Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s odd being home.’ He sighed. ‘All the time I’ve been away I’ve been dying to be back here with you. That’s the most important thing, seeing you.’ I pushed myself up so that I could look into his face. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he assured me. ‘It’s just so comfortable here. I feel as if I’m being cosseted like a child again when I’m supposed to be out there doing a job.’

  ‘But they’re only trying to make you welcome. Give you some home comforts.’

  ‘I know. It’s quite unreasonable of me. I feel . . . everything’s changed. This wretched war has turned us all upside down. But you must know, Katie, nothing could change the way I feel about you.’ He leaned towards me for a kiss.

  One baking hot afternoon we caught a train to a country station outside Coventry, with our sandwiches and lemonade, fruitcake and apples that Mrs Harvey had packed for us.

  ‘You have a lovely afternoon now,’ she’d told us. ‘You both deserve it.’ Her voice was wistful on our behalf, knowing how rare and brief were our times together.

  We walked out into the Warwickshire countryside, finding fields into which it was possible to believe the war had not yet slunk its tentacles. The corn was turning yellow. Bees moved in and out of the poppies and morning glory and a breeze moved the wheat stems.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ I said, stopping, breathing in the smell of the fields, the air free of smoke. ‘It’s so long since I’ve been out of Birmingham. You almost forget there is anything else.’

  We stood quietly for a few moments looking out over the gold field edged with the trees’ black shade and sprinkled with red.

  ‘I do think it’s right to fight for it,’ Angus said suddenly. ‘I’ve thought a lot about what your father said, before William and I joined up, and I can see he’s probably the most, I don’t know – saintly of us. But I do feel with every fibre of me that you have to stand up to the likes of Hitler, and I want to be part of defending all that this country stands for against what they’re doing.’ He spoke with a forced casualness, avoiding sounding pompous as William would have done. I reached out and squeezed his arm.

  After a time we came to an oak tree providing a patchy ring of shade between two fields and sat on the soft grass edging the barley. I opened the packet of beef sandwiches. Angus’s mood was changeable that afternoon, sometimes joking, the next moment quiet and serious as if preoccupied, and then I could tell his thoughts were elsewhere.

  ‘It was odd travelling up to Cambridge,’ he said, pouring lemonade into our two enamel cups. ‘Now they’ve made all the signs so small we couldn’t always tell where we were. It’s quite a haul from Cornwall too. We thought we must be going to Scotland, but then it all looked too flat!’

  ‘I wonder what they’ll do with you next?’

  ‘More training somewhere. Has to be. I’m a way from getting my wings yet.’

  ‘D’you really like flying?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He sat eating with his knees drawn up in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were tanned under the dark hairs. ‘I enjoy it even more than I imagined. I wasn’t sure when we started off, of course. All those talks. It was all airframes and aerodynamics and navigation, and the hangars were horribly cold.’ He gave me his wide smile. ‘But as soon as they started teaching us to fly – oh, it was marvellous. Hard to describe it – it’s like another dimension to life. I’ll have to take you up for a spin one day, then you’ll see what I mean.’

  He talked with enthusiasm about all he was learning and the other cadets training with him.

  ‘They’re a real mixed bag of course, but we’ve got used to each other now. We had to pull together against a couple of officers who are right – ’

  I could tell he was biting back a swear word, another symbol of forces camaraderie.

  ‘ – well, tough sorts, let’s say.’

  I laughed. ‘I do have more than the odd patient who curses, you know!’

  Angus grinned sheepishly. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I keep talking as if I’m the only one who’s doing anything.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ He’d already asked me about my plans. ‘The war hasn’t touched us all that much yet, except for there being so many people missing. I sometimes feel so stuck here with you all gone.’

  To my annoyance, tears filled my eyes. The past months had been so lonely. I had poured all my energy into work. I didn’t want to be blubbing in the few days I had with Angus.

  He shifted over to me, pushing aside the packet and cups and apple cores from our picnic. The grass was soft beneath us. Crows called in the branches.

  ‘Here, let me hold you.’

  We lay in each other’s arms, looking up at the thick, strong branches of the tree, sunlight skewering through into our eyes now and then as the breeze shuffled the leaves.

  ‘I wonder what you make of it all,’ I said. The solid girth of the trunk was behind our heads. ‘You’ll still be here long after it’s all over.’

  I rested my head on Angus’s chest, listening to the sound of his heart, one arm across his body. A daytime moon hung in the sky, remote and white like a slice of pumice.

  ‘How many children shall we have?’ I asked playfully, making believe we lived in a wholesome world to which there was no threat.

  ‘Oh, six at least.’

  I leaned up on one elbow. ‘You are joking?’ But he was looking very solemn.

  ‘Katie – ’ He hesitated. ‘If I wasn’t to make it through all of this . . .’ I wanted to stop him, not to hear, but I knew I must let him speak. ‘We’ve none of us any idea how it’s all going to go, but I want you to know – I love you. Whatever happens, I’ll always love you.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, beginning to cry. ‘This is awful. Why did this have to happen? Those damn Germans messing up everyone’s lives. Angus, I love you, that’s what matters. Wherever you are you know you can always carry that with you.’

  He pulled me strongly towards him.

  ‘I love you,’ we said again and again between our kisses. ‘I love you, I love you.’

  Angus pushed himself into a sitting position, his jacket for a cushion, between the roots of the tree. I sat on his lap facing him.

  He ran his hands over my shoulders, dark eyes watching my face. ‘You’re thinner,’ he said. ‘Heavens, I can feel your bones. Don’t disappear, will you?’

  I stroked his hair, cropped RAF-style now, smiling at the bristly feel of it. Gently he tugged my thin red blouse out from the band of my skirt and reached round to free my breasts.

  ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you.’ His hands were warm on my skin, holding me close.

  ‘Katie – ’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve got some, well – protection this time. We could make love properly. That’s if you don’t think it’s wrong?’

  ‘You’ve been planning this!’ I teased him.

  ‘Not planning. Hoping.’

  Without answering him I sat back, and to his surprise, unfastened first my clothes, then his.

  ‘I take it that’s a yes.’ Again he slid his hands under the red cotton of my blouse. As we touched each other I was aware of the muscular strength of him, the force of another body so close to my own. We were nothing but gentle with each other, but in our excitement I understood how lovemaking could so easily fall over into a fight.

  After, we lay close, quiet in the dappled shadow of the tree, our heads on Angus’s brown jacket. That day is one of my most precious memories of Angus. The intent, tender expression in his eyes when he moved into me for the first time, the haze of leaves and blue sky behind his head and my hands pressing into the flesh of his back under his shirt. His cry, ‘It’s lovely – God it’s so lovely,’ at the height of it. And our ‘thank you, thank you’ afterwards as our cheeks touched, mine wet with tears.

  Lying together, we heard the planes, the sound half obscured at first by the breeze, then swelling towards us, engines straining across the sky. Angus sat up.<
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  ‘They are ours?’ I asked, only half joking. Without my specs I couldn’t even see the planes, let alone their insignia.

  ‘Yes, definitely ours. Off on a practice run, I expect.’

  The sight of the planes had pulled his mind back to his training, his job.

  ‘Can’t escape it for long, can we?’ I said, sitting up. ‘Oh, I do wish we could see what’s going to happen.’

  Seldom has a wish been more ill-guided. In our ignorance of the future that afternoon we sat, peaceful and loving in our barley field between Birmingham and Coventry, cities whose solid, familiar faces would be shattered almost beyond recognition by the approaching storm.

  Chapter 12

  As we waited through the intense days of the Battle of Britain, Angus was sent to Canada to complete his training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The inhabitants of Apple Valley en route to Moose Jaw stopped their train and deluged the lads with the red fruit which gave the place its name. Before he left again, Angus gave me a book of poems.

  ‘Some of them are my favourites,’ he said. ‘I want you to keep this for me.’

  The collection was by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I found them hard to understand but for glimpses of beauty in them and my favourite was the simplest: ‘Heaven–Haven – A nun takes the veil’:

  I have desired to go

  Where springs not fail,

  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

  And a few lilies blow.

  And I have asked to be

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

  And out of the swing of the sea.

  I kept the poem in my head as a charm, a conjuror of peace, even if there was none in the world.

  ‘Every day I thank God selfishly,’ I wrote to him, ‘that you have, as yet, no wings on your uniform.’

  God was on people’s lips more than usual in any case. With autumn came the bombing. At the height of the blitz on Birmingham I went to church with my mother. I had moved to live back at home now my training was complete.

  ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us, o’er the world’s tempestuous sea,’ we sang. The church was packed and people stood in the aisles. We all needed something to hold on to.

  Mummy was tense as a trip-wire. I stood with her one day while she was wrenching the pale flesh from a boiled pig’s head for brawn.

  ‘Wouldn’t this be a good time for you to go back to nursing?’ I ventured. ‘They’re short-handed everywhere.’

  Daddy was working incessantly it seemed. Days, nights, any demand that came he tried to meet, as if he had something to prove.

  ‘How can I?’ Mummy said briskly. ‘There’s the house to run, all the garden – there’s so much to do. And no Simmons.’ Simmons had volunteered for the ATS.

  ‘But I’m here to help,’ I urged her. ‘I thought you wanted to do more nursing?’

  ‘What’s wanting ever had to do with anything?’ she snapped. She handed the bowl of pig’s flesh to Mrs Drysdale. ‘Here, you could finish this off for me, please.’ We went through to the living room. ‘She’s so wasteful getting the meat off,’ she murmured.

  Mummy was up to her eyes in make do and mend. There were old cut up shirts and curtains strewn all over the living-room sofa. She held up a length of curtain material in a yellow and white regency stripe.

  ‘I thought this would run to a skirt. Or do you think you’d look too much like a stick of rock in it?’

  ‘No, that would suit me very well.’ I smiled cautiously. ‘It’s just – I’ve decided to delay my midder training for a few months and work in casualty for a bit. Extra help’s needed everywhere.’

  Mummy stopped again and looked up at me awkwardly. ‘I suppose I could fit in a few hours at a first aid post. It’s not as if you and William are holding me back any more.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re crying out for you,’ I said.

  The first bombs had fallen on Birmingham in August 1940. The bombardment crescendoed through that foggy, blacked-out winter, right through until April 1941. So much that we had thought solid and sure, familiar landmarks made of weighty stone, caved in like plywood boxes. The bombs destroyed the Market Hall, smashed to rubble sections of Fort Dunlop, Marshal and Snelgrove’s, the Bull Ring, the BSA. People pushed the remains of their belongings from bombed houses to the emergency centres in wheelbarrows and babies’ prams. In November, the fires from Coventry’s sacrifice bled into the sky.

  I worked nights in the casualty centre at the Queen’s Hospital in Bath Row. Mummy was doing two-night stints in the first aid post at Moseley Baths.

  On one of the heaviest nights of the blitz I set off late for work. Pushing down feverishly on the pedals of my bike I turned into the Moseley Road. There was a light mist which made the going slower with my muffled headlamps. I breathed in mouthfuls of the damp air. Abruptly, the air-raid sirens let out their terrible wail into the night.

  ‘Damn and blast it!’ I stopped, my stomach churning with nerves. Gas mask. I couldn’t go without it tonight. I tore back home to fetch it and set off again, balancing the box in my wicker bicycle basket.

  I had only gone about a mile when I heard the sound of the first planes. In panic I dismounted, and finding myself against the wall of a churchyard, left the bicycle and ducked down in the graveyard, somewhere I would never normally have gone at night on my own. Squatting, head down, hands against the lichen-covered brick of the wall, I became aware of my quick breathing, the beat of my heart, close and hard, and in the distance the drone of the planes.

  They crossed the city, coming in from the east. There was a swell of sound: ack-ack guns, the impact of the bombs, muffled explosions in the distance, then the noise dying. And here was I shouting ‘Damn you, damn you!’ at the top of my voice, furious at having to squat terrified in my own city while they knocked the stuffing out of it. It was clear they were aiming for the centre, hoping to destroy aeroplane and weapons factories, though in fact the extra ‘shadow’ factories to fuel the war were built on the edges, so shops and houses took it instead.

  I had not long set off again when I heard the next lot. I had suddenly grown wings. I flew down the sweeping slope of Belgrave Road as if I was parachuting and pedalled madly across the Bristol Road towards Five Ways.

  What little traffic was on the roads had come to a standstill. I slowed, looking upwards. The searchlights jittered and crossed over us, lighting up the bellies of barrage balloons like bloated silver fish, and now there was extra light from fires. The planes were very close. I was only yards from Bath Row, already off my bike and pushing it, when the first wave of bombs fell. I flung myself against the nearest building, shielding myself behind my bicycle and with my free arm wrapped round my head. The gas mask tipped on to the ground. Our ack-ack guns were going again, hammering into the sky. There was a terrible pause, then the impact. In seconds there were more explosions, close, but not in my street. Panting, I waited for the one that was going to fall on me. There came what seemed hours of sound, the whistle of the bombs, the echoing, shaking impact as they fell, glass shattering and debris falling and the smell of cordite and the air thickened with dust and smoke. But the sound of the impacts grew more muffled. They were moving over. The guns held fire, no doubt predicting the positions of the next wave of planes that I could already hear. I knew this was the moment to move.

  I pushed my bike upright. Flames lit the sky from the next street and I could hear fire-engine bells in the distance and shouts from firewatchers high on one of the buildings near by. As the planes roared overhead I dashed towards the entrance to the hospital, thanking heaven I could at last get under cover.

  There was an ambulance parked outside. At the Casualty entrance I held the door open for two ambulance volunteers coming out with an empty stretcher.

  ‘Won’t be Bournvita and slippers tonight,’ one of them said to me cheerfully. ‘Not for a good few hours yet, anyway.’

  I smiled at him, reassured. My
legs were like jelly, but at least I would be inside now. These people had to go out and face it all over again. ‘I wish I could get you some.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have enough to do, love.’

  But we at least had an illusion of safety here, the generous layers of the hospital stacked above us.

  Hurriedly I hung up my coat and pinned on my white cap, feeling at home now, able to be competent. Doctors, already looking exhausted, were scurrying between the new arrivals in the reception area. ‘Fractured tibia – needs casting’, ‘This one – theatre – quickly’, ‘That one can hang on for a bit’.

  Nurses were collecting valuables from the wounded, writing rapid notes on casualty record cards and trying to exude calmness and reassurance. There were already more casualties coming in.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ one of the other nurses demanded as she rushed past me.

  ‘I got caught out in it.’

  She didn’t comment further on my lateness. ‘At least you can hear ours going out there.’

  It was always a great boost to people to be able to hear the ack-ack guns, though we had no idea how accurate they were. Our defence was comforting. We were fighting back. But it was hard, even while rushing to and fro paying attention to the job you were doing, not to strain your ears, constantly wondering what was going on outside, wondering how close they were. Often we felt the vibrations of the bombs’ impact.

  I was sent to theatre to help prepare trolleys. I recited the items in my mind trying to keep my thoughts away from the bombing, from my parents, both out there working. Saline, hydrogen peroxide, sterilized dressing drum, Cheatle’s forceps, tray of instruments, bandages, iodine . . . the reassurance of routine.

  I’d no sooner got going on that, though, when Sister hurried over to me. ‘Nurse Munro, we need you to come and help with some of the new arrivals . . .’ and once I’d got started on that one of the doctors sent me scurrying back and forth for dressings. As I completed this task we heard a loud groan of pain from one of the two men lying to the side of the reception area waiting for further attention.