Child from Home

by John Wright

  It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. How do you tell young children such a devastating, life-changing thing as that? At first the words, which fell like hammer blows, failed to register and I sat there with trembling hands unable to speak, until grief overwhelmed me and the tears came. I don’t know how long I cried for but it set George off and Gran, with her shoulders stooped, put her arms around us and held us to her capacious bosom. Nothing had prepared me for this bolt from the blue and the finality of death was just too hard to grasp. Mam and Dad had gone forever! In the space of just a few seconds my life had been irreversibly changed.

  Mrs Harris had packed our cases beforehand, not that we had much to put in them, and, as far as I can remember, Mr Harris was out at work. The farewells were brief and perfunctory with no tears and no promise of any reunions. I can’t honestly remember much of the bus ride into York and the train journey home except for a brief glimpse of the towers of the Minster soaring up above the rooftops. I must have been in a state of shock the whole way but I clearly remember us walking down King George Street to Gran’s house in the hazy August sunshine. The long terraces of old, two-up, two-down street houses were brick-built and it all seemed so drab, grimy and grey, and there was a closed-in feel about everything after nearly five years of life in the wide, open spaces of the countryside. Gran had Archie and Renee at home, so the sleeping arrangements had to be changed to accommodate us. If Gran hadn’t taken us in we would have been put into the grim Victorian orphanage at Nazareth House.

  There was still no electricity in the house, which was lit by two swan-necked gaslights on the chimneybreast in the kitchen. On going to bed we had a candle in a holder, which was placed on a chair next to the bed, the only other furniture being a wardrobe and a small dressing table under the window. The coalhouse and toilet were at the bottom of the yard, so there were chamber pots under the bed for use during the night and there was no bathroom. The table took up most of the space in the tiny kitchen. Gran’s wooden rocking chair stood by the side of the black-leaded fire range and an old, leather-covered chaise longue stood beneath the casement window. There was a cupboard under the stairs and a step led down into a pantry with a rectangular, white-glazed sink. The back door led into a small area under a closed-in lean-to, in the corner of which was a gas cooker.

  As I climbed the steep stairs with their strip of threadbare carpet, I noticed that there was a quarter of an inch gap between them and the wall, and it dawned on me that it had been caused by the blast from the bomb that had killed Mam and Dad. The realisation caused a big black cloud to descend on me and I felt utterly bereft and alone. I sat on the stairs and sobbed my heart out for my dead parents and what might have been. Gran left me to get on with it and, when I had cried myself out, I crawled up the stairs on all fours and got into bed and snuggled up to George, who was sound asleep, and I must have eventually dropped off. The next day my emotions were in turmoil, life seemed wearisome and I did not want to go out or to meet anyone. I found refuge in the small space between the front door and the inner glass-paned door where I sat brooding for a long time – a sad, listless little boy striving hard to remember what his parents looked like. George couldn’t remember them at all as he had been only five when they died, but I had fleeting and poignant memories of their deep and tender love. In my mind Mam and Dad would remain forever young and fair, but I began to cry at the thought that I would never again see their beloved faces. As another wave of grief hit me, I curled up with my arms around my bent knees and rocked back and forth.

  In our society death is usually hidden from us as we grow up, which makes it all the more shocking when we have to confront it. The only other place in which I could grieve undisturbed was in the brick lavvy down the yard where I would sit feeling sorry for myself. Never again would Mam wake me in the morning with a kiss or take me on her knee and explain things. Never again would Dad dandle me; tickle me; throw me in the air to catch me in his strong arms or gallop and prance around with me on his broad shoulders. At these thoughts an unspeakable sadness welled up and my small frame was wracked by sobs that hurt inside and out. When the tears that coursed down my cheeks one after the other dried up, I went back into the house with my eyes red-rimmed and sore. I could see the pain and anguish reflected in poor Gran’s eyes, for after all my Mam was her eldest daughter and who can ever know a mother’s pain when their own flesh and blood is taken from them.

  I seemed to see the world differently then and there was a void; a big black hole; a nothingness where there should have been a mother’s love and the emptiness was unbearable. I had never felt more alone in my life and when Renee took me out to show me the bombed area, I became jealous of other kids when I saw them doing things with their parents. The roads had been cleared and the rubble of the broken houses had been made safe but the scene brought home to me the horror and the reality of that dreadful night. Powerful emotions kept bubbling up and in my utter distress I sobbed so much that Renee was obliged to take me back to the house. I was like a sleepwalker and found it hard to carry out even simple tasks. On the Sunday I went to St Cuthbert’s church with Gran and Renee but it seemed as if it wasn’t me walking around, the real me was locked inside. When the vicar spoke of Jesus Christ crying out, ‘God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ at his crucifixion, I knew the feeling, and I started to feel a sudden anger and bitterness towards Him for having dropped such a devastating bombshell on me when He was meant to protect us. How could He have let such a thing happen? What had I done to deserve it?

  Later I sat behind the front door shouting at Him and the Germans, who I hated with a passion for taking Mam and Dad away from me. As I wallowed in self-pity, Gran must have heard me, for she took me into the front room and, sitting me down on the settee, cuddled me and tried to console me. But I got angry with her as well, as Renee had told me that everybody knew, except me and George, and they had said nothing. All the teachers and the nurses when I was in hospital must have known and they had kept quiet about it. Even Jimmy knew! I shouted out, ‘Why did this have to happen to me? Why didn’t you tell me? You lied to us and I’ll never forgive you for it!’

  The terrible hurt that Gran had endured at the time of the bombing and in telling us never entered my self-centred mind, but I was to feel guilt at the way I had treated her as I grew older. ‘I was only trying to protect you. I thought that telling you when you seemed so happy would only upset you. I thought it best to wait until you were a bit older. I didn’t want to hurt you when you were so young and far away from home,’ she said in an apologetic tone. Feeling that God had let me down, I longed for someone to reassure me; to take away my deep sadness and to answer the thousand and one questions that filled my head. I became surly and diffident and suffered spells of melancholy with long silences as the ‘whys of it all’ gnawed away at me. Gran said, ‘Still waters run deep’, which I didn’t understand. At other times I whinged and chuntered on and on, until Gran said in exasperation, ‘Whisht now, you’ve got my head splitting. You’d better get that chip off your shoulder young man or nobody will want anything to do with you.’ An enduring anger was to simmer inside me for many years and I told myself that I did not need anybody. I became reticent and found it difficult to show affection and just wanted to be left alone.

  Gradually the debilitating grief gave way to a grudging acceptance and I locked the pain away in my heart where it could not be reached. My personal tragedy had eclipsed everything and the emotional pain lay there like a long, dull ache that never went away. Eventually there were no more tears. I had reached that stage of grieving when a strange sense of relief descends as the first wave of grief passes and I slowly emerged from my self-made cocoon. I needed some of that spirit that Mr Churchill had shown when he had said, ‘We must fight or go under!’ I had to buck up and get on with life. I decided that it was fate; you had no choice in the matter: what will be will be!

  Shortly afterwards Jimmy called at the house and knocked on the front door as I w
as sitting behind it. Many years later he told me that he had heard a squeaky voice call out, ‘Who is it?’ It was great to see him again after fourteen long months apart, but luckily grief does not linger too long in the very young and by that time the blackness had lifted sufficiently for me to start taking an interest in the things around me again. Jimmy had known the same bitter taste of grief and loss as I had and had got over it, but it affected our outlook on things for the rest of our lives. We picked up where we had left off, as if we had never been apart, and he came round to play with me and the local lads nearly every day but, after our tragic loss and the cruel treatment at the hands of Mrs Harris, our self-esteem was low and we were lacking in confidence.

  It took some time to get used to the miasma created by the steel and chemical works and the incessant metallic clanging from the nearby rail sidings. We played in the drab dusty streets and back alleys and got into all kinds of scrapes, but Jimmy’s presence helped to lift me out of my sullen, withdrawn frame of mind. The resilience of childhood came to my aid again, and we climbed all over the mountains of rubble and the charred beams that were being colonised by weeds, and made dens in it so that I didn’t have time to brood too much. It felt strange seeing the broken toilet pans, the empty fireplaces, the pictures and the wallpaper in bedrooms that were open to the sky. They looked like the insides of damaged dolls’ houses and I felt a bit guilty, as though I was prying into people’s private lives (or deaths).

  Gran thought that we were out playing games in the street, which we were most of the time, but at other times we were clambering about on the rubble or in the bomb-damaged house on the corner of the block opposite. It had been boarded up but we forced the back gate and the door and climbed the rickety, creaking stairs, edging our way round the huge gaps in the bedroom floorboards and risking a drop of sixteen feet or so into the cellar below. It was scary but exciting and anyway Jimmy had dared me and I couldn’t refuse a dare.

  It was quite a while before Gran told me the details of that awful night. It seems that Dad had arranged to take some leave that weekend and Mam had come home to meet him, as they were to go to Grove House to collect George before bringing him to live with us in Haxby. They had packed a case with clothes, shoes and toys and had left it in the front room ready for first thing in the morning. They had just got into bed when the siren sounded at 10.37 p.m., as enemy aircraft were in the area. The warning was late and not many people had managed to make it to the underground shelters a hundred yards away on The Common. They could hear the droning of a Dornier overhead as they stepped out of the front door. A bomb dropped right on the house and they were crushed under the falling masonry, never hearing the continuous note of the ‘Raiders Passed’ siren at 1.27 a.m. Renee had been eating her supper after a two till ten shift at the steelworks when the first of four bombs landed nearby, with four more falling into the river. She had dashed down Booth Street heading towards our house and was horrified on seeing the devastation. The wrecked and badly damaged houses were illuminated by a great column of flame from a gas main that had been fractured by the explosion. As searchlights and flashes from the anti-aircraft guns lit the sky, the steel-helmeted policemen would not let anyone near and Renee feared the worst as the area was quickly cordoned off. In her desperation to find Mam and Dad, who she loved so much, she dodged under the tape and an ARP warden shouted ‘Looter!’ She was grabbed hold of but her desperation gave her extra strength and she fought him, but eventually she had to give up and go home. It was Middlesbrough’s worst night for fatalities with twenty-eight killed, including Mam and Dad and eleven children, and, as Gran said afterwards, ‘If you hadn’t been evacuated, you’d have been among ’em.’

  It took the heavy rescue squads three days to dig the mangled bodies out of the rubble and Mam’s light-brown hair had turned completely white, so that, when Renee went with Gran to the cold, white-tiled mortuary at the General Hospital, she did not recognise her at first. She told me many years later that, ‘Your Mam’s skirt was blown off by the blast and your Dad was identified by his tattoos, which included the badge of the Royal Artillery on his right arm, and by certain items in his pockets.’ Gran said, ‘Before the funeral service at St Cuthbert’s church and the burial at Acklam Cemetery, Mrs Ethel Gaunt was really kind to us. She and your Mam had been very close and she loaned us clean white sheets to cover the mirrors and to put up at the windows.’ It seems that in Suffolk, where Gran’s ancestors originated, they held the belief that the reflection of a person in a mirror held that person’s soul and it was customary to cover them to stop the devil gaining access to it. Gran then said, ‘Mrs Gaunt kindly paid for the bodies to be laid out in our front room.’

  At least I had not been there when the stillness of death had pervaded the house, and had been spared from hearing the hollow thud as soil was thrown down onto the coffins, which lay one above the other. I think my anger would have flared up if I had been present, when the vicar had proclaimed, ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take to Himself Evelyn and Alf …’ The Imperial War Graves Commission paid for a rose bush and headstone with their names and the badge of the Royal Artillery engraved upon it. In Haxby I had carried on blithely, completely unaware of these catastrophic, life-changing events, but I wouldn’t say that my ignorance had been bliss.

  As soon as she was able to get to the wreckage of our house, Renee had searched through the rubble for any trace of Mam and Dad’s prized possessions but all she ever found was a bent spoon. She swore that Mam had a hundred pounds in a tin in the cupboard under the stairs but there was no trace of it. The rubble remained there until after the war ended, when it was used to fill in the underground air-raid shelters on The Common.

  In early September I started at the local Junior School, the same school that Mam and all her brothers and sisters had attended over the years, and at which Jimmy had been a pupil for just over a year. The Victorian, brick-built school (founded in 1884) was tucked away behind a beetle-ridden pie factory (we called the shiny, hard-backed bugs ‘blacklocks’), the flea-ridden Pavilion cinema and The Acklam public house on Newport Road. Half of the school buildings were being used by St Paul’s, the school just up the road, which had been destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941. Miss Leng was the headmistress of the girls’ school, the boys’ head was Mr Hague and my teacher was Miss Trewitt, who was man-like and had a thin black moustache. It took some time to adjust to the smelly old classroom, that was crowded with so many strange people and things, but Jimmy was in the year above me and he protected me from the rough, uncouth lads in the playground. Being orphans George and I were now entitled to free dinners. Jimmy again showed me where the best sweets and lovely, creamy ‘Dainty Dinah Toffees’ and cinder toffee could be bought at ‘Toffee’ Turner’s little shop on the corner.

  At home we had baths in front of the fire in the zinc-coated tub that usually hung on a nail in the back yard, and we had to go to the outside lavvy in all weathers. Its brick walls were whitewashed and a supply of toilet paper (made by tearing the pages of the Radio Times into four small squares) hung on a nail beside the high cistern. To get to it we had to hurry past Gran’s chickens – which were meant to provide us with fresh eggs but had turned out to be cockerels – that pecked at our bare legs. Archie, now twenty years old, went down Cannon Street to the slipper baths where he paid sixpence for a good bath every week.

  Every day I carried the hurt of my loss with memories forever crowding in on me. I suffered morbid nightmares in which I saw my parents mangled in the rubble; their life-blood draining into the dust from the hideous wounds in their bodies, which had the waxy whiteness of alabaster. As the light – which had once shone with joy and love – left their eyes, they slipped away into the long, deep darkness of death and I would wake with a start to find that I had been crying. In my sleep-fuddled state it would slowly dawn on me once again that they were no more. They say that those whom the gods love die young, so may they sleep long and well in that silence beyond
all suffering. In other dreams I would picture Mam coming through the door smiling with love shining in her eyes, and I knew that their spirits had gone to heaven and were watching over me and one day I would be with them again. I sensed their presence in the air that I breathed and in the wind that ruffled my hair. How sad to die in your thirties but, as they say, ‘Time like an everlasting stream bears all its sons away.’

  Gran was very friendly with the Reynolds family who lived next door but one to her. She had befriended the Nichol family when they first came to live in Middlesbrough from County Durham in the 1920s and Lily Reynolds was Mrs Nichol’s sister. We called Lily Reynolds The News of the World as she was always gossiping and she knew everybody’s business, and Gran used to say, ‘If you want anything spreading around, just tell her.’ One day, when I was in the back alley, her ten-year-old son Terry made some disparaging remark about my Mam – something about her being a do-gooder – and I saw red and laid into him. I beat the hell out of him and had to be dragged away as blood was pouring from his nose onto my hands. After that, instead of looking on me as a soft country bumpkin, the local lads showed me much more respect and Terry and I became good pals.

  I also became friendly with the local lads. Day-to-day life took over and we played the usual street games of tee-ack, leapfrog, tip-tap and marbles (we called the glass ones ‘alleys’ and the big, much-sought-after metal ones ‘bongies’). We tied ropes to the crosspieces at the top of the lampposts and swung round on them like Tarzan, and we played football and cricket in the street with a wicket or goal chalked on the wall of the gable end of the house opposite us. Most Saturday mornings we went to the matinees at ‘The Pav’, which we called ‘the penny push’, to see The Adventures of Flash Gordon or The Perils of Pauline, which always ended in a cliff-hanger with the hero or heroine in grave danger of death but always managing to escape unharmed in time for the next episode. On many occasions the film broke down and we shouted remarks like, ‘Put a penny in the gas meter!’ and stamped our feet until the film resumed. I even remember being taken by Renee to see Charlie Chaplin in the silent film The Gold Rush, in which he was so hungry that he boiled his boots and ate them putting the nails on the side of his plate as if they were small bones. A pianist played quickly or slowly to correspond with the action; the dialogue was printed out on the screen and the films were changed twice a week. Food rationing was still very rigorous and on returning to Gran’s house we were often sent out again to stand for an hour or more in the long queue outside Meredith’s bakery shop on nearby Union Street. After standing all that time, we got just one rice cake to share between the five of us, which was all that each customer was allowed.