by Annie Groves
She was giggling now, her dismay giving way to a dimpled smile as she settled herself into her ‘transport’.
Luke came out of the Grafton just in time to see what was going on and hear Carole’s giggles as his men carried her down the street.
Impatiently he strode after them, watched by Katie, who had held back from accepting an offer of her own transport, being naturally more self-conscious than her more exuberant and boisterous friend.
‘You’re in the British Army, you two, not the Christmas panto,’ Luke barked at the two young men, causing them to put Carole down and hang their heads.
‘We was only helping the girls across the worst of the broken glass, Corp,’ Andy defended his actions. ‘With them thin shoes they’re wearing their feet would be cut to ribbons.’
It was cold and Katie was tired and unwilling to hang around outside the Grafton any longer under the disapproving gaze of the corporal, whom she was quite sure now had taken a dislike to her.
With so many torches switched on it was easy enough for her to see the ground and pick her way carefully through the glass, or at least it would have been, if she hadn’t suddenly put her foot on such a smooth piece of glass that she was slipping on it.
Luke swung round as he heard Katie cry out, sprinting the few yards that separated them and reaching her just in time to catch her as she fell. Katie gasped as she was swung off her feet with so much force and speed that she fell against her rescuer’s chest and was obliged to lie there, winded, with her feet dangling above the ground.
He smelled of khaki and soap and clean male sweat. A funny unfamiliar sensation seemed to pierce her body, leaving her even more breathless than his forceful rescue.
Her ‘thank you’ was muffled and made uncomfortable by both her awareness of how much she wished it had been any soldier but this one who had saved her, and how much he himself must dislike having had to do so.
‘You can put me down now,’ she told him. She dare not move. He was of necessity holding her very tightly. He had no option, having rushed to save her, of course, but it was still a very intimate hold, given that they were strangers, and she was now clasped so tightly to his body that she could actually feel the hard muscles in his thighs against her own legs. Katie was glad that it was dark, because she knew that she was blushing. Which was so silly, given the situation. He already despised her enough without her making things even worse by behaving like a silly overly dramatic type of girl who had to make a fuss about something that wasn’t really anything at all. Even so, she would be very glad to be standing on her own feet and not held so close to him. He must have very strong arms to hold her like that. She was panting and had to struggle slightly for breath, but he was not breathing fast at all. Well, not very much. She could feel his heart thudding quite heavily, though. And he still hadn’t put her down. In fact …
Katie gasped as she felt him starting to walk, still carrying her.
‘Put me down,’ she repeated.
‘Keep still,’ he warned her, ignoring her demand and carrying her across the worst of the broken glass to where Carole was standing watching.
How embarrassing. Katie felt so flushed and self-conscious. She had to thank him again, of course, after he had placed her on her feet, and she certainly didn’t welcome Carole’s giggled, ‘It looked ever so romantic, him carrying you like that. Just like something from Gone With the Wind,’ once they had left the men behind and were picking their way carefully through the mess.
It was nearly seven o’clock before Katie finally made it back to the Campions’. Jean welcomed her with open relief, clucking over her like a mother hen, as Katie explained what had happened.
‘We were safe enough but there’s been some dreadful damage, according to what I heard from the bus driver on my way back. There’s been fires at Hatton Gardens and St John’s Market, and there’s been a church really badly burned.’
‘Did you hear that, Sam?’ Jean called out to her husband as he came into the kitchen to catch the tail end of Katie’s comment. ‘Katie says there’s been a fire in Hatton Gardens.’
Hatton Gardens being the headquarters of the Salvage Corps, Sam was naturally concerned to learn more.
‘I don’t have any details,’ Katie apologised. ‘It’s just what I heard. The law courts caught it as well.’
She had also heard that both Mill Road Hospital and the Royal had been hit, but she didn’t want to say so, knowing how anxious it would make Jean on her daughter Grace’s behalf, since Grace had probably been on duty.
‘If they were going for the docks, let’s hope that Derby House wasn’t hit. That’s where Grace’s Seb works,’ Jean told Katie. ‘You look fit to drop, love,’ she added. ‘I’m going to have an hour in bed myself before church so why don’t you go up and get some sleep too?’
‘I think I will,’ Katie agreed.
‘Liverpool was bombed so badly last night I feel we ought to offer our services to those WVS groups in the city who might need some extra pairs of hands.’
Bella yawned, and then shivered. It was cold standing here outside the church, even though she was wearing her new winter coat, with its fur collar, and a matching fur hat. The coat was honey-coloured, with a nipped-in waist and a flared panelled skirt, and Bella knew that it suited her. The congregation at St Mark’s always dressed smartly, with the ladies discreetly vying with one another when it came to elegance and new hats. But then, as Bella’s mother was fond of saying, the congregation of St Mark’s did come from the best addresses in the area, and St Mark’s itself was very definitely High Church, with a locally renowned choir and a long waiting list of ladies willing to ‘do the church flowers’.
Bella would have avoided being collared by the leader of her mother’s WVS group, and slipped inside the church with her father before the woman had spotted them, but her mother had had other ideas.
Bella watched as members of the congregation continued to arrive: families with children dressed in Harris tweed coats and highly polished shoes, the girls’ hair in plaits and the boys’ slicked back, the mothers in good but sensible rather than stylish coats, and the fathers hurrying to catch up, having had to park their cars.
Bored and irritated, Bella yawned again. For one thing she had hardly had any sleep at all last night because of having to go into her dreary neighbour’s air-raid shelter, and for another, her mother had told her that her father had refused to increase her allowance.
How on earth was she supposed to manage? Her clothes were virtually in rags – not that there was much to buy anyway, but she couldn’t appear at any of the Tennis Club’s dances in last year’s frock. She had a certain position to maintain, after all.
She had told her mother this, of course, but instead of being sympathetic, her mother had actually asked her if she thought it was a good idea to go dancing when she was so very newly widowed.
‘A young woman in your position has to be very careful of her reputation, Bella,’ was what she had said, pursing her lips as she did so. ‘No one expects you to go into full traditional mourning, of course.’
‘Well, I should hope they don’t,’ Bella had agreed. ‘Not after the way Alan and those parents of his treated me. Shameful, it was. Anyway, people should be appreciative of me trying to make a bit of an effort and do my bit in wartime instead of crying all over the place.’
‘Well, yes, darling, of course,’ her mother had agreed. ‘No one’s saying you should do that, but to go dancing … Daddy feels that with his position on the council and everything that it would be much better if you didn’t go to the Tennis Club for a while. People talk, you know, Bella, and there was all that unpleasantness about Alan and that young woman.’
‘That wasn’t my fault,’ Bella had reminded her mother angrily.
If she didn’t watch it she was going to end up spending the rest of her life doing good works and attending boring WVS meetings, and that would not suit her at all.
To her relief her mother finally ended
her conversation. Tucking her arm through Vi’s, Bella headed for the warmth of the church. They were almost the last of the congregation to go in, and they had to squeeze past other worshippers to reach Bella’s father.
Everything about St Mark’s was rich, from the High Church smell of incense to the organ and the scarlet and white of the choristers. Even the kneeling pads were deep soft velvet – a bequest from a member of the congregation, like the prayer and hymn books.
When you said you worshipped at St Mark’s, everyone knew you were ‘someone’.
Jean might have told herself that she would go and have an hour in bed to make up for the sleep she had lost, but of course she didn’t. For one thing she was worried about Sam, knowing the danger he would be in helping with the clearing-up operations; for another she was equally anxious about Luke and Grace, wondering how they had gone on.
When Katie arrived downstairs ahead of the twins, dressed to go to church, in her dark blue coat and her matching beret, Jean found herself warming even more to her billetee.
She couldn’t take Grace’s place, of course – Grace was her daughter – but Jean acknowledged that she was growing very fond of Katie.
The twins, as usual, had to be reminded several times that they were going to be late for the service before they finally came rushing down the stairs, their coats still not on.
‘Why can’t you two get ready on time?’ Jean scolded them, hurrying them into their bright red hooded jackets, and then putting her own on – brown to go with her best skirt and twinset, and with a really smart beaver lamb collar and a matching hat – another sale bargain from Lewis’s. Jean felt a bit guilty sometimes being able to have things that were so smart, thanks to Grace, when her neighbours had to make do with plainer things. But then Sam always liked to see her looking nice, and it was lovely to have a good coat.
‘We had to make sure that our hair was right,’ Lou told her importantly. ‘Didn’t we, Sash?’
Sasha nodded, her newly cut hair bouncing in soft curls round her face.
They had disappeared the previous Saturday, refusing to say where they were going, reappearing later in the afternoon with their plaits cut off.
They had saved the money from their shared paper round and their work for Mrs Lucas, they had told Jean, and she had to admit that the short style suited them. Sam predictably had been a bit put out to see his little girls suddenly transformed into stylish young women. The twins, though, had their own way of dealing with their dad, and of course having had two older siblings they had a much easier time of it, getting away with things that Sam would never have allowed in either Luke or Grace.
‘We won’t wait for your dad,’ Jean told the twins. ‘He’s gone down to the depot and chances are that he’ll be helping out somewhere with all the mess that will have to be cleaned up.’
‘Tell us all about the Grafton, Katie,’ Lou demanded, tucking her arm through Katie’s whilst Sasha did the same at the other side. Somehow between them they managed to ensure that the three of them fell back slightly from Jean, who had now been joined by their next-door-but-one neighbours for the walk to church.
‘Who did you dance with? Was he handsome? Has he asked you out?’ The twins’ questions came thick and fast.
‘There was an air raid going on,’ Katie reminded them. ‘We spent more time crouching under the tables for protection than we did dancing.’ It wasn’t entirely true, of course, but the twins already had vivid enough imaginations without her encouraging them in their romantic flights of fancy.
‘But that’s when the best stuff happens,’ Sasha informed her, confirming Katie’s own private thoughts. ‘We’ve read about it in Picture Post, haven’t we, Lou? It’s in times of danger when a girl and a man are thrown together that “it” happens, and they fall in love.’
Sasha looked so solemn that Katie had trouble not laughing. Instead she said firmly, ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, you know. We were far too busy keeping safe last night to think about doing anything else.’
‘You can say that but I bet you had more fun than we did down our air-raid shelter.’ Lou’s voice was gloomy. ‘It was boring, wasn’t it, Sash?’
‘Yes, except when little Davie Simmonds from number twelve said that his nan had come out without her knickers on.’
Laughter shook the twins. For all their new haircuts and the fact that officially their schooldays were over, they were still very much ‘young girls’, Katie thought affectionately whilst trying to look severe.
‘Terrible night, wasn’t it, Jean?’ Anne Briars, a fellow member of Jean’s WVS group, said tiredly as they exchanged hellos outside the church.
St Thomas’s was a small, slightly shabby church, on the border between Edge Hill and the bottom end of Wavertree, but Jean reckoned you could feel its warmth and kindness the moment you saw it. There was something about St Thomas’s that made you think about all those who had worshipped there over the years so that you felt like you were part of one big family. The congregation wasn’t poor like some folk who lived in Liverpool were, but they weren’t well off either.
They did believe in helping one another, though.
‘My Jeff’s an ARP warden, as you know, and he was saying this morning that both Mill Road and the Royal Hospitals got hit.’ She broke off when she saw Jean’s face to apologise. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that your girl is working there. It didn’t sound too bad from what my Jeff was saying– no one hurt or anything. The West Derby Road got it bad, though. There’s no trams running, and down by the docks it’s even worse. Oh, there’s my sister, I’d better go over and join her.’
As Anne hurried off to join her sister, Jean’s heart was thudding with anxiety for Grace.
As people arrived for the morning service, dressed in their best clothes, carefully looked after to make them last as long as possible, everyone was talking about the night’s bombing raid and the damage it had done. A dull pall of smoke hung over the centre of the city and the docks, and it was still possible to see the darker plumes of smoke rising from fires that must still be burning.
People were moving into the church. Jean looked round for the twins, and was relieved to see Sam hurrying towards her. He had obviously been home first because his hair was newly slicked down.
Jean caught hold of his arm, drawing him to one side.
‘Sam, Anne Briars has just told me that both the Royal and Mill Road Hospitals were bombed last night.’
‘Yes, I know, but it’s all right, our Grace is fine, and she said to tell you not to worry. The nurses’ home wasn’t touched, nor Grace’s ward, although Grace had to spend the night in the air-raid shelter and ended up helping out with the patients and then having to go on duty again this morning. Not that she minds. She said she wouldn’t feel comfortable not doing her bit when they’ve had so many casualties brought in.
‘It was a shock seeing how much damage there’s bin, I can tell you, especially round Hatton Gardens. The Law Library got a hit, and there was a fire engine went down into a crater in Roe Street, killing all seven of its crew.’ Sam shook his head. ‘They’ve had to bring in reinforcements from Lancashire, extra police and all sorts. I’ve got to get back to work meself. I’ve only come back to tell you that our Grace is all right, ’cos I knew what you’d be thinking the minute you heard about the hospitals being bombed.’
‘What about Luke? Is there any news of the barracks?’
‘No news except that the barracks are OK and Luke should be fine. The army have been called in to help with the clearing-up operation, of course. Oh, and I nearly forgot, there’s a strange tale going round about the church of Our Lady and St Nicholas.’
‘The Catholic church?’
‘Yes, that’s the one. It got bombed last night really bad, being close to the docks, and it was pretty well completely gutted, only the walls and the tower left standing. I was speaking to Joe Fields, who’s with the fire service, and he reckons it was only the stout door to t
he tower that kept that from going up as well. Anyway, when the men went in as soon as it was cool enough this morning, they found two charred beams lying in the shape of a cross right where the altar had been. There’s folk saying that it didn’t happen by chance and that it’s a sign from you know who.’ Sam looked upwards as he spoke, his voice as solemn as his expression, and the fact that her normally practical and somewhat cynical husband could be so obviously moved by such an occurrence brought a lump to Jean’s throat.
As she followed Jean and Sam and the twins into the church, Katie saw how full it was and how warmly people smiled at one another.
The church was plain inside, its pews well worn and its kneeling cushions threadbare, but this morning it was filled with an overwhelming sense of quiet purposefulness and determined reverence.
As she kneeled to pray Jean gave heartfelt thanks for the safety of her own family and said a special inward prayer for all those who this morning were mourning loved ones lost.
Luke straightened up from helping with the backbreaking work of trying to clear the streets of their covering of broken glass and other debris. It had to be all the broken glass that was causing him to think about the stuck-up girl. He had showered and changed once he had got back to the barracks after leaving the Grafton, and yet he could have sworn that he could smell that light fresh scent he had been so aware of when he had carried her over the broken glass. That, of course, was just plain daft; the whole city stank of smoke and dust from the bombing.
Luke and his men had been sent down to the docks. Gladstone, Canada, Brocklebank, Prince’s and King’s Docks, together with the adjacent warehouses, had all suffered serious fires and damage. The Pier Head church of Our Lady and St Nicholas had been burned out, and some of the law courts within St George’s Hall had been destroyed.