by Annie Groves
The chairwoman had finished speaking, but the committee members, including Bella’s own mother, were still in their seats.
Those Poles wouldn’t be able to look down their noses at her once they knew she was doing proper war work. Assistant Crèche Manageress. Yes, it had a very good sound to it. It would put her cousin Grace in her place as well, seeing as Grace was only in her second year of training to be a nurse.
Bella’s own mother was getting up to speak now. Bella exhaled a bored sigh of resignation. No doubt her mother was going to go on for ever about the number of blanket squares that still needed to be knitted. She’d even tried to coerce Bella to knit some, using dirty old wool that had been unwound from someone’s old clothes.
Bella turned to Laura Wright and hissed, ‘I’ll do it.’
NINE
Katie had never felt so self-conscious and awkward in the whole of her life. She was stuck here in the Campions’ kitchen, having to make small talk with the one person above all others she most certainly did not want to make any kind of talk with. Luke Campion himself.
He had arrived unexpectedly a few minutes before Jean Campion had had to go out to a WVS meeting, explaining that he had hoped to see his father.
Jean had told him that Sam had volunteered to do some extra work but that he would be in soon, and had begged him to wait, saying that Katie would make him a cup of tea and a sandwich.
That, of course, had put a stop to Katie’s own plan to escape upstairs to her own room, and now they were alone in the house, since the twins had gone to the cinema with Eileen Jarvis, whose sister taught dancing.
Katie longed for Sam Campion to return. She felt as though her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, and that she had become a total butterfingers when she had tried to make Luke a sandwich without feeling self-conscious.
Luke Campion had made it worse by getting up and ‘helping’ her, instead of sitting down at the kitchen table and letting her wait on him. Now he had drunk his tea and eaten his sandwiches, and his father had still not come in. She’d been glad of the excuse that washing up his tea things had given her to keep her back to him whilst she busied herself at the sink.
‘So you work at the censorship place, then?’
The sound of his voice breaking the silence almost made Katie drop the cup she was washing, but what was even worse was that he was now standing beside her, a tea towel in his hand as he set about doing the drying.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she confirmed in a strained voice. Since he was attempting to make conversation and be polite, Katie’s own good manners insisted that she should do the same. Frantically she hunted around for something to say but could only come up with a forced, ‘It’s really interesting.’ That made her flush as soon as she had spoken and she added uncomfortably, ‘Not reading other people’s letters. That’s the worst part to the job, knowing that we’re reading something that’s meant to be private.’
‘A person would have to be a fool to put anything in a letter that was properly private, seeing as everyone knows the post is being censored,’ was Luke’s prompt response. ‘And anyway,’ he added, ‘it’s for the good of the country. And that’s what we’re in this war for, after all. Sometimes we have to put our duty before what we’ve been brought up to think is wrong, like reading other folks’ letters.’
His supportive comment caught Katie by surprise, relaxing her into turning to him to say, ‘That’s exactly what I try to tell myself, but it isn’t always easy.’
‘War never is.’
This was a man who had been through Dunkirk, Katie reminded herself, so it was no wonder that both his voice and his expression should be shadowed and bleak.
‘It must be very hard to … to …’ Katie stumbled to a halt. ‘I think our men in uniform are the best in the world and so very brave,’ she said simply and with such real feeling that even Luke, prejudiced against her as he was, knew she was speaking honestly.
Luke frowned and turned away from her. He didn’t want to have to acknowledge that his mother’s billetee, whom he had resolved thoroughly to dislike, had somehow touched his emotions.
‘I dare say you’d rather be with your fancy theatrical friends than stuck here. I’m surprised you didn’t get yourself a job with ENSA, seeing as your dad’s in that line of business.’
Joining the Entertainments National Service Association hadn’t had any appeal for Katie, but the hostility was back in Luke Campion’s voice and so she didn’t feel that she wanted to prolong their conversation. She told herself that she was glad of his hostility. She didn’t want to warm to Luke Campion, and she did not want to find herself thinking that he was brave and handsome, and a loving son and brother. And she certainly did not want to find herself regretting that some other selfish young woman had treated him so badly that it had turned him against those girls whom he thought might be like that, including Katie herself.
And yet despite being sure that she didn’t want any of those things, Katie still found herself saying quietly, ‘I’m very happy to be here and proud to be doing what I am doing.’
Luke had to turn away from Katie as he heard the mixture of anger and sincerity in her voice. Could it be that he had been wrong about her? He acknowledged that it got his back up a bit the way his mother in particular was always praising her billetee and going on about how kind she was, and how pretty, in a sort of meaningful way. It hadn’t escaped Luke’s notice that Katie was indeed very pretty. How could it when a girl was such a good-looker? Luke admitted that he was struck afresh by just how pretty Katie was every time he saw her. Far too pretty to want to have anything to do with an ordinary bloke like him.
Now what was he thinking? Luke wasn’t at all happy about the direction his own thoughts had somehow taken without him having authorised them to do any such thing. Hadn’t he learned his lesson the hard way from Lillian? The trouble was that he hadn’t ever envisaged finding himself in a position in which he’d have to talk to Katie on a one-to-one basis. He’d have preferred to keep his distance from her. He wished his dad would come in.
Katie wished desperately that Sam Campion would arrive home and put an end to the unwanted and uncomfortable intimacy she was having to share with Luke.
The Campion kitchen, normally such a warm and comforting, homely room, now seemed to be filled with all sorts of unspoken tensions. Perhaps she should just excuse herself and go up to her room? Katie turned to Luke at the same moment as he turned to her, both of them beginning to speak at the same time and then both falling silent as they heard the now familiar piercing warning of the air-raid siren, rising in pitch and volume.
‘Air raid,’ Luke warned Katie unnecessarily, his voice clipped and his manner suddenly very soldierly in a way that Katie found unexpectedly reassuring. ‘Come on, get your coat.’
The shelter was down at the bottom of the road, and thanks to the Luftwaffe’s frequent bombing raids towards the end of last year, Katie was already familiar with both its position and its other occupants.
She was three or four houses down the street, which was now filling with people from the other houses, all of them heading for the shelter, when suddenly she stopped and turned round, running back to the house without a word of explanation to Luke.
He caught up with her in less than half a dozen yards, grabbing hold of her arm and demanding sharply, ‘What are you doing? The shelter’s the other way.’
Pulling herself free of his grip, Katie yelled back above the noise of the siren, ‘I’ve got to go back for your mum’s china. She keeps it ready packed for an air raid and always takes it with her. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to it.’
She was gone before Luke could stop her, weaving her way through the people going the other way, her slight body making that process far easier for her than it was for him, but it never occurred to Luke not to go after her.
He finally caught up with her just as she reached the house.
‘Are you mad?’ he demanded. ‘Mu
m doesn’t think more of a few tea cups than she does of your life.’
Katie ignored him, rushing into the house and through the kitchen to the hallway, and of course Luke followed her. How could he not do? He was the eldest boy in a family of sisters, and as such he had always taken his responsibilities to the female sex very seriously.
Oblivious to Luke’s presence, Katie pulled open the door that led to ‘under the stairs’, and then she got down on her knees to pull out what looked to Luke like an old basket stuffed with newspaper and rags.
‘Careful with it,’ she warned him as he took the basket from her, and then reached down to help her to her feet.
They hadn’t got much time. Whilst she’d been in the cupboard Luke had already heard the menacing drone of the incoming bombers, heavy with their bombs, the threatening, hostile sound growing steadily louder. They’d be heading for the docks, of course, he reassured himself and, as his father always said, up here in Wavertree they were safely distant from the docks. He urged Katie towards the back door, having estimated that it would take them less time to make it to the safety of the air-raid shelter if they ran down the narrow lane at the back of the houses rather than using the street itself.
As soon as they were outside, the noise of the bombers, engines desynchronised to prevent them being tracked by the British defence systems, as Luke knew, was becoming louder by the heartbeat. Down towards the docks, the night sky was filled with the beams of searchlights trying to pick out the bombers for the anti-aircraft guns.
The planes were Dorniers, from the sound of their engines, Luke reckoned. The guns from the batteries were now thumping out anti-aircraft fire whilst the Dorniers’ bombs howled earthwards and explosions lit the darkness.
‘Run!’ Luke urged Katie, as he put down the basket to pull the back door closed behind them, but when he turned round again she was standing next to the basket, not having moved at all.
As he bent down to lift the basket she reached down too, telling him, ‘We can take a handle each and then we can both run.’
It was the kind of thing that Grace would have said to him, and for no reason he could think of Luke felt a sudden prick of unmanly tears. Blinking them away, he grabbed the basket handle nearest to him and, just as though she was as well trained as one of his men, Katie took her handle and then broke into a run.
Added to the other sounds now were the ringing of fire engine and ambulance bells, flames shooting up from newly bombed buildings. The flat whistle of distant sticks of bombs falling on the docks was reassuring in the sense that the characteristic sound of the falling bombs meant that they were at a safe distance.
They had to pause at the bottom of the garden whilst Luke opened the gate, and then they were out onto the muddy track that ran between the gardens and the allotments, and came out on the main road itself just a little bit down from Ash Grove, where Luke could see a couple of corporation buses obviously caught out in the open, their windows blacked out, a line of thin blue light emerging from them where the passengers were disembarking, no doubt making for the same air-raid shelter as they were themselves.
They were over halfway down the path, when Luke heard the Dornier, the hairs lifting in his nape as he did so. He knew instinctively somehow, even before he heard the scream of the bomb, just how close it was going to be. He reacted automatically, dropping his end of the basket and then pushing Katie down beside it before throwing himself on top of her.
Luke lifted his head as he saw the bomb hit one of the huts on the allotment, only a few yards away from the stationary buses, causing it to explode with a dull crump, and then ducked again, knowing that the explosion would send wood and glass flying through the air.
He could feel Katie squirming beneath him as though she wanted to get up.
‘Keep still,’ he warned her. ‘They’re still overhead.’ He stopped speaking as a burst of machine-gun fire drowned out his voice, making speech impossible as the Dornier turned and strafed the trapped buses.
The cries and screams from the injured and dying mingled with the general nightmare sounds of the night, as the Dornier, its work done, banked and turned, dropping a final stick of bombs as it went.
Luke had gone so still that if it hadn’t been for the firm steadiness of his heartbeat and the warmth of his body protecting her own, Katie could almost have thought herself alone. She could smell mud and rain and grass, the scents of life and the living, but they were mingling with the smells of smoke and explosives and burning – the scents of potential death.
The bombers weren’t overhead any more, although she could still hear them and their bombs, just as she could still hear the sound of fire engine and ambulance bells, and the determined thudding of the heavy anti-aircraft guns.
She wriggled under Luke’s muscular weight; he had somehow braced himself on his forearms in such a way that whilst he was protecting her he wasn’t squashing her. No doubt it was some technique they must teach them in the army, she decided, suddenly growing conscious of the fact that she felt slightly dizzy and shaky, and very much aware now of the unfamiliar man scent of Luke, which at the same time was disconcertingly also very familiar, as though she had been aware of his scent all the time without even knowing that she was, and could have recognised it, picked it and him out from a hundred other men without a second’s hesitation.
She shouldn’t be thinking about things like that, Katie chided herself. She should be thinking about more important things, like Jean’s tea cups.
The china!
Luke could have broken it, the way he had almost thrown it down like that. She struggled more anxiously, telling him, ‘Let me up, you shouldn’t have dropped the basket like that. Your mother’s tea cups are probably broken now.’
‘Keep down,’ Luke told her.
His voice sounded thick and choked, alerting Katie at once.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ she demanded to know, pushing even harder to be free.
‘The so-and-so’s strafed a couple of buses that had stopped to let people off to get into the shelter,’ he told her. ‘Come on. I’ll see you safely into the shelter, then I’ll go and see if there’s anything I can do to help.’
Katie’s heart lurched into her chest wall. Those poor people on the bus. It didn’t take much imagination to work out how defenceless they would have been.
‘I’m coming with you,’ she told Luke stoutly. ‘I go to first-aid classes.’
However, when they got closer to the scene it was obvious to both of them that there was nothing that anyone could do.
The buses were burning wrecks it was impossible for anyone to get near. Fire crews were working busily to put out the flames whilst the ambulance crews were kneeling on the ground beside charred still-smouldering bundles of what looked like rags, but which Katie recognised with a heave of her stomach were the remains of human beings, who must have been flung from the burning buses by the force of the explosion.
Katie almost dropped her handle of the basket.
She looked at Luke, and he looked back at her.
‘Come on,’ he told her gruffly. ‘Let’s get you and Ma’s tea cups into the shelter.’
‘I don’t think I can,’ Katie told him. Her legs were shaking so much that she didn’t think they could support her. Luke took one look at her and then gently told her to put down the basket.
Poor kid, this was probably the first time she had seen something like this, and he hadn’t forgotten how he had felt his first time. He had thrown up his dinner and cried like a baby. After, he had felt properly ashamed of himself, but an older, much more experienced soldier than he was himself had comforted him and had told him that it affected everyone like that at first.
There was nothing he could say; no words of comfort he could offer. He knew after all that, just like him, Katie had seen the two small charred bundles laid out next to the bigger one and guessed like him that they were a mother and her two children. There were no words for things like that, but
what you felt about them was there inside you, engraved on your heart for ever. Luke pulled Katie towards him and then wrapped her tightly in his arms.
Katie wanted to close her eyes and blot out what she had seen but it seemed wrong somehow, an insult to those poor people who had been killed. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She wanted to say something but she couldn’t. She was, she realised distantly, shaking from head to foot, her teeth chattering together despite the warmth of Luke’s arms holding her tightly and Luke’s body against her own.
TEN
‘Well, I really don’t know why you felt it necessary to come rushing over here to Wallasey, Jean,’ Vi told her twin sister, ‘just because you’d heard that a few bombs had been dropped on us when clearly they were intended for the docks.’
They were in Vi’s immaculate but somehow cold-looking kitchen, with its cream and blue colour scheme.
Jean exchanged rueful looks with Grace, wishing now that she hadn’t wasted her daughter’s precious few hours off from the hospital by taking the ferry and then the bus to Kingsway, Wallasey Village to make sure that her sister hadn’t suffered in the severe bombing Wallasey had endured.
Jean was so very proud of her eldest daughter and the way in which she had matured since she had started her nurse’s training. Grace was so very much a young woman now, and able to hold her own as such, rather than the sometimes impulsive and slightly scatterbrained girl she had been. Of course, the fact that she was training to be a nurse had done a lot to give her a calm air of capability, and Jean had noticed how proudly and confidently Grace held herself these days. Some of that must be due to her happiness with Seb, who always treated Grace just as he ought. It was plain to Jean just how much Seb thought of Grace and that they were very much in love. Grace felt very strongly, Jean knew, that she had a duty to finish her training and that, of course, meant that they could not get married until she had done so.
