by Maggie Ford
‘Oh, God, Mumsy, it’s an air-raid siren.’
They stared at each other, her mother with fingertips bent against her lips as though to stop their sudden trembling, Jenny with the teapot hanging loose by its handle from her momentarily paralysed fingers.
Her flesh had gone cold, the rising goose pimples conveyed an actual sensation, the fear that clutched at Jenny’s heart was like cold fingers attempting to restrict its pumping, pumping so heavy that it felt as though it were in her throat.
It was her mother who first came to life, swinging away from her with a cry, making for the hallway and the front door. She had flung it open before Jenny could collect herself enough to chase after her, catching her halfway down the few stone steps to the street.
‘No, not that way. We must go down into the Anderson shelter.’
A man’s voice was calling to them from across the road. ‘Over here – into our shelter.’
It was Mr Ward standing at his gate beckoning to them. After a brief hesitation, Jenny took her mother’s arm, hurrying her diagonally across the road. It would be far more comforting and, even though erroneously, it felt safer to be with others than the two of them all alone in the darkness of the newly built shelter put in for them by a paid man, having to sit by candlelight with the dank shelter’s earthy smell all around them. Mr Ward would never know the relief with which she hurried towards him.
He was a tall man, in his early fifties she reckoned, who must have been an extremely handsome man in his youth – still was, she supposed. He looked very much like Matthew except that he was very thin and looked drawn. Matthew said his father had received a touch of mustard gas in the last war, leaving him with a slightly weak chest. He seemed a kindly man, and always nodded to her or her mother when passing them in the street, not like his wife who, though she would always nod too, left one with a feeling of inferiority. However, Jenny was sure she had no idea of the effect she had on others. She struck Jenny as somehow being older than her husband though she probably wasn’t: it was just her attitude that made her seem so. Thirty years ago one might have called her a handsome woman and she still carried herself like a duchess. Jenny was sure she had a kind heart for all that but she had never felt at ease meeting her in the street. And now she was being asked to enter her home – or at least her Anderson shelter.
‘We do have our own,’ she explained as she came up to Mr Ward. ‘We had it put in for us last week.’
He held an arm out as though shepherding them. ‘Even so, we can’t see two women alone down one of them. This is a time for us all to help each other. Come along.’
They followed him nervously through a narrow side gate into a small, neatly laid out town garden surrounded by trees and bushes whose dusty leaves screened it from neighbours’ eyes. Mrs Ward liked privacy.
‘Will Mrs Ward mind?’ Jenny queried behind him.
‘Why should she mind? We should all stick together in these times.’ He sounded so like Matthew. Jenny fell silent as she followed him to the mound at the end of the garden that now covered the raw corrugated iron structure half sunk into the ground, its straight sides and curved top precisely fitted together, the soil already made a little less unsightly by a transplantation of geraniums and Michaelmas daisies. Her own, so far covered only by bare earth, had more the appearance of a wallowing elephant as it awaited a few plants to disguise its grimly utilitarian purpose.
She watched as he handed her mother down the four wooden steps to below ground, then herself. There was a curtain across the square entrance covering a small door already fitted. Hers so far had just a curtain. The door stood open and as she entered Mr Ward let the curtain fall back to its proper position, to shut out any light that might be seen at night by enemy bombers looking for a target. She was amazed at the light there actually was. An electric bulb in the centre of the curved roof, shaded by a small but beautiful orange lampshade, cast a cosy glow. But then, Mr Ward knew all about electricity, didn’t he? The interior, measuring six foot by eight, was made to seem much narrower by double bunks lining either side to accommodate this family of four. At the far end a small table with a red chequered cloth held a decorative oil lamp; a square mirror propped against the back wall reflected everything back to give the illusion of a less cramped space. Above it a shelf bolted to the corrugated iron held provisions for a night’s stay. The cold iron was painted pink, and a pink brocade curtain partly shielded the back wall for an extra sense of snugness. Thus a cosy retreat had been fashioned from what could have been an uncomfortable hole in the ground. Even the pervading mustiness of damp earth was allayed somewhat by a large bowl of home-made pot-pourri beside the lamp.
Mrs Ward was standing by the table, her posture very upright, her expression stiff, the unwilling hostess compelled to receive uninvited guests, which Jenny felt she and her mother must be. They were intruders into this extension of her home, which this musty-smelling underground shelter with its effort to appear cosy indeed was. Yet behind the stiffness lay an attempt to hide her fear for the moment, the air-raid warning having now faded away to leave an eerie silence outside.
‘Thank you so much for having us,’ Mrs Ross began in a small voice, she too feeling the tension, not just because of this impending air raid. In return she received a wintry smile but no word of welcome.
Jenny stood uncertain, wishing they hadn’t accepted Mr Ward’s invitation. In their own damp, half-finished shelter they’d at least have felt at ease, if isolated. She was glad Louise was also there.
Crouched forward on a lower bunk so that her head wouldn’t knock against the one above her, her arms clasped about her chest in foreboding, Louise looked as though she were making some sort of obeisance at her mother’s feet. But there the impression of humility ended. A younger version of her mother in many ways, Louise at seventeen bore all the hallmarks of becoming a staid, strait-laced woman by her forties. Already she had a tendency to bossiness and certainly a way of managing people whether they liked it or not. She was nevertheless a generous-hearted person, which Jenny imagined she owed to her father, and she had found herself liking Louise from the very start. Mumsy said once, when she had mentioned it, that Louise was rather like a black widow spider! But Jenny considered Louise’s way of calling a spade a spade very commendable and people could not be held responsible for who they took after at birth. She was heartily glad, though, that Matthew took after his father rather than his mother.
‘Not made a bad job of it, have we?’ Mr Ward was saying with pride in his voice. ‘Me and Matthew put it up between us, but the titivating bits his mother did, and a great job she’s made of it too. Never know how long we might have to stay down here if things get really bad.’
He gestured to the other lower bunk. ‘Well, sit down then, both of you. Make yourselves at home.’
‘Where is Matthew?’ Jenny asked as she sat.
‘Out with a friend, apparently.’ Mrs Ward’s reply was chilly, sharp, it seemed to Jenny, disapproving of her son’s absence at such a perilous time. Jenny fell quiet. She might feel safe here, yet in the chill that had descended she wished she could be anywhere but here.
Her mother ventured, ‘Young people seldom understand,’ only to be met with more bleak silence, and in this vein the five sat facing each other, the Wards on one side, Miss and Mrs Ross on the other, each with their own thoughts, waiting for the first distant roar from swarms of enemy bombers they were sure were coming to annihilate them all.
Every now and again, her mother sighed, ‘Oh, dear.’ Mr Ward cleared his throat quite a lot, now and again smiling encouragement at them as they waited. Mrs Ward’s face remained stony, but Jenny noticed how she twisted her hands together at one or two unguarded moments, and despite her own fear that persisted in clutching at her stomach, she found herself looking on the woman as being capable of human emotions after all. She knew so little about her, wondered how Matthew and his sister could live with such an unapproachable woman, except that she was their mother
and they were used to her, she supposed. But over and above her fear of the unknown beyond this shelter, she counted the minutes when she could be away from here.
Relief was a surge of joy in more ways than one when after only ten minutes – though it had seemed like an hour – the sweet single note of the all clear sounded. Everything that a moment before had seemed suspended in a sort of bubble of waiting, sprang back into life. Voices could be heard beyond the shelter. The whole street seemed to be alive with people as Jenny and her mother emerged to go back home.
She had never seen Victoria Park Road like this before, neighbours standing about in groups discussing where they’d been and what they had been doing at the moment of the siren sounding, speculating if it had been just a false alarm or not.
For Jenny it was an event she felt she’d never forget, not so much because of the fright as the camaraderie that appeared after it. Also it had been her first-ever glimpse into Matthew’s home, at least as near as she imagined she’d ever be to it. A little like an eavesdropper, she had watched those twisting hands of Mrs Ward as she’d sat on the edge of one of the lower bunks, had been given an ever-so-brief peep behind the barrier she appeared to put up between herself and everyone else. Although Matthew hadn’t been there, just being in the Wards’ Anderson shelter had made Jenny feel closer to him than she had ever felt before.
*
Everyone had grown closer that Sunday. Men who would hardly have nodded the time of day to each other on their way to business, their privacy a virtual barbed wire fence, now passed on their observations of what the next few months might have in store for everyone. Women from the larger houses were even nodding more often to those in the smaller ones, snobbery magically put aside. Only on the bus going each day into the City were people still reserved, minding their own business, reading their paper, staring out of the window, perhaps smoking their pipes and cigarettes a little more reflectively, isolated from each other, apart from those riding together, Cockney vowels ringing loud, and of course the cheery voice of the bus or tram conductor calling for fares and pinging his ticket machine.
Everything was changing. The instant blackout extinguished all light but for the dimmest of blueish light in buses and trains. London’s main railway stations were alive with men and women in uniform, with loved ones saying goodbye, husbands embracing wives, fathers kissing their children, mothers clinging to their sons, sweethearts interlocked. For some reason public transport became erratic; no one could be sure of getting to their destination on time any more. Not that civilians had many destinations to go to other than to work, since access to the coast just for pleasure was now forbidden unless one had a relation living there or specific reason to go. Seaside holidays stopped.
Everything stopped. On the wireless the BBC closed down its regional services, sticking to just one, the Home Service; schools closed, places of entertainment shut down to dissuade people from gathering in any one place for fear of hundreds being killed at once in an air raid.
St John’s Girl Guide and Brownie troop and its Boys’ Brigade ceased to meet, most of the children evacuated anyway from the East End to the country, away from bombs expected to fall on the population in a matter of days or weeks. The second wave of children to go since the Munich scare of 1938, they toddled off with their gas masks and their packets of sandwiches for their journey into the safe heart of the countryside, labels fastened to coat collars, mothers anxiously watching them go and wondering if they would ever see them again. Witnessing the scenes at Liverpool Street Station, and the looks on those mothers’ faces as she passed on her way to work, Jenny could almost feel the heaviness of their hearts.
‘It all seems so strange. I still can’t get used to all this.’
Mrs Ross was helping paste strips of gummed brown paper tape in the recommended criss-cross pattern on the window panes, supposedly to help stop flying glass from the effect of a bomb blast.
‘It makes the windows look so horrible. I don’t like it at all.’
‘It doesn’t matter if we like it or not.’ The gum tasted awful; Jenny pulled a face as she licked. She had tried resorting to a saucer of water to dip the gummed side in, but it was awkward, far quicker to steel herself to licking. ‘They say it’s safer. They say just one shard of flying glass can kill. I don’t fancy being slashed by something like that, not even in a small way.’
Not that there had been any air raids since that first false alarm, a stray French plane at the time unidentified over the Channel, they had been told. But it was better to be safe than sorry.
Mumsy had already complained about the blackout regulations. Their own efforts were still temporary, made with flimsy frames of batten wood and cardboard with black paper pinned to them, and they had draped their shades with thick material for the time being to lessen any light that might escape. The result was having to sit in a dingy room and that in itself lowered the spirits. In time they would get proper heavy material instead of the present light curtains that let out a little too much light.
Of all the deprivations and inconveniences that had arisen, blackout was the worst. Air-raid wardens already knocked on doors ordering erring occupants in superior tones to ‘Put out that light!’ A lot of things irked, not the least of them, Jenny calculated, the total change in her social life.
With the departure of London’s East End children the young men went off too. Of Jenny’s little set Dennis Cox said goodbye and joined the RAF. He asked if he could write to her and Jenny had half nodded, rather hoping he might forget once he got out into the wide world and met other girls. She couldn’t tell him she felt somewhat relieved to see him go. She had never really fancied him, but had just been naturally thrown together with him, and consequently was sometimes thought of as his partner.
Jean Summerfield’s parents, deciding that London was a dangerous place, went to relatives in Devon, to fulfil a longstanding dream of a cottage by the sea.
Jean’s going was rather heartening. Although Jenny had never presented any competition for Jean where Matthew was concerned, Jean would nevertheless no longer be around to disconcert her.
Freddy, who’d enlisted as a part-time soldier during the Munich crisis before he had begun going seriously with Eileen, was called up immediately. Hastily, he and Eileen planned a registry office wedding, and leaving her pregnant, though neither knew that, he went off into the Pay Corps.
Of the group only she and Matthew remained. Obviously he was perfect for conscription under the new National Service Act, but unlike the other two he made no move to volunteer, much to Jenny’s confusion. She had expected him to be the very first to do so but now she remembered the day when he had hurriedly and so noticeably – at least to her – changed the subject when Dennis had asked what service he had chosen to go into.
Already three weeks into this war, August and that particular Friday dance seemed years away. Yet every time she saw Matthew, that incident became like yesterday and the embarrassment she had felt then burned as acutely as ever, now also coupled with bewilderment. It was her mother, who like most meek souls always managed to extract a confidence from the most private of people, who treated Jenny to Mrs Ward’s admission of dismay at her son’s odd reluctance to join up.
‘She really expected him to apply for a commission by now,’ Mrs Ross related to her daughter as she treadled away on her sewing machine, making blackout curtains to replace the black paper they’d had to use as an emergency measure.
‘I don’t actually expect it’s cowardice, but I’m sure she feels a certain embarrassment about it. She’s a person who needs to hold her head up in front of others but how can she while young Matthew is still hanging round? He must know he’ll be called up sooner or later. I imagine he’s thinking right now what a pity it was he didn’t take that Marconi job as she wanted him to – he would have had a reserved occupation by now and no one to query his remaining at home.’
Jenny was threading tape through a finished curtain. She let it drop
on to her lap. ‘That’s unfair, Mumsy.’
‘I don’t think so, dear.’ Mrs Ross gave an extra push down on the foot treadle and with a final spurt pulled the fabric free of the machine needle, snipping off the cotton. ‘If you ask me, I think he’s quaking in his shoes in case he’s called up.’
‘That’s not true, Mumsy!’
‘True or not, I think he’s being rather silly. He’ll end up being pushed into any old thing – something quite unsavoury, with all the riffraff. All that education gone to waste. Unless of course he is hoping he’ll be deferred. He could be, with his father not in good health and needing help with his business. But I think it unlikely. I hear there are some who are applying for deferment and getting away with it. Perhaps that is what’s on his mind.’
Extracting the last curtain from the machine, she stood up, stretching her back painfully. After she had laid the curtain across the chair she lifted the domed cover of the sewing machine back into place. ‘There – that’s done.’
‘Matthew wouldn’t do a thing like that,’ Jenny said, even though her mother seemed no longer to be listening, apparently more anxious to measure her finished work against the upstairs windows. But her taciturn departure left behind waves of doubt pounding in Jenny’s breast. What if her mother was right? Meek she might be. Indecisive and dependent she might be. Silly she wasn’t.
Angrily, Jenny fought to push away the doubts her mother had sown. The curtain destined for this room idle in her lap, she gazed out of the living-room window at the warm blue of a late September sky. Each pane was criss-crossed by gummed strips of brown paper but she hardly noticed.
‘He must have his reasons,’ she said aloud several times to the blue sky beyond. ‘He must have.’ But it wasn’t enough.
When the doubts her mother had voiced, innocently she was sure, began to bear down on her like a ton weight, she approached Louise. As his sister she must know more of the inner workings of Matthew’s mind than anyone. Approaching his mother was unthinkable. His father would probably be very hurt by any reference to his son even being thought suspect; the last thing Jenny wanted to do was to hurt anyone with her prying. But she had to unburden her doubts on someone. Louise was the most likely candidate.
