by Annie Groves
‘There’s a shelter at the other end of the street,’ Rob began, but Rosie shrank back as he tried to grab hold of her hand and hurry her to safety.
‘Rob, I can’t,’ she told him. ‘Not after…’
The rattle and whine of the bombs being dropped on the docks made it impossible for them to speak, so instead, Rob hurried her into the nearest doorway. A warehouse, receiving a direct hit, went up in flames, followed by another, and then shockingly up ahead of them the market itself suddenly took the full force of an exploding bomb. Rosie cried out, covering her mouth with her hand, her whole body trembling whilst, through the screams and shouts and the smoke, the smell of roasting poultry and duck filled the evening air.
‘Bloody hell, there won’t be no Christmas dinner for us now,’ a woman standing in the next doorway to them grumbled.
‘Come on,’ Rob urged, and somehow or other, against the backdrop of the noise from the bombers overhead, the ack-ack guns valiantly defending the city and the dull deadly thump of the exploding bombs, they managed to make their way back to their own local air-raid shelter.
‘Get inside, quickly,’ Rob begged, but Rosie shook her head.
‘I can’t. I’m on fire-watch duty tonight. Don’t worry about me, though; I’ll be fine…’ She could see the anxiety in his eyes. ‘Go,’ she repeated. ‘You’re on duty, remember…’
Rob nodded, and then before she could stop him, he leaned forward and pressed a clumsy kiss on her lips.
He had gone before she could remonstrate with him, leaving her to take up her position on the flat roof of a nearby building along with her co-fire watcher, an elderly neighbour, Mick O’Brien, who had served in the First World War. He rarely spoke about what had happened to him then, but Rosie had heard her father say that those who had gone through the First World War had had a much worse time of it than they were doing now.
‘Jerry’s got it in for us tonight,’ he told Rosie grimly as they both kept watch on the streets below them, ready to call out a warning to those waiting below should they spot any incendiaries.
Rosie gasped as a bomb hit the chemical factory on Hanover Street, resulting in an explosion so loud that it numbed her ears and left her unable to hear anything for several seconds.
‘Ruddy hell,’ Mick swore. ‘That felt like they’d blown the heart right out of the city.’
In the distance a shower of falling incendiary bombs caught St George’s Hall but none of the bombs was landing close to their own area until suddenly they both heard the low thrum of a plane and then saw the incendiaries falling from it.
‘They’ve got the church,’ Mick called out. ‘They’ve got Holy Cross…I’ve seen it all now. Come on.’
Rosie needed no second bidding to scramble down after him and hurry towards the church, along with others who had seen the bombs falling.
It only took them a matter of minutes to reach Great Crosshall Street but by the time they got there the church was already well alight.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ Rosie heard someone breathe close to her as they all stood and stared in shocked disbelief at the old church. Then John Kinsella from Standish Street yelled out, ‘Come on, don’t just stand there!’ And everyone rushed forward to do what they could, whilst Father Doyle and Father Morrison stood there, tears running down their faces as the flames ravaged their beloved church.
They seemed to have been battling the heat and speed of the fires for ever before a fire crew finally arrived. Rosie turned round half expecting to see Rob come striding towards her whilst the man next to her said bitterly, ‘At bloody last.’
‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ the fireman nearest to them demanded tersely. ‘We’ve lost an engine and its crew on Roe Street. Hit a bomb crater in the road – eight men dead.’
Rosie trembled and almost lost her footing, someone calling out to her, ‘Watch out…’ Numbly she bent to take the bucket of water being passed to her along the human chain, endeavouring to save the church whilst she prayed that Rob hadn’t been part of the lost fire crew. Her heart felt like a dead weight inside her chest whilst a sense of doom tightened her skull until her head was pounding with a dull remorseless ache of foreboding. She couldn’t leave her post, though, not even though fresh bombs were falling and exploding all around them, not even when after what felt like hours of battling against the fires, the roof timbers finally gave way.
‘Get back. Get back, everyone,’ one of the fire team warned. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
John Kinsella, his face streaked with soot and tears, called out above the roar of the fires, ‘We’ve got to save the vestments and the sacrament whilst we can,’ before plunging into the church.
Rosie’s arms ached from passing the heavy buckets of water.
Another fire engine arrived and, unbelievably, through the smoke she saw Rob walking towards her.
‘Rob…’ Half running and half stumbling she hurried towards him, not resisting when he caught her in his arms, as she sobbed, ‘You’re alive. Thank God…oh thank God.’
He held her tightly, rocking her in his arms whilst she laughed and cried, light-headed with exhaustion and relief.
‘We couldn’t save the church,’ she told him. ‘We tried but we couldn’t…’ She was crying more than laughing now.
‘No, I know.’
Something in the sombre starkness of Rob’s voice made her push back to look up at him.
‘Something’s happened,’ she guessed. ‘What is it? Tell me…’
‘Rosie…’
‘What is it? Tell me.’
‘The street’s caught it,’ Rob told her gruffly. ‘A parachute mine.’
‘The street? Our street, you mean…?’
There was something in the way he was looking at her, a mixture of pain and pity, that caught at her heart and stopped its beat, and immediately she knew.
‘The house,’ she whispered. ‘It’s hit our house.’ She whirled away from him, catching him off guard, and started to run whilst he ran after her, calling her name. The cobbles were slippery with a mixture of water, smoke and soot, and several times she nearly lost her balance but finally she rounded the familiar corner and then skidded to a halt. In the light from the torches of the heavy-duty damage team she could see the empty space where her home had once been. The crater made by the bomb had spewed out bricks and roof timbers into the street, the force of the blast tearing the roof off two other houses, shattering windows, to leave the street full of broken glass and the side of another house without an entire wall so that the rooms gaped open.
‘Rosie, don’t go any closer,’ Rob shouted behind her, catching her up and reaching out to pull her away. But it was too late. Rosie had already seen what the men were removing from the wreckage.
‘No! No!’ she screamed as she pushed Rob out of the way and, ignoring everyone, ran to where the men had placed the lifeless bundle of what looked like rags on the ground. Only it wasn’t a bundle of rags, Rosie recognised, it was her mother. Her mother!
Rosie kneeled down in the street next to her. Her mother was covered in soot but there wasn’t a single mark to be seen on her face once Rosie had gently cleaned it with her handkerchief. Her eyes were open wide and staring into nothing. Rosie’s hand trembled as she closed them, and tried to ignore the jagged wound she could see on the side of her head.
‘Rosie…don’t…’ Rob begged her, but Rosie ignored him.
‘She wouldn’t have felt anything,’ one of the rescue workers tried to comfort her. Rosie couldn’t say anything. Her throat had closed up too tightly around her pain. Several yards away in the rubble where the men were still working she could see something that looked like a male hand and an arm, a wedding ring gleaming on one finger. She stood up and started to walk towards it, only Rob wouldn’t let her, and started dragging her away.
‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ she demanded tonelessly. ‘He was with her. She died with him…’
‘Rosie. I’m sorry…’
Her
mother had died with her lover. If it hadn’t been for her affair with him she would probably still be alive. Pain and anger tore at Rosie.
A knot of women and children were already gathering in the street and Rob guided her towards them. A woman in a WVS uniform came up to them and started telling them that they would be able to get a cup of tea and somewhere to sleep for the night at the local school where the WVS had set up a temporary shelter for those made homeless by the bombs.
‘I can’t go,’ Rosie told her politely. ‘I need to stay here with my mother. My father’s away at sea, you see, and I’m all she’s got.’
‘That’s all right, dear. You do not need to worry about all that now. You go with Gracie here,’ the WVS woman told her in a kind but no-nonsense voice.
‘I’ve got to go back on duty,’ Rob told her. ‘But I could try and come back?’
Rosie shook her head. ‘You go. I’ll be all right…’
Words. Just words…She was saying them but they meant nothing. All she could think about was her mother. All she could see inside her head was her mother’s lifeless body and that hand and arm betraying them both.
‘Right, dear, name and address, please?’
Rosie tried to focus on what she was being asked by the uniformed WVS woman, smiling patiently at her, but the noise from the press of people filling the church hall, combined with her own shock, made it almost impossible for her to answer.
‘It’s Rosie,’ she managed eventually. ‘Rosie Price.’
‘And your address?’
‘It’s number 12…’ Rosie couldn’t speak for the salt taste of her tears burning the back of her throat as she tried to swallow them back.
‘She’s from Gerard Street,’ the WVS helper who had brought her to the shelter supplied. ‘Parachute bomb…’ she leaned closer to the desk and murmured something so quietly that the only word Rosie caught was ‘fatality…’
‘Betty here will take you to get a cup of tea. Have you got someone you can go to tonight?’
Rosie closed her eyes and squeezed back her tears. Once she would have been able to answer immediately that she had close friends to turn to, knowing that the Grenellis would have taken her in and cared for her; helped her, comforted her and loved her – once – in what seemed to be a different lifetime now. She shook her head.
‘I should have left a message at the house for my dad,’ she burst out anxiously. ‘He won’t know. He might think I have been killed…’ What a dreadful place this was, she couldn’t help thinking, packed tightly with people, some of them wearing bomb-damaged clothes, others clutching unwieldy pillowcases and even sacks full of what Rosie assumed must be their personal possessions, all of them looking grey-faced and in despair. They were, she recognised, the new homeless of Liverpool, and now she too was one of them.
‘The authorities will deal with that entirely, dear. You can stay here tonight. Betty will find you a blanket. If your papers were in the house…’
Automatically Rosie reached for the bag she was wearing over her fire-watch siren suit.
‘They’re in there, are they? That’s good.’
Numbly Rosie allowed herself to be led away by the shy-looking young woman who had come over to her, suddenly aware for the first time of the reality of her own situation. Her papers and her ration book were in her bag, but the only clothes she had left in the world were those she was wearing.
She was taken to a large store at the back of the hall where more WVS women were handing out blankets and other necessities to the line of people waiting patiently to be attended to.
‘You wait here, and I’ll go and get you a cup of tea,’ Betty promised her, disappearing and returning within several minutes with a mug of tea, a couple of plain digestives and a fig roll.
Rosie hadn’t realised how cold and thirsty she was until she held the mug between her icy hands. A young woman behind her in the queue was trying to calm her crying children, and as soon as she had drunk her tea Rosie turned round to her and asked if there was anything she could do to help. She needed to do something – anything – to take her mind off the pain.
The young mother gave her a grateful smile and introduced herself as Daisy Oakes.
‘This is the second time we’ve been bombed out in as many weeks,’ she told Rosie in a tired voice. ‘The kids should have been evacuated and me wi’ ’em but my husband wanted us to stay ’ere. I’m not staying for Hitler to have a third go at us, though.’ She shivered. ‘First thing Monday morning I’m off to me mum’s in Cheshire.
‘Have they asked you if you’ve got your ration book with you yet?’ Daisy asked her. ‘Because if they haven’t, if you tell them no you’ll get two weeks’ worth of coupons. My, you have got a good touch with the little ’uns,’ she admired, when the two older children stopped crying to listen to the little story Rosie was making up for them.
Rosie was only too glad to have something to distract her from the terrible events of the evening.
Eventually they reached the head of the queue and were given clean blankets and told that they must return them when they left the shelter.
‘If I was you, as soon as it comes light, I’d go and mek sure that if there’s anything to be salvaged from your home, you’re the one who gets it,’ Daisy warned Rosie. ‘I wished I’d done that meself, when I saw one of me old neighbours wearing me best coat, I can tell you, and her kiddies decked out in my little ’uns’ stuff. You can put your trust in no one these days. Mind you, if you can’t salvage nothing then the WVS will do what they can to help you. They kitted me and the girls out a treat.’
Rosie gave her new friend a wan smile as they made their way past all those who had already secured their blankets and their spot for what was left of the night, until they could find a bit of free floor space.
‘If you haven’t got anywhere to go, then they’ll try and billet you with someone, but from what I’ve heard it can take for ever to get a place on account of them in war effort work taking priority.’
The all clear had finally gone but Rosie knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. All she could think about was her mother. Sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin, and her blanket wrapped around her, fighting back the burn of her tears, she whispered her mother’s name, wishing she had told her she loved her one last time.
FOURTEEN
The last thing Rosie really wanted to do was to go back to the street that had once been home, but she knew that she had to do so, so after a breakfast of tea and a bacon sandwich provided by the WVS, which she somehow managed to eat, she handed back her blanket and steeled herself to make her way home.
A pall of smoke and dust hung over the city, and here and there a thicker, more acrid smoke was still rising from bombed-out buildings. Averting her gaze from where the heavy rescue teams were still working to remove debris, Rosie was suddenly confronted by the sight of the church they had all worked so hard to try to save. Its roof gone and its Gothic beauty destroyed, there was still something about its defiant stance even in its destruction that brought the sharp sting of tears to Rosie’s eyes. She found herself joining the quiet throng of worshippers making their way into the burned-out church where its priests were preparing to hold Mass and hear the confessions of their congregation. Once the Italian families from the area would have been here to share everyone’s grief at the destruction of their church. Rosie thought sadly of the many processions she and Bella had walked in together, which had brought them to this church. Now the church, like her friendship with Bella, had been damaged beyond repair.
Keeping to the back of the church, Rosie made her own prayers. Despite the dreadful things that had happened during the bombing raid, there was somehow a sense of calm and peace here this morning, and a sense of unity too amongst those who had come, many of them the same people who had striven so unceasingly, risking their own safety, to save the building.
When the service was over it was hard for her to drag herself away from the church and its atmosp
here of faith and strength and make her way back towards what had been her home.
The street was busy with inhabitants whose houses were still standing but who had had their windows blown out by the blast, and who were still trying to clean up the broken glass. Several of them stopped what they were doing to offer Rosie their sympathy.
‘’Ere, Rosie, come inside, love. I’ve got summat for you,’ Mrs Harris from three doors down called out to Rosie, ushering her into her own pin-neat home whilst cautioning her to ‘mind all the broken glass’. ‘I was right sorry to hear about your ma, Rosie. I know there was them round here that didn’t hold with what was going on.’ Rosie winced. ‘But your ma was allus a good neighbour to me. I saw her goin’ in with that chap of hers many a time.’
Anger joined the desolation Rosie was already feeling.
‘I went out this morning and I found this lot,’ her neighbour continued, producing two pillowcases filled to the brim with clothes. ‘There’s not much. Them lads from the council said that everything will have been blown to bits, and what I did manage to find will need a good wash on account of it being covered in soot and dust.’
Rosie thanked her, blinking away her tears as she stared at the pillowcases. She could see the familiar sleeve of her mother’s dressing gown dangling from one of the cases. An acrid smell of soot and dust and burned cloth emerged from the bundle.
‘You’ll have your work cut out, after what’s happened, ’cos there’ll be the funeral to sort out and all that. If you need a hand with anything you just let me know. I’ve buried me husband as well as me own mam and dad, so I know what it’s all about.’
Rosie remembered that the WVS had said something to her about helping her to deal with the formalities of her mother’s death.
‘You’ll be moving in with your auntie now, I suppose. Young Rob Whittaker is going to miss you.’
Rosie stood stock-still. After the shock of last night, she’d given no thought to where she would go, where she would live. There was no way in the world she wanted to live with her aunt – and no way her aunt would want her.
