Some Sunny Day (17 page)

Ten minutes later, as she reached Edge Hill and saw the extent of the damage caused by the bombs that had been dropped – not as her aunt had insisted on the docks but on the suburbs of the city – Rosie shivered in shocked disbelief at the carnage. Rescue workers of every kind, fire engines and ambulances clustered around what had once been whole streets and buildings, whilst overhead the searchlights probed the sky.

‘Here you, miss…there’s a shelter over there. Get yourself into it,’ an ARP warden called out sternly to Rosie when he saw her staring in shock at the heap of rubble from which several bodies had just been removed. Half blinded by a mixture of soot, dust and tears, Rosie followed his instructions, and made her way to the already full basement shelter beneath the Junior Technical College on Durning Road.

‘Just about room for one more little ’un in this section here,’ someone called out cheerily as Rosie gave an apologetic look in the direction of the female ARP warden taking people’s names.

‘There’s a chair here, love,’ she told Rosie, when Rosie had given her name and explained where she had been.

‘I don’t want to take it if someone else needs it,’ Rosie told her.

‘That’s all right,’ the other woman said. ‘It’s not normally like this here but some of the other shelters in the area caught it in the bombing raid so them as should have been there have been sent here, and we’ve had two tramloads drop on us as well. I’m Mrs Taft, by the way.’

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Rosie asked her.

Mrs Taft smiled at her. ‘Thanks, love. If you could keep an eye on some of the little ’uns and their mums, I’d be grateful. Get them having a singsong or something. It’s hard for mothers, having to keep getting their kiddies out of bed, and once one of them sets off crying all the others seem to start.’

Obediently Rosie did what she could to coax half a dozen crying youngsters to stop and ‘help’ her to sing a Christmas carol instead. Within a few minutes other children and some of the adults had joined in. When a man produced an accordion and started to play it, Mrs Taft gave Rosie a relieved look.

‘I knew you were the right sort,’ she told Rosie with a smile. ‘I’ll have a cuppa for you if you can just hang on for a while.’

Sharing the companionship of the public shelter was more comfortable than being at her aunt’s, Rosie acknowledged, and the time flew by as she made herself useful and discovered that somehow
or other she seemed to have become Mrs Taft’s assistant.

‘Sounds like they’re back,’ Mrs Taft murmured to Rosie at one point as they both stopped what they were doing to listen to the throbbing sound of the engines of returning bombers. Silence fell as one by one others in the shelter tensed to listen with them. And then a baby cried and an elderly woman muttered a prayer and tugged on her rosary beads, and slowly the shelter began to hum with noise again.

‘It’s nearly bloody two o’clock,’ someone protested. ‘When are we going…’ The rest of his words were drowned out as an explosion ripped violently through the shelter, filling the air with choking dust and darkness.

As Rosie struggled to get to her feet she could hear people screaming and moaning.

‘The roof’s fallen in and we’re trapped!’ someone called out.

In the panic as people tried to find an exit, Rosie almost lost her balance when she bent down to pick up the child she could feel clinging to her legs. There was something soft and wet on the floor beside her and her stomach turned over as she realised that it was someone who had been badly injured. The child’s mother? Another child? It was too dark for her to see.

She turned to Mrs Taft, who was standing next to her. ‘There’s someone…’ she began, but the ARP warden shook her head.

‘Dead I’m afraid,’ she told her quietly. ‘I’ve just checked. You’re a sensible girl. I’m going to have to rely on you to keep calm and to help the mothers look after the little ones whilst I try to find a way out.’ Raising her voice, she called out, ‘Everyone, please keep calm.’

‘How can we when we’re going to drown?’ someone howled in fear. ‘I can feel water creeping up me legs…’

‘Those with small children, please pick them up to keep them above the level of the water.’

A young mother standing next to Rosie sobbed frantically, ‘I can only find one of my two. Where’s my Jenny…?’

‘The exits are all blocked,’ a man called out in panic.

It was almost impossible to move and the shelter lights had fused, but everyone was struggling to follow Mrs Taft’s example as she said steadily, ‘Let’s keep calm and try the emergency exits.’

‘We’ll never get out,’ someone cried, whilst Rosie’s heart contracted at the sounds of the wounded and dying they could hear from the other side of the wall dividing them from the main shelter.

‘Yes we will,’ Mrs Taft called back firmly. ‘They’ll get us out safe and sound.’

‘Oh Gawd, look, there’s a fire there in the main part of the shelter.’

Rosie froze as she looked towards the wall that divided the part of the shelter they were in from
the main part, and sure enough she could just see the flames on the other side of it.

‘That’s where the school furnaces are,’ a man close at hand groaned. ‘If they’ve bin hit then we’re goners.’

The smell of the acrid smoke starting to pour into their part of the shelter reminded Rosie of her fire-watch practice, but it wasn’t possible for them to drop down to the floor beneath the smoke as she had been taught because of the water slowly filling the shelter and rising coldly up her legs. Everyone was pressing towards the emergency exits.

‘The emergency exits are jammed.’ The words were passed from one to another in an anguished whisper as people instinctively sought to keep calm whilst their hopes died.

Rosie hugged the small child she was holding. They would die together in here, strangers united by their inescapable fate. Then miraculously she heard Mrs Taft calling out, ‘I can see a light,’ and even more miraculously Rosie realised that the warden had found a window leading out of the shelter, which somehow had not been totally blocked by the falling debris that surrounded it.

Four men struggled through the press of people. One of them had a torch, which he flashed by the window until the rescue workers outside saw it.

Within an unbelievably short space of time, or so it seemed to Rosie, she was helping the children to climb to safety over the debris and out into the waiting arms of their rescuers. It was only
when one of them cried out to Mrs Taft, ‘Nana,’ that she realised that the ARP warden’s daughter and grandchild were amongst those who had been trapped. At last it was Rosie’s own turn to be helped out into the freedom of the smoke-laden night air.

As she was led gently to where a group of WVS women were handing out blankets and tea, Rosie saw the pitiful sight of the small bodies being laid gently on the ground as they were removed from the main part of the building. Tears filled her eyes and splashed down her face.

‘That’s right, love,’ someone told her gently. ‘You ’ave a good cry.’

Although she insisted that she was all right, somehow or other Rosie ended up being taken to Mill Road Hospital to have what the WVS lady had described as ‘a nasty cut’ cleaned and dressed. She had no recollection of receiving the wound, which had sliced open the upper part of her arm, ruining her clothes, but thankfully it was not deep enough to require stitching.

Daylight was just beginning to lighten the sky when Rosie, feeling faint and queasy, bumped into someone on her way back to the hospital reception. Firm hands took hold of her shoulders and a familiar voice exclaimed worriedly, ‘Rosie!’

Numbly she looked up and saw Rob Whittaker gazing back at her.

‘What’s happened to you?’ he demanded anxiously.

‘She’s one of them they brought in from the Junior Technical College that was bombed on Durning Road,’ the nurse who had dressed her wound answered for her. ‘She’s had a nasty cut on her arm but she’ll be all right. Not like some poor buggers. Over three hundred dead, so I’ve heard – kiddies and all.’

Rosie’s stomach heaved as she remembered the sounds she had tried to blot out.

‘Come on, let’s get you home,’ Rob told her gently.

‘You can’t. You’re on duty,’ Rosie protested.

‘I finished my shift an hour ago. I was just helping out.’

Rosie didn’t have the energy to object, and besides, she wasn’t sure if she could manage to get home without his help. Her whole body seemed to have gone strangely weak and her arm was now throbbing agonisingly.

‘There was something. Someone on the floor at my feet,’ Rosie whispered, shivering as Rob guided her out into the pre-dawn cold. ‘Mrs Taft said that they were dead…They must have been standing right next to me…’

‘That’s how it happens sometimes, Rosie. If it’s got your number on it then it just has.’

Somewhere in the city she could hear the sound of a church bell. ‘It’s Sunday morning.’

‘Yes,’ Rob confirmed

‘Sunday morning and all those people dead,’ Rosie told him, and promptly burst into tears.

Very gently Rob took her in his arms, holding her carefully. Her hair and her clothes were covered in dust from the explosion, and the tip of her nose was pink with cold, but as he looked down at her, Rob Whittaker thought that he had never seen a more beautiful girl.

‘So what’s up with Sylvia then, Rosie?’ Enid asked briskly. It was Monday morning, and although it was only a few hours since her ordeal, Rosie had still gone in to work, the bandage on her arm concealed by the sleeve of her sweater. She didn’t want to have to talk about the events of the day before and relive the trauma of what she had seen.

‘Her dad found out about her seeing Lance, and since she told him that I was the one to encourage her to date him, he’s told her she’s got to find another job and that she can’t come back here,’ Rosie answered.

‘She blamed you? Cheeky young madam. Well, I’d better go and tell Mrs Verey that she isn’t going to be coming back. Not that she’ll be missed that much. Workshy she was, and no mistake.’

Rosie watched her leave the workroom. The pain in her arm had eased off slightly, but she still blushed when she thought about the fool she had made of herself, crying all over Rob Whittaker like that. But Rob had been kind and understanding, and somehow or other Rosie had let him persuade her to go to the cinema with him on Wednesday night.

The shop was quiet with it being a Monday,
but by dinner time Rosie’s head had begun to ache unpleasantly.

‘That were awful about the Technical College, weren’t it?’ she heard one of the girls commenting as she unwrapped her sandwiches, carefully so that the paper could be reused. Everyone was getting used now to having to ‘make do and mend’, as the government slogan exhorted them to do. ‘My sister’s boyfriend’s uncle was one of them helping to get them out. He…’

Inside her head Rosie could see the images she had been trying to blot out. People so dreadfully injured, just standing there in silence, covered in their own blood, one little girl who had lost her arm, other children, their little bodies lifeless, their mothers crouching over them, holding them, a woman sitting there nursing her dead baby, her eyes wide and blank, two young children miraculously unharmed sitting either side of their obviously dead mother. And then all the bodies, on the ground after they had been recovered. Bodies everywhere, or so it had seemed to Rosie.

She jumped up in agitation begging, ‘Please don’t talk about it…’

When the other girls looked at her curiously she admitted shakily, ‘I was there in the shelter…I saw…’ Her head was swimming and suddenly she started to sway on her feet. She felt quite dreadfully faint she thought dizzily as it started to go dark… 

What on earth was she doing lying on the workroom floor? Rosie struggled to sit up and was stopped by the kind pressure of Mrs Verey’s hand and her voice insisting firmly, ‘Lie still, Rosie.’

‘Oh, I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Verey.’ Rosie was mortified by the realisation that she must have fainted.

‘That’s all right, dear.’ Mrs Verey leaned closer to her. ‘Enid tells me that you were involved in that terrible tragedy at the Technical College on Saturday night.’

‘Yes,’ Rosie whispered. ‘I’d been to see my Auntie Maude and I was on my way back…’ She bit her lip. ‘It was so dreadful. All those poor people…So many children.’ It gave her an unexpected feeling of relief to talk about what she had experienced, even though she felt guilty at burdening others with her own distress. Tears filled her eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks as she relived seeing the small bodies. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Verey.’

‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for, Rosie. I’m going to send you home for the rest of the day.’

‘Oh, but I’m all right, really I am,’ Rosie tried to protest, but her employer was shaking her head firmly.

‘I can see that you’ve hurt your arm, Rosie, and I can imagine what a terrible ordeal you must have had. I hope that I’m not such an unfeeling person that I expect my staff to carry on working after that kind of experience.’

Rosie wanted to protest that somehow she felt better coming to work than being at home alone, reliving what had happened, but she felt that it would be rude to throw Mrs Verey’s generosity back in her face, so she thanked her and allowed Enid to help her to her feet.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell us?’ Enid scolded her half an hour later as she walked Rosie to the tram. ‘Marjorie said she feels ever so awful now for going on the way she did and making you faint.’

‘I just didn’t want to talk about it at first,’ Rosie admitted. ‘I saw the children, Enid, the ones they’d brought out. Their little bodies…’ Rosie put her hand to her mouth and fought her emotions.

The tram was virtually empty, and Rosie tried to avoid looking at the new gaping holes and craters caused by Saturday night’s bombing. She got off the tram at the top of the road and walked reluctantly down it. Her mother would be in bed, of course, since she was working nights. Rosie hadn’t even told her about what had happened yet – not that she’d care, she decided bitterly.

When she stepped into the kitchen she saw the cup and plate her mother must have used when she had come in from the factory still on the table, unlike her own breakfast things, which she had washed and left neatly stacked on the draining board before she left. Her head was throbbing sickeningly now and so was her arm. She opened the door into the narrow hallway and then stopped,
staring in disbelief at the stairs as she heard the sound of rhythmic squeaking bed springs coming from her parents’ room.