Birmingham Blitz (42 page)

‘So in the end I wrapped my arms round Lenny, sort of in a hug, and picked him up. And I ran up the road after Mom. With his big head in the way I couldn’t see where I was going and he was such a weight. I tripped and fell down right on top of him. His head went down with a bang on the pavement. Knocked him out. He wasn’t quite two then, and he’d been starting to chatter on, but he never said another word after that – not for about five years, and he was never the same again. The doctors said he had brain damage . . .’

I could see it all, the little girl hoiking her baby brother along the road. Nan’s face, the anger that even now she couldn’t help spilling out on occasion when she spoke of her eldest daughter.

‘You didn’t mean it though, did you Mom?’

She shook her head, crying now, like the frightened child who’d done the deed. ‘Course not. I wouldn’t have hurt him for the world.’

I crept closer and sat by her, not quite daring to take her hand.

‘Look at him.’ Her cheeks were wet. I wondered if her tears tasted of gin. ‘He’s going to be a father and he’s still only a kid himself. Thanks to me.’ She looked at me. ‘I deserve them hitting me after all the things I’ve done. One of these nights they’ll get me.’

‘Mom, no,’ I said, frightened. ‘Of course not. You didn’t do anything on purpose. You’re just . . .’ I trailed off. Just what? Unlucky? Careless? Foolish? ‘You’ve just had some accidents, that’s all. You’ve had enough punishment.’

Later in the night, when she’d quietened, we felt sleep coming over us even though the raid wasn’t finished. It was more distant and I found I’d blanked out for a time, I didn’t know how long. It could have been seconds or hours. But then they were hard over us again and I was suddenly awake. The battering of noise was back, the planes, ack-ack guns with their tennis-like rhythm, the whining and crashing. I sat up, wide awake. The lamp had gone out.

Mister was still lying beside me, but I stretched out on the bunk. Mom wasn’t there.

‘Lenny?’ I shouted across to him. ‘Where’s Mom? Where’s Doreen?’

‘She’s your side.’ He must have been awake already because he sounded alert.

‘She’s not.’ I wondered if she’d tumbled on the floor. ‘Mom? Where are you?’ I felt around in the dark. Nothing.

‘Len, take Mister. I’m going to see out there.’

I wrenched the door open and stepped up into the crazed, coloured world outside. The sky was copper streaked with yellow and red, and puffs of white from the ack-ack fire. Fires across the city – beacons to guide the bombers – were filling the air with acrid smoke and the searchlights scratched at the sky with their cold beams. The explosions of light now were from the foul-smelling high explosive bombs.

But my eyes were fixed on Mom. She was standing with her back to me half way down the garden in her nightclothes, staring up at the glowing sky, her arms stretched out in front of her, open, as if she was in the act of embracing someone. Just standing there, quite still.

‘Mom – for God’s sake!’ I ran to her, wondering if she was asleep or awake. Her pale nightdress stuck out at the front over her belly and I realized she’d taken off her coat. She must have been frozen. Her eyes were open.

‘What’re you doing?’ I bawled at her. ‘Come back in for Christ’s sake.’

‘I thought I’d just get it over with,’ she murmured, so I could only just hear.

There came the most massive bang from very close by that snatched the ground from under us and we curled on the ground like babbies, our hands over our heads. I squeezed my eyes tight shut. The noise seemed to go on for ages and ages, the crashing and splintering and explosions of glass. When we stood up, instinct guiding our hands to our bodies to check everything was there, tongues of fire were shooting up from the street behind our house. There was already the sound of fire-engine bells somewhere near.

Mom and I dashed into our dark house. There was glass everywhere, front and back, strewn like a hard, crunchy icing on every surface we touched as we groped our way through to the front. I heard Mom gasp, cutting herself. The blackout blinds at the front were in tatters and through them we could see that a great swathe of the opposite side of the road was gone. Just matchwood and rubble, burning, and more to see than usual of the sky.

Mom’s hands went to her cheeks, breath sucking in. ‘Oh, look!’ She was gulping breath in and out and couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘They got it – not me . . . Someone else got it!’

When the light came we could see it all. The three of us walked out dumbly into the dawn, only half dressed, to see our familiar street changed utterly. We stepped over fat hoses squiggling along the road, leaking feeble arcs of water and lying in a mouse-brown mess of wet plaster and brick dust, and more glass crunched under our feet.

‘Lord above, look at it.’ Mom stood with her arms folded, a rough dressing on her cut finger. ‘God in Heaven.’

Gladys and Molly’s house was still standing, as were those on each side of it, but not much further along a great block had been blasted out of the terrace, the inside walls of some still left standing pointing jaggedly up, with their pathetic strips of wallpaper, their picture hooks and damp stains, and the rest of the houses smashed to charred rubble, bits poking out at all angles like spillikins.

There were people out all along the street. Len rushed across and banged on Molly’s door and after a time Gladys opened it and the two of them came out, already dressed as they’d most likely been all night. The pair of them looked as tired and dishevelled as we must have done. In the quietest ever voice Gladys said, ‘Wasn’t it awful? Just a few more yards this way . . .’ and she looked along at the shattered houses, her eyes filling.

Len put his arm round Molly, who huddled close to him. Along the street a vicar, shabby old mac flung over his cassock, stood comforting a man who was watching the rescue squad, his face full of fear and desolation. They’d already been working out there for several hours, and the flames had all been put out. We could hear sawing and drilling and the men calling to each other. A team was waiting with stretchers. Other neighbours were gathering round. Mr Tailor from our side of the road stood out in his braces, and everyone was squinting in the shocking sunlight, no one saying, but all of us thinking, as we stared glumly at the houses opposite, ‘Who’s in there still? Who’s dead?’ A horrible, dank smell hung over everything, of wet, charred wood and plaster, wisps of grey smoke still floating in the air like the ghosts of those already dead. And mixed with this, the sickening smell of gas seeping from broken pipes in the houses.

One of the gossips I recognized from down the road was standing in front of what had been her house, two toddlers clinging dumbly to her coat and a baby yawling in her arms.

‘Look,’ Mom said. ‘Mrs Terry.’

We went to her, seeing her shivering, the shock on her face.

‘We was in the Anderson,’ she said. ‘In the Anderson. The Anderson at the back.’ Their faces were brown with grime like panto gypsies but they all seemed unhurt. There was a mobile canteen at the end of the road handing out tea and we led her down, handing her carefully over the rubble because she didn’t seem able to look out for herself. As we waited for our turn they carried a stretcher past to a grey ambulance, the face covered by a sheet. We all watched, no one speaking, but somehow we couldn’t take our eyes off it.

Those who could go had already been taken to first aid posts, but the workers were still having to follow the trail of the buried or dead, listening for moans, tiny gasps, any flicker of life entombed under the houses. I heard a voice somewhere saying loudly over and over that we had to boil all our water. The bombing cracked and destroyed water pipes and the water wasn’t safe.

As Mrs Terry sipped her tea, handed out by the cheerful woman in the mobile canteen, we stood trying to offer her comfort by our presence, not knowing what else to say. Mom held the babby for her, trying to quiet it.

‘You can come back to ours and rest for a bit,’ she said. ‘They’ll find you a place to go after, won’t they?’ None of us was sure. We couldn’t think straight and it was all too new. Later we’d be able to gather our wits and ask one of the wardens where she could go.

Mrs Terry shook her head. She didn’t know anything. She was in a state of paralysis. But she did hold out her arms to have her babby back. The two kids were chewing on the canteen’s stale buns, both of them unnaturally silent.

A shout went up from amongst the wreckage. ‘Here! There’s someone under this lot!’ There was urgent activity, equipment carried over at a jerking run, men sawing, lifting chunks of masonry, throwing out objects here and there when they got further down, a clock, a clothes-horse, a skein of baby-pink wool. It seemed to take so long. After a time they called a nurse through to give an injection.

‘Morphine I s’pect.’ Mom shuddered violently, arms folded tight. ‘Christ, imagine being under there.’

As we watched, a man appeared in the street in trousers but bare at the top, blood dark on his head and stains of it on the shoulder underneath. His feet were bare as well and he was turning his head frantically from side to side as if looking for someone. One of the ambulance crew led him gently away.

‘I’ve got to get over to your nan,’ Mom said. ‘See if they’re OK.’ She was agitated suddenly, pulled her fags out and was about to light up, hands shaking.

‘No!’ The warden almost flung himself at her, knocking it from her hand. ‘Can’t you smell the gas? You’ll have the whole bloody street going up!’

‘Sorry,’ Mom said. ‘Oh I’m sorry, I never . . .’

But he was too busy to listen to apologies and had already gone.

We were leading Mrs Terry and her children down towards our house when a murmur rippled through the straggling group of neighbours, a low moaning sound of everyone breathing out together. The rescuers were now pulling a body from the house where they’d heard the tiny sounds. It was a woman, and at the sight of her I saw Molly turn and bury her face in Len’s chest with a whimper of distress. So slowly and tenderly they lifted her out, as if they were handling some treasure precious to their own lives. She was unconscious now, drugged out of her agony by the morphine, but how and what she had suffered these hours was more than any of us could bear to imagine. Her face was almost untouched except for a few small cuts, and the upper part of her body appeared unscathed, though it was hard to tell as she’d been trapped down there and could be crushed. But when the bomb came down she’d fallen, and been trapped by the weight of her house, next to where the fire burned in her little grate. For these past hours the heat of it had smouldered along the lower portion of her body so that all that remained of her feet were gnarled things like charred twigs which crumbled, dropping in small bits as they moved her, despite all their carefulness. The clothes on the lower part of her seemed melted round her like black tissue paper. Her head lolled to one side.

She can’t live. Everyone must’ve thought the same. Not after that. I knew her face. Mrs Deakin, a widow in her late sixties who’d always been kind. I saw the nurse who’d given her the injection turn from the sight of that grilled body on the stretcher and take deep controlling breaths. She was young, with light freckles on her nose.

Silently we led Mrs Terry to our house, where yellowed leaves piled gently against the door as they would on any October morning, except that today they were mixed with ash and glass.

After work that day I hurried across to Belgrave Road. There was a lot of damage in the area, gaps and mess where before it’d been whole. Life itself was wobbling. I had to rush because sometimes they came over as early as six and the sirens’d be off, barely giving you time even to get home.

Teresa and Vera had volunteered their house to the WVS as a respite point where people could be taken temporarily for rest and help.

‘Otherwise we’re no use to anyone, are we?’ Vera said. ‘It’s the least we can do.’ It gave them a sense of purpose, and they both seemed lifted by it.

At Nan’s they were already preparing for the raid. Lil had made a makeshift bed for herself and Cathleen under the table. The others would go down the coal cellar and they had coats and shoes rowed up and blankets ready.

Lil, cooking chops, was in a state about Frank. ‘He was on yesterday and he’s on tonight. Thinks he’s got a charmed life. God, I do hope he’s careful with himself after that lot last night.’

Mom’d told them about our street, but the other news on everyone’s lips that day was the Carlton Cinema. A bomb had come down in front of the screen when the place was packed. Killed nineteen.

‘They say they were just sat there as if they were still watching the film,’ Lil said.

‘That’ll be the blast.’ Nan was filling a flask with cocoa. ‘Does odd things. D’you know, Genie – when we came up this morning every window in the house was open?’

I looked round. ‘All the glass is in.’

‘No breakages. But they were all open. Wouldn’t credit it, would you?’

I only stopped there a few minutes, but in that time it would’ve taken an idiot not to notice there was something wrong with Tom. He wasn’t himself at all. I tried talking to him, making jokes, but he was pale and very jumpy, poor kid, very sunk into himself.

‘This is all making him bad,’ Lil whispered to me. ‘I don’t know what I can do for him.’

I could do no more either, except give him a cuddle and say goodnight to go and face the next round. The days which had seemed such hard work before now seemed like a rest cure compared with the nights.