Birmingham Blitz

by Annie Murray

  I was so proud of Joe, but I never had a minute’s peace. His letter was like having him back from the dead, but I was sure that would never happen again. I knew he was alive and safe each time he wrote, but by the time it reached me? And the next day, and the next? I felt so unworthy of him I just could not believe he’d survive and come back to me.

  This was different from anything I’d felt before. Frightening, because I couldn’t just brush it off like I could with Walt or Jimmy. Joe had marked my heart and I couldn’t get away from it.

  That week Mom handed in her notice at work and a day or two later she was summoned to the Labour Exchange. She came back fuming with humiliation.

  ‘D’you know what that hoity-toity little bit said to me? Cut-glass accent she had, can’t have been much older than you. “Well, Mrs Watkins.”’ Mom was pretty good at taking off other people’s voices. ‘“Are you quait sure you heven’t got yourself in the femily way in order to get orf war work? Surely at your age you wouldn’t normally be plenning to enlorge your femily?” Stuck up little bitch. What’s she doing in a soft job like that anyhow? She could be in the army or summat.

  ‘Anyhow, I told her she could keep her airs and graces and not talk to her elders and betters like that. She didn’t like that, I can tell you.’ Mom was roving round the room tidying, slamming things down on the table.

  ‘Did they say you could give up war work though?’

  ‘Yes, in the end,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘Bugger this cowing war. Your life’s not your own any more, is it?’

  Music while you Work was blaring out as usual. ‘We’ll Meet Again . . .’ and ‘Bless ’em All’ – thank goodness for the jolly ones because they didn’t touch me. Horrible, being wrung out by music all day long. I wished they’d switch the flaming thing off half the time. My eyes and hands worked automatically, head down, not joining in with the jokes. They kept trying to cheer me up, bless them, but even though I tried to put on a brave face, nothing worked. I’d had one more very short note from Joe, but I’d got myself in such a state I was always consumed by worry.

  ‘Genie!’ A call passed along the warehouse. I hadn’t seen the yard door open wide enough for his head to poke round. ‘Mr B wants you out the back.’

  All those eyes watching and my legs watery, nearly letting me down. If it was good news about Joe he’d have come right in. Run and told everyone, because after all everyone loved him, not just me.

  By the time I reached that door I was trembling so much I could barely get it open. Someone helped, twisted the handle, shut it behind me.

  My first breath on the other side of that door I gasped in so hard you could hear it. He was standing waiting for me across the yard, half smiling, uncertain. The time he’d been away felt so long.

  ‘Oh—’ I gasped again, grinding my fist into the middle of my chest. For a moment I couldn’t speak. Breath came in jerks and pants.

  ‘Genie . . .?’

  I didn’t remember crossing the yard. I might’ve flown for all I know. I was holding him, squeezing his arms, pressing his cheeks between my hands, pulling him to me tight, kissing and kissing his lovely face.

  He didn’t speak at first, calmed me with his hands, taking me by the shoulders to hold me at arm’s length, and we looked at each other. His face was thinner, cheeks covered with a day’s growth of stubble, dark eyes full of emotion. He pulled me to him and held me so tight.

  ‘Joe, Joe—’ My tears flowed, like fear dissolving down my face. ‘Oh my God, are you all right?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m fine. On top.’

  ‘You’re here.’ I couldn’t let go of him, couldn’t stop saying it again and again. ‘You’re here – really here . . .’

  ‘Yes—’ He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘Finally made it.’

  ‘Don’t ever, ever go away again,’ I demanded.

  Joe was holding me, laughing as Mr Broadbent came back out smiling, the worry lifted from him. He even looked taller. I mopped my eyes.

  ‘Thought I’d leave you both for a bit,’ he said. ‘Betty, my wife, telephoned to say Joe’d got home and I said she’d better send him up here quick because there was someone losing a lot of sleep over ’im.’

  Joe smiled properly for the first time. ‘Thanks, Dad. But I was coming anyway.’

  He only had four days and we spent every possible moment we could together. At the end of the week, while I was at work he stayed at home with his mom and sisters, catching up on sleep after the punishing weeks he’d been through. But he was young and very fit and he bounced back.

  His first evening home Mr Broadbent asked me to come over and spend some time with them.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t just want him to yourselves?’ I asked, uncertain about being included in the family like this. I knew Mr B was OK with me but I wasn’t sure about the rest of them.

  ‘Course not. And anyhow, if we don’t get you along we shan’t be able to tie Joe into his seat long enough to get anything out of ’im!’

  I was nervous about meeting Joe’s mom and his sisters. What on earth were they going to think of me? Marjorie, the sister who’d been at Broadbent’s show, opened the door of their recently built house in Hall Green with its fresh-looking white window-frames.

  ‘We were just finishing off tea,’ she said. I saw she had Joe’s dark eyes and the same pale hair and skin. She did have an aloof manner but I think it was shyness, and she was trying to be nice to me.

  ‘Sorry. Am I too early? I could go and walk round for a bit . . .’

  ‘No!’ She thawed further and laughed. ‘We’re expecting you. I’ll never hear the end of it from Joe if I send you off again. Come and join us.’

  Joe was coming out to meet me and introduced me to everyone – his mom and Marjorie and Louise. And he made it very clear I was someone special, brought me in as if I were royalty.

  Marjorie was soon to be twenty-one, according to Joe, though as we sat round that evening I kept looking at her, trying to take this in. I couldn’t help feeling I was older than her. There was something cardboard about her. Amiable enough, but with a bit missing somehow. She seemed like someone who was afraid of life, even her own shadow.

  Joe sat beside me on their sofa and I basked in being close to him. Mr and Mrs Broadbent were in chairs on either side of the little tiled fireplace. Mrs Broadbent was, over all, a very pale woman. Looked as if she’d had a bad shock, the colour of her. Her hair was white-blond and her skin ashen and thin-looking so that you could see the veins in her neck. I was trying to puzzle out how she’d managed to build up the vile reputation she had round the factory. I came to the conclusion that because she was beautiful and fragile-looking she was like a red rag to a bull for some of those women. They were expected to be tough, coping, hard-working, whatever time of the month, stage of pregnancy or chronic illness they were suffering. Mrs B looked like one of those Victorian women who might get the ‘vapours’. Actually her health seemed quite all right. Her manipulative illnesses must have been a factory legend that started small and swelled into something much bigger.

  The fact was she was quiet and shy and pleasant and I was grateful to her that she didn’t seem to mind me. After all, if she’d been half the snob she was painted as being she’d’ve objected to her son courting a factory lass. Maybe she thought it’d all blow over and he’d grow out of me, but either way, she was kind to me.

  ‘I hear your father’s been in contact,’ she said, passing me an oatmeal biscuit. ‘What a relief that must be.’

  ‘Oh it is. Couldn’t believe it when we heard. It’s been so long, and no one telling us either way.’

  ‘Like someone else we could mention.’ Louise, Joe’s younger sister, nudged him with her foot. She wasn’t much older than me, with jet-black hair, Joe’s cocoa-brown eyes and a lot of spark to her. She was in her last year at the grammar school. Her hair was cut in a pageboy with her fringe long and dead straight, level with her eyebrows. ‘Next time just send us a pie
ce of paper every day with a cross on or something, and then at least we’ll know the Jerries haven’t had you for breakfast.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Joe said, for what was obviously far from the first time. ‘I did my best. It’s not my fault if the postman can’t read . . .’

  ‘You’ve always had illegible handwriting,’ Louise retorted, slouching back in her chair. ‘Why do boys always write so much worse than girls?’

  I wanted to tell her to shut up and leave Joe alone but fortunately his dad did it for me. ‘Leave ’im, Louise,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I thought you were off out?’

  ‘I am.’ She pushed the last piece of biscuit into her mouth and got up. ‘The pictures with Laurie. Won’t be late.’ She nodded at me. ‘Cheerio, Genie, nice to meet you.’

  Marjorie drifted off as well, leaving the four of us sat round on their coffee-coloured furniture. They didn’t make me feel awkward and I liked the way Joe and his dad talked to each other, man to man. Joe often turned to smile at me as we talked. I was still reeling from him coming home, didn’t care where I was or what we did as long as I could be with him. Mrs Broadbent asked me about my family and later she made drinks of Bournvita.

  As it grew late Mr B said, ‘Are you going to run Genie home?’

  ‘Can you drive?’ I was impressed with that. No one else we knew had a car except the doctor.

  ‘I’ll give you a demonstration, shall I?’ Joe took my hand to pull me up.

  When we’d climbed into his father’s Austin, me looking round the inside in amazement, he said, ‘It’s good to be home, but I’ve been dying to have you to myself.’

  We waited while his dad gave us a wave and closed the front door, then Joe took me in his arms and I rested against him, smelling his familiar smell mixed with the leather of the seats. Our lips found each other’s.

  ‘I thought so much about what it would have been like if you hadn’t come back,’ I said, looking up at him. ‘It felt as if anything good in my life had ended.’

  Joe stroked my head against his chest. ‘I thought about it too – about losing you. You’ve had raids here already, haven’t you? And there’ll be more if London’s anything to go by.’

  ‘Didn’t you think about yourself – what danger you were in?’

  ‘Only when I let myself. You can’t too much. Hardly ever at Tangmere – otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do the job. You don’t think about dying. You get through every day, somehow. You have to be nearly as much of a machine as the planes.’

  I didn’t want to press Joe too much on the subject. Wasn’t even sure how much I wanted to know anyhow. He’d said he was in an air crew at Tangmere and that towards the end of it all, Tangmere and Kenley had been the only sector airfields left to handle the defence.

  ‘It’s over anyway, that part,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s think about the future.’

  He started the car and drove across to the Stratford Road.

  ‘How d’you fancy a day out tomorrow?’

  ‘With you? Nah, don’t think so.’ I grinned at him as we pulled up outside our house.

  ‘Cheeky hoyden!’ He leaned over and tickled me until I was begging him to stop. ‘Dad might lend us the car.’

  ‘The car!’ I sat up straight. A car to drive anywhere we wanted! ‘Pick me up as early as you can,’ I ordered him. ‘I don’t want to miss a single moment.’

  Apart from the Lickey Hills, which just about counted, I’d never been out of Birmingham before. Joe drove us out to Kenilworth, me in a state of high excitement.

  ‘There’s a castle,’ Joe told me as I was bouncing up and down on the seat next to him. ‘And lots of country round to walk in. That’s if the car’s still in one piece to get us there by the time you’ve finished.’

  ‘I can’t believe this, Joe,’ I kept saying as we drove out along the Coventry Road, and Joe laughed again at my fidgety happiness as the edges of Brum faded behind us.

  ‘It’s not a very marvellous day,’ he said, leaning forward to look up through the windscreen. ‘Doesn’t look as if it’ll rain though.’

  ‘I don’t care if it does.’ We laughed. Laughed a lot that day.

  Now we were out of town I was full of exclamations about the fields, the fresh smell of the air, old cottages in the villages, cows and sheep, and the fresh hay bales spilling out of barns. All of it was exciting to me, like travelling into a story book.

  ‘Oh Joe, I want to live in the country,’ I said, overcome by all I could see and how lovely it all looked, even under a cloudy sky. ‘I know it seems strange, no pavements and chimneys and shops and that, but I wouldn’t miss them. Not if I could have all this.’

  Warwickshire seemed at least as good as heaven that day.

  Joe parked up the car in a narrow side street in Kenilworth and we walked through the little town with its pretty houses and generous green space in the middle. In the gardens there were still roses, beds of marigolds, golden rod.

  ‘It all looks so small, doesn’t it?’ Joe said.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I sighed, and Joe laughed.

  ‘You’re nice and easy to please.’ He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket, and with his spare one, drew my hand through the crook of his arm. He leaned round and kissed me. I didn’t care that it was in the street where people could see. I was proud to be there on his arm and I didn’t give a monkey’s who was watching.

  We walked around, close together and very leisurely all morning, talking and laughing. We had a fish dinner in the Queen and Castle (a big treat), before going to see the real castle, not far away, at the edge of the town.

  As we walked round inside the shell of the castle walls, where it felt very quiet suddenly, or set out along a path into the fields, I held my hand in Joe’s, or sometimes slipped it into the pocket of his coat where his change rattled against the silky lining.

  ‘I don’t even know why you’re wearing a coat this time of year – must be a born pessimist!’

  We walked across the fields, climbing stiles, as the sky turned to lead, and watched the cows grazing, wondering when the rain was going to come. It wasn’t long before enormous drops started to fall. Right away everything smelt lovely in the wet.

  ‘Oh no!’ Joe groaned, getting all bothered like he had over the bikes. ‘Here, Genie. You have my coat.’

  ‘No, I’m all right. I don’t mind!’ The rain made me feel wildly happy and reckless. It was heavy but warm, and the sound of it was all around us like a loud rustling. I turned my face up and held my arms to the sky, half dancing along the path.

  ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring—’

  I didn’t care if I got drenched to the skin. I tore along, feeling it dash on my face and sink into my scalp through my hair.

  Seeing me, Joe must have decided there was no point being worried, and he ran behind me and took my hand.

  ‘Look!’ he called out. ‘Over the other side – we can shelter.’

  The field we were running across was pasture for cows. It had clumps of enormous thistles with purple tops and there were cowpats all over the place. I was glad to see the black and white cows were all huddling right at the other end. Joe and I ran together, careful where we put our feet, laughing and whooping as the rain streamed down our faces.

  ‘Crikey, what a downpour!’ Joe shouted.

  He felt very strong and fast but I kept up easily, even though it was all uphill, feeling as if I had an iron body and could have just gone on and on running.

  The barn at the border of the fields was almost full. Joe picked me up and lifted me on to the ledge of straw bales which was about up to my chest, then climbed up himself and at last we were under cover. The rain was still coming down like mad, sweeping sideways across the slope of the field. We looked round, then at each other, and laughed again.

  It was perfect. The stack was packed like a staircase, the bales at the back and sides piled right to the roof of the barn, but with a wide-stepped gap up the middle presumably designed so you could
climb up to reach the ones at the back. It might have been made for us. The light was dim as we climbed further towards the top of the stack and the rain thundered on the roof. We settled down together surrounded by the fresh, prickly bales of straw, water seeping from the ends of our hair.

  Still getting my breath back, I lay and looked up at the darkness. ‘This is the most wonderful, exciting thing I’ve ever done.’

  Joe turned and smiled at me, shouldering his coat off.

  ‘I suppose you think that doesn’t say much for the rest of my life? And that’d be about right. But it’s doing this with you. That’s the thing.’

  He leaned over and wiped my face with his handkerchief, his own still shiny with water, eyes on mine. ‘Some people would have let it spoil the whole day. Not you though.’ Teasing, he pressed his little finger into my cheek as I smiled. ‘Dimples.’

  He mopped his own face, then absent-mindedly opened up the white square and laid it out flat on the other side of him, although there wasn’t much hope of it drying. I think he was looking for something to do. Neither of us spoke for a time.

  Things changed in those moments. I went from wild, crazy happiness to feeling solemn suddenly, affected by Joe’s closeness to me. I watched him, wondering what he was thinking.

  Joe had never said or done anything to offend me in any way. We’d kissed of course, touched outside our clothes, but he was always considerate and tactful. He’d never pushed me to do anything more than I wanted. I suppose he thought I was more innocent than I actually was, coming from households like ours and Nan’s. I knew promiscuity led to punishment, like it had for my mom. That it was cheap and wrong to think of going with a man before you were married and that he’d probably think so badly of me if he knew what I was thinking . . .