by Annie Groves
‘You need to see the doctor and tell him what’s happened,’ insisted Jan.
Bella shook her head and then stopped, wincing. Just moving her head hurt because of the way Alan had banged it against the wall.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ she challenged Jan. Now that she was safe, her normal desire to make sure that the refugees knew their place reasserted itself. Far easier to do that than let herself think about those moments when she had feared for her life. ‘I thought you were busy being a hero. Not that it managed to stop Hitler invading your own country, of course.’
There was a small pause but he didn’t respond to her gibe, simply saying instead, ‘I had a twenty-four-hour pass. I knew my mother would be worrying with everything that’s been in the papers about the fighting over the Channel, so I decided to come home to tell her myself that there was no need to worry about me.’
Bella wished he would go away. She wasn’t feeling very well at all, but she wasn’t going to let him see that. She hated him, she really did, and she would rather anyone but him had seen what Alan was doing to her. He must have hit Alan very hard.
Her head was swimming and a cramping pain was invading her stomach.
‘You’ll find your mother and sister down at the WVS Refugee Centre. And I don’t know who gave you a key to my house but they had no right to do so.’
The pain was becoming so intense now that she could hardly speak. It was seizing her in red-hot waves like wires being dragged through her insides.
Jan was saying something but the pain was too intense for her to listen.
She heard him curse and saw him get up and go into the hall.
The pain invaded her, possessing her, growing ever stronger as it surged and seethed in a relentless tide of agony. She tried to stand up and collapsed on the kitchen floor. She could hear doors opening and closing and then voices – her mother’s, the doctor’s, Jan’s, his mother’s. She could see anxious faces bending over her, but all that really mattered was the pain. She wanted to tear it from her as it was tearing the child from her womb but it was too strong for her.
On and on it went, relentless and unending, until finally it was over, and her body expelled the life the pain had destroyed.
Grace and Seb had both agreed that they would take things slowly and that they would not allow themselves to be swept away by a kiss exchanged in a very emotional moment, especially now, with the air-raid sirens going off almost every other night and the whole country on edge, knowing that the raids by the Luftwaffe were just the first stage in Hitler’s battle to break the spirit of the British people and invade the country.
This was a time to give their hearts and their minds to the war effort and not to themselves and their own feelings for one another.
Seb had told her that now he was going to be based in Liverpool at Derby House, they would have plenty of time to get to know one another properly and that there was no need for them to rush into anything, quite the opposite. They would start off as they meant to go on. Seb wanted to introduce himself properly to Grace’s parents before they became a couple, and there must be respect for Teddy, even though he and Grace had not been romantically involved.
For her part Grace had said that she had no intention of allowing anything or anyone to stop her from completing her training. Qualified nurses were going to be needed if Hitler went ahead and invaded and there was fighting in the streets.
And then despite all that, and the practical decision they had made, the very first thing they had done afterwards had been to seal their agreement with a kiss of such sweet and intense passion that it had left Grace trembling and Seb wondering how one earth he was going to keep the promise he had just made.
Bella lay motionless in the bed, staring up at the ceiling, watching the patterns made by the sunlight coming in through the curtains. Sunlight that her baby would never see.
The pain started again. A different kind of pain from the one that had ripped through her yesterday. This pain filled all of her, not just her body, which now felt so drained and empty, as, of course, it was.
It bewildered her that she could feel like this. She hadn’t really wanted the baby, except as a means of bringing Alan to heel and yet just acknowledging that brought a searing emotional agony so intense that she could hardly endure it.
How was it possible for her to feel this overwhelming loss and devastation?
When she had woken up this morning and known that the baby was gone, her own reactions had made her feel as though somehow she was different from the person she knew. Her emotions confused and frightened her. She wasn’t used to feeling things so deeply and painfully. She didn’t want to think about the baby and how she had not protected it as she should have done, and yet she couldn’t not do.
The fact that now there was nothing to tie Alan to her and he could walk away from her meant nothing. All the things that had seemed so important before meant nothing. All that mattered was her baby, and that was gone.
Her grief filled her completely, totally absorbing her. At some deep level she knew, even if she didn’t want to recognise it, that nothing could ever be the same as it had been now. Her life was changed for ever and she with it.
She put her hand on her flat stomach and the urge to howl like a wild animal in mortal agony filled her.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Well, thanks for letting me stay here with you, Jean.’
‘You know you’re always welcome, Francine.’
They were avoiding looking directly at one another, both of them knowing there were questions that must not be asked and answers that could not be given.
‘I bet this B & B the BBC are putting me up at in Bangor won’t be anywhere near as comfortable.’
‘What do you think you’ll do when you’ve finished doing these BBC programmes?’
Safer to talk about Francine’s singing than about the fact that she had broken her contract with the theatre to take on this nowhere near so well paid work where she wouldn’t even be the main act but would merely be supporting Vera Lynn, just because it was in Bangor, and because Wales was where Jack was. Safer too, Jean felt, not to mention either the letter that had come for Francine in Jack’s schoolboy handwriting. That way, if Vi should find out and object, she would be able to deny that she had been involved.
Outside the car the BBC had sent was waiting, its driver standing on the pavement smoking a cigarette.
‘You’ve got everything?’
Francine nodded. ‘I’ll write and let you know when I’m settled in.’
She hadn’t wanted to say anything but Jean discovered that she had to.
‘You … you won’t do anything silly, Fran, will you?’
Francine looked at her, and shook her head, bending down to pick up her case. She was only taking a few of her clothes with her, leaving the rest behind in her trunk.
The twins came rushing in just in time to see her off, hugging her and saying how much they were going to miss her.
‘You know why she’s doing it, don’t you?’ Jean said to Sam later as she poured him a cup of tea. ‘She’s doing it so that she can see Jack.’ She put down the teapot. ‘If Vi finds out …’
Sam reached for her free hand and held it tightly within his own. ‘You’ve got to let them sort out their own lives, love.’
The B & B in Bangor was every bit as dreary as Francine had known it would be, but the other entertainers billeted in the town were a cheerful lot, including in their number some of Liverpool’s most famous comedians such as Tommy Handley from the programme ITMA, but Francine’s mind was on other things.
Jack had written to her to tell her that the new couple he was living with were much kinder than the Davieses but that he wished he was still in Liverpool. He missed her, he had written, and Francine certainly missed him.
The first thing she had done – even before unpacking her case and introducing herself to the other entertainers billeted in the boarding house – had been to find
out how far it was to the small Welsh village where Jack was staying and how easily she could get there.
She would be best driving there, she had been told, since it was too far to cycle and there was no direct route by train.
It hadn’t been easy finding someone prepared to lend her a car, but eventually Francine had managed to persuade a local garage owner into doing so, with the aid of an enormous sum of money.
Now, following the carefully written down directions that had accompanied his even more detailed instructions on the proper care of his precious car, she was driving along virtually empty roads that climbed upwards into Welsh mountains so high that their tops were lost amongst the clouds. Great barren sweeps of granite mountainside rose starkly either side of her, as she drove through valleys so narrow that the towering mountains cast shadows that Francine felt must never be penetrated by the sun. This was a dark and ancient land that wore its scars and its survival proudly.
She had brought sandwiches and a flask with her, but she didn’t bother to stop to enjoy them. She would share them instead with Jack.
She exhaled with relief when she found the small village with the long and unpronounceable name, which was close to the farm where Jack was living. She stopped the car outside the post office and got out. It would be a good place to enquire which direction she should take out of the village to reach the farm.
As she walked out of the sunshine into the gloom of the low-ceilinged room, the half a dozen or so people waiting in a queue all turned to look at her, as people do when strangers arrive in close-knit communities.
‘I’m looking for the Thomases’ farm,’ Francine told them, feeling that some explanation of her presence was called for.
The people in the queue looked at one another and there was a groundswell of muted conversation in Welsh.
It was the woman behind the counter who answered her. ‘It’s down the road on the left as you go past the chapel, but you won’t find much of it left, not after what the Luftwaffe did to it last night. Dropped one of their ruddy bombs right on top of it, they did, see, and flattened the whole place.’
The singsong words danced inside Francine’s head, impossible surely to believe, for what reason could the Luftwaffe have for dropping bombs out here where there was nothing but sheep and a handful of scattered farms, and Jack.
Francine started to walk and then run from the post office towards her borrowed car.
The road up to the farm was potholed and narrow, and at the end of it lay what must have once been a building but was now a heap of rubble, over which hung a pall of dust and smoke from the still smouldering rafters.
A group of rescue workers, their faces smeared with smoke and their expressions bleak, stood silently beside a couple of battered trucks.
Francine got out of the car.
‘You can’t go over there, bach,’ a short burly-looking man told her, barring her way. ‘Too dangerous it is, see, with the building half collapsed already.’
‘Please let me past. My son was staying here. I have to know what’s happened to him.’
Something – pity, perhaps – came and went in the man’s eyes before he explained, ‘There was no one survived – took a direct hit, the place did, see. They reckon the pilot was after Liverpool but lost his way and had to turn back so he dumped his bombs in Wales. Half a dozen or more gone off last night, there was, so they say, but this was the only one that hit anything.’
‘He wouldn’t have known nothing, bach,’ another man told her gently.
‘Killed old Thomas’s prize dog, it did, an’ all. Promised me one of her pups, he had,’ a third mournful voice joined in.
Francine wished they would go away and leave her here on her own.
Jack. She couldn’t take it in that he was gone. Dead. Killed. Here in this burned-out wreckage of what had once been a home. She couldn’t visualise him here; not at all. When she created a picture of him inside her head she saw him in Liverpool, smiling up at her … and alive.
But he wasn’t alive. How could he be? Francine looked at the still smouldering wreckage and knew that the men were right and that no one, nothing could have survived. Jack. What she had previously thought of as emotional pain had been nothing. This now was real pain, and it had only just begun.
As she drove past the small stone-built chapel on her way back to Bangor she looked at the message written outside. It read, ‘God is with you.’
She started to laugh hysterically.
The now-familiar wail of the air-raid sirens brought Bella out of her sleep. She lay in bed listening to it without making any attempt to obey its summons. She could hear Bettina and her mother getting up, and making ready to take refuge in the communal air-raid shelter at the end of the road. Still she didn’t move.
There was a sharp rap on her bedroom door and then it opened and Bettina warned her, ‘The air-raid siren’s gone.’
‘I’m not going.’
She could almost feel Bettina’s angry frustration as she wondered what to do and then, after hesitating, she closed the door and Bella heard her hurrying down the stairs to join her mother.
The front door opened and closed. The wail of the sirens stopped. Bella counted the seconds that ticked by. She had reached forty-five when she heard the first undulating hum of approaching desynchronised aircraft engines, the noise swiftly growing louder. Soon the scream of falling bombs and explosions would fill the air, along with the thump of the anti-aircraft guns. Familiar noises now, that had fallen into a familiwell-organisedar pattern. In the morning, newspapers would carry reports of where the bombs had fallen and how much damage they had done.
Bella tensed as she heard the first whining whistle of descending bombs, followed by the dull crump of explosions.
It had started. Well, she didn’t care. She didn’t really care about anything any more.
A bomb screamed earthwards so close at hand the noise hurt her eardrums. Silence. Then an almighty explosion that shook the whole house to its foundations and brought the toiletries on her dressing table crashing to the floor, filling the air with the scent of her Ma Griffe perfume.
At the hospital, as soon as they had heard the air-raid siren, the nurses and porters had rushed to get the patients to safety, following a now well-organised procedure after a month of constant alerts. Seb, who had been told he would be discharged in the morning, made sure he kept a protective eye on Grace, as he and the other mobile patients helped the nurses with those who were bedridden.
‘I dare say it will be the docks that will be getting the worse of it,’ Seb shouted to Grace above the noise of the sirens.
Grace nodded, feeling more anxious about her father and her brother, who were both bound to be more closely involved in the raid, than she was about herself.
The night was filled with the sound of exploding bombs and destruction, whilst the ack-ack guns of the batteries spat out rounds of gunfire that lit up the sky. Shattered glass covered the ground, crunching underfoot.
‘They’ve got the Customs House,’ one of the porters yelled, ‘and a couple of warehouses.’
Just as they reached the shelter a dozen or more incendiary bombs hit the ground, bursting into flames. One of them came so close that Grace felt the heat of it singeing her uniform before Seb dragged her out of the way.
Another landed on the entrance to a corporation bus that had just stopped outside the hospital. Whilst Grace watched, the conductress kicked it off so that it exploded harmlessly in the street.
Dodging the broken glass from windows blown out by the bombs, and the incendiary bombs themselves, Grace finally got her patients into the shelter.
In answer to Seb’s, ‘You OK?’ she gave a brief nod and acknowledged, ‘Yes, thanks to you.’
There was no time to say any more. She had her patients to attend to, and Sister was doing a roll call to make sure that no one had been left behind by accident.
By the time that had been done the German bombers had turned for home an
d the all clear was already sounding.
Luckily the hospital itself hadn’t been hit, but there’d been a lot of damage down by the docks and Wallasey Town Hall had been hit, as well as several houses, Seb reported to Grace before she went off duty.
‘You won’t be here when I come back on duty tonight. The ward won’t be the same without you.’ Despite her best intentions Grace knew that her voice was betraying how she felt.
Seb squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll be waiting for you here at the hospital when you come off duty on your day off, just like we’ve arranged.’
Grace looked at him. ‘Do you think it’s too soon, after Teddy?’
‘No, I don’t, and I don’t think that Teddy would think so either,’ said Seb seriously, still holding her hand. ‘We already know how we feel about one another, and my guess is that your Teddy’s up there somewhere watching over you and that what he wants more than anything is for you to be happy, Grace.’
‘Oh, Seb …’ Grace’s voice was muffled. ‘I think you and Teddy would have got on really well together.’
‘I think so too,’ Seb agreed. The public air-raid shelter at the bottom of the street was crammed with people. One household had been having a party when the siren had gone off, and the men had grabbed their beer and the women the sandwiches, and now the party was continuing inside the shelter in a very jolly way indeed, with one of the guests playing his harmonica and several of the men singing at the tops of their voices.
Jean gave the twins a warning look when she saw them exchanging looks and giggling. Of course the old-fashioned songs weren’t to their taste, but at least they drowned out some of the noise of the bombs going off.
Sam was on standby down at the Salvage Corps headquarters in Hatton Gardens, and Luke was on duty at his barracks.
The harmonica player had stopped to have a sandwich, allowing them all to hear the fierce retaliatory fire from the ack-ack guns defending the city.
