Lime Street at Two

by Helen Forrester

  Throughout the previous four months, there had been scattered raids causing a fair amount of damage. But we had slept undisturbed for a week or two before the May blitz, and had been lulled into a false sense of security.

  We were all in our night clothes, and Brian and Tony had been in bed for some time, when, on the first night, the siren went. The clatter of incendiaries, the sound of bomb explosions and the roar of guns all seemed to come together immediately after the wail of the warning, and we tumbled down the stairs to shelter on the cellar steps. Now we shivered in the dank cold, heads on knees to protect our faces —of all injuries, young people seemed to dread most being blinded or having their faces disfigured. The family were shivering but none of them panicked, and we talked and made jokes to sustain each other, though our voices sounded oddly muffled through pyjamas and nightdresses.

  After a stricken moment or two, Iremembered the sound of incendiaries and that I was on fire duty that night, so I left the top step on which I was sitting and, with a muttered explanation to Mother, went through the shaking house, snatched up my overcoat from its peg in the front hall and slipped it over my faded, pink nightgown. Then I cautiously opened the front door. No one was in the street and there was no sign of flares on the opposite roofs. Keeping my head down between my shoulders, I ran across the road, bare feet pattering clearly in tiny breaks in the noise. I looked up at the roofs on our side of the road.

  Nothing.

  Very thankfully, I ran back into the house, through it and out of the back door, to look at the rear of the houses in the next street. They seemed all right, so I opened the yard door and went into the smelly alley which ran between our yard and the adjacent ones of the next street. I looked up at our roof and the other roofs in the block. All were dark, though the sky above looked like a Coronation firework display.

  Sickened by the odour of urine roundme and acutely aware of my bare feet in the filthy alley, I turned to go indoors again, and bumped into someone else.

  I was more frightened by the sudden contact than I was by the raid itself, and I nearly fainted. A pair of arms were pushed under mine and I was unceremoniously heaved to my feet again.

  "Aye, luv, what's to do?" asked our faithful air raid warden.

  "Oh," I said in relief. "I was checking the roofs. It's my turn tonight."

  "Miss Forrester?"

  "Yes." You was falling. Are you faint?" You frightened me so much," I laughed shakily.

  "Sorry. You get indoors. I'll shout if there's need."

  "Thanks." I felt my way back to the door. Before entering I scrubbed my feet thoroughly on the bit of coconut matting which served as a door mat. Not even the zooming planes above and the sharp rap of ack-ack fire outweighed the sense of sick revulsion at what I had probably walked through in the alley.

  The tremendous throbbing of aeroplane

  engines above our heads and the quick response of the guns immediately after the warning, told us that this was probably going to be a very heavy raid, and so it proved. Both sides of the Mersey were pounded.

  As the house shuddered over us from a nearby explosion, and a slate slid down the roof and shattered in the street, Mother said, "I hope Fiona is all right."

  "I hope so, too," I agreed through the folds of my nightgown covering my knees.

  As promised in her parting note, Fiona had telephoned me at the office, and had given me her address, a bed-sitting room in a southern suburb, not far from the factory in which she worked. She had made me swear that I would not tell our parents where she was, and I had unwillingly agreed, knowing very well what a fierce family battle there would be if Mother suspected that I knew her address. All I told Mother was that Fiona had said, over the telephone, that she was living in a most respectable house.

  Now, feeling sorry for Mother, I said hesitantly, "She's living well away from the city centre.""I am glad. Mother's voice sounded flat and tired. She had always leaned on Fiona for company because she was hopelessly isolated from her own kind.

  It obviously had not occurred to my parents that they could have traced their errant daughter through her employers. Perhaps a factory seemed so huge and alien to them, a place where anonymous employees were simply swallowed up every morning, their identities unknown, that it seemed an impossible task. While I sat Ust-ening to the fierce detonations outside, I decided that one night I would tell Mother I would be working late, and then go to see Fiona; I wanted to be sure that she was really taking good care of herself.

  As the clock crawled towards midnight, we became very silent, each one of us nursing his own fear, afraid to say anything lest we lose our courage and become hysterical.

  We all jumped with surprise when, soon after one o'clock, the all clear sounded. While the rest of the family stumped back up the stairs to bed. Father and I followed our usual practice after a night attack, and went out into the street to take a lookround. Several of the neighbours were doing the same thing.

  Towards the city centre the sky was red, sparks eddying amid heavy clouds of smoke, while white pillars of flame from broken gas mains lunged upwards.

  The streets on either side of us and our own street were apparently undamaged, and we whispered to our neighbours our relief that it should be so, as if speaking in normal voices would wake the neighbourhood. If there were anyone left asleep after such pandemonium as we had just endured, it would have been the sudden silence that would have woken him!

  Like everyone else, Father and I were very shaken by the intensity of the raid, and before he went up to bed. Father sat down to smoke a cigarette. Knowing from childhood how even a thunderstorm could evoke again in his mind the roar of the battlefield, and reduce him to tears, I was loath to leave him, so I pulled a chair out from beside the table, and sat down to gossip a minute or two. He offered me a cigarette, and I laughed and took it. He had to demonstrate to me exactly how to smoke it, and I found it soothing. Afterthat, I kept in my handbag a packet of cigarettes, mostly American ones culled from the purveyors on the Installation, and I smoked through the long, boring periods of waiting which a war brings. I smoked in innumerable queues, fish queues, sausage queues, greengrocer's queues, and bureaucratic queues for ration books or Government information, for stamps or a turn in a public telephone booth. Sometimes I smoked while waiting for dates under the clock in Lime Street station.

  Walking to work through Princes Park the following morning, it was as peaceful as untouched countryside. The guns stood silent amid their camouflage, and, overhead, silver barrage balloons floated like cuddly toys put there for the amusement of children. Outside the park the tranquil-Uty was not so apparent. An ambulance came out of a side street where there was a flurry of uniforms. The driver was going very slowly, indicating that she was ferrying someone in great pain, and I trembled at the amount of suffering being endured. It must have been a bad incident, I decided.

  Incident had become a word which, tome, made little of death and destruction. There had grown up a sickening gobbledygook, as the Government, to avoid panic, sought to minimise what was happening. The upbeat stories in the newspapers were often nauseating in their hyperbole. The true bravery of the survivors and the dying, in the face of appalling suffering, was often overlaid by a description which made a raid sound like a football match we had unfortunately failed to win; better luck next time.

  Sadly, I marched on to work. In the office, we silently looked round the desks, a quick glance by each arrival to see who was missing. When all the desks were full, we settled soberly down to work. Each day of that dreadful week we did the same. If someone was late, our hearts sank, and we would see the same worry in each other's eyes.

  Towards the end of the week, our office boy who lived considerably further up the coast, in Southport, failed to arrive.

  "He's as safe as houses up there," we told each other. "He must be ill."

  He came in after lunch, fair hair roughand uncombed, the rest of him smudged and untidy. He grinned broadly when he saw our anxio
us faces. "It took a bit of time to dig us out," he announced casually.

  A bomber with a fighter in pursuit had jettisoned its remaining cargo; a bomb had hit his home. They had lost everything, but had survived themselves, unhurt.

  The outside staff and the roster of firewatchers for that week had a very busy time, trying to avoid fire on the Installation. Even though we had our own fire brigade, a lot of help was needed to watch for incendiaries, or unexploded bombs or shells, falUng amid the tanks. It was while on fire-duty during this week that a member of the outside staff won the George Cross for his outstanding bravery.

  One night, the end of the Installation's jetty was blown off. Here, American tankers were tied up and their contents pumped through pipelines running the length of the jetty, straight into the storage tanks. When the river end of the pipes was damaged, oil spewed into the water before the flow could be stemmed, andthe Mersey suddenly became a deadly menace.

  Wardens ran from house to house, and the news was spread by telephone from dock to dock along the river, not to so much as strike a match for twenty-four hours, while two tides swept up and down the river and cleared the spill.

  As the week progressed, the national newspapers reported nonchalantly that there had been a raid on a North West town. But by word of mouth, ominous stories reached us, even in our rather isolated workplace. We could see the heavy pall of smoke over the city centre, and on the wind came the smell of burning rubber, roasting wheat and peculiar chemical odours, and over all, and lasting the longest, the smell of wet ruins of plastered walls.

  Officially, the city was not under martial law. The Board's lorry drivers reported, however, that soldiers were on guard in a number of places and were helping with the rescue work. They said, also, that the roads into the city were janmied with fire engines, caterpillar tractors and lorries, and buses full of workmen.

  After several nights, I stopped in the yard one morning to ask a group of drivers waiting for their tanker lorries to be filled whether any of them had been to Bootle.

  One took his cap off to me and said he had.

  "What's it Uke?" I inquired. "Is the damage very great?"

  "It's bad. Very bad. Supposed to be eighty per cent of the houses flat or damaged. Have you got friends there. Miss?"

  I sighed, as, in my mind's eye, I saw the packed waiting room and the weary, ragged queue on the staircase. "Yes," I repUed. "I have a lot of friends there."

  "Sorry, Miss."

  I smiled up at his deeply Uned face, eyes almost lost in wrinkles with much driving. "Thank you."

  Considering how great even its normal need of help was, there were very few social workers in Bootle. Now, the inhabitants must be desperate. So often, after being rescued from their smashed homes, it was middle-aged women who had to trail about ^on foot, children clinging to their hands, to find a place to live, to getnew documentation—like ration cards, or pension books for the elderly, visit those members of the family in hospital or arrange burial for those who had died. And frequently they had no money whatever,

  I knew that, at first, they would be defiantly cheerful, though shaking with shock. Their sorrow and despair would strike them a few days later.

  As the week progressed, I thought of the fatigue of the police, the firemen, the wardens, the Women's Voluntary Service, the First Aid and the rescue squads. During that week, most of them never had a proper wash or took their clothes off, and they had, of course, no knowledge that the seventh consecutive raid would be the last of the series. The Germans afterwards turned their attention to London and Glasgow. The Luftwaffe was also being regrouped for the invasion of Russia —a piece of news which left us speechless when we were faced with it about six weeks later.

  Meanwhile, not only Bootle, but the whole city was constantly showered by the ash of the records of hundreds of offices,their burning files drawn upwards by the draught of the fires to make a dismal pall for a considerable time, until finally it was washed out of the air by rain, and the residue dusted up by housewives and street cleaning crews.

  On the seventh day, I was so quiet as I prepared my payroll, that one of the male clerks asked me what was the matter.

  I was near to tears, as I responded heavily, "I feel I've left Bootle when they needed people like me the most. They'll be in an awful mess after this. I should never have left."

  Although I must have sounded a Uttle pompous, he was sympathetic. "You might be able to get leave from here for a week or two," he suggested, and after a second's thought, he added, "without pay."

  "You think I could? I'll ask Miss Hughes at lunchtime."

  Like everyone else, I was so tired simply from lack of sleep, that all I wanted to do was put my head down on the desk and nap off. Everybody tried to keep going, however, and, for myself, I often felt that if for one moment I let go of my usualroutine, I would collapse, simply fall apart mentally with fear and fatigue.

  By lunch time, my courage began to fail. The old fear of being dismissed for absence engulfed me, of being without a job and kept at home by a triumphant mother. I thought with growing dread of asking a favour of the rude man in the bowler hat, of his wandering gaze and coarse speech, or, even worse having to go to see the manager of the entire installation, a vague authoritarian figure, of whom the girls spoke in whispers, a personage who in five years I saw only once.

  After eating my bread and margarine, I went for a little walk along the single paved road of the Installation. The smell of petrol spoiled the lovely day, and I could understand why many of the older employees suffered from ulcers.

  Near the main gate guarded by the pohce, I met the Head Stenographer, Miss Hughes, a lady who, like the regular staff in my httle office, usually kept a httle apart from the wartime temporary employees. She stopped, however, and beamed and asked if everything was all right.I replied with genuine feeling, "Oh, yes. Everybody is very nice." I wanted to say to her that, to me, it was like having a new, extra family to love and admire. But she would have thought I was mad. It was unlikely that she had ever been quite so lonely, so isolated, torn from her natural roots, as I had been.

  She seemed in no hurry to leave me, so I asked her what she thought about my taking leave of absence for a couple of weeks, to work among the bombed-out in Bootle.

  She pursed her lips while she considered the question. Then she said in a doubtful voice. "You might get it—as long as you don't expect to be paid—I can't imagine them paying you while you were away. Do you really want to go?"

  I sighed. "Well, I know Bootle so well, and they wouldn't have to teach me anything—as they would an inexperienced person. I could get on with a lot of work for them."

  She looked me up and down, and cleared her throat. Then she said decisively, "I don't think you should worry about it. Somebody will have taken overyour job, I expect—and there's a lot of outside help coming into the town now. For the moment, they'll need brawn rather than brains out there—to clear it up."

  I smiled at the implied compliment— I had already discovered that approbation from Miss Hughes was unusual. "Do you really think so?"

  "Yes, I do." She looked round her as if to encompass the whole Installation; and, though there was a hint of disparagement in her voice, she sounded convincing when she went on, "We're working hard enough here—we've got to have petrol, after all."

  My smile became a grin. I could not say to her that I had never in my life done so little for so much money. After my loaded desk in Bootle, and the earlier five years of ruthless hounding I had endured in the Head Office of the same Charity, it took me some time to realise that most people did not work themselves to a standstill in their jobs, that many employers were thankful if they got a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.

  I thanked her, and then added brusquely, "I can't afford not to be paid at all—and I doubt if the charity in Bootlecould pay me, in addition to my

  successor."

  "All the more reason to stay here—and stop worrying about it."

>   17

  THE premises of the chemical company for which Sylvia Poole worked had been totally destroyed during the Christmas blitz. The staff was lucky that the raid occurred at night when the building was empty. As Sylvia told me, "The only perpendicular object in a devastated landscape was the strongroom— where the cash and ledgers were kept."

  Sylvia was my oldest friend, my theatre-going companion, a fountain of common sense which, through many discussions, sobered my passionate, idealistic interpretations of life. I was very concerned about her. Her company, however, continued to employ her for some weeks, while they re-organised. But her future seemed uncertain. When an opening occurred for a clerk in another department of the Petroleum Board, I recommended her and, since she had excellent references, she got the position. Though she worked there for the durationof the war, I saw little of her during the day. She was quick-witted and cheerful and became very popular.

  She was always a httle late for work, and I can remember her flashing past the poUceman at the gate, blue skirts lifted in the breeze, short, blonde curls glinting in the sunlight. She would rush up the steps of the main office as fast as her high heels would allow, in order to sign the attendance book before the clock struck nine. At the stroke of nine, the Senior Clerk drew a red line across the page. If her signature was below that line, the Manager would demand to see her, and she would have to give him a good reason for her tardiness.

  If the Senior Clerk happened to hear her rapid steps on the stairs, he would wait with pen dripping red ink, ruler at the ready. As she shot up to him, blue eyes wide with impish hope, he would slowly lower the pen to the paper.