Daughters of Liverpool (39 page)

‘Nurse Campion.’

Sister looked less disapproving than she sounded.

‘Sorry, Sister,’ Grace apologised.

Up above them in the night sky the bombers were still coming, dropping their cargo of horror and pain. All around her now Grace could hear what she had not heard before, the cries of the injured and the groans of the dying. Angry tears blurred her vision and her throat was raw from inhaling the acrid smoke and dust but she still lifted her fist and shook it furiously and helplessly at the bomber-filled night sky.

If Liverpool could survive this then it could survive anything. And it would survive. It must.

Grace turned back to her patient, lying still in his bed, an amputee who had lost both his legs in a bomb blast on Friday night and who was thankfully sedated with morphine to dull his pain.

She said a little prayer for her family and for Seb, told Charlie briskly that he couldn’t walk around in hospital pyjamas, and told the white-faced probationer to go and see if she could get a cup of tea.

All around her everyone was doing what they had been trained to do, fire fighters, police, ambulance crews, salvage workers, nurses and doctors. This was war but it was also life.

It was Luke who got back first with a bomb disposal team, followed within seconds by Sam with a Salvage Corps heavy demolition unit.

Jean and Lou were both told they must be moved to allow the men to do their work properly. Both of them protested, Lou fiercely defending her right to be with her twin.

It was one of the bomb disposal team who eventually persuaded her to move over to allow him to take her place. A boy who didn’t look that much older than the twins themselves, for all his air of maturity and calm professionalism, Jean recognised.

‘What will they do?’ Katie asked Luke when he came to join her at a safe distance away from the bomb where she had been sent after refusing to be escorted to the nearest air-raid shelter.

‘They can’t risk moving Sasha in case it detonates the bomb, so they’ve got to remove the detonator and then free her.’

‘Oh, Luke …’

‘I know,’ he agreed, holding her tight.

‘About the letter,’ Katie told him. ‘I can’t say too much. But it was to do with my censorship work. I would say more if I could but—’

Luke kissed the top of her head. ‘You don’t have to say anything. You should never have had to say anything. I should have known. I do know,’ he corrected himself. ‘I know that you love me. I know that you aren’t the kind of girl who would say that if you didn’t mean it, or if you were committed to someone else. I’m sorry, Katie, can you—’

They both looked up as three bombers, flying in formation, swept in overhead, frighteningly low and close as they headed for the docks. The force
of the explosion of the bombs they dropped shook the ground on which they were standing, the sound followed by another explosion nearer at hand.

They looked at one another and then they started to run. Where the bomb and Sasha had been there was now only thick black smoke and the beginning of a small fire.

Katie felt acutely sick.

‘Sorry if we gave you a bit of a scare, but we decided it would be safer to detonate the bomb after all, because we couldn’t get to the second fuse.’

The corporal who had been in charge of the UXB team grinned at them through the thick smoke.

‘Sasha?’ Katie asked anxiously.

‘She’s fine. Crying all over young Bobby, though, and calling him a hero. Hero, my eye, all he did was take her place under the bomb so that we could get her out.’

‘She’s safe?’ That was Luke, disbelief and hope straining his voice in equal measures.

The smoke was clearing and through it Katie could see Sam and Jean standing side by side. Sam was holding Sasha in his arms, whilst Jean had her arms wrapped tightly around Lou, who was standing in front of her.

‘Those ruddy twins …’ Luke commented half an hour later after a quick medical examination had pronounced Sasha uninjured and they had all set out for home, ignoring the planes roaring in over their heads. Their threat didn’t seem to matter now
after what they had all been through, and surely the sky was lightening; a sign that soon it would be dawn and the planes would be gone.

‘What on earth did they think they were doing?’ Luke asked Katie emotionally, as he stopped walking.

Dawn was now clearly paling the sky but they had fallen behind the others, and were virtually alone in the shadowy narrow street.

Katie looked at him, knowing what he must be feeling. They were his sisters, after all, and he loved them very much. That they had been found and were safe and unharmed was a miracle.

Katie reached out and touched his arm, the tender understanding look of a woman for the man she loves.

‘Luke!
Luke!
’ she protested, when he took her in his arms and held her tightly, kissing her fiercely. But she still clung to him for all that she had protested, and she returned his kiss equally passionately. War did that to you. It made you snatch at your happiness whilst you could. She had learned that. It found your weaknesses and your strengths, it made heroes and cowards out of ordinary men and women, it broke hearts and lives and tore families apart.

‘I don’t know if this has been the worst night of my life or the best,’ Luke told her, still holding her.

‘Maybe I should ask you which when we’ve been married forty years?’ Katie teased him softly, before frowning and looking up at the sky. ‘Listen.’

‘To what? I can’t hear anything.’

‘Exactly. The bombers have gone,’ she told him, laughing as the all clear started, swelling in sound until they couldn’t hear themselves speak above its noise. No sound had ever been more joyous, Katie thought, as she and Luke held each other tight.

It was five o’clock in the morning and the city of Liverpool had just endured its worst night of bombing of the war. Its worst, but not its last.

 DAUGHTERS OF LIVERPOOL

Annie Groves lives in the North-West of England and has done so all of her life. She is the author of
Ellie Pride,
Connie’s
Courage
and
Hettie
of Hope Street
, a series of novels for which she drew upon her own family’s history, picked up from listening to her grandmother’s stories when she was a child. Her most recent novels are
Goodnight Sweetheart, Some Sunny
Day, The Grafton Girls, As Time Goes By
and
Across the Mersey
, which are based on recollections from members of her family who come from the city of Liverpool. Her website, www.anniegroves.co.uk, has further details.

Annie Groves also writes under the name Penny Jordan, and is an internationally bestselling author of over 170 novels with sales of over 84,000,000 copies.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive updates on Annie Groves.

Ellie Pride
Connie’s
Courage
Hettie
of Hope Street
Goodnight Sweetheart
Some Sunny Day
The Grafton Girls
As Time Goes By
Across the Mersey

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