The Girls They Left Behind (48 page)

It seemed strange to them to go into the big, grand building down in the main square of the city, up the wide steps and between the two majestic lions, to attend a children’s party.

Strange to sit at long tables with a thousand other children, eating jelly from small cardboard bowls, with coloured lamps and balloons festooned above their heads. At one end of the room was a platform, piled high with wrapped gifts, and in front of the platform stood a tall Christmas tree, glittering with tinsel and twinkling fairy lights.

The presents came, the Lady Mayoress explained, from British people who lived in a country called Uruguay, six thousand miles away. They had sent a hundred and fifty pounds to give the children of Portsmouth a treat, and this was it. For three hours, they could forget the war and enjoy themselves.

For three hours, they did. Led by the Lady Mayoress, they marched around the hall, roaring out songs like Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile - Smile - Smile and There’ll Always Be An England, accompanied on the big Guildhall organ by the city organist. They played games.

They watched a dancing display and a conjurer and were commended for their courage by the Commander-in-Chief himself, a real Admiral in full uniform, who told them they were helping England in her task of winning the war.

‘You deserve a prize,’ he said, and the children cheered.

‘And I shall give you one. A pound note to the first boy or girl of school age who puts out an incendiary bomb. What do you think of that?’

‘Hooray!’ the children cheered again. ‘Hooray! Hooray!

Hooray!’

They cheered again as the Lady Mayoress announced that the presents so enticingly displayed on the platform would be handed out, and waited in line, some more patiently than others, as the gifts were handed out. It took an hour, but at last they were all provided for, and when their parents came to take them home each child was well supplied with a stick of rock, a present and a balloon.

Rose and Joy took their leave of the Guildhall in silence.

Neither had ever been in such a grand place before, and they looked around the glittering walls with awe. The high ceiling, the white paint, the gold leaf and the gleaming, polished floor - it was like a royal palace to the girls who had known only terraced houses. They looked at the Christmas tree, decorated just for them, at the glowing colours of the Christmas lights. They looked at the walls where portraits of previous Lord Mayors and dignitaries, clothed in rich, fur-trimmed robes, gazed down at them, and wondered if they would ever come here again.

They would not, and nor would many others. For only two nights later, the Luftwaffe’s attention turned once again to Portsmouth and the blitz began. The proud Guildhall was almost totally destroyed.

It began at seven o’clock in the evening. It was a Friday.

Jess had.just put Maureen to bed. She slept in her cot in the back bedroom, where Rose also slept now that the boys were away. She tucked the baby in and was halfway downstairs when the siren began.

Instantly, she was back upstairs and lifting Maureen from the cot, blankets and all. Holding her close, she ran down the stairs. Rose was already gathering together the things they would need, the cushions and old blankets, the thermos flask Frank had bought for Christmas, which was filled with hot water every night, the basket which held packets of cocoa and sugar, a small bottle of milk, a tin of biscuits. They might be in the shelter for only half an hour, they might be there all night.

You had to be prepared.

‘Quick, Mum, oh, please be quick.’ Rose was crouching under the stairs, her face white as Jess quickly thrust Maureen’s feet back into the socks she had taken off only twenty minutes earlier. ‘Put them on when we get down there.

The planes’ll be here, oh hurry, hurry.’

Frank was still at work, or more likely on his way home. Jess thought of the first raid, last July, when he’d got caught in the streets. He’d never said much about it, but he’d changed that night, as if he’d seen sights that couldn’t be talked of. She prayed that he would come home safely tonight. Frank, Frank…

He was right, she thought, looking at Rose’s ashen face.

The girl would have been better off out in the country. She was terrified. But she’d been just as frightened out there, so Mrs Greenberry had said, and at least if she was here she knew what was going on, knew that her mother and baby sister were safe. As they would be, as soon as they reached the shelter.

The planes could be heard now, droning overhead. It was high time they were in the shelter. Jess wound Maureen up again in her blankets and grabbed the tin box that held all the papers. She made for the back door and, with Rose at her heels, scurried down the garden path.

They had just ducked through the low doorway and scrambled down the steps when the sky turned suddenly red.

Olive Harker had been cooking Derek’s supper when the warning went.

‘Oh, drat!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was just looking forward to a nice cosy evening listening to the wireless.’

Her mother came into the kitchen and turned out the gas.

‘Down the shelter, quick!’

‘But the supper ‘

‘It don’t matter about the supper. You can finish that later on. Derek won’t be home anyway, not till it’s over.’

‘Oh, they do it deliberately,’ Olive wailed. ‘Just to spoil things!’

‘D’you expect them to send us a timetable?’ Annie grabbed the bundle of cushions and rugs they kept by the back door and hustled her out. ‘Look at those flares. They’re going to hammer us tonight, mark my words. Why, it’s bright as day out here.’

Olive hung back. ‘I promised to look in on Kathy ‘

‘Kathy’ll be going to her own shelter.’ The two young women had become friends since Kathy’s baby was born.

Olive, suddenly passionately interested in babies now that she was expecting her own, had been a daily visitor to admire little Thomas. She spent hours stroking his firm little limbs and trying to make him smile. Yesterday, he had done so for the first time and she had been enchanted.

‘But she’s there all on her own with those two little girls and the baby.’

‘It’s what she chooses,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t want to be unkind, Livy, but she could have been evacuated if she’d wanted.’ She pulled Olive’s arm. ‘Come on, for goodness’

sake, do you want us to be bombed on our own doorstep?

Look at the way they’re lighting us up.’

Olive glanced up. The sky was now almost entirely red, the glow of the flares stretching from sunrise to sunset. The roar of the planes was directly overhead. It could be no more than moments before the first bombs began to drop.

In sudden fear, she ran down the garden path after her mother and scrambled into the shed. Together, they ducked through the doorway and dragged the old woollen curtain across. Annie found the blackout frame and pushed it into place, and then groped for the matches.

‘Not that it matters if we show every lamp we’ve got, the way they’re lighting up the whole city,’ she said. ‘But we don’t want Tommy Vickers round here shouting the odds.’

The hurricane lamp flickered into life and they sat back on the bunks and looked at each other.

‘Maybe it’s just a false alarm,’ Olive said, without much hope. ‘Maybe they’re just passing over, like other nights.’

Annie shook her head. ‘I don’t reckon so, love. I reckon this is something worse. We’ve never had flares like that before. They’re lighting up their targets, that’s what they’re doing.’

She paused for a moment, then said quietly, ‘Tonight they’re going to smash Pompey right down into the ground…’

Kathy Simmons acted calmly enough. The things they needed to take down to the shelter were kept in a basket close to the back door, blankets and cushions, an old cot mattress for the baby, a thermos flask and cups. There were a couple of books for the girls and one for herself, from the library. There was a hurricane lamp, though she didn’t like to use it for too long in case the paraffin ran out. You never knew how long an alert might last, it might be only half an hour before the All Clear sounded, it might be hours, even though nothing seemed to be happening.

Tonight, as she ran down the path in the red glow of the flares, it looked as if it might be a long time.

Frank Budd and Ted Chapman were on a trolley-bus together, coming up to North End. Both had finished work for the day and were anxious to get home. Frank had boarded the bus to find his brother-in-law sitting in the seat by the door, and he’d nodded and sat down beside him. The bus was dark and gloomy inside, with only the lowest possible lights to show passengers their way, and it crept slowly along the unlit streets.

The two men said nothing for a while. Both were tired from the week’s work and from the alerts that sounded night after night. Both were firewatchers and had to stand outside, looking at the sky, waiting for incendiaries to drop and set Portsmouth ablaze. Both were suffering from broken nights and the dread that hung over the whole country.

‘They’re doing it to scare people,’ Ted said at last, breaking the silence. ‘They’re trying to wear us down. Bombing London, night after night… Hitting places like Bristol and Manchester … They think if they keep on hammering us, we’ll give in and let Hitler walk all over us.’

‘They’ve got another think coming, then,’ Frank said grimly, and they relapsed into silence again.

When the siren sounded, they did no more than sigh and wait for the bus to reach their destination. But when the flares began to light the streets, they looked at each other in dismay.

And when the trolley-bus came to a halt, they rose from their seats in real alarm.

‘That’s as far as we’re going,’ the conductress called out, her face reddened by the glow. ‘You’d better get yourselves to a shelter. There’ll be no more service tonight, by the looks of it.’

No more service tonight! ‘But I’ve got miles to go,’ one woman exclaimed in despair. ‘I live right up Cosham.’

The conductress shrugged. ‘Sorry, love.’ She was already gathering up her bag and coat, ready to get off the bus. ‘You’d better forget about getting home tonight. There won’t be no more buses running.’ She turned her face up to the sky, and Frank followed her gaze and saw the mass of flares drifting from the sky. ‘That’s incendiaries comin’ down, that is,’ she said tersely, and leapt to the pavement and ran.

The street was filled now with hurrying figures. People running for the shelters, people running for home. People just running, with no real idea of where to go. Sheltering in doorways, pressing themselves against walls. Looking up, up at the crimson lights, up towards the ominous drone of the planes. Calling to each other, to lost children, to elderly parents, calling with fear in their voices, whimpering, crying.

Where had they all come from? Frank wondered. It was well after dark, surely most people were safe at home by now.

But it seemed that there were plenty who weren’t. Or maybe mey’d been driven from their homes by the siren, driven out to seek shelter. Not everyone had an Anderson; there were plenty who must go to the public shelters, and if there wasn’t room in the first must look for another.

‘What’re we going to do?’ Ted asked, and Frank turned to look at him. His brother-in-law’s eyes were scared.

‘What can we do?’ Frank replied. ‘Go home, of course.

We’re on duty there, aren’t we? At least we can see to find our way.’

He set off up Stubbington Avenue, striding fast. They could, he knew, have sought shelter. They could have gone to a public one, overcrowded though it might have been, or they could have gone to Jess and Annie’s parents who lived nearby.

Perhaps they should do that. Nobody would expect them to walk halfway across Portsmouth in the middle of a raid.

But he couldn’t do that. He didn’t want to spend another night searching through rubble for bodies and bits of bodies, when Jess was there by herself with Rose and the baby, when she didn’t know whether or not he was safe. If a bomb fell before he got home, if people needed help, he’d do what he could. Of course he would. But he’d do his damnedest to get home first, and so would Ted.

He looked up again at the sky, listening to the drone of the aircraft, watching the fearsome descent of the parachutes. In God’s name, what was going on? Could there possibly be men on the end of those parachutes?

The first stick of bombs, falling on the electricity station, shook the ground with their explosion. And Frank knew that this was no invasion. This was the blitz over Portsmouth.

‘There it goes!’ Gladys said, and reached for the bag she always kept near the door, containing her First Aid kit and gas mask. ‘I’m off.’

‘Wait for me.’ Peggy too caught up her bag. ‘Blimey, they don’t give you much warning, do they? I can hear the planes already.’

Diane stared at them, her eyes almost black in her white face. ‘What about me? You’re not going to leave me here by myself.’

‘Oh lor’,’ Peggy said, stopping, ‘she’s right, Glad. We can’t leave her on her own.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘I don’t know, up the pub, I suppose. He’ll go to the street shelter.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t,’ Gladys said crossly. ‘He knows we’ve got to go when the siren sounds.’

‘He knows, and he doesn’t like it. He’ll expect you or me to stop behind.’

‘For God’s sake! Don’t he know there’s a war on? Anyway, he ought to be on duty himself, he’s a firewatcher, isn’t he?’

Peggy shrugged helplessly. ‘That won’t help our Diane.

There still won’t be anyone to stay with her in the shelter.’

‘Well, she’d better come with us, then,’ Gladys said. ‘She can help at the First Aid post. She’s helped us practise our bandaging often enough, she must know what to do.’

Peggy opened her mouth to protest. The girl would be in the way, she’d see things she shouldn’t. There’d be blood, broken limbs, people crying and shocked. And then she looked at Diane and thought again. She was sixteen, no longer a child. There were plenty of youngsters her age doing war work already - Boy Scouts acting as messengers in raids, girls helping in canteens, lads too young for call-up joining the Home Guard. Diane could easily make herself useful, keeping the kettle and teapot on the go if the rest were busy, and it would be better for her than staying here on her own.