by Marie Joseph
Ten minutes later Sally bumped into her mother on the landing. Josie was still wearing her coat and a headscarf and when she turned round, obviously unwillingly, Sally saw that her cheeks were wet with tears. Josie Barnes who never cried – Josie who could lose her temper in a flash, shout and carry on, but who only cried when she was peeling onions.
‘You’ll see John in the morning, Mum.’ Sally put out a hand then drew it back.
‘John? Is he home then?’ Josie pulled her headscarf off, then with it trailing from her hand walked with dragging feet into the front bedroom.
‘I’ll go down and put the kettle on.’ Equally slowly Sally walked downstairs into the living-room where Stanley sat by the wireless twiddling with the controls.
‘Mr Churchill has been speaking to the Poles. I hope some of them manage to listen.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘What that country suffers doesn’t bear thinking about. But we’ve brought thirty-three bombers down, so the news isn’t all bad.’
Forgetting to control the pitch of her voice, Sally shouted: ‘That’s all you care about, the news. Isn’t it, Dad?’ She turned to leave the room, with Stanley staring after her in mild surprise.
But the news reader was speaking again, this time about Crete. Stanley pulled at his top lip with a finger and thumb. Now this could be serious. Mr Churchill would take it very hard if we had to leave there. He seemed to have accepted the loss of Greece, but Crete … well, that was another matter altogether.
When he turned round again he was alone in the room.
At one o’clock in the morning the sirens wailed and the bombers came back. Now the sky over Liverpool was blood red from a thousand fires. From docks and warehouses, boiling sugar, oil and paint exploded over houses in a terrifying spread of flames.
‘God help them,’ Stanley said, sitting round the kitchen table sipping his fourth mug of tea. ‘It’s the women and kids fighting the war at the moment.’ He got up and yawned, stretching his arms high above his head. ‘I’m off to bed. The worst’s over for tonight, and I expect we’ll be having John knocking us up soon after the “all clear”. I’ve heard the Duckworths have a shelter in their back garden, complete with all mod. cons.’ He pointed a finger in the direction of the door. ‘C’mon, Sally. Upstairs! It’s all over for tonight.’
They were shuffling into the hall, only half awake, when the floor seemed to erupt beneath them. The windows at the front of the house blew in, and they were lifted bodily, all three of them, to lie in a tangled heap of arms and legs at the foot of the stairs. The house seemed to sway like a tree in the wind, then settled itself as plaster drifted down to cover the carpet like snowflakes.
‘Famous last words,’ Stanley muttered.
It was dawn before the full extent of the damage to the quiet suburban road could be seen in all its horror. The wide road was littered with broken glass and the jagged edges of broken pipes; four houses had been completely destroyed, and ten or more badly damaged.
Working like Trojans, the men of the rescue parties moved the wreckage of Edna Turner’s house brick by brick, working against time, holding up their hands for silence then shaking their heads and starting again.
Stanley wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his sleeve. ‘Mrs Turner would be in her shelter.’ His voice felt raw in his dust-parched throat. ‘She always went in her shelter.’ He stumbled over splintered floorboards and mounds of bricks. ‘My daughter was with her last night. She said Mrs Turner was acting strange … so there’s no telling. She might not have been in the house at all.’ He jerked his head towards what had once been a house next door. ‘She could have gone in there, and if she did …’ He sighed heavily, remembering the broken bodies and the firemen slumped on their hoses, standing by, red-eyed and helpless.
‘You can forget about Edna Turner being anywhere but in her own house.’ A puny little man, his face dirt-streaked, almost unrecognizable as the dapper solicitor’s clerk he happened to be, shouted across the rubble. ‘Edna Turner wouldn’t let any of us help her, and you know it. My wife got tired of asking her to come in with us when the sirens went. Nay, she’s under that lot sure as eggs is eggs.’ He climbed over to Stanley and lowered his voice. ‘Isn’t that your lass standing by herself over there? I thought they’d sent the women home hours ago.’
When Stanley turned, he saw Sally at the very perimeter of the rubble, a small hunched figure with arms wrapped round herself to keep out the early morning chill.
‘You know you’ve no right to be here,’ he said, climbing over the rubble towards her. ‘The warden will see you off if he spots you. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘It’s Mrs Turner.’ Sally shivered suddenly. ‘She’s somewhere under there, isn’t she? David doesn’t even know what’s happened to her, so somebody has to watch for her, Dad.’ Her voice shook. ‘I keep thinking how she would have hated everything showing like this.’ She jerked her chin to where a broken wall flew a flag of yellow wallpaper like a strip of pathetic bunting in the breeze.
‘When you left her last night, did she say for certain she was going into her shelter?’ Stanley’s voice gentled. ‘It’s important, love, because if she is inside then there might be just a chance she’s alive.’
‘I left her standing on the front doorstep.’ Sally bit her lip remembering Edna Turner’s lined face twisted with anger as she bellowed her bitterness to the reddened sky. ‘No. I remember now. She went back inside. I saw the brass knocker rattling against the door when she slammed it hard. But she was acting so strangely, not frightened or anything, just blazing mad. Partly at Hitler and partly at me.’ Sally’s voice wavered as she felt her father’s touch on her hand.
‘Quiet, love. I think they’ve found her.’
Sally held her breath. It seemed in that moment as if every part of her was holding still. She saw the warden hold up a hand for silence.
‘Aye, they’ve got through.’
A broken window frame was tossed aside. A twisted piece of metal was prized from a deep hollow scooped brick by brick from the mountain of rubble. The silence was as deep as Sally’s own private silence as the warden lowered himself down inch by inch into the hole.
She could see instructions shouted through cupped hands as feet scrambled over the high piled bricks and stones. Turning round instinctively she saw a fire engine on its way back from the city, picking its way along the shattered stretch of road. A man appeared in front of her, waving both arms high above his head, and from behind her two stretcher-bearers materialized, almost knocking her over. Sally stared straight in front of her, hearing nothing, but understanding all. All her senses strained into the silence thick as a blanket round her. She prayed that Edna Turner would be found alive, yet even as she prayed she knew the lonely little woman was dead.
When they lifted her out of the black hole, her legs dangled, broken and twisted. She was showing pink knickers, the elasticated legs almost down to the knee. And when they laid her on the stretcher her head fell back so that Sally saw her white parting covered, like the rest of her, with grey plaster.
There was no dignity in the way her shattered body was exposed to neighbours she had shunned and kept away from all her life. In spite of all the feverish activity and the scrabbling helping hands, no one had thought to bring a blanket to cover what was left of Edna Turner.
‘And she once told me,’ Sally sobbed, ‘that if she hung her knickers out at all on the washing line she always hung them close to the house so that the neighbours wouldn’t see them. They should have covered her up … oh, Mum, they should have covered her up.’
‘She’s better off dead.’
Josie was sitting in the kitchen exactly as Sally had left her, smoking in fierce little puffs, using a saucer as an ash-tray. Her blue eyes were swollen into slits, and as she stubbed out one cigarette she reached for another. ‘Oh, God, there’s no need to look at me like that! If you believe what they taught you at Sunday School then Edna Turner’s with her husband now, liv
ing in a mansion like one of those up Park Road. She always said she should have been in one by rights, anyway.’
Sally didn’t appear to be making any attempt to lip-read. ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before,’ she said.
‘Then you’d better be prepared to see plenty more before this lot’s over.’ Josie coughed as the smoke caught her throat. ‘This flamin’ war hasn’t lasted for two years yet and look what we’ve got. Empty shelves in the shops, food rations that have to last a week when they’re only enough for a day. Black-out, bombs – and we’ve seen nothing to what they’ve been getting in London for months. So it’s God rest Edna Turner’s miserable soul, I say. I only hope she finds summat to laugh at up there, ’cos nowt ever tickled her fancy down here.’
Josie pushed her chair away from the table. ‘And now I’ll go upstairs and get meself ready for work. We might have nowt but corrugated paper in our front windows, half our neighbours are dead or had their legs blown off, but there’s the Police Ball next week and there’s sure to be some silly woman who wants a new dress for it. Oh, and when your dad comes in tell him I put the wireless on and the Nazis are landing by parachute in Crete. I wouldn’t like him to miss anything.’
‘Mum!’ Sally pulled Josie round to face her as she tried to slip past her to the door. ‘I can’t hear you! You’ve been talking with your head down and I couldn’t hear a word.’
‘Then you’ve missed nothing neither, have you?’ Josie ran upstairs, head down, pulling herself up by the bannister rail. In her room she leaned against the door and held her hands over her face. Oh God, dear God, how was she going to get through the coming days? When Bill had told her last night that he was being posted away, and they had decided, both of them, that this was the time to finish, it had all seemed so right, so much the only thing to do. Yet even now, already, in spite of the raid and in spite of John staying out all night with a girl she hardly knew … Josie took a deep, shuddering breath … and in spite of Sally’s face stiff with hurt as she struggled to understand … nothing, nothing at all mattered if she never saw Bill again.
‘May God forgive me, but I love that man …’ Pushing herself away from the door Josie went over to her dressing-table and saw that the mirror was broken with an ugly crack running from top to bottom, and all her jars and bottles covered with a powdery layer of grey dust. The face staring back at her was distorted and old, with peroxided hair forming a grotesque halo over pallid cheeks and shadowed eyes.
Downstairs Sally trailed miserably into the hall, picked up a dustpan and brush and swept up the slivers of broken glass revealed more clearly in the morning light. The plate-rack was covered with sparkly dust yet, miraculously, a Blue Willow plate was still in position. She felt vaguely sick, quietly detached, then her face brightened as her brother came in from outside, looking so honestly bewildered that she almost burst out laughing.
‘The door’s off its hinges!’
John turned to see Stanley standing behind him, his eyes smoke-bleared, his narrow shoulders drooping with exhaustion.
‘I didn’t know. I’d no idea.’ John put up a hand as if taking an oath. ‘We knew there’d been a big one over this side, but right till I turned the corner – honest to goodness, Dad, I nearly died!’
‘Quite a lot of folks did.’
Josie had worked hard on herself. She had rubbed Crème Simone on her face, patted orange-tinted powder over it, and fluffed her hair out with her fingers. With no more than a cursory glance at her son, she spoke to him over a disappearing shoulder, leaving Sally staring from one to the other in unhappy dismay.
‘The “all clear” went at least six hours ago!’ Josie whipped round, her blue eyes blazing above the circles of rouge. ‘It was more important for you to say goodbye to a girl we hardly know when God only knows how long it will be before you come home again!’
John flushed with a temper that was a match for his mother’s, only to close his mouth when Stanley stated baldly in a loud flat voice, ‘Your mother’s upset, son.’
‘We’re all bloody upset!’ Josie shot a baleful glance in her husband’s direction. ‘And take that flamin’ tin hat off! You don’t suit it, and never have!’
‘Mum, for crying out loud, just listen!’ John followed Josie through into the kitchen. ‘How do you think I feel going away, leaving you like this?’ He jerked his chin back towards the hall with its drifts of dust and shattered glass. ‘I should have come home last night, but hell’s bells, if I’m old enough to be sent abroad I’m old enough to stop out all night!’
‘So you do admit it, then?’ Josie whirled round, the hurt inside her making her lash out. ‘You stopped out all night with a toffee-nosed girl who wouldn’t give you the time of day if you weren’t jazzed up in that uniform! Aw, I know Christine Duckworth, an’ I know her mother as well. Tell them they look wonderful in something when they come in the shop, flatter their flamin’ egos, and they’ll buy owt.’ Josie’s lips, thickly coated with Tangee lipstick, lifted into a smile that was more of a grimace. ‘They’ll be laughing t’other side of their faces, those two will, when clothes rationing starts next month. Oh aye …’ she rounded on Stanley, standing quietly in the doorway, ‘that’s a bit of news even you missed, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll go up and get my kit together.’
There was no point in staying to hear any more. John knew his mother of old. Let something upset her badly enough and her reaction was to let fly with her tongue. It was up to his dad to stand up to her more, but it wasn’t Stanley he was sorry for. It was Sally. The poor kid looked as bewildered as she obviously felt, watching them and only catching a fraction of what was being said. Last night Christine had said Sally was frightened of the boys on the shop floor at the works. Ducked her head and walked away, if they came up to her and tried to speak. On his way upstairs he stopped long enough to ruffle his sister’s curly hair.
‘I’ll ring her up tonight,’ he whispered. ‘She’ll have calmed down a bit by then. Christine’s my girl, now. I’m going to marry her when this lot’s over. Be nice to her, for my sake, our kid.’
He took the stairs two at a time up to his room at the back of the house. There was a long framed photograph of his old school on the wall. His tennis racket in its press leaned against the wardrobe, and on a shelf behind his bed a row of mechanical engineering textbooks stood next to the Complete Works of Shakespeare and his Sunday School bible.
It was all so ordinary, so familiar, and in that moment so surprisingly precious. John stood still on the strip of carpet by his bed, taking in every detail, watching the way the sun was beginning to slant across a tiny copper bust of Molière, won in his last term at school in a French-speaking competition.
That day in the office seemed as long for Sally as the lists she typed. They were endless lists to be carbon-copied, tabulated, yellow paper for the firm’s files, pink for the Ministry of Supply, green for Mr Duckworth’s personal reference, and top white for the recipient of the small gun parts supplied.
She knew the girls were swapping bomb stories, but unable to see their faces all the time she laughed when they laughed, composed her expression into concern when she guessed the stories were harrowing. And all the time she saw in her mind Edna Turner’s body flopping on the stretcher as if filleted of all its bones.
In the afternoon a part-time worker was brought into the office, white and shaken, a bare patch glistening on the crown of her head.
‘I forgot to put me turban on.’ The woman stared round wildly for understanding. ‘Me front wave caught in the drill.’ She groped for a handkerchief in her overall pocket. ‘It was the bombing last night, then coming out of the shelter to hear me sister’s boy’s gone missing over Germany. I just switched me machine on without thinking. I’m sorry, Mr Duckworth. I’m really sorry.’
‘I hear you’d have been scalped but for old Harry’s quick thinking.’ Sally read Christine Duckworth’s father easily. ‘We don’t need any Veronica Lakes on our shop floor, lass.’
>
Sally bent her head over her typewriter again, seeing the angry faces mouthing angry words in the kitchen that morning. She saw she had forgotten to indent five spaces before a column of figures, and knew she would have to start all over again.
‘Our John telephoned half an hour ago.’ Josie Barnes’s face was smooth again. ‘He didn’t say where from, but my guess is they’ll be sailing straight away.’ She pointed to the dresser. ‘There’s a letter for you. It was behind what’s left of the door when I got in from work.’
Sally glanced quickly at the closely written sheet of paper before pushing it back into its envelope. ‘It’s from David Turner. Written before …’
‘He’ll get compassionate leave.’ Josie held a loaf of bread against her chest and began to slice furiously and dangerously towards her left breast. ‘Though where he’ll stop, I don’t know. His mother didn’t seem to have any friends. Anyroad, he’s not stopping here.’
‘Why not?’ The idea had never occurred to Sally before that moment, but after a twelve-hour day she was tired. It had seemed the streets were filled with people hurrying home before the sirens went, a lot of them to makeshift meals cooked on makeshift fires. They would be washing in a small bowl of water in some cases – water salvaged from a hot-water bottle from the night before. She lifted her chin. ‘If I see David I’ll invite him to stay with us. It’s the least we can do.’
Josie threw the bread-knife down with a clatter. She felt better after talking to John on the telephone, but not that much better. The events of the past twenty-four hours had numbed her mind into a resigned and bitter acceptance of the way things were going to be. Dull grey faces and dull grey clothes, dwindling rations, sleepless nights, when all she had ever asked from life was a bit of laughter, fun, a night out dancing now and again. She felt she didn’t care if she never went dancing again. They had drunk what was left of the week’s tea ration last night, and Sally was all set to make trouble. She sighed a deep, shuddering sigh.