Three Women of Liverpool

by Helen Forrester

  “Sardines in a bloody tin,” he snorted. “Can you reach over your head to your hair where it’s caught?”

  “Mm. I’ve bin tryin’ to pull some of it loose.”

  “I’ve got a penknife in me pocket. I doubt I can get it out, though. I’ve hurt me wrists, and me hands is as sore as hell.”

  “Oh, Dick! You never said you was hurt?”

  “It’s nought terrible. Could you reach in me right-hand keck pocket?” She felt him wriggle himself slightly upward, so that he was more level with her.

  With her long, bony Lancashire fingers, she hunted feverishly down his side, stretching as far as she could. She touched his belt. “Lower,” he instructed her. “Look, I’m goin’ to ease meself a bit across you.” She felt his head move across her shoulder till it lay against hers. He tried to ease the dead weight of his body over her arm. He grunted. “That’s it. See if you can reach now.”

  The long fingers ran down his thigh, paused and then scrabbled at the pocket opening. “If you truly can’t get it, I’ll put me own hand in – but it’s that tender, I don’t want to.”

  “Hold still,” she advised him. “I’ll winch the pocket lining out.” She giggled nervously. “You’ve got all sorts in here. I got your hanky out.”

  “Well, don’t lose it. Put it where you can find it. We’ll wipe our faces with it.”

  She obediently hauled it out and stuffed it down her chest.

  Again the long, exploring fingers. He gritted his teeth; not with pain, but to control the sudden arousal which her warm nearness and her gentle fingers was exciting. The tendrils of hair against his cheek were having their effect, too. Many times, when he had seen Robert and Emmie walk out of the canteen with arms around each other, he had been pierced with envy and wondered what she would be like to bed. Now, however, crammed in a hell-hole which was likely to be their coffin, his desire for her was so strong that he longed passionately to roll back on top of her and have her.

  She was his best friend’s girl, he reminded himself forcefully, and with eyes screwed tight he kept himself rigidly still, until she almost shouted, “I got it. I got it.”

  “Good,” he muttered, and took a large sighing breath and promptly sneezed.

  She was panting with the effort she had made and began to cough again. When the paroxysm had passed, she cleared her throat, and said, “Afore I start sawing at me hair, I’m going to wipe your face with the hanky.” She paused, and then added with a tremor in her voice, “Me own old dial is too sore. I’m bleeding a bit, I think.”

  “Ta.” Poor kid, he thought. If her face is ruined, how’ll she endure life, even if we are rescued?

  She could feel his breath on her cheek. “Is your face hurtin’ at all, afore I touch you?”

  “No, Em. I think I were pressed against you when we fell.”

  His face was carefully wiped. She spat on a corner of the hanky and ran it clumsily around his eyelids. God, how he wanted her. She was surprised, yet pleased, when a kiss was planted on her cheek. She pushed the hanky back down the front of her blouse. “Now,” she said almost cheerfully. “I’m goin’ to start chopping. Proper sight I’ll be when I’m finished.” It was comforting to feel the man’s warmth against her, especially when a particularly loud crash made the whole structure above them vibrate, and small rushes of debris slithered down on them.

  The smell of gas had gone, Dick realised. The firemen must have managed to turn off the main. So much for that. He did not know whether to feel relief or disappointment. Willy-nilly, as shock had receded and been replaced by more mundane yearnings, a faint hope crept into him, that maybe the bomb that hit the canteen was not engraved with his and Emmie’s names, that they might, by some miracle, be found.

  Whimpers came from the girl next to him, as she tugged and cut hair by hair. She sighed and stopped work, to rest herself for a moment. Then she said without preamble, “We must have fallen into somebody’s cellar – right under the yard, ’cos we was still outside – and I fell and slid quite a ways.” Her voice was mournful. “I ache all over from it. Who’d build a cellar under a yard?”

  “Plenty o’ people, not too many years ago – about a coupla hundred, maybe. For keeping smuggled goods in – or privateers hiding their loot.”

  “They would? How’d they bring the stuff in?”

  “A hidden door from the cellar under the building – where the shelter was, like.”

  “There weren’t no back door out of that shelter.”

  “Could’ve been bricked up when they built the present building.”

  She sighed, and recommenced the cutting of her hair. If she could get her head free, perhaps she could move enough to find the water that trickled so maddeningly close to her. As they lay at present, Dick could not move much either.

  viii

  Though the raid was over, and to Emmie, deep in her prison, the din seemed less, the noise outside from the roaring fires was sufficient to make everyone converse in shouts.

  With shoulders hunched and bodies bent close to their jetting hoses, firemen had managed to advance a little into the raging inferno of South Castle Street, at the back of Paradise Street. Then the water pressure fell to a trickle and they had to beat a hasty retreat. Petrol in a pump caught fire and it blew apart. Dispirited men watched helplessly as, fanned by a light breeze, the flames began to eat their way towards Paradise Street. Wandering wisps of smoke worked their way through the wreckage. Neither Emmie nor Dick said anything, as they lay rigid with fear in the face of this new menace.

  The building in which the canteen had been housed had blown outwards across the street. It effectively blocked the movement of traffic, already in difficulties because of the bomb hole further down, in which Post Office engineers struggled to restore some kind of telephone service for the authorities.

  A gang of Army Pioneers, aided by volunteers, both civilians and servicemen, inched their way down the centre of Paradise Street, shovelling smaller rubble into wicker skips; larger pieces were hauled to one side. “For Christ’s sake, why don’t they bring in some cranes?” groaned a man in blue mechanic’s overalls, as he heaved and shoved in company with a German Jewish pioneer. They turned to move a huge metal desk which had lain upside down under the girder they had just shifted. “Jesus!” the mechanic exclaimed, as he stooped to get a grip on it. With all his strength he heaved and rolled it on to its side – and looked down in horror at what had once been little Dolly, the firewatcher.

  Her uniform had been blown off her. Terribly crushed, her entrails spread out, only the long gleaming hair indicated that there lay someone who had been soft and pretty.

  The Pioneer looked down at her in silent pity, while the less hardened civilian shouted, “Curse them, curse them!” beside himself with horror. He bent down and gathered the frail, sticky remains up as best he could and took them to the pavement. There was nothing to cover her with. Soon, he knew, somebody would come along with a bag to put her in. Weeping, savage with rage, he went back to work.

  Help was coming. Through moonlit lanes and narrow streets snaked a stream of fire engines and ambulances, water tankers, kitchen lorries, mobile canteens and vans of food. Rescue parties, including miners and demolition experts, spent an uncomfortable night crammed into trains as they converged on Liverpool. Through broken roads, spanking clean American soldiers manoeuvred bulldozers and dump trucks, and great shovels, also mounted on caterpillar tractors, bigger than anything most Britons had seen before. They would eat into the choked thoroughfares and make a path for other vehicles.

  The looters came gaily from the suburbs and the countryside, to rob those who had already lost so much.

  ix

  An unexploded land-mine, sitting quietly at the back of a deserted insurance office, suddenly blew up and the ear-splitting bang shook Emmie’s and Dick’s tiny refuge. It shook not only the debris above them, but the ground on which they lay, like some huge earthquake. In terror, they clutched each other, their heads buried i
nto each other’s shoulders, to avoid the dust which rose once more around them. Bits and pieces rattled and fell above them. The great stone over their heads held, however, though the beam which was holding down Emmie’s hair shifted slightly and the remaining strands of her hair were freed.

  “My God!” Dickie’s teeth were chattering helplessly, as the bang was followed by a series of rumbles, gradually dying away into quiet.

  Ears pricked, they waited for the next onslaught, but there was only the creaking and shifting of the ruins and the occasional splash of water. Very dimly, they also could hear what might have been slow traffic and, at times, felt the faint vibration of it.

  As the dust settled again, Dickie muttered to a whimpering Emmie, “It has to be morning – that bang were too big for a bomb – it were something special. Come on, luv. Now’s the time to feel around for a stone and bang on that wall by you, so a rescuer knows where to look.”

  Emmie stirred and half sat up. Dickie exclaimed at her sudden movement.

  “Me hair came free in the last shake-up.” She laughed tremulously and felt round for a likely stone.

  For nearly half an hour, they banged steadily, to no purpose. During that time they had both, shamefacedly, to urinate and now lay in wet clothes.

  As they rested, feeling surprisingly weak, Emmie said, “David – me brother – ’ll be out lookin’ for me. What about your folks?”

  Dickie explained that he had nobody and that this was his weekend off from his duties as night-watchman at a seed warehouse. “They’ll wonder where I am come Monday, though, when I don’t turn up for work.”

  “Gwen – that’s Dave’s wife – she won’t bother. She hates my guts. Be glad to see me dead, I truly think. All she cares about is her house. If you breathe out, she’ll dust all round you.”

  Dick laughed. “She can’t be that bad.”

  “She is,” insisted Emmie. “Dave’s proper patient with her. It’ll be him as comes to find us.”

  “The wardens and the Rescue Squads is good at finding buried victims,” Dick replied, to reinforce her hope of help.

  David was, however, sound asleep on a bunk made of chicken wire in a street shelter in Bootle. He had worked until the siren went, on repairing water pipes in narrow, badly damaged streets, while housewives and children hung round him, waiting for the taps, or at least the fire hydrants, to start gushing again. They also had no gas with which to cook, and often torn chimneys made it impossible to build a fire in a grate. Once water was restored, a good many kettles got boiled in the back yard on a fire made from splintered beams. In most cases their tiny stores of food were ruined, tins laced by slivers of glass, the contents of cupboard blown into pieces and lost in the general mess of broken plaster.

  On Sunday morning, fed by a grateful housewife, David and his mate, Arthur, continued to work, laying new water pipes. Two streets away, another gas main sent a scarifying sheet of flame into the sky, threatening to engulf the slums around them in fire.

  A little soothed by the thought that David would be seeking her, Emmie said to Dick, “You’d better have your knife back afore I lose it in the dark.”

  He fumbled round until he found her hand and the knife. As he slipped it into his shirt pocket, he felt her begin to sit up again.

  “My God! Me poor back,” she groaned, as the stiffened muscles were stretched.

  “Now watch it,” Dick warned. His voice sounded muffled, the words coming reluctantly from a parched throat. “Move carefully. If you touch something solid, don’t push it or we’ll have an avalanche down on us.”

  “OK.” If she could stop shivering, she thought, she would be less clumsy. The shivering would not stop, however. As she sat up, it became a wild shaking, her teeth chattering uncontrollably.

  Dick heard her wincing, and the shuffle of her skirts against the loosened earth, as she finally got herself seated upright. Instinctively, she turned towards him, to bend forward and touch him. “Ow!” she squeaked, as she hit her head on the sloping stonework over him. When she rubbed her scraped forehead, it hurt much more than she had expected; there was a trickle, which might have been blood, down over one eyelid, and she whimpered slightly as she carefully wiped it away with a shaky finger.

  “Steady on, girl.”

  “Suppose I move too far away and I can’t find you again?” she croaked.

  “Na,” he assured her. “We’re like a pair o’ mackerels in a tin – waitin’ for the tin-opener.”

  Her shaky laugh was close to being a sob.

  She heard Dickie sigh with relief as the pressure of her body on him was eased when she moved. Very carefully she tucked her feet under herself and then kneeled up. She promptly hit her head again and sat back dizzily until the throbbing stopped. In a wild hope that there might be an aperture through which they might creep to greater safety, she rapidly ran her hands up and down and along the wall beside her. Her spirits fell, when she found that the huge rough-hewn stones of the wall met tightly with the sloping slab which roofed them over. There was enough height on the wall side for them to sit up, if they kept their heads bent, and she reported this to Dick.

  “That’ll be a relief,” he replied. “I’ll stay put till you’ve felt right round.”

  She crawled with difficulty a foot or two along the wall, until, where her feet had rested, her exploring fingers found what felt like a metal girder sloping the opposite way to the stone above her. She tried to reach over it, but the way was blocked with rubble; she managed, however, to slip her hand under it and work her fingers through a pile of cobblestones and plaster. As she eased her hand carefully in, there was a loud creak and dust began to rise.

  “For God’s sake!” Dick’s voice held panic.

  She snatched her hand back under their sheltering slab. “I’m doing my best,” she said crossly, and then sneezed. The sound was answered by another small rattle of debris from the same direction. She stayed frozen until the last small piece seemed to have dropped. Then she voiced the need of both of them. “I wonder where the water’s running?”

  “Let’s listen hard.”

  The sound indubitably came from somewhere beyond the iron girder.

  She burst into tears.

  “I’m comin’ up beside you, Em. Just sit still. Steady as you go, there’s a girl.”

  He wriggled out of his narrow niche, his shoulders aching sharply, the rest of his bruised body complaining bitterly. Guided by her whimpering, he hauled himself alongside her. He sat, panting and dizzy half leaning against her, and then he straightened up. “Phew, that’s better.” He listened again, and then said, “There’s water there all right. May be from the pipes leading to the canteen taps.”

  Emmie sniffed. “Doesn’t matter where it’s from. It’s on the other side of a bloody great girder, and the girder’s too big to either climb under or over. Even if you could, there’s a lot o’ smallish bits very loose there.” she tried to still her chattering teeth, and then quavered, “I don’t know what we did to deserve this. We’re not wicked.”

  Dick gave a rattling laugh. In the pitch-darkness, he tried to visualise the tiny space in which they found themselves. Then he said ruefully, “War’s like the weather; it falls on the good and the bad alike. Only them what starts it takes care to be well away from it.” Then, with determined cheerfulness, he went on, “Never mind that. First, I’m going to move forward a bit, so you can lie along this big wall. You lie on your stummick, and very, very slowly slip your hand under the girder again and work your fingers into whatever’s there. See if you can feel wet. It’ll be easier for you to do than me – ’cos o’ me weight, like. I’m plain fat.”

  “Right.” Her voice was a little firmer. After a tight squeezing past each other, she managed to do as he had suggested, and she worked her arm further and further under the girder until part of her shoulder lay under the unyielding metal. It was all bone dry.

  With her arm still stretched into the rubble, she lay and listened carefully. “It�
�s no more’n a foot beyond, I’m sure,” she wailed in despair.

  “Not to worry,” Dick wheezed. “It might make a puddle in time and we’ll be able to reach it. Have you still got me hanky?”

  “Yes. Down me chest.”

  “Good. If it makes a puddle we can reach, we’ll get at it by soaking the hanky in it.”

  She remained prone for a moment, while she mentally savoured the joy of cold water. Then she cautiously withdrew her arm and heaved herself round until she could sit up.

  “Eh, I’m that sore, and you must be, too,” her tremulous voice came out of the darkness. “Why don’t they come? It’s been pretty quiet for a while now. It has to be morning. Surely they’ll be lookin’ for us?”

  “As soon as you hear anything that sounds like them coming, we’ll shout as hard as we can, so they know we’re here. And we’ll bang with the stones again.”

  “T’ warden what come to the canteen counted us all. He’ll tell the rescue men how many people to look for.”

  “Aye, he will.”

  Outside in the street, the Pioneers carefully consigned the warden to the mortuary and, with him, the remains of the police constable, who would at least have known there were people sheltering in the canteen basement.

  Further down the street, in a bomb crater, a newly bathed and clean-overalled Post Office Telephones engineer relieved his exhausted colleague. Elsewhere, linesmen continued to string wires from anything they could hang them on, in an effort to re-establish communications within the city.

  As less fatigued aid arrived from other towns, a mood of ebullience spread amongst the toilers. This was the end of this run of raids, they told each other. Everybody would be able to go to bed tonight and sleep it off, ready for work on Monday.