What Was Rescued

by Jane Bailey

  ‘No one will be found alive now,’ was the phrase going round. I was glad to hear one woman say, ‘You never know. You never know.’

  I made all sorts of pacts with a god I didn’t believe in. If she was found alive, I would do this or that wonderful thing. I don’t know how I functioned, looking back. I don’t know at all. I do remember thinking about Arthur, and what I thought was this: I had thought him weak. I had hated him for not seeing the truth when it stared him in the face. But now I could see how easy that was. How much you see what you want to see when the truth is too painful to let in, and when there is still the tiniest shard of hope that you are wrong. Now, that weakness seemed like a strength. It kept my hands giving out the cups of tea to desperate, exhausted men.

  59

  ARTHUR

  The Joneses’ bus was packed. I couldn’t work out what was going on, but some of them were talking about the Coal Board and compensation and accidents waiting to happen. I didn’t listen too carefully. I was busy trying to think what I could possibly say to Dora.

  I see now that I was wrong. How lame. I can see now what a fool I’ve been. Sounded like a cheap romance at the pictures. I don’t really know how you can forgive me, but if you could, you would make me the happiest man alive. Oh Lord. I didn’t have a clue. I can’t marry you yet, but I will, if you’ll have me. I was in such a state. Coal Boards, compensation, dodgy tips went in one ear and out of the other.

  Then, before we reached Dora’s village, the bus came to a standstill. Voices were raised. It seems there was a police blockade across the road. The bus driver got out and talked to the police. More raised voices. He was not turning round, he said. There were people up the valley who deserved a bus service, and they were waiting for him.

  Eventually we were allowed on our way, but when I got off the bus I knew something serious was afoot. The men streamed along the alleyways between the terraces, heading down into the valley behind Dora’s house. I knocked on Dora’s door. When there was no answer, I tried the unlocked door, went in and tentatively made my way down the stairs to the back parlour, calling for Dora as I went.

  There was no one there, but as I stood looking around I caught sight of a van down beyond the end of the back garden with ‘BBC TV’ on it. I stood close to the window and saw the scene before me. Now it was clear what the men had referred to. I opened the back door and ran as fast as I could down to the site of the disaster.

  ‘Keep back! Oi! You! Keep back!’ A policeman came towards me and held on to me. ‘We don’t need onlookers.’

  ‘I want to help!’

  ‘We don’t need any more help, sir. You’d just be in the way. The best thing you can do is leave it to the professionals now.’

  My heart was racing. Why hadn’t I read a newspaper on the train? My stupidity seemed to be mounting up out of control. I turned and circled the outer perimeter of the crowd. I walked round and round searching for a spade that might have been cast aside. I asked a Salvation Army man what had happened, and he explained. I begged him for something to do, and he said I could collect the paper cups if I liked. I sighed. I was desperate. And then I saw her, sitting on the wet ground hugging her knees.

  ‘Dora?’

  There was no reply. I walked up to the woman I thought was Dora and looked at her closely. I had been mistaken.

  I was about to walk away when the figure spoke. ‘Arthur?’

  I looked at her again and saw that it was her. She was padded out in a man’s coat with the sleeves hanging over her hands. Her hair was windswept and hung raggedly over a gaunt face with bloodless lips. She looked more like a ghost than a woman.

  ‘Dora!’ How many times had I said her name like this? Something more was needed of me. ‘Are you all right?’

  She struggled to her feet, and I helped her up. We looked at each other, and she looked away into the distance. ‘Our Mam’s dead. I wanted to tell her . . . I wanted to tell her . . .’ Her lips were shaking. ‘I never got to say I knew how much she . . . I never got to tell her I know how she must’ve felt with Siân . . . why she seemed there but not there. Why she sent me away to keep me safe . . . and not because she didn’t . . . I never got to tell her.’

  I stood there, hopelessly lost for words.

  ‘My Helen’s in there, under the rubble. My little girl.’

  I had never seen her look so fragile. I thought if I put an arm around her she might break into pieces. She had been there all night, and all of this day. Now it was getting dark again. Nothing had passed her lips but Salvation Army tea. She was cold and frightened but unwilling to talk any more. She looked at my hands. I looked down and saw that I was carrying a bunch of red roses.

  I threw the roses on the ground beside her and took off my coat. ‘Wear this one – it’s dry and warm.’ She was reluctant at first to take off the coat she was wearing, but it was sodden. I folded it and put it on the ground, dry side up for her to sit on. Then I took off the jacket of my new wool suit. ‘Where was she? Which part of the building was her classroom?’

  She became animated now and pointed to the back of the school.

  ‘Dora, wait here. I’m going to find your little girl.’

  It was a bold, wild statement. First, I had to get past a line of police, then ranks of digging miners and firemen, and even then there seemed no chance, now, of bringing back more than a body. Still, I was determined to do it. Never had a mission been more made for me, or more crucial to the woman I loved.

  I made my way up the slope a little, away from the affected buildings and the row of policemen. One of the miners was walking away with his spade slung over his shoulder, his face black as pitch with little white rivulets of sweat or tears on it. I pointed to three small gables poking above the rubble. ‘What are those? Over there – away from the floodlights – the three little gables.’

  He turned and looked with me. ‘Over by there? That’s the lavs, that is. There won’t be anyone there, see, because they weren’t allowed in lesson time, and lessons had begun.’ Then, seeing my desperate face, he added, ‘Also, if you look, you’ll see the tops of the doors, and they’re open. People close the door when they go to the lav, don’t they? Even kids.’

  It was true: each of the cubicles was full of the slurry, and I could see the tops of the doors flat against the inside walls. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘I have to do something. Can I borrow your spade?’

  He shrugged, slung the spade off his shoulder and pointed the handle in my direction. ‘Good luck, mun.’

  The latrines were well away from the school building. There was no one working on them, for the very reasons given by the miner, but it made it easy for me to slip through the more sparse police line and start to shovel. As soon as I was there, spade in hand, no one bothered me. All the effort was around the classrooms, which were bathed in bright lights.

  Digging into the shale-like waste was harder than it looked. The miners had made it seem easy. Each shovelful hurt my palms. I started with the first cubicle and felt a fraud. I knew I would find no one in there, and I had told Dora that I’d find her daughter. I kept on shovelling. Helen. ‘Helen,’ I said it out loud. ‘Helen! Helen!’ I pressed my inappropriate footwear down hard on the spade, and each time it went in, the sound was like chains uncoiling. It took me the best part of an hour to hollow out that first cubicle, and I was ashamed. I couldn’t stop though. The blisters on my hand hurt more when I looked at them. I started on the second cubicle, also open, also full of dirt and coal spoil and mud and wet earth. It was hot. It was so hot to dig without stopping. I paused and took my shirt off. The second cubicle took me just over an hour. The third cubicle was even more deeply covered than the others. All that could be seen was the gable. I was done in. My mouth was dry, my energy spent. I slung the spade down and took deep breaths. I imagined myself going back to Dora empty-handed. I swallowed hard, picked up the spade and started to dig.

  There was nothing but the repetitive thunk and swish of the chainmail sound as the spa
de went in and then threw the heavy wet grit to one side. Like waves receding on a pebble beach. The pain and the monotony were a sort of necessary penance for all my ignorance in the past. No one could have stopped me, not even a policeman, not even Dora telling me I was wasting my time. I went into a strange kind of trance. I stopped feeling the blistering soreness of my palms, the shooting cramp in my legs, the pain in my back. All I felt was Dora’s arms around me when I found her little girl. I was so focused on my goal that it took a while to notice that something was different.

  A hard ridge blocked my spade. It was wooden. It was the top of a door. This third cubicle was closed.

  Furiously I shovelled. I couldn’t get the spade in quick enough. My pulse quickened even more than I thought possible, and the pounding of it filled my head. A trick of the eye, that’s what it had been. The other two doors had been open, flat against their walls: the first one partially visible, the second one only just, but this one was covered right up to the gable by the same steeply sloping mulch, and the assumption was that this door was open too. But it wasn’t.

  I hesitated for a moment. The first two doors had a gap of about six inches underneath them. This cubicle would have filled with mud and debris from the bottom. How far up would it have gone? Up to a child’s waist? Their neck? There was no point clearing away the outside of the door, for how would I open a door against a bank of mud and rubble? I stared at the task in front of me for a while. What was it? What did I have to do to free any child inside this trap?

  I climbed carefully up the bank of rubble, trying not to set it sliding, until I was level with the gable end. I bashed at it with my spade until the wooden slats gave way. There was a gap big enough to look into, but by now it was getting dark, and there were no floodlights directly on this part of the site. I needed a torch, but I knew that if I went back to look for one I might never be allowed back, and whoever was in here needed me to work fast. I shouted at the top of my voice. I could see men moving around under the lights, but no one seemed to hear. I tried again and waved my arms, but no one was looking my way, into the pitch dark.

  I reached in with my arm. There was only air. I lay down on my belly on the sloping black mud and reached down further, as far as I could stretch. Nothing. I clambered tentatively on to the neighbouring gable and struck down hard on the little pointed roof of the third cubicle. A few slates came off. I bashed it again with the edge of the spade and the felt underneath caved in. I stuck the spade in and levered off a wooden baton, then two. I put my hands in and pulled and pulled at the wooden frame, great splinters jabbing into my hands as I did so.

  It must have taken no more than ten minutes, but it seemed like hours. The gable roof was off, collapsed in pieces. I climbed over the cubicle that I had opened to the sky and lay down carefully behind it on the rubble. I peered in. It was dark now, but my eyes, accustomed to the lack of light, made out something pale against the black. A toilet cistern. Reaching in as far as I could stretch, my fingertips brushed against gritty wet earth. There was perhaps two feet of air. Enough for a mouth to breathe. I felt around the metal cistern. There was something soft. Hair.

  A torch. I desperately wanted a torch. Foolishly I patted my trouser pockets as if I might find one there, as if I had set off this morning to the twentieth-anniversary reunion equipped with a torch.

  But I did find something. I found a lighter from a beast.

  There was a child’s head. The child must have stood up on the toilet when the mud started coming in. There were shoulders and one arm resting on the earth, the other being buried. Frantically, I tried to loosen the second arm. I eased myself forward as far as I could. My back was in agony, my fingers numb, but I couldn’t stop. I had to free the arm.

  Every now and then I picked up the lighter to see how I was doing. It was no use. I could only dig down so far. I would have to get something underneath the armpits and haul the child out.

  I scrambled down and found my discarded shirt and wound it into a tight coil from one arm to the next. It went easily enough under the child’s first armpit, but the second one was a struggle. It was painstaking work. I no longer felt in charge of my hands; they were strangers attached to the ends of my arms, and my fingers had all the finesse of sausage balloons that men twisted into animal shapes at fairgrounds.

  When at last it was done, I tied the shirt in a firm knot as close to the child’s chest as I could. Then I began to heave.

  Nothing happened. There was no upward movement whatsoever, but I felt a searing pain in my back. I changed position as carefully as I could and tried crouching over the cubicle. It was no good. I couldn’t reach down far enough to get a good hold of the shirt. I could have wept.

  Looking back, I can’t imagine what stroke of luck made my ruined hands rest hopelessly on the side of the cistern with the chain. But there it was: the chain. I unhooked it, and it came out of the earth easily. I manoeuvred myself once more on to my belly and hooked it through the shirt. Then I tied the two ends of the chain as best I could and looped the chain over the spade. Finally, I got back into a crouching position, one foot on each side of the cubicle wall, held the spade horizontally and pulled. I heaved and tugged as if my life depended on it, because I think I knew it did.

  Nothing seemed to happen. There was no noise from the child. Reluctantly, I lay down again and drew the lighter from my pocket. The earth was too impacted. I began to try and loosen it with my hopeless hands. I told myself to take my time, that this was important, that time spent loosening the earth would make a rescue possible. I saw now that the arms wore a dark knitted cardigan, and that it was a girl. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, but she seemed lifeless.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said suddenly. If she was alive, I wanted to reassure her, and I used the word I’d heard Dora’s mother use once. ‘It’s okay, bach.’

  I thought I heard a gasp from the dark, but I couldn’t be sure. Then I heard it again.

  ‘It’s okay, bach, you’re okay now. You’re safe now.’

  And because I had said it, I had to make it true. I don’t know where the strength came from – from that little gasp, perhaps – but I crouched over that cubicle again and pulled up with the spade, willing my legs to straighten like a weightlifter’s. Something shifted. I half stood and threw my weight back, and a little body slipped out of the dark depths on to the cistern as if the black earth had given birth.

  I took the spade out of the chain, bent down to pick her up and started to stagger down the slope of debris. My legs almost gave way. I could hear the land slipping a little behind me, and a rush of rubble, but I didn’t care. My feet put themselves one in front of the other, knees buckled, as I made my way back towards the thinning bustle of the crowd.

  ‘She’s alive!’ I shouted, or thought I shouted. I may have just said it, but in my heart I shouted it. ‘She’s alive!’

  Dora stood alone – exactly where I’d left her, a dark beacon on the mountainside – and then began to run towards me, like an animal sensing her young. A policeman came rushing forward, and so did a group of women that he tried to hold back.

  ‘I’ll take over now, mun,’ said another man coming towards me, but I didn’t want to let her go. She felt too precious to give up. Dora was shaking. She stood in front of me staring at the blackened child. I was terrified I had given her false hope.

  ‘Helen!’ she wailed. ‘It’s Helen!’ She grabbed the child’s head and kissed her – ‘Oh my little lamb!’ – battling with the man who was trying to make way for a stretcher.

  ‘She’s alive,’ I said again. ‘Unconscious, I think, but . . . she’s alive.’ As I said these last words I could feel my voice go. Tears spilt down my cheeks before I could stop them. I stood there, blackened and naked to the waist, on a desperate Welsh hillside, holding the child of the woman I loved – had never stopped loving – and I wept.

  BEACHCOMBING

  DORA (January 1969)

  A few months ago, an eager young woman
journalist approached me and Arthur about writing a book on our experiences for the thirtieth anniversary of the seavacuee disaster. After Pippa’s accounts, I had always wanted to give my side of the story – and yes, maybe I did want to get back at her a bit to start with. Talking about it all so openly with someone has been sort of cathartic for both of us. Each of us making notes for her about what happened somehow helped us to make sense of things, but really, that was enough for us. We’ve thought long and hard about it, and although we feel bad about wasting this journalist’s time (and she really is so very keen), we’ve decided to go with just an article instead. When we read the outline she’d sent us, we realized that the stuff about Ralph and Pippa was going to be her main focus. We’d been a bit naive. What journalist could resist a story like that? We went up to London to tell her in person, and we didn’t take any of our notes with us. We offered to pay her to make up for any wasted time. I tried to explain to the young woman that we have to think about our daughters.

  I mean, I think Arthur and I suffered from not knowing what our parents really thought. We both stupidly imagined we were less loved than we were. We both felt second best. I could only imagine what dynamite this would be for our two if they read a book like this. Fliss would see herself as the daughter of a murderer, and she would imagine that I couldn’t possibly love the daughter of my greatest rival. And of course, I do love her. How could I not? She is fifty per cent the man I love most in all the world. And Helen would see herself as the daughter of an abuser, and she might assume that I couldn’t possibly love a daughter who reminded me of him. And we would have to find a way to convince her that as far as genetic inheritance goes, she has got Ralph’s beautiful brown curls and his athletic body, so she hasn’t come off too badly. She’s shown no interest in seeking him out, so far, although Pippa turns up for Fliss’s birthdays, when she remembers. Fliss sees her as a bit of an eccentric, I think, and is in awe of her. But they have both been so loved, Fliss and Helen. They couldn’t be more loved, and that matters more than anything.