle and good voice. Firstly, though, she had gone into town and got clothes for Sandra and the children at the Mission Hall, and then the family trailed up to the Town Hall for new identity cards and ration books, for Sandra’s shelter bag had been buried in the rubble. They ate from a WVS van and then Lizzie went along to Lewis’s to see how her in-laws were, while Sandra went to see about her money in the Post Office and the insurance policies.
Flo looked anything but pleased to see Lizzie, and Lizzie reminded herself that her mother-in-law, who was getting old, had had a terrifying experience and maybe had no news of Neil. But before she could say a word, Flo snapped, ‘You took your bloody time.’
‘I came as soon as I found out, last night, but I wasn’t allowed to see you,’ Lizzie said. ‘You were sedated, they told me.’
‘You’d be sedated an’ all, girl, if you’d been through an ordeal like that.’
‘I know,’ Lizzie said, genuinely sympathetic. ‘It must have been terrible. Violet and I hadn’t left work, so we took shelter in their cellar.’
