by Janet Tanner
‘This is it. This is where we get off.’
They emerged once more into daylight. The buildings here were grey and mean and there were many gaps of rubble strewn ground, the legacy of Luftwaffe raids, to add to the air of desolation.
‘Oh look – the old Crown’s gone!’ Elaine said, skipping along the pavement and pointing to one tottering wall above a water-filled bomb crater. But she seemed more interested than dismayed.
Unerringly, she led the way past warehouses whose bleak walls stretched up towards the grey sky and pubs where the smell of beer and stale cigarette smoke hung in the doorways and spilled out onto the street. Some of the windows had been boarded up, others taped to protect them from blast. They turned a corner into a street of terraced houses which were separated from the pavement by narrow strips of garden.
‘This is it,’ Elaine said. ‘This is our street.’
She skipped on ahead leaving Margaret to struggle along with the case and turned into a path where the gate hung, paint peeling, on one rusty hinge and the strip of what had once been lawn was overgrown with weeds and scattered with stones.
Like the gate the front door was peeling, brown paint revealing an earlier coat of dark green. She knocked on it, thumping the tarnished knocker so that Margaret thought it was in danger of falling off, and lifted the letter box to shout through: ‘Mum! Mum – we’re here!’
At first there was silence then the door creaked open, dragging against the floor. Mrs Cooper stood there wearing a dressing gown which had once been cheap but cheerful but which now bore the stains of spilled tea and fat splashes. Her hair was in curlers beneath a brightly coloured scarf, her lipstick and rouge had been applied to a face which was devoid of any other make up and was deathly pale.
‘Mum!’ Elaine shrieked, hugging her briefly then rushing past her into the house. But Marie hung back, shy suddenly.
‘Oh, you’re here then,’ Mrs Cooper said. She sounded less than welcoming. ‘Do you want to come in?’
Margaret hesitated. There was a stale smell emanating from the house, a mixture of fried food and cigarette smoke and plain old fashioned dirt. She was suddenly struck by the claustrophobic thought that if she went in through the peeling door she might never come out again. But she still held the brown case containing the children’s things and Marie was hiding behind it. Elaine came darting back along the hall and rushed at her mother. Mrs Cooper put her away impatiently.
‘Elaine, don’t! I don’t feel too rosy. I haven’t been to work today. I’ve got one of my bad heads.’
The child’s face fell and Margaret wondered if the ‘bad head’ might be the result of having had too much gin the previous evening.
‘Come in, if you’re coming,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’
Margaret, who was parched after the long journey, would normally have jumped at the suggestion. Now her stomach revolted. She couldn’t face drinking tea or anything else in this smelly house and she hated the thought that the children she had cared for for the last four years would be living here from now on. If she did not go at once, this minute, she thought, she would never be able to leave them at all.
‘It’s all right, thank you,’ she said. ‘I think I ought to be getting back. With the trains as they are I don’t know how long it will take me.’
‘Please yourself, I’m sure. Are you coming in, our Marie, or are you stopping out there on the doorstep all day?’
Margaret put the case inside the hall, gagging at the smell. Then she bent to kiss Marie, checking the urge to take her in her arms and run.
‘Goodbye darling. Come and see us soon – if you can manage it before you go to America,’ she added, looking at Mrs Cooper across the top of Marie’s head. The woman snorted.
‘Gawd knows when that’ll be! Joe’s gorn, ain’t he? Gorn off to France with the Invasion Force.’
‘He’ll be back though when it’s all over, won’t he?’ Margaret asked.
Mrs Cooper pulled a face, her scarlet lips making a downward turned slash in her pasty skin.
‘I s’pose so. Who can tell what these Yanks’ll do?’
Margaret smoothed Marie’s hair, tucking a strand into her kirby grip.
‘Write to me if you can, darling. And I’ll write to you.’
Marie’s small face creased suddenly. She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. Margaret straightened. This was the moment she had to be strong.
‘Goodbye, then.’
She kissed the girls again and walked away down the path. At the gate she turned to wave. Mrs Cooper and Elaine had already disappeared back into the house but Marie stood in the doorway watching her go. She looked very small and forlorn. Tears filled Margaret’s eyes and she turned and walked quickly away down the street. She did not dare look round again; the effort of walking and holding back the tears was all she could manage. She had reached the corner when she heard footsteps running after her. She checked and turned to see Marie, out of breath and waving the potato cut pattern.
‘Auntie Marg! You can have this if you like.’
Her heart melted. She took the pattern, a little crumpled now from being squashed into the carrier bag for the duration of the journey.
‘Oh thank you, darling! I shall treasure it …’
Marie threw her arms around Margaret.
‘I don’t want you to go, Auntie Marg. I want to come with you …’
Raw anguish flooded her. If only she could take Marie with her! But she could not.
‘Go home to your mum for now, Marie, and we’ll see what we can do.’ But the child was not listening. Her head was buried in Margaret’s coat.
At first, neither of them noticed the peculiar honking sound and if they had done they might have thought it was a small-engined motor cycle down on the main road. Had they listened carefully, however, they would have realised that the sound came not from the road at all but from the sky. But even then it is doubtful whether Margaret would have realised the danger they were in.
She had heard rumours, it was true, that the Germans had a new ‘secret weapon’ which they hoped to unleash upon an unsuspecting British public in an effort to stem the tide of the war which was now running against them, but she had been too preoccupied with the children’s future to take much notice. Secret weapons belonged in the realms of science fiction. And bombs, when they came, came at night, preceded by the wailing air raid siren.
So as the V1 came in, one of the first of the ‘flying bombs’ launched like so many pilotless planes from the Pas de Calais coast and pointed in the general direction of London, the thought of imminent destruction and death never so much as crossed Margaret’s mind. As it came closer, a dark crossbow shape silhouetted against the sky, she hugged Marie close; when its engine cut out and it began to fall to earth she was thinking only: can I take her back with me? Will Mrs Cooper let me take her?
It was only when she heard the peculiar whine and the rush of air almost directly overhead that she looked up, startled, and saw it. There was no time to feel fear, only surprise, and she stood transfixed, holding Marie to her and watching its descent. Down, down, closer, closer, and suddenly all her senses were screaming danger. But it was too late to run, too late for anything but to stand and watch. And then the world seemed to be disintegrating around them, the air cracking and rending, the earth beneath their feet shaking. In that moment Margaret faced eternity and saw only a vision of hell. A hell of noise and exploding colours. And she was falling, falling, with Marie still clutched to her. Falling into a pit where there was only darkness …
The doodlebug hit the row of houses at an angle, slicing through stone like a knife through butter. The first caved in, the others followed like a pack of dominoes placed end to end. The force of the echoing blast flung Margaret and Marie ten yards along the road, away from the scene of the destruction, knocking the breath from their bodies and rendering them senseless so that in the first vital minutes they had no idea what had happened. As bricks an
d mortar settled in a thick cloud of choking dust, as whole strongly built walls tottered and collapsed, they lay in the road, Margaret’s body shielding the child’s. At last the tumbling rending noise stopped and over the whole area there was a hush of deathly quiet.
In the gutter a tattered sheet of paper covered with blue green and orange potato cut, patterns fluttered like a dying bird.
The child’s soft whimpers reached through the blackness, jabbing persistently at Margaret’s unconscious mind like tiny sharp barbs. With returning awareness the horror came flooding in, too great to comprehend, concentrated at first merely around herself and Marie. She moved awkwardly but with some panic thinking she was suffocating the child, trying to coordinate limbs which seemed clumsy and refused to respond properly to the commands of her fogged brain. She saw the blood on the road, a bright pool, darkening as it spread, and it shocked her to full consciousness.
‘Marie!’ she screamed. The child sobbed, throwing herself at Margaret’s half prone body and she realised the blood was her own, pouring out of a deep gash in her leg where a piece of flying debris had cut into it. She tried to rise and could not.
A man was running towards them, gibbering. ‘Christ Almighty what next? What bloody next? Stay there, missus, don’t try to move …’
As if his words had been some magic lever the unnatural stillness erupted into chaos, a new vision of hell Margaret had glimpsed. There were shouts, cries, the jangle of bells as the rescue services arrived. And in the midst of it, before the darkness began to threaten again, Margaret was aware of only two things, one filling her with relief, the other with a dawning horror so enormous it almost took her breath away.
Apart from deep shock Marie seemed to be quite unharmed. She had been protected by Margaret’s body.
But the street of houses, including the one into which Elaine and Mrs Cooper had disappeared, was gone. Nothing remained of it but rubble and beams, snapped like so many matchsticks. Her leg pouring blood, her head swimming, Margaret clutched Marie to her and knew with absolute certainty that they were dead.
Then, mercifully, she and Marie were being loaded into a Civil Defence ambulance and the horrific sights of the afternoon’s destruction were hidden from them by the clanging shut of its doors.
They were kept in hospital overnight and the next day Harry drove to London to fetch them.
He had been shocked when news of the doodlebug had reached him; he had no idea Margaret would be going into danger by escorting the children to London. Now he went down on his knees and thanked God that she was safe.
Fifteen people had been killed in Marie’s street, the oldest a great grandmother of eighty-two, killed as she I headed out with her canvas bag to buy her regular Saturday night’s bottle of beer, the youngest a baby whose pram had been pushed out into the small square of garden at the rear of the house for his afternoon nap.
Mrs Cooper and Elaine were among the dead as Margaret had known they must be. It had taken the rescue workers a very long time to dig them out of the rubble but the time lapse made no difference to them. They had both been killed instantly in the evil smelling kitchen of their home.
‘Thank God, you didn’t go in for that cup of tea she offered you!’ Harry said when Margaret related to him the sequence of events before the flying bomb had struck. ‘If you had …’
Margaret nodded. She had slept only intermittently last night in spite of the painkilling drugs the hospital had administered to her, for her rest had been broken by nightmares when she had lived and relived it all and experienced cold sweats as she realised how close she had come to death.
But to Margaret by far the greatest miracle was that Marie had been saved because of a sheet of garishly-daubed drawing paper. If she had not expressed a wish to have it, if Marie had not decided to run after her to give it to her, if it had been in the suitcase as it should have been instead of in the carrier bag … Margaret’s stomach turned over at, the thought of what the consequences would have been, and she pulled Marie’s head against her shoulder, holding the child very tight.
‘We’ll look after you, Marie, don’t worry,’ she whispered.
And she remembered another car journey home from hospital when she had been empty and bereft. At least this time she was not alone, cocooned in her misery. This time the object of her love was with her, silent, shocked and tearful perhaps, but alive and unharmed. It might so easily have been different.
Suffused with love and gratitude, Margaret vowed that she would move heaven and earth to ensure that from now on Marie’s life was secure and happy. She would do everything in her power to make up for the loss of the child’s mother and sister, devote herself to erasing the horror from her mind. Once again she thanked God that she and Marie had been spared.
What had she done to deserve to live when so many had died? she wondered. Humility added itself to the cocktail of other emotions as Harry drove them back to Hillsbridge.
That summer of 1944 just when it seemed to a war weary world that victory might be in sight, it seemed the news of deaths and casualties came thicker and faster than ever.
Hillsbridge was shocked by the news of the death in a V1 raid of Margaret Hall’s ‘vackie’ girl, saddened to hear that Farmer Brunt’s grandson Ron had died of his wounds in Italy and concerned for one of the Talbot boys, missing in France since the D-Day landings.
‘It doesn’t sound good to me,’ Peggy Yelling said to Charlotte. ‘You’d think they’d have heard something by now if he was a prisoner. I saw his mother when I was in the chemist’s this morning getting some Beecham’s Powders for my lumbago and she’s in a terrible way about it.’
‘You never know, there’s hope yet,’ Charlotte said. ‘Look at our Alec. It was over a year before our Sarah heard that he was alive.’
She did not add that sometimes she wondered if Alec was still alive. It was so long since that one meagre postcard. But there was no point being pessimistic. With James not there to annoy her with his constant platitudes Charlotte found herself harking back more and more to his philosophy of quiet hopefulness, almost as if he was behind her shoulder soothing her as he had so often in life – and with more effect.
But the news of one death came as a great shock to the Hall family, all the more so since it was more of a side effect than a direct consequence of war. In a terrible accident involving explosives at the camp where she was stationed, Huw’s wife Claire had been killed.
Claire had only been to Hillsbridge twice when she and Huw had managed to snatch a few days leave at the same time, but Amy had liked the quiet, straight forward girl in spite of the feeling she could not suppress – that it should have been Barbara by his side rather than the pretty brown-haired WAAF. When Huw’s letter arrived her heart bled for him and she wished desperately that he was here so that she could offer him some comfort. She knew of old how he reacted when he was hurt, shutting himself up in a shell and hiding from the world, and she was certain the bald words spelling out what had occurred hid a depth of feeling that no one but she could guess at.
That night she could not sleep, but lay tossing and turning until at last Ralph woke and asked her in disgruntled tones what was the matter.
‘How can you ask that?’ she snapped. ‘After all he’s been through, now Huw has lost his wife, and before they even had the chance of a life together, too. It’s cruel, Ralph, really cruel. Oh, this war has a lot to answer for!’
‘I know, love, I know.’ Ralph sighed and pulled her into his arms. Amy buried her face in his pyjama jacket and thought of all the couples, less lucky than she was, who would never again be able to lie in bed in one another’s arms. And then she was thinking of Llew, who had been snatched from her injust the same way, though there had been no war to blame for his death. But she had gone on to find happiness with Ralph. Please God some of those mourning tonight would be as fortunate. Please God one of them would be Huw.
The prayer was still on her lips as she finally fell asleep.
&nb
sp; Chapter Twenty-six
In August Huw came home to Hillsbridge on two weeks’leave. It was the first time he had been away from his base for more than forty-eight hours since he had joined the Lysander flight and he would not have accepted the leave now had he not been ordered to do so by his Medical Officer.
‘You’re a stubborn sod, James,’ the MO had said, looking at him over the top of half-glasses which had kept him from doing the one thing he had wanted to do himself – pilot planes like most of his patients. ‘Getting you away from this dashed camp is like prising a Yank away from his chewing gum. This time, I’m glad to say, you have no choice in the matter. You’re not operational and you’ll be a dashed sight more use to us when you’ve had a dashed good rest and recovery.’
Huw had shaken his head impatiently. They had had this argument before. When Claire had been killed the MO had done his best to send Huw home on compassionate leave and on that occasion Huw had resisted. There was work to be done and he would be far better off doing it than moping around at home with time on his hands for thinking. It was bad enough here with operations to fly and his pals around him. In quiet moments he thought he would be eaten up by grief, a grief which seemed to have a hundred different faces ranging from the sense of utter desolation and loss to anger at the unfairness of it. That was ridiculous, he knew – the war had taught him that nothing in life was fair and he had lost so many friends that he had thought he had come to accept death as inevitable and indiscriminate. But for Claire to have died so needlessly as a result of a stupid moment of carelessness – it was that which tasted so bitter in his mouth, no matter that he told himself the accident was probably as much a result of the war as anything else – a man too tired out by the constant strains and alerts to pay proper attention to the safety of a dump of ammunition. Her loss ached in him constantly like a nagging tooth and exploded to fierce agony when he was alone with time to think. Claire had been warm and loving, yet also down-to-earth with a wicked sense of fun. In some ways she had reminded him of Barbara – it was that which had attracted him to her in the first place, he thought. But he had soon come to love her for herself. Claire had been the future. In the little time they had had together they had planned what they would do when the war was over – Huw would remain in the RAF, for there was nothing he had ever wanted to do but fly – and they would set up home within striking distance of his base. ‘I’d like at least six children,’ Claire had said and laughed at the look of horror on his face. ‘I think big families are nice. And you need not worry, you’d be away half the time so it would be me who’d have to look after them.’
