Kitabı oku: «The Heart of the Family»
ANNIE GROVES
The Heart of the Family
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2009
Copyright © Annie Groves 2009
Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007265909
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007322695
Version: 2016-12-15
Dedication
For my readers who have so kindly and generously supported me. I hope you are all enjoying reading about the Campion family as much as I am enjoying telling their story.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
PART TWO
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
PART ONE
ONE
Wednesday 7 May 1941
It had just gone midnight. Conversation between the occupants of Jean Campion’s comfortable and homely kitchen slowed and stuttered, then died.
Jean’s twin daughters, Sasha and Lou, Katie, her billetee and her son, Luke’s, girlfriend, looked at one another.
Jean’s husband, Sam, who had been out working since eight o’clock that morning helping to remove what could be cleared of the devastation left by Hitler’s six nights of ferocious bombing, slumped in his chair, looking defeated. All of them were waiting for the dreaded and now familiar sound of the air-raid siren, warning them that Luftwaffe bombers were approaching the city, bringing yet another night’s destruction and death.
The tension caused by the heavy bombing of Liverpool had taken hold of them just as it had all those who were now virtually trapped in a city cut off from the rest of the country, its buildings destroyed, its people killed and maimed, a helpless victim now waiting for the deathblow.
Jean looked at the twins. They had been very subdued since Sasha had been rescued on Saturday night after becoming trapped in a bomb site. The young UXB soldier who had taken Sasha’s place beneath the bomb so that she could be rescued without the device being disturbed had become a hero to the whole family.
Without his bravery Jean was convinced that there would have been only one of the twins here now. Her heart missed a beat. She mustn’t think of what could have been. She must concentrate instead on praying that they would all survive what was happening now. The twins were growing up. Soon they would be sixteen – young women and not merely girls any more. Sixteen and on the brink of womanhood with their adult lives stretching ahead of them, if they survived Hitler’s onslaught on Liverpool.
Just gone midnight. If the bombers were coming then they would know soon. The siren had sounded around midnight for the last three nights.
Jean thought of her two eldest children – Luke in the army and stationed at nearby Seacombe barracks; her daughter Grace in her final year as a trainee nurse and on duty tonight in one of the city’s busiest and most vulnerable hospitals – and she prayed as she had done every night since the war had started that those she loved would all be safe.
Surreptitiously Katie looked at her watch. Nearly half-past midnight. Would tonight be yet another spent in the air-raid shelter, trying not to be afraid for Luke, whom she loved so much and whom she knew, as a serving soldier whose unit was on home defence duties, would be in far more danger than they were?
Jean couldn’t bear the tension any more. ‘I’ll put the kettle on—’ she started to say, and then stopped as it began: the shrill urgent call to protect themselves, the sound of which gripped a person by the throat and around the heart, a shuddering shocking exhalation of noise that warned of the terrible unbelievable horror that brought death raining down from the night sky.
They exchanged helpless, anguished looks.
‘Here we go again,’ Sam announced unnecessarily. ‘I’ll walk you down to the shelter and then I’d better go and report for fire-watching duty.’
‘But, Sam, you’ve worked from morning to night for the last six nights,’ Jean protested, as they all picked up the bundles containing the sleeping bags and everything else they would need for yet another night in the air-raid shelter.
‘Aye, well, at least I can still work, not like some,’ Sam replied grimly.
Jean felt her heart bump shakily. On Sunday morning, in the aftermath of Saturday night’s heavy bombing, two of his colleagues had been badly injured when a building had collapsed on top of them.
Fortunately, the shelter was only at the end of the road. Ash Grove nestled comfortably between the top end of Edge Hill, with its aspirational working-class inhabitants, and the bottom end of middle-class Wavertree, lying further inland to the east, and was far enough away from the docks and the city centre not to attract the main attention of the Luftwaffe. But not so far that the Campion family couldn’t in happier times walk down to the ferry in under half an hour when they wanted to visit Jean’s sister, Vi, and her family who lived across the water in Wallasey. And certainly close enough for Luke to take that same ferry home from the Seacombe barracks, which also lay on the other side of the river from the city.
Once they were outside in the street they were able to see what the blacked-out windows had protected them from.
Below the gentle rise that lifted Edge Hill and Wavertree above the city proper, the probing beams of the anti-aircraft batteries revealed ghoulish images of gutted buildings, still smoking from the fires of earlier bombing raids.
They had reached the shelter now. Sam gave Jean a swift hug and, unusually for such an undemonstrative man, turned to hug both the twins, then placed his hand on Katie’s arm and gave it a small squeeze before standing to one side to watch as they all filed into the shelter.
Jean prayed, as she always did, that her husband would return from his work safe and unharmed.
‘Not again.’
Grace heard the note of suppressed panic in the voice of the probationer who was new on the ward, and told her calmly, as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘I think Mr Williams has finished with his bottle now. Go and collect it from him and take it to the sluice room, will you? When you’ve done that come back and help me get the patients ready to take down to the shelter.’
After pausing to check that her calming words had had the right effect, Grace moved swiftly towards the end of the ward to start securing those patients who had to stay put. Straps hung down at the sides of the beds, ready to fasten over the patients when the siren went off, and the recent spate of attacks now ensured that everyone moved automatically to do what had to be done – even the new probationer, once Grace had calmed her fear.
Grace loved working on men’s surgical. The patients were for the most part absolute darlings – although of course there was always the exception, like her own cousin Charlie, who had been brought in on Saturday night suffering from concussion. Charlie was well on the way to recovery now, but not quite well enough to go home, and he was making a thorough nuisance of himself, expecting special treatment because his father was a member of Wallasey’s town council, and flirting with the other nurses, despite the fact that he was engaged and due to get married in June.
Now, as she paired up with the probationer so that they could secure the patients, Grace reflected that routine and having a job to do, as she had quickly learned, had a way of calming the nerves and making a person focus on necessities instead of worrying about what might happen – or thinking about the terrible raid three days ago when the hospital had been bombed, and staff and patients killed and injured.
Another bloody air raid. Determinedly Charlie avoided the look he knew his cousin Grace would be sending him. After all, why should he risk his own life pushing ruddy beds around, like those patients who were daft enough to get out of their beds to help the nursing staff? In this world a chap had to put himself first if he wanted to survive.
Whilst he might have been too badly concussed to be able to remember much of what had happened to him when he had originally been brought into the hospital, once he had started to recover, the memory of what had happened that night had come back to him. Naturally, Charlie had then been quick to edit the truth to show himself in the best possible light. In his version of events, the beating inflicted on him by the ex-soldier-turned-petty criminal who had been blackmailing him had become a tale of him being set upon by some unknown men, no doubt intent on robbing him when he had been on an errand of mercy to see an old comrade.
His mother had been too relieved that he was safe to ask too many questions, and Dougie Richards, the blackmailer, certainly wasn’t going to call his bluff, since he had been killed by the bomb that that been dropped on the pub he had made his headquarters.
As for the girl with whom he had spent the night, as an engaged-to-be-married man Charlie wasn’t going to tell his mother or anyone else about her, was he? As he joined the exodus of people hurrying down the stairs to the safety of the air-raid shelters, Charlie shrugged dismissively. What a chap did with that kind of girl had nothing to do with the respectable things in life, like getting engaged and married. The girl he’d bedded lived in a different world from the one inhabited by women like his mother and his fiancée, and those two worlds never could and never would meet. That was understood.
Pity he’d left his battledress jacket behind, though. If the discharge he was angling for, so that he could leave the army and return home to Wallasey to work for his father, didn’t come soon, he could end up having to fork out for a replacement. He’d got far better things to spend his money on than a piece of army kit he wasn’t going to wear.
Everyone who’d heard what had happened to him said how lucky he’d been to have left the pub where he’d gone to meet his ex-comrade, before it had been flattened by a bomb, killing everyone inside, but only he knew just how lucky he was, Charlie acknowledged. With Dougie Richards and his fellow thugs dead, Charlie was now free from the threat of blackmail.
Having assured his mother that his bruises looked worse than they were, Charlie had then told Vi that he didn’t want Daphne, so carefully protected from the realities of life by her doting parents, to be unnecessarily upset by the sight of them when she already had the wedding to worry about. The last thing he felt like doing right now was having to comfort Daphne whilst she wept all over him. That reluctance had nothing whatsoever to do with his memories of the passionate warmth in his arms of a girl who was not his fiancée. Of course it didn’t. Good Lord, the last thing Charlie wanted in a wife was passion. Daphne was the perfect wife for him.
Yes, he had a lot to congratulate himself about, Charlie decided, with a grin. Poor old Bella, his sister, had had her nose well and truly put out of joint by his sudden ascent to the throne of parental favouritism, and her own removal from it, on account of his upcoming marriage to Daphne.
Daphne’s parents not only possessed a double-barrelled surname and titled connections, Daphne’s father was a Name at Lloyd’s and, in Charlie’s father’s own words, ‘bound to be rolling in money, war or no war’.
Edwin was the kind of man who judged other men by one simple criterion – their financial status. Those like his wife’s twin sister’s husband, who didn’t have a hope of ever earning what Edwin did, he despised; those who threatened his supremacy in his own field, he made sure he kept where they belonged – several rungs below him on the ladder, by whatever means, dirty tricks included, if they were called for; those a few steps above him on that ladder he detested and consequently accused in public of using sharp practices, of a type abhorrent to him, of course, otherwise he would have been their equal. But those like Daphne’s father, who were members of the ‘professional class’, and who had family money, were so far above him in his estimation that he could only treat them with reverential awe. To have his son marry the daughter of such a man swelled Edwin’s chest with a pride that had had Edwin dismissing Bella’s claims on his paternal affections in place of Charlie’s. Edwin had decided that Bella was to hand over the keys to the smart house Edwin had bought for her on her own marriage so that they could be given to Charlie and his bride-to-be. What need, after all, did Bella, a widow with no children, have of a detached house, Edwin had asked pointedly. All she had done was fill it with refugees, he had reminded his daughter during the argument that had followed the announcement of his decision.
Remembering that row now, Charlie grinned. Poor old Bella indeed. His sister might be a stunning-looking girl, with her blonde curls and her large blue eyes, and the waist she swore measured only twenty-two inches, but her looks had no effect on their father and nor had her angry reminder that the refugees had been forced on her by the Government, and the council of which he was a member.
In fact, Charlie acknowledged, his future was looking pretty good. Or it would have been if it weren’t for this ruddy bombing. He pushed past a group of nurses who had had to adjust their walking pace to the slowness of the patients they were assisting, without stopping to offer to help, his thoughts fixed on his own bright future and securing a decent place in the air-raid shelter.
The night air was thick with the smell of burned wood, the smoke from the fires that had been put out hanging over the city like a November smog. His mother had had forty fits when she had come to visit him, complaining about the fact that it had taken her three hours to get to the hospital because of all the blocked roads.
‘They’ve bombed Lewis’s,’ she had told Charlie angrily, ‘and there were soldiers lolling around in the street, sitting on brand-new furniture that had been removed from some of the shops, and drinking bottles of beer. Disgraceful. I mean who would want that furniture now?’
Charlie could think of any number of people who’d no doubt be only too happy to acquire it, if only to sell it on through the black market, but of course he had known better than to say so to his mother, who wasn’t renowned for the acuteness of her sense of humour.
Without anything having to be said, the more senior of the trainee nurses such as Grace had taken it upon themselves to go in turn with those patients who, because of the severity of their wounds, were not only bed bound but also could only be moved very slowly.
Tonight it was Grace’s turn. She had seen the brisk nod of approval that Sister had given her when she had come quietly to the bed holding the most seriously injured of all their patients, a young soldier who had been caught in a blast from an unexploded bomb. His face and head were heavily bandaged. It was a miracle, according to the doctors, that he was still alive. Grace, who had been on duty the night he had come out of the morphine he had been given and who had heard him screaming in agony and then begging for death, found it hard to think there was anything miraculous about what he was having to suffer.
He couldn’t survive, they all knew that, and for that reason if no other they were all taking extra care to ensure that the fact that he was still alive was respected and that he was treated exactly the same as those patients who would survive.
Hannah, Grace’s closest friend from their original training set, had told Grace bluntly that had she been someone who loved him she would have been tempted to place a pillow over the bandaged face to ease his agony for ever.
As Grace and one of the porters slowly pushed his bed towards the exit, a bomb exploded close at hand, causing the patient’s body to contort in agonised fear. Automatically Grace reached for his hand to comfort him, holding it in her own.
Just as it had once seemed unbelievable that something like this could happen, now it seemed equally impossible that it would ever cease. The worst of the debris caused from Saturday night’s bombing had been cleared away but the scarred seared wall of the courtyard where so many had died, caught in the bomb blast, still stood as a stark reminder of the frailty of life. The patient, who had been trembling convulsively, suddenly went still, the grip of his hand slackening.
They were still several yards from safety and the shelter, but Grace realised she had something far more important to deal with now than her own safety.
Bending towards the bed, she told the porter quietly, ‘I think we need the padre, if you can find him for me, please, John.’
They said that you always remembered your first death, but for Grace each one brought her that same sense of loss and pain, and that wish that things could be different and that her patient might live.
What was easier now, though, was to hold tightly to the slackened hand and quietly recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Sister, in that calm all-seeing way of hers that Grace so admired, seemed to materialise on the opposite side of the bed out of nowhere, her own hands competent and professional as she reached for the dying man’s other hand, checking his pulse against her watch, then talking quietly to him once Grace had finished her prayer.
He had gone before the padre managed to reach them, but the formalities of respect had still to be gone through, the blessing said, and a doctor summoned, a space found for the ritual and respect accorded to the newly dead even in the midst of a bombing raid that could take their own lives at any minute. A well-trained nurse did not abandon her patient to protect her own safety.
Grace waited until the doctor gave the brief nod of his head that signalled that the body was to be taken to the morgue before accepting her own dismissal from Sister and continuing on her way to the shelter.
It was three o’clock. Her eyes felt dry and gritty from smoke, brick dust and uncried tears. When this war was over she would cry an ocean of them, but not now – not when, as their vicar had said from the pulpit on Sunday morning, with every strong heartbeat of hope and courage and the belief that they would prevail they were driving back the enemy, just as with every weak heartbeat of fear they were inviting defeat.
Now instead of thinking about the bombs and worrying about her own danger, she would think instead of Seb and how much she loved him. Like her, Seb was on duty tonight. He was based at Derby House, down near the docks. They tried to time their off-duty hours so that they could be together if at all possible. Nurses weren’t allowed to wear engagement rings, so Grace kept hers hidden, wearing it on a fine chain beneath her uniform. When she felt afraid, like she did now, just knowing that it was there and that Seb loved her was enough to calm those fears.
The air-raid shelter was crowded, but a nurse whom she vaguely recognised shuffled along to make room for her, welcoming her with a tired smile.
None of them had taken her full off-duty hours, snatching a few hours of sleep instead and then going back to work, knowing how desperately her skills were needed.
The remorseless throb of aircraft engines overhead made Grace want to cover her ears. They couldn’t go on like this much longer, being attacked night after night, everyone said so, talking about the effect the unrelenting attacks were having on people’s morale in low hesitant whispers. The unthinkable, the unbearable, had begun to drift into people’s minds, obscuring hope in the same way that the smoke-and dust-filled air was obscuring the sky.
‘Lord knows where we’re going to put them as gets injured tonight,’ the other nurse sighed wearily. ‘The whole hospital’s already bursting at the seams.’
Grace nodded. It was true, after all. Patients were already having to lie on makeshift beds in corridors. The operating theatres were working at full capacity, with extra surgeons coming in from surrounding towns, including Manchester, and now the staff were facing shortages of supplies, the hospital authorities unable to restock fast enough to cope with the demand. Some patients, like the boy who had died earlier, were so badly injured that there was nothing that could be done for them other than to try to relieve their pain, and even that wasn’t always possible. Word had gone round on the grapevine when Grace had been in the dining room earlier that with the city almost cut off from the rest of the country, morphine was to be kept for those patients who could survive and not given as palliative care to those who would not, for fear of the supply running out.
War was such a cruel thing, its horrors thankfully unimaginable to those who had not experienced them. Grace had seen people whose bodies were so badly damaged that if anyone had told her three years ago about such injuries she would have thought they were trying to frighten her.
She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the sound of the continuous waves of incoming bombers and focus instead on the bursts of gunfire from the ack-ack guns. How much longer could Liverpool survive such an onslaught? Not much longer, she suspected. The Germans were bombing the heart out of the city and its people, destroying its buildings, smashing its infrastructure, maiming and killing its people, knowing how much the whole country depended on the vital necessities – raw materials and foodstuffs – that those Merchant Navy convoys whose port was Liverpool struggled to bring in from across the Atlantic.
Cutting off that vital lifeline would be like cutting off the flow of blood to a patient’s heart – and only death could follow.
TWO
Down in the protected underground buildings beneath Derby House, Seb couldn’t help worrying about Grace. He loved her so much and she was so very brave, as he already had good cause to know, never flinching from putting the safety of her patients first.
Derby House was the Headquarters for Joint Strategic Planning, a combined operation involving both the Navy and the RAF, and Seb had seen the devastating losses the conveys were suffering thanks to the speed and accuracy of Hitler’s U-boats.
Churchill had given orders that no effort must be spared in capturing from the Germans one of their Enigma machines. These cipher machines sent signals between the U-boats and their HQ close to Paris, using special codebooks, and if one could somehow be acquired, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park would be able to decipher singals and so warn convoys of the U-boats’ whereabouts. But thus far no Enigma machine had been captured and the shipping losses continued to be very heavy.
Seb was part of a secret RAF Y Section, set up to listen in on and speedily record enemy Morse code messages, and he was waiting for the particular sender he was currently monitoring to start transmitting again. It was at times like this, with an air raid going on, the city devastated by what it had already endured, and other men putting their lives at risk to protect what was left of it, that Seb wished that he was playing a more active role in the country’s defence himself.
At the beginning of the war when he had been approached to work for SOE, using his radio operator’s skills to teach French Resistance cells the skills they would need, Seb had been working in the field in France in conditions of such personal danger that he had truly felt that he was doing his bit. But then with the German invasion of France and the BEF being driven back to Dunkirk, Seb had been recalled to England.
Dunkirk, everything it had been and everything it now represented for the way in which, by some miracle, tens of thousands of soldiers had been rescued from the beaches of northern France, was etched on his soul for ever. He had been lucky, but so many had not.
Back in Liverpool he had expected to be handling Morse code messages sent from France by members of SOE secretly landed there and from the groups of French Resistance he had helped train. Instead he had been put in charge of some newly trained Y Section recruits, dealing with military messages passed between the enemy.
Churchill insisted on seeing every day the transcripts of the messages monitored the previous day, a habit he had begun, so Seb had heard, when he had been First Lord of the Admiralty. The work demanded the highest level of concentration, and the kind of quick mind that could speedily recognise the variations in the ways different operators touched the keys of their machines. As Seb always said when he was lecturing new recruits, a wireless operator’s touch on the keys was as individual as a voice.
What they were doing was the other side of war, the hidden side. Where the glory boys of the RAF pursued their targets in full view through the skies, those members of the RAF employed on Y Section duties tracked theirs through countless recordings of Morse code messages. It took concentration, dedication and a special instinct to be able to recognise and follow a specific message sender; to recognise his or her ‘way’ of tapping out the Morse, to be able to block out the crackles, hisses and jamming devices used by the enemy as though they did not exist and to sense that moment when the sender was about to change frequency and plunge after them to keep track of them.
On a night like this one, though, when your girl was in danger and you weren’t, translating Morse code messages didn’t really feel much like a proper man’s work.
Seb looked at the clock on the wall in front of him. Just gone half-past three. With any luck the raiders would leave before it started to get light. As soon as he went off duty he could go up Edge Hill to Mill Road Hospital where Grace worked to check that she was all right.
Nearly four hours they’d been at it now, Luke thought bitterly, as he lay sleepless on his hard narrow army cot bed listening to the bombers sweeping in.
The defiant night fighters of 96 Squadron, based at Cranage, had been screaming overhead but had as yet failed to turn back the incoming waves of the raiders.
Luke and his men would be on duty at first light as they were part of a work party of three thousand soldiers detailed to help in the clear-up operations after the bombers had left, work they’d been engaged in every day since Sunday.
Tonight it sounded as though it was Bootle that was getting the worst of it. Thank heavens his family lived well away from the docks, up at Edge Hill, and Katie with them, although nowhere was safe.
From his vantage point on the roof of a building close to the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company, off Edge Lane, where he was doing his turn on fire-watching duties, Sam Campion could see as well as hear the waves of incoming enemy bombers.
All that was left of St Luke’s, the church that had been regarded by many as the most beautiful church in the city, was its tower and a blackened shell. The Town Hall had been hit, as had the New Royal Telephone Exchange in Colquitt Street, and on Duke Street various buildings had been destroyed. The city was at its last gasp. Flames and smoke billowed from newly hit buildings, and it seemed to Sam that there could be only one end to Liverpool’s magnificent fight against the Luftwaffe’s bombs.
Sam’s heart had never felt heavier, nor his emotions more intensely aroused. It was only now, looking down on the burning city, that he realised how much he loved it. Liverpool was being bombed and burned right down to its foundations, and yet not one word of concern had Sam heard spoken on the wireless, nor one word of praise for all that its people were doing to try to save it. Let London be bombed and the whole ruddy country knew about it, but when it came to Liverpool, the powers that be didn’t seem to care that the city was in danger of burning end to end.
The acrid smell of the smoke drifting towards him from Brunswick and Harrington Docks, and the Prince’s landing stage, stung his eyes, or at least that was what Sam told himself was the cause of his need to knuckle the moisture from them. The overhead railway had been hit and from Gladstone and Alexandra Docks Sam could see ships burning down to the water line.
High above him in the night sky, fighters from RAF Cranage were doing their best to drive back the raiders, and as Sam looked on, an RAF planes pursued one of the bombers, finally catching up with it over the Welsh hills. As he watched the defender bring down the bomber, and then looked down on the burning city, Sam admitted to himself what he had been trying to avoid since the blitz had started.
He might not be able to do anything to prevent his two older children from being exposed to the continuing danger – not with Luke in the army and Grace a nurse – but he could insist that Jean took the twins out of the city for their own safety and hers.
Exhaling on the decision, Sam felt his chest contract with pain. He and Jean had never spent a night apart in the whole of their marriage, she was the best wife any man could have and the only wife he could ever want, but it simply wasn’t safe for them to stay in the city any longer.
Lying awake in her comfortable bed in the cottage she was renting in Whitchurch, Emily Bryant too could hear the sound of the bombers on their way to Liverpool, fifty miles away from her new home in the small market town on the Cheshire-Shropshire border and surrounded by farmland. She had definitely done the right thing getting out of the city, and only just in time, judging by what she’d heard on Sunday when she and Tommy had made their first visit to their new church. Everyone had a tale to tell about what they’d heard about the pounding Liverpool had taken and the damage that had been done.
By rights she ought to be asleep. After all, they were safe enough here, with no need to go into some nasty uncomfortable air-raid shelter. She was a fool to have relented and left that worthless husband of hers with a decent sum of money in his bank account – money he’d no doubt spend on those trollops of his. He could, after all, have come with her and Tommy if he’d wanted to, but of course somewhere like Whitchurch would be far too quiet for Con.
It wasn’t too quiet for her, though. It fact it suited her down to the ground.
As soon as she’d got everything unpacked and the two of them properly settled in she’d have to see about sorting out a school for young Tommy. It was just him and her now. Mother and son, so to speak. Just thinking those words filled her with so much happiness that she could feel it right down to her toes. And yet for all her happiness, and despite knowing that she had made the right decision in leaving Liverpool – after all, what did she owe the city; what had it ever done for her except give her an unfaithful husband? – the sound of those bombers and their relentless purpose brought a lump to her throat and caused her to say a silent prayer for the city of her birth.
Eight o’clock. She’d better get a move on, Lena decided, otherwise, she’d be late for work and her boss had told her that she wanted her in early because they’d have a lot of women wanting their hair done, since the blitz meant that many no longer had access to proper water in their own homes.
Lena hesitated as she turned the corner and saw a small group of women and children standing on the pavement outside number ten, where the Hodson family lived. Her heart sank. There was no way she could avoid them, not with half the houses down on the other side of the street and no pavement left.
‘Ruddy Eyetie,’ Annette Hodson said loudly as Lena drew level with them. ‘I don’t know how she’s got the brass neck to show herself here amongst proper English folk when her lot have sided with that Hitler.’
Annette Hodson was blocking the pavement now, her arms folded across her chest as she confronted Lena.
Some of the sparse mousy hair has escaped from her rag curls and was hanging limply over the red scarf that drew unkind attention to her heavily flushed face. The apron she was wearing was grubby, her fingers stained with nicotine. Annette Hodson was a bully whose own children went in fear of her. Somehow, though, she’d set herself up as the street’s spokeswoman when it came to who and what was and was not acceptable. She’d had it in for Lena ever since she’d discovered her husband leering at Lena one Saturday afternoon after he’d trapped her in conversation, one hand resting on the house wall as he refused to let her go past.
Initially Lena had been believed when Annette had appeared, quickly making her escape, but then the comments had started, and Lena’s aunt had soon backed up her neighbour and friend, warning Lena that no good came to girls who made eyes at married men.
‘Course, it’s that Italian blood of hers,’ Lena had heard her aunt telling Annette.
Lena had never known the Italian side of her family but she did know that the war had turned some of Liverpool’s citizens violently against the Italian immigrant community, which had previously lived peacefully in the city.
Italian businesses had been attacked by angry mobs, and Italian people hurt. There had been those who had spoken out against the violence and those too who had helped their Italian neighbours, but there were others who, like Annette Hodson were the kind who seized on any excuse to take against other people.
Then, by order of the Government, all those Italian men who had not taken out British citizenship had been rounded up and sent away to be interned for the duration of the war. That had led to more violence and also to terrible deprivation for those families deprived of their main breadwinners.
Italian families with sons who had British passports and who were in the armed forces found that they were being treated with as much hostility as though they were the enemy, and those with Italian blood had quickly learned to be on their guard.
‘I’ll bet she was down the shelter last night, though, taking up a space that by rights should have gone to a proper British person,’ Annette was jeering. ‘If I had my way, it wouldn’t just be the Italian men I’d have had rounded up; I’d have rounded up the women and the kids as well and put the whole lot of them behind bars. Aye, and I’d have told Hitler he could come and bomb them any time he liked, and good riddance. ’Oo knows what she gets up to? For all we know she could be a ruddy spy.’
Ignoring Annette’s insults, Lena stepped out into the road to walk past her and then gasped as a small piece of broken brick hit her on the arm. Automatically she turned round to see Annette’s youngest, four-year-old Larry, grinning triumphantly as he called out in a shrill voice, ‘I got her, Mam. Ruddy Eyetie.’
‘Good for you, our Larry. Go on, throw another at her, Eyetie spy,’ Annette encouraged her son, laughing as he bent down to pick up another piece of broken brick.
She wasn’t going to run, Lena told herself fiercely, she wasn’t. She would think about him instead, her lovely, lovely soldier boy. That way she couldn’t feel the pain of the sharp pieces of brick the children gathered round Annette were now hurling at her with shrieks of glee. They didn’t mean any harm, not really. It was just a game to them. Lena gasped as someone threw a heavier piece, which caught her between her shoulder blades, almost causing her to stumble.
‘Eyetie spy, Eyetie spy,’ the children were chanting. ‘Come on, let’s get her … Let’s kill the spy.’
‘What’s going on here?’
Lena had never felt more relieved to see the familiar face of the local policeman as he grabbed her arm to steady her.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, Davey, just the kids having a bit of a joke on Lena on account of her being an Eyetie, isn’t that right, Lena?’ Annette challenged her.
Lena longed to deny what she was saying, but she knew that if she did Annette would only tell her aunt and then she’d have her aunt going on at her and threatening to tell her uncle to take his belt to her.
Tears of misery and self-pity blurred her eyes. You couldn’t miss what you’d never had, not really, and her parents had never been the loving protective sort, too interested in quarrelling with one another to bother much about her, but right now she wished that her dad was here and that he could put Annette Hodson in her place and the fear of God into her just as she was trying to do to Lena.
Davey Shepherd had released her now.
‘Aye, well, no throwing stones, you lot,’ he told the now silent children. ‘Otherwise Hitler will come and get you.’
‘Lena’s an Eyetie and she should be locked up,’ Larry piped up truculently. ‘Me mam says so.’
Lena could tell from the way Davey didn’t look at her that he didn’t want to get any further involved.
‘You’d better get on your way,’ he told her in a gruff voice.
‘Aye, and don’t bother coming back,’ Annette called after her as Lena made her escape whilst Davey stood watching her.
There was brick dust on her cardigan sleeve. She’d look a fine mess turning up at work all dusty and dirty. Simone would give her a right mouthful and no mistake. The hairdresser might speak to her clients in an artificial and affected posh voice, but when they weren’t around and she was in a bad mood, she yelled at the girls who worked for her, using language so ripe it would have made a fishwife blush.
Lena had been working part time for Simone ever since she had left school, fitting the hairdressing work in round the cleaning jobs her Auntie Flo forced her to do, and which really were part of her aunt’s own job, but now Simone had offered to take her on full time and Lena had said ‘yes’ immediately. Other hairdressers might have closed down thinking that the war would be bad for business but Simone had different ideas and she was shrewd. She had told Lena that, with all the rationing and everything else, she reckoned women would want their hair doing more than ever, and that the war could actually be good for business.
She had been proved right. With so many women going into war work and earning their own money, they could afford to treat themselves.
Simone had told Lena right from the start that the main reason she was taking her on was Lena’s own hair.
‘They’ll take one look at you, and come in here expecting to be turned out looking the same. So you just think on to make sure that you tell them wot asks that it’s this salon that does your hair.’
Lena knew that her aunt was itching to make her leave the salon and get better-paid work in one of the munitions factories, but luckily for Lena she wasn’t old enough – yet. You had to be nineteen at least before they’d take you on, or so she’d heard. She’d heard too about the danger of working in munitions. There was a girl down the road who’d lost an eye and had her hands all burned, and that was nothing compared to the injuries some of the women got. Not that her auntie would care if she was injured.
It wasn’t just her that Auntie Flo didn’t like, Lena knew; she and Lena’s mother had not got on very well either, and her auntie was fond of pointing out that for all that Lena’s mother had been so proud of the fact that she was in service with a posh family, that hadn’t stopped her from getting herself into trouble with the Italian who had charmed his way into her knickers.
Lena found it hard to imagine that her mother had once loved her father. There had been no evidence of that love during Lena’s childhood. Her mother had always been criticising her husband, and Lena’s father had spent more time with his Italian family than he did with Lena and her mother. As she had grown up Lena had become used to hearing her every small misdemeanour put down to the ‘bad blood’ she had inherited from her Italian father. That had been one issue on which her mother and her auntie had been united.
Like many of those who had been in service, Lena’s mother had been a bit of a snob in her own way, and uppity too, saying that she wasn’t having Lena growing up rag-mannered and not knowing what was what, and how to do things right. Lena’s parents had died together in the November bombings of 1940, leaving Lena with no option other than to move in with her mother’s sister, whose ideas of what was and what was not acceptable were very different from those of Lena’s mother.
Lena could still remember having the back of her hands rapped when she’d hesitated over which piece of cutlery to pick up when her mother had been teaching her what to use.
Witnessing this, her aunt had jeered at her mother and they’d had a rare old argument about it, Auntie Flo claiming that it was plain daft giving Lena airs, and her mother retaliating that she wasn’t having her daughter showing herself up by not knowing her manners.
Her mother would certainly have had something to say about the state Liverpool and its people were in now, Lena thought, blinking against the gritty smoky air.
Where the narrow streets opened off the road she was walking along, running down towards the docks she could see new gaps where last night’s bombs had hit, and people picking their way carefully through the debris as they searched for their possessions. Fires were still burning in some of the newly bombed-out buildings down by the docks, fire crews playing water hoses on them. Here, though, where the road turned upward away from the docks, the buildings were relatively unscathed, with only the odd collapsed building.
She could see the salon up ahead. Thankfully, at least that was still standing. Lena didn’t reckon much to the chances of staying out of munitions if she lost her hairdressing job.
After what had just happened with Annette Hodson she’d have been tempted to pack her things and take herself off. There was plenty of work around now, and she’d heard that the council was rehousing anyone who’d been made homeless. Imagine living somewhere where there was no aunt and cousin, and no Annette Hodson either. But she couldn’t leave now, could she, not now that she had met him? She had to be there for when he came looking for her on his next leave.
A small wriggle of pleasure seized her. Hopefully next time there wouldn’t be any bombs falling and then they could make proper plans.
He wasn’t based at Seacombe barracks, but somewhere down south. She’d found that out from his papers, which she’d found in one of the pockets of his battledress, just as she’d also found out that he was single, his full name and his address in posh Wallasey.
Not that she’d got any need to go looking for him, because she just knew that he would come looking for her when he was next on leave.
Annette Hodson and her woes forgotten, Lena almost skipped the rest of the way to work, her head full of happy plans for the future she was going to share with her Charlie.
Charlie. She hugged the name to her, saying it inside her head and then in a determined whisper, Mrs Charles Firth. Lena gave another wriggle of blissful pleasure. Oh, but she could not wait to stand in front of her aunt with Charlie on her arm and his ring on her finger. That would show Auntie Flo, with all her talk of Lena having bad blood. Her Charlie had loved her dark curls and her dark eyes, and he’d love her curves too. A pink blush warmed Lena’s cheeks as she remembered just how much Charlie had loved them and how intimately. Of course, what she had let him do would have been very wrong if he hadn’t been a soldier and been at war. She tossed her head. A girl had to do the right thing by her chap when there was a war on. What if her Charlie were to be sent to fight overseas and …? Lena shivered, the joy draining from her. What if he had already gone overseas? She must not think like that. He wouldn’t go without coming to find her first. Not her Charlie. After all, he had said that he loved her and that he would marry her, hadn’t he?
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