Domestic Soldiers (8 page)

As bombs whistled relentlessly to the ground, the city’s barometer jumped up and down wildly from the rush and suction of continual blasts playing havoc with the air pressure. The greatest disaster that night occurred when a bomb hit the Marples Hotel on the High Street, causing its seven floors to fall into the cellar where seventy-seven people were sheltering. Only seven survived. Most of the damage done to the city, however, was in the southern corridor that the Germans used to approach the city and in the industrial areas east of the centre. That night, in her farmhouse north of Leeds, Natalie Tanner and her family saw ‘a lot of gunfire (at least a lot for us) and … three flares and some shells bursting’ in the distance, but they were too far away to feel the impact of any of the 355 tons of bombs dropped on Sheffield that night.

Though Edie was not writing for M-O at the time, she later told M-O that she’d never forget sweeping up
shards of glass the morning after, dressed in a top coat, bonnet and boots to stave off the bitter cold December morning streaming undeterred through the holes where windows once stood. Later that morning she may have picked her way into town and experienced the poignant ruins and varieties of dirt that the official account of the raid describes: ‘Whole sides of sturdily-built, expensive Victorian houses fell away and crumbled,’ wooden doors and plaster walls shredded by splinters of glass flung at high speed, and the long, deep channels that flying metal gouged through solid stone.

A thin dirty ice formed around the smouldering ashes and charred timbers left in the wake of the bombing. In the end, all that was left was ‘mud and mess and desolation’.
17

While Sheffielders cleaned up the morning after, the Tanners inched their way through gale winds over rain-swept icy moors to James’ school in Glossop. James had a role as one of the dwarfs in
Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs
. Natalie proudly reported to M-O that he remembered all his lines and brought the house down three times with his performance. On their return home, Natalie and her husband, Hugh, stopped in Leeds for dinner and a movie. When the Germans came back to Sheffield on 15 December, Natalie didn’t hear the ack-ack fire from her seat at the Civic Theatre in Leeds, but those in the balcony did.

Alice Bridges spent the waning weeks of December entertaining guests at her house, picking through the wreckage caused by Birmingham’s recent raid to visit friends and family, buying Christmas gifts to send to Jacq, tidying her house and securing their Anderson shelter – Les laid some concrete to stop the rain from coming in.

For Alice, the season was a bust. Christmas Eve was her thirteenth wedding anniversary, but the couple had forgone their usual party and she felt miserable and lonely. Jacq wasn’t home, and Les only mirrored Alice’s mood, making her even more depressed. She had asked Mrs Empson if there was anyone she might invite to Christmas dinner who was bombed-out and had nowhere to go, but it seemed everyone was settled. Christmas was ‘peaceful’ in more than one way: the night skies were quiet and the normally sociable Bridges had no visitors. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were quiet for Alice, and for Britain. On Hitler’s orders, there were no raids on British soil over the holiday.

The Blitz of 1940 was punctuated, however, by raids directly following the Christmas lull. On 29 December St Paul’s Cathedral in London narrowly escaped the fate of its predecessor in 1666 and thereafter stood evocatively among the flames to uplift the spirit of the people, and remind them that the popular song, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ had some substance in its hopeful message. In the following year bombers would not visit the capital with such regularity, but the intensity and devastation of the raids ratcheted up steadily until 10 May 1941, when London experienced its worst and its last major raid of the war. Across Britain that winter and spring of 1941, other cities also suffered the wrath of the bombers.

Early in January 1941, Hitler called off the invasion and suspended Operation Sea Lion indefinitely. Still, night after night, bombers hit strategic ports; as well as London, other ports – Cardiff, Swansea, Hull, Liverpool and others – were to be destroyed according to Hitler’s plan. Irene Grant’s Tyneside and the huge shipbuilding facilities at Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness were also on the list.

Glasgow was targeted too, and in the course of a bombing raid on that city the Luftwaffe decided to hit Sheffield. Visibility, however, was low and the bombs were accidentally released over Leeds. This was the closest Natalie Tanner and her family got to the Blitz. They were in Bradford for the evening, taking in a play and a late-night drink when they heard the sirens. With the lethargy of those who had never experienced the bombings first-hand, they leisurely finished their drinks before they headed home. The drive passed uneventfully, but when they got home, ‘We heard guns and some dull thuds. We could see the shells bursting and our door rattled a bit.’ Those in Leeds were not so lucky. The bombs caused extensive damage and left fifty-seven dead.

Irene Grant and her family had just returned home after a day out visiting her mother when the first sirens went on 9 April. The Grants had thus far experienced few significant raids and the noise startled them. Rita, Irene’s daughter, jumped and accidentally spilt her glass of water. Irene’s husband, Tom, began to curse. Quickly, Irene and her other daughter, Marjorie, got between them to save Rita from Tom’s angry blows. Soon, they began to hear the planes come over. ‘So starts the most terrible night of bombs, gun-firing, [and] planes,’ Irene noted in her diary. Windows shook and
nearby bombs twice knocked Irene off her bed. Later, Irene learned that the fires she saw from her windows were the timber yards at Tynedock. She also reported that about five miles from her home, North and South Shields sustained heavy bombing, while Sunderland’s Town Hall and many of the businesses on what Irene considered the town’s ‘finest street’, Fawcett Street, were gutted.

That same night, on 9 April, raiders flew over Birmingham, as they did throughout the spring. This night, after so many raids and so many evenings spent shaking in fear, Alice’s nerve finally shattered. All night, she trembled fearfully, and as each whistling bomb pounded the earth around her shelter, she could not help but jump in fear. When a massive bomb split the ground nearby, electric fear raced up her spine and it took every ounce of strength she had to stop her hands and legs from shaking uncontrollably.

Luckily, Jacqueline did not have to witness this raid. Only weeks before, Alice’s daughter was at home after Alice had learned that the family that took Jacq in December 1940 had neglected her. Jacq came home with frostbitten feet and filthy clothes – it seemed as though they’d never been cleaned in two months. Furthermore, she complained, the billeting family repeatedly ridiculed Jacq. Sadly, it was a common story for many of the evacuees, though some endured much worse abuse at the hands of their foster families. After several weeks in Birmingham, however, Alice found Jacq another home that was a much happier environment, and her daughter thus narrowly escaped the spring raids on Birmingham.

In Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last endured several terrifying nights of air raids over the course of that
April. When the sirens went, Nella and her husband, Will, along with their cat and ageing dog, scattered to the reinforced space under the stairs in their semi-detached home, and listened to the angry bombers growling overhead on their way to targets on Clydeside and in Northern Ireland. As they passed over the shipbuilding town, the ‘devil bombers’ let fly machine-gun fire and bombs on Barrow’s city centre and industrial sites. Shrapnel poured down on the roof of Nella’s home, which was not far from the centre of town, while ‘Doors and windows shook and rattled, as if someone is trying to force their way in,’ with every bomb that fell nearby.

Following each raid, Will, a joiner by trade, went into town to repair what he could and demolish what was unsalvageable. The damage Will witnessed convinced him that Nella’s desire for an indoor Morrison shelter was wise, and the couple quickly sent away for theirs. With each passing raid, Nella noted more and more townspeople packing up and heading out of town. The scenes of people queuing for buses, hailing taxis or simply on foot reminded her of the chaos in France only a year earlier, when scores of scared refugees flooded the roads out of town. What would happen if Barrow had a ‘big blitz’, she wondered.

On 3 May, Nella hunkered down in her newly arrived Morrison shelter, waiting for ‘the end’ during Barrow’s greatest raid. The squat indoor, coffin-like shelter with thick steel plates on top and bottom and open steel-mesh sides – large enough to accommodate two adults and two children lying down but small enough to fit into a small space – protected her from the damage done that night. The windows in her home were blasted out, doors were torn off their hinges, plaster
rained down from the ceilings, walls were cracked, and the roof on the garage separated four inches from the house. Ten people were killed and 2,000 rendered homeless in Barrow’s Blitz.

A week later, on the night of 10 May, the conditions over London were perfect for destruction. The moon was full – a ‘bomber’s moon’ – and the Thames that sparkled in the light was at its ebb. Across Britain, everyone feared clear evenings and full moons. At the end of 1944, when the threat of bombers over Britain had all but evaporated, Edie Rutherford noted a beautiful moonlit evening and immediately thought of the Blitz four years earlier. ‘I wonder when we will cease connecting perfect moonlight with blitzes,’ she mused.

The 2,000 fires that were started in London on 10 May 1941 fanned across the city. All firemen could do was watch the conflagration grow as their hoses ran dry. Landmarks across the city succumbed in the onslaught. Bombs destroyed the Commons debating chamber and 250,000 books in the British Museum, Westminster Abbey was bombed, as was the Palace of St James, King’s Cross and Temple Church, along with other notable London structures. Thousands were made homeless, almost 2,000 were seriously injured and nearly 1,500 died that night in London.

People stood the strain of these raids for as long and as best they could. Some packed up quickly after heavy raids and sought relative safety in the countryside. Others trekked nightly out of town centres and slept on moors, in caves or forests nearby to escape the bombings. In Barrow’s raids, some people walked the five miles to nearby Dalton. During Plymouth’s April
1941 raid, when German raiders hit the city hard for five days in one week, masses walked out of the city at night and slept in barns, in churches, in ditches or under hedges. Some bedded down on Dartmoor, wrapping their children in rugs to stave off the bitter cold nights. When daylight came, they brushed themselves off and trekked back to the city to work.

In the heaviest blitz on Birmingham, Alice Bridges had hoped to get out of the city, too, but, thwarted in her quest, she hunkered down in her Anderson shelter with a fatalistic attitude, some liquor and her diary. Although she kept a M-O diary for nearly a decade, it was during the 1940 Blitz that Bridges turned to her diary the most. From 1939 to 1949 she sometimes wrote sporadically, sending in brief diaries usually recounting a three-month time span. But with the Blitz, the difference is striking. Almost every day during the height of the Blitz, Alice wrote of her own experiences and actively sought out friends and neighbours, asked them about their stories, and told M-O about them. At significant points in her daily life, such as during the Blitz or a er major tiffs with her husband, she became detailed in her writing. M-O was not only a social research group for whom she volunteered, it was a friend to whom she could turn and offload her troubles. And, during those long and sleepless nights of autumn 1940 and spring 1941, she had plenty of time to do so.

The constant barrage of the blitzes could work strangely on the mind. At times, the fear was intense – hands shook uncontrollably, stomachs churned, chests tightened and pangs struck at the heart. But the body and mind can take only so much for so long. Mundane thoughts would creep in and temporarily mitigate the
fear. While Nella Last waited for ‘the end’, with her ceiling coming down in bits all around her, she thought of tea and wished she’d eaten the fruit salad she’d saved for another day. Friends told Alice, ‘Sometimes we feel all “het-up” and quite sick and ill at the thought of what is happening and what might happen and at other times, don’t care a damn.’

‘Taking it’ did not mean that one was impervious to the fear, but that one put on a brave face and remained outwardly calm while a titanic struggle to overcome that fear raged inside. Keeping up appearances, keeping to schedules and ‘acting’ normal was a crucial component in this battle. A factory roof might be blown off during a raid, office buildings reduced to rubble, but the workers came nonetheless, even if it took them hours to pick through blitzed streets or walk across miles of hills from where they sheltered for the night.

Women were under considerable pressure to keep calm in front of their families – going to sit on the stairs to cry alone or finding refuge to allow a tear to fall in the darkness of the cinema. A brave face also meant a pretty face. Forgetting one’s appearance was evidence that the war had beat them.

When Alice visited her friend, Jane, who had been bombed-out during the December raids, she was concerned by Jane’s appearance. Her hair was a mess, no make-up had been applied – indeed, her face was dirty – and there was a blank look in her eyes. Furthermore, the baby was fussy and the new house was a wreck. Alice sat with Jane and listened to her troubles. Bridges offered comfort by telling her that everything happened for a reason, but ultimately reminded her of her duty. She told her friend,