Avalanche of Daisies

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘I know,’ Barbara said. The thought of it made her feel panicky again but she made a great effort and spoke as calmly as she could. ‘That was a bomb, wassen it?’

  Heather didn’t show any sign of fear at all. ‘Big one by the sound of it,’ she said. ‘What’s the time? Can you see?’

  Barbara peered at Steve’s bedside clock in the light from the landing. ‘Nearly half past four.’

  ‘The sirens’ll go in a minute,’ Heather said shortly. ‘Put your shoes an’ socks on. We might have to go downstairs.’

  The first shock was passing and, now that the night was quiet again, Barbara realised that her heartbeat was steadying. She sat on the edge of the bed and put on her socks and shoes, her movements slow but quite controlled. Heather ran back to her own bedroom. Mrs Connelly called up the stairs to see if they were all right. ‘You coming down, are you?’ And Bob’s voice answered, ‘I think so, don’t you?’

  Within minutes, the five of them were gathered in the Connelly’s musty front room, sitting round the Morrison shelter, dressed and drinking tea and speculating as to why the sirens hadn’t gone and why the guns weren’t firing. The shelter looked huge and clumsy, like a cage for some poor wild animal, but it was better than waiting to be bombed upstairs.

  ‘I thought we’d finished with this shenanigans,’ Mr Connelly grumbled, rubbing the grey stubble on the side of his face. ‘Bloody Jerries! You’d think they’d shut up with the invasion an’ all. Have we not had enough?’

  ‘I reckon it was a loner,’ Bob said. ‘Come over on the off-chance an’ they shot him down.’

  ‘He had a bloody big load,’ the old man said. ‘Must’ve done a fair bit a’ damage.’

  Mrs Connelly finished her second cup of tea and set it down on the table with a crack. ‘If they don’t sound the sirens soon I’m off back to bed,’ she told them. ‘I’ve lost enough sleep in this war without sittin’ up for nothin’. My feet are like ice, so they are.’

  And as the air raid warning didn’t go, that’s what she did. The rest of them sat on for another half an hour but it was still quiet so they turned in too.

  ‘A loner,’ Bob said, as they climbed the stairs. ‘See if it ain’t. We’ll hear tomorrow.’

  But there was nothing about it on the wireless and nothing in the papers either. ‘Too small,’ Heather said. ‘It has to be a big raid to get a mention nowadays, with the Second Front and everything.’

  Barbara’s passengers were full of it. ‘Did you hear it, duck?’ they asked. ‘Bloody Germans. Startin’ up again. They don’t know when they’re beaten.’

  It wasn’t long before the tramway bush telegraph was in action and drivers and clippies were passing on the news of what had happened. It had been a plane and it had come down on the railway bridge in Grove Road in Bow, blocking the Chelmsford-Liverpool Street line. ‘Winders out for a quarter of a mile,’ Mrs Phipps told Barbara. ‘Ten killed, so they say, an’ ever so many casualties. Flying glass, you see.’

  It was quite a triumph to be able to come home that evening and tell her in-laws all about it. In fact Bob had heard the story that morning too, but he kept quiet and allowed her the floor, pleased to see how sensible she was being and how clearly she explained.

  ‘A one-off,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘An’ just as well. We don’t want all that starting up again.’

  ‘We won’t tell Steve,’ Heather decided. And she gave Barbara her fiercest expression to make her understand that this was an order. ‘There’s no need to go upsettin’ him over it. He’d only think the worst. It’s over an’ done with now.’

  But she was wrong. Three nights later they were woken by the howl of the air raid sirens and minutes later, while they were still struggling into their clothes, they heard the sound of an approaching plane. Not the laboured throb of a German bomber or the high, sweet note of a pursuing Spitfire or a Hurricane, but an alarming, unfamiliar sound, phut-phut-phut, rattling and spluttering, more like a motorbike than a plane. And before they could work out what it was, there was another explosion, exactly the same as the first one but this time nearer.

  They tumbled down the stairs one after the other, dressing as they ran.

  ‘And don’t tell me that was a lone plane’, Heather said, ‘because I won’t believe it. Once maybe, but not twice, an’ not making a row like that.’

  The ack-ack was putting up an enormous barrage.

  ‘We’ll wait till they ease off an’ then I’ll go out an’ have a look,’ Bob said.

  Heather wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You’ll do no such thing. There could be hundreds a’ the beggars.’

  And as if to prove her right, there was another explosion, further off this time but just as violent, and twenty minutes later, a third.

  ‘Better get in the shelter,’ Bob said, looking from Heather to Mrs Connelly. ‘There’s room for three. We’ll join you if they get any nearer.’

  So the three woman crushed into their protective cage. And the explosions went on and on, each one throwing Barbara into a renewed surge of fear.

  If this house is bombed, she thought, wincing at the ceiling, that’ll all fall down on top of us an’ we shall be crushed. Or suffocated. An’ there’s nothing we can do about it. She’d never felt so frightened, or so helpless. And yet the others were so calm.

  ‘Sounds as if it’s over Woolwich way now,’ Mrs Connelly observed. ‘Or Eltham.’

  Barbara looked at her in amazement. Fancy sitting there working out where the bombs were falling, when one of them could fall on you at any minute.

  ‘I’ll tell you what though,’ Bob said. ‘They’re big bombs but they’re few and far between. I reckon it was half an hour between the last two.’

  ‘They could go on all night at that rate,’ Mrs Connelly said. ‘It’s as bad as the Blitz. I’m going to lie down, so I am, an’ see if I can’t take a little bit of a nap.’

  She was asleep in five minutes and snoring in ten.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ Barbara asked, as another explosion roared in the distance.

  ‘It is so,’ Mr Connelly told her with feeling. ‘Snored every night of my married life, so she has. Winter and summer, peace and war, every mortal night the same.’

  ‘It’ll be breakfast time soon,’ Heather observed to Bob. ‘I’d better be getting on or you’ll be late for work.’ But as she spoke there was a really heavy explosion, so loud and so close that the lustres on the mantelpiece tinkled in alarm and Mrs Connelly sputtered and coughed and woke up.

  ‘Now that was close,’ she said.

  Heather crawled out of the shelter and brushed herself down. ‘Eggs an’ bacon,’ she said. ‘Good inner lining. That’s what we need.’ And to Barbara’s amazement, she went upstairs.

  ‘Is that safe?’ she asked Bob. ‘I mean, the raid’s still on, issen it?’

  ‘If it’s time to cook a meal,’ Bob told her with some pride, ‘she’ll cook it, raid or no raid. That’s the way she is.’

  Thass courage, Barbara thought, admiring it and adjusting her opinion of this mother-in-law of hers. ‘Shall I go an’ help her?’

  But they all said she should stay where she was.

  ‘She’ll call us when she’s ready,’ Bob said.

  Which she did, her voice steady as if there were nothing extraordinary about what she was doing at all.

  It was a surrealist breakfast, because although it was light enough for the curtains to be opened, they kept them closed and ate in electric light. Bob and Heather made a good meal but Barbara had no appetite at all and her mouth was so dry she could barely swallow. The raid was still going on, even though none of them mentioned it. They could hear ambulances and fire engines hurtling along the High Street as they ate. But, after a while, a train chuffed along the line at the end of the garden in its usual, ordinary way and Bob put on his cap and jacket, kissed them both goodbye and went to work.

  Why isn’t he frightened? Barbara wondered. He might get killed, going out in a raid. But he w
as walking downstairs perfectly steadily, closing the door neatly behind him, whistling as he set off down the road.

  The all-clear sounded as the two women were washing the dishes. And after that, they went to work too, parting at the top of the road with barely a nod.

  Barbara was surprised by how alert she felt. After a night without sleep she should have been exhausted, but the raid seemed to have energised her. It was partly because everything was so strange. The sky was full of drifting smoke and the air prickled with a strong and distinctive smell, a mixture of bonfire, brick dust and cordite, a tang of unlit gas, damp wood, stale shit. It was the characteristic smell of a bombed house as she was to learn in the days that followed.

  I’ve lived through my first air raid, she thought, as she walked to the depot. And she felt quite proud of herself. But it wasn’t long before she realised what a devastating effect one air raid could have.

  She and Mr Tinker took their first tram out bang on time as if it were an ordinary day, but they didn’t get far. One of the bombs had fallen on a Deptford square and the blast had damaged the High Street and blocked Deptford Bridge, which was littered with rubble and cordoned off by the civil defence.

  Mr Tinker stopped the tram and Barbara got out to see what they were going to do next.

  ‘Run a shuttle service,’ he told her. ‘That’s what we done in the Blitz. Go as far as we can both ways.’

  Their passengers grumbled a bit, particularly about ‘bleedin’ Hitler’, but having made their protest, they left the tram and struggled over the debris to wait for another on the other side, while Barbara and Mr Tinker drove back to the depot to report.

  News of the air raid was passed from tram to tram all through the morning and the revelations grew more terrible as the day progressed. The shops at Rushey Green had been hit, and Colliers, Marks and Spencer and the Times Furnishing badly damaged. The civil defence was still clearing the site. There’d been a bomb on the railway siding at Hither Green, and two in Eltham, one on the Cottage Hospital and the other in Castleford Avenue, where it had blown up nine houses. And the casualties had been gruesome. Scores of people had been buried alive in the rubble of their homes. One had been hurled through a plate-glass window by the blast, another had been killed by a shard of flying glass that had gone through her like a spear, another had been ripped in half.

  The only mystery was where the planes were coming from and what sort of planes they were. It occupied Barbara’s passengers all through the morning. Some thought they were old planes, brought out of retirement to replace the ones that were being pinned down in France, others thought they were something completely new. As one woman said, ‘I mean to say. Hark at ’em. They don’t sound like any Jerry I’ve ever heard.’ And that afternoon, as the tram was whirring up the New Kent Road and Barbara was collecting fares on the upper deck, they saw one of them.

  It was flying quite low over the rooftops about half a mile to the east, a squat, black, ugly looking plane, with stumpy squared-off wings and sparks of flame belching from a high tail, scarlet against the blue of the sky. The sirens hadn’t sounded, there were no guns firing and, as far as they could see, it was the only plane in the air. It looked purposeful and dangerous and uncanny.

  As they watched, the clatter of its engines suddenly cut out, the nose dipped and it began to fall.

  ‘Down!’ Barbara yelled. ‘Get you down!’ Not that her passengers needed urging. They were on the floor before the explosion, lying flat or crouched with their hands over their eyes. Seconds later the tram was buffeted by a shock wave that jerked them sideways against the legs of the benches and shattered the glass in their taped windows. The air was full of smoke and they could hear the crash of falling debris. Then it was suddenly and completely quiet. The traffic seemed to have stopped and nobody was moving or speaking.

  Barbara picked herself up and dusted down her uniform. ‘That was close!’ she said. ‘Everyone orl right?’

  To her great relief – and theirs – everyone was, apart from the odd bruise and an old lady who’d spat out her false teeth and was down on her knees trying to find them.

  Mr Tinker appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘We’ll have to take it out a’ service,’ he said. ‘’Cause of the glass.’ And repeated Barbara’s question. ‘Everyone all right?’

  They drove the tram back to the depot very slowly and carefully, just in case there was another bomb, and because they were now on the wrong side of the tracks, and they dropped off their remaining passengers wherever they wanted to be set down.

  ‘I don’ reckon that was a proper plane at all,’ Mr Tinker said confidentially as he and Barbara went to report. ‘If you ask me, there wasn’t anyone in it. I never saw no parachute when it was comin’ down. Did you?’

  Barbara had been too busy looking after her passengers. ‘A sort of robot, do you mean?’ she asked. ‘But thass horrible!’ The idea of an automatic thing flying towards them, full of bombs, with that awful flame coming out the back of it and nobody in it, was fearful, like something out of science fiction, or something in a horror film. It filled her with revulsion. You could accept a plane with a man in it. That could be shot down or driven away. But a robot would just keep on coming, no matter what. And it could fall on anybody.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past ’em,’ Mr Tinker said. ‘It’s just the sort of stunt they would pull.’

  Two days later the newspapers were agreeing with him. ‘New raids on London,’ they announced. ‘Flying bombs hit the capital.’ In fact they were reaching Greater London at the rate of seventy-three a day but that wasn’t mentioned, being the sort of information the authorities kept hidden. Not that their caution made any difference. Within a week the size of the new attack was general knowledge and the flying bombs had acquired two mocking nicknames, buzzbombs and doodlebugs.

  Because she knew her mother-in-law would disapprove, Barbara wrote a long letter to Steve every evening, describing the night raids and how they slept in the shelter, telling him what the new weapons looked like and how uncanny they were and what a lot of damage they did.

  ‘You got about thirteen seconds to take cover when the engine cuts out,’ she wrote, pleased that she could be so sanguine about it, and added with splendid pride, ‘We don’t take no notice of them unless they’re directly overhead. Me and Mr Tinker take our tram out no matter what. People make jokes about them.’ And to prove it she sent him a copy of the cartoon that had appeared in the Mirror that morning. It showed a street full of people with a buzzbomb flying overhead. They were all standing still and all looking up and every single one of them had grown an ear as large as an elephant’s. ‘Now I know what they mean when they say “London can take it!”’ she finished. ‘We’re all in this together.’

  Then she waited for him to write back and praise her. Dear Steve. Although she knew what dangerous situations they were in, it pleased her to think that they were both sharing the same hazards.

  It was another long wait. The 131st Brigade was pinned down in desperate street fighting in the ruins of Villers Bocage and if she’d seen her dear Steve at that moment she wouldn’t have recognised him. The strain of three weeks living from one terror to the next, always in the open and always under threat of attack, had changed them all, fouling their clothes, hardening their faces, emptying their eyes, reducing them to such fatigue that they were little more than robots themselves. Even when the order came through that they were to withdraw to a village called Jerusalem for rest and refit they were almost too exhausted to respond to it.

  They’d been at rest for two days before Steve read his letters and learnt about the buzzbombs. Then he was roused to a dreadful protective anger and wrote immediately and fiercely to tell her to get another job where she could be near a shelter. ‘There is nothing noble about war,’ he wrote. ‘It is an obscene necessity. It brings you to the abyss of death and forces you to look into it until you are dead.’

  Fortunately, the act of writing cooled his frightened ange
r and gave him time to recover. When he read the letter through he saw that he couldn’t send it. It was too raw and too alarming. It would only upset her. So he wrote a second, simply telling her he was out of action for a week or two, that he was well and hadn’t been hurt, and advising her to take cover when the buzzbombs were overhead.

  Then, being calmer, he added a postscript to thank her for the photograph and turning the little picture over, almost carelessly, saw her saucy message on the back. He answered it at once and seriously.

  I could never forget you. You are under my skin. I remember everything about you, how you look, how you smell, how you feel. If I don’t write you love letters it is because war and love are worlds apart but I could never forget you. You are my own dear darling. So please take care of yourself. It is better to run for cover and look foolish, than to brave it out in the open and get killed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  All through the long bright days of that summer the news from northern France was followed intently by everybody in the British Isles. The BBC Home Service went on broadcasting at the usual regular intervals, but the Forces’ Programme put out fresh bulletins every hour on the hour and the newspapers provided daily maps and pictures, as the advance continued, step by slow and costly step.

  Saloon bar warriors up and down the country were scathing about the lack of progress.

  ‘They wanna get a move on,’ Spikey Spencer said, wiping the froth from his upper lip but leaving the sneer in place. He and his friends were in the Three Tuns analysing the state of the campaign, as they did most evenings. ‘They ought to ’ave been in Paris by now. Thass where I’d have been if I’d been there. Not pissin’ about on the coast. I dunno what they’re playin’ at.’

  Tubby had reached the befuddled stage of his evening’s drinking and was finding it hard to focus his eyes and harder to put sentences together. ‘When you think how they was …’ he grumbled. ‘I mean to say how they was when … when they was round here. How they was … Now they ain’t here thass different. An’ why? Cos they hain’t here, bor. Thass why. Don’t you think so, Vic?’