She began to laugh, in spite of her agitation. ‘You know that’s what the girls on Lime Street do,’ she said. ‘The street walkers. They shine a torch on their legs.’
‘Now how does a respectable girl like you know a thing like that?’ he said, taking her arm. She laughed again but said nothing and they walked slowly up the hill. In an angle of the wall by the Picton Library, Joe drew her into his arms. ‘Sarah, I’ve got to say it – I love you.’
She turned her face up to his. ‘And I love you, Joe,’ she whispered. His lips came down on hers and they clung together, Sarah’s arms tight around his neck.
‘I had to tell you,’ he said finally. ‘I couldn’t go on any longer and I had to know if you felt like this too.’
‘I do, Joe,’ she said. ‘I always did, I think.’
‘I did from the first time I saw you,’ he said. ‘I was going to say something, then I realized you were Terry’s girl.’
‘But I wasn’t,’ she interrupted. ‘Not when I first knew you, but you went away and Terry and I – we just sort of got thrown together.’
‘I feel every kind of heel and rat,’ he said. ‘My own brother! But I can’t help it. I just had to say it, Sarah.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ she said. ‘But we can’t hurt Terry, Joe. Now we know, we’ll just have to go on like before.’
‘I know,’ he agreed. He seemed suddenly to realize what Sarah had said about herself and Terry. ‘What did you mean about being thrown together?’
‘I mean I was never really in love with Terry, and he wasn’t with me. It was just fooling around as a joke, and then people seemed to pair us off.’
‘But he thought you were his girl. He had your picture above his bed.’
‘But even that – he just asked for the photo because he saw it, and then on the station there were couples saying goodbye and Anne had left us on our own. Even then I thought we could see how it went and break it off if we wanted to, and no harm done. I didn’t forsee this.’
Joe kissed her again hungrily and she responded as fiercely, then when he released her said self-consciously, ‘I sound as though I’m making excuses, as though I’m trying to justify feeling like this when Terry—’
‘I don’t think so for a minute,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to know what really happened, but I know it doesn’t alter anything.’
‘I didn’t love Terry, Joe, and he didn’t love me. If we’d had time, we’d have realized it and gone our own ways. But the way things have worked out, we can do nothing until after the war, can we?’
‘You know, Sar, I feel a lot better about Terry, about being disloyal to him in my thoughts, but I wouldn’t do anything that would hurt him,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be easy, but we’ll have to keep it dark about how we feel till then.’
‘I talked to Dad,’ Sarah said. ‘Well, he practically asked me. He noticed I was depressed when I heard from Terry, and happy when I got a letter from you, and I was dying to tell someone. He won’t tell anyone else, not even Mum. He said we’ve behaved honourably, and that it might be all right when Terry comes home because he’ll have changed too. I don’t mean have met someone else, but grown up and realized this was a mistake.’
‘I hope he’s right. You’re sure he won’t say anything?’
‘Absolutely,’ Sarah said. ‘Not if he says he won’t, not Dad.’
They kissed again then she said, ‘We’ll have to go, Joe. Where do they think you are?’
‘Church,’ he said with a grin. ‘God forgive me.’ They kissed again and clung together then walked slowly home. At the corner of Egremont Street they kissed again in the friendly dark.
‘This will have to last me for a while now. Oh, Sar, I love, love, love you. I loved you from the minute I saw you.’
‘And I love you, and I always have.’
‘“They never loved who loved not at first sight,”’ Joe said. ‘Time to put the mask on now, love.’ He gave her a swift kiss, and Sarah whispered goodnight and walked away.
She was relieved to find the house empty when she went in, and a note on the table that her dinner was in the oven and her mother would be home at eight o’clock. She looked at herself in the mirror, seeing with dismay her bright eyes and the happiness in her face. Good thing no one was in, she thought. I’ll have to be more careful.
Fortunately Claire and Stephen announced their engagement while Joe was home, and said that they planned to marry in June, and in the excitement at their plans attention was diverted from him.
Joe and Sarah had intended to resume their relationship as it had been before they declared their love, but they found it was impossible and managed several surreptitious meetings before the end of his leave.
‘Just for this leave,’ they told each other, and after that they would be as brother and sister again. Stephen was home on a week’s holiday so he saw Joe off from the station, but Sarah pleaded illness and came out from the office in time to wait in a doorway near the side entrance to the station to see him pass. She thought she was unobserved, but she saw him speak to Stephen who dashed ahead into the station. Joe turned back and kissed her passionately.
They had only a moment before he had to dash after Stephen but when he wrote to her from camp he said that he had seen her and asked Stephen to get him cigarettes. “It meant so much to me, that kiss, Sar,” he wrote, “and to know that you would contrive to be there.”
John came on leave in April, and he and Anne announced that they planned to marry in September, unless John was ordered abroad before then, in which case they would marry on his embarkation leave.
Only a few weeks earlier Claire and Stephen had cancelled their marriage, and Anne said to Sarah that she hoped no one would think that might happen to her and John. ‘Never,’ Sarah said emphatically. ‘I was always a bit doubtful about Claire and Stephen anyway. Good thing they found out in time.’
John went back on May the first. There was a comparatively light air raid that night, followed by eight nights when it seemed that every bomber Hitler possessed was sent over the Liverpool area. Air raids had continued throughout the early months of the year but never, it seemed, with such ferocity.
Cathy, Sarah and Greg were all on duty, and Sally and Kate spent the first night in the street shelter trying to comfort Josie’s children as one explosion followed another and fires made everywhere as bright as day.
‘There’s thousands of them,’ a woman in the shelter said.
Sally said quickly, ‘Some of them are ours.’
When the night ended, Josie said that she was taking the family out of Liverpool. ‘They’re not going through another night like that,’ she said, and Peggy urged Sally and Kate to come with her and Meg to Chrissie’s in Huyton.
Sally refused to go to Chrissie’s. ‘She’s got enough with all your family,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you tell me that thirty-two people slept there during the Christmas raids?’
‘She’ll fit us in,’ Peggy said. ‘I’d take the Major and his wife but he won’t leave the house or let her either.’
When Cathy and Greg came home they added their pleas to Peggy’s. ‘You don’t have to go to Chrissie’s,’ Cathy said. ‘There are rest centres, and we’d feel easier if you were out of this. You and Kate can look after each other. She couldn’t go to work today anyway.’
‘I don’t need to,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t want another night like last night, Grandma.’
It was Greg who clinched the argument by saying wearily, ‘Look, Mam, anyone here who doesn’t need to be is another potential casualty, and we’ve got enough to deal with already.’
Sally agreed to go, but stopped to make a pan of scouse ready for the workers coming home to Cathy’s house, and was taken by surprise when an ARP man came to the door.
‘Mrs Ward? Place for you and your granddaughter in the lorry for Huyton.’
‘But what about my neighbours?’
‘Mrs Meadows is in the lorry with her family,’ he said, and Peggy came o
ut of her house carrying a blanket.
‘I’m going with Meg and Willie,’ she called. She jerked her thumb at the house behind her. ‘They’re staying. Ta ra, Sal.’
There were mattresses on the floor of the rest centre and helpers who made Sally and Kate and the Meadows family as comfortable as possible, but only the children slept.
The air raid began at six-thirty and went on until after five o’clock the following morning. The noise was continuous. An ammunition ship had been bombed the previous night and the cargo was still exploding, to add to the noise of high explosive bombs and land mines and the crash of falling buildings.
‘I wish to God Cathy and Sarah and Greg were here,’ Sally said to Josie. ‘God knows what’s happening there.’
Sarah had been fire-fighting in the office block, but the incendiaries were too numerous for them to deal with, and they were ordered out of the building by the Fire Brigade. Moments later a bomb fell on the burning building, and Sarah and two other girls were brusquely told to “scarper” by a warden.
Buildings were burning all around. Sarah picked her way over the crisscrossed hoses and the masses of debris. She sometimes helped in a canteen and as she walked down a street of small houses which had been demolished, she was seized by a woman who worked there.
‘Sarah Redmond, thank God! Take these people to the school shelters. Someone will look after them there.’
She pushed a woman and some children towards Sarah who realized that they were from a house which lay in ruins beside them. A man’s arm was sticking out of the rubble, fingers outstretched. The woman kept repeating, ‘It’s him. It’s him. The cat done that to his nail. The cat done that to his nail.’
She pulled away from Sarah, looked down again at the hand with its blackened nail and began again her sad refrain, but a priest came up beside her.
‘He’s dead, Ada,’ he said. ‘I gave him absolution but he’s dead. They can’t get him out yet in case the whole thing goes, and there are others further back. Be a good girl now, and go along. Take your children.’ To Sarah he said, ‘Take them to the playground shelter and say Father Hewlett said they have to be looked after.’
Sarah gathered the family together, three children between about four and ten years old and the woman, and took them to the shelter where they were wrapped in blankets and given hot tea. She stayed to help the relief workers who were trying to brew tea and make sandwiches in a corner. ‘Our rest centre was hit so we brought what we could save here,’ one of them explained.
When the raid was over she began to make her way home. In almost every street she passed there seemed to be houses missing, sometimes almost the whole street, and she began to hurry, fearful of what she would find. In such wholesale devastation, surely Egremont Street could not have escaped unscathed? When she came to the corner, she stood still, rooted in horror.
Her grandmother’s house, and Peggy’s, and others on that side of the road, were just piles of rubble. Her own house, although still standing, was without windows or door or chimney pot. Thank God Grandma wasn’t there, was her first thought. She felt a touch on her arm and her mother stood beside her. Neither of them could speak, but only stare at the ruin of Sally’s house and the state of their own. Finally they roused themselves and went to their house, stumbling over bricks and a brass coal scuttle, and the remains of a dog kennel.
They got inside and looked around. Window frames had slipped to strange angles, and the floor was littered with crockery and ornaments and fallen plaster, but it seemed there was no structural damage. ‘Good solid houses these,’ Cathy said. It was some time before Greg joined them, and he agreed that the house could be repaired.
He told them that the Major had been buried when Peggy’s house was hit, and killed, but his wife had been blown through the window and survived. Later Sarah saw her picking over the rubble, then standing looking dazed with a pan in her hand which she had dug up.
She told them without emotion that her husband’s jugular vein had been severed and he had bled to death before he could be reached.
Peggy and Sally were told about what had happened before they saw the remains of their houses. Peggy’s only comment on the Major was ‘Serve him right,’ but she took his wife with her to stay with Meg.
The house opposite to Meg and Willie’s had been hit, and a brass bedstead hung half out into the street with coats still hanging on the wall behind it, but Meg’s house was unharmed. She and Willie had been in a basement shelter all night.
In later years when Sarah looked back at those days and nights of horror, she marvelled that what would have been unimaginable even a year earlier so soon became almost a normal way of life.
She marvelled too at the resilience of people who could still shout jokes to each other after a night of continual bombardment, with death and destruction all around them.
Most of all she looked back with wonder at the fortitude shown by her grandmother and Peggy Burns who could accept the loss of their houses and all that they had collected during a long lifetime, with the comments, ‘No use crying over spilt milk,’ from Peggy, and, ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ from Sally, and even a joke, ‘I never liked that ornament anyway.’
Sally could have told her that she and Peggy had lived long enough to realize that people were more important than possessions, and none of their immediate family had been killed although several were injured.
Cathy’s left arm was scalded when a tea urn exploded when the rest centre was hit, and Peggy’s son Ritchie, who was a fireman, was injured and her eldest son Rob and three of his family trapped for two days in a cellar before being rescued uninjured.
Seeing the Major’s widow with the pan had given Sarah the idea that she might salvage something from Sally’s house. It was just a pile of rubble but there were gaps here and there. Poking about, Sarah saw a hollow where the table had been blown against the grate. She moved some bricks and in the gap saw her grandmother’s handleless teapot and a pipe of Lawrie’s which had stood on the mantelpiece.
Cathy was almost as delighted as her mother to see the teapot. ‘I remember that from when I was a tiny child,’ she said. ‘We always felt safe because there was the handleless teapot to fall back on. It saved my bacon many a time, even after I was married.’
Sally tipped out a pile of silver and a few coppers. ‘I haven’t bothered so much these last years,’ she said, ‘but I remember this when your dad lost his job. I’m thankful to have it back, love.’
In June Hitler invaded Russia. Clothes rationing was introduced also, and Anne told Sarah that she was more concerned about the clothes rationing than the invasion.
‘I should have got everything for the wedding before it happened,’ she said. ‘It’s going to make things very difficult.’
‘I’ve ruined some of my clothes fire-watching’ Sarah told her. ‘Lewis’s rigged their fire-watchers out with wellingtons and clothes and tin hats. We got nothing, needless to say.’
‘I’ve got more money than I ever had,’ said Anne, ‘but I’ve been working such long hours I haven’t had time to spend it. I wish I’d made time.’ A few weeks later she told Sarah that she had changed her mind about the importance of the invasion of Russia by Germany. Instead of being regarded as an enemy, Russia was now welcomed as an ally, and Anne said this made a difference to John.
‘He says suddenly the fellows are all agreeing with him instead of arguing,’ she said, laughing.
‘He’s not arguing there, too, is he?’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘I thought he’d left all that behind when he went in the Army.’
‘You know John,’ Anne said lightly. ‘He’d cause a row in an empty house. Actually he says it’s quite different to civvy street. These are more discussions than arguments, but he was making the point that in Spain he was fighting Fascism, just as he is now.’
‘He used to be always arguing with Dad,’ Sarah said, ‘but they seem quite pally now.’
Anne laughed. ‘Must be somethin
g about eldest sons,’ she said. ‘Tony was always like that with our Dad too.’
‘What about the other lads?’ Sarah said, longing to speak of Joe in whatever context.
‘No, they were all right. In fact, Joe and Maureen always used to act as peacemakers because Mum used to get upset about the rows. Joe used to say that some American, Mark Twain I think, said when he was sixteen he thought his father knew nothing, but by the time he was twenty it was surprising what the old man had learnt.’
Sarah smiled happily, knowing that her face was hidden as they walked through the dark streets, but she only said, ‘Mick never fell out with Dad.’
‘Mick never fell out with anyone, did he?’ said Anne. ‘I hope he can get home for the wedding to be best man.’
‘He will,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s waiting to go to Grading School in Yorkshire, but he’ll only be there three weeks, and should be in Manchester in September.’
Help had poured into Liverpool after the “May Blitz”, as it was being called, and the Redmonds’ house had been quickly patched up. Sally had moved in with them, and the arrangement worked well. All the family loved and respected her, and Mary wrote from America that she was “ecstatically happy” that her mother was with the family.
She also sent numerous parcels of food and clothes which she claimed were “part worn” on the customs declaration so no coupons were claimed for them. Both clothes and food were very welcome, and Sally and Cathy laughed about the parcels which used to come from Fortnum and Mason as they unpacked the chocolate and sugar and dried fruit. ‘You’re not going to turn your nose up at this, are you, Mam?’ Cathy asked.
‘This is different,’ Sally said. ‘Those parcels seemed like charity – as though she thought we were starving – but I suppose she meant well.’
Sally used some of the food to make a magnificent cake for Anne and John’s wedding, and more of the food was put aside for the wedding breakfast.
The small back parlour in her house had been made into a bedroom for Mrs Fitzgerald, who had become weaker and more frail although she was as gentle and uncomplaining as ever. It was a bright, sunny room. Tony papered and painted it, and all the family made it as comfortable as possible for their mother. It soon became the heart of the house.
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