The Girls They Left Behind (55 page)

All three had been preparing for an evening of relaxation.

Unless there was a raid, the men of 698 Unit were allowed to go home for a few hours at weekends and Derek had been looking forward to eating supper with Olive while her parents went down April Grove to spend the evening with Jess and Frank. Bob had no wife or girlfriend to occupy his evening, but had been cheerfully anticipating an hour or two in a chair by the fire, and the ministrations of his mother and sisters.

And even George Glaister had been hoping for a few home comforts at number 15.

But for 698 Unit, the orders were constant. If a raid was expected, all leave was cancelled and they must stand ready to go out into the city. From that point, there was a difference between the part they must play and that demanded of the Navy. The sailors could give real help. The Army’s duty was to stand guard.

‘Guard against looters!’ Derek had exploded when he first heard the command. ‘Pompey folk don’t loot!’

‘They’re not getting the chance,’ the sergeant-major said.

‘We’ll be at every doorway, armed and with fixed bayonets.

It’s no good looking at me. I didn’t issue the order.’

‘Well, who did?’ Derek wasn’t the only one disgusted.

George Glaister was equally annoyed and less frightened of saying so to his sergeant-major than he would have been to his wife. ‘We want to be out there doin’ summat. We’re soldiers, aren’t we? Fighters. Well, that’s what we oughter be doin’, tannin’ the Huns’ backsides for ‘em. Standing guard! Looting. It’s a bloody shame.’

But there was nothing to be done about it. Orders had come from somewhere on high, and such orders must be obeyed. The Unit would be sent out as soon as it was known what damage had been done and where. And yes, they could give a hand to people who’d been injured and dig out any who were buried, and do whatever else they thought necessary. But their prime function was to prevent looting, and they’d better remember it.

The first stick of bombs landed and in the barracks of 698

Unit, as in every home in Portsmouth, the lights went out.

‘They’ll kill us all,’ a woman moaned as Gladys Shaw worked to free her from the rubble of her home. ‘Oh, why don’t they do it and get it over with? I can’t stand this any longer, I just can’t.’ A bomb whistled as it fell in the next street, and everyone cringed as the explosion brought more debris raining about them. ‘Oh no, no, no …’

‘Here, love, shift out of the way and let me do it.’ A navy clad arm pushed Gladys as she struggled with a heavy beam. ‘Little scrap like you can’t move that.’ The sailor thrust his shoulder under the wooden shaft and heaved. ‘There she goes. The-e-ere she goes…‘The beam groaned and creaked, then rose just enough for Gladys to pull the woman free.

‘There you are. Takes a man to do a man’s job, eh?’

Gladys was half grateful, half annoyed. She said sharply, ‘I’d have got it up in a couple more minutes.’

‘Daresay you might, but a couple of minutes saved means a couple of minutes to use somewhere else.’ The sailor grinned cheekily and reached out to ruffle her hair. Gladys jerked her head away and he stared. ‘Here, don’t I know you?’

‘I dunno. Do you?’ she retorted waspishly, already turning away. It was no place to start making up to a girl, in the middle of an air-raid. Trust a sailor! But his next words brought her turning back, startled.

‘Yes, I do. You’re Gladys Shaw, old Bob’s sister. You live down April Grove.’

Gladys stared at him. His cap was gone, his hair covered in dust and soot, but she could see traces of ginger. ‘Graham Philpotts! What are you doing here?’

‘Having tea with her Majesty, of course,’ he retorted, grinning, and ducked as another bomb whistled and crashed a few streets away. ‘See you later, Gladdie.’

Gladdie. Ginger Philpotts had been the only person ever to call her that, she thought as she slammed the door of her ambulance and set off once again. They had patched up the Royal Hospital and casualties were being taken there again, but she’d been told to take this lot to the Queen Alexandra. It was a longer drive, and all the way Gladys found auxiliary fire engines passing her on their way from other districts into the city. They must be bringing in thousands, she thought. What in God’s name were they expecting?

They were expecting bombs. And bombs they got. All that night and the next, the incendiaries and high explosives rained from the sky. For Gladys, there seemed to be no respite from the ceaseless journeying to and fro through streets that rained with shrapnel and roared on every side with flame. She could feel the heat of it through the sides of the van, her eyes were seared by the blaze that billowed from the houses she passed. Sometimes every house in an entire street was on fire, sometimes a huge building created an inferno.

She saw walls, great panels of flaming masonry with each window a scorching glimpse of the fury within, topple slowly outwards across a road she had just been about to enter, and jammed on her brakes violently, swerving to avoid the scattered gobbets of burning debris.

She set her bell ringing, with little hope that it would be heard in all the turmoil, desperate to get her load of injured bodies to the hospital, despairing at having to ignore the pleas of those who flagged her to stop.

There must have been times when she slept, times when she ate and drank and rested. But she could never recall them afterwards, or if she did saw them too as a blur, a vague memory of sandwiches and mugs of tea thrust into her hand, a faint recollection of an hour or so of oblivion on a camp bed, somewhere in a corner of a noisy room.

From time to time, she thought of Ginger Philpotts. She’d known him at school before his parents moved over to Gosport. He’d been in her brother Bob’s class and had come round to their house a time or two. Now he was mucking in with the rest of them, giving a hand wherever it was needed, shifting rubbish, crawling into burning buildings, facing danger every minute. And so was Bob, working with the 698s.

And so were Betty’s brother Colin, somewhere at sea, and George Glaister, and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

She wondered if she would see Graham again. He’d been working in Peterborough Road when she’d come across him, where a bomb had scored a direct hit on an Anderson. Eight bodies there’d been in there, all dead when they’d got the rubble off them. Eight dead, when they’d thought themselves safe. It just showed … And where was Graham now, with his ginger hair and his cheeky grin? You couldn’t keep track of anyone in this mess.

Graham had been one of the rescuers who had found the Anderson with the family killed inside it. He’d gone at the rubble like a madman, scraping away at torn and jagged corrugated iron until his hands had bled and an ARP man had dragged him off. ‘You won’t help nobody by getting yourself hurt as well, son.’

Graham knew he was right, but the sight of those poor broken bodies huddled together in the damp little dugout had touched him on the raw. A whole family wiped out, just like that. And what sort of a shelter had they had? A pathetic little hole in the ground. What had the Government been thinking of, to get them all into a mess like this?

The past few weeks had shaken Graham more than he had realised. From being a bit of a game, the war had turned into something serious. At first, he’d felt the same kind of exalted patriotism that many young men had felt as they queued outside the recruitment offices to volunteer. When he’d swaggered down the street in his uniform and gone straight round to Betty’s house to show it off, he’d felt important, a sort of hero even though he hadn’t done anything yet.

Perhaps that was why he’d got so annoyed when she wouldn’t do what he wanted. She’d made him feel ordinary again, a chap who wasn’t anything special after all, trying to take advantage of his girl.

He went back to the shelter, working more carefully now, but it wasn’t long before he was needed to help where someone was buried alive. And then there was another, and another … It wasn’t until dawn was breaking that he was able to walk slowly back to the ship, through the littered and still burning streets, and remember Gladys.

Gladdie Shaw. He’d known her when they were kids, of course, but he hadn’t seen her for years now. She was a bit of all right, though - not very tall, and even though her hair had been covered up with some sort of hat or scarf, he’d been able to see that it was yellow. He liked small girls. They made him feel protective. And he liked yellow hair too.

Mind, Gladdie Shaw didn’t seem to need much protecting.

She looked as if she knew just what she was doing, helping to get people into the old van she was driving as an ambulance.

And she’d been pretty cool with that too, backing it away and then tearing off up the road like a bat out of hell… She was quite a girl, was Gladdie Shaw.

I wouldn’t mind seeing her again, he thought as he reached the ship and reported aboard before going below to crash out on his bunk. Maybe I’ll go up Copnor one day and see how she got on last night…

Micky Baxter and his gang had given up searching ruined houses for whatever broken oddments might have been left behind, and looked for bombs instead. Their first one was kept carefully in the basement den. None of them was quite sure whether it was a dud or not and they were half scared, half thrilled to possess it.

They had almost managed to retrieve another from a crater a few streets away, but a policeman caught them just as they were scrambling down the rubble and jerked them roughly back to the road. He banged Micky’s and Jimmy’s heads together.

‘You stupid little twerps! D’you want to get killed?

Dragging a little ‘un into it, as well.’ He looked at Cyril’s angelic face. ‘You shouldn’t be running around with these boys, sonny. Get off home to your mum.’

‘Mum’s at work.’ Cyril watched as a truck arrived and several soldiers jumped out. ‘Are they going to explode it?’

‘Never you mind about that. You get off home like I said, and you two go with him, see he gets there all right.’ The policeman released Micky and Jimmy and gave them a parting cuff. ‘And don’t get playing round bomb craters any more, it ain’t safe.’

The three boys scuttled down an alleyway and then doubled back, flattening themselves against the wall to peer round the comer. The crater had already been roped off and the soldiers were climbing carefully into it. One or two stayed on the rim, peering down. The policeman had retreated to another corner.

‘They’re going to blow it up,’ Cyril breathed. ‘We’ll be able to get bits for souvenirs.’

‘I’d rather have a bomb.’ Micky was disgruntled. Jimmy was beginning to challenge his position. Possessing a bomb gave a boy automatic rights and Micky still hadn’t found one of his own. If he didn’t look out, Jimmy would be trying to take over.

The soldiers scrambled out of the crater. They were moving more easily now and one of them was carrying the bomb. The policeman came out of his shelter and the boys stared in disgust.

‘They didn’t even blow it up.’

‘It musta bin a dud.’

‘They defused it, that’s what they did.’

They wandered away, feeling let down.

I’ve got to get a bomb, Micky thought. I’ve got to.

Betty worked her way slowly down the field, setting the seed potatoes in their rows.

The days on the farm seemed long and hard now that Dennis was away. He had been accepted immediately for bomb disposal work in the Pioneer Corps and had been shifted somewhere up in the Midlands for training. He wrote every other day, and Betty spent hours writing back, but the farm was lonely without him and she lay awake night after night, longing for his touch, for the feel of his arms about her, for the warmth of his body.

She knew that she was not, as she had been with Graham, in love with love. Engagement rings and outward symbols had never figured in their conversation. And Dennis had made no demands, had never assumed that he had rights over her in any way. She was free - free to love him as she wished, free to give her body or to withhold it.

But that freedom brought its own price, and the price she must pay to love Dennis was to give him his own freedom, the freedom to walk into danger, knowing that he might not walk away.

Night after night, Betty lay awake listening to the bombers passing overhead. Nobody was really safe. In the darkness, you could see fires burning, often over the hill in Portsmouth or Gosport, occasionally in another direction.

‘We’re giving as good as we get,’ Mr Spencer said, reading the newspaper reports of RAF attacks on German cities. ‘Our lads are flattening them, just like they’re trying to flatten us.’

‘Good job too,’ Erica said. ‘The sooner we wipe every German off the face of the earth, the sooner we can get back to normal.’ Her lips quivered.

‘And how many more of our boys are getting killed while we do it?’ Betty demanded. ‘I’m sorry, Erica, but what’s the point of boys like Geoff and Sandy being killed? They’re gone for ever ‘

‘You don’t have to tell me that!’

‘Betty, don’t,’ Mrs Spencer interposed.

‘Why not? She’s not the only person who’s lost someone.

We’re all going to lose if this goes on.’ Betty stared at them.

‘You’ve got two boys out in Libya. I’ve got a brother in the Navy. And Dennis, you know what he’s doing. You can’t call him a coward now. But what good is it going to do if they all get killed? What sort of “normal” is there going to be when it’s all over?’

‘It’s not for us to think about. We’ve just got to do our bit.’

‘And let other people drag us into an even worse mess?

Look, it’s right what Dennis says. We’re just killing by numbers. Why can’t they sit down and talk about it? Or kill the ones who’ve causing all the trouble? Hitler and Goering and all them.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Jack Spencer said. ‘There are more and more countries joining in all the time. The whole world’s in a muddle.’

Betty sighed. It was like a tangle of differently-coloured wools that must be sorted out before they could be made into something useful. And perhaps the tangle was so bad that some parts would just have to be cut out… But that would spoil the rest, leaving some colours too short to be used at all…