Jack Strawbridge and his wife, Louise, were killed outright, in the kitchen of Number Twenty, Jack as he crossed the threshold, with Harold at his heels, and Louise as she moved away from the gas-stove, carrying the teapot.
Harold was lifted and flung outwards, towards the nursery, where he landed amidst debris on the vegetable rows that Jack had quitted but a moment before.
Becky Clegg was killed by blast at the bottom of her garden, and Miss Baker had a miraculous escape when masonry was hurled into her front room, at Number One, killing the local Health Visitor who was making a routine call on her.
Mrs. Westerman and Mrs. Baskerville were killed in the corner shop, along with Mr. Saunders, Archie’s successor, and his shopgirl, Letty Jarvis. The two customers had been buying their weekend rations, and enjoying a pleasant little gossip about the Norton girl, Amy, who had just given birth to a coloured baby at her aunt’s home in Lucknow Road.
Letty Jarvis’s sister, Cora, who had been listening to excerpts of ‘The Student Prince’ on the radio, was killed at Number Eight, which was bad luck indeed, for the Jarvises were newcomers to this end and their old home, Number Eighty-Six, was untouched by the bomb.
Mrs. Hooper was killed under the stairs at Number Six, and old Mrs. Coombes, who had survived a direct hit on her home in 1941, was killed in the open as she slipped out to post a letter to Bombardier Crispin, in Italy.
When the dust settled the rescue teams found that their way into the Avenue from Shirley Rise was blocked and consequently had to approach the scene from the Rec’ end. They found that the far end of the crescent had been virtually wiped out.
Jim Carver, having led the gibbering Edith away and handed her over to some people in Shirley Rise, ploughed his way over the loose debris that now covered the unrecognisable yard of the corner shop. He stood for a moment on the site of Number Four, with tears streaming down his face and the muscles of his throat twitching.
In the last few years he had witnessed a large number of incidents but he had never looked upon such horror as this, not even on the Western Front. Body after body was lifted from the rubble and carried to the line of ambulances that were queueing further down the Avenue. Members of heavy rescue teams were calling to one another to lift beams and clear away what seemed to Jim to be whole acres of shattered bricks. Every now and again they came upon someone whom Jim recognised, and when the still figure of Becky was found, and he saw that she was not disfigured, he sponged her face and tried to take a more active part in the work.
It was useless, however. His brain seemed numbed and his legs and arms weighted down, so that it required an immense effort to move across the uneven ground.
He thought: “Thank God old Harold wasn’t here! Thank God he won’t be home yet! I’ll go down to Woodside and meet the train! I wouldn’t like him to see this, it would upset him for months!”
Then young Baskerville called him from the rear of the nearest ambulance. He saw that the boy’s face was ashen and wondered vaguely whether he had been on the spot when it happened.
“Mr. Carver! Will you go and tell my Dad about Mum, Mr. Carver? I ought to but I can’t, I just can’t! Shopping she was, getting the rations. Look at her, Mr. Carver, just look at her!”
Jim glanced at the shapeless bundle under the stained blanket and looked quickly away again.
“All right, son,” he said wearily, “I’ll tell him. You get yourself some tea from the mobile canteen. I’ll tell your Dad about Mum!”
He made a great effort to collect himself and clambered across to the warden who was directing operations.
“How many?” he asked, hoarsely.
“Over twenty so far, Jim,” said the warden. “Christ! Did you ever see such a shambles?”
The man who had succeeded Jim as chief of the heavy rescue squad now approached him.
“This is your road, isn’t it, Carver?”
“Yes,” said Jim, “and I’ve got to find out about my daughter and son-in-law. They were in Number Twenty, right in the path of the bloody thing!”
“Hopner’s making some sort of list,” said the man. “Some of the locals are helping him with it! He’s over there, on the old bomb site.”
He moved over and saw from Hopner’s failure to meet his eyes that Jack and Louise were among the dead. He looked over his shoulder at the list and it seemed at first as though almost everyone he knew was on it…Jack, dear old Lou, Becky Clegg, Mrs. Baskerville, Mrs. Westerman, the two Jarvis girls, Mrs. Hooper, old Mrs. Coombes…merciful God, how many more?
Somebody touched his arm. It was an A.F.S. man that he knew, from the Upper Road depot.
“There’s a chap here asking for you, Carver, one of the injured. Can you spare a minute?”
Jim left Hopner and followed the man over the rubble that had been Twenty and Twenty-Two, and into the garden behind, now knee deep in litter. A small group of ambulance men were standing round a stretcher placed on a cleared space. The man on the stretcher was Harold.
“Hullo, Jim!”
The voice was barely a whisper but the eyes smiled. Jim fell on his knees, unable to say a word, but taking Harold’s hand in both of his and pressing it.
“I came home early, Jim,” said Harold, as though to convince Jim that it really was he who was lying on the stretcher. “What happened to Louise and Jack? Are they all right?”
Jim found his voice but hardly recognised it.
“Never mind anyone else, how about you?”
“It’s my leg, I think,” said Harold and shuddered violently. “Think is, I’ve lost my damned glasses! Do you think you could find my glasses, Jim? They must be somewhere around!”
Jim glanced at the confusion around him and then back at Harold. He saw that his friend’s face was drained of colour and that his hair was white with brick dust. His eyes travelled lower down the stretcher and he saw that two ambulance men were applying a tourniquet to the right leg and that Harold’s left leg and left arm were already swathed in bandages. Was Harold, too, going to die?
“I’ll have a look round, Harold,” he faltered, “and then bring ’em along to the hospital.” Then, his brain clearing somewhat: “I tell you what old chap, I’ll ’phone your oculist and see if he can rustle up a spare pair. You’ll need ’em in dock you know, you’ll want to read. Take it easy right now, Harold….” As the men lifted the stretcher, one of them shook his head at Jim and frowned. “I’ll come along to the hospital as soon as they let me, how’s that?”
A look of desperation showed in Harold’s grimy face and he half rolled on the stretcher, shooting out his right hand and plucking the seam of Jim’s trousers.
“Don’t leave me, Jim, don’t!”
“I’m not leaving you, Harold. I’m taking you to the ambulance and I’ll be around all the time!”
They picked their way into the Avenue and moved down to an ambulance that stood outside Number Forty. Gently Jim disengaged Harold’s hand as they slid the stretcher inside and closed the doors.
“How badly is he hurt?” Jim asked, of the remaining stretcher-bearer.
“Difficult to say,” said the man, “deep cuts and compound fracture of the right leg and other fractures in the left leg and left arm. Ribs caught it too, by the look of things. He was blown about twenty-five yards, clean over the fence!”
Jim turned away and then seemed to lose his sense of direction. He kept telling himself that he should be doing something useful, instead of drifting about and looking on, while others worked at rescue, but the shock had made conscious thought impossible and he remained standing irresolute where the cart track broke the sweep of the odd numbers. It seemed to him the one recognisable spot in the Avenue.
He was still standing there when Edith found him. She came scrambling over the loose bricks from the direction of Shirley Rise and it seemed to him that she showed remarkable agility and resolution. When she reached him she smiled and caught up his hand.
“I had to come the minute I heard, Mr. Carver
! Oh, you poor dear…. They told me about your daughter and son-in-law, and I had to come, I knew you’d need somebody!”
He looked at her in astonishment. Did she also know about her own sister and all the others?
“It’s terrible I know,” said Edith, “but it’s better than any of them being terribly injured and suffering. They couldn’t have known anything about it…. Just a terrible bang. I’m sure Becky didn’t know anything about it, poor lamb!”
The numbness began to lift from his head. Then she did know and yet, in the midst of her wild grief, her instinctive concern had been not for herself, or even for Becky, but for him! Less than half an hour ago she had been hysterical with shock and now here she was, having learned the worst, scrambling over piles of rubbish to console and comfort him!
“Where are you going to sleep tonight, Edith?” he asked, taking her arm. “Almost everyone we knew is homeless or with too much trouble of their own.”
“I’ve thought of that,” she said, “and Mrs. Foxley, that nice little woman you left me with in Shirley Rise, is fixing it up right now. The sister of the manager at my cinema runs a little hotel…. You probably know it, it’s called ‘The Priory’, at the corner of Outram Crescent. I’ve been there to dinner, and it’s ever so nice and homely. I thought I’d go there and there’s a room for you too, if you’d like it. I asked Mrs. Foxley to ask her to keep you one!”
It was astonishing, he thought, how steady and clear-thinking she was, and how impressively she had risen to the occasion while he, a man, and a professional rescue-worker, had gone to pieces under the impact.
She was leading him gently away from the Avenue and down Shirley Rise to Mrs. Foxley’s and as she led, and he followed without protest, she chattered away as if she was organising a Bank Holiday excursion.
“You’d better have some tea now, and then a good hot bath, Mr. Carver. Afterwards we’ll come round and see if we can salvage anything. I don’t suppose everything will have been smashed or buried. We can borrow a couple of suitcases, I suppose. Mrs. Foxley said she knew where she could lay hands on some, and then we’d better get a taxi and go round to The Priory. I mean, it’s no good hanging around here until dark, is it? It’ll only make us all the more morbid and miserable!”
He made no reply and she glanced at him sympathetically, imagining that he was still brooding about his losses, but she was wrong; he was trying to find words to express his admiration of her courage, but could find none that he considered adequate.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Christmas Roundabout
NO SNOW FELL IN the suburb that Christmas, the last Christmas of the war, but those who were left in the Avenue would have welcomed a flurry, just enough, perhaps, to cover the new scars at the short number end.
As it was the crescent had a dismal, slovenly look, the neat houses tapering off into a row of hovels and, finally, into mere heaps of brick from the point beyond Number Forty, now the last, intact home on that side of the road.
The uneven side looked more itself, for there were still curtains in the windows, although every pane of glass was heavily criss-crossed with new adhesive tape. Many of the front-gardens were sadly overgrown and neglected, but at least they were free of half-bricks and stacks of chipped slates. Even here, however, deterioration began about halfway along the crescent, at Number Forty to be exact, where the roofs were covered with tarpaulins stretching as far as the end of the block.
On the Shirley side of the cart-track there was not a great deal of difference between the odd and even sides. The odd houses were still standing, but few of them were occupied and one was almost demolished. It was easy to distinguish between the old and new wounds on this side. Time had done a great deal to heal the 1941 gap, and coarse grass was growing over the mounds that had been Numbers Seventeen, Fifteen and Thirteen. People living higher up the Avenue, however, had almost forgotten this incident and when they talked of The Bomb they now meant the flying-bomb of 1944, not the comparative pin-prick of 1941.
Very little of value had been salvaged from the even number ruins. They curved away from Number Thirty-Eight to the site of the corner shop, looking like a vast tumulus.
In a sense they were a burial mound, for two of the people killed there had not yet been accounted for and were presumed to be lying under the debris.
The autumn rains had softened the outlines of the long cairn, but here and there were pathetic reminders of the families who had lived on this spot, a splintered clothes horse that had belonged to Mrs. Hooper, some sodden clothing that had been hanging on the line in the garden of Number Eight, and a soggy pile of Jim’s pamphlets, still held together with picture wire.
The survivors were right to prefer snow to the sleet that drove in from the east that Christmas. Snow would have been a cleaner, softer mantle than the December murk.
Jim and Edith spent that Christmas with Bernard and Pippa, in their bungalow on the road to Caernarvon. They had been invited down to Devonshire by Judith, but Edith reminded Jim that Judith, already in charge of Esme’s five-year-old Barbara, was expecting her own baby within weeks and would have as much as she could do looking after herself. Esme was still in France and had only been home for a few days in early autumn, when they all thought that Harold was going to die.
Pippa made her father-in-law and Edith very welcome, and Edgar and Frances drove over from Llandudno on Christmas morning. One aspect of the visit did a good deal to cheer Jim, who was recovering but slowly from the shock of losing Louise, Jack, all his personal possessions, and the solid comfort of Harold’s matchless companionship in a single afternoon. He was relieved to see that Bernard was now quite himself again and that his marriage to Pippa was obviously a great success.
Old Bernard, Jim decided, had overcome his handicap with courage and resolution, but it was clear that he owed as much to Pippa as to his own determination. He still limped slightly but it was wonderful to see him work the petrol pumps and even change the wheel of a car with his single arm.
He had always been tough and wiry but Jim was struck by the tremendous strength he displayed with his over-worked left hand, and the dexterity he showed in bracing tools against his chest, and even using his teeth when he needed to shift his grip on a wrench or a length of chain.
He looked very well, thought Jim, but what was more important he looked serene and happy. There was a smooth, matter-of-fact comradeship between him and his wife, that had its basis in the girl’s casual attitude towards him, as though they were brother and sister rather than man and wife.
They shared the work both in garage and kitchen, and Pippa told Jim that they would continue to do this until they could afford hired help, or at least until her baby arrived in June. The prospect of yet another grandchild pleased Jim and he praised her decision to start a family instead of waiting, as so many young people seemed to do nowadays, until it was too late. Pippa was quite frank about the baby.
“It would have been a jolly sight more sensible to wait, Mr. Carver,” she said. “I do all the books, and I work the pumps whenever Berni’s at work in the shed. I don’t know how I’ll cope with it all when there’s a baby to see to, but we’ll manage somehow. We have so far!”
“I think you’ve coped marvellously,” Jim told her, “and what’s more I think you’ve worked wonders with Berni!”
“It wasn’t me, it was the garage,” admitted Pippa smiling. “This dump was a godsend—finding something that he could do right away! We even cut our honeymoon short to get it started!”
“How did Berni feel about having the baby?” he wanted to know.
“I’m afraid I didn’t consult him,” said Pippa, laughing, “it was my idea, just something else I thought might be good for him!”
Jim kissed her impulsively. It was not often that he kissed anyone uninvited, but he felt moved by her friendliness and by her vast stock of common sense.
“I think he’s a damned lucky chap, in spite of all his injuries,” he told her.
&
nbsp; It was probably this talk with Pippa that set Jim thinking about his own future that Christmas afternoon.
After dinner he suggested a walk but everybody except Edith declined. Edgar wanted to listen to the King’s speech, and Frances had promised to do some mending for Pippa. Bernard said he had urgent work to do on a customer’s car that had been promised for Boxing Day, and Pippa preferred to doze beside the fire, so Jim and Edith went out along the main road and walked into Caernarvon to have a look at the castle.
The castle was shut but they made a circuit of the walls and then sat down to enjoy the pale sunshine on a seat overlooking the little harbour. He told her about his chat with Pippa and how good she was for Bernard.
“I only hope young Boxer’s as lucky, when he gets home,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a matter of luck,” said Edith seriously. “I think it’s much more a question of whether one takes a short or a long-term policy in life.”
“Just what do you mean by that, Edith?” he asked, amused by her solemnity.
“Well, it’s just that I don’t think people really do fall in love with one another, like everyone imagines they do, and like they do at the pictures,” said Edith. “I think most successful marriages don’t begin that way at all, but simply arise out of people saying to themselves, “I’m all right on my own now, but will I still be satisfied with life when I’m over forty?” You see, I’ve always thought it needed much more courage for a man to get married than it does for a woman! A young man can have a very nice time nowadays if he stays single, and keeps all his money, but if he takes a longer view, and marries somebody who attracts him, he gets the benefits later on, when there’s somebody there to take an interest in him, and he’s got a stake in life with his children, just as you have!”
“Well, I suppose there’s something in that,” admitted Jim, “and I should be in a position to judge, but as you’ve seen for yourself, children grow up and make homes for themselves, and you never mean as much to them as you like to pretend to yourself! It’s the people of your own generation that count when you’re getting on in years. I’m fond of my bunch, and I’m more interested in them now than I was when they were kids, but if I was completely honest I’d say that you and old Harold Godbeer meant much more to me than any of them!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 58