The rumble of traffic and clop of horses’ hooves you could often hear from Bristol Street had ceased, as if everyone was listening, waiting, although they knew what was to be said.
’I am speaking to you today from the cabinet room of ten Downing Street
……
Consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’
There was a collective sigh and then people began speaking again. Lizzie’s door had been left open to the yard, for not everyone could crowd into the living room, and now those in the yard pointed out the menacing-looking barrage balloon that had appeared, floating in the air above their heads as the air-raid siren blared out.
It proved to be a false alarm, but it unnerved Lizzie and many more, because she hadn’t been ready, not sure what to do, with no plan of action. God knows what might have happened if it had been real. That day, she put together a shelter bag, and into it she put identity cards, Post Office books and treasured photographs. Later she would add ration books, and she
was to find that nearly every woman had a shelter bag which went with them wherever they chose to hide away from the raids.
‘Are you ready then?’ Violet asked.
‘Are you ever ready for war?’ Lizzie replied. ‘But I’m as ready as the next, I suppose. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what the Germans intend to do.’
Just five days after war had been declared, Steve, Stuart and Mike went off to Thorpe Street barracks and enlisted in the Royal Warwickshires, as they’d declared they would. Many men and boys followed the same course and others were called up, and so, within a month or so, the streets were very different, stripped of many of the young, fit males.
The women drew even closer together, and never was Lizzie more grateful for Violet’s support and that of the others down the yard. They looked out for one another and drew strength from being in this together.
Everyone had someone to worry over. Violet’s Barry was too old to be called up, but Carol, having finished her basic training, was now based at Castle Bromwich aerodrome, learning to maintain and repair the Spitfires and Wellingtons, which were made at the Vickers factory across the road. ‘Each night the road is closed off by the military,’ she told Violet and Lizzie one day, while briefly at home on leave, ‘and the planes are pushed across the road. It’s a sight, not that you can see much, like, with the blackout as well.’
‘Blackout, huh…’ Violet began, but Carol hadn’t finished and she went on, with a glance at her mother, ‘Some of the girls are training as pilots,’ and her eyes were dreamy.
Violet’s own opened wider in shock and horror. ‘Pilots!’ she shrieked. ‘I’ll not have you…’
‘Not for fighting, Mom,’ Carol said with a giggle. ‘They fly the planes down to the airfields in the south and that, and then take the train back. There’s not so many at the moment, but one of the officers told me he can see a time when they’ll need more planes and I’ll get my chance then if I’m really keen.’
‘You get on well with them all then?’
‘Oh yeah. ‘Specially the Americans.’
‘Americans?’
‘Volunteer Air Force. There’s a small company of them based there. Full of charm they are. Think they’re God’s gift, some of them.’ She thought for a minute and went on, ‘in the main, the black ones are nicer.’
‘Black ones!’
‘Yeah, like the ace of spades they are, and when they open their mouths their teeth look real white. Not that they ever say much to us, like.’
‘Are there many?’
Carol shook her head. ‘Just a handful, and the white Americans are not always nice to them.’
‘Why not?’
Carol shrugged. ‘Search me. Cos they’re black, I suppose. Mad, ain’t it? I mean, ain’t we got enough to do fighting the flipping Germans without scrapping amongst ourselves.’
Lizzie couldn’t agree more. She was horrified when
Steve came back after just seven weeks away at a training camp and whispered he thought it was embarkation leave. He looked very smart in his uniform and the children were impressed, but Lizzie knew an army at war isn’t made up of military parades and polished boots and the ability to make up a bed with proper hospital corners. ‘It’s so soon,’ she said.
Steve laughed. ‘Hitler has rode roughshod over Europe and is still coming,’ he said, and added, ‘Maybe Churchill should have a word. Hold your hand there awhile, man, and play the game. Give our chaps a chance to have six months’ training before we engage in hostilities.’
‘No, but…’
Steve kissed her on the nose. ‘I’m as well-prepared as the next man.’
‘Are Stuart and Mike home too?’
‘Yeah, Mike went straight over to Ireland,’ Steve said. ‘She’s up the pole again, your cousin.’
‘No,’ Lizzie cried in disbelief.
‘Yeah, due in February, Mike said.’
‘She must be mad, and so must he. That will be six.’
‘Yeah, well maybe she’ll have a wee bit of a break now, if he’s away for a bit,’ Steve said. ‘It’s up to them, anyroad, but I want better for you.’
Lizzie sighed and leant her body against Steve and he bent and kissed her. Desire rose in her at the sweetness of that kiss, and if it hadn’t been for Tom, who’d turned three the previous week and was playing on the floor with the toy cars his mother had managed to find
and buy him, Lizzie would have turned the key in the door and led her husband upstairs, though it was the middle of the afternoon.
She wished she could do this, for soon Steve would be gone and in danger, and suddenly she knew that, despite his faults, she cared for Steve greatly and wanted no harm to come to him. He took her in his arms and kissed her again. ‘I love you, Mrs Gillespie.’
‘Ah, Steve.’
‘You know why I’m doing this, don’t you? It’s for you and the kids, you do know that?’
‘I know that.’
‘Sometimes I’ve thought that I was daft joining up straight away,’ Steve admitted. ‘You know, with me a family man and all; and then I think, if this madman is to be stopped, everyone has to do their bit. We can’t run and hide and let others fight our battles for us and keep us all safe.’
‘I know, Steve,’ Lizzie said. ‘Don’t worry. I know where you are coming from—and knowing you as I do, it’s what I expected of you. I don’t ever imagine there was a time in your life when you let others fight your battles.’
‘No,’ Steve said. ‘But if I’m honest I did enlist in a fit of patriotic zeal, with me mates Mike and Stuart, like we was off on some great adventure. I know really that war ain’t like that. Sometimes you sort of wake me up when you get up in the morning to see to the children and I listen to you all and know I might lose all that I hold most dear.’
Lizzie knew he was right and he wouldn’t be the only one, but the die was cast now. There could be no
turning back. All they could do was savour every moment of that precious leave together.
One dark, dismal, rain-sodden night in late October, the Royal Warwickshires were part of the British Expeditionary Force that sailed across the Channel, and Lizzie settled to life without her husband, with the additional anxiety that he was now in the firing line.
She was finding, like many people, that the blackout was the worst thing of all to contend with. Often any stars in the heavens would be hidden by the smoky Birmingham air, and if there was a moon at all it was usually obscured by cloud. She’d helped paint the white line down the side of the road as the Government had advised. ‘As if a bloody white line helps, when the night’s as black as pitch,’ Violet said contemptuously, but continuing to wield her brush.
Lizzie knew Violet had a point, for there were more people killed and injured in those first dark days, weeks and months of the war than from any type of military action. She didn’t see how white lines painted on the edges of pavements were going to help in stopping people falling off them, just as she couldn’t see how a white line around lamp and pillar boxes were going to prevent people walking in to them.
‘I keep out of it as much as I can,’ Ada said. ‘Make sure I’m back in the house well before dark.’
‘We all do if we can,’ Gloria said. ‘But what about the poor souls out at work all day.’
‘Yeah, must be dead depressing, that.’
‘What depresses me is those bloody awful black curtains at the windows,’ Minnie said. ‘The warden, the
son of her up the entry, told me the fine’s two hundred pounds. Claimed he could see a chink of light from my window. There was nowt when we were both in the yard, though. Told him he must have imagined it.’
‘Anyroad,’ Sadie put in. ‘How can one chink through the smoky Brummie air light the way for enemy bombers?’
‘What bombers?’ Lizzie said. ‘There’s been nothing yet.’
That’s what made the whole thing seem so pointless. ‘It’s Hitler’s secret weapon,’ Barry said one day. ‘He ain’t bothering going to war at all, he just said he was, and now he’ll wait while we all kill ourselves on the bleeding roads.’
Eventually, the government announced vehicles could use shaded headlights. Shielded torches could be used too, though batteries for them were soon like gold dust. It was an improvement, but not much of one, and it was hard to find anything to be optimistic about as Christmas approached. There was little food in the shops and talk of rationing in the New Year. ‘Rationing what?’ Lizzie said, looking at the sparse array of food on the table. ‘Half of what I want now is unobtainable.’
‘Yeah, and if you say owt they remind you there’s a war on,’ Violet said. ‘As if we don’t know. Like you was dropped in from another planet or summat.’
There was very little festive stuff to buy at all, and virtually no toys. Lizzie scoured the Bull Ring and the little shops in side streets to find a yo-yo and skipping rope and a couple of colouring books and crayons for
the children. And so, Christmas for them was the usual magical time, and they had no idea of the headache Lizzie had to produce the dinner they tucked in to with gusto.
Rationing came into effect in January and ration books became a way of life, although, as Lizzie prophesised, even your allotment was sometimes unavailable and she had to be more inventive to provide nourishing family meals. Every women’s magazine ran articles and recipes and there were even snippets in the paper and in the cinema, people told her, slotted in between the first mediocre film and the main one, and just after Pathé News.
‘It’s riveting stuff, all right,’ Violet remarked. ‘Fifty million ways to cook swede, turnips or carrots.’
Lizzie laughed, for it was a bit like that. The public were bombarded with advice and encouragement to eat home-grown produce. ‘The Kitchen Front’ gave out recipes each morning after the eight o’clock news and millions tuned in to Radio Doctor, who told people what foods were good for them and how to cook them. Potato Pete was only rivalled by Doctor Carrot, and one or both of these vegetables turned up in nearly every recipe in one form or another.
People were being urged to ‘Save Our Ships’, meaning the merchant ships bringing British imports from other countries, which with enemy action was always a hazardous procedure.
To cut down on imported goods, more food had to be grown. The phrase ‘Dig for Victory’ became popular, and to this end, next to the trenches, many
parks now had furrowed rows growing all manner of things. Many of those lucky enough to have gardens had used some of their lush lawns, and flowerbeds too had been given over to growing cabbages, potatoes and the like.
‘So we won’t starve to death, like,’ Violet said. ‘But if I eat much more of them root vegetables, I just might be bored to death.’
‘Aye,’ Lizzie said with a smile. ‘Or be blown up by the gases inside you.’
Tressa had a baby girl on 26
th
February that she was calling Nuala. Lizzie wrote a long letter to her and said she’d be over maybe in the summer.
But then news came in of the German invasion of Norway and Sweden on 9
th
April, and the countries’ subsequent collapse was worrying. But there was soon a greater worry when Lizzie heard on the nine o’clock news that Hitler had invaded Belgium and Holland and inflicted great hardship on the people.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked Violet, but Barry answered.
‘It means the Maginot Line is bloody useless,’ he said. ‘Like I said it was from the beginning.’
‘What is the Maginot Line anyway?’ Lizzie said. ‘All I’ve heard since the beginning of the war is that this line, whatever it is, can’t be breached.’
‘It can’t,’ Barry said. ‘Well, not at least without great loss of life. The Maginot Line is a long line of deeply buried fortifications that were erected along the border that France shares with Germany after the last war,’ he explained. ‘But it stops at France’s border with
Luxembourg and Belgium. If you were a German, what would you do?’
He’d bought the
Evening Mail
on his way home from work and he spread it out on the table. ‘There’s a map in its centre,’ he said. ‘And the line is marked clearly.’
Lizzie studied it and then said slowly, ‘if I was a German, I’d go through Holland into Belgium and across the border to France.’
‘And me,’ Barry said grimly. ‘And that’s what the German Army has done.’
‘Can’t they fight them off?’
Barry shrugged. ‘Only time will tell.’
No letters came from Steve, the papers made grim reading and Lizzie could scarcely bear to listen to the news reports. Flo was at her door every day, asking if she’d heard anything—as if Lizzie would keep such a thing to herself—and she was wailing and bemoaning all the time. Lizzie was desperately worried and trying to keep a lid on it for the children’s sakes. She wished Flo wouldn’t show such open emotion in front of them. They knew nothing definite yet.
‘Why is Granny always crying?’ Niamh asked at last. She’d come home from school to see her grandmother in floods of tears again.
‘She’s upset. It’s nothing.’
‘It’s about Daddy. She said so.’
‘She’s just concerned.’
‘She was crying her eyes out,’ Niamh said flatly. ‘Where is daddy? Why is she so worried?’
‘No one knows where he is, that’s why your granny
is upset,’ Lizzie admitted, because she couldn’t think of a plausible lie.
‘We all know where daddy is,’ Tom declared.
‘Do we?’
‘Yeah, killing Germans, bang, bang, bang.’
Lizzie gave a sigh and picked her son up and held him close to hide her glistening eyes from the inquisitive Niamh. ‘Of course he is, Tom,’ she said. ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’
She saw Niamh wasn’t satisfied and in a minute would start a barrage of questions, and so to forestall her she said, ‘How would you both like dripping toast?’
Niamh was starving, she always was when she came home from school, and dripping toast sounded just the thing. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said with glee. ‘And bagsy I have the toasting fork first. Tom’s no good anyway; he always drops the toast in the fire.’
‘I don’t!’
‘Yeah you do.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Do.’
‘Stop it,’ Lizzie said sharply. ‘Or neither of you will do it.’ But in reality she was pleased Niamh’s attention was diverted.
If only hers could be diverted so easily, Lizzie thought during the next few days, for neither papers nor wireless had anything remotely cheering to say. She roused herself to make an effort for Niamh’s sixth birthday, although any festive food was hard to find. The cake had to be baked without eggs and with extra sugar and margarine ration donated by Violet, and the only
present she had was a doll which had once been Carol’s, though Niamh didn’t know that the doll was secondhand and she was delighted with the knitted outfits Lizzie and Violet had made for the doll she called Maisie.