Cousins at War (3 page)

He turned to her earnestly. ‘All my pals are in the forces already, the last one signed up today, and I want to do my bit too.’

‘I know how you must feel,’ Patsy sympathised, ‘but think of Mum and Dad.’

‘It’s them I was thinking of, them and all the other mums and dads. The army needs young men like me.’ He looked at his father again. ‘Once I’m eighteen, I
won’t need your permission.’

The determination on his face made his mother’s heart turn over, and Joe muttered, ‘If you still feel the same way when November comes, I won’t try to talk you out of it, but
I’d like you to think it over carefully before that. The wartime army’s not a bed of roses, no matter how exciting you think it’ll be. Ask any old soldier from the last
time.’

Aware that his father was meeting him halfway, Neil said, ‘I’m sorry I flew off the handle at you, and I promise to think it over, but I’m sure I’ll still feel the same
in November.’

When she learned that Neil was intending to join up when he was eighteen, Olive made up her mind to put more pressure on him. She couldn’t let him get away without giving
her some guarantee that he’d come back to her. Once he was in the army, he’d be out of her control, and she wouldn’t know what he was getting up to. Surely she could make him fall
in love with her in six months? The problem was . . . how?

In June, the newspapers and wireless reported the evacuation of Dunkirk, the last British troops leaving from Cherbourg, as the
Press and Journal
stated on 1 July.
Most of the 51st Scottish Division, however, were left behind to fight a rearguard action and were taken prisoner. This was a bitter blow to Aberdeen, the home of the Gordon Highlanders. It was the
first real indication that the war was not running well for Britain. There had been several air raids in the city, of course, but the 612 Squadron from Dyce usually managed to divert the enemy
bombers before they reached the coast, and the Aberdonians had had a false sense of security. Now most families had or knew someone who had escaped from, or been lost at, Dunkirk or who was a
prisoner in the enemy’s hands and the war was affecting the citizens for the first time.

Gracie Ferris was deeply thankful that Joe had refused to give his permission for their son to join up when he wanted to. ‘Neil could have been one of the men that were killed on the
beaches if you’d let him go,’ she said one night.

‘He wouldn’t have finished his infantry training yet,’ her husband told her, ‘and maybe this business’ll have made him think twice about going.’

On 9 July, the headlines – with the intention, no doubt, of giving hope, but actually giving rise to renewed fears in all minds – screamed MEN OF DUNKIRK RE-EQUIPPED – READY
FOR BATTLE OF BRITAIN. Gracie, positive that Neil had seen sense about volunteering, was more upset that the government was speaking about taking all garden railings to make munitions, although
there were no railings in her part of King Street. ‘It’s interfering with people’s privacy,’ she said to Joe.

‘They wouldn’t be left alive to enjoy any privacy if there was no munitions,’ he reminded her. ‘There’s word of Hitler going to start an invasion.’

Joe rushed in one lunchtime a few days later brandishing the
Press and Journal
he had bought that morning. ‘Listen to this, Gracie. It says, IF THIS IS DER TAG, WE’RE
READY.’

‘Der tag?’ Gracie looked perplexed.

‘German for “the day”,’ he explained. ‘It means that we’re ready for the invasion if this is the day, and they say the rumours about 600,000 invaders coming
are just moonshine.’

‘Thank goodness for that. Now, when are you giving me the extra two pounds of sugar we’re supposed to get for making jam? I could maybe get berries from the Green on
Friday.’

Shaking his head, Joe muttered, ‘Do you not have anything in your head at all except your stomach?’

On 12 July, a gorgeously warm day, Neil was using a wire brush to clean the plugs of an Albion when he heard a crump-crump sound as if bombs had fallen some distance off.
Hardly able to believe that the enemy would attack in the middle of the day, he turned and looked uncertainly at the time-served mechanics who seemed to be as nonplussed as he was.
‘What’s happened to our Spitties?’ one of them asked, of nobody in particular, and another man answered, ‘I bet they’re chasing the Jerries back now.’

In the next instant, the scream of descending bombs made them fling themselves down on the cement floor just as the explosions came, in quick succession and so close that Neil could feel the
workshop floor reverberating under him.

When the next series of bombs fell, they seemed to be much farther away, so he sat up – his teeth chattering, his body aching from being gripped in to make a smaller target – and
gave a low, slightly hysterical giggle at his own stupidity. His legs were shaking as he got up, and he hoped that no one saw him when he leaned against the lorry for a moment. This was no way for
a future soldier to behave.

Patsy crossed King Street, walked down Mealmarket Street, up Littlejohn Street and down Upperkirkgate, going slowly to get the benefit of the sunshine. She heard a few bangs,
but as she wasn’t far from a munitions factory, she assumed that something must have gone off accidentally and she carried on up Schoolhill. When she came to the gate to the ‘Trainie
Park’ as her father called the Union Terrace Gardens, she thought of going down the steps and walking along the paths to her office, but a glance at her watch told her that she didn’t
have time, so she cut through the slip road past the statue of William Wallace as she normally did. She was turning into Union Terrace when an aeroplane, flying very low, appeared from nowhere. One
of ours, she thought, and didn’t halt, but a loud, staccato burst of machine-gun fire made her stop in her tracks, the red-hot tracer bullets dancing along the pavement only inches away from
her.

‘Get doon! It’s a bloody Jerry!’ The man’s yell came from behind her, and a shove in the small of her back knocked her to the ground. When she got her breath back, she
saw that a tramcar had pulled up between stops, and that the passengers had all jumped off and were running to shelter in a shop at the other side of the street.

In a minute or so, the man at her back shouted, ‘Look! The Spitfires are efter him.’ Feeling safer now that the German pilot’s attention was fully occupied in trying to save
his own skin, they stood up to watch, and people came running out of shops and offices to see the toy-like planes darting back and forth beside the bomber, forcing it away from the area, an area
congested with people in the busy lunch hour.

A great, triumphant shout arose from massed throats. ‘He’s going down! He’s down! They’ve got him!’

The whole incident had taken less than five minutes, but it was something that Patsy – and all the other people there – would never forget, and when the quiet voice spoke beside her,
she was startled. ‘I hope you werena hurt when I shoved you, but you coulda been killed, you ken.’

Turning round, she saw him for the first time – a slight, short, oldish man with glasses, in white overalls splattered with all the colours of the rainbow. A painter, she thought, in wry
amusement. She’d been saved from death by a painter. ‘I didn’t really take in what was going on, and I’m glad you pushed me down. Thanks very much.’

He grinned at her. ‘Nae bother, lassie. Now, are you sure you’re OK? Hiv you far to go?’

‘Just along there a wee bit, at the other side.’

‘So long, then, it’s been nice meetin’ you.’ Tipping his cloth cap, he walked away, whistling.

She had to smile at his matter-of-factness after the drama they had witnessed, but she dusted down her skirt with her hands before finishing her journey, her wobbling legs soon regaining
strength. The other watchers dispersed, too, still talking excitedly – as they would for years to come to those who would listen – about their hair-raising experience.

When she heard the noise of bombs exploding, fortunately not too close, Hetty Potter’s first concern was for her husband, who worked in the centre of town. Her children
had gone on a picnic to Hazlehead Park on the outskirts of town, and would be well away from any enemy activity – or so she believed.

Raymond was barely inside the house when he burst out, ‘Me and Olive had to dodge among the trees at Hazlehead or else we’d have been machine-gunned.’

‘Oh, God!’ Hetty gasped, then looked sceptical. ‘It’s not true. You’re just trying to give me a fright.’

‘It is true, Mum,’ Olive said quietly, ‘and when we were coming home on the tram, we heard men telling the conductor that they worked in the nurseries at Pinewood, and they had
to jump over a dyke to save themselves.’

The Pinewood nurseries, where young trees and shrubs were cultivated for selling, were situated just behind the Park, so Hetty realised that her children were telling the truth, and she sat down
with a thump, her face chalk-white. ‘You should have come home right away. I thought you were safe, but . . .’ She wrung her hands in agitation.

‘Mum, we’re OK,’ Olive assured her, ‘and it was all over in a few minutes.’

Raymond grinned. ‘It was kind of exciting while it lasted though, and I don’t think he was aiming at us anyway.’

On tenterhooks until Martin came home, Hetty flew into his arms as soon as he appeared. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her, ‘but a lot of men were killed at Hall Russell’s. The boiler room got a direct hit. I’d an appointment to see one of the directors
at four, to explain some of the legal jargon on a contract they have from the War Ministry for some naval boats, and I didn’t know they’d been bombed. When I got there it was absolute
pandemonium.’

Hetty was silent for a moment, then she whispered, ‘What if you’d had to go in the forenoon? You’d have been there at the time the bombs fell.’

‘But I wasn’t, thank God.’

Raymond, who had been waiting in suppressed excitement to tell of his lucky escape, took the opportunity of the slight lull to say, ‘We were in the thick of it.’

Olive could tell that her father had been badly shocked by what he had seen. ‘It was nothing, Dad. We got a scare, but I don’t think we were in any real danger.’

Mrs Mavor, Gracie’s neighbour on the same landing, came to her door in the afternoon. ‘Did you hear aboot the folk that was machine-gunned in Union Terrace at
dinnertime? Doesn’t your Patsy work there?’

Gracie’s heart raced uncontrollably. ‘Her office is about halfway along . . . oh, I hope she’s all right.’

Regretting having upset her, Mrs Mavor tried to reassure her. ‘You’d have heard by this time if she wasna.’

‘I suppose so.’ Gracie, grateful for her concern, gave her a cup of tea, and having been warned, was more able to face the other tenants in the building when they came to tell her
the same thing. They were only being neighbourly after all, rallying round her as they would to anyone in trouble. But even although Mrs Mavor stayed with her for almost an hour, she felt nauseous
until Patsy came home, unharmed but eager to tell her mother what had happened.

Gracie was horrified when she heard how close her daughter had come to death, and when Joe came in with the news that Hall Russell’s shipyard had been bombed, and that the single aircraft
had caused mayhem all over Aberdeen, she telephoned to ask Hetty if any of her family had been hurt. ‘Olive and Raymond were machine-gunned, as well,’ she told Joe in a few minutes,
‘but they weren’t hit either, thank God. Oh, that damned German, putting the fear of death in folk.’

Knowing how much his wife was against even the mildest of swearwords, Joe let it go. It just showed how upset she was.

Neither that night’s
Evening Express
nor the following morning’s
Press and Journal
reported the full story, which spread by word of mouth, exaggerated a little more
each time it was passed on. Gracie’s conviction that this would put the final nail in the coffin of Neil’s plan to join up was very wide of the mark. Her son was harbouring a deep
hatred of the enemy for this act of barbarism and was all the more determined to enter the fight against the Axis powers.

Over the next few weeks, as the newspapers reported repeated attacks on London, Gracie felt anxious about her brother and his family. Croydon was one of the places mentioned that had been
severely hit by bombs, but with so many enemy planes shot down, she believed that the Germans would abandon their fruitless attempts to force Britain’s capital to its knees. It came as a
shock, therefore, when she received a note from Donnie’s wife, Helene.

‘It must be terrible for them,’ Gracie wailed, returning the letter to the envelope, ‘and Donnie should give up his shop and come up here with them.’

Joe shook his head. ‘It’s all very well saying that, but the newsagent’s is his livelihood and he’s worked hard to build up a trade. I wouldn’t leave if I was him,
but I’m glad he’s had the sense to get Helene and Queenie away.’

Gracie’s mind had already jumped ahead. ‘I’ll have to give them Neil’s room – I’ll give it a good going over – and he can sleep on the bed-settee.
I’m sure he won’t mind in the circumstances and it’ll just be for a wee while.’

‘No, Gracie, it’ll be longer than a wee while. Look, I can sleep with Neil, Helene can sleep with you, and Queenie and Patsy’ll manage on the three-quarter bed.’

Although it was into August, Saturday morning was cold and misty – the damp even seemed to pervade the glass roof of the Joint Station – and Gracie and Patsy were both shivering
after only ten minutes. After another half hour, Gracie began to panic. ‘Maybe the train’s been bombed. For all we know, they could be lying dead somewhere.’