To Have and to Hold

by Anne Bennett

  ‘We’re fine,’ Carmel answered. ‘What’s happened?’

  The girl descended the stairs and Carmel saw the state of her: covered in grey-brown brick dust, her eyes full of tears in a face alive with terror.

  ‘It’s dreadful,’ she said, placing her lamp on the floor. ‘There was a bomb. Staff Nurse said she thinks it probably fell in Steelhouse Lane and we were caught in the blast. I was flung right across the room, but the others…oh God…’ And the young nurse covered her face with her hands.

  ‘What’s happened to them?’ Lois demanded.

  The young girl raised her face and said, ‘They’re not there any more. One half of the room isn’t there any more either. Sylvia was thrown across the room with me, but Jane and Aileen and all the beds that side of the room have just gone.’

  ‘Gone!’ Lois and Carmel said in unison as the other nurses in the basement crept forward to listen too.

  The nurse nodded. ‘They are searching the rubble for them now and they sent me down to see if you are all right here.’

  ‘They will be all right, though?’ Carmel asked the girl, seeking assurance. ‘They are just buried, aren’t they?’

  The girl shook her head sadly and her eyes swam with tears. ‘No, I’m sorry. I thought you understood. They don’t expect anyone to have survived. I know that Jane was a special friend of yours and they brought her body out just before I came down here. She was quite, quite dead.’

  Carmel just stared at the girl as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Numb with shock, she remembered that Jane had met her at New Street Station that first day, and how vibrant and full of life she was and the sense of fun she always had. And if the young nurse was right, there was Aileen too. Aileen who kept them constantly amused by the number of times she ‘fell in love’.

  Carmel was aware of Lois weeping beside her as she felt the enormity of the tragedy began to seep into her too. Poor, poor Jane, looking forward to her wedding day. And poor Pete too. What a terrible and tragic shock he was going to get. Yet she felt unable to cry, though she comforted Lois, who was crying as if her heart was broken.

  Later, when the all clear rang out, Carmel worked like an automaton, finding beds in other parts of the hospital and helping to settle the patients down for the night. A whole wing of the hospital had been caught in the blast and under the rubble they had found the bodies of two doctors and two nurses, one of whom was Aileen, and numerous patients. There were many injured too, and they were sent to Lewis’s basement, which is where Carmel and Lois found Sylvia.

  They looked down from the top of the wide staircases, the steps full of bloodstained clothing. The pungent odour of blood permeated the air, and at the bottom of the stairs lay the injured, row upon row of them, on makeshift stretchers and covered with grey blankets so that only their faces, often powdered with brick dust, were showing. The keening and wailing of these poor people was constant and heartbreaking.

  Sylvia, when they found her, looked not too bad when you discounted her panic-riddled eyes in a face as white as the bandage around her head, and the big black and blue bruise almost covering one cheek. She was pleased to see Carmel and Lois.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘What can you remember?’

  ‘Well, I know it was a bomb,’ Sylvia said. ‘I heard it explode and then it was as if all the air was sucked from the room and next thing I woke up here.’

  ‘You must have passed out.’

  ‘I did. They told me that much.’ Sylvia said ‘That’s why I was brought in. Was it a direct hit or what?’

  ‘No,’ Carmel said. ‘The bomb fell in Steelhouse Lane. We saw the huge crater on the way here. Someone told us it had killed one policeman who was fire-watching on the roof, blinded another and nearly severed the foot of the chief inspector. The hospital was been caught in the blast.’

  ‘A young nurse told us that you were thrown across the room,’ Lois said.

  Sylvia nodded. ‘That’s when I must have cracked my head. I think it was bleeding quite badly, because one of the nurses said it needs stitching when the doctors get around to seeing me, but he is so busy, as you can see. Apart from cuts and bruises I am all right really—a damned sight better than most of this lot, anyway. How are the others?’

  Carmel couldn’t prevent the shadow flitting across her face and Sylvia grasped her arm. ‘Jane! Tell me Jane is all right?’

  Carmel shook her head helplessly and Lois said gently, ‘She didn’t make it, Sylvia.’

  Carmel took hold of Sylvia’s hands, which were plucking agitatedly at the blanket as the horror of it all registered on her face. Tears began to trickle from her eyes as she repeated almost in a whisper, ‘Not make it?’

  ‘The whole side was blown out of the ward,’ Carmel said softly, ‘No one who was there could have survived it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Did you actually see for yourself?’

  Carmel nodded. ‘We saw Jane’s body before we left. Aileen was there too, and all the patients, of course.’

  ‘Jane was my best friend.’

  ‘We know, love.’

  ‘There will never be another like her.’

  ‘We know that too.’

  ‘Poor Pete.’

  ‘Aye, poor Pete.’

  The storm of weeping broke then within Sylvia. The tears flowed so fast and furious, it was as if a dam had burst. Lois took her in her arms and let her cry until she was calmer. Eventually the torrent of tears changed to hiccuping sobs and she pulled herself from Lois and wiped her eyes.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Lois said huskily. ‘It broke my heart too when I heard.’

  ‘Will you let Pete know, and Dan?’ Sylvia said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My address book is in my handbag in the staff room.’

  ‘We’ll see to it, don’t fret,’ Carmel promised.

  Carmel and Lois arrived home as a pearly dawn was lighting up the sky, worn down by sadness and weary, and footsore after walking every step of the way. Carmel had expected Beth to be asleep in Ruby’s house and was surprised to see Ruby curled up on the settee in her lounge. She woke as the two girls came in and rubbed her bleary eyes.

  ‘Ruby?’ Carmel cried. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for you,’ Ruby said, and she withdrew the telegram from behind the clock. ‘This came for you,’ she said, ‘but the raid was too fierce for me to leave the house.’

  Telegrams seldom brought good news. Carmel felt as if she had had a surfeit of sorrow that day already and she sank into an armchair before opening the telegram with fingers that trembled slightly. It was from Michael.

  ‘Daddy dead of heart attack. Details later.’

  ‘My father’s dead,’ she said in a flat, expressionless voice. She passed the telegram over for Ruby and Lois to read. ‘And don’t even bother saying you are sorry. I’m not sorry, not one bit. I just wish he had done it sooner. And I don’t even know why I am crying.’

  It was more then mere crying; the trauma and tragedy of the day had caused more an outpouring of grief as she mourned the deaths, particularly of Jane. And she wept for all the other senseless deaths she had witnessed since the war began, indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, the very old, very young and the vulnerable amongst them.

  Her father’s death was just one more, and why should she care? He was the one man in the world she had hated above all others and yet the tears continued to pour from her eyes and the sobs shook her whole frame. Ruby, her arms clasped around Carmel, was confused about the remorse the girl was showing over the passing of a man she never said a good word about when he was hale and hearty—until Lois told what had happened to them both that day, and then she understood Carmel’s anguish.

  ‘I can’t possibly go, of course,’ Carmel said to Jeff the following day when he called round. She was holding aloft the letter that had arrived that morning, giving details of the funeral.


  ‘Carmel, my dear, you can’t not.’

  ‘That man did nothing but terrorise me all the days of my life,’ Carmel retorted angrily. ‘I owe him nothing, but Jane, Jane was my friend.’

  ‘This is not for your father,’ Jeff said firmly. ‘And you will go to your father’s funeral and not shame your mother, and I will go too.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I will go to represent my son,’ Jeff said.

  ‘You are determined about this?’

  ‘Oh, yes, my dear girl,’ Jeff said. ‘Will you take the child?’

  ‘Do you think I would be let in the house without her?’ Carmel said. ‘Mammy is dying to see her. But you know how Beth is now that she is mobile and taking life at a run. I think it will one body’s work to watch her, particularly on that boat, and I would be glad of another pair of hands and a person who is firm with her when she needs it.’

  Jeff chuckled. ‘You know how hard I find that,’ he said. ‘For that cheeky little smile would melt a heart of stone. And yes, I know you go on all the time about my spoiling her, and within reason sometimes, I have to say, but in this instance I know what you mean and I will keep a weather eye on Beth, don’t worry.’

  ‘What shall I do about Jane and Aileen?’ Carmel said. ‘They are being buried on the same day as Daddy and I feel so bad I can’t go and show my respects.’

  ‘People will understand why you can’t,’ Jeff said. ‘It isn’t something you designed on purpose.’

  Jeff was right. Lois and Sylvia both accepted that she had to attend her father’s funeral, even though they knew what her feelings about him were. Lois said she knew Eve would value the support of her eldest daughter at the funeral of the man she had despised and feared.

  ‘Your mother fully supported you when you wanted her to,’ she pointed out. ‘Look at the way she came hotfoot over here for your wedding. Now it is your turn, because this funeral is bound to be a strain on her.’

  Carmel knew that every word Lois said was true, and she told Jeff to go ahead and book everything while she arranged time off from the hospital, and sent a telegram home detailing when they would arrive.

  Michael withdrew all his savings from the Post Office and Jeff sent fifty pounds ‘to help with things’, and so Eve had herself and the children kitted out respectably for once in their lives for the funeral.

  In fact, Eve displayed more grief when Carmel told her about the raid and the subsequent deaths of Jane and Aileen and the others than she had over her husband. She was genuinely very sorry about the deaths of the two girls she had met, and she remembered Aileen flirting with Michael at the wedding, to his obvious discomfort, and found herself smiling at the memory. Both Aileen and Jane had seemed so determined to enjoy life to the full and it was terrible that they had been killed in such a way. She definitely felt their deaths to be more of a tragedy, not to mention more of a loss to society, than the demise of Dennis Duffy.

  Eve knew too the dilemma her daughter would have been in and was very glad that she had chosen to come to her father’s funeral, rather than her friends’, for she’d felt she needed her there. She also wanted to express in person how devastated they all were to hear of Paul’s death. Wee Beth, of course, whom they all adored, was like the icing on the cake for Eve, and she hoped she had proved a consolation to Carmel when she had lost her soulmate.

  She hadn’t been that surprised that Jeff had come as well, ostensibly in place of his son, but really, Eve suspected, to give Carmel a hand and to see how she herself was coping. She didn’t mind why he was there, she was just glad he was, because she liked him a great deal.

  First, though, they all had to cope with the funeral. The church was quite full, the coffin by the altar covered with a black cloth bedecked with Mass cards. The Duffys and Jeff took up two complete rows and the younger ones, having been threatened by Michael what he would do to them if they should misbehave and shame their mother, were very subdued. The Requiem Mass was long and sometimes tedious, but no one shuffled or turned around or whispered. The priest, with the Mass nearly over, mounted the pulpit and described a man they had never seen, this devoted husband and father, and his family in mourning for him.

  Carmel stole a look at her mother. Beneath the very proper and respectable widow’s bonnet, Eve’s eyes sparkled with relief and even happiness because she knew no one would ever hurt or terrorise her or the children again.

  Carmel felt the same way and later, at the graveside, rather than throw a clod of earth on the coffin she had the urge to leap on it and dance a jig of thankfulness that at last the man was dead and gone. She felt the pressure of Jeff’s fingers on her arm and was grateful for the show of support. The moment passed and she felt the hate and resentment she had for her father seep away to be replaced by a feeling of peace.

  There was no room for all the mourners back at the house. The landlord of Dennis’s local, where he had spent considerable time and more money than he could afford, offered them the back room, and Jeff paid for food and drink to be laid on. There Carmel’s hand was pumped up and down by men who might cross the street to avoid the living Dennis, but they declared the dead one to be ‘a grand fellow altogether’, ‘one of the best’ and one who they were sure ‘would be greatly missed’.

  ‘Aye,’ Siobhan whispered to her sister when she overheard this remark, ‘like I might miss a headache when it is over.’

  ‘Who’s the girl Michael seems so pally with?’ Carmel asked, glancing across at her brother.

  ‘That’s Bridget McCauley,’ Siobhan said. ‘She’s the daughter of the farmer Michael works for. Like to be more than pals, if you ask me. Anyway, now the old bugger is dead and gone, maybe Michael will feel free enough to have a life of his own.’

  ‘And why not?’ Carmel said. ‘It’s not before time, if you ask me. That bloody man tried to ruin so many lives.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Siobhan agreed with feeling.

  Carmel moved closer to her mother. She had seldom left her side all day and was glad Sister Frances had offered to mind Beth until the whole thing was over, to enable her to do just that. She knew that her mother was finding it hard to respond in the way people expected when they expressed their condolence at her loss. In Eve’s opinion, the whole thing was like a farce and she was being worn down by the total insincerity of it. When Jeff saw the jaded look on her face, he suggested to the landlord that he start to clear the tables so that people might take the hint the wake was over, and though some of the men elected to stay on at the pub, most began drifting home.

  Siobhan was ahead with the younger ones, Jeff had gone with Michael to fetch Beth home from the convent, and Carmel found herself walking home with her mother.

  She knew that such a situation might not arise again and there was something she had been worrying over and so she said, ‘Mammy, how are you off for money?’

  Eve smiled. ‘You’re as bad as Jeff,’ she said.

  ‘Jeff! What’s he to do with this?’

  ‘He asked me the selfsame thing.’

  Carmel felt annoyed suddenly at his muscling in like that, and wondered if it was reasonable to feel cross. She knew, of course, that he had been sending Eve money weekly and that she had been glad enough to accept it, so maybe it was legitimate for him to ask such a question. But still she said, ‘Jeff thinks every problem can be solved with money.’

  Eve smiled. ‘He is only trying to be helpful and it has oiled the wheels for me these past years.’

  ‘Maybe, but between us we can look after you now.’

  Eve laughed and Carmel realised that she had never heard her mother laugh like that before. She smiled at her as she said, ‘All right. What’s so funny?’

  ‘You,’ Eve said. ‘All of you. Look at me. I am not some decrepit old woman and I am quite capable of looking after myself and even earning my own living, if I have a mind. Your father took away enough of your freedom when you were growing up. You got away, but the others didn’t. I will not chain them furt
her by letting them think they have to support me now.’

  ‘Michael said once you would be better off if Daddy wasn’t here,’ Carmel said. ‘I just wanted to make sure, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about me,’ Eve said. ‘I will be fine.’

  She told Jeff the same when he asked again the day before he and Carmel were returning to Birmingham. ‘Jeff, you are a good, kind man, but sure I will be in the lap of luxury now they are all working bar Edward and Pauline. With the keep they tip up and the widow’s pension we will manage fine.’

  ‘What about a better house?’

  ‘I will be looking for one of those when I see what I can afford,’ Eve conceded. ‘I do know this one is a disgrace.’

  ‘I could buy a wee place for you.’

  ‘You could not,’ Eve said firmly. ‘What an idea, Jeff. And if I was daft enough to agree to it, what complexion would the townsfolk put on it? And don’t say it doesn’t matter what they think because in a small town it does matter a great deal. I know that they will view me with a certain amount of suspicion now I am a widow, and we have been the talk of the place for long enough. Even if I could cope with rumour and speculation, I would not have the children go through it again. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the help you have given me so far, but from now on we will stand on our own two feet.

  ‘I’ll tell you what worries me more than anything else, and far more than concerns about money,’ Eve went on, ‘and that is where Carmel works. It could have been her killed just as easily as poor Jane and Aileen.’

  ‘I know,’ Jeff said. ‘You saw where the General Hospital is when you were over, and most of the attacks have been centred around the city centre. You would see a very different skyline now if you came to Birmingham, for the place is bombed and burned to bits, and she is often in the thick of it.’

  ‘Michael was for going over, you know, to see if she was all right,’ Eve said. ‘But she said she was grand and told me I was not to let Michael go over, for the raids were too bad and she couldn’t guarantee his safety. What about her safety?’