The Girls They Left Behind (53 page)

Now his conscience was taking him further. It would take him right to the front line, wherever that might be, into dangers and perils as extreme as any faced by a fighting man.

It could take him to his death.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand.’ But even while her mind said yes, she felt her heart cry out against it and she wanted to beg him to stay.

But she knew she could not say the words. She could not have said them to Graham, to Bob Shaw, to Derek Harker or her brother Colin. Nor could any woman say them to the man she loved, for this was war and the country had first hold on its men and could take them from their hearths and homes, sending them far across the world to fight battles they did not understand and did not want. They could not choose to stay at home.

And even for Dennis and those like him, who claimed the right to set conscience above the requirements of the country, there was no choice. For the demands of such a conscience were greater even than the demands of the heart, and would drive many of them into greater peril even than those who were prepared to fight. For they could not accept ‘safety’ and looked instead for ways to use their own brand of courage in the service of their fellow men.

Some, Betty knew, had become stretcher-bearers, ready to go unarmed into the front line of the battlefield. Some had joined the Red Cross or went with the Friends’ own field hospitals to those same areas of conflict. And some, like Dennis, went to the very heart of danger and took their lives in their hands as many times a day as it was asked of them.

She held him closely and let her tears run. He was driven by something too powerful for her to do more than glimpse.

But that power contained also his love for her, and this she could understand, for her love matched his own, and she would send it with him wherever he might go.

They stood close in the warmth of the cattle byre where they had first fallen in love, and she felt the cold, black shadow of war drift slowly around them.

The work of recovery and rebuilding started at once.

Water had been the biggest problem. With nearly three thousand fires burning in a single night, the fire services had been helped by the Navy, the military and by ordinary civilians, trained and untrained, who worked throughout the bombing to try to keep the flames under control.

But the water supply had never been intended for such a conflagration, and when the mains themselves were fractured people were forced to watch it gushing out and flowing uselessly away where no fire was burning. Tenders were diverted to fill their tanks, people ran hoses down the streets and through their homes to bring them where they were needed, but many of the fires could only be contained and men and women alike wept as they watched their homes burn unchecked to ashes.

Four miles of steel piping was purchased to provide an overland main and huge water tanks were built on cleared bomb sites, ready for the next attack, for nobody believed that Jerry had finished with them. They were still alive, weren’t they? Still defiant. The Germans wouldn’t like that. They’d come again.

The work took a long time, some of it not begun until after the heaviest of the raids were over. But no one could know whether there was not worse to come, and the City Council, sharply criticised for being unprepared, was not going to repeat its mistakes. It even began to look again at the plans for tunnels into the hills, and the proposal for the Kearney tunnel, to be built beneath the harbour, linking Portsmouth with Gosport.

But before all this, the victims of the first blitz must be buried, and many went together to a communal grave a hundred feet long, lined with Union Jacks, their coffins borne by a long procession of hearses and accompanied by the band of the Royal Marines. Soldiers and sailors marched slowly alongside and the pavements were crowded by those who wanted to pay their last respects to friends and neighbours, those who knew nothing of the ones who had died save that they were fellow Portmuthians, and even some who were there simply from curiosity.

‘You don’t get many chances to see summat like this,‘Jess heard a man say. ‘Try and get near the front, we might get a look at the grave.’

She wanted to turn and slap his face. There are people we knew in those coffins, she wanted to cry, there’s a young mother there who died with her five-week-old baby in her arms. There’s another woman, with her little girl only nine years old, their lives snatched away from them, and an old man of ninety-two who ought to have died peacefully in his own bed. It’s not an entertainment!

But there was no point in saying anything and, suddenly sickened, she turned and pushed her way through the crowd.

She had paid her respects to Kathy in a different way, by taking in her two little girls until they could be found a billet out in the country where they would be safe. That was better than standing here, watching the sombre procession go by and living through the misery all over again.

In any case, the war had not retreated. Although there were no more raids for almost three weeks, the siren still sounded nightly, and now the All-Clear rarely went until early morning. Enemy aircraft were active in the skies whenever the weather was favourable, and even sometimes when it was not. You could hear them passing overhead, on their way to London or other cities. The south coast was permanently a potential target for those aircraft who had been turned back still loaded with bombs, and you never knew when the target might again be Portsmouth.

More people now had joined the nightly ‘trekkers’. Every afternoon, a crowd of mothers with children who had not been evacuated would catch buses to trek ‘over the hill’ and shelter with relatives in outlying villages. Fathers would cycle to join them after work, or even take their cars, using precious petrol and causing much bitterness amongst those who must queue for a bus, or trudge through the cold and dark to safety.

And even those were resented by many who stayed behind to face whatever danger there was.

‘They go off for a good night’s sleep and expect us to look after their houses,’ Peggy Shaw said caustically. She glanced disparagingly at number 15, now left empty each night when Ethel Glaister and her two children departed for her sister’s house at Denmead. ‘I’d leave it to burn, but you can’t let the fire spread just because it’s her house.’

‘Well, we all have to do whatever we think’s right.‘Jess had been feeling increasingly unhappy about keeping Rose and Maureen at home. She could not get the picture of Kathy Simmons’ baby from her mind. She had been the one to find him, still clutched in his mother’s arms, the firm little body torn like a rag doll. She had thought of ‘trekking’ from the city herself, just to keep them safe, but she knew no one out in the villages and couldn’t afford to pay for a room. For her, it was either proper evacuation or face it out at home, and she knew which it had to be.

The Evening News kept the people together. Each day, its headlines kept them informed of the progress of the war. On the big map which Frank had pinned on the living-room wall, he could see how the RAF had bombed Berlin and Wilhelmshaven, how the British Imperial Forces were closing an ‘iron ring’ around Tobruk, how the RAF was bombing Naples, Benghasi and Messina. Places he had scarcely heard of were suddenly important strategic points, and he spent as much time as he could studying the newspaper and the map in turn, collecting together enough information to give himself a picture of what was happening.

The map of Europe was no longer enough. He needed a map of the whole world.

But it was local news for which the Portsmouth paper was most eagerly scanned, and in those days after the first blitz the city could hardly have functioned without it. As shops and offices dragged themselves out of the ruins, the paper was filled with notices telling people where to find them.

‘It’s like a mystery tour, trying to find places these days,’

Peggy Shaw commented. ‘Bits of the Co-op in Fratton Road, other bits in Kingston. As for trying to find a newsagent or a butcher, it’d be like a needle in a haystack if it wasn’t for the News. It’s a marvel there’s places for them all to go.’

‘There’s not, for some of ‘em.’ Annie Chapman touched her hair. She had it set every Friday, bombs or no bombs. ‘I had an awful job to find Rene’s. She’s had to set up in her own front room.’

It was like living in a huge board game, where pieces might be moved at random and the player’s task was to seek them out, while still living a life as near to normal as possible and snatching some sleep between the sound of the sirens and the nightly journey down the garden to the shelter or ‘over the hill’.

The wireless was another lifeline. At nine o’clock every evening, Frank and Jess switched on the set and listened. ‘This is the Nine o’clock News and this is Alvar Liddell reading it.’ News was like a drug, you had to have it, good or bad. And, later in the evening, the homely north-country tones of J B

Priestley’s Postscripts would roll into the room, or the quickfire jokes of Tommy Handley in ITMA.

‘A good laugh,’ Jess said, ‘that’s what we need most. And some nice singing. Those girls, Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton, they’re lovely. They give you heart, somehow.’

It was heart that was needed most in these cold and dismal days after the first blitz. Heart and warmth, and courage of a sort that most people had never dreamed they would need, had never believed it possible to find. In the back streets of Copnor and Fratton, in the slums of Rudmore, in the tiny alleyways of Old Portsmouth, those who had been bombed out of their homes, who had lost all that they held most dear, must face whatever came next.

For many, it was too hard a task, for they were already exhausted and became more so as the winter wore on. For many, it seemed that it was a winter that would never end.

For some, it was an adventure.

‘We ain’t scared,’ Micky Baxter boasted. ‘We likes watching the planes. I’m waitin’ for that parachutist. We’re doin’

war work, we are.’

The three boys made it their business to investigate all the bombed areas. They roamed through the littered streets and clambered about in ruined houses, keeping a sharp eye open for wardens who would chase them off. They salvaged whatever was worth taking away and filled their basement den with treasures, broken ornaments, crockery, clocks with shattered faces. But they were more interested now in finding shell cases and shrapnel.

‘Look at this.‘Jimmy Cross was holding up a stubby metal object. Micky and Cyril crowded round to examine it.

‘What is it?’ Cyril’s large brown eyes were even bigger with excitement. ‘Is it a bomb?’

‘I reckon it is.’ Micky touched it with awe. ‘It’s an unexploded bomb.’

‘Will it go off?’ Cyril retreated a few steps.

‘It might. If it does, we’ll all be blown to bits.’ Micky gave a sudden yell, then laughed. ‘Don’t drop it, Jim!’

Jimmy jumped and clutched the object tightly. It had a blunt nose and fins along its side. Gingerly, he held it up to his ear.

‘It’s not ticking.’

‘Well, that’s all right then. It’s a dud. Let’s take it back to the den. it’s our best thing yet.’ Micky looked at it enviously, wishing he could have been the one to find it. Jimmy Cross had been getting too cocky as it was. He’d be wanting to be leader of the gang soon, just because he’d been lucky enough to find a bomb.

‘Our best thing until I gets a parachutist,’ he corrected himself, and led the way through the ruined streets.

Tim and Keith were aggrieved that they had missed the big raid. They described the attack of Christmas Eve to anyone who would listen, but a good many of the children had been in Portsmouth themselves and had their own stories to tell.

‘I wish we were still in Pompey,’ Tim said disconsolately as they sat in the vicarage kitchen listening to the News on the wireless. ‘They’re getting all the fun.’ It had snowed during the night, but even that wasn’t enough to make up for what he was missing.

Mrs Mudge, the housekeeper, was making breakfast. She put a bowl of porridge in front of each of them.

‘You think yourself lucky you’re here, out of it all. There’s no fun in being bombed out of your home. It’s no place for kiddies, Pompey’s not. I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to stay there.’

‘Our sister’s there,’ Keith observed. ‘She didn’t want to come back and Mum and Dad let her stay. And she doesn’t even like it!’

‘Nobody likes it. I daresay she wanted to be with your mum and help with the baby.’ Mrs Mudge had known Jess when the whole family, except for Frank, had been in Bridge End during the early days of the war. She also knew, from Mrs Greenberry, just how miserable Rose had been after her mother had gone back. ‘That doesn’t mean you’re not better off here.’

Tim made a face and started to eat his porridge. He was still disgruntled at having to stay in the vicarage. Brian Collins already called him ‘choirboy’ and kept making sneering remarks about saying his prayers at night. And Tim knew that many of the children laughed at old Mr Beckett for his eccentric ways. He knew, because he’d done it himself.

The vicar came into the kitchen and sat down. He’d been to church already that morning and his pyjama trousers could be seen poking out from under his cassock.

‘Well, and how are you two faring this morning? I see we had some precipitation in the night. Do you intend to build a snowman?’

Keith looked at him doubtfully. Mr Beckett didn’t talk like anyone else he knew. He sounded as if he was on the wireless all the time.

‘Are we allowed?’ he asked.

‘Allowed? My dear child, I shall be mortally offended if you do not. The front lawn, I think, don’t you? We can then appoint him our guardian.’ For a moment, Keith had a wild idea that he meant ‘guardian angel’, and imagined a snowman with wings and harp. ‘We shall start as soon as breakfast is over.’

‘You mean you’re going to help?’ Tim said in astonishment.

‘Help?

I shall be in charge! I’ve wanted to build a snowman every winter but Mrs Mudge here has never allowed it. Now that we have real boys in the house, she will not be able to object. Everyone knows that boys need to build snowmen.