“Aye, but we could be digging down through solid rock, if we go down through the cobbles.”
“How far into the yard, measuring, like, from where you was lyin’, do you think she was?” The foreman rubbed his heavy-muscled arms which ached intolerably. He was bent on pinpointing as accurately as possible where they must penetrate.
“A way,” the miner said immediately. “I went over the stone foundation wall what you told me about – back o’ where the canteen shelter must’ve been – and all me body was on cobbles. She must’ve been at least twenty feet from me, bearing half right; and I tell you, the voice came from below – not level with me.”
Robert caught the foreman’s arm. “I know!” he broke in eagerly. “Me grandad told me often enough. Privateers – and smugglers – used to have hiding-places for contraband – and you said the cellar of the canteen was much older than the building above it. Could be there’s some merchant’s old cellar under that light well.”
The foreman sighed and pursed his lips, and then said rather condescendingly, “It’s an idea. But God knows how she fell into it.”
“This fella here said it would be hard to go down through the light well itself. Could you still get into the shelter?” asked Robert, fatigue forgotten, and the plan of the building he had seen the warden draw clear in his mind.
“Oh, yes. It was all well nigh cleared out by the time we’d finished. Have to go down carefully, because of the of the big chimney collapsing over there, last night.”
“Did you see any doors in the walls?”
“No, lad. We’d ’ve gone through ’em if we had – to make sure nobody was there.” The tone was scornful now.
“Look again,” Robert persisted. “If they had a secret cellar under the light well, then they had a place to get into it. Maybe it were bricked up when they built the offices. Round here they’ve bin building and rebuilding for centuries – even the offices were real old. There must be all kinds of little places built over – even small rivers have been.”
The men stood round arguing amongst themselves, while the foreman thought this over. The ultimate responsibility was his and he was not going to put his men at risk unnecessarily.
Finally, when Robert had begun to think he could not bear another moment of suspense, he said, “OK. I’ll go down meself and look.” He turned to a young miner who was particularly small-made. “You, Evans, you can come with me.”
They had been squeezing slowly round the shelter’s walls for nearly five minutes, before Evans said triumphantly, “I’ve got it. See, this is brick, not stone.”
The foreman flashed his torch along the wall. Once pointed out, it was possible to see a line under the whitewash where the texture of the wall changed. He crawled closer to the younger man and then carefully tapped on the brick and listened. No response.
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Some of the rescue crew, who could do nothing for the moment, went down to the WVS van to get some lunch, while, amid the smell of wet plaster mixed with that of a charnel house, the foreman dug out the first bricks with the care of a surgeon. The wall would be weaker at this point and the old brickwork could crumble suddenly under the weight of the wreckage above.
The wall proved to be four bricks thick, and when the fourth one suddenly gave and fell out on the other side, a poof of surprisingly cold, damp air blew out at them.
Evans broke into excited Welsh; then remembered his English. “The lad up there was right. There’s space here.” He put his face close to the hole they had made, and shouted, “Anybody there?”
In the light of the foreman’s torch, his face fell. “Try again,” the foreman urged.
“Anybody there?”
Very faintly came a croaking sound that could have been a human voice.
The wall was broken as fast as human hands could do it without causing a fall. As soon as the hole was big enough, young Evans wriggled through feet first. He felt around with the toes of his boots, to make sure he was not dangling over a hole. Cautiously, he stood upright.
“Lend us the torch.” The foreman passed it to him and he flashed it round. “It’s like a blinking castle dungeon,” he reported. And then he called, “’Allo! ’Allo!”
From beyond a massive blockage facing him came a faint response, a distant sob.
“We’re coming. Hold on. Are you by yourself?”
The reply was unintelligible.
Evans tried again. “Are you badly hurt?”
There was a pause and then Evans clearly heard an effort at a throat being cleared. “No,” came the answer.
Meanwhile, in preparation, other men worked feverishly, pushing pit-props and tools down the tunnel and through the hole in the wall. They whistled when they saw, by the light of a powerful lantern, parts of hefty stone arches. There was room to stand against the wall through which Evans had clambered; but the rest seemed to be an almost solid mass of wreckage.
“She’s on the other side of that,” said Evans, his young face gloomy in the light of the lantern, as he gestured to his right.
The foreman, who had followed Evans through the hole in the wall, glanced quickly round. He said, with more optimism than he felt, “We’ll find her. God, it must be five hundred years old, this place. They knew how to build in those days – and that’s what’s saved her, though there’s more’n one fall here.” He rubbed the end of his nose and then went on, “Reckon she’s tucked up not far from the wall we’ve come through, but it’s goin’ to take a while afore we get through that lot.”
The floor of the cellar was earthen, which at times was a help to them, in that they could loosen large pieces of debris by digging for a little way under them. Miners can almost sink into the earth when they dig, but a bucket brigade had to be formed, to move earth and debris out of the way as it was dug, and these men had difficulty in keeping up with the moling miners.
“At this rate, we’ll be home in time for tea,” one of them joked.
The moles themselves, though fast, moved with the greatest care, with the minimum of noise, with the least disturbance of the dense mass poised above them. A faint smell of burning made Evans shiver; occasionally small runnels of water would cascade down on them. “From the fire-hoses,” the foreman told them firmly. “Water and gas is turned off. You’re not goin’ to drown.”
Every so often the gasped curses would cease and the leading man would call to Emmie, partly to reassure her, but partly to keep them on course.
She would answer them with a faint croak. Every tired nerve alert, she had listened through an eternity of time to the muffled sounds indicating that help was coming. Sometimes the men had paused, to consider how to deal with an obstruction facing them; there was no sound, and at such times her spirits would sink. They had given up, deserted Dick and her. Dreadful, agonised fear went through her parched, starved body. She tried to shout but little noise came. She felt around the sick man beside her, to find her petticoat with which she had earlier wiped Dick’s burning face. It was half under her, and she laboriously hauled it out, to suck it and dampen her mouth. Though they were lying on wet ground, it seemed impossible to do more than moisten their lips and tongues.
She found the stone with which she had tapped earlier and hit the wall unsteadily with it.
“That’s good,” said a voice surprisingly close to her. “Every time I call, you tap, eh?”
She tapped once in acknowledgment and prayed she would not pass out.
Outside, Robert Owen stood hunched in his Red Cross, brown jacket, nearly out of his mind with the frustration of the long wait. As he mechanically emptied buckets or handed in pieces of wood, his mind would hardly function, and suddenly he heeled over and fell face down on to a pile of debris. The watching crowd murmured and shuffled.
A First Aid man who had been checking his canisters of milk and water, and the tube which he could poke through a small hole in the obstruction between himself and a victim, and thus feed the sufferer until he was freed, dropped his satc
hel and ran to Robert. He went down on one knee and gently turned the exhausted man over. The doctor and driver from the ambulance also hastened across the street and together they lifted the limp figure and laid him down on the pavement, which had earlier been so sedulously cleared by Alec Robinson and Lady Mentmore’s chauffeur. The lady doctor knelt to wipe gravel from his bruised face and half turned him on his side, so that he was less likely to choke if he vomited. She checked that he had no false teeth in his mouth and then lifted one of his eyelids. She smiled and took his pulse. Still amused, she got up slowly, dusted down her slacks and said laconically, “Gone to sleep on his feet.”
She turned to the warden, who had come from helping the constable keep back the crowd. “Better find out who he is,” she suggested, “and send him home.”
“He’ll be right mad if I do. It’s his girl what’s bein’ dug out.” He ran his tongue round broken teeth. “I’ll get a couple of blankets and we’ll lay ’im in the hallway of the office opposite.”
The First Aid man returned to digging through his satchel. For the third time, he checked its contents: hypodermic syringe, pain-killers, sterilised pads, sticking plaster. A stretcher had already been carried as close to the tunnel entrance as possible. There was nothing he could do but wait. He envied Robert, sound asleep in the hallway. It was thirty-six hours since he had been to bed himself.
Far below the horrifying ruins, the miners burrowed like ferrets, thin sinewy arms flashing in the lantern light, flat-stomached bodies swinging in rhythm, as they passed buckets of earth back to a space near the broken entry to the old cellar.
Jimmy, the foreman, moved his helpers around as if he were playing a complicated game of chess, his seamed face a picture of intense concentration, as he improvised the steps of the rescue. No two rescues were ever the same; no two buildings ever fell in exactly the same way – their stresses and strains had each to be weighed up anew, and their constant tiny shifts watched with feline intensity. Not only had he to rescue those buried; he must at all costs ensure the safety of his team, and as he sometimes remarked, “Me old woman would be proper put out if I buried meself and she was done out of a good funeral.”
They came up within two feet of her, to a tight tangle of splintered wooden beams and what might have been part of an iron girder, the same obstruction Emmie had felt in her first search for the dripping water. Now she squeaked with shock when her foot was grasped by a warm hand slipped under it.
They were stalled.
“Sufferin’ Christ!” The foreman’s disappointment was as bitter as if his own daughter lay beyond the girder. “Get First Aid to bring some water and a shot for her, while we decide what to do.”
The nervous young man crawled down the tunnel and fed both Emmie and Dick with water and then a little milk through the tube he thrust over the girder. She refused any sedation. Without a hint of his inward horror of the tight confinement of the suffocating tunnel, he whispered encouragement and told her that her fiancé was waiting outside.
“He’s there?” Her voice was suddenly comparatively clear. “Thank God, thank God.” She began to weep, soft, helpless crying in which was mingled a tremendous joy. He was there, he was safe.
When the miners were ready to start again, he backed down and told the surprised foreman that he had two living victims to get out.
Like dogs getting at a bone buried under a tree root, Evans hollowed out a space in the earthen floor under the girder. He then grasped her ankles firmly and told her he would help her wriggle down and under, on her back. When her knees were through, he grasped her bent legs and heaved her upwards. She cried out at the scratches she received, but she was through, her eyes dazzled excruciatingly by the blaze of the torch held by a second man behind Evans.
After calling Dick and getting no response, Evans turned himself on his back and squeezed himself into the space Emmie had occupied. He flashed his torch quickly round the tiny refuge, sickened by the stench. Near Dick’s head, neatly wedged between a piece of stone and what looked like the remains of a table, was a telephone. So the engineer had been right. With a grin, he turned to the job of easing the barely conscious Dick out.
With difficulty, the warden managed to wake Robert. “They’re bringin’ her out,” he said, a smug satisfaction in his expression, “and she’s not badly hurt.”
Without a word, Robert stumbled to his feet. Across the road he saw her being carefully carried down the slope of the debris. She was wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a stretcher.
He pushed his way through the crowd of excited onlookers and ran across the road. Emmie was alive – and absolutely nothing else in the world mattered.
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On its way to Walton Hospital, the ambulance carrying Emmie, Dick and Robert, passed the bus in which a very subdued Gwen was travelling back home from her visit to David in the selfsame hospital.
Regardless of the thirty-odd other men in the ward, she had put her head down on the white coverlet of David’s bed and cried. Too ill to do more than hold her hand, he had been staggered when she had laid her cheek on his work-scarred palm and told him he must get better, because she could not face life without him. She had paused to give a weepy sigh, and added, “Half the time I dunno what to do for the best.”
“I’ll be all right,” he had whispered with an effort, and closed his eyes. It was nice to be wanted and not to be regarded as merely a walking pay-packet.
When she got home, Nora and Brendy were rolling round on the kitchen floor like a pair of angry young wolves. Patrick was kicking them none too gently in an effort to separate them, while Mari watched him from the living room, where she was seated at the table, trying to do her arithmetic homework. Ruby sat near her with Michael in her arms, feeding him from his new bottle. She was shouting, “Leave them be, Pat. They’ll stop of themselves in a minute.”
Gwen took one look at the fighting youngsters and total exasperation seized her. She strode through the crowded living room and squeezed quickly behind Mari’s chair and into the kitchen. “Stop kicking ’em,” she ordered Patrick, and he slunk back, muttering, “I were only tryin’ to stop ’em.”
Nora rolled triumphantly on top of a beleaguered Brendy, and Gwen bent down and administered the heaviest slap she could on the girl’s small cotton-covered bottom. As quick as a cat, the child loosed Brendy and jumped to her feet. A stream of invective poured from her, as she rubbed her stinging bottom.
“Any more of that and you get no jam for tea,” threatened Gwen, as she picked up the kettle to fill it from the kitchen tap. Nora made a face at her, and Ruby hastily called the little girl to her. “You coom ’ere afore you get into more trouble, our Nora.”
Brendy lay on his back and laughed, as he watched her go.
Patrick had a tin bowl of grain in his hand, some of which had spilled on to the kitchen floor in the mêlée. He squatted down and began to scoop the precious seeds together. “I were goin’ to feed the micks,” he told Gwen defensively.
“Aye, feed the pigeons – and you’d better do your dad’s cocks, too.”
After he had fed the cockerels, Patrick stood, empty bowl in hand, and looked round the familiar muddle of the Donnelly backyard. He burst into tears. Where was his mother? Where had she gone after death? Her body had been in the coffin the day before, but that wasn’t her – not really her. Would he never again come through the back yard, to see her leaning against the doorpost, waiting for them all to come home from school? He did not know how to bear the pain within him.
An hour later, Gwen surveyed her troublesome brood across the littered tea table and prayed that their grandmother would turn up soon.
Patrick looked as if he had been crying. Deep compassion for him and for Ruby welled up in her; they must both be feeling terrible despair. Yet they were being very brave. Impulsively she leaned forward and pressed Patrick’s grubby fist lying on the tablecloth. He looked up at her, startled, and saw the pity mirrored in her faded blue eyes. Quickl
y, he withdrew his hand and picked up his piece of bread and margarine. “Everything’s going to turn out all right,” she assured him, feeling a little shy herself.
He nodded.
She turned to Ruby. The girl looked crushed. She was staring vacantly at her empty plate. “Would you like another butties, luv? I can soon cut you one.”
“No. I’m all right.”
“Coom ’ere.”
The girl rose and went to stand by Gwen’s chair, like a schoolgirl called before the headmistress. Gwen put an arm round the thin body and gave her a hug and a smile. “Come on, now. Cheer up. Your gran’s goin’ to come soon – and I’m goin’ to be next door all the time, and you can ask me.” The girl smiled faintly, and unexpectedly put her arms round Gwen’s neck, as she had so often done with her mother. She did not cry.
Mari watched in jealous shock. Her mother never hugged her. All she ever got was a peck on the cheek and an admonition to be a good girl. She had endured the invasion from next door, because of the strange magic of Patrick’s presence. Now she wished crossly that they would all go back to their own house and that her father was home to give her a smacking kiss and call her his pretty young lady.
At midnight, she was sitting on the cellar steps, reading Gone With the Wind aloud to Patrick and Ruby, while one of the worst raids Liverpool had ever experienced raged outside.
On a mattress dragged down to the bottom of the steps lay Nora, Brendy and Michael, mercifully sleeping the sleep of the totally exhausted.
Gwen nodded over a cold cup of tea, while her mind went round and round in weary confusion. What if Emmie is injured – not killed? Do I have to nurse her as well as Dave? It would, she felt be a fit judgment on her, for not helping Emmie with her parents; the pain-filled face of her acid-tongued mother-in-law haunted her for the duration of the raid.
THURSDAY, 8 MAY 1941
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Three Women of Liverpool Page 18