by Anne Bennett
Bridie turned to look at her mother after one of these reports and said, ‘If they die, if anything has happened to my children, it will be my fault.’
‘No, Bridie,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s the people dropping bombs that will have hurt your children.’
But Bridie shook her head. She thought to herself that if they were dead it would be another two deaths laid on her door. Peggy McKenna would have her wish at last and Bridie wouldn’t care any more, for her reason for living would be over.
And what would Tom do then, if he lost them all, and after urging Bridie to take the children to a place of safety, long before the war began in earnest? What now if it was too late?
Sarah was worried about her daughter, what she’d find back in Birmingham and how she’d cope with it. She already looked far from well and more than thin, gaunt almost, so that her ill-fitting clothes hung on her frame. But it was the look on her face that worried her most. It was her face, white as snow and her eyes, which seemed to stand out in her head, looking huger than ever and filled with terror, with blue smudges beneath them.
Sarah so wished she could enfold her daughter in two good strong arms and tell her everything would be all right, but the time for such things, such assurances, was passed. She could do nothing but wait, for she was worried herself. Hadn’t she another daughter and a much loved sister going through it, not to mention her grandchildren?
Sometime in the long night, Jimmy went to his bed, exhausted beyond measure. But rather than disturb the women folk grouped around the fire, he undressed behind the curtain. Sarah was also tired, but she stayed as support for her daughter.
Bridie’s eyes felt gritty and sore, but she knew there would be no sleep for her that night. The extreme terror she felt had made everything around her of no importance. She drank the seemingly endless cups of tea her mother pressed on her, and was aware that they knelt at least once and said the rosary together. Time had no meaning for her and she sat hunched forward, gazing into the fire, her hands clasped and between her knees, immobile except for the odd shudder that ran through her. Every hour the newscaster spoke of the raid continuing and the whole of the city centre blazing out of control.
As the raid began that night, back in Bell Barn Road, Ellen watched her husband’s laboured breathing and knew he hadn’t long to go. Dear God, she thought, this war was no place for the young, the old and anyone vulnerable. It was no place for anyone, but not everybody could run away. There comes a time when people have to stand and fight evil and this was one of those times and, if she’d been younger and hadn’t had Sam to consider, she’d have been alongside of them.
But, Sam, dear Sam, her husband of many years was on his way out. It had been a good and happy marriage, the only disappointment being that they’d not had children. And yet with Mary and then Bridie and their families living around the doors, she’d not felt the lack so keenly. Still, she thought, Bridie was right to get the children away. She listened to the whistle and whine of the falling bombs and the crashes, thumps and crump of impact and shivered, especially at those falling close, and imagined the children’s fear.
Sam had seen the shiver and it bothered him. He was no fool; he knew his days were numbered. Hadn’t Father Shearer given him the last rites earlier in the day. Heard his confession too. That had made Sam smile. ‘God love us, Father,’ he’d said. ‘You can’t get up to much wrongdoing tied to your bed. This is probably the most sinless time in my life.’
Father Shearer had smiled and gave Sam absolution, followed by Communion and then the last rites to prepare him for the afterlife. Sam wasn’t afraid of dying – he was prepared for it – but Ellen had years ahead of her yet. ‘Go down to the cellar,’ he urged now.
‘I will not.’
‘Ah go, Ellen. To please me.’
There was a catch in Ellen’s voice as she said, ‘Not even to please you will I leave you alone in this bedroom tonight.’ She caught hold of his weather-beaten hand and said, ‘We’ll stick it out together, as we always have.’
Sam smiled, glad of the comfort of that hand. ‘We’ve had a good life together haven’t we, Ellen?’
Ellen didn’t insult Sam’s intelligence by telling him they had many more years yet. Her voice was little above a whisper as she said, ‘Aye, lad. A grand life.’
‘There was never anyone but you,’ Sam continued. ‘I loved you from the first moment I saw you.’
This was unusual talk. Ellen and Sam never spoke of the love they shared. And yet, the words brought a glow to Ellen’s whole being. And so, uncharacteristically, she said, ‘I loved you then too and I love you even more today,’ and, still holding his hand, she leaned over the bed to give the paper-thin skin, stretching over his hollowed cheeks, a kiss.
As she did so, there was a whizzing sound and for a split second it was as if all the air had been sucked from the room. Ellen opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. There was an ear-splitting explosion, the room went black and Ellen knew nothing more.
The raids still continued and Bridie sat up all night, with Sarah keeping her company, as they listened to the growing list of targets. There were many other armament factories, big and small attacked, and the broadcaster said many hospitals has also been hit, with many casualties and doctors, nurses and patients killed. Bridie worried about Jay; the General in the centre of the city was probably one of those damaged.
At midnight, she heard of more bombers approaching and, at three o’clock, another raid. Bridie knew what they’d all be going through and wondered when it would end. She desperately wished for morning so she could go back and check her loved ones were all right.
The raid didn’t finish until almost six o’clock, but by that time Bridie was aboard the rail bus. Her anxiety was such she hadn’t been able to eat breakfast and her mammy had given out to her gently.
‘No food, no rest! What good will you be to them if you fall ill?’
‘Mammy, food would choke me,’ Bridie said. Sarah, seeing how dreadfully worried she was, and with reason, didn’t argue further. Instead she’d said, ‘I’ll wrap up a few pieces of soda bread with some lumps of cheese and a few apples. Maybe you’ll fancy it later.’
Bridie let her do that, knowing she’d be unable to eat the food. She felt as if a lead weight had filled her stomach and she knew it wouldn’t shift until she was home and held her children in her arms.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was dusk by the time Bridie emerged from the station and she could see that the high street and New Street were still ablaze. Water streamed along pavements and gurgled in gutters, but while many fires just smouldered, others blazed merrily. Plumes of black smoke swirled over the city and mingled with the orange and red flames filling the winter’s sky. Black dust stung her eyes, went up her nose and in her mouth and settled on her clothes, mixed with the smell of smoke and gas.
She didn’t bother waiting for a tram or a bus. She’d heard of areas where the tarmac had been set ablaze, or others where it had melted enough to slide into the gutters, thereby lifting the buckled and twisted tram tracks. Buses were always being re-routed too, for many roads were impassable due to great craters, or piles of rubble, and just occasionally because an unexploded bomb had landed close by, so trying to get anywhere by bus was just as fraught.
She wondered if she should first go and see if Jay was all right as the General Hospital had been hit, but she had a great longing to be home and so she set off quickly. She went up Bristol Passage and then stood still, more stunned and horrified than she’d ever been in her whole life. One side of Bell Barn Road, the side Ellen’s house had been on, was one giant mass of rubble: not one house remained standing. She suddenly felt light-headed from lack of food and sleep and the horrifying sight before her, and she staggered and would have fallen to the filthy littered ground if it hadn’t been for an ARP warden who steadied her.
The warden, Gillian Pearce, had just recently been drafted into the area to help with rescue work,
after working all night in Hockley. Not that there were many survivors expected, they had told her. For the first time that night, low level attacks had been carried out and they’d also used some naval mines, which had exploded near the ground to maximise the damage caused. So she asked Bridie gently, aware that she may have to impart bad news, ‘Was this your road?’
‘Aye,’ Bridie answered, looking bleakly about her. ‘At least it was after I was bombed out of Grant Street. I … I went to Ireland then to ask my Mammy to take the weans in. I left my sister minding them while I was away and there was my aunt and uncle as well. They were in the cellar of number 78.’
She looked about her. In the growing dark, the rubble looked like a big, black mound and not far away, she could see a rescue party moving the debris by hand with the help of shaded flashlights.
Suddenly, there was a cry. ‘They’ve found a survivor,’ Gillian told Bridie. ‘Come on. It might be someone you know.’
Bridie hurried after the woman, anxious to see if it was a neighbour or possibly one of her relatives, for it was difficult to say where the house had been. Minutes later, she was looking down into the bruised and battered face of Peggy McKenna. Grey dust covered her face and her lashes, coating her cheeks and lips, ingrained in her hair and mixed with the blood seeping from a head wound. Her whole body was covered in dust too and one leg was at an odd angle. With a sickening lurch, Bridie saw the bones sticking through the flesh.
But it was Peggy’s eyes that held her, bored into her. ‘God will have his revenge,’ she said in a hoarse whisper, each word spaced out as if it was an effort to speak. No one but Bridie appeared to have heard, but Peggy’s meaning couldn’t have been clearer.
And then, Peggy coughed and spluttered. It was obviously painful for her, for her eyes glazed over. Two wardens rushed to raise her, but it was too late, Peggy’s head rolled back and blood pumped from her mouth in a stream, so that Bridie had to leap out of the way of it. She stared at the eyes of the dead woman and felt relief seep all through her body. She was dead and could hurt her no more, but when all was said and done, nothing could hurt her more than the loss of her loved ones and she had no way of knowing if they were alive or dead.
But maybe they weren’t lost. Maybe just now they were being cared for in some hospital or other. ‘Where were the survivors taken?’ she asked as they carried Peggy away.
A man answered. He didn’t say that those caught in the epicentre of a parachute mine, or blasted by a bomb, often came out in pieces. Nor did he tell her that bags of human remains had already been delivered to funeral directors to clean and try to assemble to help with identification. ‘Many were taken along to the General Hospital,’ he said, ‘and then directed wherever they had room.’
‘Thank you,’ Bridie said. ‘I’ll go along to there now.’
But the man, who knew what she might find, told Gillian to go with her, but softly so that Bridie wouldn’t hear. ‘She looks very near to collapse to me,’ he added. ‘And I don’t think what she will find there will help her any.’
Bridie was glad of the warden’s company; she seemed unable to function properly and doubted she’d have even found her way without help. The hospital was packed, both by victims of the raid, some of those buried in the rubble only coming in now, and relatives and friends trying to trace them. Bridie looked at the press of people helplessly. ‘Stay here,’ Gillian said. ‘I’ll ask about your relatives. What are their names?’
Bridie told her and a little later she was back. James Coghlan was there and not injured further in the raid of the 22nd, although the ward next to his had been caught in the blast and his own ward had a huge hole in the wall.
‘And my children?’
The warden shook her head. ‘No sign,’ she said. ‘Your sister’s here though, but she’s in a coma.’ She didn’t add that the nurse had said Mary Coghlan would be unlikely to survive the night and that if Bridie wanted to see her alive, it wouldn’t do to linger. She asked Bridie instead if she’d like to see her sister.
Gillian didn’t tell Bridie what the nurse had said, but she did ask her if she wanted to see her sister. Bridie considered it, but a coma didn’t sound that serious and anyway she was in the right place to be treated. Surely it was better find the others first. Her overriding concern was for her children and so she shook her head. ‘No, not yet.’
Gillian bit her bottom lip and wondered if she was wrong to keep the seriousness of Mary’s condition from Bridie. But, just at that moment, Bridie turned and said, ‘I must find out how everyone else is before I see Mary. You must understand that? It’s the children I’m worried about mostly.’
Gillian knew Bridie would not rest until she found out what had happened to the children, good or bad, but Gilliam felt her heart lurch at what she might discover.
‘I also need to find out about my aunt and uncle,’ Bridie said, and with a sigh went on sadly, ‘I don’t really think they will have survived such a devastating raid. They never used the cellar you see, my uncle was ill and bedridden.’
She looked at the concerned woman before her and suddenly asked, ‘What d’you think has happened to my children?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You were working there.’
‘No. No, I wasn’t,’ Gillian said. ‘I’d just been drafted into the area to help with the rescue work when I saw you. Last night and all day today I’ve been over Hockley way. Shall we try Lewis’s basement? They said at the hospital some of the injured were sent there.’
There they found Mickey, lying on a makeshift stretcher, and he was as delighted to see his aunt as she was to see him. His eyes were panic ridden, but they shone as he caught sight of his auntie’s face. ‘Oh, Auntie Bridie, I’ve been so scared,’ he said with a sigh of relief, as Bridie bent and kissed him on the cheek.
‘How are you?’
‘All right,’ Mickey said. ‘I mean not bad. Mom sort of threw herself over us, me and Katie and Liam.’
Hope leapt inside Bridie. ‘So where are Katie and Liam now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mickey said. ‘I blacked out. First I knew I was waking up here. Have you found Mom?’
‘Aye, she’s in the General Hospital,’ Bridie told him. ‘She’s in a coma. It’s like a deep sleep.’
‘She’ll be all right though?’
Bridie, ignorant of the severity of her sister’s condition, said reassuringly, ‘I’m sure she will be, Mickey. We must hope so. Jay’s doing fine too, though the hospital was hit.’
Mickey was pleased Jay wasn’t hurt further and was so glad his mother was going to be all right that he sighed again with relief. ‘I must go, Mickey, and get news of Katie and Liam and Ellen and Sam,’ Bridie said.
‘Will you come back?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Bridie promised, and though she felt sorry for the young boy, left alone, she knew she must search until she found out what had happened to her own youngsters. Mickey sensed the restlessness in his aunt and could even understand it. He drew on all his reserves of courage and gave his aunt a hug and watched her walk away. He knew he had to try to be brave, but he also knew if the bombers came again that night, he’d bawl his head off like a baby.
Bridie was glad to be away from Lewis’s. The dust-filled, smoke-laden air was preferable to the stench from the basement where Mickey was found. Bridie hadn’t been aware that blood smelt, but she knew it now all right, like she knew the smell of charred flesh made you want to vomit. But it wasn’t that alone. It was the smell of human misery, of fear and death, decay and hopelessness.
And the sounds tore at your very soul, the heartrending sobbing, the long drawn-out moans, the cries of pain, the odd shout or scream, and the nurses moving amongst them trying to sooth them and make them as comfortable as they could while they waited to see a doctor.
Gillian knew most of the undertakers used and so she led the way over the rubble-filled streets where fires still smouldered. ‘If they turn out tonight, them German bombers,’ she
remarked to Bridie, ‘Brum is done for.’
‘Why?’
‘No water. Three trunk water mains were smashed up in the raid last night. They drained the canal and everything, but couldn’t contain the fires. God, if the wind had been in the wrong direction last night, there wouldn’t have been anything of Birmingham left. As it is, if there’s a raid tonight – well, let’s just say, I bloody well hope there isn’t.’
‘Dear God,’ Bridie said. ‘What if I’ve found Mary and the boys only to lose them tonight?’ And what of her own little ones? Where the Hell were they?
Gillian couldn’t see Bridie’s face, but heard the sigh and thought what a depressing job she did. What the Hell was she doing anyway, touring the city, looking for Bridie’s people when she longed for a hot sweet cup of tea and her bed. She couldn’t leave Bridie, though, for she knew her sister and nephew were probably all she was going to find alive and she sensed she needed someone with her when that realisation dawned.
Two hours later they found Ellen and Sam in an undertakers. Their bodies and faces had to be pieced together, but Bridie had no doubt the pain-riddled faces were of her aunt and uncle. There was no record of the children in any of the funeral directors, or in the city morgue, or in any of the hospitals and emergency rest centres they visited around the city centre. Bridie knew then that her children were dead. Maybe their bodies where blown into such small pieces she’d never know for sure, or maybe they were still buried beneath the bricks, wood and glass in the ruins of Bell Barn Road.
The shock of it, the realisation that her children, her beautiful children that she’d have given her own life to save had died, struck at her like a knife in the stomach and she doubled over with a cry of deep distress.
Bridie didn’t feel herself falling to her knees, nor the other woman’s efforts to lift her, for her misery was too intense for anything, or anybody, to touch. Flashing through her mind were memories of the children that she knew were all she would have to sustain her in the years to come.