‘Oh, is that the one starring Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Yes, I’d love to see it. Some of the fellers went earlier in the week, and they say it’s grand. Besides, once we get to Church Broughton it may not be so easy to get in to the flicks. Where did you say it were near? Derby? All I know about Derby is that there’s a racecourse there. Or is it just in the song?’
Alec cast his eyes up to heaven and laid down his pen. ‘I don’t know any more about Derby than you do . . . but if we get a move on and get the gharry we could be in time to catch the early evening performance for a change and come out before the pubs shut. We could have a couple of jars and a sandwich or perhaps a meat pie at the Lamb, that pub almost opposite the Haymarket.’
Jimmy plunged a hand into his pocket and produced his loose change. ‘Yeah, I reckon I could run to a beer and a cheese sarnie,’ he said, having counted his money. ‘Of course, we don’t get paid like officers, but I can still afford the odd night out and I dare say you’re the same. Shall we go, then?’
‘OK; I’ll just finish off this letter,’ Alec said, scribbling busily.
Within a very few minutes he was folding the paper and stuffing it in the envelope. He had run out of stamps but would buy some more in the city. He stood up. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’
The gharry carried them into Norwich uneventfully enough, though the driver told them laconically as they climbed aboard that the city had been bombed a couple of days before. ‘They got the railway lines again and Caernarvon Road was hit, which mean water and gas mains and telephone lines are down,’ he told them. ‘Still, you fellers will be headin’ for the centre, I reckon, so that won’t affect you.’ Alec agreed and when the gharry stopped on Castle Meadow, as all the gharries did, a crowd of men got down and soon dispersed, leaving Alec and Jimmy to cut through Davey Place on to the Walk. Presently they were comfortably ensconced in the cinema, roaring with laughter over the antics of the two stars and an excellent supporting cast. It quite took Alec’s mind off the war, the strangeness of travelling up to Derbyshire and the occasional doubts which attacked him. He was used to the small Blenheim bomber, and the crew, but he was sure that Frank was right; if they were to survive they needed a bigger aircraft with better armaments, more speed, even more manoeuvrability. The three of them had studied all the available information on the Wellington bomber and had decided to go for it, and had then waited, with some apprehension, to hear whether they had been successful in their application. Now it seemed they had, and would, once more, be moving on. But the antics of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch gave them a breathing space, time out so to speak, before they confronted the next stage in their war.
The two young men came out of the cinema when dusk was falling and made straight for the Lamb. As they entered the pub, Alec glanced up at the sky and commented that there was unlikely to be a raid that night because of the low cloud. A local man, leaning against the bar, overheard him and ambled towards them. ‘You fellers don’t know nothin’,’ he said mockingly. ‘We’re had the bloody raid earlier in th’afternoon. They hit Thorpe Station this time and made a right mess of it. There’s a couple of fellers killed, I heard. So there’s no sayin’ that they won’t be over agin tonight.’
‘They won’t,’ Alec muttered to Jimmy as the man swayed unsteadily back towards the bar. ‘A daylight raid is OK when the cloud is low and visibility poor, but weather like that make night flying impossible. The trouble is, Norwich is the first sizeable place the Luftwaffe reach after they’ve crossed the sea so they drop their bombs and incendiaries and that, and probably go home and tell their masters they’ve flattened London.’
‘But they really are flattening London,’ Jimmy reminded him. He shuddered. ‘I know Norwich has been hit but we’re lucky we weren’t posted to the south coast because they’re getting a pastin’ an’ all. Norras bad as London, but they must hear enemy aircraft goin’ over most nights and, of course, if they haven’t got their target they’ll jettison the bombs somewhere on their way back, so they aren’t carrying them when they cross the Channel.’
‘Aye, the further north you are, the safer, I reckon,’ Alec said. ‘A good thing you’re from Liverpool and not Southampton, old feller. They say Southampton and Portsmouth have been practically wiped out. The Jerries were after Harland & Wolff and the shipyards an’ that, but of course, when your home’s just a pile o’ rubble and your kids are killed, that’s no comfort to know the bombs weren’t meant to drop on you but on some factory or other.’
‘True,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whose shout is it? If it’s yours, I’ll have a pint and one of them meat and potato pies, but if it’s mine I’ll have half and a cheese sandwich.’
‘We’ll go Dutch, as usual,’ Alec said, punching his friend’s shoulder. ‘Oh, damn, I meant to post my letter but I forgot to buy a stamp. Never mind, I’ll send it from the station tomorrow.’
‘It’s about time I wrote home,’ Jimmy said rather remorsefully as they bagged a corner table and settled on to the long, leatherette seat. ‘My girl – that’s Jane – has gorra good job an’ she’s having a gay old time, what with the place being full of sailors and lots of soldiers as well, I gather. They embark ’em from Liverpool when they’re sending ’em to foreign parts, ’cos it’s safer than Southampton or Portsmouth. But she’s true as fire, my Jane, and she lives for me letters, she’s telled me so many a time. Yep, when we get back to the station tonight, I’ll go to our hut and sit down and write her a good, long letter.’
On 2 May, Kathy called for Jane at their usual early hour. When Jane came to the door, already with her coat and headscarf on, she was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, for the previous night the city had suffered a heavy bombing raid and no one had got much rest.
‘Jane, I’m so glad you’re all right! We looked for you in the shelter but I suppose you must have gone to another one. Wasn’t it dreadful? I thought my eardrums would burst when that big one went off – I dunno what time it was, about half an hour after we got to the shelter, I think – and Billy was shaking like a little leaf. Mam and I were scared it would make him ill again, but it didn’t, thank God. The women were great: they started a sing-song . . . one woman passed round a bag of sweets – she’d made them herself, lovely slabs of toffee – and another lent blankets to anyone who was cold. If it hadn’t been for the fearful noise, it would have been quite an adventure.’
‘It weren’t the noise so much as the shakin’,’ Jane said, as the two girls began to walk up Daisy Street. ‘The windows rattled – I thought they’d come in – and the teapot and the cups bounced on the table. It were horrible, worse even than the raids last Christmas. Dad was fire watchin’ and Mam decided it were too much of an effort to trek out to the shelter, what with Gran being crippled with arthritis – she takes an hour to get going mornin’s – so we all stayed put. We didn’t realise it were goin’ to get as bad as it did and by the time we did realise, it were too dangerous to go on to the streets. Dad were that furious when he came home at dawn and found we’d not used the shelter. He made Mam and Gran promise on their lives that they wouldn’t be so foolish again. Only – only I kept thinking you can be killed in a shelter just as dead as you can in a house, if you see what I mean. Remember all those people who were killed in Anfield when their shelter received a direct hit? The
Echo
said there weren’t one survivor,’ she concluded with a shudder.
‘Yes, I remember,’ Kathy said, ‘but I think the reason they make us go to the shelter is because a dug-out is pretty deep and the roof is concrete and iron, quite a lot stronger than tiles. What’s more, in a house you can be crushed by a ceiling falling in or a dresser toppling over, but shelters don’t have such refinements.’
‘Ye-es, but I hate the smell in those places,’ Jane said as they reached the tram stop. ‘Dad said there were terrible fires raging last night. He said the fire brigade couldn’t begin to cope. It were mostly in the city centre, mind, but he reckons there’s been a deal o’ damage done.’ Her face brightened. ‘I wonder if the factory were hit? If so, they’ll send us home, I suppose.’
‘If it’s been hit, then the night shift will have bought it,’ Kathy said grimly. ‘And if there’s no factory there’s no work, and if there’s no work there’s no money. Honestly, Jane, your mouth doesn’t seem to be connected with your brain this morning.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry. I’m not usually this stupid,’ Jane said apologetically. ‘I think I must still be asleep, for all I don’t look it. My cousin Nellie is on nights at the moment and I’m rare fond of our Nellie. Why, I wouldn’t want anyone hurt, not even Miss Bridges.’
Miss Bridges was the most hated supervisor in the whole factory. A thin, bitter woman of fifty or so, she ruled the girls with a rod of iron, would not allow them to speak so much as a word when she was on duty and forbade them to leave their benches even to go to the toilet. Jane and Kathy invented ridiculous – and probably slanderous – stories about Miss Bridges’s imaginary past. But nothing entirely took away the dread which overcame them when they walked on to the factory floor and found her in charge of their section.
Kathy laughed again and squeezed Jane’s arm, beginning to say she knew her friend would not harm a fly and that the remark about the factory had been spoken without thought. But at this moment the tram drew to a halt beside them and both girls climbed aboard. Kathy, looking around her, realised that she and Jane were not the only ones to have suffered a sleepless night. Everyone, even the conductress, was pale and heavy eyed and as the tram rattled along Stanley Road Jane commented that the queues of workers waiting to come aboard were shorter than usual.
‘I do hope all the people who usually catch the tram haven’t been killed,’ she said apprehensively but Kathy, cheered by the fact that so far the streets and buildings looked much as usual, told her tartly that it was likelier to be folks sleeping in late and using the air raid as an excuse.
Presently, the girls descended from the tram and caught their bus, arriving at the factory in plenty of time to clock on. There, they heard tales of what had been happening in other parts of the city and realised that they had been lucky only to lose sleep. ‘But it were a big raid. Someone said fifty or more bombers attacked the city last night,’ Jane said, as the two girls sat in the canteen eating sawdust pie and leftover lettuce, which was their name for the dish which the canteen staff had christened pork pie and salad. ‘I don’t s’pose anything like that is likely to happen again.’
On Saturday, neither Kathy nor Jane was working so they slept late and then met to do their messages. Kathy told her friend that the doctor at the Stanley Hospital had suggested the Kellings. might like to evacuate Billy from the city. ‘You’re even nearer the docks than we are,’ he had observed when Sarah had taken Billy into his consulting room on Friday morning. ‘It’s the docks they’re after, you know, and the shipping, of course. If they can cripple our Navy then half their work is done. Don’t you think, Mrs Kelling, that it might be as well to take young Billy here into the country for a spell? No one knows how long these raids may go on, now that they know they can get this far north.’
Mrs Kelling and Kathy had discussed, very seriously, whether this would be wise, but Sarah was still nervous, thinking that if Billy did have a bad fit she would prefer to be within reach of the Stanley. ‘It’s all very well for the doctor to talk about being safer in the country,’ she had said. ‘But how do I know Billy won’t be worse away from home? And what about you, queen? There’s your work . . . come to that, there’s my work. We’ve got to earn . . . oh, I don’t know, I’m sure, but for the moment we’re stayin’ put.’
It was a bright and pleasant morning and Kathy and Jane did most of their messages locally. Mr O’Brien had told them that the fruit and vegetable market in Cazneau Street had been damaged and he doubted whether it would be open for business until the corporation had had a chance to clear up the mess. They had a busy day but as it grew darker Kathy was conscious of a horrible tightening in her stomach. Later, as night drew on, she began to feel increasingly uneasy, especially when she looked up and saw that the sky was clear, save for a scattering of ragged cloud which never obscured the moon for more than a moment.
She and Jane parted company and Kathy went home to help her mother to prepare the evening meal. Dorothy’s Tearooms had been hit by blast and, though the main structure of the building was undamaged, the windows had blown in. After they had cleared up the mess, the staff had all been sent home, so Mrs Kelling was already in the kitchen working, whilst Billy sat at the table, building a Meccano tower and singing beneath his breath.
Sarah turned round and smiled at her daughter, but Kathy went straight into the subject most on her mind. ‘Mam, Jane and I met a girl we were at school with and she was telling us that they’re evacuating’ – she spelled the word out carefully so that Billy would not understand – ‘mothers with children under ten. It isn’t what you might call a regular evacuation,’ she added hastily, seeing her mother begin to frown and shake her head. ‘It’s only for night times. Apparently, they’ve got reception centres in places like St Helens and Crosby. They’ll take you out there around nine or ten and return you to your own homes next morning. What do you think? It would be a sort of trial run to see how you-know-who takes to being away from home.’
Billy looked up. ‘I’m you-know-who,’ he remarked. ‘What’s evac – evac – whatever you said? Only I aren’t goin’ to another school and I aren’t goin’ away from me mam, either.’