Birmingham Blitz

by Annie Murray

  But Mom didn’t know about these worries. I’d sit watching her white, sunken face, wondering what I was going to say to her when we could talk again. Nan kept bringing in things for her to eat, bits of fruit, little custards or junket she’d made. But she never even had a response from Mom, let alone got her to eat anything. I’d grip her hand but got no squeeze from her in return. Only later we found out why. As she regained consciousness the doctors said she’d lost the use of the right side of her body – the right arm completely, the leg showing little flickers of life.

  The first time she came round while I was there, her eyelids seemed so heavy she could barely prise them open as she bubbled slowly back up to us. Her right eye wouldn’t open.

  ‘Mom.’ She croaked the word, coughed, tried again. Only half her mouth was working. ‘Oh, God, Mom – Genie—’ She couldn’t say any more. Tears seeped down her face.

  ‘Mom, oh Mom . . .’ I could only bow my head, resting it on her, and cry too, overcome by her misery and my own shame.

  There was Mom and there were the raids. That was what made up our lives. Nan and I went to the hospital every day, Lil when she could. I told Mr Broadbent my mother was ill. He told me to have days off, take my time. ‘The others’ll rally round,’ he said.

  I was staying at Nan’s and Len was at Molly’s. All other aspects of life faded into the background. Something happened to me during those days. Everything had changed from my life before, like a coin flipping over. The thought of seeing Joe appalled me, revolted me even. No, never again. Such things were not meant for me. This was family, and only family. And not even my family knew the depth of pain I was carrying in me over what had happened.

  I couldn’t look my nan in the eye. I’d let her down. Let us all down. I hadn’t looked after Mom properly. That had always been my job. I was the one who saw her out there, arms out, calling to the bombs, and I should have known how near the edge she was. I should have been able to save her.

  Nan did what had to be done, though she’d aged in a week. I thought she was angry with me. I couldn’t stomach food, kept being sick at odd times. I wished I could be like Lil and let it all out. Lil could say all the things she needed to say, ‘Poor, poor Doreen – fancy us not knowing she was that bad. Was she bad, Genie? And the poor little babby . . .’

  But it was my nan I couldn’t stand to be near. I couldn’t bear the grief pushed down in her as she ran the shop still, day after day, in her pinner, her jawline held proud, listening to the grievances of her customers. She didn’t let on about her own.

  By the early evening the sirens were screaming and it was a terrible rush to get some food, get organized. The minute it started Mister was howling and Tom would be curled up under the table quivering and refusing to move.

  ‘I ain’t going in that coal ’ole – I’m never going down there again!’

  The poor kid. When he was awake he was terrified and when he was asleep he was thrashing about screaming with nightmares and wetting the bed. He nearly jumped out of his skin at the slightest sound.

  So we arranged it that I’d stay up with Mister and Tom under the table. I was happier up there in any case, what with my sudden bouts of sickness, and because I was happier away from Nan, couldn’t face her. I also wanted to do the best I could for Tom. I told him stories and we both looked after Mister, who was just as scared as he was, or we lay curled up together, the darkness in the house made even thicker by the heavy table above our heads, while the sky was set on fire outside.

  This particular night as we lay there I said to him, ‘D’you know what day it is today, Tom? It’s fireworks night!’

  We both managed a bit of a laugh at that. ‘Don’t exactly need to bother with it this year, do we?’

  Tom clung to me, shaking, as the noise escalated outside.

  ‘I wish it’d stop,’ he said. ‘Stop and never come back.’

  ‘So do I.’ All the time I was thinking about the hospital, what a big target it was. At least Nan’s house was small.

  When the All Clear went, some time late in the night, my muddled brain didn’t know how much time had passed. Tom had finally fallen asleep, his arm across me, and I lay there listening to his breathing, his restless muttering. Poor kid.

  There was light moving in the room and I heard Lil taking Patsy and Cathleen up to bed. It went dark again. After a time Nan’s slow tread came up the steps and through from the scullery. She went to the range and struck a match to light a candle. Her shadow moved nearer the table and I shut my eyes, sensing her bending to look under at us, taking it that we were both asleep. After a moment I heard a spoon chink against a cup and knew she was taking Turley’s Saline to settle her stomach. I waited for her to move the candle and find her own way to bed, but instead of that she went and opened the door. Picking up a chair she carried it outside, came back in to put her coat on and blow out the candle, then disappeared again, quietly latching the door.

  When she didn’t come back in I moved Tom’s arm off me and crawled out from under the table. My insides churned and I stopped, wondering if I was going to retch, but it passed. I felt my way to the window and moved the blackout curtain. There was a tiny piece of moon in the sky and I could see stars. And right the other side of the glass criss-crossed with tape I could see the back of Nan’s head. She was sitting out there, quite still.

  It took me quite some minutes to pluck up the courage to go out to her. But I couldn’t go on living with her the way I was. Not with the shame I felt. She didn’t turn her head when she heard the door open, was looking up at the moon, her hands folded in her lap, and I stood there by her shoulder.

  ‘Can’t you sleep, Genie?’ She spoke very quietly.

  ‘No. Tom’s gone off, though.’

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘Nan—’ My heart was like a throbbing pain. I needed her forgiveness, for her to say it was all right, although it wasn’t, none of it.

  She waited.

  ‘Nan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry – I know it was my fault.’

  She seemed really startled and looked right round at me. ‘Genie love? What’ve you got to be sorry for?’

  I wished so much that I could cry. I tried to make the tears come, to ease it, but they wouldn’t. ‘I let you down. I was supposed to be looking after her. It was my job. I should’ve been able to save her.’

  ‘But bab, you were the one that did save ’er.’

  ‘But before – I should’ve known . . . I should’ve woken up. But the day before she seemed better than she’d been—’

  Nan gave a sigh then, the great breath of someone pressed by a heavy burden.

  ‘There’s no blame on you, Genie love. She’s been a poor mother to you in many ways and you’ve been better to ’er than she ever deserved. It’s a hard thing to ’ave to say about your own daughter but it’s the truth. When I think back, ’ow things might’ve been different, what I could’ve done . . .’ She shook her head and brought up one hand, clenched in a fist, to her lips, the elbow resting on her other arm.

  I thought of Lil’s saying, ‘Kids – when they’re young they break your arms, and when they’re grown up they break your heart.’

  I saw that all this time she’d been blaming herself as well. I don’t know if Nan’s heart was broken. She’d had enough in life to chip it all right, from her dead babies and my rotten grandad right the way through to this, and it all sank somewhere deep in her like a stone so the world never saw what she was feeling. I’d have done anything, anything to make her feel better.

  After a week at Nan’s I went back to work. There was nothing much I could do at home and I felt I owed Mr Broadbent, but I was nervous about facing them all, or disgracing myself if I was sick without expecting it. It didn’t happen all that often, maybe once every day or two, but it was always very sudden. Just happened, not much warning. Put me right off eating.

  ‘How’s your mom?’ they all asked, and I made up something about how she was poorly and getting better.
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  ‘You awright, Genie?’ Agnes asked me. ‘You’re looking terrible. You’re all skin and bone.’

  The others agreed. ‘You want to get some flesh on them bones, girl. Joe’ll think we’re overworking you when ’e comes back!’

  Course, everyone was tired and jumpy, not just me. The sound of a car engine in the road’d make you start violently. Every noise felt like a bomb coming to get you, even in the daytime. I just tried to smile at them through it all, praying my innards would behave themselves, at least while I was here.

  I went back to our road, dreading the house. I called in on Len, told him Mom was OK. At home there was a letter from Joe. I picked it up and stared at it. His writing seemed like something so foreign to who I was now. I couldn’t open it, couldn’t stand to read his words of love when I felt so hateful. I knew how terrible it was not hearing, that I owed it to him to write back straight away, but I couldn’t. There was nothing in my head except the bombing and what had happened to Mom. I had nothing to give Joe in a letter. Nothing to give him full stop. And I’d been a silly little fool, living in a dream world to think I could be with someone like him. I may have had Nan’s forgiveness, even if she thought none was needed, but I couldn’t forgive myself.

  I put the letter in a drawer up in my room, still unopened.

  It came on when I got to the front door, a sudden rush so I only just made it back into the kitchen, retching over the bucket, nose and eyes running, until I was empty and wrung out. I sat on my heels on the floor after, too weak for a while to get up. If only I could cry instead of this. Stop feeling so numb. This was my punishment. I didn’t deserve Joe and now I’d lose him. If he wanted to know how I was he’d have to ask his dad. He wouldn’t get an answer from me. Not from someone who’d died inside.

  On 13 November there was a daylight raid on the Austin Aero factory, but thank God, Lenny was safe. On the night of the 14th the Luftwaffe flattened Coventry, bombed and burned it to the ground. Nowhere else disappeared as thoroughly as Coventry. As Teresa said to me after one of the endless, terrifying nights when they’d been over us, ‘What the hell will there be left when they’ve finished?’

  The night they bombed Coventry was a rest for us, but they were soon back. I was at Nan’s all the time. That day it was her and me went up the hospital. Mom just lay there, face white as the sheets, her one open eye blank and empty. She had no energy to give it any expression. But the blankness looked like an everlasting sadness that no one would be able to take away.

  We always tried not to look at the women in the other beds round us, with their rasping lungs or odd swellings. Sometimes you just couldn’t stop yourself looking round, your eyes pulled by a noise or a smell, but we’d try to fix everything on Mom. We never knew what to say to her though. Nan put her coat on to go up there like a suit of armour, always as smart as she could manage, hat on too.

  That day, nestling in the bag she always carried, was a carefully wrapped little cup of egg custard, carried delicately as if it were the actual shell of the egg. She fed it to Mom with a teaspoon, Mom half sitting up, bending her head forward, bits of custard slipping back out of the right side of her mouth.

  ‘This’ll ’elp get your strength back, Dor,’ Nan kept saying. ‘We’ll soon ’ave you out of ’ere and back ’ome where you belong.’

  Mom’s good eye looked at her. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered, mouth twisting against her will.

  ‘Soon, Mom.’ I took her hand, my heart thumping. I was almost afraid of her. ‘They say a bit longer – maybe next week.’

  ‘When you’re a bit more yourself,’ Nan said, stowing the little cup from the custard back in her bag.

  What was ‘a bit more herself’ going to mean now?

  ‘I’ve brought you a drop of beef tea. Will you have some?’

  Mom closed her eyes as if in revulsion. Nan’s face twitched. She put the bottle back in her bag and sat turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger, cuddling the bag on her knees as if she thought some-one’d nick it if she put it down for a second.

  I picked up Mom’s brush and stroked it over the hair round her face. She hated to be a mess. Her eye flickered open and closed. She was falling asleep.

  On the bus home, full of smoke and the smell of stale old coats, Nan and I sat without talking. Nan’s hands were clasped tight round the handles of the bag. The lights were very dim in the bus, and when tears started rolling down my face I didn’t think anyone would see. Just a few tears I was going to allow myself, but something caved in in me on that bus ride when I thought of my mom so far away from us and so sunk in despair she might as well have been dead. I even wondered whether stopping her when I did had been the right thing. I’d kept her alive into something worse. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. I was too far gone to control myself, just pushed my face into my hands, trying not to make too much noise. All the fear and guilt and worry of the past fortnight came over me and I couldn’t help myself. I was only sorry for embarrassing Nan.

  ‘’Ere, bab.’ She didn’t tick me off like she might have had things been different, just leaned over and gave me her hanky and that made me cry even more. She took one of my hands and hers kept clenching and unclenching on mine. When we were nearly back into town she led me off the bus and crossed over to the bottom of our road where she stopped me, took the hanky and mopped my face.

  With no warning I was heaving, sick in the street. I rushed to the gutter, so glad it was dark, and stood there gulping in misery when it was over.

  Nan led me by the arm. ‘There now. You shouldn’t be in a state like this, that you shouldn’t. Let’s get you ’ome—’

  Next thing, the air raid warning was cutting her sentence in half and everything was forgotten in the fear that noise brought up in you. I took Nan’s bag off her to carry – it was hard for her to hurry with her bad legs – and as fast as we could we raced up the hill, terrified of being caught out in the road. The last tears dried on my face.

  ‘Thank God,’ Lil said as we came in. The room smelt of stew. Tom was curled up under the table and Lil, in a tizzy, was trying to persuade Patsy to take Cathleen down the coal hole, and dishing up plates of food.

  Coat off, Nan started sorting out saucers and stubs of candles for the cellar.

  ‘Fetch me a couple from out the front, will you Genie? We shan’t get far with these bits.’

  The sirens had stopped by now and although we were all doing things we were straining our ears to hear the planes coming, those minutes between the two usually one mad rush of getting ready.

  I ducked under the counter into the shop, holding up one lighted candle stub, fumbling for new ones on the crowded shelves. It didn’t take me long to realize there was an argument going on outside. Morgan’s voice and no mistake, right outside the shop door, and a girl, pleading with him, it sounded like.

  Pulling back the bolts I opened up to the moonlit night.

  ‘Ah,’ Morgan said, seeing me. ‘Course, you’ve closed early tonight. I couldn’t get in.’ We weren’t supposed to bolt him out but Lil had shut the shop right up without giving it a thought.

  ‘Course we’re closed – there’s a flaming raid on in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  As I appeared, the girl made to take to her heels but Morgan grabbed her by the arm, and although she couldn’t get away she wrenched round away from us, hiding her face. Seemed a bit timid this one, not like some of the brazen hussies he brought along.

  ‘Don’t be silly now,’ Morgan said to her. ‘You can’t go rushing ’ome – as Miss, er . . . Miss Genie ’ere says, they’ll be over any moment.’

  The planes moved into the range of our hearing as he spoke.

  ‘Get in then.’ I stood back to let them past, making sure he didn’t so much as brush against me. He kept hold of the girl, who from what I could see was plump and quite young, and she kept her face pushed down in her coat collar.

  ‘What the hell’re you doing here tonight?’

 
‘Thought there wouldn’t be a raid.’ Morgan let go of the girl now I’d shut the door and rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Course there wouldn’t be a raid. Why should there be a raid? I mean they only smashed the living daylights out of Coventry yesterday.’ Must admit, I was rather enjoying myself. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to fit you in. You can’t go up there, can you? Mrs Rawson’s really going to love you turning up.’

  As I turned to lock the door, the girl gave out a noise like a whimper and moved over to me, speaking with her head still right down. I thought she seemed a bit odd. ‘Let me go,’ she whispered. I could hardly hear her. ‘I’ll just go ’ome.’

  ‘You mad? Hark at them out there! It’s the daft bugger you came with wants his head looking at. See – he don’t care about you. He’s in there saving his own skin already. You come on in. I dunno what you’ve heard about my nan but I s’pect even she’ll call a truce in this.’

  ‘I can’t.’ This time it was almost a sob. I picked up the stub of candle on the saucer and held it by her face.

  She cringed away from me. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Shirl?’

  Turning away, she put her hands over her face. ‘I’d no idea in the world ’e was going to bring me ’ere, Genie, honest I didn’t. He just said it was somewhere in Highgate. I couldn’t believe my eyes when it was your nan’s . . .’

  The first bombs were falling and I rushed her through the back and under the table with Tom. Shirl sat crying and I put my arm round her. Nan must’ve told Morgan he could shelter under the stairs if he was prepared to clear himself a space, because we could hear him banging about, moving out Nan’s enamel wash pot, the bucket of sand and stirrup pump, some old crocks and something that fell over with a crash which might’ve been a clothes-horse.

  From feeling so down before, my emotions swung right the other way and I suddenly got the giggles, hearing Morgan’s muffled cursing from under our stairs.

  ‘Hark at him,’ I spluttered to Shirl, who actually managed to look me in the face for the first time and mopped her eyes, seeing I wasn’t about to have a go at her. Some other hard object came flying out with a clatter, we heard Morgan say, ‘Bugger it,’ and I was in stitches as the planes came over, Tom clinging to my legs, still holding on to Shirl, the old wood smell coming from the worm-eaten table.