by Annie Groves
‘Sylvia, you’re only sixteen; Lance is close to thirty. You’re too young to get married.’ Rosie didn’t want to upset her by suggesting that marriage was probably the last thing on Lance’s mind, but at the same time she felt that she had to try to warn her.
However, to her dismay, Sylvia tossed her head and said, ‘Well, as to that, Lance has already promised that he will wed me, so there.’
The door opened, causing Sylvia to give Rosie a warning look as Clara came in.
‘You’d better go,’ she told Rosie, ‘just in case our dad does come back, otherwise we’ll be for it – me included for letting you see our Sylvia. Has she told you that he’s said that she’s not to go back to the shop?’ she asked as she left Sylvia in the parlour and escorted Rosie to the front door.
Rosie nodded. ‘I’ll tell Mrs Verey.’
As shocked as she was by Sylvia’s father’s violence towards his daughter, she was equally shocked by what Sylvia had done. What was it about women like Sylvia and her mother that led them down the path towards the wrong men? Sylvia was young and naïve enough to believe that Lance really would marry her, but her mother already had a husband and from all accounts had been around the block…
An hour later, when she let herself into the cold kitchen of her own home, her mother’s behaviour was on Rosie’s mind again. On the cold air of the empty room she could smell quite plainly the strong smell of the Brylcreem used by her mother’s lover – she had smelled it that night she had discovered them.
How could her mother continue to behave so badly? Rosie wondered miserably. She hardly saw her now that Christine was working nights, and Rosie couldn’t banish the suspicion that her mother had chosen to work those hours not so much for the money as the opportunity it could give her to have the house to herself whilst Rosie was at work.
‘I’m lonely, Rosie,’ she had defended her actions when Rosie had challenged her. ‘And Dennis is good company. He makes me laugh and I have fun with him.’
Fun! How could her mother even think about having fun when brave men like her father were losing their lives every day, fighting to protect their country and those they loved?
Tears stung Rosie’s eyes as she heated up what was left of the soup.
Rosie had just got off the bus on Wavertree Road, when she heard the warning wail of the air-raid siren. Automatically she looked up towards the sky, crisscrossed now with the dazzling bright glare of the searchlights. She was close enough to her aunt’s to feel it would be safer to hurry there and join her in the small shelter she shared with her neighbours, installed at the bottom of their garden. Breaking into a run, Rosie prayed not to see the dreaded shape of the green parachutes attached to the deadly bombs the Germans had started to drop on the city at the beginning of the month.
When she reached her aunt’s house she was surprised to be told that her father’s sister had no intention of going to any air-raid shelter.
‘Unhygienic, that’s what they are,’ she sniffed as she let Rosie in and instructed her to take off her shoes so that she didn’t tread any dirt onto her pristine floors.
‘But, Aunt Maude, it isn’t safe for you to stay here when there’s a bombing raid on,’ Rosie protested, mindful of how concerned her father would be if he knew the risk his sister was taking.
‘I’ve got me cupboard under the stairs. That’s plenty safe enough for me. Besides, the Germans won’t drop any bombs here in Wavertree. It’s the docks they’re after,’ she told Rosie almost complacently, as if the Germans wouldn’t dare bomb somewhere she lived.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d be coming so I hope you’ve already had your tea, because I’ve nothing to spare. You’d better come into the kitchen.’
It was just as well she was used to her aunt’s peremptory manner and hadn’t been expecting a warm welcome, Rosie acknowledged ruefully.
‘So what’s this I’ve been hearing about that mother of yours?’ her aunt demanded as soon as Rosie was sitting down – in the chair furthest from the fire that heated the back boiler, Rosie noticed, as she tried not to shiver as her aunt blocked the heat from her.
Rosie tensed, her heart sinking. Surely it wasn’t possible for Aunt Maude to have discovered what her mother was doing.
‘A fine thing, her taking on night work. It isn’t respectable! Not for a married woman. What’s going to happen when my poor brother comes home on leave and needs looking after if she’s out all night at some parachute factory?’
So it was her mother working nights that Aunt Maude was objecting to. Rosie felt shaky with relief.
‘Mum is just doing her bit for the war effort, Aunt Maude,’ she shouted out to her aunt above the noise from the bombers overhead and the fire from the ack-ack guns protecting the city. ‘Our men need the parachutes the factory is making.’ Another time Rosie admitted that it would have amused her to see the way her aunt was struggling to find some way of criticising her mother whilst refraining from denying that parachutes were badly needed. But she wasn’t convinced her mother was doing it for the best motives herself.
‘I really think we ought to be in a proper shelter,’ Rosie told her aunt. ‘I’m surprised your air-raid warden hasn’t been round to tell you that.’
Every air-raid warden had a list of all those living in his area and was responsible for making sure they reported to their shelters.
‘Mr Dawson knows better than to try to tell me what to do,’ Aunt Maude responded sharply. ‘There’s no telling what a person might catch in one of those places.’
‘But you’ve got a shelter next door that you only share with your neighbours,’ Rosie pointed out.
‘I did have, but they have her cousin and her children billeted on them,’ her aunt sniffed disparagingly. ‘And they aren’t the Wavertree sort at all.’
Rosie gasped as several planes roared so low overhead that she actually ducked her head and then tensed as several seconds later they heard a tremendous explosion, which caused the china on her aunt’s kitchen dresser to rattle.
‘It will be the docks,’ her aunt declared, but Rosie wasn’t convinced. ‘It sounded much closer than that, Auntie.’
It was gone ten o’clock before the sound of the planes died away and Rosie finally felt it was safe enough for her to make her way home. Her aunt didn’t press her to stay, but, if she was honest with herself, Rosie decided she would feel safer taking refuge in one of the public shelters than staying with Aunt Maude.
Ten minutes later, as she reached Edge Hill and saw the extent of the damage caused by the bombs that had been dropped – not as her aunt had insisted on the docks but on the suburbs of the city – Rosie shivered in shocked disbelief at the carnage. Rescue workers of every kind, fire engines and ambulances clustered around what had once been whole streets and buildings, whilst overhead the searchlights probed the sky.
‘Here you, miss…there’s a shelter over there. Get yourself into it,’ an ARP warden called out sternly to Rosie when he saw her staring in shock at the heap of rubble from which several bodies had just been removed. Half blinded by a mixture of soot, dust and tears, Rosie followed his instructions, and made her way to the already full basement shelter beneath the Junior Technical College on Durning Road.
‘Just about room for one more little ’un in this section here,’ someone called out cheerily as Rosie gave an apologetic look in the direction of the female ARP warden taking people’s names.
‘There’s a chair here, love,’ she told Rosie, when Rosie had given her name and explained where she had been.
‘I don’t want to take it if someone else needs it,’ Rosie told her.
‘That’s all right,’ the other woman said. ‘It’s not normally like this here but some of the other shelters in the area caught it in the bombing raid so them as should have been there have been sent here, and we’ve had two tramloads drop on us as well. I’m Mrs Taft, by the way.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Rosie asked her.
Mrs Taft sm
iled at her. ‘Thanks, love. If you could keep an eye on some of the little ’uns and their mums, I’d be grateful. Get them having a singsong or something. It’s hard for mothers, having to keep getting their kiddies out of bed, and once one of them sets off crying all the others seem to start.’
Obediently Rosie did what she could to coax half a dozen crying youngsters to stop and ‘help’ her to sing a Christmas carol instead. Within a few minutes other children and some of the adults had joined in. When a man produced an accordion and started to play it, Mrs Taft gave Rosie a relieved look.
‘I knew you were the right sort,’ she told Rosie with a smile. ‘I’ll have a cuppa for you if you can just hang on for a while.’
Sharing the companionship of the public shelter was more comfortable than being at her aunt’s, Rosie acknowledged, and the time flew by as she made herself useful and discovered that somehow or other she seemed to have become Mrs Taft’s assistant.
‘Sounds like they’re back,’ Mrs Taft murmured to Rosie at one point as they both stopped what they were doing to listen to the throbbing sound of the engines of returning bombers. Silence fell as one by one others in the shelter tensed to listen with them. And then a baby cried and an elderly woman muttered a prayer and tugged on her rosary beads, and slowly the shelter began to hum with noise again.
‘It’s nearly bloody two o’clock,’ someone protested. ‘When are we going…’ The rest of his words were drowned out as an explosion ripped violently through the shelter, filling the air with choking dust and darkness.
As Rosie struggled to get to her feet she could hear people screaming and moaning.
‘The roof’s fallen in and we’re trapped!’ someone called out.
In the panic as people tried to find an exit, Rosie almost lost her balance when she bent down to pick up the child she could feel clinging to her legs. There was something soft and wet on the floor beside her and her stomach turned over as she realised that it was someone who had been badly injured. The child’s mother? Another child? It was too dark for her to see.
She turned to Mrs Taft, who was standing next to her. ‘There’s someone…’ she began, but the ARP warden shook her head.
‘Dead I’m afraid,’ she told her quietly. ‘I’ve just checked. You’re a sensible girl. I’m going to have to rely on you to keep calm and to help the mothers look after the little ones whilst I try to find a way out.’ Raising her voice, she called out, ‘Everyone, please keep calm.’
‘How can we when we’re going to drown?’ someone howled in fear. ‘I can feel water creeping up me legs…’
‘Those with small children, please pick them up to keep them above the level of the water.’
A young mother standing next to Rosie sobbed frantically, ‘I can only find one of my two. Where’s my Jenny…?’
‘The exits are all blocked,’ a man called out in panic.
It was almost impossible to move and the shelter lights had fused, but everyone was struggling to follow Mrs Taft’s example as she said steadily, ‘Let’s keep calm and try the emergency exits.’
‘We’ll never get out,’ someone cried, whilst Rosie’s heart contracted at the sounds of the wounded and dying they could hear from the other side of the wall dividing them from the main shelter.
‘Yes we will,’ Mrs Taft called back firmly. ‘They’ll get us out safe and sound.’
‘Oh Gawd, look, there’s a fire there in the main part of the shelter.’
Rosie froze as she looked towards the wall that divided the part of the shelter they were in from the main part, and sure enough she could just see the flames on the other side of it.
‘That’s where the school furnaces are,’ a man close at hand groaned. ‘If they’ve bin hit then we’re goners.’
The smell of the acrid smoke starting to pour into their part of the shelter reminded Rosie of her fire-watch practice, but it wasn’t possible for them to drop down to the floor beneath the smoke as she had been taught because of the water slowly filling the shelter and rising coldly up her legs. Everyone was pressing towards the emergency exits.
‘The emergency exits are jammed.’ The words were passed from one to another in an anguished whisper as people instinctively sought to keep calm whilst their hopes died.
Rosie hugged the small child she was holding. They would die together in here, strangers united by their inescapable fate. Then miraculously she heard Mrs Taft calling out, ‘I can see a light,’ and even more miraculously Rosie realised that the warden had found a window leading out of the shelter, which somehow had not been totally blocked by the falling debris that surrounded it.
Four men struggled through the press of people. One of them had a torch, which he flashed by the window until the rescue workers outside saw it.
Within an unbelievably short space of time, or so it seemed to Rosie, she was helping the children to climb to safety over the debris and out into the waiting arms of their rescuers. It was only when one of them cried out to Mrs Taft, ‘Nana,’ that she realised that the ARP warden’s daughter and grandchild were amongst those who had been trapped. At last it was Rosie’s own turn to be helped out into the freedom of the smoke-laden night air.
As she was led gently to where a group of WVS women were handing out blankets and tea, Rosie saw the pitiful sight of the small bodies being laid gently on the ground as they were removed from the main part of the building. Tears filled her eyes and splashed down her face.
‘That’s right, love,’ someone told her gently. ‘You ’ave a good cry.’
Although she insisted that she was all right, somehow or other Rosie ended up being taken to Mill Road Hospital to have what the WVS lady had described as ‘a nasty cut’ cleaned and dressed. She had no recollection of receiving the wound, which had sliced open the upper part of her arm, ruining her clothes, but thankfully it was not deep enough to require stitching.
Daylight was just beginning to lighten the sky when Rosie, feeling faint and queasy, bumped into someone on her way back to the hospital reception. Firm hands took hold of her shoulders and a familiar voice exclaimed worriedly, ‘Rosie!’
Numbly she looked up and saw Rob Whittaker gazing back at her.
‘What’s happened to you?’ he demanded anxiously.
‘She’s one of them they brought in from the Junior Technical College that was bombed on Durning Road,’ the nurse who had dressed her wound answered for her. ‘She’s had a nasty cut on her arm but she’ll be all right. Not like some poor buggers. Over three hundred dead, so I’ve heard – kiddies and all.’
Rosie’s stomach heaved as she remembered the sounds she had tried to blot out.
‘Come on, let’s get you home,’ Rob told her gently.
‘You can’t. You’re on duty,’ Rosie protested.
‘I finished my shift an hour ago. I was just helping out.’
Rosie didn’t have the energy to object, and besides, she wasn’t sure if she could manage to get home without his help. Her whole body seemed to have gone strangely weak and her arm was now throbbing agonisingly.
‘There was something. Someone on the floor at my feet,’ Rosie whispered, shivering as Rob guided her out into the pre-dawn cold. ‘Mrs Taft said that they were dead…They must have been standing right next to me…’
‘That’s how it happens sometimes, Rosie. If it’s got your number on it then it just has.’
Somewhere in the city she could hear the sound of a church bell. ‘It’s Sunday morning.’
‘Yes,’ Rob confirmed
‘Sunday morning and all those people dead,’ Rosie told him, and promptly burst into tears.
Very gently Rob took her in his arms, holding her carefully. Her hair and her clothes were covered in dust from the explosion, and the tip of her nose was pink with cold, but as he looked down at her, Rob Whittaker thought that he had never seen a more beautiful girl.
‘So what’s up with Sylvia then, Rosie?’ Enid asked briskly. It was Monday morning, and although it was only
a few hours since her ordeal, Rosie had still gone in to work, the bandage on her arm concealed by the sleeve of her sweater. She didn’t want to have to talk about the events of the day before and relive the trauma of what she had seen.
‘Her dad found out about her seeing Lance, and since she told him that I was the one to encourage her to date him, he’s told her she’s got to find another job and that she can’t come back here,’ Rosie answered.
‘She blamed you? Cheeky young madam. Well, I’d better go and tell Mrs Verey that she isn’t going to be coming back. Not that she’ll be missed that much. Workshy she was, and no mistake.’
Rosie watched her leave the workroom. The pain in her arm had eased off slightly, but she still blushed when she thought about the fool she had made of herself, crying all over Rob Whittaker like that. But Rob had been kind and understanding, and somehow or other Rosie had let him persuade her to go to the cinema with him on Wednesday night.
The shop was quiet with it being a Monday, but by dinner time Rosie’s head had begun to ache unpleasantly.
‘That were awful about the Technical College, weren’t it?’ she heard one of the girls commenting as she unwrapped her sandwiches, carefully so that the paper could be reused. Everyone was getting used now to having to ‘make do and mend’, as the government slogan exhorted them to do. ‘My sister’s boyfriend’s uncle was one of them helping to get them out. He…’
Inside her head Rosie could see the images she had been trying to blot out. People so dreadfully injured, just standing there in silence, covered in their own blood, one little girl who had lost her arm, other children, their little bodies lifeless, their mothers crouching over them, holding them, a woman sitting there nursing her dead baby, her eyes wide and blank, two young children miraculously unharmed sitting either side of their obviously dead mother. And then all the bodies, on the ground after they had been recovered. Bodies everywhere, or so it had seemed to Rosie.
She jumped up in agitation begging, ‘Please don’t talk about it…’
