A Strong Hand to Hold

Patty shrugged. ‘Least it gives you a chance to say, “I told you so”,’ she said with a smile, and went on, ‘Don’t fuss, Beat, I can’t bear fuss and I was bored stupid upstairs. I’ll go to bed early tonight and be as right as rain in the morning.’

‘Don’t think of coming into work this week,’ Beattie lectured. ‘And don’t forget, I won’t be able to take the babbies to nursery tomorrow, being as I’ll be living it up in Sutton-bloody-Coldfield. My Bert will have to see to himself tomorrow morning.’

‘He can come here for his breakfast if he wants,’ Linda said, coming in with the cups of tea on a tray.

Beattie accepted a cup from Linda and said, ‘No ducks, you got enough on your plate as it is looking after the nippers and all. For Gawd’s sake, Bert can make himself a few slices of toast and a cup of tea. Won’t kill him, will it? Might even make him appreciate me a bit more, eh?’

‘Aye, and pigs might fly,’ Patty chuckled and to Linda she said, ‘Pull the curtains, bab. We need a light on in here – it’s as black as pitch.’

Linda did as she was bid, glad to shut out the cold night. The rain hammered on the panes like hailstones and she shivered. ‘Hate to be out in this,’ she said.

‘Yeah, pity them Londoners trekking down the Underground night after night,’ Beattie said. ‘God, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Yeah, and the papers going on as if it’s some great party, as if they choose to do it,’ Patty said. ‘Bleeding fools. I’m glad my sister Lily’s out of it, any road. She was right down by the London docks, you know? How she was supposed to look after all those kids down the Underground, or somewhere just as bad, I don’t know. Any road, she was all for going back home when no bombs fell. It was only her hubby Sid who made her stay; he’d got himself a good job and the kids were settled into schools. I told her to stick it out. I bet she’s bloody glad now.’

‘Basingstoke she was sent to, weren’t she?’ Beattie said. ‘Where’s that then?’

‘Down south somewhere,’ Patty said vaguely. ‘Don’t rightly know for sure, just know it ain’t in London.’

‘Point is,’ Beattie said, ‘my Bert said it shows you now, after the raid on Coventry, that being so very far from the coast is nothing – and you got to admit, Birmingham makes a lot of stuff – armaments, tyres, planes and lots of military vehicles. If Jerry gets wind of it, he’ll come for us, I reckon.’

Both Linda and Patty shivered and Patty scooped the toddling Harry into her arms and hugged him as she cried, ‘For Gawd’s sake, Beat, put a sock in it! Proper Job’s comforter you are. If Hitler’s got something special up his sleeve for us, I hope he waits for the warmer weather, that’s all.’

Beattie drained her cup of tea and getting to her feet she remarked with a laugh, ‘Well, now I’ve cheered you up right and proper, I’ll go and do the same to me old man. Bye, all.’

Linda saw Beattie out, and as she came back in Patty remarked, ‘Right little ray of sunshine, ain’t she, our Beat?’

Linda laughed and took the tray of cups back into the kitchen, but it was really no laughing matter. She didn’t know what Beattie was on about anyway because Hitler had already gone for them. Maybe not as bad as Coventry, but bad enough all the same. The raids in August, the start of the bombs in Birmingham had been quite frightening enough she’d thought at the time, but they had got much worse through September and those in October and the early part of November had been really scary. They had all hid away in the Anderson shelter and she had joined in with her mother singing songs to the children to calm them down. Eventually they both would become drowsy enough to be laid in the bunks made ready for them, but Linda had no such release for she would be so anxious for them all. she would feel as if she had lead in her stomach and her throat would become as dry as dust.

She gave herself a mental shake. What was she doing, worrying about things before they had happened, getting nervous because of something Beattie had said. Her mother was right, she was a prophet of doom all right was Beattie. She saw George looking at her frowning face and wondered how much he had understood of Beattie’s words. No need for him to be worried anyway and she smiled at him and said, ‘D’you want a drink of milk, George?’

The lad nodded his head. ‘Can I have summat to eat and all?’

‘In a bit,’ Linda told him. She knew both boys had a cooked meal at the nursery. ‘Tell you what, I’ll do you some toast on the fire later and I’m sure we’ve got a bit of jam left in the jar.’

‘I’m hungry now though,’ he complained.

Linda poured some milk into a cup and handed him one of the apples they’d got from the market on Saturday. ‘Have this for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll get your tea later.’

Mollified, George sat up at the table cuddling Tolly in his arms and swinging his legs as he watched Linda bustling around, preparing a nourishing meal for her mother. ‘D’you think we’ll be bombed, Linda?’ he asked. ‘Beattie does.’

‘She’s Mrs Latimer to you,’ Linda said sharply. ‘And I don’t know, George. But we’ll be all right – we’ve got the shelter, haven’t we?’

Her brother wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t like that shelter, it’s smelly and cold and dark,’ he whined.

‘It ain’t dark, George,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve put a hurricane lamp in there and that will soon light the place up. We can take blankets to wrap ourselves in if we have to go down there. ’Fraid I can’t do much about the smell.’

She ruffled his dark hair and said, ‘But why are you worrying, eh? It might never happen. Hitler’s probably finished with us now. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn.’

She didn’t believe it, but George did. In a way Linda wished she was still small and could be reassured so easily. But at least she’d taken the worry away from her little brother’s eyes and she bent and planted a kiss on the top of his head.

THREE

Jenny realised almost as soon as the door clicked behind her that night, that she’d forgotten her torch. No wonder – she’d been in such a state of agitation after the row, when she’d insisted on reporting for duty that night. The point was, it was a disaster not to have any light at all on those blacked-out nights, for you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. Instead of going back indoors and facing her family again, she began to pick her way cautiously over the ground.

So many people had been killed on the roads during the first months of the war because of the blackout that Stan Walker, who worked with her at the warden post, said he reckoned it was Hitler’s secret weapon. ‘He ain’t gonna fight us at all,’ he said with his wheezy laugh. ‘He’s just going to let us kill ourselves in the bleeding ’orse road.’

White lines were painted along the kerbs and on the running boards of cars and, though they were now allowed shielded headlights, it had made little difference. There were few cars on the Pype Hayes Estate anyway and the white lines were barely visible on a dark moonless night.

Everyone hated the blackout. Norah never stopped going on about it and made no effort to comply with regulations. She would have sat by uncurtained windows, the light shining like a beacon outside, and eaten the entire butter ration in one meal if Jenny hadn’t watched her. Ignoring the blackout carried a fine of £200 and Jenny couldn’t afford to indulge her mother.

As usual though, pangs of guilt began to stab at her as she made her way to the ARP post and she wondered whether she should have stayed at home that night with her mother. She hoped that Norah and Eileen would be all right but she doubted, even if there was a raid that night, that they’d use the Anderson shelter in the garden which her brothers had erected before they went away to war. Being sunk into the earth, it was inclined to flood; her next-door neighbour Mr Patterson had helped Jenny to pump it out just the previous week. He’d floor-boarded it for her too, as he’d done his own at the beginning of the war, and put a seat one side and two bunks at the other. He’d even loaned her his old oil-heater to warm the place up, and she had bought a kerosene lamp that lit the shelter up well enough and while it wasn’t the most comfy place in the world, it wasn’t that bad.

Her mother was adamant, however, that she would not go grubbing in some underground tin shack like an animal, and that was that! Eileen felt the same. The two women had taken shelter under the stairs in the pantry that opened off the living room when the bombs came a little close. People said you were just as safe there – and maybe you were. Jenny was powerless to do anything about it, anyway. She could hardly force them to take shelter if they didn’t want to.

She hadn’t quite reached the post when the siren wailed out a warning. Before it had faded away she saw the planes approaching, though in the dark it was the drone of them that alerted her first. They were nearly overhead before she saw the shapes of them in the sky. The first planes dropped incendiaries, making the blackout irrelevant as the night was suddenly lit up like daylight; now she saw the second column of planes flying in formation behind them. She actually saw the bomb doors open and the bombs topple out fins first and then nose down towards their targets. She heard the first crashes and crumps and, remembering where she was supposed to be making for, she increased her pace.

Jenny knew with a dread certainty that there would be more grieving families before the night was over. She also knew that the news of Anthony’s death had to wait. This was not the time for the luxury of tears.

Linda was toasting bread for her brothers’ tea with a long-handled toasting fork over the glowing embers in the grate when the siren went off. She jumped so suddenly, the toast fell off the fork and dropped into the fire. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘What’s up?’ Patty called from the kitchen, where she was boiling a kettle.

‘I’ve dropped the perishing toast.’

‘They wouldn’t have had time to eat it anyway,’ Patty said struggling into her coat. ‘Go and get the hot-water bottles out of the boys’ beds, will you, love? That shelter will be perishing. I’ll fill the flask up with hot tea.’

Linda looked at her mother with concern. She was right, the shelter would be freezing – the very last place Patty should be spending the night. She scuttled hurriedly upstairs and hoped the raid wouldn’t go on very long and they’d be able to come back inside soon.

The bottles would keep them a bit warmer anyway, she thought, and she tugged the blankets off the beds for good measure. Downstairs, her mom was pouring the contents of the teapot into the flask. She smiled at Linda and said, ‘Nothing’s so bad if you can have a cuppa, eh?’

‘Not half.’

Yes, it would be nice to have hot tea, Linda thought. The vacuum flask was a wonderful invention and very expensive, but Patty had come home with one a few weeks before, bought from someone at work with contacts.

‘Take all that lot down the shelter, Linda,’ Patty said, handing her the flask as well. ‘Then come back and give me a hand with the babbies.’

‘You’d better turn the gas off under the stew, too,’ Linda said, and hoped the raid wouldn’t last long because her stomach was growling with hunger. It was as she was returning to the house that she saw a fleet of bombers heading their way. ‘Hurry, Mom,’ she said as she ran in.

‘I’m coming,’ Patty said. ‘I’ve got Harry’s bottle ready and a packet of biscuits I put by in case this might happen. Get your coat on. I’ll do Harry, you see to George.’

She went into the pantry and could hear the drones of the planes get louder and she looked at Linda in sudden fear. There sounded like hundreds over their heads. Both boys picked up the tension of their mother and sister, and Harry started to grizzle as Patty struggled to fasten him into his suit. But she took no notice and then she picked him up and handed him to Linda. ‘Take him down,’ she said. George trailed after his mother, dragging his beloved teddy bear Tolly behind him, his coat flapping open because Linda hadn’t had time to fasten it.

A resounding crash, terrifyingly close, startled Patty. Her hand closed around the biscuits on the top shelf of the pantry. The sooner they were under cover the better, she thought, and she turned with such suddenness, she almost tripped over George who was clinging to her skirt. The intensity of the raid had unnerved her totally and she screamed, ‘Let go, George, let go! Come on, let’s get to the shelter quick.’

George was too scared to loose his mother’s skirt and, as another bomb landed too close for comfort, he gave a yelp of terror. Patty bent to pick him up with a suddenness that took him by surprise and Tolly fell from his arms on to the pantry floor.

‘Tolly,’ he cried, but Patty wasn’t stopping for no threadbare teddy. She dashed after Linda out of the back door and into the comfortless shelter in the back garden.

Warmed by the hot-water bottles and wrapped in the blankets, they sat huddled on the bench. It was bitterly cold. Patty doled out biscuits by the light of the hurricane lamp she’d hung from a protruding screw on the shelter wall. ‘We can’t eat them all now,’ she told George as he clamoured for more. ‘We might be here some time.’

‘Can we have a cup of tea? I’m gagging,’ Linda asked.

‘Not yet,’ Patty said. ‘This could go on for hours and it would be daft to have drunk it all then.’

Linda said nothing, but her stomach continued to rumble; the biscuits had done little to fill her up and a cup of hot tea would have been comforting. The crashes and explosions all around them were frightening the boys and Linda began to rock Harry to and fro as she and her mom started to sing to the boys as they’d done before to calm them down. They started on all the nursery rhymes they’d ever known to encourage George to join in, and then all the rousing war songs to counteract the explosions and the tremors they felt even through the shelter. In time the lateness of the hour, Linda’s rocking motion and the sucking of the warm milk caused little Harry’s sobs to ease and his eyelids to droop. But George suddenly sat up straight, all sleepiness forgotten as he said, ‘I want Tolly.’

Linda raised her eyes questioningly to her mother, who said, ‘He dropped it on the pantry floor when I picked him up to run in here.’

Linda knew of George’s devotion to Tolly. ‘He’ll be all right, George,’ she told him. ‘He’s looking after the house.’

George lifted a tear-streaked face and said, ‘No he ain’t, ’itler will bomb him.’

‘No, he won’t, George.’

‘Yes, he will. Else why we in ’ere?’

Linda couldn’t answer that and as George began to cry again, she said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.’

Patty unscrewed the flask and poured out a half-cup for George. ‘Here,’ she said to Linda, ‘see if this will shut him up.’

Patty took Harry from Linda and tucked him in the bunk with a hot-water bottle and a blanket, and left him sucking the last of his warm milk while Linda was blowing the hot tea until it was cool enough to give George.

‘Beattie’s well out of this tonight,’ Patty remarked.

‘Oh yes, didn’t she say Sutton Coldfield’s too posh to bomb?’

‘Got no industry, that’s why,’ Patty said.

‘She’d better stay there then,’ Linda said, ‘than put up with this. This isn’t a place I’d like to spend much time in.’

Patty’s chest was hurting her again but she tried to control her coughing so as not to worry Linda. ‘I agree with you,’ she said at last. ‘These shelters are not the healthiest places in the world, but we must be safer in here than out there. Our Beattie won’t stay longer than she can help at her Vera’s. She always says she can’t stand her, nor the place where she lives. Apparently they never got on, even as kids. But there you are, blood’s thicker than water when all’s said and done.’

‘Well, she’s lucky to be there tonight at any rate, ain’t she?’ Linda said. ‘If she was here, she’d be sharing our shelter and probably our biscuits too.’

Patty opened her mouth, but before she could say anything George handed Linda back the empty cup, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and said, ‘Can we go and get Tolly now?’

‘God, child, I’ll brain you in a minute,’ Patty cried.

‘It’s stopped,’ George said flatly.

The raid hadn’t stopped exactly, but the explosions were further away, certainly. ‘I’ll run back to the house and fetch Tolly for you,’ Linda said.

‘You’ll do no such thing.’

‘It’s eased a bit. Listen.’

‘Any minute they could be back.’

‘I’ll only be a tick,’ Linda said. ‘You know our George won’t settle without that flipping bear.’

George began to whimper and cry again. ‘I want Tolly, I do. Get me Tolly, Linda.’

‘Honest, Mom, it won’t take me a minute,’ Linda said. ‘Pour me a cup of tea and I’ll be back to drink it.’

She was out of the shelter before Patty could stop her, glad for a moment of the blast of cold air after the stale damp mugginess of the shelter. The air smelt smoky and the night sky was lit up by searchlights; there was an orange glow everywhere. Her ears were filled with the loud tattoo of anti-aircraft guns, the drone of aeroplanes and the sirens of the emergency services.

She’d almost reached the house when she saw the formation of planes that seemed to have come from nowhere and were heading straight towards her like menacing black beetles. She bolted in the back door; the sooner she got George’s bear and was back inside the shelter the better, she thought.

She’d reached the living room and turned on the light when a whooshing sound seemed to knock her off her feet and take all the breath from her body. She lay where she’d been thrown for a moment or so. The house had been plunged into darkness and debris continued to fall all around her. Linda knew a bomb had fallen terrifyingly close and her house had been caught in the blast. She was frightened to death, trembling in every limb, fearing at any moment the house would fall on top of her.

She could see nothing. The darkness was so thick she felt she could almost touch it. Yet she told herself to keep calm, and to try and remember where she’d been in the room when the blast had knocked her over.

Cautiously she got on to her hands and knees and began to crawl frantically over the rubble, whimpering with fear and knowing there was just one place where she might be moderately safe and that was the pantry. However, in the pitch black, she had no idea if she was even going in the right direction.

She found the remains of the pantry door first, and crawled over it into what remained of the small room. She was only just in time. As she lay, panting with fear, the house began to give ominous creaks; there was a sliding, splintering sound and Linda curled in a ball with her hands over her head as with a roar the house collapsed. There was a crash of falling masonry, the smell of brick and plaster, and the stink of charred wood.

Never in all her life had Linda felt such intense terror and she broke out in a cold sweat. The dust swirling in the air was gritty in her eyes, stopped up her nose and filled her mouth, threatening to choke her. Any minute she expected to be buried alive.

Eventually, things stopped moving and there was no sound at all – only a deep silence. She moaned in relief, almost surprised that she was still alive. She tasted blood in her mouth and realised she’d bitten her bottom lip and hadn’t been aware of it. She was so tense, every bone in her body ached.

She was mighty glad her mom knew where she was. She even knew where it was Tolly had dropped out of George’s fingers, so she could pinpoint exactly where Linda would be right away. Until then she knew she just had to stay calm and eventually they’d dig her out.

It was hard though to remain calm, all alone in the dark, and soon she began to shiver with cold and shock. Had she been injured anywhere? She felt all over her face and extended her arms, very gingerly one at a time, not sure how much space she had. She did the same to her legs and gave a sigh of relief when she found there was room to stretch them out fully. It was a fairly large space, she reasoned, so there’d be plenty of air if it was a long time till she was rescued. Suddenly, there was a loud crack above her head and she opened her mouth in a scream. But before she was able to utter a sound and before she could pull her legs out of harm’s way, the bottom of the stairs collapsed on top of them. The stairs had held the weight of the house and of the houses adjoining, and the pain that ran through Linda’s body was agonizing. She was also stuck fast. At first she couldn’t believe it and began wriggling and struggling, but it achieved nothing but more pain.

She forgot about being brave and staying calm. She wanted her mom and she began to shout for her, but her mouth filled with dust and she started to cough. She thought she was going to die, die here all alone in the blackness, and tears poured down her cheeks as she continued to yell for help.

Eventually though, she was too tired and her throat too sore to shout any more and she lay quiet, shaking all over. She tried to calm herself; she wouldn’t be there long. People were probably looking for her right now. She listened intently, but couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the raid was still going on. She had to be patient; they’d come as soon as they could.

When her fumbling hands came into contact with fur, she realized she’d found Tolly and was absurdly pleased. She’d thought he would have been buried under the rubble that had once been their home. George would be pleased at least, she thought, by the return of his beloved bear, but her mom would be cut up by the loss of the house she loved. Linda wondered where they’d all live. Something would have to be found for them; they could hardly camp out in the street. Mom would sort it all out, Linda thought sleepily.

She wished she could see her, or hear her voice. She cuddled Tolly, surprised how comforting it was. The bear smelt of her brother George and she leaned her head against the toy and closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep, to pass the time away till she was rescued, and she thought of all the tales her mother had told her about her real father. She pictured his face before her as he had been in his wedding photograph. ‘Oh, Dad,’ Linda whispered into the darkness. ‘I wish I could remember what you really look like. I wish you were here now.’ That was the last thing Linda could remember. It was as if a deep peace came over her and eventually she slept.

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