by Janet Tanner
Barbara began to tremble. ‘Is he all right?’
‘All right enough to write,’ Amy said shortly.
‘What happened? What does he say?’
‘I’ll read it to you.’ Amy took the letter into the dining-room and sat down at the table because her own legs were trembling too much to support her a moment longer. ‘It’s pretty brief – you know Huw – but here goes. “We were alerted late and didn’t have the chance to get high enough before we met the Nasties. That’s a pretty fatal situation – you need height and speed to control a fight and we didn’t have it. We were sitting ducks. One of my mates was killed and I got a cockpit full of bullets. I think I managed to put a round into the nose of a Heinkel but I couldn’t hang around to see. Two 109s got onto me and shot me up. I had to bale out. Landed in a hop field with nothing more than a few cuts and bruises to show for it. But my Spit is a goner and I’m sick about that. Seven notches on her wing and she has to end up as scrap. Suppose I’m lucky not to be scrap, too, but all the same it hurts to lose a kite – especially when they are so damned precious!” There you are, he’s unharmed, thank God. But how like Huw to be simply concerned about losing his plane instead of thanking God he escaped with his life! He could have been …’ She broke off, swallowing hard.
‘He’s right, of course,’ Ralph, who had been listening quietly, said. ‘We’re losing too many planes every day.’
‘How can you talk about planes as if they were more important than men’s lives?’ Barbara asked passionately.
‘I didn’t say they were more important. But if we don’t keep the numbers up we have no chance of defending this island of ours – and then none of our lives will be worth living,’ Ralph said. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t do something about it.’
Barbara, re-reading the letter over Amy’s shoulder, said nothing but Amy asked: ‘Do something? What do you mean?’
‘I thought maybe we could raise the money to buy a Spitfire.’
‘We could?’
‘Well – Hillsbridge and the surrounding areas. We could get a committee together and organise fundraising events.’
‘What would it cost?’
‘I haven’t gone into that yet. Several thousand I should think. But I thought I could start the fund off with a good donation and I’m sure people would be willing to do all they could. The rate we’ve been losing Spits we’ll be shot out of the air soon if we don’t do something.’
‘That’s a marvellous idea!’ Amy enthused. ‘Hillsbridge’s own Spitfire! Our little bit towards the war effort.’
‘I’m glad you think so. I’ll get on the telephone today and have a word with a few of those who might be interested in helping us. And now,’ said Ralph, ‘we’d better be going. Do you want a lift, Barbara, or are you going to miss the bus on your first day?’
‘I’m ready,’ said Barbara. She was still trembling from thinking how close Huw had come to death.
‘We really should contribute something to the war effort,’ Ralph said again from the doorway, obviously preoccupied as he waited for her to gather her things. ‘If we don’t the Luftwaffe is going to overrun England.’
That night when Barbara returned from her first day in the new business college they heard the news.
For the first time, London had been bombed.
And so it continued while the blue and silver of September became the russet reds and golds of October and into the dark and dreary days of November.
By the middle of September the Battle of Britain had been virtually won. The RAF had the Luftwaffe on the run and Hitler was obliged to disperse the barges he had waiting in the ports of Northern France and Belgium and postpone his invasion plan, Sealion, for the winter at least. But new tactics had been adopted. If the bombers could not get past the Hurricanes and Spitfires during the hours of daylight then they would come when they could hide in the darkness.
Every night, the air over London was heavy with the sound of the Me10s and the Dorniers droning in with their loads of death and destruction. Soon, the subway stations on the underground were being used as shelters where Londoners could gather nightly in comparative safety, but people were being killed in their homes and in the streets nonetheless and Margaret wondered sometimes about Elaine and Marie’s mother. Whilst the other evacuees were in constant communication with parents who loved and missed them but who wanted them to remain out of harm’s way, the two girls heard from their mother only rarely, a brief card or badly written note, and Margaret thought angrily that it really did seem a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
‘I believe she’s glad to be rid of them,’ she said to Harry one night when the girls were in bed. ‘It seems to me she’s glad of the war as an excuse to let someone else look after them.’
That was before the air raid siren began sounding at night in Hillsbridge, too, as the German bombers extended their range and began aiming for the aircraft factories in Bristol and Yeovil along with their other city targets – Birmingham and Coventry, Southampton and Liverpool. When that happened Margaret shepherded the girls into the cupboard under the stairs where they all three sat cramped together playing ‘Snap’and ‘Strip Jack Naked’ by the fading beam of a torch that Margaret kept handy on the shelf just inside the door.
It was the same in houses all over Hillsbridge when the siren wailed its stomach-churning warning. A few people, like Eddie Roberts, had their own shelter built in the back garden and they would troop out with their flasks of tea and hot water bottles to the comparative comfort of their specially equipped bolt-holes.
Most, like Margaret and her evacuees, took cover as best they could inside their own homes, using kitchen tables and heavy old sofas as makeshift shelters if there was no room in that universal favourite – the cupboard under the stairs.
Some, Charlotte and James included, preferred to ignore the sirens and carry on with their usual routine. James had suffered another bad chest bout when the first chill of October had turned the air cold and damp; if it had not been for the new wonder drug ‘M & B’ prescribed by the doctor, Charlotte was convinced it would have turned to pneumonia and been the death of him. As it was he had rallied once again but there was no way she could move him from his bed in the front room every time the siren sounded and she sat beside him, stoic as ever, while the planes droned overhead, remarking, ‘Well, at least if we go, we’ll go together,’ and ‘If they drop a bomb on our house we shall be in good company’. Buckingham Palace had been hit by a bomb in September though mercifully none of the Royal Family had been injured and Charlotte, always an ardent monarchist, took comfort from the fact that she was able to share in the ordeal of ‘our dear King and Queen’.
There were those, of course, who were out in the streets during those dangerous hours of darkness carrying out their duties. Ralph, as Air Raid Warden for Midlington, was out every night when he was not at committee meetings raising money for the Spitfire project and Barbara, thwarted in her desire to join the WAAF, had persuaded her mother to allow her to volunteer as a Fire Watcher.
Since bombing raids had switched to the hours of darkness the Germans had discovered the advantage of well lit targets – and the best way of illuminating town and countryside alike was by the dropping of incendiary devices. Some landed harmlessly in fields and gardens – one struck the garden that ran down steeply from the Durrants’house in Greenslade Terrace, sinking a deep crater in the patch where the Clements’pig had once uprooted the parsnips – but some landed on the roofs of houses, setting them ablaze, and the engines of the Auxiliary Fire Service were kept busy dashing here and there, bells jangling, to put out the fires.
Amy was not altogether happy about Barbara being a Fire Watcher but since Ralph had promised that the moment the siren sounded the girls would be sent under cover and as she still felt a trifle guilty about insisting that Barbara should do a full year at college before even considering volunteering for the WAAF, she had eventually allowed herself
to be persuaded.
One evening in early November Barbara was out as usual with her team – three men and another girl, Jessie Bendall – when the siren sounded.
‘OK girls – in you go!’ Ron Hodges instructed them.
‘What about you?’ Barbara asked as she always did.
‘Never mind about us. We’ll be all right. You girls go under the
Chapel. That’s the safest place.’
They were in the main Westbury Hill where the Methodist Chapel stood tall and stately on a bank of high ground below a rising rank of privately owned houses. A flight of stone steps led up to the main doors at first floor level and beneath it a passageway linked the main road to a little used steep lane. It was to this passageway that Ron Hodges ushered the girls. Jessie went willingly enough but Barbara hung back a little, resentful of being bundled off the moment danger threatened.
When the air began to tremble with the throb of the bombers’ engines, however, she was glad enough of the cover. The Chapel was a good solid structure – then she remembered photographs she had seen of the destruction in cities where buildings every bit as solid as the Chapel disintegrated like a pack of cards when a bomb scored a direct hit.
I wouldn’t like that lot coming down on top of me, she thought.
The throbbing engines were coming ever closer. When they were almost overhead she heard the first piercing whine of an incendiary. As the roar rose to a crescendo, making heaven and earth tremble around her, she pressed her hands over her ears. Another incendiary whistled down, and another.
A dark silhouette appeared suddenly in the entrance to the passageway and Ron Hodges threw himself in breathing heavily.
‘That was a close one! They’re bloody peppering us!’
‘Have they got anything yet?’ Barbara asked. She had to shout to make herself heard above the throbbing of the engines.
‘Not yet but if they go on like this they will and it will be like daylight for the bombers when they come. The buggers know what they’re doing all right. Oh, sorry …’ He broke off, embarrassed at having sworn in front of Amy Porter’s daughter.
‘I didn’t even hear you!’ Barbara shouted back and wanted to laugh. Fancy anyone worrying about their language in the middle of an air raid!
As she spoke the whistling sound came again, so close it sounded as if the incendiary was going to land on top of them. Barbara automatically ducked and they heard the thud as it landed close by.
Ron Hodges poked his head out of the passageway and swore.
‘Right on the roof of one of them houses!’
Barbara straightened and risked popping out to look too. As Ron had said the incendiary had landed just below one of the chimney pots on the rank immediately above the Chapel. Already it was a mass of flames.
‘We’ll have to get the brigade,’ Ron said.
The nearest telephone was three hundred yards away up the steep hill. Ron was a big man and not as fit as he might have been. Barbara had often heard the breath wheezing in his chest when he hurried. She made up her mind.
‘I’ll go.’
‘You bloody won’t!’
‘Oh yes I will.’
Before he could stop her she ducked out of the alleyway and was running up the road beneath the garden walls of the houses. She could get to the telephone box three times as quickly as he could, she knew. She ran without stopping, though after the first fifty yards the steepness of the incline made her legs ache and her heart pump painfully, only ducking her head slightly as the incendiaries whistled down through the clean cold air. One landed in an allotment on the opposite side of the road, one had caught something alight on the other side of the valley – she could see the whole area bathed in the rosy flickering fire glow. But that was someone else’s area. Not her responsibility. Gasping for breath, Barbara ran on.
The telephone box was on a lane which branched away at right angles from the main road and it sloped less steeply. Barbara turned into it thankfully, keeping close to the hedge that defined the garden of the end house. She reached the telephone box and yanked the door open, leaning against the glass panels and trying to catch her breath as she jiggled the receiver to try to get a dialling tone.
The wait seemed endless, the lines were busy. Barbara hopped up and down with impatience. Phones! She could have made it to the fire station in person by now if she had run the other way.
At last her call was answered and she blurted out her message.
‘One of the houses in Westbury Hill has been hit. The roof is well alight. Can you send an engine?’
‘You’ll be lucky,’ came the reply.
‘But it’s on fire! It’s like a beacon for the bombers.’
‘So is half Hillsbridge. OK love, thanks. We’ll do what we can. Keep your head down now.’
The line went dead and Barbara was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. How the hell could they cope with an attack on this scale? They simply weren’t geared to it. And the whole sky seemed to be aglow … Well, if there was no engine to be spared, they’d simply have to do the best they could with buckets and hoses when the planes went away.
The heavy bombers were coming now. She could hear them thundering in. Better not risk running back down the road – better to stay where she was in the telephone box. Or was it? If a bomb landed anywhere in the vicinity all the glass could shatter. She crept out, ran as far as the corner and dived under the garden hedge. Then she lay in the cold wet grass with the twigs scratching her neck and hands listening to the horrid sound and wondering why in the world the Germans should be raiding Hillsbridge. It was a mistake. It had to be. They had probably set out to bomb Bristol and missed their target.
When the bomb fell it took her by surprise although she had been half expecting it. Even in her wildest dreams she had never imagined it could be half so awful. The fearful whine as it fell, the bang as it hit something solid, the ear-splitting reverberations of the blast that made it seem as though the whole world was caving in, the roar of cascading bricks and plaster that seemed to go on forever.
‘My God, something has been hit!’ she thought and only realised as she heard her own voice that she had spoken aloud.
She lay shocked into immobility for a moment then suddenly the sky was alive again, this time with a scurrying flight of British fighters. Gunfire traced the sky with bright streaks and the bombers turned tail. One loosed his bombs somewhere out over the open countryside as he tried to lighten his load for a quick getaway; she heard the dull thuds but no more explosions. They were going. The fight was further away now. Mesmerised, she watched it disappear over the top of the ridge on the Hillsbridge skyline.
Better get back now. There was work to be done. She was amazed by the coherence of her own thoughts. She picked herself up and started for the corner, running again. Then her heart seemed to stop beating.
The Chapel The bomb had hit the Chapel. For a moment she could scarcely believe it, yet the scene, like something from Dante’s Inferno, was all too real.
There was a fire tender in the road – the one she had phoned for and they had said they could not send? – but its hoses were trained not onto the burning roof of the house but into a pile of bricks and rubble which burned fiercely in the gap where the Chapel had stood. Mrs Miles, the shrill and none-too-bright elderly houseowner was standing in the road shouting at the firemen to ‘Come quick – my roof’s afire!’, and Cliff Button, Herbie’s brother, who was now Sub-Officer Button of Hillsbridge Voluntary Fire Service was shouting over his shoulder as he worked: ‘Never mind your house, Missus! There’s people in here!’
People. Ron Hodges and Jessie Bendall. Dear God, if she had not gone to the telephone she would have been in there, under the heap of collapsed masonry! She remembered the thought which had occurred to her when Ron had first told her to shelter in the passageway and knew it had been a premonition.
She ran to Cliff Button. He made to brush her aside as he had done poor panic stricken little Mrs Miles,
then recognised her and swore.
‘Barbara! Thank God! Jack Bull thought you were in there too.’ Jack was another of the fire watching team.
‘No. I’m all right. What can I do?’
‘Nothing. Just keep out of the bloody way,’ Cliff said grimly. She stood helplessly watching. The fire was out now, the firemen moved on to deal with Mrs Miles’ blazing roof and the heavy rescue squad moved in. It was their first genuine emergency but their nights of training stood them in good stead and some of them were experienced in Mines Rescue work too. In the muted light by which they were working Barbara saw an arm exposed and clapped her hand over her mouth. Another minute and they had uncovered the body of Ron Hodges. Half his clothes had been torn off by the blast yet he looked remarkably untouched. For a moment Barbara thought he was all right. Then, as they laid him gently on the road, she could see he was dead.
She stood looking down at him, sick to her stomach, then a shout from one of the men caught her attention. Someone had heard a faint cry from beneath the mass of rubble. It could be that Jessie was still alive. The men worked more frantically now, clawing at the rubble with their bare hands in their haste. Barbara joined them, heaving at chunks of masonry with a strength she had never known she possessed and after a few minutes someone gave a cry.
‘Steady now – steady! We’re almost there!’
Barbara craned forward, hands pressed to her mouth, to watch the last careful excavation and found herself whispering a prayer of gratitude for the miracle which had saved Jessie. When the Chapel had collapsed one enormous block of coping stone had fallen from the arch above to form a cave and it had protected the girl from the shower of masonry and rubble. But to get her out would be a long and painstaking operation. One false move and the coping stone could slip and crush her.
Barbara crouched down beside the cave while the men worked, murmuring words of encouragement to Jessie; The girl seemed remarkably cheerful and Barbara was filled with admiration for her courage.
‘Well, Barbara Roberts, you were the lucky one, weren’t you?’ she joked, only the strain in her voice betraying the trauma she was enduring. ‘The whole lot came down, didn’t it?’
