by Anne Bennett
‘You just wondered, did you?’ Brendan thundered, leaping to his feet and grabbing her. Maeve’s words had incensed him. She was prepared to desert him, leave him to scratch about by himself because of a sodding baby, he thought. The children always came first with Maeve, just as they had for his mother. Bloody women were all the same. ‘Listen to me,’ he hissed. ‘Let the bloody brat go if you’re so bleeding worried about her, but you go nowhere. You get that?’ And he shook her so hard that when he let go, she fell against the fireplace.
Maeve got it fine. No way would she allow her baby to go miles away in the charge of strangers, especially when Maeve had missed so much of her early babyhood.
‘Maybe I’m selfish to keep her with me and in danger too,’ Maeve said to Elsie, ‘but I can’t bear to let her go. I miss Kevin and Grace every day as it is, but Bridget’s so small.’
‘A baby is always best left with her mother,’ Elsie said firmly.
‘What if something should happen to her?’
‘Something could happen to any of us,’ Elsie said. ‘Aren’t we all in God’s hands?’
And they were. The priests always said they shouldn’t question God. He was all-powerful and loving and yet, thought Maeve, he allowed such suffering. It was a mystery to her.
Then, on 19 November, the sirens went off at fifteen minutes past seven. With a sigh of relief that at least the meal was over and done with, Maeve picked Bridget up. She was now toddling around the room and objected strongly to being grabbed and zipped into her siren suit, and over her wails Maeve said to Brendan, ‘Are you on duty tonight?’
‘No, I’m going down The Bell, but I might be called out. After the raid on Coventry they reckon this will be the big one.’
Maeve felt her limbs beginning to tremble. Weren’t the raids they’d gone through already big enough?
‘Can’t you shut that brat up?’ Brendan snapped.
‘She’s tired and out of sorts, that’s all,’ Maeve said. ‘She can’t help it.’
‘I’ll give her something to bloody cry for in a minute,’ Brendan threatened.
‘No, you won’t!’ Maeve said firmly. ‘You touch her and I’ll go straight to the priest. Anyway,’ she said, taking her coat from the hook on the door, ‘we’re away now.’
She was out into the black inky night before Brendan could reply, glad of Elsie and Alf’s company.
And there followed a night when Maeve doubted she’d see the dawn. Wave after wave of bombers attacked Birmingham and while few areas escaped damage, the city centre and the roads ringing it where the factories working for the war effort were situated were the prime targets.
That wasn’t apparent to those cowering in the shelter, but what was, was the boom and crash of explosives, so powerful and so close they rocked the walls of the shelter. People screamed in fear and others cried or prayed, while one man with a mouth organ tried to organise a singsong, mainly for the children.
The noise was earth-shattering, what with the whistle and thud of bombs, the clatter of incendiaries and shrapnel that hit the walls and roof of the shelter like hailstones. This was answered by the ack-ack guns barking into the night and the emergency services’ bells ringing crazily.
Maeve felt as if she was going mad. She wanted to cover her ears with her hands and scream her head off. She held Bridget tight, for the child screamed in fear and Maeve didn’t blame her. She was aware of Elsie beside her, her face chalk white and her hands shaking as she poured tea. Alf was no longer with them. He’d been taken with other male volunteers as a rescue party to another brick-built shelter that had collapsed, trapping many people inside. Maeve looked at their own shuddering walls and wondered if theirs would be the next to go.
When the all-clear finally went at 4.30 a.m. and Maeve and Elsie left the shelter, they were met by billowing black smoke and swirling grey dust. It almost choked them, stinging their throats and causing them to cough till their eyes streamed. Bridget had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion and Maeve held her tight against her to protect her throat and lungs.
The glowing amber and red sky showed up the buckled tramlines, the crater in the middle of Bristol Street and gaping holes opposite where shops had once stood. The rubble-filled pavements ran with water, and burst sandbags leaked on to the gleaming wet pavements.
Carefully, they picked their way over the debris littering the pavements, but when they got to the top of Bristol Passage they stopped dead and their mouths dropped open in shock, for Grant Street was there no longer, and neither was one side of Bell Barn Road. Instead, there was a vast sea of bricks, splintered wood and glass. Some houses had been sliced in half, spilling out the now dust-laden contents, and odd walls leant drunkenly and unsteadily against one another.
Even with the glowing orange sky, the swirling dust and smoke made it difficult to see much clearly, but Elsie and Maeve made their way resolutely up what little remained of Grant Street, wondering if Latimer Street, which led off it, still stood. Maeve wondered what she would do if she’d lost her home. Move in with Lily? Never! But what choice would she really have? The only alternative to that would be a shelter in a derelict building or a church hall somewhere, hardly ideal with a small child.
She was so taken by her own thoughts that she almost walked into Deidre Bradshaw, who was standing looking at the remains of what had once been her house. Even in the shielded light from the torch Elsie held, Maeve could see the tear stains on the young woman’s face.
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ she said to Maeve. ‘Dear God. But it’s bad of me to cry like this over a house when others have suffered more. Pauline Dobson just two doors up was killed outright with her baby daughter last night.’
‘No!’ Maeve said in shock. She remembered the young woman had a baby born just three weeks before. The news would devastate her young soldier husband, of that Maeve was certain.
‘Wouldn’t go to the shelter, see. Said the baby was too small and she might catch something.’
‘Bloody little fool!’ Elsie said, but Maeve had sympathy for her. Sometimes even now she dreaded rousing Bridget when she looked so peaceful and she did worry that the baby would catch something from the air in the shelter, which grew fetid and stale with so much humanity crammed into it, and many of the people spluttering or coughing all the time.
‘I asked her to come in with me tonight,’ Deidre went on, ‘but she wouldn’t. Said it was too cold for the baby. Mind you, when the other side of Bell Barn Road went, I thought we were all goners. The whole place shook and plaster dust trickled down on us. I thought, this is it, we’ll be entombed in a minute.’
‘Oh God, don’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Come on in and I’ll make us all some tea.’
‘No. I best get back,’ Deidre insisted. ‘My mom will be anxious. I had to see for myself, you know. I thought I might be able to salvage something.’ Deidre gave a shrug. ‘Fat chance, though.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Lodge with my parents,’ Deidre said, ‘till Matthew’s demobbed, anyroad.’ She put out her hand suddenly and stroked Bridget’s cheek gently. ‘Ain’t she lovely?’ she said. ‘You know, times like this I don’t mind not having kids.’
But Maeve heard the tone of Deidre’s voice and saw the gentle way she touched Bridget and knew she hadn’t really spoken the truth. She fervently hoped that when the war was finally over, she and Matthew might get it together and start a family.
Maeve yawned, suddenly aware of how tired she was. She was glad to reach the door of her house and hoped they’d get some sleep that night and the Luftwaffe would have a night off.
But they didn’t. Maeve could hardly believe it. With Brendan on duty fire-watching again, she’d fallen asleep almost as soon as she had fed Bridget. But the sirens woke her just a couple of hours later. She stumbled sleepily around the bedroom, preparing to go to the shelter. That evening the attack was from parachute bombs and the first fell mainly in the Aston area of the city, but still Maeve and Elsie, with Alf this time, stayed in the
shelter until the all-clear.
The following night, there was no raid, but it hardly mattered, Maeve thought, for she’d sat up half the night anyway waiting for the sirens, her nerves taut. She’d fallen across her bed fully clothed by the time Brendan stumbled into the room and she awoke to find him fumbling at her clothes, cursing that she had so much on. Maeve longed to ask Brendan to leave her alone and let her sleep but she couldn’t take him starting on her. She undressed hurriedly and let him do as he pleased. Afterwards she lay sleepless for hours, her body aching from Brendan’s rough handling, though her eyes smarted with tiredness.
On the evening of 22 November there was another raid, almost as bad as that on the nineteenth, when single attacks with high-explosive bombs were followed by wave after wave of bombers.
Maeve’s heart was thudding against her ribs as the explosions went on all around them, but she tried to remain calm and blank from her mind all thought of the public shelter that had collapsed on the first major November attack, killing and crushing the people inside. ‘If it’s got your name on it, that’s that,’ was the general consensus.
The raid didn’t finish till six o’clock, but the next day they found out how badly the city had been pounded. The pipes from three trunk water mains on Bristol Road had been shattered and the whole city was without water. Even draining the canals was not sufficient to cope with the fires, and the six hundred that had been started that night had to be left to burn. Although Brummies were not told how serious the situation was, the news filtered through.
For three days following this raid, water had to be collected in buckets from water cans until the mains were repaired and the taps connected up again, but during that time there were no further raids and everyone was glad of a little respite.
Despite this, most people could summon up the energy and enthusiasm for the second Christmas of the war, though the rationing was especially hard to take with the festive season to provide for.
It wasn’t helped by two other major raids in December, both causing much destruction and loss of life. The first was on 3 December and the second a week later, starting at six o’clock in the evening and going on for thirteen hours.
The next day King George visited the ravaged city in an unscheduled stop and talked to the people suffering the raids, those in the rescue and emergency services and those made homeless. Despite herself, Maeve was impressed by the softly spoken King, who she’d heard had battled for years to control a stammer. Maeve thought he seemed genuinely upset at what the people had suffered. News of his visits spread through the city and people thronged the streets to see him, and the National Anthem was sung spontaneously in many places.
Over Christmas there was a lull in the raids and Maeve and Elsie went to the Bull Ring and took a look at their dilapidated, fire-gutted city. Whale meat was on sale but it was 2/6d a pound, too dear for Maeve, but Elsie bought some and the stallholder told her to cook it with onions and try to cut down the strong taste by mixing it with mashed potato. When Maeve tried a bit of Elsie’s fish pie made in this way, she was glad she’d used the tip. It still tasted extremely fishy, but it filled her up and, anyway, no one could afford to be fussy.
‘I hope 1941 is a better year than this last one, anyroad,’ Elsie said to Maeve the day before New Year’s Eve.
‘And me. The raids terrify me,’ Maeve admitted. ‘Not for myself alone, but for Bridget and you and Alf and all the other neighbours and friends around.’ Neither woman thought it strange that Brendan’s name wasn’t mentioned.
In January there was a call for more women to work in munitions and it was just after Maeve read this in Alf’s paper that she met a neighbour, Maureen Dempsey, in Mountford’s and they got to talking about it.
‘Would you go, Maureen?’ Maeve asked. ‘I’d be a bit nervous about working in a factory. Anyway, it wouldn’t do me a bit of good. Brendan would take every penny off me.’
‘God, I’d go tomorrow if I could find someone to look after my two nippers,’ Maureen said. ‘I’d love to get out and get a job, and my old man can’t take anything off me ’cos I don’t even know where the bleeding sod is, but “somewhere in France”. Mind you,’ she added, ‘if he tried that lark, I’d brain him with the bleeding frying pan.’
But an idea was stirring in Maeve’s mind to earn some money of her own. She looked at Maureen’s children, one just a wee baby and one a toddler, and she said, ‘I’ll look after the babies for you, Maureen.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Would I joke over something like this?’
‘And would you take another nipper on?’ Maureen asked. ‘Only me mate and me was talking about it the other day and she said she’d like to do it and all, but her babby’s nearly two. We could be set on together if you’d do it, like.’
And it was as easy as that. Maeve took on the three children, and as they arrived after Brendan left and were collected before he returned home, he was unaware of it. She got two pounds ten shillings a week for each child she minded, and so she normally received seven pounds ten shillings a week, plus what she tried to keep back from the money the priest still brought. And she continued to try because she couldn’t allow Brendan to get any hint that she no longer had such a great need of it.
Fortunately, he was too caught up in his own affairs to notice any difference in Maeve or the children, so Maeve’s source of income went undetected. Never one to waste money, Maeve put the cash box at Elsie’s into play again, but she kept some money back to buy a few extras to add to the food cupboard on their weekly trip to the Bull Ring every Saturday.
Just after Maeve started minding the children she was issued with a Morrison shelter, which consisted of a steel table with steel mesh sides that she’d open to crawl inside. The bottom was sprung for a mattress to be fitted, which Maeve was given by the Red Cross.
‘D’you think it’s really necessary for us to have them?’ she asked Elsie, because since the turn of the year, the raids had been light, short and infrequent, and had caused little damage. ‘I mean, Hitler seems to have finished with us now.’
‘Who knows what’s on that madman’s mind, ducks?’ Elsie said. ‘You hang on to your Morrison and I’ll hang on to mine till this bloody war is over.’
Brendan kicked off about it right and proper when he came home and said it took up too much room, but Maeve let him rant, knowing he’d take no steps to remove it. Maeve soon found another use for it anyway, because it was a good place to lay the children down for a rest in the day, once they’d outgrown a pram. It was warmer than the bedroom in those crisp spring days and safer than a bed or chairs that they could roll off.
On 9 April Maeve was glad of her Morrison, because the Luftwaffe again attacked Birmingham in force, the sirens going off at nine thirty. Maeve soon found that one of the disadvantages of a Morrison was that the noise of the raid was all around you, not muffled like in the sandbagged, reinforced public shelters. There was also no one to talk with, to take your mind off the terrifying noise, the drone of the planes with their distinctive ‘burr burr’ engine noise and the whistle of the dropping bombs and resultant blast of explosives that shook the walls and rattled the windows of the house. She clearly heard the shuddering crash of buildings collapsing, the screams and cries of people and the noise of ambulances and fire engines rushing through the night. She felt as if she were held in a vice of fear and she prayed that she and Bridget would be safe.
Surprisingly, Bridget did eventually fall asleep against Maeve’s shoulder, but Maeve continued to sit and hold her, sure the house would collapse about them. A Morrison was supposed to stand up against that and Maeve was terrified that soon it would be put to the test, but when the all-clear went in the early hours of Good Friday morning, she was still alive and so was Bridget, and the house was intact.
Shortly after that raid, Maeve knew she was pregnant again and was scared stiff of telling Brendan.
‘Oh, Elsie, what the bloody hell am I going to do?’
/> ‘Stand up to the bugger. Tell him straight,’ Elsie said fiercely. ‘Tell him it ain’t your bleeding fault and he should learn to keep it in his trousers more often.’
‘Oh, Elsie . . .’ Maeve cried, and pictured the scene if she actually did what Elsie suggested. It really didn’t bear thinking about. ‘I wish I could just feel bloody well excited like I should be, instead of so frightened to tell my husband,’ Maeve went on. ‘I wouldn’t mind how many I had if I was given enough money to rear them properly.’
But in the end she didn’t have to tell Brendan, because he tumbled to it himself when he heard her being sick in the morning. The beating he gave her was so severe, she feared she would miscarry and though she didn’t, she was too sore and bruised to move. She had to call on Elsie to look after the children until she was on her feet again and able to cope, because she’d been terrified of losing her source of income.
The childminding job was a lifesaver for Maeve. She wrote to her mother immediately she began earning, thanking her for the money she’d sent, saying it was no longer necessary and offering to contribute towards the cost of bringing up her children. Annie’s reply was swift and firm. It would be a poor body indeed who needed payment for looking after their own flesh and blood, she said. And though she was glad things were better for Maeve, she didn’t want another word said about money.
For Maeve, the money she earned made all the difference to her life, although much of it still was saved in the cash box. While others moaned about rationing, for cheese had been added to the grocery list and clothes were put on ration in June 1941, for Maeve the money meant now she could get decent food for Bridget and herself as well as Brendan. She could afford whale meat and horse meat from the Bull Ring on her Saturday outings with Elsie, and a bit of fruit, even if it was just apples and pears. There were no bananas or oranges, and grapes were far too expensive for Maeve’s purse.
She was, however, able to buy some fairly good second-hand clothing that she could unpick to make something halfway decent for herself. Maeve often thought it was amazing the boost wearing clothes that weren’t mere rags did for a person.