Put Out the Fires

by Maureen Lee

  Many streets were blocked by rubble and impassable, Hilda found, as she took the canteen from one scene of devastation to the next. She would park as close as possible, and as the weary rescuers came for a cup of tea to quench their thirst, Eileen began to wonder if her town would ever function again. She’d no sooner had this thought, when she saw two young girls coming along the street; well made up and smartly dressed, they were obviously on their way to work, their gasmasks slung over their shoulders. Then a woman came out of the front door of a house that had been left relatively undamaged, a georgette scarf tied around her curlers, and began to brush her step. Even more incongruously, a milk cart arrived, bottles jangling, the blinkered horse, at least, entirely unaware of the devastation all around him.

  She realised that, no matter what happened, life would go on.

  Mid-morning, they ran out of water, but when Hilda asked a Civil Defence worker where she could refill the boiler, to her consternation, she discovered there was no water to be had.

  “The mains have been ruptured. There’s no electricity or gas, either. He suggested I drive out as far as Waterloo to fill up.”

  “Do you mind if I pop round to Pearl Street while you’re gone?” Eileen asked. “Someone said it’d been hit.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” Hilda said. She was grimfaced and clearly fatigued, as was everybody, but showed no inclination to rest. “In fact, Eileen, I’d sooner you didn’t come back at all. I can always get someone else to help me out.” When Eileen began to protest, she said sternly, “Remember our little talk last night?”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “You’re very brave, but you’re also very foolhardy.

  Once you’ve been home, I suggest you immediately make your way to Melling and join your sister. Promise?”

  Eileen nodded and gave a little smile. “I promise.”

  “Take care, dear.”

  “You too, Hilda.”

  So Eileen went back to Pearl Street, where she discovered Jacob Singerman was dead and there was a neat little space on one side of the street where her sister’s house and the two adjacent ones had been.

  It was almost biblical, the exodus of people from Liverpool early that evening. With prams and handcarts piled high with precious personal possessions, not to mention the most precious of all, their children, they began to leave the city in their thousands, heading towards the relative safety of the fields and villages outside.

  All they wanted was a good night’s sleep and a few hours of safety from the raids.

  Eileen walked alone, carrying only her shopping bag with a few clothes and a toothbrush. There was nothing in Pearl Street she cared about if she lost her house that night.

  By the time she reached Melling, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Birds sang in the trees and the water in the stream which ran alongside Dunnings gurgled merrily over the white stones. The gardens of the houses in the High Street were full of flowers, and children played Tick in the churchyard. It was a beautiful, peaceful spring evening, and war, and all the suffering it brought with it, seemed a million miles away.

  They were having their tea in the cottage.

  “There you are!” Sheila breathed a sigh of relief when Eileen appeared. “How’s our dad? Have you seen him?”

  “I haven’t seen him, but he’s okay, apart from a burnt hand. He’d been round to Pearl Street looking for me.”

  She’d tell Sheila about her house later, there was something more important to deal with first.

  Ruth Singerman was giving Michael his bottle. She looked at Eileen, smiling anxiously. “I suppose Jacob swore he slept through the whole thing?”

  Eileen went over and knelt in front of Ruth’s chair. “I’m sorry, luv . . . ”

  That night, everyone in Liverpool held their breath as the clocks ticked towards midnight. It looked as if they were to be allowed a respite, time to catch their breath and catch up on their sleep. But at five to twelve, the unearthly wail of the siren blared forth, and they went wearily to their shelters, and the various Civil Defence workers squared their shoulders in readiness for the terror about to begin. If it was anything like last night, there’d be nothing of the city left to bomb by tomorrow . . .

  The raids on Liverpool continued, though on Monday and Tuesday, Glasgow and Tyneside were the main recipients of the enemy bombs. On Wednesday, the Luftwaffe targeted Liverpool and Boode yet again, to complete a week-long blitz. On that particular night, Marsh Lane Baths, which was being used as a temporary mortuary, received a direct hit. The bodies, including that of Jacob Singerman, were buried in a mass grave.

  Jack Doyle, as brave as a man could be, felt convinced morale was at breaking point. There was just so much the human spirit could endure. He’d been into Liverpool to find the centre of the city reduced to little more than a wasteland, and the sight of so many beautiful old and treasured buildings, lost forever, had almost reduced him, a grown man, to tears.

  “If this goes on much longer, we’ll snap,” he said one night in the King’s Arms, where the windows were boarded up and the only illumination came from candles on the bar, and according to Mack, the landlord, there wasn’t enough ale to last the week out. To some, this was the unkindest cut of all.

  Wild and totally unsubstantiated rumours circulated, not surprisingly when you considered the chaos in which people lived: -without water, gas or electricity, without food and transport, without homes. Even worse, without the loved ones who’d been cruelly snatched from them during the seven nights of mayhem. It was said that martial law was about to be imposed, that the homeless had marched through the city waving white flags, that food riots had taken place.

  All this proved to be untrue. The spirit of Liverpool may have been weakened, but the spirit was iron at the core and would never, never break.

  Anyroad, miraculously, it was Hitler who decided he’d had enough and Wednesday night’s raid turned out to be the last—for the time being.

  Chapter 19

  That May was perhaps the blackest period of the war so far, a time when Hitler seemed unstoppable and the terrifying realisation dawned that the victory that had so far seemed inevitable, might turn out not to be theirs.

  British and Allied troops continued their retreat in the deserts of North Africa, and those sent in aid of Greece when Hitler invaded were humiliatingly driven out with the loss of their equipment. The troops withdrew to Crete, and with almost breathtaking audacity, Hitler invaded the island from the air. More than three thousand paratroopers dropped from the skies, in what was thought might be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of the British Isles. In an evacuation considered even more inglorious than Dunkirk, fifteen thousand troops were forced to withdraw again, this time to Egypt, leaving behind many thousands to become prisoners-of-war. In the ensuing chaos,” three cruisers and six destroyers had been lost.

  Whilst all this was going on, HMS Hood was sunk by the German pocket battleship Bismarck with the loss of thirteen hundred lives, a tragedy which somewhat overshadowed the subsequent sinking of the Bismarck itself.

  There was minor jubilation when Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy, landed in Scotland, having fled from Nazi Germany alone. People hoped this was the first drip through the dam, that Hess knew the fight was lost and had decided to desert the sinking ship, but as they listened to their wirelesses or read their newspapers, it appeared Hess had come all this way just to complain about the food!

  Most of the front doors in Pearl Street were wide open, and” in order to get the best out of the sparkling June sunshine, several old people were sitting outside on their steps.

  Since the May blitz, windows had been temporarily repaired with sheets of canvas, slates replaced and doors refitted—many doors had already been treated to a fresh coat of paint. Sewage no longer seeped up through the grids and ran in the gutter, and it was several days since anyone had seen one of the hundreds of rats which had been disturbed by the bombs. Water, gas and electricity had
all been reconnected, so, really, there was no more need to eat in one of the British restaurants which had hurriedly been established after the blitz, except that at fivepence for breakfast, and eightpence for your dinner, the meals were definitely a bargain, and you saved on your rations at the same time.

  You could almost pretend the street was back to normal, Eileen Costello thought as she stood in the bedroom, struggling vainly to fasten the buttons of her biggest frock, particularly if you ignored the ugly gap where Numbers 19 to 23 used to be.

  Sheila had refused to remain in the cottage when she learnt she no longer had a house of her own. “If you don’t mind, Eil, I’d sooner move in with you. It’s too noisy here.”

  “Noisy!” gasped Eileen. “That’s the last word I’d use.”

  “Well, there’s the trees rustling all night long, for one thing,” Sheila explained. “Then the birds start at the crack of dawn, followed by a cockerel not far away, which wakes up the dogs. They all make a helluva row between them. I suppose I’m used to the sounds in Pearl Street.

  Anyroad, I’d sooner live in Bootle than any place on earth.”

  So, Aggie Donovan and George Ransome offered the loan of their spare beds, and Number 16 burst into life as Sheila Reilly moved in with her six children. The Reillys had lost everything they possessed, except their lives, so Sheila didn’t complain.

  “You must write to Nick and tell him that we’d all be dead if it weren’t for the cottage,” she said to her sister.

  “Just think, we would have been under the stairs, all seven of us, when that bomb fell . . . ”

  As soon as Sheila found another property, she would get a nine-pound grant from the Government to replace her lost furniture. In the meantime, Eileen made sure the family had a change of clothes off the second-hand rack at the WVS.

  Eileen gave up trying to fasten the frock. Even if she got the buttons in the holes, they’d pop out if she dared so much as breathe. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched Dai Evans paint his front door exactly the same shade of green it had been before it had been torn off and thrown halfway up the stairs. Her dad had promised to paint hers as soon as he could find the time. She’d do it herself, but even the thought of the smell of paint made her feel slightly nauseous.

  Watching Dai, she felt a surge of pride at the way everyone on Merseyside, the ordinary people as well as those in charge, had collectively cocked a snook at Hitler, pulled themselves up by their rather frayed and tatty bootstraps, and begun the almost superhuman task of putting things to rights after the raids - though it would be years before the thousands of houses totally destroyed were re-built. Eileen still shuddered when she went down Marsh Lane and came face to face with the devastation brought by the German bombs. There was scarcely a house left in Bootle that hadn’t been damaged in some way—and the raids still continued. There’d been two bad nights at the end of May, but they were nothing compared to those at the beginning of the month.

  Even the docks, battered, bruised and broken though they were, the waters clogged with sunken ships, had miraculously continued to function, so that the port of Liverpool had never closed.

  A white cat came wandering along the street and began to sniff at the paint which Dai Evans had put on the doorstep. Eileen stiffened. Snowy! But when she looked properly, the cat had a black-tipped tail. Although several people, including Eileen, had searched, Snowy had never been seen again since the night Jacob Singerman had died, though Nelson had returned home of his own accord the following day. Dai aimed a kick in the cat’s direction, which missed, and the animal shot down the entry beside the railway wall.

  Eileen’s eyes welled with tears when she thought about the old man who’d been such a dear friend. So many people had gone forever—the remains of five hundred and fifty had been buried in a brick vault at Anfield Cemetery-and even more had been seriously injured and would forever bear the scars of that week-long blitz.

  “Are you all right, Eil?” Sheila called. “You’ve been up therefor ages.”

  “I’m just thinking, that’s all.”

  “Mind you don’t strain yourself!”

  Eileen took a cardigan out of the drawer. Even that would scarcely stretch over the gaping hole where her frock refused to button. She seemed to have grown big all of a sudden.

  “I’m just popping over to Brenda Mahon’s for a minute,” she told Sheila when she went downstairs.

  Brenda’s front door was open to the brilliant sunshine.

  Eileen poked her head into the hallway. “Are you there, Bren?” she yelled.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” Brenda yelled back. “Come on in, Eileen.”

  Everything was as it used to be in Brenda’s house, except there was no longer a photograph of Xavier Mahon on the wireless and the front room was as neat as the rest, the sewing machine having been relegated to a corner, where it remained, unused.

  “I’ve just made an eggless sponge,” Brenda explained when Eileen appeared in the back kitchen doorway. “If you use a spoonful of vinegar instead of an egg, it’s supposed to rise just as well.”

  “Does it work?” Eileen asked, interested.

  “I dunno yet. It’s still in the oven.”

  “Let me know how it turns out and I’ll make one tomorrer.”

  “Okay, Eil.” Brenda licked her fingers. “I was just scraping the bowl. Can I offer you a cup of Bovril? I’m afraid I’ve run out of tea.”

  Eileen wrinkled her nose. “No, ta. I always feel as if I’m drinking gravy. I came to ask a favour, actually, but I expect you’ll send me away with a flea in me ear.”

  “Try me,” Brenda said with a smile.

  “I was wondering if you would run me up a couple of maternity smocks? Look at me!” She unbuttoned the cardigan and exposed the gap where the buttons wouldn’t meet. “This is me biggest frock and I’ve got nowt else that’ll fit. I’ve kept me eye open in the WVS, but they’ve never had anything suitable. I thought, if I let the seams out of me old black skirt and put a patch in both sides, then two smocks will see me through till September.”

  Brenda shook her head. “I’m sorry, Eileen, but I’m just not in the mood for dressmaking.”

  “You haven’t been in the mood for months!”

  “And I’m not likely to be, not ever!”

  Brenda said this with such utter finality that Eileen reckoned it was no use arguing. Nevertheless, she said gently, “You shouldn’t let what Xavier said put you off, luv.

  It seems such a shame to let all your talent go to waste.”

  “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it. Every time I go near my machine, it all comes back to me.” She was merely the dressmaker who lived downstairs and fancied him. “A woman came yesterday I haven’t seen for a couple of years, wanting a wedding dress and four bridesmaid’s frocks, but I still said no.”

  “Oh, well, never mind,” Eileen sighed. “I’ll just have to look around the shops. I wonder how many coupons they’ll cost?” Clothes rationing had begun at the beginning of the month. She was a fool not to have bought them before, but had been reluctant to waste her savings—or the money Nick had sent—on maternity clothes.

  “Eil?”

  “Yes, luv?”

  “I wanted to ask . . . ” Brenda wrinkled her face and looked slightly uncomfortable. “I mean . . . Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Go on, Bren,’Eileen urged.

  “I was just wondering . . . would you like half the sponge when it’s done?” Brenda said in a rush.

  Eileen stared at the woman thoughtfully. “No, ta,” she said eventually. “It’s very generous of you, but keep it for you and the girls.”

  As she crossed the street to go home, Eileen wondered what it was that Brenda had really wanted to ask.

  What Brenda was too embarrassed to ask Eileen was, how did she feel about spending the rest of her life without a man? Did Eileen have the same dead scary sensation as Brenda had, as if she was only half a person?

&nbs
p; There were times when Brenda was terrified that Xavier might turn up and plead with her to take him back, and although she’d sworn she’d never touch him again with a barge pole, she might well take him because she couldn’t bear the thought of being alone. It wasn’t that she minded being by herself, she was used to it, even before Xavier was called up, but he was always there, in the background, someone to talk about to the neighbours or on the tram or in queues. She still talked about him now, as if nothing untoward had happened, as if he hadn’t betrayed her with Carrie Banks and probably half a dozen other women. But once the war was over and Xavier hadn’t returned Brenda crossed her fingers—who would she talk about then?

  It wasn’t the bed thing, either. Although it was nice whilst it lasted, she didn’t miss it a bit. In fact, there’d been times when it had been a bit of a nuisance if she’d just dropped off to sleep.

  Of course, there was always Vince. Brenda sighed.

  Vince worried her, too. In a moment of weakness, she’d told him about Xavier, and since then he kept demanding they move in together. Not in Pearl Street, of course, Brenda wouldn’t have tolerated the thought for a single second, but on his side of town, where they could pretend they were married.

  “It makes sense, luv,” Vince kept urging. “We get on, don’t we? We always have a lot to talk about.”

  Well, Vince did. He bored her rigid going on about bus timetables, and a change of route became the sole topic of conversation for days. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to stop him from popping in several times a week for a cup of tea, and she was frightened, really frightened, that ugly and boring though he might be, he was a man, and one of these days she’d agree to his proposal and move in with him, assuming she hadn’t taken Xavier back first.

  Brenda shuddered at the very notion she was willing to consider spending the rest of her life with a man she couldn’t even bring herself to kiss!

  She opened the oven. The sponge had risen, not so well as with an egg, but the surface was smooth and brown.