The Mersey Angels

by Sheila Riley

  ‘So, the authorities caught up with him, yet again,’ Izzy said to herself after she had settled Lottie into her own bed. She had no sympathy for her eldest lad who, in her eyes, didn’t have the sense he was born with. Always looking out for himself, like his father. And look where that had got Splinter.’ Izzy was glad she was stronger now and in a position to help the poor motherless girl who’d had her head turned by her unscrupulous son. She should have been proud he was going to do his bit for his country, like Nipper, but the difference being was, Nipper joined up of his own free will, while Jerky was taken kicking and protesting.

  ‘Izzy doesn’t deserve a son like him,’ Anna told Ellie, recalling the days, long gone, when he would terrify her with his boyish taunts and his suggestive remarks until Ned put him in his place. Jerky Woods was so different from his younger brother who, like his mother, always tried to do the right thing, no matter what. ‘And Lottie certainly deserves a better husband.’

  ‘What chance does she stand now?’ asked Ellie wiping her forehead with a lace handkerchief as the clammy July heat seemed to rise from the pavement. ‘Given her predicament, she is in no position to pick and choose. But it’s poor Izzy I feel sorry for, she will be so worried when she reads this morning’s newspaper,’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’ Anna asked, taking the paper from Ellie that told them over nineteen thousand men had been killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. What the newspaper did not tell them was that the Accrington Pals had been effectively wiped out in the first few minutes of the battle.

  10

  July 1916.

  The second day of the Battle of the Somme saw Nipper Woods sitting alone in one of the trenches that he believed stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland. The end of the pencil he was chewing had turned into a wet pulp of wood and every now and then he spat out a splinter, his mind searching for something to write and tell his mother about.

  He knew he couldn’t tell her that the war was not going well and large parts of France and Belgium were still under German occupation. It would never get past the censors. Nor the fact that Germany’s modern weapons made killing on a grand scale more possible than ever.

  The allies had agreed to join a summer offensive and the area they chose to launch their attack was this twenty-six-mile stretch of the Western Front in Northern France by the River Somme. That’s what he would say:

  Dear Ma,

  I hope this letter finds you well. I am in good spirits as we have now moved from the muddy trench to some lush green pasture, where the ground is nice and dry, and the smell of chamomile fills the air with its apple scent. Some of the lads boil the chamomile in water and drink it like tea. They say it helps them sleep, but you won’t catch me pandering to those daft ideas.

  I did as you asked and told the Padre the truth about only being sixteen and you’ll never guess, he said I had the heart of a lion, Ma.

  Just to let you know there was a bit of a skirmish yesterday, and so there aren’t as many tea-drinkers left but, being an agile lad who had to dodge his older brother many a time, I had enough nous to get out of the way of any strays being chucked my way.

  See you when I get home, Ma. Look after yourself.

  Your ever-loving son,

  Nipper xxx

  ‘I got a letter!’ Izzy, behind the high pawnshop counter, waved the envelope in the air and the line of waiting women on the other side nodded, bunching up to hear her exciting news. ‘Surprised the life out of me, I can tell you,’ Izzy proclaimed, laughing as she spoke. ‘I didn’t know he could read and write.’

  ‘He’s a lovely lad, your Nipper,’ said a woman from Ariel Street, ‘he used to carry my shopping back from the market. Not like…’ She stopped abruptly. No mother wanted to hear bad of her son, even if he was a badd’n.

  ‘Yes, Missus?’ Izzy said sharply. ‘Not like who?’ She knew nobody had time for her eldest lad, because he refused to go and fight like their boys did. But she would be a poor mother if she didn’t stick up for her own.

  ‘Nobody,’ said the customer, ‘I wasn’t gonna say nothing about one of yours.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ said Izzy. ‘I’d be so disappointed if the stuff you’re hocking wasn’t up to snuff.’ She was not going to enlighten this lot that Jerky had joined up and was, at that moment, training out in Litherland.

  ‘My sheets were all washed and ironed first thing this morning,’ the woman countered, but Izzy was having none of her backchat. She was miffed.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ she said, lifting her chin, ‘but I’m the one who decides on the price.’ She went about her business examining the wares that local women were here to hock, in the hope that they would get enough money to see them through to their old man’s payday.

  Who’d have thought it? Izzy considered the question that asked how she had arrived at such an exalted position – at her age, and she knew it was all thanks to Ruby and Archie Swift.

  ‘When I finish here,’ she said proudly ‘I am going to go straight home and write my Nipper a nice long letter…’

  ‘If your name is on the bullet, it will find you,’ Nipper said to nobody in particular, ‘so there ain’t no point worrying, is there? Like the song says, what’s the use?’ He shrugged, accepting his fate, and resting his spade on his shoulder, he joined the line of men digging trenches in the soft mud and laying telephone wires. All German lines of communication had been cut the day before and he was feeling invincible.

  ‘Fancy a game of cricket, anyone?’ an officer asked when they finished digging and were told that they would not be going to the Front today because of the heavy rain.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Nipper, ‘rain can stop the war, Sir, but it can’t stop a game of cricket.’

  ‘Spot on, Private Woods,’ said the Lieutenant Commander Rupert Bray, who had no wish to enlighten the young lad that there were rumours over twenty thousand men were killed at the Somme in the first hour of yesterday’s assault to capture German trenches. Armed only with rifles and bayonets, the British soldiers were no match for the hail of heavy machine-gun fire that the enemy issued in the final insult to over a third of the advancing troops.

  By the end of July, the casualty list had run into many thousands. Nipper and his unit had been waiting since the beginning of the month for orders to move forward and the waiting around was stretching some nerves to breaking point.

  The sun was high in the pewter sky and the nearby fields were held in the glorious arc of a rainbow after a thunderstorm that was barely heard above the bombardment on the other side of the woods. Nipper imagined he could smell the faintest scent of chamomile and lavender. Then, as the perfume grew stronger, filling the rain-soaked fields, he watched the commander coming towards them and the whole battalion seemed to hold their breath. In minutes, the order came.

  ‘Pack up, Men. We are moving to a new house,’ Lieutenant Commander Rupert Bray ordered, and, with military precision, the trench was emptied of everything the soldiers would need for the next part of the operation to near the Front Line and the final push, to overtake the German trenches.

  Ten kilometres along the road, Nipper saw wounded men being put onto stretchers by women.

  Women? He was seeing things. He must be. Women couldn’t carry men on stretchers!

  ‘I’ve never seen the like!’ Nipper watched two female medics dressed in military-style jackets and ankle-length skirts. And they were running towards a mobile hospital. The ambulance, with its huge red cross on the side, was taking injured men on board to be looked after by more women.

  As they marched further on, Nipper saw more soldiers. They were lying so still he was sure they were already dead. A bit further still and he saw men without limbs, without faces, injuries that were impossible to survive. His stomach churned.

  ‘Jesus. Mary and J…’ He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. Nipper didn’t feel the mortar bomb blast that lifted his body from the ground.

  11

/>   ‘Don’t worry, Bud, I’ve got ya.’ The voice sounded American. But Nipper Woods knew he must be confused. The United States hadn’t joined the party. ‘You’re one of the lucky ones, Soldier,’ the voice told him as every bone in his body felt like it had been smashed with a tank driven by a malicious giant. Every muscle screamed, contracting and twisting in pain. He didn’t know where he had been hit. He didn’t know how bad his injuries were. Nobody would tell him. When he tried to speak, no sound came. ‘You’re one lucky son-of-a-gun, soldier. You bagged yourself a Blighty one, and I’m the guy who has the power to send you home. Yessir, you are one lucky son-of-a-gun.’

  Nipper didn’t feel lucky as the flap of canvas slapped his face. This must be the casualty tent, he thought, listening to the sound of nurses and doctors shouting orders.

  ‘Bag him, tag him and get the next one on the table!’ Nipper heard an impatient male voice issue orders with the same speed as one of those Vickers machine guns. Although he could see nothing for the mud that had glued his eyes closed when he fell into the shell hole and had now dried. What the hell had he been thinking of to sign up for this lot?

  Mam will have a fit of conniptions when she gets the news. Nipper, thinking his days were numbered, tried to open his mouth, but his lips seemed to be glued shut. Sorry Mam. I didn’t mean to cause you this heartache. He just wanted her to have a son to be proud of.

  Someone lifted his identity disc, known to all as a dog-tag, which bore his name, rank, number, regiment and religious denomination. ‘Liverpool Pals?’ said the medic, ‘That’s my old hometown.’

  ‘American?’ Nipper could barely sound the word through the mud-baked grit in his mouth.

  ‘Canadian,’ said the medic, ‘but Scouse runs through my veins. Do me a favour, Soldier, if they send you back to Liverpool, you tell the folks back home that Sam Cassidy said Hi.’ Sam hoped that someone back in Liverpool might remember him, although he had no family there now, believing his sister Anna to have died of pneumonia before he was sent as an orphan to Canada.

  Although Nipper could not see the medic, he remembered a lad called Sam Cassidy from Queen Street. How could he forget. That Christmas Eve, when the fire took most of the Cassidy family, would live with Nipper for the rest of his life.

  ‘We found you hanging on a barbed wire fence, Soldier, you’ve breathed in a bit of gas and it’s irritating your eyes,’ said Sam as the stretcher was put on a hard surface, which Nipper supposed was the floor or a table. ‘Lord only knows how you managed to climb out of that mud hole and find your way into no-man’s land.’ Sam Cassidy deliberately kept his tone upbeat, knowing the patient needed to be reassured when they had such severe injuries. ‘But you can’t keep a good man down, so I reckon you’re going to be fine… Just, fine.’

  Nipper didn’t feel fine.

  ‘This place has been manic for days,’ Sam Cassidy said conversationally. ‘The medics are sending patients to England as soon as possible, so they can get new patients in and fix them up. It’s been one long continuous convoy in and out.’

  Nipper did not know how long he had been stranded on the barbed bush that trapped him in its steely grip in no-man’s land. All he could remember was the lances of stabbing pain shooting through his leg when he regained consciousness. Struggling to disentangle himself from the barbed wire only caused more pain, ripping his hands to a shredded mass of flesh. In the end he must have passed out again, barely still alive when they scraped him up and transported him to the casualty tent three miles back from the front line.

  A shot of morphine gave him the first decent sleep he had experienced since he got to France.

  When he woke sometime later, the dim light of a paraffin lamp hurt his eyes.

  ‘They will be sore for a while, that mud dried like cement on your face, we will cover them with a bandage to help them heal,’ a deep male voice told Nipper as a cool bandage was wrapped round his head, covering his eyes.

  Taking the opportunity to sleep, he drifted off once more and only woke when he felt himself being moved again. His lips and ears were being washed, and then he heard the sound of gulls’ cry. He flinched as the bird’s cry seemed to be right on top of him.

  ‘I imagine the mud made you partially deaf, but we have most of it out of your ears now, soldier.’

  Nipper could feel the adrenalin course through his veins when the stretcher he was lying on tilted forward, and from the sound of boots on wood, he realised he was being carried up a gangplank.

  ‘Don’t worry, soldier, you are going back to Blighty on the hospital ship tonight.’

  Nipper could not believe it. He was alive and he was going home!

  Accustomed to the relentless rumble of bombardment, the boom of explosions and the dying groans of pals, Nipper could now hear only the gentle thrum of the ambulance engine rumbling through quiet roads and had no idea where he was. For months, he had known only the rural countryside of France and Flanders, where every living thing had been trampled and obliterated into the mud and trenches and shell holes. Being injured was a blessing, he thought. At least it got him off the battleground.

  A Blighty wound allowed him to escape the death and destruction of war, but he did not allow his thoughts to drift to what the future had in store for him. Ignoring the nagging familiarity of soldiers whose injuries brought a new kind of terror. Fear for the future.

  The prospect of never walking or never working again. The probability of unending pain, of lasting disfigurement. But for Nipper, the fact that he was alive was a godsend he could not ignore, for his mother’s sake.

  Sam Cassidy was squatting in an eight-feet deep trench after patching up another poor soul. Stopping only for a quick smoke, he thought about what he would write to his girl, Millie. He wanted to tell her how much he loved and missed her, and how he feared for her now that she had volunteered to join the hospital ship Gigantic.

  But he could not write the words. He could not build up her hope that their relationship could be anything more, even though he cared for her in a way he had never cared for anybody else in his life. He was scared to lose her, petrified. But she would never understand his need to get back to Liverpool and see the faces and the places he had left behind and try to get some answers as to how and why his family died that Christmas Eve six years ago. And his sister, Anna died later in hospital after trying to save them. His whole family wiped out.

  If truth be told, that was only one of the reasons, he didn’t fear this war, although he did have a healthy distrust of those new tanks they were now using, and the power that went behind them.

  He was more scared of his strong feelings for Millie, and whether she would want nothing to do with him when he told her he was not going back to Canada when the war was over. He intended to go back home to Liverpool and find out the truth. The need to know had sustained him over the years and had coloured his actions. Spurred him on to join the battlefield with his countrymen on both sides, English and Canadian. And made him proud to do his bit.

  Only then would he be able to relax and raise a family, live a good life… But he could not bear the thought of settling down with any other girl except the pretty Canadian nurse whose father saved him all those years ago when he was on the brink of death. Because it was Millie who gave him the strength to believe life was good, and he grew strong again.

  What if he could persuade Millie to set up home in Liverpool? he wondered. Would she? Could she leave everything she had ever known to be by his side? Sam questioned how he could he put his thoughts into words when they made no sense to him?

  Millie would never leave Canada. Why would she leave a clean, vibrant country, for the dirt and smoke of a port city that got into your soul and never let go?

  After a week at the busy end of intense fighting, Sam went down the line to pick up more casualties from the trenches that had been transformed from tranquil forests and bountiful farmers’ fields into a wilderness of spent iron and rotting corpses that came to be called the West
ern Front.

  The temporary ditches became multiple lines of dugouts, fortified with sandbag parapets, barbed wire and heavy Vickers machine-guns on tripods. Within these underground cities, their only means of relaxation was to recline into a dugout depression carved into the side of the trench, known as a funk hole, which was also a space for soldiers to keep out of the way of busy medics with stretchers, who came to collect the wounded.

  ‘Want a smoke?’ he asked when his pal, Alfie, finished bandaging the hand of another soldier.

  Alfie was another Home Boy who had joined the Canadian Medical Corps when war broke out and shared his trench, called Scotty Road by its inhabitants, because that was where most of them came from.

  Alfie shook his head and sat down beside Sam, tipping his tin hat to the back of his head, and closing his eyes against the glare of the afternoon sunshine. ‘I’m trying to get a tan before we finish this holiday,’ said Alfie, always the joker. ‘Can’t go home to the missus looking like a bottle of milk.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll care what you look like,’ Sam smiled. ‘Although, you might want to get a bit of a wash.’

  ‘I’ll book meself into the Hotel Du Luxe, have a bath and a shave – she won’t be able to keep her hands off me.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, Alfie, old son,’ Sam said, enjoying the respite. After last night’s heavy bombardment, the casualties came thick and fast. There was no let-up until first light and even now there was still the odd distant boom in the background.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll come back here for my holidays, next year,’ said Alfie, ‘it’s a bit noisy.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Sam agreed, drawing in a lungful of nicotine and flicking the butt of the cigarette onto the lime-strewn floor, grinding it out with the heel of his boot.