The Girls They Left Behind (60 page)

‘Come on, mate. It’s not healthy out here.’

The two women climbed out by themselves and staggered in through the casualty entrance. Peggy went with them, handed them over to a nurse and then hurried out again.

There were other people about too. A doctor, some nurses, porters, another sailor on his way out. One of the porters came out with Peggy and gave Gladys a nod.

‘Good girl. There’s some char inside if you want it.’

Gladys shook her head. ‘There isn’t time ‘

‘There is,’ Peggy said. ‘You need it. We all do. We’ve ‘

Whatever else she had been about to say was lost for ever as one of the mines struck the roof of the casualty department and blew the building apart. At the same moment, another bomb fell in the main courtyard and destroyed the main entrance. Fire broke out at once and the blaze spread across the whole of the front of the building. To the pilots high above, it must have seemed then that all Portsmouth was afire and that no more need be done to bring this ancient city to its knees.

Neither Gladys nor Peggy saw the sight.

Gladys was saved by her battered old ambulance, which had protected her from the main blast. She was knocked unconscious by a piece of flying debris, and when she came round later she found herself in St James’s Hospital with a broken arm.

Her mother was in the next bed. She had been thrown over thirty feet across the yard and landed in a flowerbed. She was covered in scratches - ‘from one of those dratted rosebushes’, she said - but otherwise, miraculously, she was uninjured. She was kept in for a few hours for observation and then allowed to go home.

Graham Philpotts, along with the doctor and everyone else who had been in the casualty department at that moment, was killed at once.

They had a funeral for little Cyril Nash, though there was little left to put in the coffin. Sometimes, it seemed as if they just buried a coffin, for the sake of it. As if you couldn’t feel properly finished without a funeral.

Cyril was buried a few days after the big raid. What he’d been doing down Powerscourt Road, nobody could make out, and they wouldn’t even have known he was there if Micky and Jimmy hadn’t told them. The boys had lain in the garden, on the edge of the crater, all through the night, drifting in and out of consciousness, and only been found next morning by accident, by some other boys who were climbing about in the wreckage. The boys had dragged Micky out and got him to a First Aid post, where he was given hot tea and wrapped in blankets, but they hadn’t been able to do anything for Jimmy. He’d had to wait until a proper rescue team arrived, headed by the young woman doctor, Una Mulvaney, and when he had finally been lifted clear he had lost a leg.

‘Poor little bugger,’ Granny Kinch said when Micky was brought home in an ambulance van. He’d been kept at the First Aid post for most of the day, until Dr Mulvaney was sure he was fit to be moved. ‘That’ll put paid to ‘is footballing. ‘Ave to ‘ave a nartificial leg now, ‘e will. Thank Gawd it wasn’t you, our Mick.’

‘Oh, my Micky’s got a charmed life,’ Nancy remarked.

She hadn’t even known Micky was missing, for she hadn’t been at home when the raid had started and had made the most of it in a dark corner with a sailor. No point in losing

good money, after all. ‘Knows ‘ow to look after ‘imself, Micky, does.’

‘All the same, ‘e didn’t oughter bin out in it,’ her mother said. ‘Worried sick, I was, ‘ere all by meself listenin’ ter the bombs. It coulda bin you, blowed to bits,’ she told Micky severely. ‘Then where would you’ve bin, eh?’

‘All over Pompey, I s’pose,’ Micky answered, but the cheekiness in his voice was more wavery than usual. His memories of the raid were garbled now, but he could feel with his body the terror of being trapped in the cellar, the panic as the house collapsed about them. He could still taste the dust and smoke, and his eyes were sore from grit and the red flare of the sky. It had seemed an eternity that he had lain there, with bricks digging into his ribs and a sharp spike of wood scratching deeply into his thigh and the cacophony of planes, bombs and guns resounding all about him. He did not know for sure whether it had been real, or a dream. He had a feeling that it had been totally real, but that from now on it would be a recurring nightmare.

‘That Micky Baxter ought to be locked up somewhere,’ Frank said. ‘He’s a holy terror. He leads other boys into trouble and gets off scot-free.’

‘He had concussion. He nearly died,’ Jess said, but in her heart she agreed with Frank. It was terrible to think of little Cyril Nash, killed for the sake of a bit of boyish mischief, and Jimmy Cross with only one leg. It didn’t seem right that Micky, who had been the ringleader, should be able to strut about the streets, looking cocky again.

May brought more furious attacks on Portsmouth, Liverpool and London. Dawn scarcely penetrated to the capital city through the smoke that hung like a funeral pall over thousands of stricken buildings, and the firefighters battled through three days and nights to control the flames that threatened to sweep away the rest.

In Portsmouth, nine high explosive bombs fell near the Hilsea Gas Works and on the main railway line to London.

Houses were damaged in all the nearby streets and several people killed. One of them was Jess Budd’s aunt Nell, who had let Frank and Jess live in two rooms of her house when they had first got married. Jess heard the news with sorrow and went to look at the house where she had started her married life.

‘Poor auntie Nell. She had a sharp tongue, but she was good-hearted, she’d never see anyone go in want. We had some good times in that house.’

‘Well, she never knew a thing about it, there’s that to be thankful for.’ Frank held his wife close. ‘And she had a good life. As good as anyone can expect, these days.’

‘I know.‘Jess sighed and straightened her shoulders. She wiped her eyes. There was never time for proper grieving.

The blows came thick and fast, as fast as the bombs, and all you could do was take a deep breath and carry on. Carry on, carry on. Keep smiling through. Don’t let Hitler win. Are we downhearted? No - let ‘em all come!

‘We’re giving as good as we get,’ people said, but did that really help? As far as Jess could see, it just meant more and more people killed or homeless. More and more misery.

She went up to Annie’s to tell her about Frank’s auntie.

Her sister was in the kitchen, baking an eggless sponge. She looked tired and there were lines of worry etched on her face.

‘Ted’s still bad,’ she said as she put the kettle on for a cup of tea. ‘It’s hit him real hard this time. The doctor don’t know what to do with him.’

Jess sat down at the kitchen table. Ted had been found on the turret roof, curled up in a corner and sobbing like a child.

Annie had had to call Frank to come and help her, and together they’d unwrapped his arms from about his head and led him down the stairs. Bed had seemed the best place and they’d given him some sweet tea and waited for the shock to wear off, but Ted was still there, staring dry-eyed now at the ceiling and refusing to move. It was almost as if he’d had a stroke.

‘The doctor says it’s nothing like that. Just shock. He says that last raid was too much for him.’ Annie glanced at the ceiling and lowered her voice. ‘If you ask me, it all comes from Dunkirk. He would go, and you know how scared he was of even going across the harbour at night. Seeing all them poor soldiers being shelled and machine-gunned where they stood - well, he’s never got over it, never. He has awful nightmares.’ She poured the tea and sat down opposite Jess.

‘I don’t think he’ll ever be the same again.’

‘Oh, Annie! He’ll get better, I’m sure he will.’ Jess reached across and touched her sister’s hand. ‘It’s all been too much for him, but he’ll get over it. People always do.’

‘Do they?’ Annie gave a short laugh. ‘What about old Herbie up the road? He was shellshocked in die last war and he’s never got over it. I can remember him going off, a fine figure of a man he was, and always laughing. Half the girls in Copnor were in love with him. And a year or so later he was back, a wreck, frightened to crawl along the pavement, jumping half out of his skin if a door slammed.

He’s hardly been across the doorstep since and they say his poor old mother still has to cut up his food as if he was a baby.’

‘Ted won’t be like that,’ Jess said uncomfortably, but she knew that Annie was right. Some people never did recover.

But it was no use letting it get you down. Like the old song said, there was a silver lining to every dark cloud, and you just had to look for it. Turn the dark cloud inside out… And there were spots of brightness in the gloom, and if you tried you could raise a smile, on even the worst of days.

One of the brightest spots was Maureen. Now fast approaching two years old, she was toddling everywhere, always with a smile on her face. She could talk well and had begun to ask questions. Her favourite word was ‘why’.

‘Why does the sun shine? Why is it dark? Why is that flower red? Why is the leaf green? Why does Henry scratch his ears?

Why - why - why?’

She never asked why a war was being fought, why she must spend every night in an air-raid shelter, why the darkness was filled with the noise of aircraft and bombs.

But, standing at her mother’s knee one day and hearing the adults talk about ‘peace’ she furrowed her brow and asked, ‘What’s peace?’ And could not understand the expressions this brought to their faces, nor the reason for the sudden

tears in her mother’s eyes.

Another bright spot was the letter written each week by Tim and Keith. Jess could imagine them, sitting down together to try to think of things to say. She was amused by the large handwriting, straggling over two or three sheets of paper, on both sides, to make the letter look longer. The letters were singularly uninformative - ‘We went to church on Sunday. We went to school. We played’ - but she treasured them all the same. Usually, they finished up ‘How is our Baby?’ and she would write back and tell them all the things Maureen had said and done, and what Henry the cat was doing, mostly sleep, in front of the fire if he could get there, and about the garden and allotment. She kept talk of the bombs and the war out of her letters, unaware of the fact that this was what the boys most wanted to hear.

‘Children shouldn’t have to think about such things,’ she said, but Tim and Keith were avid for news. To them, war was still exciting and such protection kept it so. They knew little of the destruction, the misery, the injured and the homeless. They saw the planes fighting overhead and danced in ecstasy, recreating them as they zoomed along country lanes with arms held wide, pretending to be Spitfires and Hurricanes. They watched the glow in the sky as Portsmouth or Southampton burned and never thought that their own families might be in danger. For the next few days they played firemen, dousing the flames. They longed for an enemy aircraft to be shot down somewhere near the village so that they could take its crew prisoner and be awarded medals by the King himself.

All through the bombing, people tried their best to live normal lives. They went to the pictures and saw films like Spring Parade, with Deanna Durbin, to bring a little glamour into their lives, or Spare a Copper, with George Formby to bring fun. They saw Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 21

Days, and Bette Davis and Charles Boyer in All This and Heaven Too. They went dancing and watched football matches, they visited each other for Sunday afternoon tea and played cards and Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. They

listened to In Town Tonight on Saturday evenings and Gert and Daisy handing out household tips in The Kitchen Front on weekday mornings. They coped with ever-tightening rations, with milkless days, with baking cakes with no eggs. They dug their gardens and grew vegetables and made clothes for themselves and their children.

In other places too, the war went on. Turning her attention to nation after nation, Germany threatened Yugoslavia with total destruction. Rommel arrived in Libya and launched his African offensive. The Allies were evacuated from Greece and, a few weeks later, from Crete. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, parachuted into Scotland and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The Italian army surrendered in North Africa, and Britain rejoiced as the Bismarck was sunk, a fitting vengeance for the sinking of the Hood.

‘It’s not over,’ Frank said. ‘Not by a long chalk. He’s just drawing breath.’ He tapped the newspaper in front of him.

‘Look at this. They’re starting on the plans to make tunnel shelters in the hill. They wouldn’t be doing that if they didn’t think we were going to need them. They reckon they could get five thousand people in them.’

On the first of June, another announcement appeared in the paper and Jess read it with dismay. She showed it to Peggy Shaw when her neighbour came in for a cup of tea.

‘Clothes on ration! We can’t buy anything now without coupons.’

‘But we haven’t got ration books for clothes.’

‘No, we’re to use our margarine coupons instead. See, there’s a list here of all the things we can get. An overcoat or mac’ll be sixteen coupons, a pair of trousers six, a skirt seven, a pair of boots or shoes five. We’ve got sixty-six to last us the year.’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘I suppose it’s not that bad. I mean, we’ve got stuff already, it’s only whatever we need new.

Mind, wool’s rationed as well, you have to think of that, and material - three coupons a yard. It says you can get clothes for children under four without coupons though, that’ll help with the baby.’

‘That’s if they’ve got the stuff in the shops,’ Peggy remarked. She was still pale and shaken after the night when the Royal Hospital had been bombed, and had not regained her usual brisk energy. Both she and Gladys had been relieved of their duties with the ambulance for the time being, though they both went to the First Aid post anyway, to help in whatever way they could. Peggy had tried to dissuade Gladys at first, but had soon given up. ‘I don’t need two hands to pour tea,’ the girl had declared. It was as if she couldn’t rest, as if she wanted to win the war all by herself, to make up for losing Graham.