Daughters of Liverpool

by Annie Groves

  They were alone in the kitchen.

  Katie tilted her chin and told Luke firmly, ‘I’m going to help look for the twins, and before you say anything, I’m not doing it because of you or because I want you to think well of me, or anything like that. I’m doing it because of them, the twins; because I care about them, and your mum as well. They may not be my family, not ever now, but they’re as close to me as if they were.’

  Luke looked at her, and then before Katie could stop him he had seized her in his arms and was kissing her passionately.

  ‘That’s what I think about you,’ he told her fiercely when he had stopped. ‘I love you, Katie, and I shouldn’t have said what I did.’

  There wasn’t time to say anything more. Sam and Jean had come back into the kitchen, dressed ready to go out and start searching for the twins.

  ‘Had the twins any plans for tonight?’ Luke asked his mother.

  ‘They were going to the pictures, but I don’t know why since they’ve already seen the film. I suppose it had some dancing in it that they wanted to copy. You know what they’re like.’

  Dancing! Katie put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘I’ve just remembered something. It might not mean anything but Carole at work mentioned that there’s going to be a dance competition tonight. She asked me if the twins had entered it.’

  Jean and Sam looked at one another.

  ‘They’d have known that we wouldn’t let them,’ Sam said.

  ‘Where is the competition?’ Luke asked Katie. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Not really. Carole said there were posters up and that it’s in some warehouse down by the docks.

  Sam gave a grunt of frustration. ‘We’ll have a couple of hundred or more to choose from,’ he told them.

  ‘I think Carole said it was in the local paper about the competition,’ Katie remembered.

  ‘The Post?’

  ‘Here it is,’ Luke announced. He’d snatched up the paper the minute he’d heard Katie and now he was showing them the advertisement.

  ‘It’s one of them warehouses off Dunton Road, Dad, where all the bombings have been. We were working down there early today, clearing up. We’ve had to post UXB notices on several of the buildings, and that’s just the ones we know about.’

  ‘UXB notices?’ Katie queried.

  ‘Unexploded bombs,’ Luke told her.

  ‘Well, I reckon Katie’s right and that we’ll find them safe and sound at this dance,’ Jean announced, but they could all hear the tremor in her voice.

  ‘Aye, and when we do and we’ve got them home, I’ll tan the hides off the pair of them,’ Sam growled, but all of them knew that he would do no such thing.

  Sam and Luke assured Jean and Katie that they were perfectly capable of tracking down the girls on their own but after one look at each other, Jean and Katie shook their heads and announced that they were going too.

  It was just gone ten o’clock when they finally reached the two-storey brick-built warehouse being used for the dance. It was one of several close to the Queen’s Dock and easily identifiable by the music they could hear coming from it.

  At first, Sam’s demand to see whoever was in charge had the effect of the men on the door refusing to allow them inside, but once he’d shamelessly mentioned his Salvage Corps status and thrown in some comments about the legality of using buildings for purposes they were not fitted for, he and Luke were grudgingly allowed inside and told to wait with one of the men, whilst the other went off. Jean and Katie remained outside.

  The warehouse was typical of its type all along the docks. Separated from the dock road, it had a small foyer area with a set of wooden stairs leading up to the first storey, and a glass-fronted office from which anyone seated in it could observe any comings and goings. The walls were bare brick, and dust was rising from the wooden floors, disturbed by the dancers filling the ground-floor space, and illuminated by the bare bulbs dangling from flexes.

  Sam suspected that the excise authorities would be very interested in the legality of the bar that seemed to have been set up on the first floor, although he guessed that the organisers would claim that it was a private party and thus exempt from any licensing laws.

  Kieran wasn’t best pleased to be told that there was an official from some council department insisting on seeing him.

  Con was steaming because the twins hadn’t turned up, and nor had half the numbers they had expected, thanks to two nights of bombing.

  However, what Kieran wasn’t expecting was to be confronted with two tall well-muscled men with very grim faces wanting to talk to him about the twins.

  At first he tried to pretend that he had no idea who they were talking about, and he reckoned he might have got away with it if his uncle hadn’t come down from the bar, swearing, ‘Them bloody twins. If they turn up at the Royal Court again, I’ll have their guts for garters.’

  ‘According to the chap we’ve just seen, the girls were planning to enter the competition and they’d been on their way here with him when Sasha decided she’d changed her mind and was going home,’ Sam told Jean when he and Luke had rejoined Jean and Katie, waiting anxiously outside the warehouse. ‘He says that Lou then carried on for a bit and then went back after Sasha.’

  ‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’ Jean asked Sam anxiously.

  ‘He wouldn’t have dared not to,’ Luke assured her.

  ‘Something must have happened to them.’ Jean’s voice trembled with fear.

  ‘We’ll have to search every street and every building between here and home,’ Sam told Luke. ‘It’s the only way to find them.’

  Luke nodded in agreement.

  ‘You’d better take your mum and Katie home first, Luke,’ Sam went on.

  Once again Katie and Jean looked at one another. Katie spoke for them.

  ‘We’re coming too. We can work in pairs.’

  ‘Katie’s right,’ Jean agreed. ‘I’ll come with you, Sam, and Katie can go with Luke.’

  Now father and son exchanged looks.

  ‘We’ll go back street by street, you can take one side of the road and I’ll take the other. We can tell the ARP lot what we’re doing when we come across them as well, so that they can look out for the twins too.’

  ‘What if no one finds us?’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay here.’

  ‘I do, because I want to.’

  ‘Do you really think someone will find us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Lou?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I’m not bothered about Kieran really, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s almost dark now.’

  ‘We’ve got our torches in our bags, we can put them on when it gets really dark, but it won’t be that dark because there’ll be a good moon.’

  ‘A bomber’s moon. My leg’s gone to sleep.’ Sasha tried to wriggle into a more comfortable position and then gasped as she started to slip deeper into the hole.

  ‘Keep still,’ Lou warned her twin. She was terribly afraid now that no one would find them, but she couldn’t leave Sasha. If she let go of her, her twin would disappear into the cavity beneath the rubble and be trapped there, and even if Lou found some help quickly there was no saying that Sasha would still be alive when they got back. She’d rather die with her twin than live without her, Lou recognised.

  It wasn’t easy moving northeastwards back towards the city and Edge Lane, combing the streets and bombed-out sites one by one, calling the twins’ names, now that it had gone dark, and they’d only covered a very few streets when the air-raid siren went off.

  ‘You and Mum need to find a shelter,’ Luke urged Katie.

  But she told him scornfully, ‘Oh, yes, we’d be likely to do that, wouldn’t we? Go and find shelter whilst you and your dad are out here and the twins not found. No, I’m staying right here with you.’

  ‘Where I go you go?’ Luke suggested ruefully. Th
ere was an emotional catch in his voice that betrayed his real feelings. Katie reached for his hand, unable to think of how she would be feeling right now if it had been their own two children that were missing.

  Jean was in despair. ‘They’ll never hear us now.’ She had to raise her voice just for Sam to hear it above the noise of plane engines, the whine and scream of falling bombs, and the fury of the antiaircraft guns, and he was standing right next to her.

  A bomb, dropping several hundred yards away, shook the rubble, dislodging bricks and sending up a shower of dust that made the twins cough. One of the bricks caught Lou’s arm, causing it to jerk upwards, her torch falling from her hand.

  ‘What was that?’ Katie asked Luke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over there,’ she told him, nodding in the direction of a barricaded-off collapsed building with a UXB notice outside it. ‘I thought I saw a torch light.’

  ‘Probably some clever little sod doing a bit of pilfering,’ Luke told her. ‘You stay here, whilst I go and have a look.’

  He was striding away from her before she could object, so Katie ignored his instruction and hurried after him.

  Luke could see the raised fin of the bomb shining silver grey in the moonlight, its nose buried deep in the heap of rubble surrounding it, but as for any torch light … He was just about to turn away when by some miracle there was a split second’s silence in the cacophony of destruction and defence that had been raging all around them, and in it he heard quite clearly the sound of Lou’s voice saying shakily, ‘That’s gone and done it now, Sasha. I’ve lost the torch and it was Luke’s. He’ll kill me.’

  ‘You’re too right I will, you ruddy pair,’ Luke announced sharply but his face was wet with tears and he was shaking from head to foot as he yelled, ‘Dad, over here. They’re here.’

  ‘… so you see we couldn’t do anything because Sasha sort of slipped under the bomb and …’ Jean’s gulped sob silenced Lou’s matter-of-fact explanation of their plight.

  Sam said huskily, ‘Aye, well, it wouldn’t have happened if the two of you hadn’t been so daft. I’ll stay with them, Luke,’ he told his son, ‘whilst you go and find help. You’ll need to get the UXB lot, I reckon …’

  ‘No, I’m staying with them,’ Jean said quietly but very determinedly. ‘That will mean that both of you can go and get help much faster.’

  ‘I’ll stay too,’ Katie began, but Jean shook her head, reaching out for Katie’s hand and holding it firmly in her own.

  ‘No. Whatever else happens, I want to know that you and Luke will be together and safe, Katie. You two and all those like you – you’re the future of this country.’

  Katie knew what Jean was saying, but even so, she hated having to leave Jean with her children, knowing what would happen if the bomb did explode.

  ‘You stay here,’ Luke told her, leaving her at the first ARP post they came to, where he and Sam explained what had happened and a boy messenger was summoned to alert the nearest UXB team, Luke insisting on borrowing a bike to go with him, whilst Sam organised a team of men to help excavate the rubble just in case Sasha could be moved without risking setting off the bomb.

  Grace had just come back from her tea break, ignoring the now familiar roar of the bombers overhead, and not even counting them any more to shiver in fear at their number, even though her brain had registered that it was more than last night, and last night had been very bad. Nor had she done more than glance at the dozens of fires burning throughout the city as she hurried back onto the ward, just as a large bomb exploded in the courtyard at the back of the hospital.

  Everything in the ward, including the walls, shook, but not one single nurse ran or made a fuss, not even when they realised that they could see down into the courtyard through a gaping hole in the corridor wall. Instead, aided by those patients who were well enough to help, they pushed those who were bedridden out to safety, ignoring the plaster dust coating the beds and somehow managing to sidestep the rubble lying on the linoleum floors.

  It did not do any good, of course, to look down into the courtyard at what had once been buildings and ambulances and human beings, and which were now all beyond human help.

  Dr Leonard Findlay, the medical superintendent, and the matron, Miss Gertrude Riding, were both calmly giving orders and instructions, despite being injured.

  ‘Hannah,’ Grace exclaimed in relief, greeting her closest nursing friend. ‘You’re all right!’

  ‘Yes, but the bomb got everyone apart from the surgeon and the patient in the operating theatre next to ours, and there’s heaven knows how many ambulance drivers bin killed, and some patients. I’ve got to go. I’m to accompany some of our patients to one of the other hospitals.’

  ‘Grace, what are you doing here?’

  Grace turned round to see her cousin Charlie standing behind her in his hospital pyjamas, a bewildered expression on his face.

  That was when Grace did something she’d never imagined herself doing in a hundred lifetimes. She went up to Charlie and put her arms round him and hugged him tightly.

  ‘Nurse Campion.’

  Sister looked less disapproving than she sounded.

  ‘Sorry, Sister,’ Grace apologised.

  Up above them in the night sky the bombers were still coming, dropping their cargo of horror and pain. All around her now Grace could hear what she had not heard before, the cries of the injured and the groans of the dying. Angry tears blurred her vision and her throat was raw from inhaling the acrid smoke and dust but she still lifted her fist and shook it furiously and helplessly at the bomber-filled night sky.

  If Liverpool could survive this then it could survive anything. And it would survive. It must.

  Grace turned back to her patient, lying still in his bed, an amputee who had lost both his legs in a bomb blast on Friday night and who was thankfully sedated with morphine to dull his pain.

  She said a little prayer for her family and for Seb, told Charlie briskly that he couldn’t walk around in hospital pyjamas, and told the white-faced probationer to go and see if she could get a cup of tea.

  All around her everyone was doing what they had been trained to do, fire fighters, police, ambulance crews, salvage workers, nurses and doctors. This was war but it was also life.

  It was Luke who got back first with a bomb disposal team, followed within seconds by Sam with a Salvage Corps heavy demolition unit.

  Jean and Lou were both told they must be moved to allow the men to do their work properly. Both of them protested, Lou fiercely defending her right to be with her twin.

  It was one of the bomb disposal team who eventually persuaded her to move over to allow him to take her place. A boy who didn’t look that much older than the twins themselves, for all his air of maturity and calm professionalism, Jean recognised.

  ‘What will they do?’ Katie asked Luke when he came to join her at a safe distance away from the bomb where she had been sent after refusing to be escorted to the nearest air-raid shelter.

  ‘They can’t risk moving Sasha in case it detonates the bomb, so they’ve got to remove the detonator and then free her.’

  ‘Oh, Luke …’

  ‘I know,’ he agreed, holding her tight.

  ‘About the letter,’ Katie told him. ‘I can’t say too much. But it was to do with my censorship work. I would say more if I could but—’

  Luke kissed the top of her head. ‘You don’t have to say anything. You should never have had to say anything. I should have known. I do know,’ he corrected himself. ‘I know that you love me. I know that you aren’t the kind of girl who would say that if you didn’t mean it, or if you were committed to someone else. I’m sorry, Katie, can you—’

  They both looked up as three bombers, flying in formation, swept in overhead, frighteningly low and close as they headed for the docks. The force of the explosion of the bombs they dropped shook the ground on which they were standing, the sound followed by another explosion nearer at hand.


  They looked at one another and then they started to run. Where the bomb and Sasha had been there was now only thick black smoke and the beginning of a small fire.

  Katie felt acutely sick.

  ‘Sorry if we gave you a bit of a scare, but we decided it would be safer to detonate the bomb after all, because we couldn’t get to the second fuse.’

  The corporal who had been in charge of the UXB team grinned at them through the thick smoke.

  ‘Sasha?’ Katie asked anxiously.

  ‘She’s fine. Crying all over young Bobby, though, and calling him a hero. Hero, my eye, all he did was take her place under the bomb so that we could get her out.’

  ‘She’s safe?’ That was Luke, disbelief and hope straining his voice in equal measures.

  The smoke was clearing and through it Katie could see Sam and Jean standing side by side. Sam was holding Sasha in his arms, whilst Jean had her arms wrapped tightly around Lou, who was standing in front of her.

  ‘Those ruddy twins …’ Luke commented half an hour later after a quick medical examination had pronounced Sasha uninjured and they had all set out for home, ignoring the planes roaring in over their heads. Their threat didn’t seem to matter now after what they had all been through, and surely the sky was lightening; a sign that soon it would be dawn and the planes would be gone.

  ‘What on earth did they think they were doing?’ Luke asked Katie emotionally, as he stopped walking.

  Dawn was now clearly paling the sky but they had fallen behind the others, and were virtually alone in the shadowy narrow street.

  Katie looked at him, knowing what he must be feeling. They were his sisters, after all, and he loved them very much. That they had been found and were safe and unharmed was a miracle.

  Katie reached out and touched his arm, the tender understanding look of a woman for the man she loves.