The day after Niamh’s birthday, the veil of secrecy lifted at last. Allied soldiers were trapped on the beaches at a place called Dunkirk and the navy were having trouble rescuing so many, for the waters were too shallow for the big ships. They’d already commandeered some boats capable of crossing the channel to take the men from the beaches to the naval ships lying at anchor in deeper waters, but more were needed.
Once the dilemma was known of, more boat owners set off on their own, risking life and limb to bring home as many of the soldiers as possible. Soon the papers were full of pictures of men alighting from landing craft of all shapes and sizes, or disembarking from the bigger naval ships. There were pictures of them smiling for the camera as they accepted tea, sandwiches and cigarettes from the women of the WVS, or cheering from the railway carriages taking them home.
It was all over by the 4
th
June, and on the 5
th
Lizzie received the buff telegram. She opened it full of trepidation, steeling herself, and then went into Violet’s, needing to tell someone. ‘He’s alive,’ she cried. ‘Steve’s alive! Injured, but alive, and at a military hospital in Ramsgate.’
It was then she noticed the tears pouring unchecked down Violet’s face and the telegram crushed in her friend’s gnarled hand. ‘Colin isn’t,’ she said. ‘He was
stationed on a gun boat,
HMS Mosquito,
and now he’s missing, presumed dead, and I bet them German bastards blew the thing clean out the water.’
‘Oh God, Oh Christ, Violet, I’m sorry,’ Lizzie cried, holding Violet’s shuddering body tight. She’d liked Colin, with his cheeky grin and infectious laugh. He’d worn his uniform with pride and was more prepared for war than many, but in the end did that count for anything?
Steve had had one of his legs and one of his arms badly crushed and was riddled with shrapnel, and Lizzie had gone down to see him in Ramsgate before he was transferred to Dudley Road Hospital. Stuart was also injured, but Mike had escaped virtually unscathed.
While Steve was in hospital, the Battle of Britain raged in the skies. Britain teetered on the edge of defeat. Invasion seemed imminent. The Home Guard no longer seemed ludicrous, though few people had any faith that the motley crew of old, young and disabled could take on the might of the highly disciplined German army, who’d trampled their way unchecked across Europe.
Signs were removed from roads and railway stations and posters told you that, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and advised, ‘Keep Mum’. At railway and bus depots, others asked, ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’
People were told to disable cars and bicycles not in use, to hide maps and to ‘Be Vigilant’. Across the water there were reports of Hitler massing boats and landing craft ready for invasion. ‘We’ve only got the RAF now,’ Carol told her parents, still devastated by Colin’s death.
But Carol couldn’t help being excited. Factories like Vickers were working around the clock to produce the planes as speedily as possible. Fighter pilots couldn’t be spared and so Carol got her wish. Many of the girls like herself had a crash course in learning to pilot a plane and then climbed into the cockpit and took it to Biggin Hill or wherever they were needed.
She never told her mother much about this work, but she often popped in for a word with Lizzie when she had a spot of leave.
‘So you’re enjoying yourself then?’ Lizzie asked, seeing Carol’s shining eyes.
‘Yeah,’ Carol said. ‘You don’t think me awful, then?’
‘Why ever would I?’
‘Well, you know, with our Colin dying and that,’ Carol said. ‘I did miss him. Still do. I keep expecting him to come in the door and start taking the mickey and that or ruffle me hair, cos he knew that used to get me real riled up.’
‘The way I see it,’ Lizzie said, ‘is that you are doing a valuable job. I didn’t know Colin like I’ve come to know you, but even I can guess he would be very proud of you and tell you to go for it if he was here today. Wouldn’t he?’
‘That’s exactly what he would say,’ Carol said. ‘I can almost hear him say it.’
‘So, that’s what you must do, and don’t worry either about enjoying yourself, like many do when a loved one dies’ Lizzie told her. ‘Grab life with both hands, Carol. We only get the one go at it.’
‘I always feel better when I talk to you,’ Carol said. ‘You’re so sure of yourself.’
‘Sure of myself?’ Lizzie repeated, surprised. ‘I was never sure of myself when I was younger. I was always being pushed about by other people: my cousin, my family, particularly my elder sister.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t let that happen now, though.’
‘Probably not,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘But you are much braver than me, Carol. I could never go up in one of those planes. Aren’t you ever scared?’
‘Ah, no, never,’ Carol said. ‘It’s wonderful, exhilarating, and the view is tremendous. What isn’t so nice is seeing the destruction at the airfields as we fly over them; dirty great craters in the runways and sometimes the planes still smouldering or reduced to mangled heaps of metal. It’s heartbreaking, for every plane is needed so badly, but some of the airfields are under almost constant bombardment. But don’t tell mom that, will you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lizzie said. ‘She has enough to worry about without me adding to it.’
They all had. The coastal towns—Portsmouth, Southampton, Ramsgate, Dover and Plymouth—were being bombed indiscriminately, and so were the ships bringing valuable supplies into Britain.
The day that the Luftwaffe sank seven ships on their way to Weymouth was the day before the first bomb fell in Birmingham on 9
th
August. It took everyone unawares and no sirens sounded. Many thought the lone bomber was looking for Fort Dunlop or Castle Bromwich aerodrome, but instead he dropped three bombs on houses in Lydford Grove, Montague Road and Erdington Hall Road, killing one boy on leave from the army and injuring countless others.
On 13
th
August, Castle Bromwich and the aerodrome were heavily bombed, as well as areas near the centre of the city. It happened again the next night, and the next. Many of these were too far away for Lizzie to take shelter, although she did go to the shelter in Bristol Street on the 23
rd
August and stayed there till the ‘All Clear’ sounded some seven and a half hours later, when she struggled home with two overtired, hungry and fractious children to snatch a few hours’ sleep.
Two days later, Violet and Lizzie were back in the shelter while the city centre was pounded. Barry wasn’t with them as he was fire-watching and people around were grumbling about the sirens not sounding soon enough. They had a point, Lizzie thought. You often heard the crump and crash of explosions before the sirens warned you, and a policeman on a bicycle, blowing a whistle and shouting for people to ‘Take Cover’, didn’t have the same sense of urgency.
But, just then, Violet said to Lizzie, ‘I’m taking a job, starting Monday.’
‘A job?’ Lizzie repeated, aware suddenly that she would miss popping in for a cup of tea and a chat whenever the notion took her, and how good Violet was at minding the children a time or two.
However, the light of determination was in Violet’s eyes. ‘I’m making shell cases,’ she said. ‘It’s at Arkwright’s up Deritend way. Her on the corner gave me the wink there was some jobs going, like. I mean, I’ve been thinking everyone must do what they can to win this damned war, or my Colin and thousands like him have died in vain. I mean, yeah, it was great so
many men were rescued from Dunkirk, and yeah, it were a miracle, like, but what about the equipment left? They can’t fight the whole of the German army with pop guns, and if there ain’t the men to make them then the women must.’
Violet was right of course, and though women had worked in war-related fields since the start, now there was a drive to get more of them involved. Lizzie knew she’d consider it herself if she hadn’t the children to see to—and Steve, of course, for he was coming home for a period of convalescence and some physiotherapy on his arm and leg, and she looked no further forward than that at the moment.
The last raid had torn through the city centre and ripped the roof from the Market Hall in the Bull Ring and done extensive damage elsewhere. The following night set the Snow Hill area alight as far as the Jewellery Quarter, liquid fire running along the streets, licking at the warehouses that were mainly made of wood and destroying factories. Lizzie wondered if the Grand Hotel still stood.
Steve returned home the next day to a world of blackouts and shortages, and a wife wearied by lack of sleep and hardly able to cope with a traumatised man who was often in pain and snappy because of it.
He seemed totally different to the man who’d walked away that day in October. He had a shorter fuse and often shouted at her, and his violent outbursts would cause Niamh to put her hands over her eyes and Tom’s bottom lip to tremble.
But Lizzie forgave him, for as well as the pain he was
so obviously in, she’d seen his haunted eyes and heard the screams he gave sometimes in the night. But she did miss having Violet next door, whom she could have a good old moan to and know it would go no further. She lived in hope that when Steve had had some rest away from it all, he would improve. It was hard, though, to get away from it, for the raids were almost a nightly occurrence. At these times Steve would seldom seek shelter and would instead go to The Bell. Stuart Fellows’s family had moved while he was in France, for when their house, much further down Bell Barn Road, was caught in a blast and declared unsafe, they were offered a home with an elderly uncle who lived near the back of the airfield at Castle Bromwich. If Steve took himself off to see Stuart he’d often not come home all night, and he was so wearing and unpredictable when he was there that Lizzie was often glad of it when he stayed away.
Steve knew he was being unfair yelling at Lizzie. He was really yelling at the unfairness of life and the things he’d been subjected to and the suffering witnessed at Dunkirk, which was so brutal and terrible he couldn’t talk about it, but which he knew would stay with him as long as he lived.
Those last few days in action never left Steve. While retreating, most of The Royal Warwickshires were set to guard the right flank just outside a small town called Wormhout. They’d gone on hour after hour. They hadn’t hoped to win this battle, outnumbered as they were, but every minute, every hour, meant more of their comrades might make it to relative safety back home in England.
Steve had felt as if he was in the pit of Hell, with whistling shells erupting around him and whining machine-gun bullets getting their target more than enough times. Before he went to war, he’d have said he was afraid of nothing. He was six foot in his stocking feet, broad-shouldered, well-muscled and as strong as an ox, a man to be reckoned with. But in the fields of France and Belgium he’d tasted fear. It was in his mouth, his nostrils, flowing through every fibre of his being.
Suddenly, a shell, closer than any other, had burst amongst them, taking out both the machine gun and those that manned it. There was another shell and another, and Mike and Stuart and Steve were thrown to the ground with the force of the blast.
When the smoke cleared and they were able to see, they realised they were alive and uninjured. Without a word they began slithering away from their dead and dying companions, wriggling on their bellies through the long grass till they reached the shelter of trees at the edge of a little copse.
It was suddenly remarkably still.
‘What’s happening?’ Mike asked.
Steve, spread out on the ground, risked a peep. ‘They’ve surrendered,’ he said. ‘There’s Officer Crabtree, look, with his hanky on a bit of a stick, and the rest behind him with their hands up.’
‘Be a prisoner-of-war camp for them then,’ Stuart said, but the words hadn’t left his lips when the German machine gun spat out once more and first the officer, and then the men behind him sank to the ground in rows. ‘Dear God,’ Steve said in an awed whisper. ‘They’ve shot them.’
‘And we’ll be next if we bloody hang about,’ Mike hissed. ‘Come on.’
And, tired though they were, they began to run though the trees to the road. Dunkirk was miles away, but better to take a chance on making it than wait to be shot to pieces or impaled on a German bayonet.
They walked all night, and it was about mid-morning of the next day when they came upon a party of refugees on the road in front of them, the flotsam of bombed villages. These were the old and infirm, and mothers with babies and children. Some carried the contents of their homes on their backs, others had a pram piled high or a cart pushed by them or pulled by a donkey or small pony. Steve saw one child cradling a kitten and noted the pet dogs running alongside.
They turned at the soldiers’ approach, their eyes full of despair and fear but with a little glimmer of hope when they saw the men were British. However, when Steve, Mike and Stuart opened their hands helplessly, the refugees gave a shrug and parted to let them pass. The little caravan of people turned into a field, obviously to rest. It was ringed with trees and had trenches dug all around it. Mothers settled thankfully against the trunks of the trees and some put their hungry babies to the breast, while the other children cavorted and played together, the dogs running between them, and the ponies and donkeys were released from the shafts to graze on the grass.
Minutes later, the planes were overhead. Steve scanned the road. There was no cover anyway. They moved to the side where the ditch was and knew the Germans would pick them off one by one.
But the planes didn’t go as far as the men, though they couldn’t really miss them. Instead, they circled the field where the frightened people were. Steve raised his head from the ditch and saw the bombs hurtling downwards and the blast on impact. He saw pet dogs, ponies and donkeys mangled to a million pieces, babies torn from their mothers’ arms and blown into bits that littered the lush grass, the bodies of the children and the elderly blasted into the air. And following after the Heinkels came the Stukas, flying in low, machinegunning any the bombs had missed, until nothing even twitched in the field of death, whether human or animal.