Three Women of Liverpool

by Helen Forrester

  “They would choose the hospital furthest away,” she grumbled to Mari, Patrick and Ruby, at lunch-time. “How’m I goin’ to get out there to visit him, I’d like to know. This mornin’ I’d no one to leave Michael with, so as I could go with him, to see him settled in, like.”

  Mari ignored her mother’s whining complaints. “He’s not going to die, is he, Mam?”

  “Of course not,” snapped Gwen peevishly. “If they can’t cure a heart attack we’re in a proper bad way.” Her panic regarding Dave must not be conveyed to Mari.

  In the afternoon, she announced to Michael, who was having a great game on the heathrug with a collection of saucepans and lids, “Now we got to go and do the ration books – yours as well – ’cos Annie’s corner shop’s gone with the wind. Got to find a new grocer. And all that beastly red tape, to register again.”

  As she trudged back home up her own familiar street, carrying a very tired and fretful Michael, she passed the pile of rubble which had been Annie’s shop and she stopped to sigh sadly in front of it. The pillar box still stood amid the rubble, and Mr Marsh, the neatly uniformed postman, was just unlocking it to collect the letters from it. “Nice day,” he said mechanically, and she laughed almost hysterically, “Aye, I suppose it is.”

  A few yards further on, she met Bridget Mahoney, her neighbour from across the road. Bridget was looking red-faced and sullen, but she listened as Gwen told her about the Donnelly invasion of her home, something she knew about already. “And to crown all,” Gwen finished up, “our Emma is missing down town somewhere, and I’m worried to death about her.”

  Bridget regarded her dully, as she nursed her bandaged arm, cut when she had removed the incendiary bomb from the gutter of her house. Her body trembled and she could not answer Gwen at first. Then she muttered, “So’s me husband – in Greece. Got a telegram just now.”

  Gwen was aghast, stuck for words, knowing that she should say something optimistic and comforting.

  Bridget swallowed. “I don’t know how to tell me boys.”

  vii

  Conor received with some anxiety the information that Emma had not been found in the canteen’s air raid shelter. The constable on duty, who had given him the news, added heavily, “Either she were struck down on her way home – or she took shelter somewhere else and got buried there.”

  “We could try checking amongst the unidentified.” Conor sighed. “Could start with the living. I’m off duty now – I’ll see what I can do on the phone.”

  Four unidentified women between the ages of 25 and 35 lay in three different hospitals, their names unknown, though only one had been found in a street Emmie was likely to have traversed on her way home. The voice at the other end of the telephone added laconically, “Of course, there’s several hundred unidentified bodies, a goodly number unidentifiable, at Webster Road mortuary.”

  Patiently, Conor hitched lifts to the various hospitals; looking at the women was the only way to be certain.

  One woman had recovered consciousness and had identified herself. Another had been claimed by a frantic husband. The third one had just died and Conor was allowed to view the body before it was wheeled away to the mortuary.

  To see the fourth one, he followed hopefully a young probationer through a packed women’s ward, filled with lively chatter. Behind a screen, a person lay on her back, arms neatly arranged at her sides under tightly tucked-in bedding. Her breath fluttered uneasily from blanched lips. Her eyes and head were sheathed in bandages, as if a white turban had slipped half way over her face. Her head was supported on either side by what Conor supposed were sandbags. An angular, elderly nurse raised an eyebrow, as Conor intruded softly.

  He whispered, “I’ve come to see if she’s Emma Thomas.” The nurse nodded and stepped back, while Conor peered down at the end of a nose, prettily curved white lips and a rounded chin with an unexpected dimple in it, totally unlike Emmie’s long narrow face.

  The nurse’s face softened, as he nodded negatively. “Poor little lass,” she murmured. “It’s her eyes, you know.”

  With a dreary ache in his heart for Ellen, mixed with sorrow for the pretty young woman he had just seen, he decided that he would try the dead.

  A delivery van driver gave him a lift to within a couple of streets of his destination. He had to wait, while a calm, slender woman in a white coat dealt with a sailor in a tight-fitting Royal Navy uniform, who could not have been more than nineteen. The sailor stood timidly at the counter, his round white cap clutched in both hands in front of his chest. The acne spots stood out on his face and neck against an unnaturally pale skin. Together, he and the woman went through a series of large brown envelopes holding the effects found on or near the bodies in the mortuary. Time and again he nodded affirmatively, as he recognised the pitiful possessions. Sometimes he hesitated uncertainly and the woman put those envelopes on one side.

  Conor felt himself reeling at the strong smell of disinfectant mixed with the ghastly odour of disintegrating bodies. He lit a cigarette and drew on it heavily, as he watched the pile of envelopes in front of the hapless sailor grow and grow. Finally, the woman drew the shaking boy further into the building. Conor began to whistle softly to keep his courage up; he had seen enough at the shambles of The Dwellings to understand what the youngster was going through. Thanks be to the Holy Mother that his Ellen was decently wrapped in a winding sheet in a proper coffin, and tomorrow, when his mother had arrived, they would see her respectfully committed to her own grave.

  The sailor suddenly bolted past him and out of the front door. When the woman turned inquiringly to Conor, tears were streaming down her face. “He’s from Seaforth,” she burst out, as if she must share her agony of mind with someone. “He had fourteen bodies to identify, and some of them were a mess.”

  She had no trace of anyone who could be Emmie; the only likely corpse, picked up in Whitechapel, which was the continuation of Paradise Street, had been identified.

  She rubbed her damp eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Mr Donnelly. Try the temporary mortuary near the scene.” She paused and tapped the table with the end of her pencil. “If I were you, I would talk to the men on the spot.”

  Between the mortuary and Paradise Street lay Emmie’s home. He thought he should drop in en route and assure Gwen that the fact that he had no news of Emmie was probably good news.

  He was surprised to find the front door open and, after a perfunctory knock, he walked in.

  He was immediately engulfed by his children, their faces smeared with jam, as they rushed from the tea table. They were followed by Gwen holding a feeding-bottle. Behind her, a man half rose from his chair by the fire. Robert Owen had duly received the information through the police that his fiancée was missing, and, since not much more could be done regarding the still exploding cargo of the Marakand, he had been given a few hours’ leave. He had come just as he was, blackened and reeking of fire, his eyebrows and hair singed. When, at last, he had found a tram blundering along in the right direction, he had endured with suppressed fury the stares, and occasional giggles, of the other passengers, at his outlandish appearance.

  Gwen looked inquiringly at Conor above the children’s heads. He nodded negatively and she sucked in her lips as her sense of guilt returned to her. She shouted suddenly, irritably, at the children, “Now, Patrick – you kids – get back to the table and finish your tea. Now, Mike, you come to Auntie and I’ll put you on the sofa, and you can show your dad how you can hold your bottle.”

  When the child had been propped up on the sofa cushions, he put the teat in his mouth and looked triumphantly at his father out of the corner of his eye. His father had, however, other things on his mind.

  “You must be Emmie Thomas’s intended,” he said to Robert. “I been lookin’ for her just now.”

  viii

  The air raid siren interrupted Conor’s and Robert’s conversation with the police constable they found on duty at the corner of Paradise Street.
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  “Oh, blast ’em,” rumbled the constable exasperatedly.

  Robert’s heart sank, as he looked out over the enormous, smoking pyre facing him. He thought he’d seen the worst in Seaforth, but here was just such another scene of devastation – and possibly his Emmie was under it. He wanted to run across the road and start tearing it aside single-handed, to find her, but instead he had to listen to the doubts expressed by the constable that there were any more bodies there; certainly nobody alive.

  High in the sky anti-aircraft fire flashed white. There were few clouds. Despite the smoke haze, it was much too clear for comfort.

  From the south, where Toxteth lay, the guns spat forth. Conor, so tired that he was becoming a little incoherent, prayed in the back of his mind that his children would be spared. With a quivering match he lit a cigarette handed to him by Robert; one more flash of light was not going to help the Germans; the fires still burning would guide them beautifully.

  The constable glanced uneasily at the firemen, rescue teams and a demolition squad still at work amid the destruction, and the women of the WVS mobile canteen nearby. The blue flash of the men’s lanterns made them look like ghosts. Nobody ran for cover as the gunfire increased. He began to herd the chattering crowd of sightseers into a nearby underground shelter. It beat him where all the onlookers came from. He’d have thought that every man and woman in the city had enough to do at present; and if they didn’t, that they would be thankful to sleep. But here they were, come to gloat. Ruddy vultures, the whole bloody lot of ’em. He blew his whistle impatiently, to summon one or two stragglers, and to draw the attention of the solitary telephone engineer, still toiling in the nearby crater.

  The engineer took no notice. The whole job was almost completed and he continued to check the lines which he and his colleague had been sedulously splicing together all day. In cooperation with the exchange operators, the reconnected phones were rung in nearby offices. Sometimes the line was still dead, the telephone shattered under the debris. Occasionally, a late-working clerk or a firewatcher or cleaning lady would lift the receiver and assure him that everyone had gone home, which never failed to make him smile. Now, with the increasing noise overhead, he was frightened and was glad of these nasal Liverpool voices responding to him. George, he told himself wearily, you’re getting a bit old for this game. When a piece of flak whizzed down and buried itself in the clay side of the hole, he clapped his tin hat on to his bald head, clenched his teeth over his cold pipe and went on working.

  The constable returned to Robert and Conor and they all stared skyward. Beneath the hissing of water from the firehoses and the rhythm of the pumps, they could hear the steady chug of engines from the east, and they moved to the shelter of the sandbags surrounding the entrance while they discussed what could have happened to Emmie. The sandbags had been pierced by flak and were slowly bleeding their contents on to the pavement. Conor absently poked a bigger hole with his finger, while the constable assured him, “They cleared the shelter, the rescue squad did – they were proper tired – and then they went home to get some sleep.” He turned, to rebuke someone trying to leave the shelter, and then, in answer to an impatient query from Robert, he said, “Well, you could talk to the new incident officer – the other one was killed last night.”

  A series of thuds not very far away announced the arrival of the Luftwaffe, and George nervously collected his tools into his tool box and said to himself, “Me lad, this is where you beat it.”

  He hastily had the line he had been working on rung by the operator. It failed to ring, and he cursed his wasted effort. The exchange operator said sharply, “Mind your language, if you please,” and transferred her plug to another call. He made a face and was just about to remove his instrument from his ear, when distantly down the line came a hoarse female voice singing falteringly Men of Harlech. He grinned. The receiver must be off the hook and some cleaning woman probably dusting round it. He listened for a second; the sky directly over- head was quiet, though more distant sounds of combat warned him not to linger. The song became a series of harsh sobs. It seemed to him that very faintly he heard also the rumble of a male voice, and then, a little more strongly, the tune again sung in Welsh. He gave a small laugh. Welsh miners sang it a lot better, probably because they were always singing; he had been told that they sang even when they were entombed in a mine accident.

  Entombed! My God!

  “Can you hear me?” he shouted, in incredulous apprehension. There was no reply, only the weak, cracked voice carrying the tune.

  He called the telephone operator. Could she heard it? But the voice had stopped and the operator told him loftily not to be so daft. Lips pursed, he put a clamp to mark the line and scrambled out of the hole. Like a lumbering bear with a tin hat on its head, he ran down the newly cleared pavement, looking madly for the constable.

  The WVS volunteer, a mug of tea in each hand, directed him to the entrance to the shelter.

  “Get away,” exclaimed the constable, when he poured out his suspicions to him.

  “I’m not joking,” spluttered George furiously. “I tell you I heard it. It’s possible, I tell you. And buried miners always sing – and this woman was singing in Welsh. Me grandmother was Welsh – I know Welsh when I hear it. Damn it.”

  “It’s her,” Robert interjected with conviction. He caught at the constable’s arm. “Come on. Who do we have to see to start ’em digging?”

  The constable swallowed, while Conor said simply, “Emmie Thomas is Welsh.”

  George looked a little bewildered at this exchange and they hastened to explain to him about the missing woman. “And you think this is technically possible, that the telephone fell somewhere near her and still managed to remain connected?” the constable asked the engineer.

  “You’ve just said the canteen was on the ground floor. It wouldn’t have far to fall, if it wasn’t blasted out; if it were protected by a wall that didn’t give, like. Anyways, I heard her.”

  “Let’s try the line again,” Conor suggested impetuously. He started to move out of the sheltered doorway, but the constable held him back and pointed to the bit of sky they could see above the sandbag wall. It was filled with flashing light, and a series of reverberating booms came from the direction of the docks. “You’re chancing your own lives,” warned the constable. “What number was it?”

  “I’ve forgotten. I can find out. I marked the line.”

  “For God’s sake, let’s try it,” Conor urged. “Come on,” he called to George and Robert. He started to run across the road, George skittering unhappily behind him, followed closely by Robert. A shrill shriek overhead sent the three of them into the gutter, hands clasped over heads, noses in the dirt.

  The missile passed over them, to fall into a fire slightly closer to the river. Its explosion sent a mass of burning debris flying into the air, to start fires in buildings hitherto untouched. Firemen dropped their hoses and ducked for cover wherever they could find it, only to regroup a few minutes later and continue their tasks. Conor, George and Robert stayed firmly in the gutter until the remainder of the stick of bombs had been deposited in a neat line across the city, and had sent to Kingdom Come one ambulance driver and her assistant, twenty-two homeless people in a rest centre, two pedestrians never identified, one firewatcher and one special constable; the thin red line was becoming frighteningly thinner.

  A series of bombers sweeping the length of the fan-shaped city, now dived one after the other to loose their deadly loads, and sent up fountains of rubble as their bombs scored hits. The three men cowered in the gutter, hearts racing, as all kinds of lethal odds and ends pinged and plonked on the road and pavement round them. A group of soldiers and rescue men, their hooded lanterns bobbing, chanced running for the air raid shelter. Robert heard a muffled cry, as one was hit. He crammed himself further into the littered gutter.

  During a moment of lessened hubbub, Robert cautiously turned his face to peep upward. The gun flashes were like an
enormous storm of sheet lightning. Tracer bullets and flares added to the scarifying display. A further beat of heavy engines made him push his face tightly against the pavement’s friendly curb. George, his head near Conor’s feet, stretched out a careful hand to touch the warden’s boots for comfort. He could feel panic rising in him, but he was haunted by the sound of the quavering voice and he tried to concentrate on the technical arguments why he should be right. He’d prove he was right, he would, even if he had to dig for her himself.

  In Paradise Street, a big Victorian chimney, balanced by a piece of side wall from the building in which the canteen had been, shivered and fell, its stonework rattling over the wreckage at its foot. The usual cloud of dust spumed upwards. Through chattering teeth, Conor prayed for his life to his patron saint, who had not heard from him for some years. Conor had said bitterly that he was accursed; yet even so, life seemed unexpectedly precious when it looked like coming to an end.

  The Defiants succeeded in disorganising the raiders and the bombing moved further north. Robert was so stunned with noise and fright that it was a moment or two before he could make himself scramble to his feet, to find the constable bending over George, as he got to his feet, and shouting through the noise, “Come on, get back in t’ shelter.”

  Though terrified out of his wits, George was determined. “I’m goin’ to try that line again. Won’t take a mo’.”

  “You’re clean out of your mind,” the constable bellowed. But he ran with them to the cavity in the street.

  They crouched together in the clay hollow. George found the wire with a clamp on it. He clipped on his headphones.

  “No.” He found also that he could no longer contact the telephone operator.