An air-raid alert that night meant a couple of hours in the dubious comfort of the shelter, although no bombs fell on Sunderland. Newcastle wasn’t so fortunate – they were regularly getting pounded.
Lucy was deathly tired when she awoke on Sunday morning. The others were dressed for church when she came downstairs, but she declined to go with them. The events of the last few days had caught up with her and the thought of chatting with friends and acquaintances after the service, all of whom would be dying to know more about what had happened, was beyond her.
After waving the others off, she made herself a cup of tea and walked through to the sitting room, where the French doors were open to the glorious June sunshine. She had intended to sit in the garden, but finding the sight of Donald’s empty deckchair too painful for the moment, she sat down in the sitting room and shut her eyes.
She must have dropped straight off because when she awoke from a deep sleep, to a knocking at the front door, her tea was cold and untouched. Feeling slightly woozy, she made herself get up and answer the door, hoping against hope that it wasn’t another of the neighbours, or a friend with a bunch of flowers and condolences about Donald. The Echo had got hold of the story in the last couple of days, and since then people they barely knew had been popping up out of the woodwork.
She opened the door, a polite smile in place. Jacob stood there, his bruised face abeam and, without a word, he took her in his arms. He did not kiss her immediately. His lips brushed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, before taking her mouth in a kiss that must have hurt his swollen jaw, such was its fierceness.
‘Come inside.’
She managed to find the strength to come back to Earth long enough to pull him into the house, away from prying eyes, and shut the door, and then they were kissing again, hungrily and without restraint.
It was minutes later when she murmured, ‘When did you leave the hospital?’
‘A little while ago. I came straight here.’
‘I’m so glad you did.’
‘Where is everyone?’ It only now dawned on him that the house was quiet.
‘At church – they’ll be back soon.’
‘Then come into the sitting room. I’ve got something I want to say. I was going to ask you to come for a walk, but if we’re alone?’
‘We are.’
He pulled her into the sitting room, pushing her down in a chair and then kneeling down in front of her.
‘Jacob?’
‘Shush!’ He touched her lips with one finger. ‘Lucy, I have always loved you. Never for one moment have I stopped loving you, and I never will. You are my sun, moon and stars, my universe, my everything. Will you marry me, my love? Will you be my wife and let me take care of you and Daisy and any little ones we might have together? Will you wait for me, because I intend to come back to you and nothing will stop me, I promise.’
She knew he had no power to keep such a promise, but at that moment it didn’t matter. Her eyes shining, she flung her arms round his neck and slid down onto the floor with him. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
And then they were laughing and rolling about like two children, before he became serious again, sitting up and reaching into his pocket. She looked at the small velvet box he was holding and, as he lifted the tiny catch and then the lid, she caught her breath. The ring was beautiful, a large sapphire surrounded by a bevy of small glittering diamonds. ‘Will you wear it until I come back and can put a gold band beside it?’ he asked softly.
She nodded, her heart so full she couldn’t speak.
He slid the ring onto the third finger of her left hand and she knew a moment’s deep thankfulness that she had moved Perce’s wedding ring to her right hand a day or two ago. It had seemed time somehow, the end of an era, and she had felt that Perce would have understood. And it made this moment, which had been so long in coming, perfect.
‘I bought it before I came home on leave,’ he murmured, looking into her shining eyes. ‘In faith.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ She touched his face. ‘I love you so much.’
The following day Lucy stood with Daisy on the platform of Central Station waving Jacob off. She was glad Daisy had asked to be there; but for her daughter’s presence, she didn’t know if she would have been able to stop herself running after the train screaming and crying for Jacob. He had survived Dunkirk, he’d done his bit; it didn’t seem fair that the war machine expected more of him. But for his sake and for Daisy’s, she made herself smile and wave until the train had disappeared and even the clouds of steam had evaporated in the warm sunny air. And then the reality that he was gone swept over her and she couldn’t stop the tears.
‘It’s all right, Mam.’ Far from being embarrassed by the heightened emotions and shows of affection she’d been witness to over the last twenty-four hours, Daisy had taken it in her stride. She’d recently discovered Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters and had been reading their books avidly; now she was captivated by her mother’s real-life story of childhood sweethearts who had been separated through no fault of their own, only to find each other again. Lucy had told her only what she needed to know; there had been no mention of Tom Crawford, simply that they’d been thrown out of their home after the menfolk were killed, and her Uncle Donald had gone down south at a time when Jacob had been desperately ill and out of the picture. Daisy’s father, Lucy had emphasized, had been a wonderful man, who had taken them in and married her to give her his name and protection, and they had been thrilled when she had come along to cement the marriage.
Now Daisy slipped her hand in her mother’s, squeezing it tightly. ‘You still have me,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, I know, my sweetheart, I know.’ Lucy hugged her daughter to her. ‘And I can’t tell you how precious you are.’ She took a deep breath and then wiped her eyes. The war would be over one day and Jacob would come home to her. She had to believe that, and keep believing it . . .
Chapter Twenty-Eight
August saw Sunderland’s first air-raid casualties of the war when the Germans bombed the shipyards and docks, and within two days the Luftwaffe were back. It was the beginning of Sunderland’s Blitz, and life was never to be the same again. Especially for Lucy’s family. On the same day she received a letter from Jacob informing her that his unit had been ordered to Egypt immediately, but he would write when he could, Flora and Bess told her that, after much deliberation, they’d decided to go to Newcastle to work in a munitions factory and would take lodgings there.
‘We want to get involved in proper war work,’ Bess said over the family evening meal, ‘and you can easily replace us at the shop with lads fresh out of school. They keep saying women are needed to free more men for active service, don’t they?’
‘And Bess and I are strong and healthy,’ Flora put in. ‘We want to do our bit.’
Lucy couldn’t argue with that, although privately she agreed with Ruby’s summing up of the twins’ decision: the girls might want to contribute to the war effort, but an added incentive was the big wages they’d earn in the factories, plus the excitement of the night life in Newcastle and the number of soldiers, sailors and airmen who’d be in and out of the city. But they would be eighteen years old on their next birthday, they were children no longer, and they were determined to go. So, with many misgivings, she and Ruby made the journey to Newcastle with the twins, found them lodgings in a good area with a motherly landlady who promised Lucy she’d keep an eye on the girls, and by the beginning of September they had gone.
Within the week, Matthew had joined the Navy. He had become increasingly unhappy about merely serving in the Home Guard – as Winston Churchill had renamed the Local Defence Volunteers – in spite of the provision of uniforms and real weapons, and having had his seventeenth birthday in the summer had decided to enlist.
Lucy came home from work to find Matthew and Charley waiting for her, Charley dressed in Matthew’s Home Guard uniform and holding one of the First World War rifles that had recently been d
istributed to the volunteers. Before she could ask any questions, Matthew said, ‘Charley’s taking my place in the Home Guard. He’s turned fifteen now and we’ve been to see the Sergeant Major and he says it’s all right.’
Numbly, knowing the answer, Lucy said, ‘And you?’
‘I enlisted today.’ His eyes on her stricken face, he said softly, ‘I had to, Mam. Please try to understand.’
He had called her Mam from the day she had married his father, and indeed he felt as much her son as Daisy did her daughter. She loved Charley, and she never made any distinction between the two brothers, but Matthew held her heart as a son of her own flesh would.
He was already a head taller than she was, and now he took her into his arms and hugged her as he whispered, ‘It’ll be all right, Mam. Don’t worry.’ He was lean and gangly and his lanky frame, with hands and feet that seemed too big, was so painfully boyish she couldn’t bear it. But he had looked so proud when he’d told her he’d enlisted, and Charley, standing in Matthew’s uniform with the rifle over his shoulder, had been trying to stop himself from beaming. They were babies – her babies, both of them – and she couldn’t protect them from this terrible war and a world gone mad.
With John and Matthew and the twins gone, the house seemed painfully empty. The Battle of Britain waged in the skies above, and everyone knew the mass raids by the Germans was Hitler’s attempt to clear the way for invasion. London was being hammered, as one newscaster put it, but in spite of sleep made impossible by the sound of bombs, anti-aircraft guns and the shrill bells of fire engines and ambulances, Londoners continued to function with a quiet stoicism that impressed foreign observers.
‘Here, listen to this,’ Ruby said one night as she sat reading the paper after their evening meal while Lucy helped Daisy with her homework. ‘It says Londoners haven’t lost their traditional cockney humour, whatever old Hitler tries. A police station, its windows shattered and its door hanging off its hinges, bore a sign saying: “Be good, we’re still open.” I like that, don’t you?’ She grinned at Lucy. ‘That’s what the Nazis don’t understand: that we’ll never give in.’
Lucy smiled back but said nothing. She had read the paper earlier and it had been the report that the Italian Army had advanced into Egypt and was engaged in fighting British defences at Mersa Matruh that had caught her eye.
As September turned into October the battle for control of the Atlantic began. With the Luftwaffe having lost the Battle of Britain, it was generally thought that the long-promised invasion of Britain would be shelved by the Nazis until the spring, but now it seemed that Hitler had decided to try to beat his only fighting foe by starving her out. Although Sunderland wasn’t having anything like the bad time London and Coventry were enduring, the bombing continued and the rationing bit harder. Lucy decided to convert Perce’s original shop in the East End into a refuge and soup kitchen for folk who were bombed out and needed shelter and food for a while, until accommodation of a more permanent nature was found. The council agreed to fund the project, and although the man of the family she’d installed in the shop was away fighting, his wife and daughters were enthusiastic about it.
By the end of November, when food shortages were commonplace, the refuge was up and running. Charley had left school in the summer and was delighted when Lucy involved him by letting him help manage the refuge. It stopped him brooding about being too young to fight. Lucy wasn’t so easily distracted. She thought about Jacob and the others constantly. Jacob had written since arriving in Egypt to say he was safe and now she eagerly awaited his letters each week.
Flora and Bess came home for the Christmas holiday and they all went to church on Christmas Day. The building was full with people praying for loved ones in the thick of the war. The six of them exchanged gifts later, and Lucy cooked the Christmas dinner. She’d managed to obtain a turkey from Farmer Thornhill, a rare luxury, but carrots had taken the place of dried fruit in the Christmas pudding. The extra Christmas rations of four ounces of sugar and two ounces of tea didn’t go far, either.
Nevertheless, it was lovely to have the twins home for a couple of days and they made the most of being together again, pulling the crackers that Daisy had made for everyone and singing along with the carols broadcast on the wireless. Each one of them was painfully aware of the empty places at the table, but no one said anything.
Within days everyone knew Christmas was well and truly over when the Luftwaffe turned the City of London into an inferno. The raid had been planned to coincide with the tidal lowpoint in the Thames, water mains being severed at the outset by parachute mines. For a time the blaze created by 10,000 German fire-bombs raged out of control, firemen being unable to use the mains supply or pump water from the river. It was only the weather unexpectedly deteriorating over the low-lying German airfields that caused the Luftwaffe to call off the raid before the whole of London and its inhabitants were annihilated.
To Lucy, it was another example of German thoroughness and the ruthlessness that had typified the enemy from the outset of the war. The thought of Jacob falling into their hands and being transported to one of the concentration camps they’d heard so much about was a constant worry. Each time she received a letter and knew he was all right her relief was immense, but then she immediately started worrying as to when she’d hear from him again.
And then, within a week of each other in January, she heard from John and Matthew that they were leaving England’s shores. John’s battalion was being sent to bolster the Allied troops in Malaya, and Matthew was sailing to reinforce the British Mediterranean Fleet, who were continuing to engage Mussolini’s navy. She was distraught, and Charley, somewhat insensitively, made no effort to hide the fact that he was green with envy.
At the start of the winter it had been predicted that, after the extraordinarily clear and sunny summer, they’d be in for some severe weather. In February it arrived with a vengeance. Wearside was gripped by the worst blizzards in living memory. Power lines were brought down due to the weight of snow and ice, and Charley was shocked and distressed when two of his pals died, one treading on a power line and the other killed trying to pull his friend clear. Even Abe and Dolly’s weekly visits in the horse and cart ceased, much to Daisy’s distress. She had taken to the couple and they were unashamedly besotted with her – at long last Daisy had some grandparents, and Dolly the grandchild she’d often dreamt about.
Rationing, along with a lack of fuel, added to their trials and, as if life wasn’t hard enough, on the last Sunday of the month, another sub-zero raw night, the sound of the sirens preceded an air-raid attack in which several streets were set on fire. The rescue services were hampered by the freezing conditions, many roads being impassable with snow, and just starting their vehicles had proved a battle. Leaving Ruby to take care of Daisy, Lucy and Charley made their way to the refuge in the East End to help Mrs Kirby and her daughters once the All-Clear sounded. By the end of the night some thirty people who had been made homeless had been fed and bedded down, and as Lucy and Charley tramped home in the stingingly cold but bright morning, Lucy reflected on some of the stories she’d heard and the tales of bravery.
The landscape of the town was changing, with more and more streets bearing witness to the devastation caused by Hitler’s bombs; and ordinary men, women and children, babies too, were dying in the wreckage of their homes, although she hadn’t heard one person in the refuge bemoan their lot last night. She looked up into the silvery, mother-of-pearl sky where a winter sun shone without warmth, ribbons of pink and opalescent dove-grey winding through the iridescent expanse. It was beautiful. The world was beautiful, the natural world, and most folk just wanted to live and work in peace and be happy with their families.
She glanced at Charley, trudging along beside her. ‘You were brilliant last night,’ she said quietly. She had intended to go to the shelter on her own, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
He grinned at her, looking so like his father it was as though a young P
erce was walking beside her. ‘I like to help.’
‘I know you do.’ And it came to her, on a wave of revelation, that but for the circumstances which had driven her from Zetland Street, her two boys wouldn’t be in her life and it would be so much the poorer for it. In spite of Tom Crawford’s devilishness, his manipulation and mania where she was concerned, good had come out of bad. There was so much love in her life. ‘Let’s have a bacon sandwich when we get home,’ she said, knowing it was Charley’s favourite breakfast.
His grin widened. ‘Farmer Thornhill?’
She laughed out loud. ‘The very same, God bless him.’
The bombing continued through the spring and into the summer, but with the bad weather behind them, one problem was eased. In spite of the ever-present anxiety about their loved ones, life inevitably settled into something of a routine for Lucy’s family. Clothes coupons were introduced in June and coal rationing began in July. Flora and Bess made the odd day-trip home; Lucy converted another of her shops off High Street West into a refuge-um-soup-kitchen, which she ran herself; Charley did manoeuvres and now manned anti-aircraft batteries with the Home Guard most nights; and any letters from the ‘boys’ were read over and over again, although Lucy kept Jacob’s letters for her own eyes. These were few and far between. Jacob’s unit was part of the 22,000 men holding the garrison at Tobruk against Field Marshal Rommel’s huge German army, and the garrison could only be supplied by sea, as Allied anti-aircraft gunners fought to keep the harbour open. The siege was in its fourth month and the Allies had fended off repeated attacks as they stood their ground. A German newspaper had dubbed the British defenders the ‘Rats of Tobruk’, a name they had happily embraced.
‘Desert rats are cunning and tough and vicious,’ Jacob had written in his last letter:
Good attributes in a war, don’t you think? But this desert rat is missing you so much, my darling. But for the fact we are fighting an evil which, if left to its own devices, would swallow up everything good and noble in life, I would swim the Mediterranean tomorrow. But our time will come, I know it. God is on our side. One day I will kiss you and hold you and make you mine, in body as well as soul. I think of that in the dark moments, my sweet girl. My Lucy.
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