The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  Dennis was particularly excited that his dad was involved in the nightly fire-watching activities. Best of all were the huge brick water tanks that were built at strategic points. Dennis and his friends used them to sail their homemade boats, getting soaked in the process. Then there was the hilarity of the local Home Guard. The men who were deemed too unfit or old to go into the Armed forces were drafted into platoons and trained to be part-time soldiers. At first they were a rather comical bunch, marching down the street on Sunday mornings, some with no uniforms and sticks instead of rifles. Dennis and his friends, seeing them coming, would rush home and grab brooms and march behind them in a column, trying to keep in step, only to be shouted at by the sergeant, ‘Clear off, or you’ll get a clip behind the ear!’ which sent them running with jeers and peals of laughter.

  The Home Guard had their uses, though. One day, one of the silver barrage balloons that hung over the town came loose and landed in telephone wires at the end of their road. Dennis watched in delight as the Home Guard battled to bring it down.

  By 1941 things had started to get more serious. Bill was called up. There was much anxiety in the Smith house because Bertha’s husband, William, had already been told he was off to fight the Germans in a tank in the Egyptian desert; everyone was relieved when they heard that because of his qualifications as an accountant, Bill was going to be drafted into the Army Pay Corps. He was first sent to Kent and then Oldham, near Manchester. But still, from then on, Bill hardly ever came home.

  And then, of course, the bombing started. It was bad. Every night they ran to the shelter, Grace clutching Dennis and Glenda and hiding their faces in her dressing gown. She put on a brave face even though she was terrified.

  Like continental plates, the dynamics between the sisters were always on the move. Growing up, Grace had been closest to Alice, but physical distance had forced a kind of separation. Dora, of course, had been evacuated, while Katie was married and running a household, but she still hadn’t had any children. However, Bertha, like Grace, was also struggling to cope with two children and a husband away, and she was just down the road. So they spent a lot of time together comparing notes and sometimes indulging in a kind of strange, anti-competition as they sat in Bertha’s posh kitchen drinking cups of tea, while their children ran wild outside.

  ‘Poor you. You must have it worse, what with the docks and all that,’ Grace said.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure – all those white, concrete roads around you. You must look like you’re living slap-bang in the middle of an airbase when Herman comes over! I’m not surprised you’ve had a battering,’ Bertha said, in her most sympathetic voice.

  This was true. The estate the Smiths lived in was only a quarter built, but all the roads had already been laid, criss-crossing the fields over a wide area. Being made of white concrete, it did look like an airfield.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. All I do know is I’m absolutely amazed the house is still standing when I come out of the shelter,’ Grace said.

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Bertha nodded.

  ‘But my goodness, the children! How are the children coping?’

  ‘Fine. Well, Glenda has always been quite nervous but Dennis is fine. I guess it’s all a big adventure for them, isn’t it?’

  And then Grace started what the sisters called ‘going off on one’: ‘I tell you what, though, I’m fed up with all those bleedin’ pieces of shrapnel. He’s got nearly a cupboard full. Lord knows – if this war goes on too long, he’ll end up filling the house – out there, first thing in the morning, with his friends. He doesn’t even wait to have his breakfast. He found a whole silver nose cone yesterday. Oh, he was the envy of the street! Does John do that?’

  ‘No, not so much. You know what he’s like – more interested in his own company. Serious. But he’s very interested in planes. Him and Dianne stand on top of the shelter and count the bombers going out and how many make it back. He’s keeping a record.’

  ‘Yes, he’s quite special, John, isn’t he?’

  Bertha looked keenly at Grace, trying to detect any sarcasm. Yes, John was a bit different, but Bertha was very proud of him – he was clever, no doubt about that. That unusually big head stored an enormous brain. Anyway, he was a lovely-looking child.

  ‘He does wonderful drawings, you know. Really detailed, of the planes. Bombs and things coming down on parachutes, stuff exploding, German bombers crashing in flames, crews bailing out with all guns blazing at them. Sometimes a bit too detailed, if you know what I mean …’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ They grimaced at each other, and Bertha wondered whether she had not done John any favours.

  ‘I think he was very upset by that squadron crashing into each other.’

  ‘Well, he would be, yes.’

  They both thought back to the month before, when Dianne and John had been watching a squadron of Allied planes. One of them had flown too close to another, their wings had touched and then, like a row of dominoes, they had all toppled into each other and went spiralling down in flames. It hadn’t seemed real. Little parachutes had emerged with tiny men attached and there was a huge bang as they crashed. John and Dianne had joined the other local children, shouting to their parents and running off down the road. Luckily, the planes had crashed in woodland, with the wreckage all tangled up in the trees. The children had been kept at a distance as the adults tried to see if they could rescue anyone. Mum was pretty sure that she could see a couple of men hanging from the trees in their parachutes and another in the cockpit of the plane, all burnt and tangled and dead.

  ‘Why on earth do they fly so close together?’ Bertha asked.

  ‘So they can’t get picked off by the Germans, I suppose.’

  ‘But they’re not going to be picked off in Essex, are they?’

  ‘That’s what comes from showing off.’

  ‘Grace!’

  ‘You’ve got to laugh.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right. Sorry.’ And then, looking up at the heavens and putting her hands together beseechingly, she said another, ‘Sorry!’

  They smiled ruefully at each other, and Grace changed the subject. ‘Dennis is missing his food, though.’

  ‘You’d think they’d come up with something other than those dreadful cough sweets in the shops just once in a while.’

  ‘Hmmm. Yes. Miserable bastards, aren’t they?’

  ‘You can tell it’s men in charge.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’

  ‘I think you did a wonderful job with Dennis’s birthday cake, though,’ Bertha said brightly. Grace looked at Bertha carefully. Was she mocking her? ‘I think the turnip worked.’

  ‘Oh, Bertha, stop it!’

  ‘No, really!’

  ‘Bertha, you always were a big, fat liar. Your nose is going to get so big it won’t fit in this room.’

  ‘No, really – it was moist, and … chewy, and …’

  ‘Tasted like a gran’s knickers?’

  At which point they succumbed to one of those fits of giggling.

  ‘Do you always have to take everything down to that level, Grace? Honestly, what would Mother say if she could hear you?’

  Which only made them laugh even more.

  ‘Anyway, I think it was very clever to cut the turnip up into chunks and soak them in pineapple essence.’

  ‘Now you’re just being patronising. Just because you’ve become a whizz with prunes and carrots. And don’t think I don’t know you got those nuts from the hedgerows.’

  ‘So what? Dennis told John you’ve been eating whale meat.’

  ‘Well, it had to be better than corned beef.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘No! It was bloody disgusting – pardon my French.’ And they were laughing again.

  ‘No, but seriously, there’s something I want to talk to you about – Christmas.’

  Which set Grace ‘off on one’ again. ‘What about it
? No, actually, I don’t want to talk about it or even think about it. Dennis has been worrying about the tough time Father Christmas is going to have getting through the aircraft guns and search lights. Perhaps I should just tell him the truth and be done with it. There’s no place for fairytales in this war.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ Bertha said, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s going to be miserable – Bill can’t get leave and the children are going to have to make do with a couple of wooden toys knocked together in an old man’s shed down the road.’

  ‘Well, hang on. I’ve been thinking about it. Obviously we’re in the same boat – William won’t be here, so why don’t you come round to us? The children can play with each other and you and me can put our rations together and share a bit of sherry …’

  So on Christmas Eve, Grace, Dennis and Glenda came to stay. The two boys went head to toe in John’s bed; the two girls went head to toe in Dianne’s bed, and Grace had the luxury of the spare room and a bath with running water.

  Four stockings were left out at the end of the beds.

  ‘Do you think Father Christmas is going to make it?’ Dennis whispered.

  ‘Of course he is,’ John said loftily. Unlike his older cousin, John had his suspicions about the existence of Father Christmas and thought it was either his mother, in which case the stockings were going to be full in the morning, or if he really did exist, then he would have to have such amazing supernatural powers he’d make it whatever.

  ‘Look, a small matter of anti-aircraft guns and search lights are going to be nothing to a man who has the capacity to deliver presents to every child in the world in twenty-four hours, is it?’ he said, a touch dismissively.

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ Dennis said.

  The next year, when John had proved definitively that Father Christmas was in fact his mother, he took great delight in telling my mum, who to this day tells the story of how her big brother ruined the magic of Christmas for her.

  In the morning the stockings had definitely got something in them, but they were rather uneven – Dianne’s and John’s were stretched to bursting, whereas Dennis and Glenda had to root around hard to find something down at the toes. In fact, not only did the Kendall children have full stockings, but there was a beautiful painted wooden dolls’ house for Dianne and an engine house for John at the end of the bed.

  ‘Gosh, Father Christmas must think you’ve either been very good, or perhaps I’ve been very bad,’ Dennis said, gulping back tears.

  ‘Perhaps it’s both,’ John said.

  So poor Dennis spent the rest of Christmas feeling awful. In later years he found out that it was not a vengeful Father Christmas, but William’s Old Uncle who had made these presents for John and Dianne. He was of course a master carpenter, now retired, and had lots of wood off-cuts at his disposal. And John and Dianne were the nearest thing to grandchildren he’d ever have. Nothing personal. But it did mean Bertha’s well-meaning suggestion had rather backfired.

  As the new year got underway, things became increasingly difficult for Grace. School had become intermittent, with daily interruptions when the siren went off and the children trooping backwards and forwards in and out of the school bomb shelters. In the end, the government closed the school and replaced it with ‘travelling teachers’, who came to certain houses once a week to give a small group of children a few hours’ tuition. It wasn’t very effective, especially as it was a different teacher every week and the children were all different ages. Grace tried to supplement this by hiring a teacher to come to their home for an extra lesson, but she knew Dennis and Glenda were falling further and further behind.

  Glenda stayed close to home but because he wasn’t at school, and Grace was out at work all day, Dennis was free to get into all sorts of mischief – bomb-chasing was a favourite. He scoured the area on his bike looking for unexploded devices and tracking the movements of the local bomb disposal unit. He loved watching the squad cordoning off the area and carefully excavating around the bomb. Once it was exposed they used a doctor’s stethoscope to listen for a ticking sound. If there was an unexploded bomb, they had to remove the detonator, which often had an anti-tamper device attached. Sometimes they used a steam generator to dissolve the explosive out of the bomb casing. Which was very exciting, but didn’t help Grace’s nerves. Every time Dennis was late for tea, she wondered whether he’d been blown up.

  Then one day something like that happened. Grace had asked Dennis to run to the farm shop with a sixpence to buy some potatoes for tea. As the old shopkeeper weighed them, the air raid warning sounded. ‘You’d better run along, son,’ she said. ‘This might get bad.’

  So Dennis grabbed the bag and ran out, but just as he came around the corner into his road, he was deafened by the sound of a low roar behind him, and he looked up to see a German bomber, flying very low following him, with flames and black smoke pouring out of its engines. It was obviously about to crash. In fact, it was so close he could see the faces of the two pilots as it flew past; then, at the back of the plane, he saw the rear gunner staring at him, eye to eye. The gunner swivelled his protruding gun right at Dennis, who was rooted to the spot, unable to move. Dennis remembers the roar of the gun over the sound of the labouring engine as a stream of shells struck the ground, hitting the road and making small craters. Splinters of red-hot concrete went into Dennis’s legs, cutting them. He thought he’d been hit and went all weak and dizzy. But the gunner had missed Dennis. Why? Was he just a bad shot? Or did some humanity stop him from killing an eight-year-old boy? Eventually, Dennis came to his senses and jumped over a low wall, almost immediately hearing a loud explosion as the plane crashed with its bomb load. He sat behind the wall shivering, still holding the potatoes; even after the all-clear sounded, he still couldn’t get up.

  At home Grace had heard the noise, and with Dennis nowhere to be seen, she feared the worst. She ran out and gathered the neighbours, who started searching for him, calling out his name, at which point Dennis finally managed to get his wobbly legs together and emerge from behind the wall.

  After that, Dennis became a lot less keen on the war. He was haunted (and still is) by the faces of the crew, and couldn’t stop turning over in his mind what it must have felt like knowing they were about to die, and did that gunner mean to hit him, or did he deliberately miss him? It still seems important.

  Now Dennis only had to hear the first sound of the air raid warning and he would scramble for the shelter. Then, only a week later, a rare type of incendiary bomb filled with a highly inflammable oil exploded in their street less than 80 yards from their house, and blew the shelter door down on top of Grace and the children.

  They weren’t physically hurt, but their nerves were shattered. Grace had had enough. Bill had refused to let the children be evacuated, believing the rumours that evacuated children were being used as little more than farm hands or servants or worse. But Grace was lucky, she had her sister. She wrote to Alice:

  ‘It’s bad here and getting worse with raids every night, and most days too. I really think the point has come where the chances of Dennis and Glenda getting killed are high and even if they are saved, they will have no life as they are receiving no education. We cannot afford for me not to work, but if you could look after Dennis and Glenda for me and keep them safe while it is so dangerous here, I will be for ever grateful. I can bear it, or at least I can bear it if I know the children are safe.’

  And, by return of post, Grace received a letter in Alice’s wonderfully familiar, flowery handwriting:

  ‘It’s cosy here! They will have to share a bed with Brian and Jean. And I’m out at work, but of course Mum is a brick, looking after them. But I’m guessing by the sounds of it these are minor inconveniences compared with the peril they’re facing in London. Of course send them over and I will keep them safe until they can come back to you.’

  And Grace had cried tears of relief, which fell on the letter and made Alice’s beautiful handwr
iting all smudgy.

  Which made the arrival of the letter from the ministry so particularly hurtful and shocking.

  Grace’s visit was a complete surprise. She arrived at teatime. When she walked in the door her children were overjoyed and ran into her arms.

  But Grace couldn’t pretend with the niceties. ‘Dennis, Glenda, all of you – go upstairs. I need to have a talk with Auntie Alice.’

  They got the message. The children trooped out sombrely.

  ‘And you, Mum.’

  Clara looked affronted. ‘What are you going to say that you can’t say in front of me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to hear this.’

  Clara was shocked. She walked out of the door, shaking her head.

  ‘What is it, Grace?’ Alice said, seriously worried. ‘Is it Bill?’

  ‘No, it’s not Bill. It’s this.’ Grace scrabbled in her bag, and with shaky hands brought out the letter and handed it over.

  Alice sat down and read it. She took her time and then put it on the table. ‘What about it?’

  ‘What about it? How dare you! You’ve been cheating me. Cheating your own sister. Making money out of me and my children. Money I don’t have.’

  ‘I had no idea they were going to charge you for it.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Who do you think I am?’

  ‘Well, I’m seriously beginning to wonder.’

  ‘Now hang on, I took your children in without a second’s pause. You asked, and I said yes. Even though I had no room for them and no means to feed and clothe them. My children have had to share their bed and have I complained? No.’