Far From Home

by Anne Bennett

  On 11 December the sirens rang out again at just after six o’clock in the evening. Kate, Susie and Sally reported for duty and it was soon obvious this was another full-blown attack. It was bitterly cold, the sort of cold that ate into a person, and Kate, like all the others, was on the streets helping the people to the shelters. Many of the children were in siren suits, the warm all-in-ones designed to fit over a person’s clothes, and yet many shivered with the intense cold. Flares lit up the night like day and Kate urged the tired people to hurry as the bombs could be heard falling in the distance but coming closer every minute.

  Then the menacing planes were above them, so close that in the light from the flares she saw the bomb doors open and release their arrows of death. She heard the boom and bang of them exploding not that far away and buildings collapsing with a crash of falling masonry. She thought of her house and whether it could withstand this latest attack and knew that many more would lose their homes that night. The ack-ack guns were again barking into the sky and soon the ringing of the ambulance bells could be heard.

  Kate was first directed to deal with any with minor injuries in the public shelter off Marsh Hill; she had finished there and was helping fight the fires when the ‘All Clear’ sounded after about three hours. Twenty minutes later the attack began again, and people who had not long reached home were encouraged out on to the streets once again when another wave of bombers was seen approaching. Three hours later the whole thing was repeated. ‘Playing bloody cat and mouse,’ Susie said angrily. ‘These poor people don’t know whether they are coming or going.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s done to play on people’s nerves.’

  ‘Yeah, and guess what,’ Susie said. ‘It’s bloody well working.’

  The game of cat and mouse went on for thirteen hours, and when they realized that it was finally over and the last people had been released and bodies brought out and the fires reduced to smoky heaps, Kate barely had the energy to make her way home. Sally was in no better shape. Kate returned to the house, and though she would have loved to have thrown herself on the bed and slept the sleep of the totally justified, she had a job of work to go to. She knew she wouldn’t be the only one in the factory that would feel like a bit of chewed string. Sally’s face was white with exhaustion and she had black bags beneath her eyes. She said to her sister, ‘Do I look as bad as I feel?’

  ‘Probably,’ Kate said. ‘You look absolutely exhausted and I’m probably no better.’

  Sally nodded. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get our heads down and sleep till lunchtime? And instead of that we must struggle into work?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Sally said. ‘To do anything else is terribly unpatriotic. So I am off to wash my face to wake myself up a little and then will have a bite to eat and be on my way.’

  ‘And I’ll do the same,’ Kate said.

  As she scurried up the road later, she realized that everyone seemed tired; they even walked in a ponderous way, as if it was almost too much trouble to put one foot in front of the other. So many of the faces of the people on the streets, or those who stood silently at the tram stop, were pale and strained, their eyes quite expressionless. ‘Can you wonder that they look that way?’ Susie said when Kate mentioned this as they took their seats in the tram on their way to work. ‘I think everyone’s feeling a bit battered, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I am, for one,’ Kate stated flatly. ‘Battered exactly describes how I feel.’

  ‘Everyone must feel it,’ Susie said. ‘I feel like death warmed up myself. I mean, I know we were out in the raid, but I would much rather do that and feel I was doing something useful than hide away somewhere listening to every blast.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s exactly what you would do, because unless you were in some soundproof bunker fifty foot underground, you couldn’t sleep anyway, I wouldn’t have thought,’ Kate said. ‘Isn’t King George supposed to be visiting Birmingham today?’

  ‘So people say,’ Susie said. ‘He’s coming to see the extent of the bombing.’

  ‘Well, he’s got more to look at after last night,’ Kate said. Then, lowering her voice, she went on: ‘But, judging by the people I’ve seen this morning and in the tram with us now, he could easily think that Birmingham is peopled by zombies.’

  Susie took a surreptitious look around and gave a wry smile. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said to Kate.

  ‘We’re not likely to get even a sniff of him anyway,’ Kate said.

  ‘And our lives will not be the poorer in the slightest because of that,’ Susie said, and of course she was right. The King’s visiting that ravaged city would make not a ha’p’orth’s difference to anyone’s lives.

  And yet, according to the Evening Mail that Kate bought on the way home, most people thought it admirable of the King of England to come and see what Birmingham had gone through. The reporter said that he was touched and also amazed by the courage and resilience of the people against such tremendous odds, and Kate warmed to him when she read those words.

  He visited the Vickers factory where they made the Spitfires and Lancasters, and Kynoch’s where they made the bombs and bullets, and he insisted on getting out of the car as they drove through Aston. There were hordes of cheering people standing waiting for him, and when the crowd saw what he was doing they cheered all the louder. Spontaneously, people began singing the National Anthem, and George VI stood to attention throughout. Then he thanked them all and began to walk through the crowds and talk to the people.

  Even through the grainy newsprint of the Evening Mail that night the excitement his visit generated was obvious and, thought Kate, not a zombie in sight. However tired they were, the visit from the King seemed to lift everyone’s spirits. ‘Look, they are holding babies and young children up to see him,’ Kate said to Sally in amazement as they both examined the paper.

  Sally said, ‘I wish I’d seen him in real life, and it would have been great to have actually spoken to him. Look what the reporter said about his kind, brown eyes, and how they clouded over when he saw the damage inflicted and listened to the tales the people told him; and because of it he made an unscheduled visit to a rest centre, like he really seemed to care.’

  ‘He maybe does,’ Kate said. ‘He’s as helpless as the rest of us to do anything about it, though, and can you imagine the unholy flap when he visited a rest centre almost on the spur of the moment?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sally said with a grin. ‘Royals aren’t supposed to do that, and it probably was a headache for the detectives and that, but at least he saw things as they really are.’

  There were no further raids after the one on 11 December and yet Kate looked forward to a second wartime Christmas with little enthusiasm. There was even less in the shops to buy, and trying to find anything even the slightest bit festive was fraught with problems.

  She didn’t bother with any decorations or fetch in the battered tree she had put in the shed outside, because there seemed little point. She and Sally would be having their Christmas dinner at the Masons’ house anyway. Gillian, Derek’s wife, had been asked too, and Martin got a spot of leave as well. Kate guessed it was embarkation leave, but she was unable to ask him because Mary had declared that there should be no war talk for that day at least and she respected that.

  Frank had contacts and had been able to get hold of a large chicken. Kate thought it the most succulent she had tasted in a long time. She might have felt guilty about it, until Frank told her he had grown all the vegetables they were eating in the garden he had dug over.

  The food, and the wine that Martin produced, certainly helped the mood around the table that day and it was Martin who proposed the toast to absent friends. There were so many – David and Nick and Derek – and Kate felt a lump in her throat as she raised her glass and thought in particular of Phil. But she pushed her sadness away because that day wasn’t the time for sorrow.

  In fact, Martin was in the mood for tale-telli
ng; Kate liked him and certainly admired his ready wit. She hadn’t realized what a natural storyteller he’d become, and she listened as he regaled the family with one tale after the other and kept them all laughing.

  The dinner things were cleared away and washed up in good time so they could all listen to the King’s Speech on the wireless. It seemed more pertinent than usual as he had visited their city less than a fortnight before. And after it, everyone braved the cold to go for a bracing walk, returning as darkness was falling to hot toddies and mince pies.

  Much, much later, Sally and Kate walked home and Kate felt warmed by the good wishes of her friends. They had made the day she had been dreading extra-special and she knew she would hold on to the memory of it for a long, long time.

  Apart from a few raids between January and March 1941, it really did seem as if their ordeal was over. On the other hand, merchant ships continued to be sunk and people were encouraged to ‘Dig for Victory’.

  More and more parkland and ornamental gardens were dug up and tilled for vegetables, and Kate brought home more seeds for potatoes and carrots, which she and Sally planted to grow on the top of their Anderson shelter as they had the previous year. Despite being farmer’s daughters, neither had ever grown anything by themselves, and it had given them great satisfaction to eat the vegetables from their own garden, which they claimed tasted a hundred per cent better than anything you could buy in the greengrocer’s.

  People were also encouraged to ‘Make Do and Mend’ their clothes, and to be a ‘Squander Bug’ was to be the worst in the world. ‘And that is all very well if you had plenty to start with,’ Kate said. ‘But clothes have been hard to get for ages anyway – and what about the poor bombed-out people? They usually only have the clothes they are standing up in.’

  ‘I know, it’s awful,’ Sally said. ‘And it’s like the government and Birmingham council have been taken by surprise with these aerial attacks – and yet they must have expected them, else why did we have the blackout, and why were we told to put tape across our windows and have sandbagged shelters erected and cellars reinforced. What did they expect the people to do?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Good job a lot of the churches have understood that and have set up clothes banks and the like.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s great,’ Kate said. ‘I’m sure that everyone is very grateful, but it shouldn’t have been left up to them. Mind you, rationing of clothes will start in June anyway and they say that a person will have so many points to buy clothes and when those points are gone that will be it.’

  ‘I hope they give us enough to buy all that we’ll need,’ Sally said. She sighed as she went on: ‘I know that there are no raids at the moment and that’s good, but I think everything is ever so depressing. A few of the girls I work with who live over this way are thinking of going to dancing lessons at this place called Bromford Club in Church Road in Erdington and they wanted me to go with them.’

  ‘Are you going to go?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kate said. ‘It will do you good, and it’s something you never had time to do before with working so many evenings.’

  ‘You know why I can’t go.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Kate said. ‘I know that you loved Phil and still must miss him like mad, but you are only young, and locking yourself away in the house night after night is no way to go on. From what I knew of the man, he wouldn’t expect you to do that.’

  ‘You think so?’ Susie asked doubtfully.

  Kate gave an emphatic nod. ‘I don’t think, I know. Look, the last time David was home he actually said to me that if anything happened to him he didn’t want me to waste my life mourning him, but to live. I didn’t like him talking that way and it isn’t a thought I like to keep in my head, but it is the way he felt. Phil gave his life fighting for freedom, and if you mourn him all your days and never go beyond the door except to work or to the warden post, what was the point of his sacrifice?’

  ‘Oh, Kate, you make me feel so much better,’ Sally said. ‘And you are right. From odd things he let slip, he felt the same as David.’

  ‘It’s time to start taking up the threads of your life again,’ Kate said encouragingly. ‘And dancing lessons are a grand way to start. Tell your friends you will go.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sally. ‘I will.’

  However, the type of dancing that Sally learnt – which she often demonstrated at home – surprised Kate. ‘It’s not like when we learnt dancing,’ Kate said to Susie in the tram on the way home one evening in late March. ‘Though they have touched on the basics of the waltz and foxtrot, she said dances like those don’t go with the modern music.’

  ‘Good job we don’t go to the dances any more then,’ Susie said. ‘We might be right out of our depth.’

  ‘We’d probably pick it up,’ Kate said. ‘The music she is talking about is only the kind of big band stuff that we used to love and, as I remember, you could do an energetic quickstep to a lot of that. Now, they do things called the swing, and kangaroo hop – and her favourite of all, the jitterbug, is fairly wild apparently.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll coerce the boys into taking us to a dance the next leave they have,’ Susie said. ‘And we will see for ourselves.’

  ‘Um, maybe,’ Kate said. ‘I just don’t feel right going without the men.’

  ‘Not to a dance, no,’ Susie said. ‘But there is no need for us to go into decline either. Now the raids have stopped and we have some sort of rota in place for ARP duties, what’s to stop us going to the cinema once a week?’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose,’ Kate said. ‘In fact, I would really like that.’

  ‘How about tonight then?’ Susie said. ‘The Philadelphia Story is on at the Plaza.’

  ‘Yes, that will be great,’ Kate said. ‘And we must start going down the Bull Ring as well.’

  ‘We could do that tomorrow if you like,’ Susie said. ‘There’s always a special buzz to it of a Saturday. Tell you what, after Easter we will take stock of our lives again.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate said, for Easter was only a fortnight away. ‘Most people have New Year’s resolutions, but we will have Easter resolutions. It’s a much better time of year, with the nights drawing out and some warmth in the sun and that makes everything more hopeful.’

  When the sirens screamed out on 9 April at just after half past nine at night, Kate and Sally, and in fact, most Brummies, were a bit blasé about it, but when the strains of the sirens died away, there was the rumble of many planes in the air and Kate sighed as her eyes met Sally’s. ‘Oh, God! Seems like here we go again,’ Sally said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate said, digging out their uniforms, which were hung up in the cupboard under the stairs. ‘I really thought he would leave us alone now. We’d sort of had our turn.’

  ‘Huh, he’s done this before,’ Sally said as she struggled into her uniform. ‘Easing off on the raids and then hitting you with a big one.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said as she fastened up her steel-capped boots. ‘And I know what a bloody nuisance it is.’ She plucked their tin hats from the hook behind the door. The planes were right above them now and they heard the sticks of incendiaries plummeting down and the whistle of the first bomb.

  ‘Ready?’ Kate said.

  Sally gave a grimace as she said, ‘I suppose as ready as I ever will be. Let’s go.’

  It was soon apparent that this was no light skirmish, but an attack reminiscent of the raids in October and November. Most of the bombs flew over their heads, but they heard them explode not that far away. ‘Aston seems to be getting it again,’ Sally remarked, and Kate felt her stomach contract in sympathy for the people who had already suffered grievously.

  A little later a call came in for help in the city centre, where the firemen were almost overwhelmed with the fires, many of which were out of control. The three girls volunteered immediately because they had been shocked by how much of the city had alread
y been destroyed and they were willing to help save the rest of it. They weren’t the only ones to feel this way and a truck took the cluster of girls in, but the driver explained that he could only take them as far as the fire station on the outskirts of the city centre because of the state of the roads.

  Outside, though it was after midnight, the crackling fires made it more than light enough to see the planes, droning with their unmistakable intermittent engine noise and flying in formation, like menacing black beetles. Kate looked up and saw two planes caught in the beam of the arc lights raking the sky. Immediately the ack-ack guns spat into the air, but the plane had released the bombs and the girls threw themselves to the floor as one landed with a stupendous crash and then another and then another.

  The bomber made off for the city centre as they struggled to their feet, coughing as the dust hit their throats, and the air reeked with the stink of cordite and the smoke that swirled in front of them. They heard the unmistakable sound of falling masonry, and as they reached Steelhouse Lane only moments later, they saw where the bombs had made their mark, for there were big craters in the road. ‘They’ve hit the police station,’ Sally said. ‘All the windows are gone.’

  ‘And they have got the hospital too,’ Kate said. ‘Look, a whole corner of it has collapsed.’

  They all gazed in horror for a moment, for part of the Casualty department at the hospital where Susie had been just a few short months ago was now just a mound of rubble. Doctors, nurses and waiting patients had already begun moving it brick by brick and the girls joined in to help, while ringing bells announced the arrival of ambulances bringing injured people who probably needed fairly urgent treatment.

  It was depressing work, for there were very few survivors pulled from that wreckage; most were either already dead or very badly injured, and that included doctors and nurses as well as patients.