Angel of the North (16 page)

The sirens wailed their first warning at five minutes past midnight. Marie groaned and rolled out of bed, feeling half dead. Alfie was up and dressed before she was fully
conscious.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To the ARP post.’

‘Not tonight, my lad. You’re staying here with us.’

‘I’m not,’ Alfie said, and before she could get hold of him he ran downstairs, unlocked the kitchen door, and was out and off on his bike.

‘Where’s our Alfie?’ her mother demanded, after Marie had helped her to get up and dressed, and brought her downstairs.

‘Gone to the ARP post, again.’

Her mother’s face fell.

Marie put the kettle on to boil. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be as safe there as he would be here, or in the shelter,’ she said, with more confidence than she felt. ‘He
told you, all he did last night was play billiards with Danny Elsworth. If it’s the same again tonight, he’ll be just as safe there as anywhere else.’

‘And what if it’s not the same?’

‘Well, it can’t be any worse, can it? But if the phone lines come down, well, everybody knows he’s only eleven. Don’t worry, Mam, nobody’s going to send a kid so
young with any messages. Look, I’ll go and get the chair cushions and put them in the cupboard so you can lie down if you want to; we might be here a while.’

Marie had just managed to fill the flask and get the usual bag of comforts ready when the second siren went. She stooped to get into the understairs cupboard beside her mother, prepared for
another long night of terror with the air filled with the screaming and crashing of bombs.

‘Look on the bright side, Mam,’ she said. ‘We’ve a lot more leg room than last night. We can nearly lie straight,’ she said, struggling to keep the bitterness out
of her voice at the thought of Pamela in bomb-free Bourne, safe and very comfortable in the Stewarts’ mansion. She knew which side her bread was buttered, that one. She certainly knew how to
look after herself.

At five to six, after six hours of relentless bombardment, the all clear sounded. Marie opened the door to Alfie and Danny shortly afterwards and gave her brother an accusing
stare. ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve both been worried sick about you.’

Danny sprang to his defence. ‘He’s been with me; we’ve been running with messages for the rescue services. And if it hadn’t been for me and Alfie, Constable Kilkenny
would have been a gonner. He was blinded by a blast from a high explosive, and we had to lead him through some blazing incendiaries and then all the way to the first-aid post. I reckon he’d
have burned to death if it hadn’t been for us, groping about like he was, wouldn’t he, Alfie?’

Alfie gave a modest half-smile. ‘We did all right, I suppose.’

‘Then we started roving the streets with a bin lid apiece, snuffing incendiaries out.’ Danny went on. ‘That was Alfie’s idea. Great fun, though. I bagged about
nine.’

‘You mean you lidded them,’ Alfie said.

Marie went cold with horror at the thought of it. ‘Come in, both of you. Alfie shouldn’t have been roving the streets to drag anyone out of anywhere, or to lid anything. He’s
only a bairn.’

‘I’m not. If you’re big enough, you’re old enough.’

She rewarded him for that with a clip round the ear. ‘Well, you’re not big enough, and you’re not old enough, either. Don’t you dare run off again when there’s a
raid on, or I’ll have you, if the bombs don’t.’

‘Who’s there, Marie?’ Their mother’s cracked voice came from inside the house.

‘It’s Alfie with Danny Elsworth, Mam,’ Marie said, leading the boys into the dining room where Mam sat at the table. ‘They’ve been a pair of heroes, rescuing blind
policemen from burning, apparently. Sit down, Danny. I was just making some tea for Mam. We’ll all have a cup, and you can tell us all about it, but speak up, so you don’t have to keep
repeating yourself for Mam. And you make the most of it, Alfie, because you won’t be going again. Good luck to that policeman, and I’m glad you helped him, but there’ll be no more
heroics for you, my lad. You’ll be staying where you’re safe, if I have to chain you to the floor.’

‘There’s nowhere safe in Hull,’ Danny shouted, for the doubtful benefit of Mrs Larsen. ‘All the rescue people we saw were saying the same.’

‘There isn’t a place of safety in the whole city,’ Alfie bellowed. ‘Nowhere.’

‘Thank God our Pam’s gone back to Bourne,’ Mrs Larsen croaked. ‘You’re going to have to go as well, Alfie; you’ll have to. I can’t rest with you here.
You’ll have to be evacuated again.’

‘You’re right, Mam,’ said Marie, looking severely at Alfie. ‘I blame myself. I should never have agreed to let him stay at home. Chas warned me what it would be like, and
he was right.’

When she arrived at the infirmary, she found that the hospital hadn’t been quite so lucky this time. The Wilson Wing was still burning after last night’s raid.
Marie picked her way over rubble to get to the offices at the back. To her relief Matron was there. She could get her business over with.

‘Yes, it was a terrible tragedy, that parachute mine on the shelter in Ellis Street,’ Matron said, when Marie had briefly explained her circumstances. ‘Really terrible. Well,
it can’t be helped, Nurse. We’re sorry to lose you, but if there’s no one else to care for your mother, then of course, you must leave. And really, there’s so much bomb
damage here we’ll be left with just two wards, as well as Out Patients and the Orthopaedic department.’

‘I feel awful,’ Marie said, ‘like a rat abandoning a sinking ship.’

‘It can’t be helped. Put your notice in writing, will you? And if your circumstances change, you’ll always be welcome to come back to us and carry on with your training. And
now, I’m afraid I’m very busy . . .’

‘Of course.’

Looking at the devastation as she left, Marie wondered whether they’d ever be able to get the place running again.

George looked haggard.

‘Have you seen Nancy?’ he asked Marie when she met him coming along Clumber Street.

‘No, not for a day or two. I’ve just been to the infirmary to give my notice in. It’s still burning! They say the fire started when an incendiary fell on the Wilson
Wing.’

George spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘No water, couldn’t put the fire out. The pressure’s too low, with all the incendiaries, and bomb damage to the mains.
It’s going to take some work to repair all that, after the past two nights. If there’s another raid like that tonight, I don’t know how we’re going to manage. It might
finish us.’

‘Well, there won’t be many patients treated at the infirmary for a while. There’s hardly anything left of it, everything’s being moved out and all the patients are being
transferred to other hospitals. Our beautiful infirmary; I could weep. Even the kiosk’s gone, where I got my goodies, and Nance used to get her cigs. It’s enough to break your
heart.’

‘It’ll break mine, if anything’s happened to her.’

‘Oh, George, you don’t really think it has, do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought she was at the hospital but I can’t find her anywhere, and nobody seems to have seen her. That’s why I’m here,
asking you. I nearly copped it myself, down near Ranks flour mill on the riverside. There was a blaze and a half there. I was standing watching it, absolutely mesmerized, until I saw the factory
wall start coming down towards me, and picking up speed on the way. I ran like the clappers, and I just managed to get behind a lorry before the whole bloody brick façade crashed down on top
of it. I’ve had some near misses, but that . . .’ He blew the air expressively out of his lungs and, shaking his head, added, ‘I thought my time had come.’

‘Oh,’ said Marie, with a shudder. ‘Oh, George, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for a few days, what with Dad’s funeral, and Mam coming out of hospital, and
having to get Pam back from Bourne. I didn’t—’ The thought suddenly struck her that Nancy might have been working on the Wilson Wing.

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Didn’t even know what shift she was on. I hope nothing’s happened to her. I’ve got to go to Thoresby Street, to see about getting our Alfie evacuated again just now, but
I’ll ask my mam to send her down to your house if she turns up while I’m out.’

‘They’ve opened Albert Avenue Baths up as a temporary morgue. Just so long as she’s not there, that’s all.’

‘Oh, George, she’s not, surely! You’ve been to see her mother, I suppose?’

He nodded. ‘She said just the same as you, but with her having lodgers Nance stays in the Nurses’ Home most of the time. Have there been any casualties there, do you know?’

Marie shook her head. ‘There might have been, but I don’t know anything. Ask at the hospital again. It’s chaos but there are still people there; they’re open as a
first-aid post.’

‘I know, and that’s my next port of call. And then I’ll have to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep. I’m dead on my feet.’

Poor George, Marie thought, as she closed the door on him, praying to God that Nancy would soon be found, because if she’d been on the Wilson Wing . . . Well, Marie just couldn’t
bear to think about it.

‘I’m not going,’ Alfie said later on, when Marie demanded he accompany her to Thoresby Street school to see the evacuation officers. ‘If I’ve got
to go out of Hull, I’ll go to Uncle Alf s.’

‘You’ll have to go a lot further than that,’ their mother said. ‘If we send you to Alfred and Dot, you’ll just keep coming back.’

‘I’ll just keep coming back wherever you send me. I’ve already proved that, haven’t I?’

‘You’re getting far too cheeky, my lad; you’ll go where you’re sent,’ Marie told him.

Alfie gave her a defiant stare, arms folded. ‘No, I shan’t. I aren’t going back with that dirty bugger Ernie, or his rotten old mother, or anywhere else like that. You’ve
never had to go away from home. You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘I’ll wash your mouth out with carbolic if you keep swearing like that, and I did have to go away from home. I went to the Nurses’ Home, remember?’

‘That’s not away. You could still walk home if you wanted to, and anyway, you came home more times than enough even when you weren’t supposed to, and always on your days
off.’

They were well into the argument, with Marie threatening and their mother cajoling when George knocked and came in, looking like a broken man.

‘There was nobody killed at the hospital, as far as they know, but Nancy’s nowhere,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked everybody I can find who knows her; I’ve looked
everywhere she could possibly have gone, and . . . nothing. I’ve even been down to Albert Avenue. It’s just indescribable; some of the bodies there, you can’t tell who they are; I
don’t think even their mothers would know them. You can’t even tell by the clothes, if they’re burned. And the stink!’

Marie’s legs started to shake so badly she had to hold onto the table to prevent herself from falling. She’d vowed not to be miserable, had kept herself determinedly cheerful, kept
telling herself to look on the bright side. But now even that prop was kicked from under her. Nancy wouldn’t have disappeared unless something drastic had happened to her, any more than
Marie’s father would have. With her dad, she’d kept that little bit of hope alive, in the teeth of all the evidence. She couldn’t do it again. It was odds on that Nancy had gone
the same way as Margaret and her dad; she’d better face it first as last, instead of clinging on to vain hopes. There was no bright side to this, but she couldn’t say that to George; it
would crush him.

‘It’s early days yet. She might turn up. There might be a simple explanation,’ she told him, offering her crumb of comfort with as much conviction as she could summon.

The sirens went just before midnight, signalling five hours of strain and anxiety before the all clear sounded, but George’s fears about another devastating raid were mercifully not
fulfilled.

Each morning, with a heart like lead, Marie went to see Nancy’s mother after settling her own mother for a sleep. There was no good news, and Nancy’s mother looked
more haggard with every passing day. Marie valiantly tried to encourage optimism but it was uphill work, since she herself was convinced that this was a repetition of what had happened to her
father. She couldn’t believe that the outcome would be any different with Nancy. In the evenings she went to Aunt Edie’s to see George and ask whether he had heard anything, but the
answer was always the same – nothing.

After three harrowing days, on a fine May evening they were in Northern Cemetery, at a mass funeral. Mourners stood four deep beside a moss-lined trench, which held a long line of earth mounds.
From where she stood Marie could just see her own father’s grave in the distance.

Nancy’s mother looked ready to collapse, and George put a supporting arm around her. He looked as devastated as Marie felt, and so did everybody else she could see in that huge crowd.
People of all ages and all walks of life were there, including soldiers and airmen in uniform. Almost all these relatives and friends of the dead carried flowers, from simple posies to elaborate
wreaths. The tiny children’s coffins were the most heart-wrenching of all.

On the other side of the trench stood Hull’s civic leaders, resplendent in their chains of office, along with the Anglican bishop and clergy, the Catholic clergy, the priest from St
Vincent’s, rabbis, and the leaders of all the nonconformist denominations. The service was short: a hymn, a psalm, and then a message of sympathy and an address from the bishop. Some people
were sobbing so sorely that others, who otherwise might have managed to keep a stiff upper lip, began weeping with them. The whole vast crowd seemed to be drowning in an ocean of grief.
Marie’s gaze was fixed on the pale face of a little girl, no more than three. Her tiny hand was held by a grey-haired old man, probably her grandfather. Perhaps that baby’s mother was
being buried today; it was very probable. Mrs Harding had lost a daughter, and in all likelihood this little mite had lost a mother – just as bad, if not worse. Definitely worse, Marie
thought, looking at that bleak-faced old man. How could he soothe a baby’s fears, or kiss her hurts better with as much devotion as her own mother?