Birmingham Blitz

by Annie Murray

  Carlo stroked his hand down Teresa’s back, trying to reassure her.

  ‘If only we knew more. We’ve had no letters for ages and we don’t know what’s going on or where they are. Sorry.’ She tried to smile. ‘I don’t want to put a damper on the evening. We’ve all got our worries, haven’t we?’

  I put my hand down and stroked Mister’s black and white back, remembering Joe’s hand doing the same. We certainly did all have our worries. But for those brief hours, things were as OK as they could be.

  Our days had already been broken into by the chilling rise and fall moan of the air raid siren. But none of those interruptions – the scramble we made to the cellar at Broadbent’s, smoke canisters going off outside to screen the factories, the singing to pass the time – compared with the night raids.

  Birmingham’s Blitz began at full strength in mid-October. There was a raid every night after that for the next two weeks.

  We weren’t ready for the first raid. At the sound of the siren, Mister put his head back and set up a shrill howling. Maybe it hurt his ears – it certainly jarred ours – but his high yowl made it all even more nerve-racking.

  ‘Can’t you shut ’im up?’ Mom snapped. She couldn’t seem to think what to do, just kept picking things up and putting them down again. ‘Give him summat to eat – anything so’s he’ll pack that racket in.’

  Not having a routine for this yet, we grabbed hold of things we thought might be useful – a lamp, Thermos, rugs, coats – and struggled down the garden into the shelter, seeing the searchlights criss-crossing in the sky. We had no idea how long it might go on for.

  Len sat perched for a while on one of the shelves that made thin bunks on each side as the planes droned closer and closer overhead, then lay down and went to sleep, his bent knees hanging over the edge because the bunk wasn’t long enough for him.

  Mom and I sat side by side on the other bunk facing him across the narrow gap. The planes came over in waves, the noise growing louder, our hearts beating faster. It was like standing on a railway track, knowing there’s a train coming. With every explosion outside, our heads ducked. If it was close enough you felt the impact under your feet. And all you could do was sit there, waiting.

  It took me a little while to notice what a state Mom was in. That first night as they came over she was feverishly smoking and biting her nails but she was quiet. She’d lit the lamp and her eyes, stretched with fright, reflected back the flame. When it’d gone on for a time she said, ‘Jesus – I wish I had something to drink.’

  I reached down for the flask. ‘There’s some tea—’

  ‘A proper drink!’ she half yelled at me. ‘It’s bloody horrible in here. They’re going to hit us, I know they are.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ I said, though my legs were rubbery with fright. I cuddled Mister, who was more scared than I was, to steady myself. ‘We’re supposed to be safe in here.’

  Mom gave a harsh laugh. ‘’Bout as safe as an empty peach tin.’

  ‘Why don’t you try and get some sleep?’

  ‘Sleep? You barmy? How the hell’s anyone s’posed to sleep through this lot? Well, ’cept him of course.’ She jabbed a finger resentfully at Len.

  It was terribly frightening. More than I could’ve imagined. My hands were sweaty, stomach all churned up. It was like being alone in all the world with the bombs. The rest of the city might as well not have existed.

  I was exhausted too. To the extent that it was beginning to fight with the fear and to win. Mom could sleep this off tomorrow but I had to be at work. Tiredness could make you fatalistic. Whatever would happen would happen. You had to sleep, just had to. That was my first taste of the half-awake, half-asleep state you found yourself in during the raids. Asleep and yet not. Still half aware of the planes, the screams and thuds of the bombs in the soapy haze that your overstretched mind had become. And whenever Mom thought I was nodding off she poked me awake. ‘Don’t leave me alone in this, Genie. I can’t stand it.’

  When it stopped and the sky went quiet, the All Clear finally sounded its two minute relief and we crawled up out of that damp hell-hole feeling as if we’d come out again into a different, miraculous world where there were stars in the sky, the shapes of houses round us, still standing, and fresh air. We were not just alive, but reborn.

  ‘Oh, I can’t go back in there again,’ Mom said, stretching her arms to the sky. ‘Never again.’

  But we were back in there that night and for many nights after. This was the striped existence of the bombing raids. The days full of brightness, sunshine and fading leaves on the trees casting yellow light. After sitting there in the dark of the night, terrified and weary, the possibility of death coming at you all the time, the light of day was like an enormous cheer breaking out. We’re alive. ALIVE. Everything felt bigger and more vivid than usual, the sky close and blue, our house bolder and more solid, the colours of flowers a cause of wonder and every building in the city, however functional, a great work of art. Every day we came out into the rank smell of smoke across Birmingham, looking round to see what had been destroyed in a city that until then we hadn’t realized we loved with a passion.

  From the second night Mom made sure she had a bottle of the kind she preferred with her. Len tried bringing Gloria in but she crackled and beeped and didn’t seem at all happy in the shelter, and what with all the racket outside we couldn’t have heard her anyway. So he stowed her under the stairs in the house after that.

  The strain began to tell on us. Even in the daytime there were enough hazards. Dread of daytime raids, though they’d mostly stopped them now, unexploded bombs left over from the nights and glass blown out by the blast, the checking and rechecking that everyone was all right, had survived the night.

  But it was the nights, those hellish nights. Mister, made distraught by all the noise, would burrow as deep as he could into my lap. Len sucked barley sugars, or hummed to himself, which drove Mom round the bend. She spent the time swigging gin, trying to drink herself into oblivion. And I sat in there with them all, so glad of Mister to cuddle, thinking of how it must have been for Joe up in those planes, holding on to the thought of him and trying to swallow the panic which rose in me like bile.

  ‘Can I have some?’ I asked Mom one night as she held tight to the neck of the bottle. No messing with glasses for her now.

  ‘Go on then, have a sip. It’ll make you feel better.’

  I took a mouthful, felt it burn down inside me and gagged. ‘Ugh – it’s horrible.’ My stomach was already to pot from fear and lack of sleep.

  More than once Mom drank until she passed out and I was left alone, as Len could sleep through anything. I sat holding my dog, counting the seconds between each whistle of a bomb and the crunch of the impact, trying to keep a hold on my mind out there in the dark garden, with only this tiny metal hub between me and death.

  When it was time to crawl out, blinking and squinting as the door opened, I had to shake and shake Mom, and more than once just had to leave her there to sleep it off.

  Another time she woke wild and hysterical, as if her dreams were a worse hell than the raids themselves.

  ‘No,’ she screamed at me, ‘I can’t go on – can’t stand it—’ clawing at me in a crazy way, and I was frightened. Her hair was loose and her face crumpled with drink and tiredness. I wasn’t sure she was even really awake.

  ‘Look,’ I said desperately. ‘Why don’t you just go back to sleep for a bit?’

  To my surprise she did lie down again and close her eyes. I think she spent most of the day asleep now, because there wasn’t much sign of anything getting done except her managing to get to the Outdoor for more drink. We were lucky if we got a meal down us before the sirens went off again. Sometimes we ran down with steaming plates and ate in there off our laps.

  One night, when we got to the shelter, she found that the gin supplies were disastrously low. There were only a couple of fingers left in the bottle.

  ‘Christ
– I can’t get through it with only that.’ The skin of her face looked thicker nowadays. She was puffing out with the pregnancy, but the boozing can’t have helped. ‘I’m going to have to get some more.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I begged her. ‘You’ll just have to make it last.’

  She looked at me as if I was a prison guard. ‘You’re getting a bit of a bossy miss round here nowadays, ain’t you? Don’t leave much room for me, does it?’

  ‘I’m not!’ I said, hurt. ‘And anyhow, there’ll be plenty to do when that one arrives.’ I nodded towards her bump.

  ‘Oh yes, that one.’ She drank from the bottle, then gave a crooked smile. ‘D’you think it’ll be a boy or a girl? I bet it’s a boy, don’t you? And what do I call him then? Bob? Or Victor? Bictor, or Vob?’ She laughed her stupid drinking laugh.

  I thought, Lil wouldn’t have been like this. Lil would’ve coped. But then Lil wouldn’t have got herself in this mess in the first place.

  ‘Do us a favour, Genie?’ She had to speak loudly now, over the noise outside.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go down the Outdoor for me and get some more?’

  There were planes overhead. I stared at her in disbelief.

  ‘I’ll go for you,’ Len said.

  ‘No you won’t, Len,’ I snapped at him. ‘They’ll be in the cellar anyhow. They don’t just stand there selling gin day and night in this lot. None of us is going anywhere.’

  Mom pouted like a child. There was a long silence then, except for Mister’s frightened whimpering and a tired moth battering against the lamp. Mom was sulking and I was too furious with her to speak.

  With every wave of planes passing over I felt my heart bang harder until it was almost a pain. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t do anything about it – you just had to wait it out. Sometimes I wished I was old enough to be a warden, so’s to get out there and do something.

  It was a heavy raid that night. The first wave brought incendiary bombs, ‘breadbaskets’ of them rattling down to set the city alight, turn it into a beacon for the heavy high explosive bombs following close behind. The smell of smoke found its way to us. What was burning tonight? What would be left when – if – we got out of here in the morning?

  Mom didn’t have enough drink to knock herself out. She sat slumped on the bunk, leaning against the crimpy wall near the front of the shelter, staring at Len who was now sleeping like a princess in a fairy story.

  I was so stung, so angry at what she’d asked me to do, I couldn’t let it go. In the end I burst out, ‘So you think more of a bottle of booze than you do me?’

  She frowned, focusing on me slowly. ‘What?’

  ‘You’d send me out in this – just to get booze for you?’

  She nodded in a befuddled sort of way and for a moment I thought she was too far gone to answer me. But eventually she said, ‘Well that’s me for you all over, ain’t it?’

  There was a sudden escalation of noise outside and both of us ducked, cringing, protecting our heads with our arms. The impact was loud and horribly near, shaking the ground, and the crashing and whooshing outside seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘God, that was close,’ I said as it started to die away. It was hard to straighten up. You got stiff and crumpled with fear.

  In the lull that followed Mom nodded across at Len. ‘I suppose you know why he’s like he is?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like he is.’ Her voice was harsh. ‘Soft in the bleeding head, what d’you think? Thought your nan might’ve let on to you.’

  ‘No. I always thought he was just born that way—’

  ‘Nah, he wasn’t born like it.’ She shook her head as hard as a Punch and Judy puppet. ‘It was me did that. Ain’t it always?’

  She talked with her eyes fixed on Lenny’s face.

  ‘When he was born I was two – two and a half more like. He was a big babby, always was huge right from the start. And he was like six Christmases rolled into one for me. He was my dolly, my babby, he was going to be my best friend. And he was. I was all over him, all the time. Mom didn’t mind. I took him off her hands and that suited her. She needed a hand, she was that pushed, what with the house and all the extra work she took in and our dad being the way he was. So Len was as much mine as he was hers really.

  ‘Anyroad, he grew. I’d cart him about – course, he was heavy and I was a skinny little thing. Then one day when I was turned four Mom said she was going out to take some things up for a Mrs Brigham who lived in another yard up the road. The lady’d just had a babby and she wasn’t any too good, so Mom was helping her out, the way she always has. She said to me – I can still hear her – “I’ll only be a few minutes. Don’t come up. You stay with Len.”

  ‘“But Mom—” I started arguing with her. “I want to see the new babby. Can’t I come with you?”

  ‘ “No,” she said. “You stay put. You’ll only be in the way. Mrs B’s not herself and she won’t want me carting you two up there as well.”

  ‘And off she went. I was furious. I remember punching the couch downstairs with my fists, shouting, I was that cross. Don’t know why I wanted to go so much really – there were always babbies about. But I s’pose I saw myself as a kid who was good with them and I wanted to be counted in.

  ‘So in the end I wrapped my arms round Lenny, sort of in a hug, and picked him up. And I ran up the road after Mom. With his big head in the way I couldn’t see where I was going and he was such a weight. I tripped and fell down right on top of him. His head went down with a bang on the pavement. Knocked him out. He wasn’t quite two then, and he’d been starting to chatter on, but he never said another word after that – not for about five years, and he was never the same again. The doctors said he had brain damage . . .’

  I could see it all, the little girl hoiking her baby brother along the road. Nan’s face, the anger that even now she couldn’t help spilling out on occasion when she spoke of her eldest daughter.

  ‘You didn’t mean it though, did you Mom?’

  She shook her head, crying now, like the frightened child who’d done the deed. ‘Course not. I wouldn’t have hurt him for the world.’

  I crept closer and sat by her, not quite daring to take her hand.

  ‘Look at him.’ Her cheeks were wet. I wondered if her tears tasted of gin. ‘He’s going to be a father and he’s still only a kid himself. Thanks to me.’ She looked at me. ‘I deserve them hitting me after all the things I’ve done. One of these nights they’ll get me.’

  ‘Mom, no,’ I said, frightened. ‘Of course not. You didn’t do anything on purpose. You’re just . . .’ I trailed off. Just what? Unlucky? Careless? Foolish? ‘You’ve just had some accidents, that’s all. You’ve had enough punishment.’

  Later in the night, when she’d quietened, we felt sleep coming over us even though the raid wasn’t finished. It was more distant and I found I’d blanked out for a time, I didn’t know how long. It could have been seconds or hours. But then they were hard over us again and I was suddenly awake. The battering of noise was back, the planes, ack-ack guns with their tennis-like rhythm, the whining and crashing. I sat up, wide awake. The lamp had gone out.

  Mister was still lying beside me, but I stretched out on the bunk. Mom wasn’t there.

  ‘Lenny?’ I shouted across to him. ‘Where’s Mom? Where’s Doreen?’

  ‘She’s your side.’ He must have been awake already because he sounded alert.

  ‘She’s not.’ I wondered if she’d tumbled on the floor. ‘Mom? Where are you?’ I felt around in the dark. Nothing.

  ‘Len, take Mister. I’m going to see out there.’

  I wrenched the door open and stepped up into the crazed, coloured world outside. The sky was copper streaked with yellow and red, and puffs of white from the ack-ack fire. Fires across the city – beacons to guide the bombers – were filling the air with acrid smoke and the searchlights scratched at the sky with their cold beams. The explosions of light now were from the fo
ul-smelling high explosive bombs.

  But my eyes were fixed on Mom. She was standing with her back to me half way down the garden in her nightclothes, staring up at the glowing sky, her arms stretched out in front of her, open, as if she was in the act of embracing someone. Just standing there, quite still.

  ‘Mom – for God’s sake!’ I ran to her, wondering if she was asleep or awake. Her pale nightdress stuck out at the front over her belly and I realized she’d taken off her coat. She must have been frozen. Her eyes were open.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I bawled at her. ‘Come back in for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I thought I’d just get it over with,’ she murmured, so I could only just hear.

  There came the most massive bang from very close by that snatched the ground from under us and we curled on the ground like babbies, our hands over our heads. I squeezed my eyes tight shut. The noise seemed to go on for ages and ages, the crashing and splintering and explosions of glass. When we stood up, instinct guiding our hands to our bodies to check everything was there, tongues of fire were shooting up from the street behind our house. There was already the sound of fire-engine bells somewhere near.

  Mom and I dashed into our dark house. There was glass everywhere, front and back, strewn like a hard, crunchy icing on every surface we touched as we groped our way through to the front. I heard Mom gasp, cutting herself. The blackout blinds at the front were in tatters and through them we could see that a great swathe of the opposite side of the road was gone. Just matchwood and rubble, burning, and more to see than usual of the sky.

  Mom’s hands went to her cheeks, breath sucking in. ‘Oh, look!’ She was gulping breath in and out and couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘They got it – not me . . . Someone else got it!’

  When the light came we could see it all. The three of us walked out dumbly into the dawn, only half dressed, to see our familiar street changed utterly. We stepped over fat hoses squiggling along the road, leaking feeble arcs of water and lying in a mouse-brown mess of wet plaster and brick dust, and more glass crunched under our feet.