by Annie Groves
Overhead she could still hear the drone of engines, the bombs falling in a seemingly neverending hell of explosions, followed by the collapsing of buildings. It looked as though the whole of the city and the sky above it were on fire.
As she looked up, desperately trying to track the downward fall of a cluster of incendiaries, one she hadn’t seen fell into a neighbouring street, blowing out the windows of the buildings ahead of them. Instinctively Emily grabbed the boy, swinging him round in front of her and protecting him with her own body as she turned her back to the blast.
When she turned back again she was shaking so much she could hardly move. But they had to move. She had to, for the boy’s sake. She had to think about him and not give way to her own fear.
Picking her way through the broken glass and ignoring the cacophony of fearful sounds all around her, Emily hurried on.
They had almost reached Roe Street when suddenly the boy tried to pull out of her hold, digging in his heels.
‘What is it?’ Emily asked him, desperate to get them both to the safety of the air-raid shelter. The street they were in now was virtually empty, and Emily’s instincts were urging her to run for safety, but she couldn’t leave the boy. An air-raid warden standing at the crossroads ahead of them yelled out, warning her to get off the street, but his words were lost behind the noise from the exploding incendiaries raining down from the sky, as a fresh wave of bombers roared in overhead and attacked the docks and the waterfront. The clamour of bells from the fire engines racing to put out the fires made Emily’s heart pound dizzily.
‘Come on,’ Emily begged the boy, tugging him forward, only to stop and gasp in fear at the sound of a plane so low overhead, it hurt her ears. Instinctively Emily pushed the boy to the ground and then flung herself down on top of him. As she lay there, hardly daring to breathe, an enormous explosion shook the ground, followed by a flash of searing heat. Emily could hear buildings collapsing all around her. Dust and smoke were stinging her eyes, and clogging her throat and nose. Something, Emily didn’t know what, a brick perhaps, thumped down on top of her, followed by another. The sky was raining debris and death.
Katie and Carole were just sitting down at the table they had secured right on the edge of the dance floor when the air-raid siren went off. The two girls looked at one another in mutual consternation, whilst Luke, who had been watching his lads head for the bar, martialled them all together, ready for whatever action might need to be taken.
All in all Luke reckoned there were about two hundred people in the ballroom.
The shrill scream of falling bombs had everyone who could including Katie and Carole diving under the tables for cover.
Katie, who was hoping that her borrowed dress would survive such rough treatment, managed to resist the childish urge to clap her hands over her ears when the ballroom reverberated to the sound of a bomb exploding above their heads, followed by the terrifying sight of a hail of shrapnel coming through the plaster ceiling. The lights flickered and dipped but mercifully managed to stay on.
Katie could see the band leader, Mrs Hamer, diving for cover under the piano, as the shrapnel seemed to chase her, scoring deep marks in the dance floor and marking it right the way across, almost up to the bandstand itself. It all happened so quickly, the shrapnel travelling at such speed, that Katie could only shudder and marvel at the band leader’s lucky escape, whilst saying an automatic prayer for her own father and his safety far away in London, where he too would be working tonight.
‘It’s the theatre next door that’s been hit,’ a fire watcher, who had come running into the building from outside, yelled out. ‘But the explosion’s taken off half the Grafton’s roof.’
Some band members, emerging from cowering under their seats, briefly struck up a rousing tune, quickly applauded by the dancers huddled under the tables.
‘I’m scared,’ Carole wailed to Katie. ‘I want to go.’
‘It’s too late for us to go anywhere now, with bombs still dropping. We’ll all have to stay here until they sound the all clear,’ Katie told her.
They could hear bombs exploding close at hand, and then abruptly the lights went off. Katie held her breath but they didn’t come back on again.
‘We’ll be killed if we stay here.’
Katie could feel Carole trembling, and she could hear in her voice that she was close to tears.
‘No we won’t,’ Katie told her stoutly. ‘They’ll leave us alone now, just you wait and see.’ Behind her own back Katie had her fingers crossed. She was every bit as scared as Carole but there was no point in saying so. She was practised at reassuring her mother in air raids and slipped easily into the role of being the strong sensible comforter.
‘Listen, the band’s started playing,’ she encouraged Carole. ‘You stay here. I’m going to see if there’s any candles.’ Katie took from her handbag the torch such as they had all learned to carry since the blackout laws had come into force, and crawled out from beneath the table, trying not to damage her borrowed dress.
Luke, having used his own torch to ensure that his men were all unharmed, and knowing that they couldn’t leave the dance hall until the all clear had gone unless they wanted to risk being caught in the open whilst bombs were being dropped, caught sight of a very harassed-looking Mr Malcolm Munro, the Grafton’s manager. He went up and introduced himself, offering the services of himself and his men.
‘I’d be grateful to you for whatever you can do, Corporal,’ Mr Munro told him gratefully. ‘We’ve lost nearly half the roof, by the looks of it. Not that you can see much with the power gone.’
‘We’ve all got torches so we can go and take a look at the ceiling to make sure it’s safe. If you happen to have any tarpaulins around we could try and secure the roof for you until you can get summat proper sorted out.’ Luke had to raise his voice to make himself heard above a group of screaming girls who were having hysterics.
He looked round the ballroom. Already someone was moving about quietly, lighting candles and placing them on the tables. Luke frowned when he realised that it was the snooty girl from the queue. Somehow she hadn’t struck him as the sort who would get stuck in in such a quiet and efficient way.
It didn’t take long for Luke and his men to confirm that the ceiling wasn’t in any immediate danger of collapsing onto the dance floor, despite the shrapnel damage, but Mr Munro had been right about the roof. And they didn’t need their torches to show them how much damage had been done. The arc lights from the anti-aircraft batteries, combined with the light from the fires burning in bombed buildings, provided more than enough for them to see where a whole mess of timbers and slates had fallen inwards into the roof space, leaving a gaping hole where the roof itself had been blown right off.
Luckily the ballroom manager had taken the precaution of providing himself with a good set of extending ladders and some tarpaulins, ‘just in case, like the ARP lot told us we should do,’ as he explained to Luke.
‘Two of you hold on to them and the rest of you stay here,’ Luke told his men as he prepared to climb the ladders once they had been extended into the roof space as close to the damage as Luke deemed it safe to place them.
‘Why don’t you let one of us go up, Corp?’ one of the men suggested, but Luke shook his head.
If there were any risks then as their corporal it was only right that he should be the one to take them. Besides, when your dad was a member of the Salvage Corps you grew up knowing a thing or two about climbing ladders in unsafe buildings.
He went up slowly and carefully, testing his weight against the wall until he was level with what had been the roof and was now a gaping hole. He was just about to poke his head through the hole when suddenly the ladder started to slide sideways on the wall.
Down below him Luke could hear a warning shout as his men fought to steady the ladder. Remembering his father’s tales of his own work, Luke spread his arms wide onto the wall, his stomach lurching when, instead of wall, his right hand
met cold night air.
‘You’re going to have to move the ladder over to the left, lads,’ he called down as calmly as he could. ‘The wall’s gone on the right-hand side up here. You’re going to have to lift the ladder, two of you to each leg – just ease it up off the ground.’
He had to swallow down the sick sour taste in his mouth as he felt the ladder jerk and sway.
‘That’s it.’ It was up to him to stay calm and keep the men steady. If he panicked then they would panic. ‘Now just ease it over – nice and gently.’
He was having to lean all his weight to the left of the ladder to keep it flat against the wall. His right hand caught the rough edges of a broken brick, dislodging it in a shower of brick dust. His heart was pounding, and so was his head. If he fell now or, even worse, if the ruddy wall gave way … The ladder jerked and swayed, and he heard a muttered curse from below. His right hand was on solid brick now, but he couldn’t risk putting any pressure on the wall yet. He counted four more bricks and then pressed his hand flat to the fifth, his breath easing from him as it held solidly.
‘That’s it, lads,’ he called down, adding laconically, ‘Thanks for the lift.’
It wouldn’t be good for their morale to let them think he’d been scared that they couldn’t do it.
Checking that the ladder was steady, he climbed the last few rungs and looked out into the cold night air. In the light of the fires and the searchlights from the batteries, Luke could see the damage that had been inflicted on the West Derby Road area of the city. Instinctively he looked towards Hatton Gardens, where the Salvage Corps, for which his father worked, was based, his heart thudding into his chest wall when he saw that the area had been hit and was on fire.
‘Here, can you smell that?’ Andy Lawrence called out from down below him. ‘Smells like me mum’s kitchen on Christmas morning.’
There was indeed a rich mouth-watering smell of roasting poultry.
‘They’ve got St John’s Market,’ Luke told his men after he had gone back down the ladder to rejoin them. Andy, typically, given his enjoyment of a bit of fun and a joke, groaned and announced, ‘Well, I reckon that’ll be our Christmas dinners gone.’
Luke smiled but his thoughts were with his father, anxiety creasing his forehead as he saw the fire engulfing the Hatton Gardens area. The salvage teams weren’t normally called out until the fires had been put out, which meant that with any luck his dad would be safe at home, in the air-raid shelter at the end of the road.
‘Ruddy hell, there ain’t going to be much of the city left if the Luftwaffe carries on like this,’ Graham Moores, one of the older men, announced bleakly whilst Jim Taylor, the newest recruit who was only just eighteen, had gone very quiet and looked a sickly green colour in the light of the other men’s torches.
‘Well,’ Luke told his men briskly, ‘the theatre next door’s taken a hit, but there’s a bit of a parapet running round the roof of this building and I reckon it should be safe enough for us to stand on whilst we fix things.’
As he finished speaking, Mr Munro and some of his staff came puffing up the stairs, carrying between them some heavy tarpaulins.
‘When I got these in,’ the Grafton’s manager told Luke ruefully, ‘I didn’t think I’d be needing them on the night of my Christmas Dance. The trams have stopped running, and the whole of the West Derby Road is a sea of broken glass, so I’ve just heard from one of the fire watchers who was on the building across from the theatre.’ The manager shook his head, obviously struggling to come to terms with what had happened, and what was still happening closer to the dock area of the city if the spasmodic bursts of explosives from the German bombs, interrupted by the fierce retaliatory booming of the anti-aircraft guns, was anything to go by.
‘We’ve got some more ladders down in the basement, if you think you can put these tarpaulins up,’ the Grafton’s manager told Luke hopefully, adding, ‘I’ll see that your lads are well rewarded for their trouble, by the way – free drinks tonight, and free entrance over Christmas and the New Year.’
Luke grinned as the men gave a loud cheer.
‘Now that you’ve said that I reckon they’d have those tarpaulins up, ladders or no ladders,’ he told Mr Munro.
As the men under Luke’s able direction set to clearing what they could of the mess by torchlight, preparatory to putting up the tarpaulins, Luke could hear the music from the dance band down below them. He had a mental image of the snooty girl with her shiny dark curls and her plain silver-grey dress, which had somehow looked so much more eye-catching than the fancier dresses of any of the other girls, going quietly from table to table lighting candles. It was an image at odds with his initial impression of her. She hadn’t struck him as the sort that would do anything as homely as light candles, never mind be quick-thinking enough to find some and put them to good use in the circumstances. She was probably only doing it because she wanted to see if there were any rich blokes about, Luke told himself cynically, unwilling to give her any real credit for thinking of others.
‘Are you all right, love? Can you stand up?’
Emily wasn’t sure. She ached all over, but at least her rescuer had removed the debris that had fallen on her. As she turned her head to look at him, Emily could see that he was extending his hand to help her. Emily blinked and focused on the ARP band on his arm. There was glass and debris everywhere, and the air smelled of smoke and fear and roasting poultry.
Watching her sniff the air, the warden told her, ‘They got St John’s Market, so that’s half the city’s Christmas dinner gone up in smoke, along with the rest.’
The warden was still waiting for her to make an effort to stand up. Reluctantly Emily did so, exhaling shakily in relief when the boy moved with her.
To her astonishment she actually seemed to be in one piece and unharmed, and the boy too, unlike some of the buildings nearby.
Taking the ARP warden’s outstretched hand, Emily struggled to her feet, dragging the boy with her. All around her Emily could see blown-out windows, the road a mass of broken glass and roof slates, a front door sticking up at an odd angle from amongst the rubble of what had been a wall. The whole northwest side of the city seemed to be on fire. The street was empty apart from themselves.
Apprehensively Emily turned round to look towards the theatre, her breath easing from her lungs in a creaking gust of relief when she saw that the building was still standing. She was just about to ask the ARP warden if he knew if anyone had been hurt, when there was a sudden whoosh of sound, followed by the loudest bang Emily had ever heard, which would have had her diving for the ground again if the warden hadn’t kept hold of her.
Another warden came racing up the street. ‘That was the chemical factory in Hanover Street,’ he told them breathlessly. ‘The Corporation’s had to send to Lancashire for reinforcements, we’ve got that many fires burning.’
Emily was properly on her feet now, and the boy with her, miraculously also unharmed.
‘You two are a lucky pair,’ the warden told her. ‘There’s a bomb dropped on Roe Street that’s left a crater the size of a house, and if you’d been a dozen or more yards down the road, you’d have had it and no mistake—’ He broke off and cursed under his breath as a fire engine came racing down Roe Street towards them, and the bomb crater.
‘No, stop!’ The warden ran towards it, waving his hands and yelling in warning, but it was too late. Right in front of her eyes Emily saw the fire engine, with its crew on board, plunge right into the crater, with a sickening sound of breaking glass and tearing metal.
‘Jeff! Pete!’ the warden was calling out, Emily and the boy forgotten as two other ARP men raced with him towards the crater, from which flames were already emerging.
Emily took the boy’s hand and turned away. There was nothing they could do, after all.
To the north, the whole of the city along the shoreline seemed to be on fire and the planes were still coming, attacking the dock area now, the night sky illuminated b
y the growing number of fires and the coloured arcs of the tracer bullets from the anti-aircraft batteries.
The ARP men by the crater were saying something about it looking like everyone in the fire engine had ‘bought it’.
Emily shivered and held the boy’s hand more tightly.
Later she found it hard to recall how long it had taken them to walk up Wavertree Road, scrunching over pavements strewn with broken glass, and past bombed-out burning buildings. There was no comforting stop at the chippie. Its windows were blown out and its owners in an air-raid shelter. Where they should be, Emily knew, but if she was going to die she’d prefer to die in her own bed in clean sheets, thank you very much, not some council shelter where you’d be mixing with all sorts. The people of Wavertree Village had certain standards, make no mistake about it.
Every time she heard a plane overhead Emily clung more tightly to the boy’s hand. He had saved her life once tonight, after all.
‘Katie, is it really you?’
Katie had just reached the table closest to the band, with her candles, as they were about to take a break, and a wide smile curved her mouth as she returned the warmly enthusiastic hug of the sax player, Eric, whose family had originally come from Hungary, and who had played for a while in one of the bands conducted by her father.
‘How is your father?’ Eric asked her eagerly. ‘He is well? Safe? There have been so many bombs in London.’
‘He is very well, thank you, Eric,’ Katie answered. ‘And you?’
‘I am well too, but I hadn’t expected this. We came away from London to escape from the bombings.’
Luke’s men had done all that they could do, and now that the tarpaulins were safely in place, Luke had agreed that they could accept Mr Munro’s offer of a free drink.
