Three Women of Liverpool (21 page)

She turned to the warden, who had come from helping the constable keep back the crowd. “Better find out who he is,” she suggested, “and send him home.”

“He’ll be right mad if I do. It’s his girl what’s bein’ dug out.” He ran his tongue round broken teeth. “I’ll get a couple of blankets and we’ll lay ’im in the hallway of the office opposite.”

The First Aid man returned to digging through his satchel. For the third time, he checked its contents: hypodermic syringe, pain-killers, sterilised pads, sticking plaster. A stretcher had already been carried as close to the tunnel entrance as possible. There was nothing he could do but wait. He envied Robert, sound asleep in the hallway. It was thirty-six hours since he had been to bed himself.

Far below the horrifying ruins, the miners burrowed like ferrets, thin sinewy arms flashing in the lantern light, flat-stomached bodies swinging in rhythm, as they passed buckets of earth back to a space near the broken entry to the old cellar.

Jimmy, the foreman, moved his helpers around as if he were playing a complicated game of chess, his seamed face a picture of intense concentration, as he improvised the steps of the rescue. No two rescues were ever the same; no two buildings ever fell in exactly the same way – their stresses and strains had each to be weighed up anew, and their constant tiny shifts watched with feline intensity. Not only had he to rescue those buried; he must at all costs ensure the safety of his team, and as he sometimes remarked, “Me old woman would be proper put out if I buried meself and she was done out of a good funeral.”

They came up within two feet of her, to a tight tangle of splintered wooden beams and what might have been part of an iron girder, the same obstruction Emmie had felt in her first
search for the dripping water. Now she squeaked with shock when her foot was grasped by a warm hand slipped under it.

They were stalled.

“Sufferin’ Christ!” The foreman’s disappointment was as bitter as if his own daughter lay beyond the girder. “Get First Aid to bring some water and a shot for her, while we decide what to do.”

The nervous young man crawled down the tunnel and fed both Emmie and Dick with water and then a little milk through the tube he thrust over the girder. She refused any sedation. Without a hint of his inward horror of the tight confinement of the suffocating tunnel, he whispered encouragement and told her that her fiancé was waiting outside.

“He’s there?” Her voice was suddenly comparatively clear. “Thank God, thank God.” She began to weep, soft, helpless crying in which was mingled a tremendous joy. He was there, he was safe.

When the miners were ready to start again, he backed down and told the surprised foreman that he had two living victims to get out.

Like dogs getting at a bone buried under a tree root, Evans hollowed out a space in the earthen floor under the girder. He then grasped her ankles firmly and told her he would help her wriggle down and under, on her back. When her knees were through, he grasped her bent legs and heaved her upwards. She cried out at the scratches she received, but she was through, her eyes dazzled excruciatingly by the blaze of the torch held by a second man behind Evans.

After calling Dick and getting no response, Evans turned himself on his back and squeezed himself into the space Emmie had occupied. He flashed his torch quickly round the tiny refuge, sickened by the stench. Near Dick’s head, neatly wedged between a piece of stone and what looked like the remains of a table, was a telephone. So the engineer had been right. With a grin, he turned to the job of easing the barely
conscious Dick out.

With difficulty, the warden managed to wake Robert. “They’re bringin’ her out,” he said, a smug satisfaction in his expression, “and she’s not badly hurt.”

Without a word, Robert stumbled to his feet. Across the road he saw her being carefully carried down the slope of the debris. She was wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a stretcher.

He pushed his way through the crowd of excited onlookers and ran across the road. Emmie was alive – and absolutely nothing else in the world mattered.

On its way to Walton Hospital, the ambulance carrying Emmie, Dick and Robert, passed the bus in which a very subdued Gwen was travelling back home from her visit to David in the selfsame hospital.

Regardless of the thirty-odd other men in the ward, she had put her head down on the white coverlet of David’s bed and cried. Too ill to do more than hold her hand, he had been staggered when she had laid her cheek on his work-scarred palm and told him he must get better, because she could not face life without him. She had paused to give a weepy sigh, and added, “Half the time I dunno what to do for the best.”

“I’ll be all right,” he had whispered with an effort, and closed his eyes. It was nice to be wanted and not to be regarded as merely a walking pay-packet.

When she got home, Nora and Brendy were rolling round on the kitchen floor like a pair of angry young wolves. Patrick was kicking them none too gently in an effort to separate them, while Mari watched him from the living room, where she was seated at the table, trying to do her arithmetic homework. Ruby sat near her with Michael in her arms, feeding him from his new bottle. She was shouting, “Leave them be, Pat. They’ll stop of themselves in a minute.”

Gwen took one look at the fighting youngsters and total exasperation seized her. She strode through the crowded living room and squeezed quickly behind Mari’s chair and into the kitchen. “Stop kicking ’em,” she ordered Patrick, and he slunk back, muttering, “I were only tryin’ to stop ’em.”

Nora rolled triumphantly on top of a beleaguered Brendy, and Gwen bent down and administered the heaviest slap she could on the girl’s small cotton-covered bottom. As quick as a cat, the child loosed Brendy and jumped to her feet. A stream of invective poured from her, as she rubbed her stinging bottom.

“Any more of that and you get no jam for tea,” threatened Gwen, as she picked up the kettle to fill it from the kitchen tap. Nora made a face at her, and Ruby hastily called the little girl to her. “You coom ’ere afore you get into more trouble, our Nora.”

Brendy lay on his back and laughed, as he watched her go.

Patrick had a tin bowl of grain in his hand, some of which had spilled on to the kitchen floor in the mêlée. He squatted down and began to scoop the precious seeds together. “I were goin’ to feed the micks,” he told Gwen defensively.

“Aye, feed the pigeons – and you’d better do your dad’s cocks, too.”

After he had fed the cockerels, Patrick stood, empty bowl in hand, and looked round the familiar muddle of the Donnelly backyard. He burst into tears. Where
was
his mother? Where had she gone after death? Her body had been in the coffin the day before, but that wasn’t her – not really her. Would he never again come through the back yard, to see her leaning against the doorpost, waiting for them all to come home from school? He did not know how to bear the pain within him.

An hour later, Gwen surveyed her troublesome brood across the littered tea table and prayed that their grandmother would turn up soon.

Patrick looked as if he had been crying. Deep compassion
for him and for Ruby welled up in her; they must both be feeling terrible despair. Yet they were being very brave. Impulsively she leaned forward and pressed Patrick’s grubby fist lying on the tablecloth. He looked up at her, startled, and saw the pity mirrored in her faded blue eyes. Quickly, he withdrew his hand and picked up his piece of bread and margarine. “Everything’s going to turn out all right,” she assured him, feeling a little shy herself.

He nodded.

She turned to Ruby. The girl looked crushed. She was staring vacantly at her empty plate. “Would you like another butties, luv? I can soon cut you one.”

“No. I’m all right.”

“Coom ’ere.”

The girl rose and went to stand by Gwen’s chair, like a schoolgirl called before the headmistress. Gwen put an arm round the thin body and gave her a hug and a smile. “Come on, now. Cheer up. Your gran’s goin’ to come soon – and I’m goin’ to be next door all the time, and you can ask me.” The girl smiled faintly, and unexpectedly put her arms round Gwen’s neck, as she had so often done with her mother. She did not cry.

Mari watched in jealous shock. Her mother never hugged her. All she ever got was a peck on the cheek and an admonition to be a good girl. She had endured the invasion from next door, because of the strange magic of Patrick’s presence. Now she wished crossly that they would all go back to their own house and that her father was home to give her a smacking kiss and call her his pretty young lady.

At midnight, she was sitting on the cellar steps, reading
Gone
With the Wind
aloud to Patrick and Ruby, while one of the worst raids Liverpool had ever experienced raged outside.

On a mattress dragged down to the bottom of the steps lay Nora, Brendy and Michael, mercifully sleeping the sleep of the totally exhausted.

Gwen nodded over a cold cup of tea, while her mind went round and round in weary confusion. What if Emmie is injured – not killed? Do I have to nurse her as well as Dave? It would, she felt be a fit judgment on her, for not helping Emmie with her parents; the pain-filled face of her acid-tongued mother-in-law haunted her for the duration of the raid.

Constable Doyle consulted his notebook and then knocked on Gwen’s front door. At least for this family he had good news – as far as it went.

He made himself smile as the door opened, to reveal Gwen in her dressing-gown, followed by five children in differing states of readiness for school.

“Me husband?” Gwen faltered, at the sight of the uniform.

“No, missus. Miss Emma Thomas live here?”

Relieved, Gwen replied that she did normally, but she was missing.

“Well, missus, you’ll be pleased to know she’s resting comfortable in Walton Hospital. Be out in a few days.”

“Thank you kindly for stopping by to tell me,” she began to close the door.

The constable cleared his throat. “I should tell you, missus, that we’ve heard as the hospital was bombed last night. We don’t know the extent of the damage yet. I’ll know in an hour or …”

Through white lips, Gwen murmured, “Dave!” and fainted on her neglected doorstep.

Though the constable was resigned to carrying news that had
this kind of result, Gwen’s collapse was unexpected. He helped to carry her in and lay her on the living room sofa. She came round within a minute or two and, through chattering teeth, asked if he or Mr Donnelly would let her know when they had more news of the hospital. “Me husband’s in there, as well as Emma. I’ll go over meself as soon as I’ve got the children away to school.”

“The north end’s a shambles,” Constable Doyle warned. “I doubt you’d get through. I’ll come as soon as I’ve any news.” He turned to Ruby and Mari – never had he seen two sisters so totally unalike – and told them to make a strong cup of tea for their mam. “Lots of sugar in it – and see she rests a while.”

On the previous Wednesday, the day before the raids began, Mrs Owen, Robert’s mother, had said a thankful farewell to the evacuated mother and children who had occupied her spare room for some months. “I can’t stand the quiet out here a day longer,” the mother had told her. “I’m goin’ home to Great Homer Street.”

Now, on this perfect spring morning, she asked Mr Burnett, the chemist in Hoylake village, for something she might sprinkle round the newly scoured bedroom, to kill off any vermin that her unwelcome guests might have left there. “Me daughter-in-law elect is coming out to live with me. She’s in Walton Hospital at present, recovering from being buried under the canteen she worked in. Poor girl. She’s real nice. I’ll be happy to have her.”

Mr Burnett looked over his gold spectacles. He swallowed. “Do you know Walton was bombed last night?”

Mrs Owen’s hand flew to her throat. “Oh, no! Poor lass, poor lass – and poor Robbie.”

She had trouble waking Robert from the sleep of the absolutely worn out. He would have to go into Liverpool,
anyway, she told herself, to be signed off from the
Marakand
and then find himself another berth. She sighed at the thought.

When he heard the news, he was wide awake in a moment and jumped out of bed. He seized his trousers and struggled into them.

“The phone to the hospital’s dead. I tried it – or rather, Mr Burnett did.”

“I can go over.”

“Well, you have some tea first. The kettle’s boiling.” Dear Lord, what a mess he was in, too. A black eye, hardly any eyebrows or eyelashes – all singed off – likewise his front hair. And both hands bandaged by the hospital, because of the burns on them.

Conor had not been home since before his wife’s funeral on Tuesday. Now, on Thursday morning, after what Glynis Hughes described as a lively night but not in the usual sense, he hesitantly opened his front door. He had snatched an occasional nap at the post, but now he knew he must really sleep; otherwise, he would collapse.

On the floor of the passage inside, lay his letter to his mother, returned through the dead-letter office. A wobbly hand had scrawled in pencil on it, “Address Unknown. Return to sender”. Then in brackets the writer had added, “Whole street bombed. Tried to trace in Rest Centre without success.”

He stood in the narrow hall, paralysed. He could not believe it. He had been so harassed himself that he had not thought about his parents’ danger.

If they were hurt or killed, why hadn’t his married sister, who lived in the same street, let him know?

A slow coldness crept through him. From bitter experience, he could visualise the scene so well. A dozen houses down, a whole series of families related to each other carried out dead
or dying; no one surviving long enough to give names to the authorities. Those same authorities, hopelessly overloaded by the sheer magnitude of the raids, would in time name most of the victims – but not yet.

He leaned his head against his paintless front door, and cried aloud, “Holy Mother have pity on me!” He beat his fist against the unresponding wood. “I’m damned! Accursed!”

Nearly demented, he fled back to his post – and the telephone.

With some difficulty, he got through, on the newly restored line, to the wardens’ post nearest to his parents’ house. Then he came slowly back to his own street. Instinctively, he sought the only people left to him, his children; he turned the rapidly tarnishing brass knob of Gwen’s front door and walked in.

Michael was asleep on the sofa, an empty feeding-bottle lolling by his cheek. From the kitchen came the splash of dishes being washed.

“Are you there, Mrs Thomas?”

The splashing stopped immediately and Ruby came running in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Dad,” she cried eagerly.

He held out his arms to her. She ran into them and with his head bowed over her he began to sob helplessly. She drew back. “Dad, what’s up?” she whispered, frightened by such a lament.

While she sat on his knee in the muddled room, he told her. He wept unrestrainedly, unable to hold in his despair and grief any more.

Half girl, half woman, she listened quietly, arm around his neck. Then she started to comfort. “Don’t cry, Dadda. We’ll manage,” she said hoarsely. “Mrs Thomas’ll help me – while I get started, like.” She clung to him while he tried to control himself.

“I’m sorry, luv,” he said, and wept on.

She was frightened to see her hot-tempered father cry, but it also put him on a level with Patrick, and she said, “Aye,
everybody cries sometimes, Dadda,” and gritted her teeth and hugged him closer.

When her father’s weeping ceased, she said quite eagerly, “Let’s go and buy a bit o’ food, Dad, so as we can move back home.”

That afternoon, Gwen and Mari sat and looked at each other over their teatime toast and dripping. The house was extraordinarily quiet and seemed to exude the misery of its damage and neglect. Gwen thought her heart had never been so heavy. By dint of taking three trams in a circular route and walking quite a distance, she had managed to reach Walton Hospital. The fright engendered by the bombs on the hospital had given David another heart attack. He had, however, survived, though he would need much nursing and would probably never be able to return to work. She had also briefly visited Emmie, who was heavily sedated and an alarming bundle of bandages and sticking plaster. There she had met Robert, sitting by her bed. He had told her that when Emmie was discharged from hospital, his mother would take care of her at his home in Hoylake, until they were married. It was the only good news of the day. Confound her – and her furniture – she could have the lot of it.

Mari broke into her gloomy contemplation by saying brightly, between sips of cocoa, “Tomorrow’s your day for Blackler’s.”

Gwen nodded. “It’s burned down. I’m out o’ work – like plenty of others.”

“They might start up again,” Mari replied. “You could go and see. There’s probably a notice set up in the ruins, to tell the staff what to do.”

“Aye. I’d be glad of a full-time job, now your dad’s so poorly.” Her face brightened. “I’ll go this evening. People’s got to buy clothes and bedding from
somewhere
.”

“I’ll walk down with you, if you like.”

“Would you, dear? I’d enjoy your company.”

One of the loneliest people in Liverpool lay unvisited, except by Robert Owen, in a huge, overcrowded men’s ward at Walton Hospital. Identified by the pay slip in his wallet, still in his back pocket, Deckie Dick opened his eyes on Thursday evening, to the long glinting rays of a setting sun reflected on a shiny, white ceiling. He was in a bed and shivering; yet at the same time feeling dreadfully hot. He had been vaguely aware of being bundled about, of being sponged and feeling chilled.

A face loomed over him. It was topped by a little white cap above a wrinkled brow. A pair of sharp blue eyes, red-rimmed, peered at him. His wrist was clasped by cold, bony fingers.

A misty mouth said, “He’ll be all right now.”

Another blanket was tucked over him. He fell asleep, only to be awakened by more fumbling hands. The air raid warning was wailing its devil’s notes, and two giggling young women were lifting him out of bed. They stuffed him underneath it. “Safest place,” they assured him, and wrapped his blankets round him.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Walton Hospital,” they told him, and he breathed, “Thanks be,” and slept contentedly on the floor through the rest of the night.

The entire population of Liverpool had been waiting tensely for the warning to go. Some of those who still had a bed had climbed into it, feeling that they
must
sleep, no matter what happened to them. Now they raised their heads to listen. But the raid was small, short and scattered; many of the townsfolk slept through it. London became the main target, though German squadrons were beginning to regroup in preparation for an attack on Russia. In the days following, mass funerals
were held, and people who thought they could not cry another tear, wept some more.

One morning, a curiously shrunken and shaky Deckie Dick, dressed in clothing supplied by a charitable organisation, tottered out of Walton Hospital and went back to the room he rented in Pitt Street. The landlady had relet it. “Ah thought you must be dead,” she told him. She had, however, stored his few belongings, in case he had a relative to claim them.

Weak and bewildered, he went into a tiny café, sat down at a greasy table and ordered a cup of coffee. From his wallet he took out a small piece of paper with an address written on it and he smoothed it between thumb and finger. The granny of the young conscript he had met in the shelter also lived in Pitt Street. Robert Owen had told him that everyone in the shelter had been killed. She must be feeling bad, he ruminated, as he slowly stirred his tasteless coffee. It wouldn’t hurt him to go up and see her; the old biddy might even know of a room to let.

Ten minutes later, he was climbing the bare, littered stairs of a lodging house similar to the one he had lived in, though this one seemed to smell even worse.

He did not have to knock at the door of the first-floor front room. The occupant had heard his footsteps and had opened it a crack.

“Mrs Pickles?” he inquired of the one grey eye peeping at him.

The crack widened. In the dim light he could make out only a female form draped in a black shawl. “What d’yer want?” The voice was full of suspicion.

“Ah come about your nephew, Wilf.”

A sharp intake of breath. “Well, what about ’im?”

“Mrs Pickles, can I come in and sit down? I bin ill or I’d have come before. I met your lad in an air raid shelter and promised to look you up.”

A pause. “Come in.”

Inside the bare, clean room, he turned to the woman. She
was very small, with a pinched, thin face out of which large steel-grey eyes regarded him with sudden compassion. Her skin looked pale from poor nourishment and lack of sunshine, and was a mass of fine lines. She had no teeth. About 55 years old, he reckoned.

She said, “Aye, you are ill, I can see that. Sit down on the sofa bed. I was just goin’ to make a pot o’ tea and a bite of toast.” She picked up a kettle from off the small fire and poured boiling water into a teapot, much blackened from being kept hot too near the fire.

Dickie sank thankfully on to the edge of the sofa; the springs complained bitterly.

“What about Wilf?” she asked. “You know he were killed? He were all I got – a real nice lad.”

As gently as he knew how, he told her about the scene in the air raid shelter and of his promise.

White cup and saucer in one hand, she looked down at him, her mouth quivering. He thought she was going to cry, but she did not. She simply sighed and sat down abruptly. She took the lid off the aluminium teapot and stirred the tea vigorously.

As she handed a cup to him, she asked, “What was you ill with?”

He told her about being buried with Emmie and his subsequent pneumonia, and as he talked some of the stress went out of him.

She listened patiently, and at the end she said, “I don’t think any of us will ever be the same again after all this. It’s as if all our lives was overturned in the course of a week, isn’t it?”

“Aye.” He smiled wryly, and stirred his tea. He wondered if he still had a job. Then he burst out suddenly, “Being buried like that – it taught me life was worth having. Funny, isn’t it?”

She smiled and her eyes crinkled up with a promise of laughter, when she felt better. “Have another piece of toast,” she invited.

Through two pots of tea and a pile of toast, they sat knee to
knee, two lonely people tossed together by a war they did not understand.

He stayed with her for the rest of his life.