Authors: Mary Nichols
‘Of course you can, dear,’ June said placatingly. ‘But this is an emergency, you know. And the funeral will have to be paid for. Did your parents have any insurance?’
‘I think they paid into the Prudential.’
‘That’s something else for you to find out tomorrow. It will keep you busy.’
‘But I have to go to work.’
‘No, you don’t. Bob will go and tell Mr Morton why you can’t go in, won’t you, Bob?’
‘Of course. It’s on my way to the factory.’ He had no sooner spoken than they heard the wail of the siren.
‘Oh, not again,’ June said. ‘Haven’t we had enough?’
‘Apparently not,’ he said. ‘Come on, into the shelter with you.’ He reached for his tin hat. ‘I’ll have to go on duty.’
He saw them into the shelter with a Thermos flask of tea, some sandwiches and an attaché case of essential documents and treasured photos, some knitting and a couple of newspapers. He lit an oil lamp for them and then left, securing the door behind him. They settled in deckchairs with cushions and blankets for another night of terror. June picked up her knitting and Sheila glanced at the newspaper, but she wasn’t concentrating and the words didn’t make sense.
‘What does it say about last night’s raid?’ June asked above the drone of aeroplanes and the noise of guns and the intermittent crump of bombs exploding.
Sheila obediently turned to the reports; it helped her ignore the noise outside. ‘Biggest daylight raid of the war beaten off,’ she read aloud. ‘Thousands enjoyed the glorious weather and watched their
favourite football teams. Crowds at the greyhound stadium stayed to watch the dog fights overhead. There is no reason whatever for dejection or depression. The RAF is more than holding its own.’ She looked up. ‘Do you believe that?’
‘Well, they can’t tell the truth, can they? That would really give Herr Hitler something to crow about. If he thinks he can bomb us into submission, he’s got another think coming.’
‘You don’t think we’re beaten?’
‘No, certainly not. Did you know Mr Churchill came down to the East End today to look at the damage and speak to some of the bombed-out people? They say he was moved to tears but very upbeat. He’ll see us through.’
‘I wish I could understand …’
‘Understand what?’
‘The reason for it all. The world’s gone mad and I’ve lost my whole family because of it.’ She tried hard not to weep again, but the tears defeated her. She scrubbed at her eyes and pretended to go on reading the paper, but the words were blurred and made even less sense.
‘I can’t tell you,’ June said. ‘But no doubt there is a divine purpose for it all and we must trust in God.’
‘Trust in God!’ Sheila’s voice rose. ‘Trust in a God that allows such things to happen?’
‘Hush, dear, we are all given free will. It is mankind that has allowed it to happen, not God, and with God’s help it will be mankind who puts it right.’
‘I wish I had your faith.’
June did not answer that, instead she said, ‘Shall we turn down the lamp and try to sleep? You must be very tired.’
Although June turned down the wick to a glimmer, Sheila knew she would not sleep. The cacophony overhead would be enough
to keep her awake, even without the thoughts going round and round in her head and leading nowhere. It ended at last and the All Clear sounded. They emerged and went indoors, not stopping to look at the fresh fires that raged all round them, thankful that they still had a house to go to. They went to bed and this time Sheila did sleep.
Bob returned for breakfast. He was so exhausted, so dirty and smoke-begrimed, he had nothing to say and after swallowing a cup of tea, went upstairs to have a bath and go to bed. He obviously had no news of Charlie or he would have told them. As soon as she had helped June wash up and sweep up the thick layer of dust that had gathered overnight, Shelia set off for South Hallsville school to find out what she was supposed to do to try and put her life together again.
She couldn’t believe the devastation, worse than the night before and that had been bad enough. Hardly anything was recognisable: craters where buildings had been, heaps of rubble where streets should have been, flames still flickering among scorched wood, firemen with hoses snaking all over the place, rescue squads digging in the rubble, signs saying ‘No entry. Unexploded Bomb’, and others on windowless shops saying ‘Business as usual’. There were houses with the fronts blown off but still standing, reminding her of the doll’s house she had once had where you could open the front to reveal the contents. It had been handed down to each sister in turn and Annie had it now. She stopped suddenly. Annie was no more and neither was the doll’s house. She felt the tears returning and blinked hard. She must not cry again, she must not. She must find Charlie.
She was in for another shock when she reached the school. It was in ruins. She was stopped from going closer by a warden. ‘That’s as far as you can go, miss. Did you know someone there?’ He nodded towards the remains of the school.
‘I was here the night before last,’ she said dully. ‘I left.’
‘Good job you did or you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. There were hundreds in there. Whole families. The buses didn’t come, some mix up about where they were supposed to go.’
‘Oh my God.’
She turned away. She had been spared by Providence a second time. But why? Why, of all the people in her neighbourhood, had she been singled out to survive when so many more deserving people, like her parents and siblings, had perished? Divine intervention or something altogether more cruel?
She went to the council offices and was given a new ration card – her identity card was safely in her handbag – and was directed to a building where the WVS were handing out clothes. Taking the bundle she had been fitted out with, one item of which was a black skirt to wear at the funeral, she made her way back to the Bennett’s. They had been good to her, but she would have to find somewhere to live soon. The trouble was her brain was moving so slowly, she didn’t seem able to rouse herself enough to think properly.
‘Sheila!’ The voice was a shout that made her look up.
‘Chris.’ She had forgotten all about him.
‘I thought you were a goner. I went to your house yesterday. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The neighbours told me you’d all died.’
‘Everyone else but me. Dad was killed down by the docks and Charlie is missing.’
‘Oh, you poor thing.’ He attempted to hug her but she pushed him away.
‘Don’t make a fuss of me, Chris, you’ll only make me cry again.’
‘But I want to comfort you.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s just … Oh, I can’t explain.’
‘OK, but you aren’t going to send me away, are you?’
‘No. Course not.’
He turned to walk beside her. ‘D’you want to come and stay with us? Mum won’t mind.’
She thought of Chris’s untidy house, all his rowdy brothers and sisters and his scruffy mother who smoked while she cooked, dropping ash everywhere. ‘Thanks, but it’s all right, Chris. I’m staying with Mr and Mrs Bennett. They’ve got more room than you have.’
‘D’you want to come out with me tonight, flicks or something?’
‘No thanks, I don’t feel like it. Sorry.’
‘Righto.’ They had reached the Bennetts’ door. ‘I’ll see you around then, shall I?’
‘I expect so.’
She watched him walk away, rueful that she had been so brusque with him, but she couldn’t deal with sympathy, she really couldn’t. He meant well but that only made it worse.
Prue brought her chestnut mare to a halt at the level crossing and waited a few yards from the gate as a train thundered through. It was a freight train and very long. Although the wagons were covered with tarpaulin, it was not difficult to see they carried guns. Making for London, she supposed, to help bring down the bombers that were devastating the city. The BBC and the newspapers played it down, of course, but it was easy to read between the lines. It was like the bombing in Spain, indiscriminate and merciless. The Nazis didn’t care where the bombs fell, so long as they terrified the inhabitants into demanding peace. From what she had read, far from doing that, they had produced anger and defiance.
The gatekeeper came out of his house beside the line and opened the gates when the last wagon had passed through. ‘Good afternoon, my lady,’ he said. ‘Nice day, isn’t it? Not so good as last week, but warm for the time of year.’
‘Yes, Mr Potts, though I imagine the poor East Enders must be praying for bad weather.’
‘True. I’m right glad I don’t live there. There’s some evacuees
at the school come from there, I did hear, bombed out, many of ’em. They’ll be wanting homes. I reckon me and the missus will take one.’
Walking her horse, she crossed the line, and rode along the lane to the lodge gates of Longfordham Hall. There were trees either side of the drive, many of them sweet chestnut, almost ripe, she noticed. Nearer the house were flower gardens and a terrace. She rode round the house to the stables and dismounted. Bill Stevens, the groom who had served with her father in the First World War but was too old and bent to fight in the latest conflict, took the bridle. ‘Master Gilbert is home, Miss Prudence,’ he said. ‘He arrived an hour ago.’
‘Oh, good.’ She smiled to herself. Stevens, who had known them both from birth, had never managed to make the transition from addressing Gilbert as ‘my lord’ after a lifetime of ‘Master Gilbert’, or her as ‘my lady’, when her father had inherited the Earldom of Winterton three years before. Indeed, she could not get used to it herself. It sounded so pretentious and she much preferred her proper name of Prudence Le Strange.
She hurried indoors and ran to the drawing room, where she could hear voices, and flung open the door. Her mother and brother were having afternoon tea. The Countess, who was seated on a sofa with the tea tray on a table at her side, wore a green silk afternoon gown, her dark hair elegantly coiffured. Her brother, sitting opposite his mother, was in his army officer’s uniform. ‘Gillie, Stevens said you were home.’
‘Prue, I wish you would not come in here in your riding clothes,’ her mother said. ‘You smell of horses.’
‘I’ll go and change. I just wanted to say hallo to Gillie.’
‘He will still be here when you come down, decently clad.’
Gilbert winked at her and she smiled at him, before taking
herself off to change. She and Gillie were especially close, being only eighteen months apart in age. He was twenty-two and she was a month short of her twenty-first birthday. In peacetime she would have had a come-out at a débutante’s ball and been presented at court, but she doubted that would happen now. She might be lucky and have a party. The trouble was that all her friends were scattered, some in the forces, others doing war work of one kind or another, and she doubted they would be able to rustle up a decent number.
‘Hitler has a lot to answer for,’ she murmured, as she stripped off her riding clothes. The shirt and underwear she put in the laundry basket and hung the jodhpurs and jacket in one of the spacious cupboards in her room and went to have a shower.
Half an hour later, she returned to the drawing room, demure in a printed cotton frock and cardigan, and took her place beside the Countess.
‘Timothy rang while you were out,’ her mother said. ‘He has some leave and asked if he might drop in on his way home. I told him to come for dinner and stay overnight. He’ll be on the five o’clock train.’
‘Oh good. It seems ages since I saw him.’
She had met Timothy Mortimer at a friend’s come-out ball in 1938. It had been a glittering affair, but overshadowed by the news from Czechoslovakia and Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. Everyone drank too much, and sounded just a little too animated, conscious perhaps that it was the last event of its kind they might have for a very long time. Tim had seen her standing just inside the door and moved over, two full glasses of champagne in hand, to speak to her.
‘Someone as pretty as you should not be alone,’ he had said, giving her one of the glasses.
‘I shan’t be alone for long.’
He had laughed, making a lock of his fair hair fall over his forehead. He pushed it back, a gesture with which she would become familiar. ‘No, I should think not, but I want to get my bid in first. What’s your name?’
‘Prue Le Strange. What’s yours?’
‘Tim Mortimer. Do you know everyone here?’
‘Most of them. Do you?’
‘Most of them. How come we’ve never met before?’
He was far too forward and she ought to have rebuffed him, but he was fun to talk to and during the course of the evening, they had danced and joked and eventually exchanged telephone numbers.
It was not until their third or fourth meeting he discovered she was the daughter of an earl. ‘You might have told me,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a complete fool of myself.’
‘Why? It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m still the same person, a title doesn’t change anything. If it does, then you are not the man I thought you were.’
‘It’s not that, it’s the fact that you kept it secret.’
‘I didn’t keep it secret, it’s simply that I do not consider it important and I certainly wouldn’t boast about it. Come and stay the weekend with my family. You’ll find we’re very ordinary.’
After a little persuasion, he had come and Mama had been kind to him and Papa jovial and he had relaxed and told them about his parents, that he had a brother and sister, both younger than he was, that his home was in a village near Stowmarket and he was in his last year at Cambridge and hoped to follow his father into law. ‘That’s if there is no war,’ he had said. ‘If there is, I shall join the air force.’
He had been as good as his word and was now a flight
lieutenant, stationed at Scampton in Lincolnshire. He had learnt to fly while at Cambridge which gave him an advantage over some other recruits, but even so he had not become a pilot, but a navigator. ‘Everyone wants to be a fighter pilot,’ he had told her at the beginning of his training the year before. ‘There’s no shortage of recruits for fighters, so I’ve landed up in Bomber Command. It’s like being back at school with text books, instruments and charts.’ Since then they had seen each other only occasionally but made up for it by corresponding regularly.
‘I’ll meet him off the train,’ she said, then turned to her brother. ‘Now, Gillie, tell me all your news.’
‘Nothing to tell. We train, we eat and sleep and we train some more. We go on night exercises, do rifle drill, then eat and sleep some more. We lost so many men at Dunkirk, we are nowhere near up to strength again yet and the new recruits have to be trained. There’s talk of North Africa, India or the Far East, but that’s all it is, talk. No one knows anything for sure. We will almost certainly be sent abroad. I can’t see us staying in England for the rest of the war.’
He was a different man from the haggard, exhausted one who had come back from Dunkirk in stinking clothes that he’d been wearing nearly a week, his handsome face lined with fatigue and his dark hair unkempt and full of grit. All he’d wanted to do was have a bath and a long sleep, but by the end of his leave he appeared to have recovered his usual spirits, at least on the surface, and went back to his unit, only to find they were not destined to return to active service immediately. Their mother might be glad of that, but he was itching to get his revenge for the suffering of his comrades. Although he had tried to tell Prue what it had been like, he had said nothing to his mother and had asked his sister not to mention it either. The harsh reality of war had seemed not to have
hit the Countess and she carried on in her serene way, doing what good she could in the village and keeping up a correspondence with friends and family, retaining the ritual of afternoon tea and changing for dinner.
‘We will have to have troops in England if there’s an invasion,’ Prue said. ‘Papa and his Home Guard won’t be able to hold them off alone, even if he thinks he can.’
The Earl’s enthusiasm for the Home Guard made them smile, but he treated it very seriously. Teaching warfare to the local volunteers was the next best thing to being back in the army himself, he had said, and made him feel he was doing his bit.
‘There won’t be an invasion,’ Gilbert said firmly. ‘Not while we’ve got an air force.’
‘I certainly hope not,’ Prue said. ‘But I want to do something useful. I think I’ll join up.’
‘You certainly will not,’ her mother said. ‘I never heard such a thing. Your father will never allow it.’
‘I might have to, if not in the forces, then for war work of some kind and I’d rather choose what I do than be directed. I can’t sit about idle, Mama, when so many of my friends are doing interesting things. Besides, it’s not patriotic. Papa understands that. Where is he, by the way?’
‘Where do you think? With his precious Home Guard. I don’t know what he finds to occupy them for so long. He was very secretive about it when I asked him. He trotted out the usual excuse, “Careless talk costs lives”. As if telling me is careless talk! It makes me think he doesn’t trust me.’
Gilbert laughed. ‘Let him have his secrets, Mama, it makes him feel important.’
‘He is important. At least he is to me.’
‘Of course he is and not just to you. All the Home Guard are,
so are the fire-fighters, the ARP and the police. Civilian or not, everyone has a part to play …’
‘Except me,’ Prue put in.
‘You will find your niche, Sis.’
‘If you are going to the station, you had better go,’ her mother told her.
‘You can take my car,’ Gillie said, throwing her the keys.
Marcus Le Strange, fifth Earl of Winterton, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Great War, now Captain of the Longfordham Home Guard, faced his company of part-time soldiers in a barn on the estate. They were a mixed bunch of old and young and a few in between who were in reserved occupations. Many of them were his own employees, farmers or employees of the farms on the estate and he had known every one of them all their lives. One or two, like Bill Stevens, had served with him in the Great War. Being country folk, used to farming, they did not need to be taught how to use a rifle, but they had only recently been issued with those and had happily started popping off blank ammunition at anything that moved. They needed discipline.
He conceded that discipline of the square-bashing type that took place in the regular army would not do for these rugged countrymen. They needed to understand what they were being asked to do and why. ‘In the event of an invasion,’ he told them. ‘We will undoubtedly be outnumbered, but that does not mean we can expect to be defeated. Defeat is not a word we recognise. We know our terrain, we know our neighbours, we know where to hide ourselves and pick off a target and not let loose with everything we’ve got.’
‘I thought we were meant to defend our homes and families,’ one of them said.
‘And that we must undoubtedly do,’ he told them. ‘But standing at your garden gate shooting at the advancing horde will do no good at all. We must be cleverer than that.’ He paused. ‘There will be an exercise next weekend to test the security of the airfield. We will meet here at nineteen hundred hours on Saturday. Do not be late.’
They nodded agreement and he dismissed them. All but six drifted away, talking among themselves. The six, including Bill Stevens, had been asked privately to stay behind. ‘I have been asked to form a special unit to be deployed in the event of an invasion,’ he told them. ‘And you six have been selected as being suitable to join it. It is entirely voluntary, of course, but if you agree, we will be trained in guerrilla warfare. In the unlikely event the country is occupied, we will be there to carry on the fight. We will do our work swiftly and silently and melt away again into secret hideaways.’
‘Do you think we will be, my lord?’ Bill Stevens asked. ‘Occupied, I mean.’
‘Highly unlikely, but the enemy might try. We must be prepared. It is absolutely imperative we do not talk about what we are doing, not to anyone, not to wives, sweethearts or the people we work with every day, is that understood?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ they said in unison.
‘If anyone wants to back out, now is the time to do it.’
‘Not on your life,’ Bill said, and everyone echoed that with a ‘Hear. Hear.’
‘Good. These units will be called Auxiliary Units and will be part of a special Battalion, but to all intents and purposes, an adjunct of the Home Guard. We must pretend what we are doing is normal Home Guard exercise, nothing more. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Our next meeting will be after the weekend exercise when I will probably have more details for you.’
He dismissed them, beckoning his gamekeeper to join him. ‘George, we have to have a secret underground bunker and we need to construct it ourselves with the help of some Royal Engineers. It must be invisible on the surface. I’m thinking of putting it in the wood. You know every inch of the woods and I need your advice on the best place to site it. We’ve got to be able to dig down about twelve feet.’
‘Twelve feet, my lord, that’s a fair ol’ distance.’
‘Yes, but it has to house us all and store weapons and ammunition and have an escape tunnel.’
‘And that’s all to be done in secret, my lord?’
‘Yes. The woods are part of the estate and the villagers won’t be able to see what is going on from the road. And I can trust you to see off any trespassers.’
‘Yes, but what about the Countess and Lady Prudence, what will you tell them?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ he said. ‘The same goes for your wife. Something to do with a Home Guard exercise perhaps.’