Keep the Home Fires Burning

by Anne Bennett

  ‘Hmmph,’ Clara snorted. ‘Well, there’s one thing that you’ve never considered.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Gas,’ said Clara, almost triumphantly. ‘You have gas pipes in that cellar. What if one of them was shattered? The whole lot of you would be choked to death.’

  ‘That will do, Clara,’ said Eddie, who had watched the colour suddenly drain from Marion’s face.

  ‘I’m only saying what could easily happen.’

  ‘I don’t think it needed to be said,’ Eddie chided.

  ‘No it didn’t,’ Marion said angrily. She remembered her tussle with the priest that morning and she felt her backbone stiffen as she faced her mother. ‘And particularly as it was said for no purpose other than to frighten me. You can sit out the raids wherever you like, Mammy, because I don’t want you in our cellar like some sort of prophet of doom and gloom scaring the children rigid.’

  ‘Well, I like that, I must say,’ Clara said, affronted. ‘If I were you, I would ask the doctor about a bottle of something for those nerves of yours.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with my nerves until I came here,’ Marion said through gritted teeth. And she snatched up her handbag as she said, ‘And if I stay much longer, I will say things I may regret and so I’d better leave.’

  ‘Wait,’ Eddie said, as Marion wrenched open the door. ‘I’ll walk a little way with you.’

  ‘You will not,’ Clara said.

  ‘Oh, but I will, Clara,’ Eddie said. ‘I didn’t think that I needed permission to do that, and anyway, I have to call in at the allotment later.’

  Marion was surprised at her father’s response. For years he had taken the line of least resistance and that usually meant giving in to his wife all the time, so as they walked side by side she said, ‘Daddy what has come over you?’

  ‘Maybe common sense at long last,’ Eddie said ruefully. ‘Clara has wallowed in self-pity long enough. Other people have suffered as much and get over it. In this war all of us are at risk and Birmingham will not be spared, with all the war-related factories in this area.’

  ‘Do the Germans know that, though?’

  ‘They will have ways of finding out,’ Eddie said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘I feel almost as if we are sort of balanced on a knife edge and all we can do is wait,’ Marion said.

  ‘That’s all,’ her father agreed. ‘Because we cannot let that madman win.’

  That night the bombers returned as Marion was getting ready for bed. The younger children were already asleep and Sarah roused the twins and Richard, his younger brother, and they helped them get ready and sort out blankets. Marion made drinks for them all and, mindful of the twins’ hunger the previous night, also added a loaf, a knife and pot of dripping. By then they were all ready, Richard had already gone, and the noise of many planes was in the air.

  Marion sat and listened to the drone of the Luftwaffe, realising there were more than ever before. Suddenly she knew that this was no short skirmish. The first blasts were so close to them, she felt icy fingers of fear run down her spine. Her mother’s words came back to haunt her. For the sake of the others, especially the children, she fought the panic threatening to engulf her as the raid gained in intensity all around them.

  She saw the twins’ eyes widen in fear as the hours passed, with no let-up, and in the end she lay on the mattress so that she could put her arms around them both, with Tony right beside them. Even underground they heard the scream of the descending bombs and the terrifying crump and crash as they hit the buildings around. She felt the children shuddering as one explosion followed another, and no one begrudged them the odd yelp of fear because they were all scared.

  Sarah quite envied her sisters and brother. She would have liked her mother’s arms comforting her too and her thoughts were also with Richard, out there somewhere in the thick of it.

  The twins and Tony, filled up with bread and dripping, eventually slept cuddled against their mother, though they were constantly being jerked semi awake by the explosions. Marion prayed for God to keep them all safe. She even dozed off a time or two, despite the noise, but it wasn’t any sort of deep refreshing sleep, more the odd snatches of the totally exhausted.

  Eventually, the nightmare was over and they looked around at one another, hardly able to believe the all clear was blasting out through the early morning. ‘God, I can’t ever remember being so tired,’ Violet said, slowly, getting up from the mattress.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Peggy. ‘But we might be able to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before the alarm if we’re quick.’

  ‘Have the morning off,’ Marion said. ‘You look so tired, both of you.’

  Peggy said, ‘But every worker at the factory will be feeling like us, or worse, and production of vital stuff to win this damned war can’t be halted because we’re all a bit tired.’

  ‘I agree with Peggy,’ Violet said. ‘I wish I didn’t, but I do. Just now, though, I am almost too weary to think straight.’

  Sarah felt the same way and Richard too was determined to go into work, though it was an hour after the all clear when he came in, white-faced with exhaustion, and his eyes wide with horror. Sarah guessed that he had seen things that night that would stay burned in his mind for ever, but she didn’t quiz him.

  Richard was glad of that. The devastation and human tragedy that he’d witnessed that night had shocked him to the core and he wanted to close his eyes and try to forget it. But when he eventually sank down in the bed beside his slumbering brother, he found that he was only able to doze fitfully as the memories kept leaping back into his consciousness.

  Much later that day Polly popped in to see Marion to discuss the raid.

  ‘The point is,’ Polly said, ‘though bombs did fall here last night, it was the city centre that took a real pounding. Pat and the lads were drafted there to fight the fires. They said the Bull Ring caught it bad. The Market Hall’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Well, the walls are just about standing but the roof’s gone, and that clock that Magda and Missie set such store by was burned to a crisp.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a shame.’

  ‘I’ll say. Part of St Martin’s was damaged too, and all them shops down the slope from High Street are mainly reduced to rubble now.’

  ‘Good job it was Sunday,’ Marion said. ‘There would be few people about at that time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Polly agreed. ‘There was the night watchman. Name of Levington, Pat said. He was speaking to him afterwards and he told him that when it was obvious the planes were heading his way, he released all the animals from their cages in the Market Hall before taking cover himself.’

  ‘The animals, of course!’ Marion cried. ‘I never gave them a thought.’

  ‘Good job someone did,’ Polly said. ‘They may not survive, of course. The puppies and kittens might, but the rabbits will probably end up as someone’s dinner, and I shouldn’t think our garden birds will take kindly to an influx of budgies and canaries.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Marion, ‘but anything surely is better than being burned alive. He must be a brave man.’

  ‘Must be,’ Polly agreed. ‘Tell you what gets me, though: twenty-five people were killed, countless more injured, fires started all over the place and buildings destroyed. All this was said on the wireless this morning only they didn’t even mention Birmingham by name, but just said it was a Midlands town.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  Polly shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Can’t understand it. But even if they don’t say it was Birmingham that was attacked, us lot that live here know full well that it was.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Marion said. ‘We don’t half.’

  SIXTEEN

  Everyone was cheered when the RAF routed the Luftwaffe in a decisive battle on 15 September. That caused Hitler to abandon Operation Sealion, the code name for his plans to invade Britain. The invasion threat might be over, but the raids went on. The Whittakers eventually got
used to disturbed nights though Marion couldn’t ever remember feeling so tired, and Richard was sometimes like a walking zombie. So when the Germans began their daylight raids it seemed like the last straw, especially as the bombers were often followed by Stukas, which strafed civilians indiscriminately.

  The girls gave up their weekly trip to the cinema because they didn’t feel confident walking the streets any more. Marion, concerned for their safety was glad of that. ‘D’you know where you’ll go if the planes come when you’re at school?’ she asked the children one night when a couple of daylight raids had been reported.

  ‘Yes, we have to go in the crypt in the church,’ Tony told her reassuringly. ‘They took us down to show us.’

  Marion was relieved. ‘At least that will be underground.’

  ‘I think it’s creepy,’ Magda said. ‘I hope we never have to go down there.’

  ‘We all have to do things we don’t want to do these days, my girl,’ Marion said sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ Peggy added with a smile, ‘don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  ‘Is there?’ said Sarah sarcastically. ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘It’s all right joking about it,’ Marion said, ‘but some of it is no joking matter. It’s obvious the Germans are a monstrous race.’

  No one contradicted this.

  A few days later there was quite an extensive daylight raid and the children were full of it when they came home.

  Later, when they sat around the table for the evening meal Magda said, ‘It was just as creepy down in that flipping crypt as I thought it would be.’

  ‘Yeah, and it smelled horrid,’ Missie agreed.

  ‘What did it smell of?’ Violet asked.

  ‘Dead bodies,’ Magda said ominously.

  She was annoyed when everyone burst out laughing, and Tony said scornfully, ‘No it dain’t, Magda. You’re stupid, you are. And how d’you know what a dead body smells like, anyroad?’ Without giving Magda time to think up a reply, he went on, ‘It’s all right, and better than arithmetic any day of the week. We can’t hear much down there, and it’s a bit of a laugh ? or it would be, anyroad only we have to wear our flipping gas masks all the time.’

  ‘Well,’ Marion said unsympathetically, ‘they are taking no chances, and rightly, I’d say.’

  ‘Yeah, but there weren’t no gas,’ Tony protested, ‘cos there weren’t no policeman on a bike rattling that thing they give them to warn us.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Richard commented. ‘You just said you couldn’t hear much down there.’

  ‘Anyway, none of this matters,’ Marion said. ‘I’m just glad that the teachers are taking this seriously and have everything organised so that you all had somewhere to take shelter, and underground as well, which is much better than anything on the surface, I’d have thought.’

  In the middle of October, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, visited the neighbourhoods and factories that had been affected by enemy bombing, and there were pictures of her in the newspaper, talking to the homeless and dispossessed people. Some of the women had placed Union flags in the piles of rubble that had once been their homes, and one was reputed to have told Clementine Churchill, ‘Our house might be down, but our spirits are still up.’ The reporter went on the praise the courage of these feisty people, whom he said showed unflinching courage.

  That night that courage was tested again as enemy bombers attacked the city once more. The raid was reminiscent of those on 25 and 26 August in its intensity. Subsequently there was an article in the newspaper detailing the bravery of a Home Guard officer. He had been called to a bombed-out house near the city centre where there were people trapped in a gas-filled cellar, and without any hesitation he had gone in to rescue them. Though he’d pulled two people clear, on his third attempt he had collapsed and died from the effects of the gas, leaving behind a widow and seven-year-old son, and all the people still in the cellar had died as well.

  Marion felt slightly sick as she folded the paper up. She remembered her mother’s words but she knew it would help no one if she were to share her fear with the others, so she kept the news article to herself.

  The nightly raids were back in earnest, causing widespread damage and deaths across the city. When they emerged from the cellar, if they pulled back the blackout curtain the Whittakers would see the fires started by the incendiaries, with orange and yellow flames licking the midnight-blue sky.

  Then one morning in October, while they were eating breakfast, Richard spoke about the previous night’s raid.

  ‘God, the flames were roaring,’ he said. ‘The firemen’s hoses didn’t seem to touch them and the air was full of cordite and steam and smoke and stank of heat – scorching, you know – and one whole corner of New Street has been wiped out. All that’s left is this gigantic mound of rubble and mangled iron girders. There’re these dirty great craters in the middle of the road and tramlines all over the place, and the road and pavements are full of splintered glass. And a bomb hit the Carlton Cinema and there were nineteen people killed in there and they didn’t have a mark on them.’

  ‘Nineteen people dead and not a mark on them?’ Marion repeated incredulously. ‘You’re having us on.’

  ‘No,’ Richard said, ‘honest, but it is hard to believe it. I dain’t at first. And I wouldn’t normally have heard owt about it.’

  ‘So how come you did?’

  ‘Well, we pulled this bloke out of some rubble. He’d cut his arm real bad and the doctor asked me to go with him in the ambulance so that I could hold his arm up and that. Selly Oak was the only hospital that had any space, and one of the ARP blokes that pulled the people out the picture house was in there. He was having treatment for burns and that, but he was really shook up. He said there were nineteen people sat in their seats as if they were waiting for the main film, like, and their lungs had been burned away by a bomb blast as they sat there.’

  ‘Crikey!’ Violet cried. ‘What a way to die.’

  ‘They probably felt nothing,’ Marion said soothingly.

  ‘Some of them did,’ Richard said. ‘That’s what really upset this chap. They was all taken to Selly Oak and he was waiting beside a young lad lying on a stretcher, and the hospital managed to located his father and when his father came in he heard the boy speak to him and then he closed his eyes and just pegged it.’ ‘Oh God!’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Marion said firmly because she had seen the shock and repugnance on the children’s faces. They had just gone through a terrible raid and then woken for school after only a few hours’ sleep and this she thought was too much for them to have to cope with. So she spoke briskly. ‘All war’s awful. I think that we’re all agreed on that, but now isn’t the time to discuss it any more or you will all be late.’

  The others saw the look in Marion’s eyes and knew what she was saying and why, and Richard felt a bit ashamed that he had told them about the people in the cinema when the children were there, particularly his younger bloodthirsty brother. He vowed that he would wait until they were out of the earshot before he recounted anything like that again.

  For the next three weeks Birmingham was battered, causing death and injury to many Brummies and destruction and chaos to all as factories and houses crumpled in the wake of so many bombs.

  At Mass on Sunday 10 November prayers were said for the repose of the soul of Neville Chamberlain, who had died the previous day.

  In the Whittaker household opinion was divided about the role he had played in leading the country into war.

  ‘D’you think he really did believe in appeasement?’ Violet asked.

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Richard conceded, ‘but what was the alternative if he hadn’t tried, at least?’

  ‘I think whatever that man did would have been wrong. He was between a rock and a hard place,’ Peggy put in. ‘Hitler wanted power and world dominance at any price, and if that included war, then he was ready for it.’

  ‘And we weren’t,’ Richard sa
id. ‘And Chamberlain at least did give us almost a year to prepare ourselves.’ He glanced at his mother and said, ‘I suppose the funeral is in London?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marion said, ‘despite the fact that he was MP for Edgbaston for years, but there’s to be a memorial service at St Martin’s down the Bull Ring on the fifteenth.’

  ‘Will you go?’ Peggy asked.

  Marion shook her head. ‘I can’t even if I wanted to,’ she said. ‘Catholics aren’t allowed to attend, or take part in a service in any other Church.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Peggy, I haven’t a clue,’ Marion said. ‘I asked the priest once and his answer was that a Catholic shouldn’t question the Mother Church.’

  So no one in the Whittaker household went to the memorial service, but that morning they listened to the news as they ate their breakfasts and heard of the massive air raid on Coventry the previous night.

  The newscaster’s voice shook as he announced that the city had been annihilated. Using the benefit of a clear night and a full moon Coventry had been pounded ceaselessly. Firemen were drafted in from all over to help fight the fires, and yet within a square mile eighty per cent of buildings were destroyed and 568 people were killed. Coventry had experienced raids before, but never on that scale. From that night, the voice on the wireless told them, a new word had entered the German language: Coventrieren, or Coventration, which meant the razing of a place to the ground.

  When the news report was over, the adults looked at each other in sudden fear. They knew that what had been done in Coventry could be done just as easily in Birmingham.

  The following Tuesday, at just after a quarter past seven, the sirens sent up their unearthly wail and everyone sprung into action. While the kettle boiled, drinks for the children and the makings for sandwiches were thrown into the shelter bag along with a packet of biscuits Marion had put on one side for emergencies. Peggy and Violet went down to light the paraffin stove, Sarah helped the twins get ready and Richard and Tony carried down the blankets from their bed. Marion could hear the first sticks of incendiaries falling before the kettle was completely boiled and she made tea and filled hot-water bottles with hands that trembled.