Goodnight Sweetheart

by Annie Groves

  ‘Sally were round here tonight,’ June informed her.

  Molly had finally managed to unfasten her coat. She blew on her cold fingers, wincing as the blood returned to them and they started to sting with pain.

  ‘She said as how she’d come because you’d been round there begging her to see me and saying how you was worried about me and Frank.’

  Molly’s heart sank. ‘June, I just wanted the two of you to be friends again,’ Molly told her.

  ‘Friends? Some sister you are, Molly, going round there after what she’s done. I’ll thank you to mind your own business from now on, and not go round telling folks about me and my Frank’s private business.’

  Molly felt more miserable with every word June said. What was happening to everyone? First Anne and now June was having a go at her, and all she had done was try to act for the best. A lump of misery rose up in her throat and tears weren’t very far away.

  ‘June …’ she began, but before she could say anything the rising wail of the air-raid siren interrupted her.

  ‘Quick, June,’ she instructed her sister, reaching for her coat again, not wanting to waste time going upstairs to get the thick warm men’s dressing gowns that she and June had found at a jumble sale and pounced on with delight. It might have taken three washes to get rid of the smells of hair pomade and tobacco smoke, but there was no doubt that they were proving their worth now on the freezing winter nights.

  Her coat already on, Molly snatched Lillibet up out of her pram, covers and all.

  ‘I’ve got the baby and I’ll get the bag. You get your coat on and hurry,’ she urged her sister.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ June told her fiercely. ‘I’m …’

  The heavy drone of the bombers almost directly overhead drowned out the rest of what she was saying.

  ‘Well, we are.’

  ‘You can’t take her,’ June objected. ‘She’s mine! Leave her here with me.’

  Ignoring her demand, Molly headed for the hall where the bags they were all supposed to keep packed for the air-raid shelter were waiting, trying to comfort Lillibet above the noise of the AA guns.

  ‘Molly, you’re not to take her,’ June was screaming, but Molly stoutly ignored her.

  ‘We can’t stay here. It’s not safe.’ She flung open the front door, shuddering at the noise outside the house. The windows were rattling with the gunfire, and above her head Molly could hear the steady throb of German engines. Down towards the docks, shells exploded, briefly illuminating the night sky. Holding Lillibet tightly, Molly ran for the air-raid shelter, praying that June would follow her.

  As the door to the shelter opened and willing hands pulled her in, she looked over her shoulder and saw to her relief that her sister was only a few yards behind her.

  ‘Don’t close the door yet; June’s coming,’ she warned John Fowler.

  ‘What about yer dad?’

  ‘Dad’s doing a late shift down at the gridiron.’

  June finally reached the shelter and was hauled in unceremoniously, and the door pulled shut, enclosing them all in the small airless space with its smell of sweat and urine and fear.

  ‘Here, June, you sit down here,’ Molly coaxed her sister, offering her her own seat close to the door, but still keeping hold of Elizabeth Rose. A fine thing it would be if June took it into her head to run out with the baby whilst German bombers were flying so low overhead that she could be seen. There were stories circulating of people being shot at from the bombers, some of them flew in so low, although the authorities dismissed them as nonsense.

  ‘I told yer we should have made this ruddy shelter twice the size it is,’ someone grumbled, as Daisy’s two sons started to fight, whilst someone else coughed and set off half a dozen more in the rank air.

  ‘I’ve brought a flask and some sandwiches,’ Elsie whispered to Molly. ‘I saw you’d only just got in when the siren went off, so you can share wi’ us, if you like. How’s your June keeping?’ she continued, still whispering. ‘Only there’s bin a few folk asking, the way she were carrying on when her Frank were home.’

  June had her back to them and was sitting rigidly still facing the door, but Molly didn’t want to take the risk that she might overhear them, not with what had happened earlier on her conscience, so she simply said quietly, and untruthfully, ‘She’s fine.’

  Elsie looked disappointed as she handed Molly a cup of tea. However, when Molly asked June if she wanted one, her sister refused to answer her, pulling her arm away and keeping her back turned towards her.

  It was going to be a long night, Molly reflected.

  SEVEN

  ‘So how about it then? Are you going to let me tek you dancing this Christmas, Molly?’ Johnny demanded as Molly negotiated the heavy emergency services vehicle round a tight corner.

  Without taking her eyes off the road she told him, ‘I might …’

  There was a cheer from the others in the van, accompanied by a spontaneous burst of hand clapping and whistles, all of which made Molly colour up, but she still didn’t take her eyes off the road.

  They had received the call-out five minutes earlier, along with the terse warning that it ‘looked like a bad one’. They were a few days away from Christmas, and already at number 78 the carefully preserved decorations had gone up. Somehow or other a small if somewhat lopsided Christmas tree had found its way from Nantwich to the close, and had been ceremoniously propped up in a corner of the front room, in a bucket full of soil from the allotment. The bright shiny clip-on candle holders Molly remembered from her childhood had been carefully fastened to the branches and, thanks to their foresight, there would be enough left of last year’s candles for them to light on Christmas Day for Elizabeth Rose.

  This year some of the families in the close, including the Deardens, had decided to get together for Christmas dinner and share their rations. All in all there were going to be close on twenty adults and nearly as many children filling Pearl Lawson’s small house on Christmas Day. Only the other night in the air-raid shelter, everyone had given a cheer when Molly’s father had announced that his sister had promised to send a turkey.

  Pearl’s husband, George, had rubbed the side of his nose and said knowingly that he wouldn’t be surprised if he could come up with a few tins of peaches and the like for the trifle, and another cheer had gone up when he had added that he wasn’t promising but there could be a bottle of beer mysteriously appearing for them as wanted one.

  But it wasn’t Christmas Day yet, and some folk might not even make it to then if Jerry had his way, Molly reflected darkly, as she changed gear ahead of another corner.

  Up above them she could hear the noise of the bombers. In a street to the right, a bomb suddenly exploded, showering the cobbles with shrapnel. Gritting her teeth, Molly put her foot down on the accelerator.

  ‘Left here, Molly,’ Johnny told her tersely, without lifting his hand from her knee, where he had placed it earlier when he had asked her out.

  ‘I know.’ She didn’t bother to remove his hand. In truth it felt quite comforting to have it there and she knew he was not going to try anything on with the others crowded into the van with them.

  Over the weeks a camaraderie had built up between all of them that was almost that of a close-knit family unit. Sometimes she felt more comfortable in their company than she did in June’s, Molly decided as she turned left.

  Up ahead of them they saw where half the buildings in the narrow street had been flattened by the bomb that had dropped on them.

  Johnny was out of the van almost before it had stopped, leaving the others, and Molly, who parked the vehicle safely out of reach of the sparks from the burning roof timbers, to follow him. Without it being formally said, Johnny seemed to have taken charge of their small unit, and Molly for one was glad that he had done so. For all his flirty ways, Johnny had an air of experience and authority about him that others responded to. The war had matured him, Molly recognised. He was a man now, and just thin
king that caused her belly to tighten in a way that told her that she would be accepting his invitation.

  Automatically, as she ran to join the others she reached for the locket Eddie had given her, touching it with loving fingers. She wore her ring on the same chain now – like everyone else she had lost weight on the reduced diet rationing had forced on them all, and she was terrified she would lose it clawing through the rubble if she kept it on her finger – and she said a small prayer in Eddie’s name for the lives of those who had been in the burning houses. A fire engine pulled up alongside, men jumping out and starting up the pumps. Through the smoke and dust Molly could see the familiar tin hat of the local air raid warden. It was one of his duties to keep a list of the names of everyone living in each house.

  ‘Any inside?’ Johnny called out to him.

  ‘Yes. I dunno how many, though. The ruddy bomb dropped almost as soon as the siren went off. They wouldn’t have had a chance,’ the warden added bitterly. ‘I’ve sent a lad down to the shelter to check and see who’s down there but, like I said, they wouldn’t have had much chance to get out. There’s at least six houses have caught it, I reckon, and families in every one of them. Some of them had taken relatives in who had been bombed out from down by the docks, and we hadn’t had time to list ’em all. They only arrived last night. I’ve heard as how there’s bin a direct hit on one of the big air-raid shelters as well.’

  The ARP warden led the way to the tangle of burning timbers and soot-blackened bricks that had once been half a row of terraced houses.

  Either side of the bombed homes, people were standing dressed in their night clothes, looking dazed, mothers clutching their children, whilst they stared in disbelief at the wreckage of their neighbours’ houses.

  ‘I can’t believe it …’ one woman started to sob. ‘I only spoke to Sandra from next door at tea time and now like as not she’s dead and her kiddies wi’ her.’

  Down over the docks searchlights still raked the sky whilst the AA guns pounded the incoming bombers.

  Molly took hold of the woman’s arm and asked her where the nearest shelter was.

  ‘Down on Ducie Street.’

  ‘I’ll see they get to the shelter,’ a slender young woman wearing a WVS uniform offered, coming across the street to join them.

  Molly nodded in relief. She couldn’t leave the van, being its driver, but her instincts told her that the children standing around watching should be in a shelter. She winced as another bomb exploded by the docks, and then hurried to join the men who were clearing the debris and searching for survivors.

  ‘So you don’t know who might have been in here?’ she heard Johnny saying curtly to the ARP warden.

  ‘No. There hasn’t been time to register them wot moved in last night. In fact I was on me way over to do that when the ruddy bomb dropped. There can’t be many as have survived this lot, though,’ he pronounced.

  ‘Well, we can’t leave until we’ve made sure. Did any of them have shelters set up inside? If so, we’ll check them houses first.’

  ‘I dunno … If they did they never said.’ The ARP man looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ve only just tekken over here, see, on account of the ARP chap they had having had a bad fall.’

  Molly was working alongside two of the men. One of them stopped digging and pointed to a limp hand sticking up out of the bricks.

  ‘Looks to me like it’s bin blown off,’ the other man opined matter-of-factly, but we’d better tek a butcher’s just in case.’

  Molly swallowed hard on the saliva of horror thickening in her throat. This was no time to start acting like a girl. Determinedly she followed the two men, picking her way over the unstable mound of bricks, beyond which lay the crater made by the bomb.

  One of the men had reached the hand. He leaned down towards it, sliding his own hand into it. ‘Cold as a piece of wet fish,’ he proclaimed, whilst his companion started to remove the bricks around it.

  Quickly Molly went to help. Beyond the hand was an arm, blue-veined and slender. A woman’s arm. A woman probably just like her. Stoically she worked on, taking the bricks from the man lifting them and passing them back through the human chain that had formed behind her, all the while unable to stop glancing at that pale white arm.

  Another half-dozen bricks were passed back, then a dozen more, the arm grew longer and Molly’s hopes rose, and then just as she turned away to pass on yet another brick she heard the man holding the hand exclaim in disgust, ‘There, I knew it.’

  She looked back just in time to see him removing a severed arm, its elbow neatly crooked.

  She wasn’t going to be sick, no matter how much she wanted to. That would be letting the side down and she wouldn’t do that, not for one moment.

  ‘Quick, over here. I can hear someone.’

  Abandoning the pile of bricks they had been moving, the whole team hurried to where Johnny was crouching, his ear pressed to the rubble.

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ one of the men told him.

  ‘Molly, you come and listen,’ Johnny commanded.

  As Molly kneeled down beside him he reached out his arm and drew her close to his body. She could feel the strong beat of his heart against her own flesh and smell the hot male scent of him through the smoky dampness of the winter night. It gave her an odd feeling to be so close to him. Hastily she pushed it away from herself, and concentrated instead on listening, her ear pressed to the filthy rubble.

  She was just about to shake her head and move away when she heard it – the faintest of sounds. It wasn’t a sound she could identify like a cry or even a gasp, but somehow immediately she knew it was human.

  She looked at Johnny and, without her having to say anything, he called back over his shoulder, ‘Get as many men as you can over here. There’s someone down there.’

  Within seconds the heap of rubble was surrounded by willing volunteers, working to remove the tangle of roof slates, bricks and beams.

  ‘Wait up,’ one of the men shouted. ‘There’s a bloody great beam under here.’ As he spoke, the rubble suddenly shifted beneath their feet, sending bricks skittering across the wet cobbles in a shower of plaster dust.

  ‘Keep still, Molly,’ Johnny urged her, reaching out to steady her.

  ‘Get Charlie over here,’ one of the firemen, putting out the blaze from a ruptured gas pipe several yards away, called back to the men working the pump. ‘He were a civil engineer afore he retired,’ he yelled to the rescue party above the relentless thud of the AA batteries. ‘Knows a thing or two about buildings, Charlie does. Here, Jeff, where’s Charlie?’

  Searchlights arced and wheeled overhead, looking for the intruders, briefly patterning the scene in ghostly flashes of stark white. The sudden warning whine of a falling bomb caused the fireman to break off and curse as the emergency service workers all ducked and then waited.

  ‘Close,’ Johnny exhaled as they heard the heavy thud of the explosion, ‘but at least it missed the docks.’

  A small wiry-looking man was making his way towards them, picking his way over the rubble.

  ‘There’s someone alive in there,’ Johnny told him quickly.

  Ignoring Johnny, he crouched down and put his own ear to the mass of rubble.

  ‘Kiddie, by the sound of it,’ he grunted.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Molly asked.

  Under the searchlights she could see beneath the grimy soot of the bomb site the lines that time had carved in his face, as he poked around amongst the rubble.

  ‘Breathing’s too light for an adult. I doubt you’ll get it out, though,’ he announced as he stood and kicked a piece of protruding timber sending up a shower of soot and plaster dust, and then brushed the dust off his hands.

  Molly stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Whole ruddy lot is going to collapse. See this?’ He put his toe on a piece of timber. ‘One of the main roof beams, this is. Now watch this …’ He used his foot to rock the wood, sending bricks and dust tumbling into th
e street below. ‘It’s unstable, see, and just about balancing on sommat underneath. You start shifting this stuff on top of it and the whole lot could cave in.’

  Silence.

  Molly looked imploringly at Johnny whilst one of the men shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, and, as though in confirmation of what Charlie had just told them, a trickle of debris started to gather force to become a small avalanche.

  ‘We can’t just leave them there,’ Molly protested. The men were avoiding looking at her, shuffling their feet. She turned to Charlie. ‘There must be some way.’

  He gave a small shrug. ‘Aye, well, the best way would be to try to tunnel under this lot. I reckon what’s happened is that whoever’s down there were under the stairs, the blast has brought the house down on top of them, but there’s bin a beam got wedged somehow that has kept the worst of it off of them. If we move this stuff from on top of it we’ll risk the beam tipping and crushing them, so the only way to do it would be to try to tunnel in.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ Johnny asked.

  They all looked at Charlie whilst he sucked on his teeth and walked round the mound of rubble.

  ‘See this here?’ He directed their attention to a small gap between a broken window and the ground. ‘I reckon we could start here. The beams will have fallen, crosswise, see, and this would be the quickest way between ’em. You’ll have to shore up the tunnel as you work, mind.’

  One hour passed and then another, as they worked laboriously to carve out a narrow passageway through the rubble. Overhead a second wave of bombers came in, dropping a clutch of bombs over the dock area. It had started to rain, but Molly was oblivious to the discomfort of her cold wet body and her bruised and bleeding fingers as she worked alongside the men, all of them taking it in turns to wriggle into the narrow tunnel they were excavating and carefully drag back more rubble.

  It was Johnny, lying on his back, who put in place the wooden staves and rescued pieces of corrugated iron in order to keep the narrow tunnel safe from falling debris, but it was Charlie who, to Molly’s admiration, insisted on crawling into the darkness to investigate the barrier they had hit.