After the Storm
Page 38
‘The stairs are really too steep for this rushing about, darling. It’s so undignified.’ There were shouts from downstairs and the revving of lorries in the drive.
‘You’re just too fat,’ Annie grinned.
‘Now don’t be cross,’ Prue pouted. ‘Now come along, back down with me. Matron wants us all assembled.’ She pulled her towards the next flight down. The oil paintings which lined the stairs were shrouded in white sheeting and Annie paused to peer at the last picture, lifting the corner of the cover.
There were only dim lights on the stairs and none in the hallway below them. ‘Oh, come on, darling,’ urged Prue. ‘We’ve got to get down now and strictly no lights allowed so put your torch away and stop poking about looking at pictures that are not yours anyway.’
She was flustered, Annie could see that now. Her forehead was furrowed and her face was flushed.
‘So what’s the hurry, I thought we had another half an hour?’ She put her torch in her pocket and started down the stairs.
‘Our transport is arriving then and the old dragon is having a heart attack every five minutes.’
‘Matron is very nice,’ Annie said quietly.
‘To you maybe,’ whispered Prue as they approached the hall. There were other nurses there now and orderlies were moving amongst them with lists in their hands which they played their torches over.
Annie stood with Prue over by the corridor. ‘All right,’ she gave in, ‘tell me what’s happened.’ She leant back against the door jamb and hitched up her gas mask.
‘All so terribly trivial, darling.’ Prue’s eyes would be wide, Annie knew that from the tone of voice. ‘I put down her list, that’s all, and I can’t remember where and before that the corporal in charge of the baggage was heard to say that he was buggered if he’d herd a bunch of camels like this again. When Matron said she’d take down his number if she heard language like that again, some wag said Corp wasn’t on the phone but he’d take her on instead. Well, you can imagine, darling.’
Annie was laughing now, so hard that her stomach hurt and Monica, who was standing further down, hissed, ‘Shut up, for God’s sake, she’ll have your head on a platter.’
The train was unlit, unheated and there were no seats left and Annie came to the conclusion as she sat on her kit in the dark corridor and pushed Pruscilla upright that this was no way to fight a war. She wore her tin hat as orders were orders but it was noisy when dropped which it did with every lurch of the train. It was so cold that she could no longer feel her feet and her hands were stuck deep into her greatcoat pockets. The corridor smelt of stale tobacco and dirty bodies. Pruscilla snored but there was no rhythm to it, just a series of disjointed grunts and gurgles.
‘Can’t you stop that bleedin’ din, Sister?’ called a man’s voice but Annie ignored it. Nothing but a cork would do that or a pinched nose and there was no way she was about to do that and provoke Prue’s hysterics. The Thermos was still full and she unscrewed the cap and took a drink as the train rattled over the points. The hot tea was tangy but warming; the steam made her nose run. It was midnight.
The black-out blind banged against the frame and it seemed lighter outside than in and she could see that they were passing through the edge of a town, then the train began to slow. It lurched and Pruscilla flopped forward and they had arrived. It was cold and dark and noise was still forbidden but this was Lime Street Station in Liverpool. Pruscilla had docked here before and recognised the station.
‘I want to hear nothing, not even the clink of a hat, not even a snort.’ The sergeant-major was very red in the face and Prue blinked.
Searchlights stabbed the sky and an air raid was on. They stayed in the station, listening to the crump, crump of the bombs and the reply of the ack-ack as they pounded the planes.
Annie’s head ached with tiredness and the bombs were too far away to be real so there was no fear. But it was still so cold. At last they were able to drag their kitbags over to the transport when the all-clear sounded and she could smell the brine of the sea and feel its stickiness in her hair.
They were still bound to silence as they approached their ship. The gangplank was steep and the non-slip strips were too wide for Annie’s stride and the water gurgled beneath them, oily and dirty. Hands gripped her as she reached the top and handed her down to the deck which was vibrating as the engines idled. It was pitch-dark still and she and Prue were passed along to where Monica and two others stood.
‘You five Sisters follow me,’ said a male voice in scarcely more than a whisper.
Once inside the hatchway, dim lights showed narrow steel-riveted corridors and the tremor beneath their feet was more noticeable and there was a heavy smell of diesel.
They were led along narrow companionways until the sailor stopped, checked his list and opened the door.
‘This is your cabin.’ He still spoke in a whisper. ‘Water twice a day at oh-six hundred hours and eighteen hundred hours. Sea soap is provided for washing. No noise until we’re under way.’ It was an order and his face told them so.
They moved into the cabin. There were six bunks and one nurse already in the cabin. Prue sidled up to Annie. ‘They look awfully small, darling,’ she whispered and they all laughed.
Monica was with them but the rest were strangers. Prue looked tired and frightened and Annie said, ‘Have the bottom bunk, lass. It’s less far to fall in a rough sea and I’ll get you some tea from the flask.’ She steered her towards the bunk and patted her arm.
Monica was stowing her kit in the space at the end of the bunks and Annie put hers and Prue’s on top. She grinned at the other three Sisters and one with a faint moustache smiled back.
‘Would you like some tea?’ breathed Annie, remembering the noise regulation.
The other Sister nodded her head. ‘I’ve something which will make it taste a little better,’ and she drew out a small hip flask. ‘Tea and whisky. Best thing for sea-sickness.’
But it wasn’t and they were. They still did not know where they were going but Annie knew it would be nearer Georgie though further from Tom.
CHAPTER 23
Grace stood by the kitchen table, impatient at the time the tea was taking to cool. She wanted to pour it into Tom’s morning flask and get to bed before the air-raid siren sounded. It was nearly eleven and in half an hour the bombers would start. The Germans were always on time, had been for months now. Aiming for the docks they were, the papers said, but you could have fooled Wassingham.
After the first week of it, Bob had explained that the Germans were a mechanical people who liked a timetable; his face was serious and his tone that of a teacher and Tom had slapped his back and told him he’d buy him a German watch with a bloody great cuckoo leaping out every hour.
Grace dipped her finger into the tea again. ‘Strange how they grabbed you the minute we arrived back up here, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A disabled agitator one minute, too crippled for the army and an essential worker the next. What a difference a war makes, eh Tom? Two years now and how many more to go, bonny lad?’
Tom grunted and moved the picture frame he was pinning to catch more light from the single bulb which dangled above him. There were a pile of gleaming steel pins on the scrubbed table and a small hammer which lay near them. The room was cheerful in spite of the gloom with scattered patchwork cushions given to them by May and Betsy creating colour, but the heavy smell of size and stove-black from the make-shift black-out curtains permeated the whole house. The furniture was sparse but familiar since it came from Joe and Betsy.
He was glad to be working like this, busy with his art after the shift, but his hands were not as dextrous as they used to be, he had noticed recently, because they were stiff from muscles knotted with manual work and damaged by dust-saturated cuts. His nails were stained black again too as they had been in the old days but he still had the energy, just, to take a painting class once a week at the library, so long as it didn’t coincide with his firewatch duty.
‘That’ll do,’ he said to Grace as he arched his back and ran his hands round his neck. ‘I’m getting old, lass, creaking and groaning like the pit-props, an old man at 25.’ He put a quaver in his voice and pulled her to him, running his hands down her back and over her buttocks. There was not much spare weight on his bonny lass these days but at least rationing had made things fairer and no one starved, like they used to. Everyone was just bloody hungry. Grace bent over and kissed the top of his head, full of the smell of coal again after being clean for four years. She sighed and tested the tea again. It was ready.
‘It’s a bloody disgrace about that shelter you know,’ Tom went on, watching her as she poured the tea into the flask and secured the top. She had nice hands still, had our Gracie, in spite of working in that factory. ‘Fancy telling people to go and shelter in the cupboard under the stairs until they find money from somewhere to finish it. We’ve said we’ll do it if they can produce the materials but even that doesn’t speed things up. The bloody war will be over before they get round to it or I hope to God it is.’ He brushed the pins into his hand and put them back in the old tobacco tin which held them, opening the drawer beneath the table and throwing in the hammer, then the pins. God, he hoped it was over soon but how could it be without help from the US and there was no hope of that at the moment. As it was, it looked as though Hitler could be over here any time and he shuddered, then hoped that Grace hadn’t seen.
‘Are you glad I dragged you back up here then, hinny, and didn’t make you go through the blitz in London?’ He was grinning now as he tried to talk away his forebodings. Grace was tipping ash gently on to the fire and she finished before straightening up and tucking a red curl behind her ear.
‘Oh aye, lad,’ she laughed. ‘Much more cosy to be bombed in me own home.’ She came over and sat on his lap. It would be time for bed in five minutes, he thought as he stroked her face and laid his head on her shoulder, but they wouldn’t go earlier than ten past eleven or they would have more time to think of the bombs that would soon start. They sayed in bed now, didn’t rush to the dark tight cupboard. It hadn’t saved Ma Gillow’s friend or the children who had been crushed just the same. It seemed so pointless somehow to rush like rats into a hole and die anyway; it was too much like the pit.
He remembered Chamberlain’s message to the nation at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September as he breathed in Grace’s scent and heard the beating of her heart beneath the green jumper that had gone felty in the wash. And how, now a state of war existed, they, like the rest of the population, had headed for home, like animals in a storm. Married they’d been though, the day before, and had stood together in the corridor for the length of the journey because the seats were packed full. It was the children he remembered most, that and the feel of Grace as she had stood close to him and pressed against him as they swung with the train.
To begin with, the bairns had run past them shouting and laughing but had soon subsided into bored lethargy and tearful boredom, sprawled all over their parents and one another, their gas masks sticking into them, making for more tears, more discomfort.
A few hours out of London the guard had come along and insisted on a drill and Tom remembered the smell of the gas mask rubber which was choking, and the misting of the glass which cut down his vision. The train had still been swinging and lurching and the children were crying now except for one red-haired boy who kept his on when others had gratefully dragged the mask from their faces and sucked at the stale train air. The boy had blown out hard and the raspberry was loud enough for the old lady with her luxury gas-mask container in the first-class compartment to tut and wonder how she was to survive the war if she was to rub shoulders with the likes of these. Did she have any evacuees now? Tom wondered, and grinned at the thought. That should knock her delicate sensibilities out of the window.
He had sketched the boy quickly and in pencil while Grace looked over his shoulder. It was good, she had said and then sat down on the suitcase propped against the compartment door. It was splitting with age and she had set her feet apart and hunched herself over her knees.
She had asked whether the Germans would really use gas and he had laughed and said of course they wouldn’t, hoping that she would not hear that Mussolini had used it in 1935 against the Abyssinians. So far though, the Germans had not used it, they used bombs instead. He lifted his head from the warmth of her shoulder and checked the wall clock. Fifteen minutes past eleven.
‘Come on, lass, up you go. I’ll get me boots out and me clothes for the morning.’ He laid his pit-clothes over the fender so that the early winter chill would be kept at bay by the small ash-banked fire.
They had called in to see Annie when they had reached Newcastle, then continued on to Wassingham and it seemed as though they had never been away; the slag-carts still churned upwards and there was that smell in the air. But as they walked on to Grace’s home, they passed white-painted kerbs and lampposts and heaps of sand which some children had spread on the pavement and turned into a soft shoe shuffle stage. It stank of dogs’ pee, he could smell it now, and so did the sandbags which were stacked in front of the library windows and shops as blast protection.
They had gone from Grace’s house to Bob’s and he had shown them the two up two down he had found for them to rent with a privy out at the back. He looked well, less drawn, and Tom had taken him and Don for a drink while Grace and Maud sorted out the house. She’d stuck her tongue out at him and called that she would tell Annie he was a pig.
It was because there was full employment Bob had gloated as he supped at his beer and the froth stayed on his upper lip until he wiped it away with his handkerchief. There’s a munitions factory opening up down the road, he’d gone on, and it’ll take our lads and they won’t have to care if the pit’s open or not. Tom laughed with Don and winced as the lad kicked him under the table. War’s done you proud has it, Bob? Don had said, and Bob had blushed and admitted that, to some extent, Don was right, explaining that the lads would be able to get away from Wassingham now into the services or, if they stayed, they had the chance of better conditions in the factories, not the bloody pits. And of course, Tom thought, as he shut the kitchen door and climbed the stairs, he’d been right.
He boarded up the bedroom windows with the cut-down doors which Bob had unscrewed from his unused bedrooms and was in bed before the nightly raid began but the crump crump and shudder of the house made his mouth run dry as it always did and he soothed Grace who clung to him. The thudding of the ack-ack as it replied did not help his fear. He was glad that Maud was with her parents in Merthyr Terrace while Don was at the supply depot outside Manchester. She wouldn’t come to them, felt too much of a gooseberry, she had laughed, and Albert scared her and Tom could understand that. It was better to be where you felt at ease.
‘Tell you what, bonny lass,’ he breathed into Grace’s ear, making her listen. ‘We’ll take Val’s Christmas presents on Sunday shall we, take Maud and clear the garden, now that the old boy can’t cope any longer. You tell Maud in the morning.’ He pulled her hair slightly and there was a louder nearer explosion and a tremor ran through the bed and the mirror on the dressing-table rattled. ‘Listen to me, Grace,’ he had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘You go and tell her after work tomorrow.’ And then she nodded but she was like a rigid board in his arms and he stroked and kissed her but they were too frightened for passion.
He left the house at five in the morning having dozed for what seemed like
a few minutes. It was still dark as he joined his Uncle Henry further down the street.
‘Everyone all right?’ he asked. ‘May, Betsy?’
‘Aye, lad, and Maud’s area’s clear an’ all but the library got it.’
‘God damn it, now where’ll I find for me bloody class?’ Tom grumbled. The dust was still falling from the bomb damage. It was in their eyes and hair but the fires were mainly under control though the glow was still bright enough to show the smoke rising in a pall from Gladburn Street where the library had been and further over, nearer the slag-heaps on the north side of town.
‘That’s your problem,’ grunted his uncle and they nodded as they passed more miners coming out from doors and alleys to start the shift. Henry was rubbing his eyes, dragging his hands down his face though his eyes were no more red-rimmed than everyone else’s, the dust and coal took their toll and the tiredness just came on top of all that, ‘Bloody shattered I am. This fire-watch is too much at my age. We’ll need some more young ’uns in the pits too, soon. I’m 55 lad.’
Tom gripped his shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Henry. Good and strong.’ But decided he would take more of the face-work. He knew he was a fool to still be in the pits himself but somehow he couldn’t make himself take an easy option. It would be bad luck somehow and after all Annie must come back safely.
Their boots were loud on the cobbles as they walked along to the pit-yard. The buildings crowded in on them and the dawn had yet to break though there was a lightening of the sky.
‘I hear there’s talk of striking,’ said his uncle quietly as they waited in the queue for the cage. Men were murmuring all around them. There was the noise of boot against cobble, bait-tin against bait-tin. A miner spat.
Tom nodded. ‘So Bob says.’ His muffler was tight up round his throat and his foot was hurting as it always did but it did not swell quite so much these days. He knew he was thinner, his face was drawn and etched with sharp lines that were not there before the pain. A pain which was with him every day, every minute since Olympia.