‘Christ Almighty,’ breathed Steve, as Mike vomited beside him into the grass. Steve and Stuart knew just how he felt.
Mike wiped his mouth and said, ‘Shall we go back?’
‘What the hell for?’ Stuart demanded. ‘Even if we found one person alive on that bloody field, what could we do, eh? Best thing is to get the bleeding hell out of here, and quick before Jerry comes back to finish us off an’ all.’
It was the only thing to do and they started out again, fear lending speed to their pace. But Steve knew he’d never blot those images out of his mind. It was so senseless, so barbaric. Those people had been defenceless and vuinerable and he knew with absolute clarity that if the Germans were to win this bloody war, a similar fate might await his family, and he was determined to make it at least to the beach, and from there home, if at all possible.
* * *
They heard the non-stop clamour from the beaches long before they reached them, and smelt the smoke. the acrid tang of it mixed with the stink of cordite, and over it all the salty sea breeze.
And then it was before them, and Steve saw the pier that looked as if it were comprised of army trucks. There was a little regatta of boats queuing up there and, despite the constant bombardment, the boats’ crews continued to lift soldiers over the sides and take them out to the Royal Navy Destroyer
HMS Havant,
which was waiting at anchor in the deeper water.
The sands were already littered with bodies and parts of bodies and discarded equipment. The noise all around them was ear-splitting and relentless, the crashes and boom of the bombs, the shrieking Stukas diving, low guns blazing, the ack-ack guns hastily set up on the beach blasting into the air. All mixed with the shouts, cries and screams of the men.
Nothing in Steve’s training or experience so far had prepared him for this, and he stood and watched in horror. ‘What d’you think of our chances, mate?’ asked a voice behind him.
The soldier was just past boyhood—eighteen or nineteen, no more. ‘Bugger all,’ was on Steve’s lips, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he said encouragingly, ‘You’ll get through, lad. You’re young and fit and England will need you again before long.’
‘Ain’t got much choice, anyroad, have we?’ the boy said. ‘Germans up our arses and the sea before us. Mind you, rather than fall into German hands I’d take the sea and swim to old Blighty.’
‘That’s the spirit, lad.’
Steve saw the boy once more after that. It was impossible to hurry in the soft sand clawing at your boots, but he tried, and he and Stuart and Mike were together. They passed the dead and dying, some dismembered, some in bits, some still twitching, others screaming or crying in agony, and on they went. The boy that had claimed he’d rather swim to England was in a pit, both his legs blasted away and his life blood seeping into the sands, and Steve had to turn away from the look in his eyes.
Time and again they had to fling themselves to the ground and try and bury themselves into the sand to avoid the Stukas, but at last, when dusk descended rapidly, they’d almost reached the pier head when Stuart gave a cry and went down, and Steve saw a Stuka had got him and ripped into his leg.
‘Leave me,’ Stuart said.
‘Bugger that for a lark,’ Mike had replied. ‘We’re nearly there, man.’
An officer was at the pier head, keeping order and directing the men, and Steve and Mike, dragging Stuart between them, took their places in the queue.
Stuart was being lowered gently into a motor launch when someone gave a shout. Five Messerschmitts came from behind the clouds and began releasing their filthy harbingers of death at
HMS Havant.
Despite the ship’s spirited response, it was over in minutes and nothing remained but floating cargo and wreckage and many, many dead bodies.
It sobered everyone. All those men rescued, at great human cost, and for what?
And then another destroyer moved into place and
the rescue went on. There was no time to spare, no time to grieve and mourn, to reflect on what was happening. Stukas came at them then, and the suddenness of the attack caused Steve to slip into the water, where he was peppered with shrapnel from a bomb exploding nearby and had his leg crushed by two army trucks. He’d been unconscious when Mike pulled him from the sea and onto the next boat home.
Had he been able to tell Lizzie this, she would have understood his fears and maybe helped him overcome them, but he saw admitting to fear as a sign of weakness. In fact, he wanted to bury those experiences in the darkest recess of his mind, and because of this he was happier in Stuart’s company than anyone’s.
Stuart left hospital at almost the same time as Steve and was welcomed home as a conquering hero. When he explained what a good mate Steve had been after he’d been injured at Dunkirk, Stuart’s family couldn’t do enough for him either.
Steve felt the need to prove he was alive, the same strong, virile man he’d once been, able to drink men twice his age under the table and with the ability to pull the women. There were many hanging around the pubs ringing the airfield, and when there were no pilots to give them a good time, a Dunkirk survivor did just as well. Many didn’t mind him being a bit rough, which was just as well because all softness and gentleness had been stripped from him, left behind on the journey to Dunkirk.
He was unfeeling with Lizzie too and she was worn out trying to please him. She knew in her heart of hearts it wasn’t all his fault. He’d been damaged by
what he’d witnessed, but she longed for him to be declared fit and healthy and able to rejoin his unit, although she felt guilty about thinking that way and knew she would worry about him every minute he was gone.
Steve went back to his unit on the 26
th
September and Lizzie tried to keep the relief out of her face and voice as she bid him goodbye.
The next day, the Germans launched the first of their daylight raids and Fort Dunlop was hit, but though there was damage there was no one injured. Not content with this, though, the tram stop by Dunlop’s was full of people when they were strafed with machine-gun fire.
This was the first of many reports of such indiscriminate shooting. Bus stops and tram stops and vehicles themselves were attacked, as well as people in streets and parks. There was one incident of a lady with a baby in her arms and another older child hanging on to her skirt who ran to the park, the nearest open space, after her house had been bombed, and all three were killed by machine-gun fire.
It could so easily have been Lizzie that she felt shocked to the core and wondered for the first time if she’d been wise to keep her children at home with her. Tom passed his fourth birthday in early October and she talked it over with Violet.
She hadn’t come to any decision by the time Clementine Churchill visited Birmingham on 14
th
October. She visited two factories and one neighbourhood that had been extensively damaged by the bombing. The
Mail
had a picture of one of the people, whose home had gone, who’d defiantly placed a Union Jack on top of the rubble and told the lady, ‘Our house is down, but our spirits is still up.’
Clementine Churchill was impressed by this demonstration of unflinching courage in this typical workingclass district and said that she found the same everywhere she went.
This Brummie courage was needed in the nightly raids that followed Clementine Churchill’s visit. Lizzie got used to getting a meal together quickly and maybe letting the children have a few hours’ sleep before needing to rouse them again. She was grateful for the siren suits that she’d bought for each of them, which could go over other clothes to keep them warm as the cold autumn nights began.
On Thursday, 24
th
October, there was another massive raid, the way lit for bombers by sticks of incendiaries dropped first. A shelter in Cox Street was blitzed and the Carlton Cinema and the Empire Theatre, and Tony’s Ballroom next door burned out completely. Lizzie remembered that she and Steve had always intended to visit the Empire Theatre, but they never had made it. She’d been to Tony’s Ballroom lots of times with Tressa in the early days and later with Steve, and she was saddened it was there no longer.
New Street had received many attacks, including
one on Marshall and Snelgrove where it was reduced to twisted black girders sticking up through the rubble and assorted debris. Lizzie remembered windowshopping there, which was all she could ever afford to do.
‘Does no harm to look,’ she remembered Violet saying one day. ‘Even that snobby lot can’t charge us for just looking.’
Well, they would look no more, and Lizzie felt desolation seep through her. She wondered if at the end of it all there would be any of the city left, for after that one raid the papers reported one hundred and eightynine major fires had begun.
The next night was another of Hell. Kent Street’s baths were hit and fires burned in Barker Street, Summer Hill, Constitution Hill and Holloway Head. As the ‘All Clear’ sounded, Lizzie gave a yawn. She shook Niamh awake, for both children had dropped asleep on the bunk. She then took Tom in her arms, though he was a weight, and Niamh scrubbed at her eyes and stumbled sleepily to her feet. Lizzie looked at her face, white with exhaustion, and knew she was doing the children a disservice keeping them with her. Both of them deserved better than this. They stepped into a night that glowed with the flames of many fires and stank with smoke that swirled around them, and Lizzie said to Violet, ‘I’m not letting the weans stand any more of this. I’m taking them to Mammy.’ But she said it in a whisper, for Niamh had ears on her like a donkey.
‘I don’t blame you, girl,’ Violet said. ‘By Christ, it gets to you after a while. Will you stay there yourself?’
‘No,’ Lizzie said firmly. ‘I won’t run away. I’ll come back and take a job some place. Do my bit, like everyone’s saying.’
‘Good on you, girl,’ Violet said warmly. ‘I could get you set-on at my place if you like?’
‘Oh that would be good,’ Lizzie said as they reached the entry. ‘I’ll see about the trains and things in the morning and we’ll go from there.’
‘Will you send a letter?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘I won’t take the time, I’ll send a telegram. One thing I know, Mammy won’t refuse. She’s been dying to get her hands on the weans since it began.’
With Violet at work, Ada willingly minded Tom while Lizzie went into the town to book their passage to Ireland. No one blamed Lizzie for her decision; in fact, Gloria said if she had relatives in the country, regardless of where it was, she would have hers away there like a shot, and the others agreed with her.
‘It’s sending to strangers I couldn’t abide,’ Minnie said. ‘But one of your own, especially your mother, that’s different altogether. I know this is no place for kids and babbies, but how would I know they was being looked after proper if I was just to send them away. Now yours…’
‘Will probably be spoilt rotten, knowing my mother,’ said Lizzie with a laugh. ‘She’s much softer as a grandmother than she ever was as a mother.’
‘That’s usually the way of it,’ Minnie said. ‘Anyway, better that way than the other, and you’ll soon knock them back into shape when this little lot is over and
they can come home again. And at least this way they will be safe.’
Safe, thought Lizzie, as she scurried through the city centre later, and she decided to go along Colmore Row to see the destruction for herself as she had taken the tram to Steelhouse Lane. She was delighted to see the Gaumont still stood, but behind it the whole area was a sea of blackened, scorched rubble. The front of Snow Hill Station was there, but behind that was a blistered landscape of brick, masonry, glass, and twisted and buckled train lines.
Along the road there were gaping potholes and craters and piles of rubble where there had once been shops and offices, but the sandbagged structure of the Grand Hotel still stood, and St Phillip’s on the other side of the road. She went down through Chamberlain Square and Paradise Hill, taking in the top end of New Street where the scale of the destruction was so apparent. Burst and sodden sandbags lay bleeding onto the pavements; here and there, snaking hosepipes still dribbled into gutters, and blackened mounds were everywhere. Here, the smell that she’d noticed as soon as she’d alighted from the tram was stronger, a scorched and acrid smell of burning and smoke, mixed with the stink of cordite and a definite whiff of gas.
Oh yes, Lizzie decided, her children were better out of this for a while, and she hurried on to New Street Station to make the arrangements.
Catherine was delighted to have the children, but couldn’t understand why Lizzie couldn’t stay there too.
‘It’s a good enough place to land your children in, but not good enough for you. Is that the way of it?’
‘No, Mammy. It’s…’
‘Tressa seems happy enough.’
But Lizzie wasn’t Tressa. ‘Can you understand why I feel I have to go back, Johnnie?’ she asked her brother.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘though I hate to think of you in danger. But you’re right. Everyone can’t just run away, and I’d say for now the weans are better here.’
‘What will Steve say about you going back to that place?’ Catherine asked.
‘You forget, Mammy, his own family are in the thick of it too,’ Lizzie said. ‘He’ll be fine about it.’
And Steve was fine about it. He knew as well as any that although three hundred thousand French and British soldiers had been rescued from Dunkirk, masses of equipment had been left to rot on the roads and beaches of France. There was an even greater need for more bullets, tanks, lorries and planes, and he was aware of the recruitment drives to encourage women to join the workforce. Lizzie was only one of many doing her bit. He was proud of her stand and wrote telling her so.
Lizzie hated the job, but was pleased with the little nest egg she was building up for herself in the Post Office. She was often more than tired, exhausted from the raids, which were virtually every night. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she was able to grab a couple of hours’ sleep, and sometimes she wasn’t. The raids weren’t always that close, but she’d lie awake, waiting and tense, knowing they could be overhead in min
utes. Other nights they had a respite, but Lizzie, like many others, would still lie awake or doze fitfully, waiting for the sirens’ strident wail. Everyone was feeling the strain, but most women turned in at the factory the next day, knowing the work they did was essential for the war effort.
On 15
th
November there was a memorial service for Neville Chamberlain at St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, though his funeral had been held in London. ‘I ain’t going,’ one girl stated. ‘Stupid bugger, anyroad, to be led up the garden path by bloody Hitler.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ Violet said. ‘My Barry says he knew all the time and it was a ploy cos we wasn’t nearly ready, was we?’
‘No? And why not?’ another put in. ‘Cos Hitler made no secret of it, did he? I mean, that Olympic Games in 1936 was nowt but showing off, what he had and that, and his bloody goose-stepping army, and still we did nowt about it.’
‘I bet some of them poor buggers in Coventry wish we’d acted sooner,’ another girl said.
Everyone knew what she meant. News had been filtering through all day of the terrible raid that had been inflicted on Coventry the night before, where the destruction and loss of life was said to be colossal, and all the women fell quiet thinking about it.
Lizzie and Violet had bought a paper on the way home and later spread it out over Violet’s table and looked at it horror-struck. Within a square mile, eighty per cent of buildings were destroyed and five hundred and sixty-eight people killed, with thousands more injured. A new word had been coined in Germany, the
paper reported: ‘Coventration’ which meant razing to the ground.
‘Well,’ said Violet, looking at the photographs of destruction. ‘They’ve done that all right, ain’t they?’ She folded up the paper and looked at Lizzie grimly. ‘Next it will be our turn.’
‘What do you mean, Violet?’ Lizzie snapped. ‘Our turn. It’s been our turn since bloody August. That raid we had last night was scary enough for me.’
‘It weren’t nothing like Coventry,’ Barry put in. ‘And Violet’s right, Lizzie. Mark my words, we’ll suffer summat similar. We make too much for the war for the Luftwaffe to pass us by.’
It began four nights later, on Tuesday, 19
th
November, and the hooter for the end of the day in the munitions factory hadn’t gone. Those who lived near set off for home, but Violet and Lizzie, along with many of the workforce, made their way to the cellars underneath the factory.
‘If it goes off, we’ll make a dash for it if you like,’ Violet said.
Lizzie nodded.
But it didn’t go off. Lizzie had experienced many raids, but few as fierce or furious as this. The bombs seemed to hurl themselves from the droning aircraft above, one blast or explosion following another, shaking the cellar walls and the ground she’d sank down on to in utter weariness. The noise, even muffled as it was, seemed incredible and relentless. Together with the boom and burst of the bombs and the crash of disintegrating buildings, they heard the
frantic ringing bell of the emergency services tearing through the blitzed city, and the tattoo of anti-air-craft fire, and this was over the chatter and forced laughter and shouts of terror from the sheltering people.
This is what the people of Coventry must have felt like, Lizzie thought, as the blood ran through her like ice. The walls shook so hard with each crash that mortar was dislodged and dribbled down the bricks, and Lizzie tried not to panic, but she did wonder if the cellar she’d fled to shelter in might turn out to be a tomb. She imagined the factory being hit—surely it couldn’t escape the mayhem outside, and then it would fall in on them, crushing them, trapping them.
People said if your number was up then that was that. Christ! Fear was etched on everyone’s face, and in the stale and fetid air it was almost tangible. Violet’s hand, which sought Lizzie’s, was shaking.
Then there was a massive explosion. It lifted people off their feet and shook the entire building and plunged it into darkness. Those with torches in their shelter bags used them, and pencils of light pierced the gloom to see people shouting, crying, praying. Lizzie played her torch on the walls, expecting to see plaster seeping from the ceiling prior to it descending on them, and saw it seemed as solid as ever. But that bomb had landed somewhere close.
One of the men, torch in hand, went up the cellar steps to look. ‘It wasn’t us,’ he said minutes later. ‘It was The Fountain pub. People are trapped in the cellars, I’m going to give them a hand getting them out.’
Other men detached themselves and followed the
first into the teeth of the raid that went on as fast and furious as before.
The rescuers had not returned by the time the ‘All Clear’ went, and Lizzie was quite surprised that she had survived the night. Upstairs, the blast had broken all the windows in the factory and covered everything with dust and ash, and the stink in the air made her feel sick. ‘Take tomorrow off,’ the supervisor told them. ‘We’ll have to get this lot cleaned up and the machines checked for safety before we can set up again.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Violet said as they set off for home. ‘God, I’m so tired I could sleep on a washing line.’
‘And me,’ Lizzie said with feeling.
They knew they’d have to walk, no buses or trams would run so early in the morning, but they skirted the city centre. Much of it was impassable anyway, for even as they cut up Jamaica Row they could see the tongues of orange and yellow sparks spitting into the night sky. They heard the roar of the flames and smelt the stink from the charred buildings, mixed with dust and smoke, cordite and gas. And neither woman spoke of it. It didn’t need words.