Sid couldn’t answer her. What could he say? He kissed the top of her head as his tears fell into her grey hair, and rubbed her spine for a very long time, lovingly and automatically, because they both knew there was no hope at all.
It was Monday afternoon before the last battered body was lifted out of the wreckage in New Cross Road. At the final tally, a hundred and forty-four people had been killed, hundreds more were injured and there were still twenty-four unaccounted for, and listed among them were Lionel Korczowski and sixteen-year-old Betty Homer.
Chapter Twenty-One
News of the New Cross rocket filtered through to the general public in the haphazard way of the bush telegraph. It reached King’s Lynn more than four days after the event, and was passed through the North End from house to house as yet another example of the barbarity of the Germans. Until it reached Maudie Nelson. She was so alarmed by it that she went straight round to Becky Bosworth, her eyes strained with concern.
‘Thass where our Bar’bra lives,’ she said. ‘New Cross. I meanter say, she could’ve been hurt. Bein’ New Cross. I mean, I wouldn’t want her to be hurt, not after young Norman.’
‘She’d write if she was,’ Becky comforted.
Maudie shook her head. ‘She hain’t writ since the funeral. We had words.’
‘I know,’ Becky said in her blunt way. ‘She tol’ me. Well then, write you to her, gal.’
‘I don’ axactly know her address,’ Maudie admitted rather shamefacedly. ‘Thass why I come round.’
‘Ah!’ Becky understood. And went to find it.
Maudie’s letter took a long time to write and when it was finished it was so long-winded and muddled and so much of it was crossed out and corrected that she was none too sure she ought to send it. But concern for this wayward daughter of hers proved stronger than the fear of exposing herself to ridicule for her lack of learning and it was committed to the post.
Barbara’s reply was short to the point of brutality.
Dear Ma,
I am alright. Steve’s cousin worked in Woolworths and she was blown to bits. We couldn’t even have a funeral on account of there was nothing left of her. That is what rockets are like. I hope you are well. Give my love to the boys.
Barbara.
‘Oh dear,’ Becky said, when she saw it. ‘Thass a bit sharp. You gonna write back, are you?’
Despite her bland expression, Maudie could be perceptive. ‘No,’ she decided. ‘Thass her way of hollerin’, I reckon. She don’t want me to write. I got the address, in case there’s some other time.’
She had understood her daughter’s state exactly. A good long holler was just what Barbara needed – and just what she couldn’t allow herself. After the first terrible waves of shock and disbelief and anger, Betty’s family were gradually moving into the second stage of mourning, easing the perpetual ache of loss by deliberately invoking happy memories. Naturally, most of them were of Betty as a little girl and that left Barbara out of things, because her memories were restricted to the last six months.
It was extremely hard to feel outside the family again and just when she needed their warmth and contact so very much. By keeping busy, she could just about cope by day, but her nights were shattered by hideous nightmares in which she walked endlessly down terrifying streets as bits of torn bodies fell out of the sky to splatter her with blood. She woke two or three times every night sobbing with terror and went to bed afraid of what the next night would bring.
It would have been easier if there’d been anyone to confide in. But there wasn’t. Betty had been the only one who had really understood her. The only one she’d loved. And she had loved her, very much. Almost as much as she’d loved Norman. But who would understand that? Even if they had time to listen to her, which they didn’t. Sis was on late turn and slept heavily, Hazel and Joyce were so upset they kept to themselves, and the other adults had too much to contend with to notice that she’d become a thing apart. She couldn’t even write to Steve, not yet anyway, and certainly not when she was so angry and so vulnerable. Her letter to her mother had shown her that. After she’d sent it, she’d felt ashamed of it, but when she’d been writing the thing, it had been a quick angry response and she’d hardly thought about it at all. If she wrote to him like that, she would upset him terribly, and that was something she’d promised herself never ever to do. If she could have seen him she could have told him everything, gradually, watching his face to be sure she wasn’t going too far or too fast, but writing was too distant and, in her present state, much too difficult.
In the end Heather brought the matter to a head.
‘It’s nearly Saturday come round again,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to write an’ tell Steve. He ought to know. I thought Mabel was going to do it, but she says she can’t face it. An’ Sid’s in such a state I can’t ask him. He ought to know though, poor boy. They were ever so fond of one another. Oh dear, it doesn’t seem right for her to be killed. She was always so full a’ life, larking and mucking about. I shan’t know how to begin to tell him.’
Barbara spoke up before she could think better of it. ‘I’ll do it,’ she offered. If she started by telling him his mother had asked her to write, it would alert him before she got to her awful news and then it mightn’t be quite such a shock.
It pleased her to see that Heather was grateful. ‘Would you?’ she said. ‘That’s ever so good of you. It’s not an easy thing, a letter like that.’
So that night, while Sis was at work, Barbara sat down in Steve’s now overcrowded bedroom and wrote to him at last. It was a very long letter, telling him all she could remember of the explosion and moving carefully on towards the worst. Once she’d begun to write it, tears and words flowed together.
She described their long wait and told him how the policeman had come to break the news and how many deaths and injuries there had been.
It makes me so angry I don’t know what to do with myself. If I could find the men what made that rocket or the men what designed it, I would tear them limb from limb or shoot them until they were dead or tie explosives all over them and blow them to pieces. I never hated anyone the way I hate them.
Then, having reached the bottom of the first furious page, she turned it over and told him that she and Sis had been bombed out and were now sharing his room.
We brought the camp bed over. That’s a bit of a squash but we don’t mind. What’s a squash compared to what other people are suffering?
Which led her to the state they’d been in ever since. She described everything, from Mabel’s tears to her own nightmares, and ended with an explanation.
We are all still in shock, I think. We all loved her very much and that’s hard to believe she’s gone. Your mum and dad say they’re sorry they can’t write to you at the moment but they know you will understand. So do the others. Your uncle Sid and aunt Mabel and Hazel and Joyce.
I’m sorry to be so angry but I can’t help it. It wells up in me every time I think of her. Please, please, take great care of yourself. If you got hurt or anything I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
The letter was delivered three days later when Steve returned to base after a long day on foot patrol. It was bitterly cold in the Netherlands and the advance there had more or less ground to a halt. The Germans had withdrawn to defences alongside a small stream called the Vloed Beek and the 131st Brigade was holding a ridge to the north-east at a place called Sittard which was little more than a village but had plenty of cellars to give them shelter when they came under artillery fire.
The line had been held by both sides for several weeks and even though the fields between them were waterlogged and heavily mined, they ran frequent patrols, for there were bridges to be watched and gun sites to be pinpointed and both sides knew how important it was to be watchful. The Germans had good positions on the banks of the canal and used their searchlights with unpleasant accuracy, and now that they were closer to home, they were better supplied than they’d been in the entire c
ampaign, especially with artillery and ammunition. They even had some heavy railway guns to the rear of the line. But at least the gunfire was spasmodic and at least there were no pitched battles, which was a relief to Dusty Miller.
‘Let some a’ the other buggers get stuck into the big battles,’ he said. ‘We done enough.’
Steve agreed with him until he read Barbara’s letter. Then he was so overwhelmed with anger he could have done with some action.
‘She was sixteen,’ he said to Dusty, pale with shock and grief. ‘Bloody sixteen an’ they’ve killed her. They want their fucking heads shot off.’
‘We’ll bring in the flame-throwers,’ Dusty promised. ‘Don’t you worry. They’ll get theirs. They won’t get away with it.’
‘But they have,’ Steve said. ‘They’ve killed all those people. Hundred and forty-four, she says, and twenty-four missing. Women and children. Little children. Our Betty. Bloody sixteen. I’ll have to write.’
‘Do it now,’ Dusty advised. ‘We could be on the go again tomorrow.’
So the letters were written. The first two, to his parents and his aunt and uncle were simply to tell them how very, very sorry he was, and what a lovely brave girl Betty had been, and to assure them that the Germans would pay for what they’d done. But the third took longer because there’d been so much anger in Barbara’s letter and there was so much he wanted to say to her.
You are right to be angry, my dear, dear darling, Don’t apologise for it. Anger is natural. Be as angry as you want. We’re angry here. It’s what keeps us going. That and knowing that when the war is over we are going to build a better world. None of us has any doubt about that. We used to talk about it a lot while we were training. We don’t so much now, there isn’t the time, but we did then and I can tell you there’s a hunger for change that is getting stronger and stronger. For a start, we won’t have a useless organisation like the League of Nations next time round. We haven’t fought and died to let a bunch of fools throw it all away for a second time. But that’s only part of it. The really serious business is to make changes at home. Political changes. We’re not coming out of the army to go on the dole and see our families starve. If we can have full employment to wage a war, we can have full employment to wage the peace. Nobody should be afraid that they can’t afford the doctor when they’re ill. Never again. Everybody who wins a place to a grammar school like you should be able to take it. It still makes me cross to think how you were wasted. You should have gone to that grammar school of yours.
Then he realised that the letter had become a rant and paused to consider what to say next. At last he wrote:
I think what I’m trying to tell you my darling, is that when someone you love has been killed, it helps to have something positive to plan for. It keeps you going. We have to keep going no matter what happens. We must never give in. Aunt Sis would tell you the same. You ask her. She joined the Union and the Labour Party when Uncle Percy was killed. It gave her something to hang on to. I’m not saying that was the only reason she did it but it was the first one. Talk to her my darling and see if she doesn’t agree.
Tell the others I will put in for some compassionate leave but I’m not optimistic about getting it. It’s usually only given for close relatives.
Take the greatest care of yourself. I couldn’t bear anything to happen to you. I love you more than I can tell you.
He’d never written to her at such length before, nor with such passion. And for once he didn’t print SWALK or BOLTOP on the envelope. He was too serious for that.
Which Barbara noticed as soon as it arrived.
She was rereading the letter when Sis came home from work late that evening. Heather and Bob were round with Mabel, as they often were these days, so they had the kitchen to themselves.
‘How is he?’ Sis wanted to know.
‘He don’t say,’ Barbara realised. ‘Thass mostly about politics. I think he’s as angry as we are.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You can read it if you like,’ Barbara said, handing it over. It would be interesting to hear her opinion of it.
‘Very sensible,’ Sis said, when she’d finished reading. ‘But then he always was.’
‘You think thass the answer then? Politics? Getting involved?’
Sis looked at her for a long thoughtful second. ‘Why don’t you come along to our next meeting?’ she said. ‘Then you could see for yourself.’
‘Depends when it is,’ Barbara said cautiously. ‘I might be working.’
But as it turned out, the next meeting was on Thursday evening when she was working days again. So she put on her sheepskin coat – partly for warmth and partly to remind herself of Betty, painful though that was, and partly as an act of a private bravado to spite the Germans and show them she wasn’t defeated and that she’d wear whatever she wanted – and she went with her aunt.
It wasn’t a bit what she expected. She’d always imagined that socialists were wild-eyed revolutionaries who met in attics and drank brandy – or coffee at the very least – young men and women with tatty clothes who made passionate speeches and manned barricades with flags in their hands.
Instead she was ushered into a musty front room where nine middle-aged men sat hip to haunch around a narrow table, smoked pipes, drank tea and coughed. The chairman was a small, grey-haired man, who was called Mr Craxton and took an interminable time to say the simplest thing, and there was only one other woman, who was tall and skinny, wore her hair in a bun and was even older than Aunt Sis. All ten of them were burdened with paper and they all spoke in the same peculiar language, about ‘conference’ and ‘the manifesto’ and ‘motion 29’ and something they referred to as a ‘possible composite’. In short they were a disappointment.
But they made her welcome and called her love and provided her with a cup of tea, and the woman, whose name was Christine, said it was nice to have someone young in the group.
‘We’re choosing a parliamentary candidate for Bellington South tonight,’ she confided, when they paused to refill their cups. ‘It’s a safe Tory seat so the Labour Party’s a bit on the small side. There are only six people on their management committee at the moment and none of them are willing to stand, so they’ve asked us to help them out.’
Barbara said, ‘Oh,’ which seemed to be all that was expected of her and wondered who they would choose. To her amazement, it was Mr Craxton.
‘But he’s so boring,’ she said to Aunt Sis as they walked home. ‘No one’ll elect him.’
‘Well not in that seat, no, they won’t,’ Sis agreed. ‘But this is just a run-in, to give him experience. He’ll make it next time round. He’s a good man.’
‘He’s boring. They should have chosen you.’
Sis laughed. ‘I’m not in the running.’
‘Why not?’
‘Buggin’s Law,’ her aunt explained. ‘He’s the chairman. It’s his turn.’
‘Thass daft!’ Barbara said trenchantly. ‘You’d make a much better candidate. He’ll send people to sleep.’
‘He writes a good pamphlet,’ Sis said. ‘Come round the flat tomorrow an’ I’ll show you one.’
‘Have they repaired it then?’
‘Not yet. There’s still no gas but it’s got windows and the light works.’
It also had new door jambs and a new door, which was a tight fit and, as such, a great improvement on the old one.
‘We’ll get the fire lit,’ Sis decided. ‘No point working in the cold. Is there any coal in the scuttle?’
There was. So they lit the fire, took down all the shredded curtains and began to sort through the debris on the floor. Sis was ruthless. ‘Chuck it out if it’s broken,’ she said, when Barbara held up a battered figurine. ‘I ain’t got time to fix it. Nor the patience neither, if the truth be told.’
But she found the file she was looking for. It was full of leaflets, headed ‘Education’, ‘Health’, ‘Housing’, ‘Nutrition’ and ‘Pensions’. Most of them were
crammed with small close print but one was much simpler. ‘There you are,’ she said to Barbara. ‘Read that.’
The Five Giants on the Road to Recovery: Giant Want. Giant Disease. Giant Ignorance. Giant Squalor. Giant Idleness. We must organize now to provide full employment; to rebuild a better Britain; to provide social services to secure adequate health, nutrition, and care in old age, for everybody; to provide full educational opportunities for all.
It was almost exactly what Steve had said in his letter.
‘So what d’you think?’ Sis asked.
‘Sounds good,’ Barbara allowed, ‘but can we do it? Thass the thing.’
‘Oh yes,’ Sis told her. ‘We can do it. Providing we win the election. If the Tories get in, it’ll be the mixture as before.’
‘Will they?’
Sis sat back on her heels with another tattered file in her hands. ‘Not if we can stop ’em,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’re all working for. To be ready when the election comes and to give ’em a damn good run for their money.’
That night Barbara wrote another long letter to Steve telling him she was going to join the Party and that they were going to win the election. And he wrote back to tell her he wasn’t a bit surprised, that he loved her more than ever – ‘I can just see you waving the red flag!’ – and suggesting that she ought to read the Beveridge Report. ‘It’s on the third shelf. Write and tell me what you think of it.’
So the weeks passed and although the family were still grieving, and Steve didn’t manage to get any leave, Barbara’s immediate sorrow began to ease. She still missed Betty terribly, especially on the days when they would have gone to the pictures or the Palais, and her nightmares continued as terrifyingly as ever, but now she woke herself up, switched on the bedside lamp without disturbing Sis and read the report to take her mind from the horrors. Which, for most of the time, it did, for it outlined the possibility of a new way of life which was exactly to her taste; work for everybody, free education for every child up to the age of fifteen, free health care paid for by a national insurance, a pension when you retire. What a weight of worry would be lifted from everybody’s shoulders if they could make that happen.
Avalanche of Daisies Page 27