Three Women of Liverpool (20 page)

As clerks and typists struggled over the debris to report for work in non-existent buildings, the incident officer offered to send a relief crew, to replace the men hunting for Emmie. The men refused to be relieved.

The incident officer did not argue with them. Amongst the motley gangs of workmen there was a stiff pride that they did not stop work until they had themselves carried the victims out.

An intact corner of the light well had been reached. The searchers tried listening there, but heard nothing. They did, however, find a woman’s shoe and this gave them new incentive to continue.

Robert could hardly stand, but he continued mechanically to pile rubbish into skips and to lend a hand where he could. He could not identify the shoe as Emmie’s.

Gathered as close as the police would allow was a large crowd of sightseers, clerks in well-pressed business suits, their female counterparts in neat black dresses with white collars and white summer hats, housewives in spring suits, with pretty baskets on their arms, and the male flotsam and jetsam of a port, who, despite two years of war, seemed to have nothing particular to do.

An untidy little office girl came out of a building still standing behind the crowd and pushed her way into the middle of the partially cleared street. She held a saucer of milk. “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” she called, and, as a thin black cat sidled up to her, she put the saucer down, and explained to a young woman standing watching, “It’s the offices’ pussies. They got no home now.” Another cat approached tentatively, and she renewed her call.

Young typists and clerks were searching the edges of the ruins for filing cabinets, account books, any records which would help to re-establish their companies, when it was agreed that a miner particularly experienced in mine rescues should go down the tunnel and decide how they should proceed further. In a moment he was gone, flicking himself along the tortuous zigzags and ups and downs, like an eel through rock-patterned water. Though the smell of this disaster was different from that of a mining accident, the dust was the same, and when he felt cobblestones under him, he paused to readjust his mask. It was surprisingly quiet, as he flashed his torch along the lines of what cracks he could see. It was clear from their angle that, further on, the yard had collapsed. This puzzled him. He turned the torch upward, to examine the fearsome mass above him. To move further in, he decided, could be dicey.

“’Allo,” he called tentatively, not too loudly – it wouldn’t take much to start a fall, he reckoned. “’Allo, there.”

Dead silence, except for an uneasy movement overhead. Blast it. He drew his piece of piping from inside the front of his singlet and this time put it to the cobbles – afterwards he could give no real reason why he did so. He bent his ear to it and listened intently.

It seemed to him that he did hear something, a movement, other than the rustles in the wreckage bearing down round him. But it was from underneath him.

He laid his head, ear down, against the unfriendly
cobblestones and held his breath. Very carefully he tapped on the stones with the end of his torch.

The girl couldn’t be under him? Or could she? He tapped and listened again. There was a small, strangled cry. And it
was
from underneath, but a good distance further to his right, he guessed. Taking a chance, he cupped his hands round his mouth and put his face to the stones. At the top of his voice, he shouted, “We’re coming. Hold on there.”

She heard him, a muffled echo. With overwhelming joy, she tried to shout back, but she had screamed so much, was so exhausted by fright, hunger and thirst that the noise was not enough for him to hear. Beside her, Dick muttered incoherently in a high fever, as if he had pneumonia.

Perplexed, the miner ran his torch again along any cracks he could find, to see their direction. He tapped the surface in several directions as far as space would allow, but there was no echo, and no further cry. He backed down the tunnel as fast as he dared, trying to imagine, as he retreated, how parts of the light well might have fallen, and into what kind of space. It had to be a cellar, he decided.

As he emerged, panting, scratched and mystified, Robert ran lightly up the debris to meet him, followed by a protesting foreman. “You shouldn’t run over it like that, you fool,” he bellowed, “Bring the whole mess down!” He forgot his complaints, however, when the miner said there was indeed someone there. “Under you?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “But it’s a yard – a light well. Cobbled. Seen it meself when I went down a bit back.”

“Well, get down there and get her out.” Robert was nearly beside himself.

“Hold on, lad.” The foreman was aggrieved. “These buildings’ve bin blasted several times from different directions. It’s not that simple.” He turned to the miner again. “You’re sure you heard her?”

The man smiled, his teeth flashing white in his filthy face. “I
heard somebody, all right.”

“Thank God!” exclaimed Robert in relief. But anguished dread then filled him. What horrifying hurt might Emmie have suffered? He fought down a wave of nausea.

The returned miner was talking again. “She must be lying in a hole under that yard. But most of the yard must be supported by solid earth – otherwise the cobbles would have caved in years ago. They’d be a dead weight.”

“Some kind of arches might be supporting ’em,” another man suggested. “Arches can hold up cathedrals.”

“Aye, but we
could
be digging down through solid rock, if we go down through the cobbles.”

“How far into the yard, measuring, like, from where you was lyin’, do you think she was?” The foreman rubbed his heavy-muscled arms which ached intolerably. He was bent on pinpointing as accurately as possible where they must penetrate.

“A way,” the miner said immediately. “I went over the stone foundation wall what you told me about – back o’ where the canteen shelter must’ve been – and all me body was on cobbles. She must’ve been at least twenty feet from me, bearing half right; and I tell you, the voice came from below – not level with me.”

Robert caught the foreman’s arm. “I know!” he broke in eagerly. “Me grandad told me often enough. Privateers – and smugglers – used to have hiding-places for contraband – and you said the cellar of the canteen was much older than the building above it. Could be there’s some merchant’s old cellar under that light well.”

The foreman sighed and pursed his lips, and then said rather condescendingly, “It’s an idea. But God knows how she fell into it.”

“This fella here said it would be hard to go down through the light well itself. Could you still get into the shelter?” asked Robert, fatigue forgotten, and the plan of the building he had seen the warden draw clear in his mind.

“Oh, yes. It was all well nigh cleared out by the time we’d finished. Have to go down carefully, because of the of the big chimney collapsing over there, last night.”

“Did you see any doors in the walls?”

“No, lad. We’d ’ve gone through ’em if we had – to make sure nobody was there.” The tone was scornful now.

“Look again,” Robert persisted. “If they had a secret cellar under the light well, then they had a place to get into it. Maybe it were bricked up when they built the offices. Round here they’ve bin building and rebuilding for centuries – even the offices were real old. There must be all kinds of little places built over – even small rivers have been.”

The men stood round arguing amongst themselves, while the foreman thought this over. The ultimate responsibility was his and he was not going to put his men at risk unnecessarily.

Finally, when Robert had begun to think he could not bear another moment of suspense, he said, “OK. I’ll go down meself and look.” He turned to a young miner who was particularly small-made. “You, Evans, you can come with me.”

They had been squeezing slowly round the shelter’s walls for nearly five minutes, before Evans said triumphantly, “I’ve got it. See, this is brick, not stone.”

The foreman flashed his torch along the wall. Once pointed out, it was possible to see a line under the whitewash where the texture of the wall changed. He crawled closer to the younger man and then carefully tapped on the brick and listened. No response.

Some of the rescue crew, who could do nothing for the moment, went down to the WVS van to get some lunch, while, amid the smell of wet plaster mixed with that of a charnel house, the foreman dug out the first bricks with the care of a
surgeon. The wall would be weaker at this point and the old brickwork could crumble suddenly under the weight of the wreckage above.

The wall proved to be four bricks thick, and when the fourth one suddenly gave and fell out on the other side, a poof of surprisingly cold, damp air blew out at them.

Evans broke into excited Welsh; then remembered his English. “The lad up there was right. There’s space here.” He put his face close to the hole they had made, and shouted, “Anybody there?”

In the light of the foreman’s torch, his face fell. “Try again,” the foreman urged.

“Anybody there?”

Very faintly came a croaking sound that could have been a human voice.

The wall was broken as fast as human hands could do it without causing a fall. As soon as the hole was big enough, young Evans wriggled through feet first. He felt around with the toes of his boots, to make sure he was not dangling over a hole. Cautiously, he stood upright.

“Lend us the torch.” The foreman passed it to him and he flashed it round. “It’s like a blinking castle dungeon,” he reported. And then he called, “’Allo! ’Allo!”

From beyond a massive blockage facing him came a faint response, a distant sob.

“We’re coming. Hold on. Are you by yourself?”

The reply was unintelligible.

Evans tried again. “Are you badly hurt?”

There was a pause and then Evans clearly heard an effort at a throat being cleared. “No,” came the answer.

Meanwhile, in preparation, other men worked feverishly, pushing pit-props and tools down the tunnel and through the hole in the wall. They whistled when they saw, by the light of a powerful lantern, parts of hefty stone arches. There was room to stand against the wall through which Evans had clambered;
but the rest seemed to be an almost solid mass of wreckage.

“She’s on the other side of that,” said Evans, his young face gloomy in the light of the lantern, as he gestured to his right.

The foreman, who had followed Evans through the hole in the wall, glanced quickly round. He said, with more optimism than he felt, “We’ll find her. God, it must be five hundred years old, this place. They knew how to build in those days – and that’s what’s saved her, though there’s more’n one fall here.” He rubbed the end of his nose and then went on, “Reckon she’s tucked up not far from the wall we’ve come through, but it’s goin’ to take a while afore we get through that lot.”

The floor of the cellar was earthen, which at times was a help to them, in that they could loosen large pieces of debris by digging for a little way under them. Miners can almost sink into the earth when they dig, but a bucket brigade had to be formed, to move earth and debris out of the way as it was dug, and these men had difficulty in keeping up with the moling miners.

“At this rate, we’ll be home in time for tea,” one of them joked.

The moles themselves, though fast, moved with the greatest care, with the minimum of noise, with the least disturbance of the dense mass poised above them. A faint smell of burning made Evans shiver; occasionally small runnels of water would cascade down on them. “From the fire-hoses,” the foreman told them firmly. “Water and gas is turned off. You’re not goin’ to drown.”

Every so often the gasped curses would cease and the leading man would call to Emmie, partly to reassure her, but partly to keep them on course.

She would answer them with a faint croak. Every tired nerve alert, she had listened through an eternity of time to the muffled sounds indicating that help was coming. Sometimes the men had paused, to consider how to deal with an
obstruction facing them; there was no sound, and at such times her spirits would sink. They had given up, deserted Dick and her. Dreadful, agonised fear went through her parched, starved body. She tried to shout but little noise came. She felt around the sick man beside her, to find her petticoat with which she had earlier wiped Dick’s burning face. It was half under her, and she laboriously hauled it out, to suck it and dampen her mouth. Though they were lying on wet ground, it seemed impossible to do more than moisten their lips and tongues.

She found the stone with which she had tapped earlier and hit the wall unsteadily with it.

“That’s good,” said a voice surprisingly close to her. “Every time I call, you tap, eh?”

She tapped once in acknowledgment and prayed she would not pass out.

Outside, Robert Owen stood hunched in his Red Cross, brown jacket, nearly out of his mind with the frustration of the long wait. As he mechanically emptied buckets or handed in pieces of wood, his mind would hardly function, and suddenly he heeled over and fell face down on to a pile of debris. The watching crowd murmured and shuffled.

A First Aid man who had been checking his canisters of milk and water, and the tube which he could poke through a small hole in the obstruction between himself and a victim, and thus feed the sufferer until he was freed, dropped his satchel and ran to Robert. He went down on one knee and gently turned the exhausted man over. The doctor and driver from the ambulance also hastened across the street and together they lifted the limp figure and laid him down on the pavement, which had earlier been so sedulously cleared by Alec Robinson and Lady Mentmore’s chauffeur. The lady doctor knelt to wipe gravel from his bruised face and half turned him on his side, so that he was less likely to choke if he vomited. She checked that he had no false teeth in his mouth and then lifted one of his
eyelids. She smiled and took his pulse. Still amused, she got up slowly, dusted down her slacks and said laconically, “Gone to sleep on his feet.”