by Knight, Lynn
‘Have a nice time, then, Winnie,’ said Betsy, who knew what was required of her even when she did not approve. ‘But where’s your suitcase?’
‘It’s alright, Mrs Nash.’ Winnie produced her brightest smile. ‘I’ve a clean pair a’ knickers in me handbag.’
Every Chesterfield company engaged in the production of iron and steel turned its capabilities to the war effort. Bomb and shell cases, landmines and gun barrels manufactured locally were said to be on every British fighting ship; the BBC reported on the town’s inaugural production of high-explosive cylinders. The area within a few miles of my great-grandma’s shop contained some key sites: Sheepbridge produced components for Rolls-Royce aircraft engines, while the Staveley Works manufactured anti-tank guns and the man-made fog that would help camouflage troops on D-Day. Far more sobering was Robinson and Son’s production of more than seven million dressings, 25 million bandages, 75,000 yards of bandage cloth and 450 tons of cotton wool. The Peak District played its own distinguished part: Ladybower Reservoir became the vital practice ground for the bouncing bombs used in low-level raids over Germany.
Ethel’s son joined the RAF. She was pleased as punch, or so she insisted. And, of course, she was proud, her smart young man a pilot, the most glamorous job of all, but she was frightened too, and with good reason. Young Rolly was killed during the Battle of Britain. Her only child, shot down in a burst of flame, somersaulting into the endless blue.
The car seats from Jack Hardy’s scrapyard were put to new use as makeshift beds in the Anderson shelter kindly neighbours erected for Annie and Cora. It was cold and damp in the shelter, with only night lights and candles for company and who knows how many spiders. But they had a piece of old carpet for the floor, pillows and plenty of blankets, food, a thermos and, if they were lucky, a square of chocolate left over from the sweet ration.
Annie buys Cora an exercise book and suggests she record their experiences. For the first few weeks, Our Adventures are described each night until Cora is too tired to write; most episodes have to be completed the following day. She is soon bored with the project, however, finding nothing new to say about sitting in the dark every evening. Unlike one of the heroines in her Girls’ Crystal Annual, Cora never chances to encounter and challenge a Nazi spy.
It is often dawn before the All Clear sounds. Giddy with tiredness, they stagger back to the house clutching their pillows and blankets. No matter how many times they emerge from the shelter, Annie is always amazed. Rubbing shoulders with the Sheepbridge plant and a railway line, let alone their proximity to Sheffield, she feels they are living beneath an arrow on the map.
My grandma was wrong, however. The family’s only wartime casualty was Betsy’s youngest brother, Jack, who died, probably as a result of shock, a few weeks after being flung to the ground when a bomb exploded in nearby Duckmanton. The closest anyone else came to a bombing raid was Annie and Cora’s experience of the Sheffield Blitz.
Home to Vickers’ steel works, which produced crankshafts for the Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain, Sheffield was said to contain a half-square-mile that was more essential to the production of munitions than anywhere else in the country. From the moment industry was targeted by German bombers, the city anticipated aerial attacks.
The evening of 12 December 1940 was crisp and clear; people were hurrying across the city, returning home after a day’s work or a little shopping, concentrating on how to make this, the first real Christmas of the war, feel as festive as any other year. Shortly before 7 p.m., an unmistakeable sound filled the sky. The first planes were heading for Sheffield, guided by a near perfect moon.
MR CHURCHILL
Mr Churchill is a man,
A man of great renown,
To whom at last, in deadly fear,
Tyrants must bow down.
Mussolini and Hitler,
These gangsters cruel and sly,
Must answer to our worthy –
(John Bull) by and by.
He is the Premier of England,
A loyal and noble man,
And our job in this war today,
Is to help him all we can.
The British people are proud,
Very proud indeed,
Of this ‘fine old English gentleman’,
Who helped them in their hour of need.
And when the war is over,
And the roaring guns are still,
How we will cheer this great leader,
Mr Winston Churchill.
– Cora Thompson, age 10
Over the next nine hours, three hundred planes bombarded the city. At this stage in the war, there were too few fire-watchers on duty to safeguard its buildings. Shops and offices blazed through the night; the city centre was almost obliterated. A direct hit on the Marples Hotel reduced this seven-storey complex to rubble. Offices, a concert hall, hotel rooms and all their furniture crashed into the cellars on top of sheltering guests. Seventy people died there; the search for survivors lasted twelve days.
Throughout that long unquiet night, Annie and Cora heard the planes overhead. Like everyone else, they had quickly learned to distinguish between Allied and enemy aircraft. They heard the bomb blasts too and hoped they were not next in line. The following morning, the whole neighbourhood was agog with tales of how Sheffield ‘got it’ the night before; some neighbours had left their shelters to watch the inferno. Annie and Cora had no time to stop and compare notes, however: my mum was due in Sheffield for a ballet exam.
In true Blitz spirit, she and Annie caught the bus. They had no telephone, no means of verifying how bad the bombing really was and, anyway, exams were exams. Everyone knew what was required: Courage, Cheerfulness and Resolution.
Nothing prepared Annie and Cora for what greeted them as they walked into the city centre. Dust coated their throats; smoke rose from crumpled heaps of masonry. The doll’s-house furniture shop (usually their first port of call) was still intact, but Walsh’s department store was now rubble.
On a recent visit to Sheffield, Cora had admired an enormous panda in Walsh’s window, his giant paws raised on strings, as if walking; his ears, soft caps of fur; his enormous head nodding up and down as his great, gentle strides took him nowhere. Confronted with this new and shocking sight, the first thing my mum considered, aged ten years old, was that big cuddly body, blasted to coiled wires and matted fur.
The Royal Academy of Dancing examinations took place on the outskirts of Sheffield. There was an unfamiliar bus to catch, which took them on a different kind of mystery tour altogether: past the gaping wounds of eviscerated buildings with cables dangling over plumes of smoke and uniformed men clambering over their remains. Street after street was cordoned off. They were driven past broken roads where roofs dangled perilously over collapsed houses and incongruous strips of wallpaper exposed the innards of people’s homes, past zigzag markings delineating stairways where stairways no longer existed. A peculiar silence wrapped itself about them.
The RAD examiner lived in London and knew that bombers come back. Far better take her chances in the bombed-out capital than in the alien North of England. She was keen to take the students through their paces as quickly as was decently possible. While Annie and the other mothers attempted small talk in the changing room, Cora and her fellow examinees strove for perfect pirouettes. Outside, the city smoked.
The ballet examiner was correct. Three nights later, the bombers returned. Thousands of incendiaries raised fires across the city; factories and railway lines were bombed. More than 750 people were killed or listed as missing and around 500 seriously injured, while damage to property left 6,000 civilians homeless and thousands unemployed. But a few days after the bombardment, the Sheffield Star went to press with a cartoon on its front cover and a one-word caption: ‘Defiant’.
By the time my mum was ten, dancing permeated everything. There were books to read, routines to devour on film, dances to create in the back garden. Council-house concrete made a pe
rfect surface for tap dancing; lino provided a reasonable grip for ballet shoes. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were not the only ones who sang and danced as they walked along the street.
When war was declared, Cora’s dancing certificates were put into the music case my grandma packed for emergencies. The case held no mementoes, just certificates and vital documents, she told my mum, ‘insurance papers and things like that’. Whenever there was an air raid, one of them grabbed it en route to the shelter.
Alone in the house one afternoon (Annie was out Providenting, I expect), my mum decided to look at her dancing certificates. I can see her now, sitting on the bottom stair in the little vestibule with barely sufficient space for bags and coats; it was a good job they never used the front door (except for Willie’s last journey). Cora started sifting through the documents, but, as she withdrew them, something unexpected caught her eye: a blue-grey file that begged to be opened.
This imposing file contains official-looking documents, typed questions and answers and, among the carefully printed lines, the word, ADOPTION. There is a girl’s name too and a city: London. Cora feels hot and cold and absolutely nothing and everything at once but, this time, she is certain. This time, she knows she is the girl in this file.
The words bounce back at her. Their details are impossible to absorb; it is like trying to grasp something fastened under glass. She is herself and someone else as well, the girl she would have been had she not become Annie’s daughter. On top of this shock, and just as intense, is the knowledge she is trespassing among Annie’s private papers. She has no sense that these documents are also hers. Instead, my mum feels guilty. The papers belong to Annie and Annie does not want her to see them.
Cora loves her mam and knows Annie’s love for her needs no formal documentation. She folds the right board back to the centre and the left board on top of that, and taking one final look at the stiff blue-grey cover, restores the file to the music case. Annie does not want her to know she is adopted and so Cora decides to pretend that she does not: ‘Annie wanted me to belong entirely to her. I wanted to belong to Annie. I felt very secure and happy with Annie, although I still very much missed Willie. But Annie was my mother and she was also my friend. The present was my life and I’d get on with it. I also knew that unless Annie told me all she knew, there was no way of finding out.’
22
Silver Shoes
IN THE EARLY 1940S MY MUM WAS ALLOWED TO WALK unaccompanied from Racecourse Road to Wheeldon Mill. She had seen The Wizard of Oz and, during summer months, often walked to her grandma’s in the gingham ‘Dorothy’ dress Annie made for her. The yellow-brick road Cora followed held its own perils in the form of two major junctions. The easiest place to cross Sheffield Road was by the council-cut patch of grass which afforded the clearest view. Then began the long walk up the Coal Road, past the allotments spiked with raspberry canes and pea sticks, and taking especial care at the busy spot where her grandad came to grief in the accident that partially crippled him.
The jam factory announced its presence with its usual cloying sweetness before Cora ducked under the railway bridge, the first of three, shouting loud enough to startle the echo before it could surprise her. Out once more into the air again, past the stubby row of houses near the little shop whose exterior wall shone with a sheet of dark blue tin advertising Five Boys’ chocolate; trailing her palm along the dusty hawthorn bushes that lined this part of the route, pausing to say hello to Eva’s friend Mrs Healey, if she happened to be in her front garden. The houses on the left side of the street petered out here. This was the scrag end of town, with more scrubland than houses, but that did not worry Cora. She had no ruby slippers to protect her, but Betsy and Toto were waiting up ahead.
The ground beyond the second railway bridge was sharp with pottery breakages. This was one of the grey tips (shord rucks) where Pearson’s Pottery dumped its apologies and failures. There was often an adult scavenging for something: a pie dish in one piece, ideally, one not so cracked as you’d notice once it was filled with stew, or whose clay protuberances would disappear beneath a pie crust. There were clay moulds, too, bulky ornaments kids presented to their mothers who thanked them for these offerings and eventually shoved them in the bin. For a child, ‘pickin on’t tip’ offered contemplative pleasures, an urban equivalent of shell seeking. There were never any glorious discoveries, however. Pearson’s Pottery manufactured functional stoneware in brown, khaki, beige. Still, its lumps of clay were good for chalking on walls and pavements, as some at the Mill knew to their cost.
Just past Pottery Lane was the house built by George Harding, no longer a terrifying figure in a battered hat, but a friendly milk-man, who nearly always had a cheery message for Betsy and Eva. Just beyond the third and final railway bridge, near some damp, spare ground, a young woman had set up camp in a gypsy wagon. Though she used the corner shop occasionally, she was not one of the gypsies Cora knew. She thought her brave, living alone on this waste ground, an odd place for a woman by herself. On the opposite side of the road, the low baby wall, so-called because toddlers liked to run along it holding an adult’s hand, revealed how easily you could reach the River Rother. Too easily: this was where one of my mum’s Wheeldon Mill playmates drowned.
She is not far from the corner shop. Were it not for the rising gradient and the trees, its doorway would be visible already. Over the little railway bridge and, finally, the bridge across the canal. Betsy is looking through the sweet window. She knows to expect Cora, and waves.
George wrote to Annie. He was now a Major passing through Chesterfield. Could he call and see her?
Annie had had to pinch herself the last time she saw George. It was shortly before the war, and she and Cora and Eva were at the Lyceum, when the programme switched to the news, and there he was. Up on the screen, a participant in the unfolding drama: the will we/won’t we question that hung over everyone in the late 1930s. While a plummy voice spoke in modulated tones of ongoing efforts, the grave political situation, and so on, there was George, in a pinstriped suit and bowler, being handed papers by another pinstriped suit, and preparing to leave for France
‘Well I never,’ Annie said, when she finally found her voice. ‘I wondered where that fellow had got to.’ The Twentieth Century Fox searchlight raked the screen and the theme music announced the main feature, but Annie remained transfixed by the thought of George and his mysterious hush-hush role. Not everything he did could be predicted.
George said nothing of his pinstriped moment when he reached Racecourse Road, and the war meant Annie could not enquire. And, anyway, there was plenty to distract them. This was his first visit to the house. George could not call while Willie was alive. I wonder what he and Annie thought when she opened the back door to greet him? But theirs was not an evening à deux. Cora and Eva accompanied them to the cinema.
There was nothing like walking out with a Major. Their progress was continually interrupted by sharp salutes. This was no trip to the local Lyceum, with commissionaire Bobby Teasle issuing commands on where they all should sit, but a bus ride into town and the Chesterfield Regal. There was no munching on a wartime carrot either (ice creams being unattainable), but an extremely rare treat, also courtesy of George – a large box of Black Magic chocolates, with a scarlet tassel dangling from its lid.
They saw Dark Victory and watched Bette Davies smoulder and suffer. ‘There’s been no one but you,’ she said, a sentiment surely not lost on George. But this was one evening only and a curfewed evening, at that. No sooner had he escorted them all back to Racecourse Road (more salutes on the return journey), than it was time for their farewells. George said goodnight at the gate. Brass buttons, officer’s khaki, shiny leather; Annie watched him retrace his steps.
George’s story did not conclude with him striding into the sunset, followed by crisp salutes. Many years later, after his wife’s death, that honourable man wrote to my grandma. But they were both in their eighties and the prospect of meeting t
oo daunting for Annie. It was all too late. My grandma never saw George again.
Once my mum was at senior school, Annie was slightly less concerned about leaving her alone for an hour while she finished Providenting. The key was slipped beneath the push-pull mower in the lavatory; a sharp twist of the knob opened the back door, and into the kitchen with its invariably dripping tap. There was always a fire – Annie returned mid-afternoon to stoke it, all it needed was a little encouragement from the poker – but even a fire could not cheer the empty house. There were no songs, no laughter, no teasing questions about Cora’s day. There was no whistling, either. When Cora was alone, the house was a small tight capsule of grief and silence.
It broke, of course, the minute Annie came bustling through the door, carrying the night air with her; ‘Put the kettle on, while I start tea. Guess who I’ve just seen?’; fishing for her apron in the kitchen drawer while Cora laid the table. They were companions as well as mother and daughter.
Much would have been different had my mum not been an only child. When she was small, Cora longed for a sister and used to tell new friends she’d once had a sister who died. However, unlike most only children, she was not often by herself. When at Racecourse Road, she was usually with the Blakes, and even bathed there. Mrs Blake’s brother was a miner and assisted her with coal, some of which she passed on to Annie. But it took a lot of coal to heat water for a bath and so sometimes Cora bathed next door, despite Mrs Blake having her own large family; their neighbour constantly helped Annie and Cora. Their kitchen windows faced each other. Each night, just before the curtains were closed, the children of each household stood in pyjamas and waved to one another, like characters in a storybook.
Cora had now progressed to the Iliffe School of Dancing. (Miss Mason had married and taken her last curtain call.) My mum’s first classes with her new teacher took place on the sprung maple floor of the Odeon ballroom. She felt she was dancing on Broadway.