by Lizzie Lane
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lizzie Lane
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Read on for some recipes used by the Sweet sisters...
Copyright
About the Book
The war has had a devastating effect on the Sweet Family.
Still there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon in the form of Mary Sweet’s upcoming wedding to her Canadian beau. But even that has failed to rouse their father from his grief.
But in London a baby has been found in a bombed out house, sheltered in the arms of his dead mother. A child to make life worth living again...
About the Author
Lizzie Lane was born and brought up in one of the toughest areas of Bristol, the eldest of three siblings who were all born before her parents got round to marrying. Her mother, who had endured both the Depression and war years, was a natural-born story teller, and it’s from her telling of actual experiences of the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century that Lizzie gets her inspiration.
Lizzie put both city and rat race behind her in 2012 and moved on to a boat, preferring to lead the simple life where she can write and watch the sun go down without interruption.
Also by Lizzie Lane:
Wartime Brides
Coronation Wives
A Christmas Wish
The Soldier’s Valentine (digital short)
A Wartime Wife
A Wartime Family
Home for Christmas
Wartime Sweethearts
CHAPTER ONE
April 1941, London
ON THE EVENING before the bombers came it had been an ordinary street in the East End of London, where little girls played hopscotch and boys rolled marbles in the gutter. But by the early hours of the next morning twisted gas pipes hissed and great clouds of smoke and steam arose from blackened buildings.
Thousands of gallons of water had been poured on to the burning buildings, but the heat was still intense enough to scorch the faces of the firefighters if they got too close.
Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky to the east, but for the firemen, air-raid wardens and the civilians from all walks of life lending a hand the job was not yet over. Fires blazed where Victorian terraced houses once stood, and some of those who had lived in them still had to be accounted for. A few had made it to the air-raid shelter or the Underground where the rattle of trains was preferable to the sound of explosions. Others had refused to leave their homes because of their fear of looters or simply because they were sound asleep and hadn’t heard the siren. The volunteers who were to sift through the bombed-out buildings were under no illusion of what to expect.
Harry Norton, a stevedore on a Thames barge by day, was standing by, waiting for the go ahead from the firemen to begin looking for survivors.
‘Looks like hell!’ he shouted to his friend Clancy Cowell, a man of few words but who had more muscles than a fairground strongman.
They had to shout to hear each other above the hissing of steam, gas and water jetting from the ends of fire hoses.
‘It is hell,’ Clancy shouted back to him.
Harry blinked. Clancy was right. The incendiary raid had started an inferno, some of which might not burn out for days. He sighed. If there were any survivors buried under this little lot, it would be nothing short of a miracle, but both he and the other voluntary firefighters tried to remain hopeful.
‘For this lot here, take these houses from here to here. Just give us a minute.’
He went back to the line of men heaving on hoses, stinking of sweat and smoke. Deep down inside all of them was the feeling of sickness that comes with the prospect that, for all their good intent, the army of volunteers would be digging nothing but corpses from the ruins.
The hissing stopped when the gas was turned off at the mains. Steam still rose from the smouldering buildings, but the sound of surging water also ceased as the hoses were turned off.
Once the noise lessened, the order to move in and begin the search was given.
Harry pulled on a pair of asbestos gloves. The fire in this particular street had been put out, but the bricks and other debris would still be hot. Even the ground beneath their feet was scorching. Like most of the men there, he was wearing his steel-capped work boots. The thick soles would protect him from the heat and, at one time, he thought the toe caps would too, but there had been times when it had felt as though the devil was toasting his toes. Not that discomfort would deter him from doing his job. If there were people to be rescued, then it was all hands to the pump, sorting through the smoking debris, and stopping every so often to listen for the slightest sound of somebody still alive.
Clancy worked beside him, methodically pulling at huge pieces of brickwork, ceiling joists and concrete. He tackled the real heavy items that usually took two men to lift.
Harry just missed being hit by a window frame. Up until then it had been held in place along the sill and up one side. It fell in slow motion, its movement almost indiscernible. Somebody shouted. Harry reacted instantly, leaping over a pile of broken bricks and a smashed-up fireplace.
The glass panes, having survived bomb damage, smashed into jagged pieces either side of a heavy roof truss, which now lay flat among bricks and bits of wood.
There was a strange silence following the sound of breaking glass and broken timbers, not a real silence, just a contrast with the noise that had gone before.
In that silent moment he heard something. At first it sounded like the mewing of a cat. They’d found plenty of trapped animals following an air raid. Plenty of dead ones too.
‘If there are any pets, they’ll be roasted,’ somebody close by muttered.
He tilted his head to one side.
‘Hear that, Clancy?’
Clancy did the same as Harry, tilting his head to one side in an effort to hear better.
A door left swinging at an angle on one hinge creaked and fell.
Harry looked around him and shook his head. ‘Blimey. This place is still falling down.’
It was also still steaming and although the firemen had done sterling work, Harry kept his eyes peeled for any flare up of the fire ignited by the incendiary bomb. He rubbed at his chest. It felt tight. He knew he’d inhaled his fair share of black smoke and brick dust. All the same he could do with a bit of light relief.
‘I badly need a smoke, funny that, what with all this …’
His face was black with sweat and soot, his eyes streaming and sore on account of the steam and the smoke.
There was that noise again. He cupped his ear the same way he’d seen his old father do when he couldn’t catch what was being said. ‘Hear anything, Clancy?’
He looked at his friend, a hulking figure among the ruins. Clancy raised his hand a
nd pointed to a spot beneath what was left of the stairs.
Harry listened. There it was again. A mewing sound? That wasn’t a mewing sound! It was crying. A baby! It sounded like a baby!
‘I hear something!’ he shouted out to the men behind him.
Clancy heard it too, but being a big man with chunky limbs he was clumsy and his movements slow. Harry got to the sound first.
Bits of brick, tile and plaster began to slide under his feet as he dug desperately and carefully, his bare hands less likely to do damage than any shovel or crowbar.
George Poster, the civil defence volunteer in charge of the job, climbed carefully over the rubble that lay between a bathtub and a broken lavatory pan, aware that disturbing anything too much might cause the whole lot to slide or fall into a hidden cellar. A lot of the houses round here had cellars. Rather than go to the air-raid shelter and chance their houses being looted, some people went down there. It was because of those cellars that some survived, trapped in air pockets beneath the destruction.
The intensity of the men listening was suddenly interrupted by the loud clanging of a bell, which preceded the arrival of an ambulance. There were one or two injured people to take to hospital. Quite a few dead ones too.
George stood up and flung a stone at the culprit. ‘Stop that bloody racket! Can’t you see we’re trying to listen ’ere?’
The bell stopped, the driver hurriedly getting out of her ambulance, sliding on the slick of mud and water, her tin hat toppled to one side. She whispered sorry, but nobody was really interested. All eyes returned to what was happening among the ruins.
Harry got down on his hands and knees so he could hear better, turning his head so his ear was close to the glass shards and other bits and pieces that had once been part of a house, that had once been a family home.
‘Here,’ he shouted. ‘Beneath this. I’m sure of it!’
It was a slow process, but gradually the piled muck was shifted, slid sideways and behind them on to other piles, the rescuers forming a human chain.
‘There’s a door,’ shouted Harry. ‘It’s coming from beneath this door.’
The door was pinned flat beneath a roof truss, one of the many A-frames whose ends had scorched in the walls before falling to earth when the walls supporting them had fallen down. Six men, including Clancy and Harry, three one side and three the other, heaved up the massive piece of wood.
‘Just enough so we can move it off the door,’ ordered George.
Sweat streaked their dirty faces as every muscle in their body strained and shook.
‘We need it held up in the middle,’ shouted Harry. ‘If we could jam something underneath it, I reckon two of us could pull that door out.’
Eyes sore from smoke and lack of sleep searched the seared bombsite. There was not one piece of material suitable for jacking up the piece of wood, nothing that wouldn’t disintegrate into cinders when it took the weight.
‘Let me try.’
Clancy crouched down as low as he could, feet apart, knees bent. Hands the size of shovels clasped the massive piece of wood and slowly, very slowly, he began to rise.
A gasp of amazement went up before the rest of the men sprang into action.
‘Give him a hand, boys,’ George ordered.
Lifted by Clancy’s broad shoulders, the crossbeam of the truss began to rise. Other men put their shoulders beneath it too, straining for all they were worth.
Choosing just the right moment, Harry let go and with the help of a young lad of barely sixteen, they managed to slide the door out from beneath the beam. The roof truss was shifted to one side, though only enough to give them access to the space beneath the door.
Harry was closest to the hole and it was him who called for a flashlight. As his fingers were cramped with tiredness, he held the flashlight with both hands. Although the gap was filled with dust and it was difficult to see at first, its beam eventually picked out the body of a woman pinned face downwards. Even before checking for a pulse they knew she was dead.
‘I heard a baby,’ Harry said. ‘I know I heard a baby.’
The same thought came to each of them: there had been a baby. They’d heard a baby, but they couldn’t hear it now.
‘Right,’ said George, the voice of authority. ‘Let’s move her, but carefully, right? If there is anyone else down there, we don’t want to disturb anything loose and bury them, now do we?’
Clancy and Harry moved the woman’s body gently. Then the baby cried. It was alive.
‘She threw her body over the baby,’ Harry exclaimed. Not for the first time, he was awestruck at a mother’s bravery and self-sacrifice, throwing her body over her child so her little one might live.
‘She protected the little tyke,’ Clancy said.
The baby was handed over to the proper authorities. Harry made enquiries regarding the woman, and was told that her name was Gilda Jacobsen and she had two older children who had been staying with their father’s parents at the time of the raid. This fact gave him enormous relief. ‘At least the poor mite will have his grandparents to care for him.’
Unfortunately, Harry was wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
April 1941, Bristol
‘SORRY LOVE. YOU can’t go through ’ere. The buggers dropped a big ’un, if you’ll excuse my French.’
The man’s face was soaked with sweat and there were bags under his red-rimmed eyes. Mary Sweet guessed he hadn’t slept a wink all night.
‘Is it very bad?
He nodded. ‘Nearly as bad as the November raid, though different types of bomb. One of ’em didn’t go off. I ’eard one of the sappers call it Satan.’ Mary understood, as everyone did, that he was referring to a detachment of Royal Engineers; sappers was the name by which bomb disposal experts were more generally know.
Resigned that speaking on BBC’s Kitchen Front wouldn’t happen today, Mary sighed, pushed the gear stick forward and prepared to do a U-turn. The car, a basic black Austin bestowed upon the Sweet sisters by the Ministry of Food, made grating noises as though reluctant to be turned back. Mary felt pretty much the same. Although she’d been nervous first off, she quite enjoyed making these radio broadcasts, airing useful tips on how best to stretch the family budget but concentrating on baking. Baking was the most difficult subject of all in wartime cooking, purely because most of the ingredients for making pastry or a cake were on ration.
The windscreen wipers slapped backwards and forwards, not that it was raining. They just seemed to come on when she least expected it.
Usually the car was driven by Corporal John Smith, Mary’s twin sister, Ruby, sitting in the back seat as a passenger. Today the privilege had been hers purely because while Ruby was fine demonstrating delicious ration-based recipes in front of people, giving out that same information over the airwaves terrified her.
The gearbox continued to make crunching noises, metal grating against metal. It really was a stubborn car.
Perhaps it wants to be a tank, she thought, and was putting up a show of defiance, relegated as it was to driving someone who talked to housewives about how best to make pies with ingredients they never would have dreamed of using before the war.
After shunting backwards and forwards a few times, she was finally facing the right direction. Homeward bound, she thought resignedly.
Although she was far enough out from the city centre not to be immersed in smoke, she could see it billowing skywards in the distance. She could also smell it, the very air dried and tarnished with its sooty heat and blown in her direction by a prevailing westerly wind.
She should have known better, of course. She knew there had been yet another raid on the city. Half the village had turned out last night after hearing the drone of bombers flying overhead. Even the pub regulars had poured out from the Apple Tree pub and the Three Horseshoes, their beer mugs tightly clutched in their fists.
First off the searchlights had picked out the black moving marks that were German bombers, vague X-s
hapes crossing the sky. Then the bombs began to fall, an awesome glow painting the sky a frighteningly beautiful orange-red over Bristol, the city of churches, their spires sharply black against the red glow.
‘Well, that ain’t no shepherd’s delight,’ somebody said.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. The meaning being that the following day would be fine.
In happier times it might have been said in jest to lighten the moment and lift the spirits of the gathered crowd, but it didn’t happen. Those watching the terrible display had fallen to silence, perhaps thinking of how much damage had been done or, more likely, how many people had died.
‘Bleedin’ Germans,’ somebody said. ‘They got a lot to answer for.’
Against her better judgement Mary had still set out for the BBC studios in Bristol. Andrew Sinclair, her contact at the Ministry of Food, had promised to be there too, but had telephoned yesterday to say he couldn’t come. London was also under siege, bombs everywhere.
‘Another raid tonight, I’m sure. My mother is very frightened,’ he’d added. ‘I have to stay close to her.’
She’d told him she could find her way there by herself. She’d done so before. She’d appreciated the Ministry providing them with a telephone, but wondered sometimes if it was something of a curse: Andrew Sinclair was the only person who phoned regularly.
Not having him come was something of a relief. Although Andrew knew she was getting married in June, he couldn’t hide the fact that he was attracted to her.
She’d told him she’d be fine. ‘The corporal left the car here last night. He knew I could drive and besides he was due some extended leave.’
She’d got up early this morning, skipping breakfast because she was feeling nervous. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this, but the butterflies came every time.
Ruby had been surprised that she was still going. ‘We all saw the bombs last night. Bristol’s had another bashing.’
Mary scanned her notes. ‘Yes, but they haven’t said much about it on the wireless, only that a city in the south-west had been attacked by enemy bombers. They didn’t say it was bad.’
