Child from Home (38 page)

For us in Haxby there was now a sense of time hanging in the balance, of waiting for something big to happen. Day succeeded day, each one much the same as the last, and we were still getting belted and clouted round the earhole. I had just endured a good hiding when Mrs Harris went off the deep end on finding that I had put my big toenail through one of the threadbare bed sheets and Sylvia was made to sew yet another patch over it. As the summer holidays drew near, school felt more like a holding pen than a place of education. When we were sent to do some hoeing on the school allotment, a stubby, wind-ruffled robin redbreast sat close by on the handle of a fork, cocking his head to one side and trilling away to his heart's content. A child's senses are wide open and I was filled with wonder and pleasure by the sweet song of the little bird. On another occasion, as we were out on one of our nature walks, we came across a German POW working in one of Outhwaite's fields. The fair-haired man greeted Miss Francis with the words ‘Guten Morgen', before he asked her, ‘How old are ze kinder?' ‘Most of them are nine years old,' she replied, at which point he took out a small, dogeared, black and white snapshot of a young blonde woman and a small boy. He became quite emotional as he caressed the faces on the photograph with his fingertips. There was a catch in his voice as he said, ‘Zese are mein frau und kinder in Deutschland', before turning away to conceal the tears that were welling up in his eyes. Some of the POWs had started to carve wooden toys for the children of the village.

We were taken to the field to play rounders and cricket and Mr Fox bawled at me, ‘Wake up, lad!' as I stood daydreaming in the outfield while the ball sped past me to the boundary. I was too busy watching the swallows, with their swept back wings, wheeling, gliding and fluttering to catch insects on the wing. My mind would often slip away when I wasn't looking and I would go into a kind of trance.

Gran started to visit more often and I sensed that something was afoot. Plans were being made for George and me to go back to Middlesbrough. I was excited and apprehensive at the same time at the thought of going home and seeing Mam, Dad and Jimmy again. Even though Mrs Harris, with her floppy body that spilled at random from her ill-fitting clothes, had made our lives a misery, it had not been all bad. We had been beaten, sent to bed early and regularly derided, and any praise had been very rare with the criticism oft repeated. However, we loved the countryside and I had shared many happy times with Jimmy and the others in spite of her.

George and I were so excited when Mrs Harris told us that Gran was coming to take us home, but when she arrived I sensed that something was troubling her. The RAF was bombing Germany day after day but I had no inkling of the devastating bombshell that was about to be dropped on me. Gran, normally so steadfast and controlled, took us into the front room, and as she sat us down on the settee there were tears in her eyes and a catch in her voice as she said, ‘I'm very sorry to have to tell you that your Mam and Dad were killed in the bombing of Newport in 1942, so you will be coming to live with me.'

It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. How do you tell young children such a devastating, life-changing thing as that? At first the words, which fell like hammer blows, failed to register and I sat there with trembling hands unable to speak, until grief overwhelmed me and the tears came. I don't know how long I cried for but it set George off and Gran, with her shoulders stooped, put her arms around us and held us to her capacious bosom. Nothing had prepared me for this bolt from the blue and the finality of death was just too hard to grasp. Mam and Dad had gone forever! In the space of just a few seconds my life had been irreversibly changed.

Mrs Harris had packed our cases beforehand, not that we had much to put in them, and, as far as I can remember, Mr Harris was out at work. The farewells were brief and perfunctory with no tears and no promise of any reunions. I can't honestly remember much of the bus ride into York and the train journey home except for a brief glimpse of the towers of the Minster soaring up above the rooftops. I must have been in a state of shock the whole way but I clearly remember us walking down King George Street to Gran's house in the hazy August sunshine. The long terraces of old, two-up, two-down street houses were brick-built and it all seemed so drab, grimy and grey, and there was a closed-in feel about everything after nearly five years of life in the wide, open spaces of the countryside. Gran had Archie and Renee at home, so the sleeping arrangements had to be changed to accommodate us. If Gran hadn't taken us in we would have been put into the grim Victorian orphanage at Nazareth House.

There was still no electricity in the house, which was lit by two swan-necked gaslights on the chimneybreast in the kitchen. On going to bed we had a candle in a holder, which was placed on a chair next to the bed, the only other furniture being a wardrobe and a small dressing table under the window. The coalhouse and toilet were at the bottom of the yard, so there were chamber pots under the bed for use during the night and there was no bathroom. The table took up most of the space in the tiny kitchen. Gran's wooden rocking chair stood by the side of the black-leaded fire range and an old, leather-covered chaise longue stood beneath the casement window. There was a cupboard under the stairs and a step led down into a pantry with a rectangular, white-glazed sink. The back door led into a small area under a closed-in lean-to, in the corner of which was a gas cooker.

As I climbed the steep stairs with their strip of threadbare carpet, I noticed that there was a quarter of an inch gap between them and the wall, and it dawned on me that it had been caused by the blast from the bomb that had killed Mam and Dad. The realisation caused a big black cloud to descend on me and I felt utterly bereft and alone. I sat on the stairs and sobbed my heart out for my dead parents and what might have been. Gran left me to get on with it and, when I had cried myself out, I crawled up the stairs on all fours and got into bed and snuggled up to George, who was sound asleep, and I must have eventually dropped off. The next day my emotions were in turmoil, life seemed wearisome and I did not want to go out or to meet anyone. I found refuge in the small space between the front door and the inner glass-paned door where I sat brooding for a long time – a sad, listless little boy striving hard to remember what his parents looked like. George couldn't remember them at all as he had been only five when they died, but I had fleeting and poignant memories of their deep and tender love. In my mind Mam and Dad would remain forever young and fair, but I began to cry at the thought that I would never again see their beloved faces. As another wave of grief hit me, I curled up with my arms around my bent knees and rocked back and forth.

In our society death is usually hidden from us as we grow up, which makes it all the more shocking when we have to confront it. The only other place in which I could grieve undisturbed was in the brick lavvy down the yard where I would sit feeling sorry for myself. Never again would Mam wake me in the morning with a kiss or take me on her knee and explain things. Never again would Dad dandle me; tickle me; throw me in the air to catch me in his strong arms or gallop and prance around with me on his broad shoulders. At these thoughts an unspeakable sadness welled up and my small frame was wracked by sobs that hurt inside and out. When the tears that coursed down my cheeks one after the other dried up, I went back into the house with my eyes red-rimmed and sore. I could see the pain and anguish reflected in poor Gran's eyes, for after all my Mam was her eldest daughter and who can ever know a mother's pain when their own flesh and blood is taken from them.

I seemed to see the world differently then and there was a void; a big black hole; a nothingness where there should have been a mother's love and the emptiness was unbearable. I had never felt more alone in my life and when Renee took me out to show me the bombed area, I became jealous of other kids when I saw them doing things with their parents. The roads had been cleared and the rubble of the broken houses had been made safe but the scene brought home to me the horror and the reality of that dreadful night. Powerful emotions kept bubbling up and in my utter distress I sobbed so much that Renee was obliged to take me back to the house. I was like a sleepwalker and found it hard to carry out even simple tasks. On the Sunday I went to St Cuthbert's church with Gran and Renee but it seemed as if it wasn't me walking around, the real me was locked inside. When the vicar spoke of Jesus Christ crying out, ‘God, why hast thou forsaken me?' at his crucifixion, I knew the feeling, and I started to feel a sudden anger and bitterness towards Him for having dropped such a devastating bombshell on me when He was meant to protect us. How could He have let such a thing happen? What had I done to deserve it?

Later I sat behind the front door shouting at Him and the Germans, who I hated with a passion for taking Mam and Dad away from me. As I wallowed in self-pity, Gran must have heard me, for she took me into the front room and, sitting me down on the settee, cuddled me and tried to console me. But I got angry with her as well, as Renee had told me that everybody knew, except me and George, and they had said nothing. All the teachers and the nurses when I was in hospital must have known and they had kept quiet about it. Even Jimmy knew! I shouted out, ‘Why did this have to happen to me? Why didn't you tell me? You lied to us and I'll never forgive you for it!'

The terrible hurt that Gran had endured at the time of the bombing and in telling us never entered my self-centred mind, but I was to feel guilt at the way I had treated her as I grew older. ‘I was only trying to protect you. I thought that telling you when you seemed so happy would only upset you. I thought it best to wait until you were a bit older. I didn't want to hurt you when you were so young and far away from home,' she said in an apologetic tone. Feeling that God had let me down, I longed for someone to reassure me; to take away my deep sadness and to answer the thousand and one questions that filled my head. I became surly and diffident and suffered spells of melancholy with long silences as the ‘whys of it all' gnawed away at me. Gran said, ‘Still waters run deep', which I didn't understand. At other times I whinged and chuntered on and on, until Gran said in exasperation, ‘Whisht now, you've got my head splitting. You'd better get that chip off your shoulder young man or nobody will want anything to do with you.' An enduring anger was to simmer inside me for many years and I told myself that I did not need anybody. I became reticent and found it difficult to show affection and just wanted to be left alone.

Gradually the debilitating grief gave way to a grudging acceptance and I locked the pain away in my heart where it could not be reached. My personal tragedy had eclipsed everything and the emotional pain lay there like a long, dull ache that never went away. Eventually there were no more tears. I had reached that stage of grieving when a strange sense of relief descends as the first wave of grief passes and I slowly emerged from my self-made cocoon. I needed some of that spirit that Mr Churchill had shown when he had said, ‘We must fight or go under!' I had to buck up and get on with life. I decided that it was fate; you had no choice in the matter: what will be will be!

Shortly afterwards Jimmy called at the house and knocked on the front door as I was sitting behind it. Many years later he told me that he had heard a squeaky voice call out, ‘Who is it?' It was great to see him again after fourteen long months apart, but luckily grief does not linger too long in the very young and by that time the blackness had lifted sufficiently for me to start taking an interest in the things around me again. Jimmy had known the same bitter taste of grief and loss as I had and had got over it, but it affected our outlook on things for the rest of our lives. We picked up where we had left off, as if we had never been apart, and he came round to play with me and the local lads nearly every day but, after our tragic loss and the cruel treatment at the hands of Mrs Harris, our self-esteem was low and we were lacking in confidence.

It took some time to get used to the miasma created by the steel and chemical works and the incessant metallic clanging from the nearby rail sidings. We played in the drab dusty streets and back alleys and got into all kinds of scrapes, but Jimmy's presence helped to lift me out of my sullen, withdrawn frame of mind. The resilience of childhood came to my aid again, and we climbed all over the mountains of rubble and the charred beams that were being colonised by weeds, and made dens in it so that I didn't have time to brood too much. It felt strange seeing the broken toilet pans, the empty fireplaces, the pictures and the wallpaper in bedrooms that were open to the sky. They looked like the insides of damaged dolls' houses and I felt a bit guilty, as though I was prying into people's private lives (or deaths).

Gran thought that we were out playing games in the street, which we were most of the time, but at other times we were clambering about on the rubble or in the bomb-damaged house on the corner of the block opposite. It had been boarded up but we forced the back gate and the door and climbed the rickety, creaking stairs, edging our way round the huge gaps in the bedroom floorboards and risking a drop of sixteen feet or so into the cellar below. It was scary but exciting and anyway Jimmy had dared me and I couldn't refuse a dare.

It was quite a while before Gran told me the details of that awful night. It seems that Dad had arranged to take some leave that weekend and Mam had come home to meet him, as they were to go to Grove House to collect George before bringing him to live with us in Haxby. They had packed a case with clothes, shoes and toys and had left it in the front room ready for first thing in the morning. They had just got into bed when the siren sounded at 10.37 p.m., as enemy aircraft were in the area. The warning was late and not many people had managed to make it to the underground shelters a hundred yards away on The Common. They could hear the droning of a Dornier overhead as they stepped out of the front door. A bomb dropped right on the house and they were crushed under the falling masonry, never hearing the continuous note of the ‘Raiders Passed' siren at 1.27 a.m. Renee had been eating her supper after a two till ten shift at the steelworks when the first of four bombs landed nearby, with four more falling into the river. She had dashed down Booth Street heading towards our house and was horrified on seeing the devastation. The wrecked and badly damaged houses were illuminated by a great column of flame from a gas main that had been fractured by the explosion. As searchlights and flashes from the anti-aircraft guns lit the sky, the steel-helmeted policemen would not let anyone near and Renee feared the worst as the area was quickly cordoned off. In her desperation to find Mam and Dad, who she loved so much, she dodged under the tape and an ARP warden shouted ‘Looter!' She was grabbed hold of but her desperation gave her extra strength and she fought him, but eventually she had to give up and go home. It was Middlesbrough's worst night for fatalities with twenty-eight killed, including Mam and Dad and eleven children, and, as Gran said afterwards, ‘If you hadn't been evacuated, you'd have been among 'em.'