Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘I’m not free! I’m only thirteen. I should be at school. I’m not a washerwoman, or a cleaner, and I don’t want to be one. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You’re nearly fourteen, and your trouble is that you see everything through Mr and Mrs Stewart’s eyes now. You really think you’ve joined the upper classes, and you look down on your own family. Well they’re not your uncle Alec and auntie Morag, Pam; they’re not related to you at all. They’re the people you were billeted with for the duration, and they get ten and six a week for having you. We’re your family, this is where you belong, and this is where your loyalties should lie.’

  Had the piano lid not already been slammed down, Marie was certain it would have been then. Pamela jumped off the stool, her cheeks pink and eyes blazing, and walked towards her, trembling with anger, arms rigid by her sides and fists clenched. ‘Oh, shut up, Marie! I’m sick of you, sticking your nose into everything and taking over. Who do you think you are? You’re not my mother! You can’t tell me what to do! I’m going to bed.’

  Lowering her voice to prevent her mother from hearing, Marie said bitterly: ‘You always said you loved Mam! This is your idea of love, then. Just think about this. Your mother’s loved you all your life, and now she needs some help from you. You shouldn’t begrudge it . . .’

  But Pam was halfway up the stairs. Now equally angry and energized by fury, Marie finished tidying the living room and started a vigorous mopping of the kitchen floor. After that, she dragged out the ironing board, and put the radio on. One of the big bands was playing a quickstep. Her mother had been almost deafened by the blast on the shelter on Ellis Street, and Alfie would be too fast asleep to be disturbed by it, so she turned it up a fraction, and took her temper out on a pile of ironing until a week’s worth of neatly finished laundry was draped over the clothes horse, airing by the dying embers of the fire. It’s amazing the amount of work you can get through in next to no time when you feel like strangling someone, she thought.

  There was only one thing for it, Marie decided, as she put the ironing board away. She hated having to do it, but she would have to go to Matron and ask for a leave of absence, at least until Pamela was doing things properly, and the running of the house got back onto an even keel.

  The warning sounded at quarter past eleven, just as she was undressing for bed. Marie threw on her old checked dressing gown, and went in to her mother.

  ‘The siren’s sounding, Mam!’ she shouted.

  ‘What?’ her mother croaked.

  ‘An air raid, Mam. We should go to the shelter.’

  ‘I’m not going to any shelter. They’re not shelters; they’re deathtraps.’

  ‘We ought to go to the shelter. There’s going to be a raid.’

  ‘I’m not going!’ her mother screamed.

  Pam came out onto the landing, her face sheet white. Alfie soon joined them.

  ‘You two get dressed fast as you can, and get down to the shelter,’ Marie said. ‘I’ll stay here with Mam. She’s refusing to go.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to make much difference whether you’re in a shelter or not. You’ve got a good chance of being killed either way,’ Pam said, looking askance at her mother. ‘Anyway, I’d rather be dead than scarred.’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘Why? She can’t hear me.’

  And it was evident from the puzzled expression on Mam’s face that she could make nothing of what they were saying.

  ‘Me and Danny were all over Hull the last two Sundays, and you know what we noticed?’ Alfie said. ‘When you look at the houses that have been bombed, the staircase is always there, all the ones we’ve seen, anyway. Even if the front of the house is blasted out, and all the tiles are off one side of the roof, the staircase is still there. I reckon we might be as safe under the stairs as in a shelter.’

  It was a common observation. Marie wavered, then: ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll be cramped, but at least we can dodge out between waves of bombers and put the kettle on. Go on then, bring your pillows down. Bring Mam’s, as well.’

  Within a minute Marie was dragging mop and bucket, sweeping brushes, ironing board, and everything else out of the kitchen cupboard, and stacking it by the kitchen door while her mother stood helplessly by. Pam was soon down with her pillow, followed by Alfie.

  ‘Where’s Smut?’ he demanded. ‘Anybody seen Smut?’

  ‘Still upstairs, on Mum’s bed.’

  Pam clutched her chest. ‘Can you hear my heart beating?’ she gasped. ‘It’s so loud, I think everybody must be able to hear it.’

  ‘No, but I can hear mine,’ Marie said, ‘and I suppose everybody else can hear theirs.’

  ‘What? What are you saying?’ their mother said, looking at Pam with an apologetic half-smile for making her repeat herself. Pam said it all again, at treble the volume.

  Her mother’s expression was a mix of pity and guilt. ‘Oh, my poor bairn. I’m sorry you had to come back.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Mam,’ said Pam, the first time she’d called her mother by the old name since her return home. ‘It wasn’t your idea.’ She went into the cupboard, studiously avoiding Marie’s eyes, and sat on her pillow. Mam went in, and sat opposite to her. Marie waited by the door until Alfie returned with Smut, then followed them in with the torch.

  ‘How long will the battery last?’ Mam asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Mam. An hour or two, maybe. I’ll turn it off, as soon as we’re settled.’

  ‘How can anybody be settled in here? Squashed in like this, among dust and spiders’ webs?’ Pam whined, averting her eyes from the scar across her mother’s face, which looked even more lurid in the beam of the torch.

  Mother was looking at Pam’s averted face, with a pleading in her eyes that wrenched Marie’s heartstrings.

  ‘First job for you tomorrow, then,’ Marie snapped. ‘Scrub the cupboard out, and then you won’t have to put up with dust and spiders next time. You look tired out, Mam. Let’s hope it’s no more than a bomb or two dropped near the docks, and then the all clear. We could all do with a decent night’s sleep.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Alfie, stroking the cat.

  ‘Right. I’ll put the torch off, then.’

  Night wore on, the family cramped and weary. Sleep lay heavy on Marie’s eyelids. It was nearing half-past twelve, just as she was lapsing into an uncomfortable doze that she heard the drone of the first wave of bombers. She flicked on the torch. The others were gazing upward, all wide-eyed with apprehension. The drone increased in volume until the air vibrated with the noise. Smut began mewing and clawing at the cupboard door, frantic to get out. A series of piercing shrieks rent the air as the planes released their cargo. Then the dull thud, thud, thud of their landing signalled that the bombs were falling some distance away. Marie took Pam’s hand to calm her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s probably the docks.’

  With that came the crash of closer explosions, some of them shaking the house. Smut yowled horribly and scratched ever more frantically at the door.

  Mam looked like death. ‘I bet the roofs gone,’ she croaked.

  ‘I wish we’d gone to the shelter,’ Pam said, her teeth chattering.

  Marie was frightened for her mother. ‘I’ll get Mam something to lie down on, then I’ll sit outside, to make more room.’

  ‘I’ll get her something.’ Alfie was at the door before Marie could stop him, and Smut shot out before him. After what seemed an age, Alfie came back with a quilt, looking awestruck. ‘Hull’s afire,’ he announced.

  ‘What, all of it?’

  He nodded, his eyes wide with wonder. ‘All of it! I had a look out of the bedroom windows. It’s blazing! Everywhere you look, everything alight! Everything must be gone, telephones, the lot. They must need runners now.’

  He thrust the bedding into Marie’s arms and was out of the back door before she even noticed he was carrying his coat.

  She went after him. ‘Hey! Come back! Co
me back here this minute! Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

  He was already on his bike, with the back-yard gate wide open. ‘ARP post!’

  Even standing at the door, Marie was breathing smoke. The air was thick with the haze and the stench of it. ‘No fear! You’re too young. Come back here this minute! You’ll get yourself killed!’

  ‘No fear! Old No-balls can’t kill me! You’ll see.’

  Alfie was gone.

  Their mother gave a cry of anguish. ‘Stop him, stop him, Marie! Where’s he going?’

  ‘It’s too late, Mam,’ Marie shouted. ‘He’s gone to the ARP post. Don’t worry, as soon as Mr Elsworth sees him, he’ll put him somewhere safe.’

  Except that Mr Elsworth would undoubtedly be fully occupied elsewhere – and haring off to volunteer his services as a runner would never have entered Alfie’s head had it not been for Mr Elsworth. Thanks a lot, Leonard, Marie thought, angry at him and fearful for her little brother, and at the same time feeling put to shame by him. For a moment she thought of going to the hospital, but after one look at her mother and Pam she knew it was hopeless. She couldn’t leave them.

  Chapter 11

  The all clear sounded at ten past five. Marie wearily got dressed and left the house to cycle to work. Outside, acrid smoke filled her nostrils and her lungs. The air was like fog. She rode down Princes Avenue, turned onto Spring Bank and froze, stunned at the devastation. The street was shining with broken glass; it was everywhere, absolutely impossible to avoid. It seemed impossible that so much glass could exist in the world, and it would have cut her tyres to ribbons. After a minute or two, when she’d regained the power of thought and movement, she turned for home. She’d leave the bike there, where it would be safe, and go to the hospital on foot. Back on Spring Bank broken glass crunched under her feet as she walked. She moved on, now clambering over rubble or striding over places where the pavement was split and lifted as if by an earthquake. People she passed looked as dazed as she felt. Tangles of firehose lay across the roads in all directions as firemen whose faces were grey with fatigue and besmirched with soot trained jets of water on buildings still crackling with flames. The spray from the jets swirled with ash and embers on the warm air. A breeze sent piles of charred paper from a bombed offices fluttering along the road. She jumped when a wall collapsed a hair’s breadth away from her with a crash louder than a thunderclap, throwing up sparks from smouldering beams. With her heart racing, Marie walked round the rubble wondering how she’d escaped with her life.

  Lamp posts were bent or broken. The trolley bus wires were down and lying on the smouldering debris like a cat’s cradle tossed aside by some giant’s child. There seemed to be nothing left to destroy. Turning down Prospect Street, she saw the once lovely church roofless and still smouldering, and half the street in ruins. Gone was beautiful Thornton-Varley’s, where as a toddler she’d thrown a massive tantrum, and had been shocked and stunned when her mother had walked off and left her threshing on the floor. Another pile of rubble had once been Powolney’s restaurant, where she’d been to a wonderful dinner-dance. And the top floor of Hammonds had been blasted away, its superb dance floor gone with it. Everything she loved, the scenes of all her happiest times had been wiped out in one night. At the end of the street, the tower of the Prudential Assurance building was listing like some punch-drunk lighthouse in a sea of devastation, a battered beacon in a haze of smoke and dust.

  To Marie’s relief, the Infirmary was still standing, its four fluted stone pillars with Corinthian capitals and the pediment they supported still solid, apparently aloof from destruction. Throughout her journey, she had been hoping to meet Alfie on his way home. Instead she met Margaret’s husband just coming out of the hospital, looking the archetypal tall, intrepid fireman. Sheer exhaustion now bent his shoulders and etched its lines in his blackened face, but his sense of humour was intact. He gave Marie a fleeting smile of recognition and the snatch of a song – ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’ – and then, encompassing the devastation with a sweep of his arm, he added: ‘But not today, is it? There must be hundreds died or injured last night, and thousands homeless.’

  ‘Oh, Terry, it’s worse . . . worse than I could ever have imagined. My 11-year-old brother went out last night to volunteer as a runner; I’m worried sick about him. I just hope he gets back safe. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just came in the ambulance with one of our lads. We’ve had more fires than you can count, and all of them major. There were hundreds of incendiaries dropped on the warehouses near the dockside, so some of us climbed onto the roofs to get them off, and the quickest way was to go along the eaves, and kick them off. Some unlucky lads got burned.’

  She looked into his eyes, reddened from the smoke. ‘I thought it must be something like that.’

  ‘He’s real bad. Probably had it.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not. We’ll do our best for him. He might pull through.’

  ‘I think he’s gone past that stage.’

  ‘No harm in trying, though. Never say die.’

  ‘See the Prudential building?’ he asked. ‘Or rather, you can’t. Everything’s gone but the tower, the rest’s nothing but rubble. There’s no hope for any of the people trapped under that. If they escaped burning, they must have drowned by now in the water from the burst main. There was nothing we could do to help them.’

  ‘Oh,’ she shuddered. ‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me that!’

  ‘Sorry. Aye, well, I’ll get back to the flat while I can still stand, and get some sleep. There won’t be as many of us to man the pumps come the next onslaught.’

  She watched him go for a moment or two, shoulders bent, trudging wearily along towards George Street and his empty flat near Central Fire Station, as if he could barely summon the energy to put one foot in front of the other. Poor man: no Margaret to look after him when he got there, only silence, and fending for himself. Marie wished that there’d been the time, or that she’d had the courage, to say something kind, something about Margaret: to tell him how much she and Nancy missed her, that their lives would never be the same.

  Well, he already knew that, better than anybody. And after tonight, life would never be the same for hundreds of people, either maimed or grieving over their injured and dead. She went into the hospital still sick at the thought of those people trapped under the Prudential Building. Maybe a few of them were still alive, even after fire and flood, she thought, and felt an enormous and irrational guilt at her powerlessness to help them. She’d certainly picked her moment to tell Matron she had to beg off nursing, just when there was so much to be done. But what alternative had she? Needed at the hospital, and needed at home, she felt torn in two. Until she learned the trick of being in two places at once the choice had to be made, and her own mother had the strongest claim. And Alfie was still missing. She wouldn’t be able to settle to anything until she knew he was safe.

  She went into the hospital and onto the ward, stopping at the office to ask for permission to go and see Matron sometime during the morning. Inside the ward one of the nurses was pulling the screens round a patient’s bed and Marie went to speak to her. The patient was still in his fireman’s uniform, probably the lad brought in by Margaret’s husband. His cheeks were almost burned off, exposing grinning teeth and his red, lidless eyes stared unmoving at the ceiling. The nurse looked at Marie and, mouthing the word ‘gone’, pulled the sheet over his head.

  Never say die, had she said? Marie was glad he had died. Die a thousand times and be at peace, rather than face the torment, the lifetime of pain and misery that would follow injuries like that. Die rather than face the comments and the stares, or the politely averted eyes of more sensitive souls. The way Pam looked at her mother’s injury was bad enough, but to have to face the world as disfigured as the man now hidden under that starched white sheet could only have been a constant torture. There was someone whose future had been wiped out as well as his past. Completely wiped out, wiped of
f the face of the earth. And she was glad that he was dead, and out of it.

  But there were so many others who weren’t out of it, and so much that needed doing here. Maybe she would put off speaking to Matron and have a real heart-to-heart talk to Pam instead, then give her another day or two and see how things went.

  Marie trudged home through the wreckage of the city, weary, and hardly able to take it in. Everything but the infirmary and the Prudential tower had been demolished. Poor Thornton-Varley’s, she could have wept over it, that and the dance halls. Roads ruined, bomb craters all over the city centre, water seeping up from broken mains, hardly one stone standing on another, it was destruction beyond anything she could have imagined. There was more than enough work here for a thousand engineers. Their once beautiful town centre looked broken beyond repair.

  ‘What’s it like in the city?’ her mother asked, when she got home. There was no confusion there, Marie thought. Her mother seemed a lot more coherent, and Marie guessed that Alfie must be all right. Had it been otherwise, his name would have been the first word out of her mother’s mouth.

  Marie threw up her hands and shrugged, words failing her. ‘Ruined,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be seen to be believed. I reckon our Alfie’s back, then?’

  ‘He’s at the Elsworths’. In bed.’

  Marie breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that. Where’s our Pam?’

  ‘Gone.’

  Marie’s jaw dropped. ‘Gone? Gone where?’

  ‘Back to Bourne, if she can get there. She was crying after you’d gone, and she said: “Mam, I love you, but I can’t stay here; I can’t go through another air raid.” So I gave her all the money I had in my purse, then she packed her case, and she went. She said she’d ring Mr and Mrs Stewart as soon as she could get to a telephone, and if they were willing to have her back, she’d get the ferry over to New Holland, and bus it to Lincoln. “It was like being cast out of heaven having to come back to Hull,” she said. “This place is hell on earth.”