The Heart of the Family (2 page)

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.

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.