Secrets of the Singer Girls (34 page)

Suddenly, a voice rang out, unfamiliar, with the soft, lilting tones of a West Country accent. ‘P-Poppy? Is that you?’

The hesitant voice emerged from the gloom and suddenly, there he was, standing just inches in front of her. Poppy felt her heart turn to water.

‘Freddie?’ she breathed. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Poppy?’ He smiled back shyly. And all at once, Poppy was overcome with a rush of emotion so powerful she couldn’t put a name to it. Not fear, not panic, just a blissful
feeling of reassurance. She didn’t know how, but instinctively she was sure this was a man with whom she could feel safe.

‘You came,’ he smiled, gingerly holding out a red flower. ‘For you,’ he added, and Poppy noticed his hands were trembling as he handed it to her. Her heart went out to
him. He was right. He wasn’t handsome, not in the traditional sense at least. A thick head of dark hair had plastered itself to his face in the damp air, and his spectacles were steamed up,
giving him a strange vulnerable quality. A deep red flush was creeping up his neck as he gazed at her adoringly.

‘I look like a drowned rat,’ she giggled.

‘Me too,’ he laughed, adding hastily, ‘That is to say, you don’t look anything like a rat, drowned or otherwise. You’re, well, you’re just as beautiful as in
my dreams . . . Gosh, that sounds corny.’

‘Your leg?’ she asked, suddenly remembering his injury. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘This old thing?’ he laughed, tapping his leg. ‘Not really. Got another one. I’m such a clod it was bound to happen . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I’m
frightfully nervous.’

‘That’s all right.’ Poppy smiled back warmly. ‘So am I. Come on, shall we get out of here? It’s awfully crushed.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ Freddie agreed. Turning, they tried to push their way against the crowd of people, back down the street.

At that moment, the low wail of a siren went off.

‘Oh no,’ gasped Poppy.

Freddie grasped her hand. ‘Where shall we shelter?’ he asked. ‘Down there, or somewhere else?’

‘Sal, where’s Sal?’ she babbled. ‘I have to find her before we go anywhere.’

He looked at her, confused. ‘Who’s Sal?’

‘She’s my friend. Remember, I told you about her in my letters? She was waiting here to make sure that everything was all right. We can’t go without her. Let’s just wait.
She’ll be here any second.’

‘All right, Poppy,’ he agreed cautiously. ‘But not too long, I should like to get you to safety.’

Poppy’s foot tapped the pavement impatiently as the siren wailed on relentlessly. ‘Come on,’ she muttered, scanning the street frantically. ‘Show yourself,
Sal.’

At that moment, three buses stopped at once and the already crowded pavement was flooded with sticky bodies clutching bundles, all bumping and jostling to get underground.

‘Oh no,’ Poppy panicked. ‘She’ll never be able to see us now.’

A mother rushed past Poppy clutching a wailing baby and a bundle of bedding. As Poppy gazed on the baby’s face, a strange thing happened. Out of nowhere a prickle of fear ran up her spine.
Shuddering, she felt as if someone had just walked over her grave. She had the most terrible premonition.

‘Poppy,’ urged Freddie, ‘I really think we ought to—’

He never finished his sentence.

The whoosh rippled through the station at the speed of sound and the very earth beneath their feet shook. The force and penetrating noise seemed to lift Poppy’s hair clean off her scalp
and she felt as if her eyes were being sucked from their sockets. She reached out to clutch Freddie’s chest and steady herself while her ringing ears adjusted. What on earth was that? It
sounded like hundreds of rockets whistling down to earth.

Out of the dark sky, heavy metal pipes rained down like confetti, pinging on the pavement around them. The crowd froze as one and there was a sickening moment of horror.

Poppy stared up at Freddie. He stood stunned and blinked wildly through the cracked lenses in his glasses.

‘It’s a bomb,’ shouted a woman nearby.

‘We’re under fire,’ shouted another.

The crowd surged forward as one, frantic to get underground to safety.

Poppy and Freddie found themselves lifted clean off the ground by the sheer weight of human traffic. Frantically, Poppy wriggled and struggled to free herself, but the wall of bodies heading
down to the stairs was solid as a rock. They were trapped. The force was too immense, and as they reached the top of the gloomy stairwell and Poppy saw the unfolding scene, a scream caught in her
throat. Freddie saw it at the same time as her and his face froze. It was the very image of hell.

The woman and her baby who had passed by Poppy not one minute before had tripped at the bottom of the flight of stairs and were sprawled in the stairwell. Before they could get up, others were
falling over them. The stairway was soon a seething mass of screaming men, women and children. The pile-up caused a human-domino effect all the way back up the narrow stairwell. Down they went, one
by one.

A crush of people desperate to get downstairs just added to the scenes of despair. In horror, Poppy realized Freddie was getting sucked down faster, his body moving away from her.

‘Poppy!’ he gasped. Reaching his hand out over the bodies, his fingers made a grab for her. Thanks to his cracked spectacles he’d partially lost his vision, but his grip was
strong and his fingers laced through hers and held on tight.

‘I’m not letting go!’ he shouted above the roar.

As they moved forwards, everything seemed to go into slow motion. Poppy had the strangest sensation she was drifting along a river that was about to cascade into a waterfall. And then she tipped
over the edge and found herself sucked helplessly into the seething pit of flailing bodies.

It could have been minutes; it could have been hours. Time lost all meaning as she drifted in and out of consciousness. She was aware of nothing. Not the great crush of people, the tangle of
twisted limbs or the immovable weight pinning her to the stairwell. Just the muffled groans of strangers clinging to life, attempting to claw their way out of the hell. Chaos swirled as desperate
cries for help pierced the air.

Curled into the foetal position, Poppy found she had a small pocket of air from which to breathe and gratefully gulped in, but as she lifted her head an inch off the floor, she quickly realized
it was futile. This narrow corridor was turning into a charnel house before her eyes. The faces squashed around her bulged in terror, slowly turning lilac as the air was forced from their lungs;
protective arms thrown around loved ones were now squeezing the life out of them. Blood-curdling screams turned to groans, then silence. The interlaced mass of bodies was five, six or more deep.
They were all trapped. It was too terrifying for words. Poppy could stand to watch no longer and closed her eyes, waiting for the merciful moment death would claim her.

How poignant, she thought as the oxygen slowly left her brain, that in the very moment she should find the love of her life, she should lose him again. Love and loss all wrapped up in the same
haunting heartbeat.

A tugging at her hand roused her and her eyelids, swollen and thick with grime, opened a crack. The tugging grew stronger. Her foggy brain struggled to make sense of what was happening. And then
she was moving. Was she alive or dead? Strong arms were hooked under her armpits and she was being hauled up and out. Up, higher and higher over the bodies. Then hands were gripping her waist,
encircling her, and she was swooped up into the air.

‘Poppy,’ chimed a distant voice, ‘hold tight. I’ve got you. You’re safe.’

Blearily she came to in Freddie’s arms. His face gazed down at her, full of love and relief.

‘I thought I was going to die,’ she croaked.

Tears coursed down his cheeks as he walked away from the crush, deeper into the Underground station, holding on to her for dear life.

‘I couldn’t let that happen,’ he sobbed. ‘I’ve only just found you. I wasn’t going to lose you so soon, Poppy Percival.’

At last, they found a spot by the ticket hall and gently he laid her down. In stunned silence they watched the scenes.

Frantically, rescuers attempted to pull free those trapped at the bottom of the crush. Poppy recognized a local warden by the name of Mrs Chumbley forcibly wrenching children and babies free
with her bare hands. It was unbridled pandemonium. Poppy squeezed her eyes shut in horror against the image.

‘Are you feeling all right now, Poppy?’ he asked. ‘It’s just that if you are . . .’

Their thoughts were the same.

‘Go,’ she urged. ‘You must go and help the others.’

She watched as Freddie, her hero, ran as fast as he could on his crippled leg back across the hallway in the direction of the crush and joined the rescuers.

Sal watched the unfolding scene in total disbelief. Her brain felt as if it were still rattling in her head from the noise of the blast. She had spied from the shadows as
Archie, then Ivy and Betty from Trout’s had hurried in the direction of the Tube with their bundles of bedding and pillows.

It had taken every ounce of self-restraint not to go to Poppy and comfort her when she had spotted her looking panicked. Then at last Freddie had arrived. Watching them lock eyes and smile at
one another, Sal had known in a heartbeat that Poppy was safe with him. Except now she was in peril.

Suddenly, her body was galvanized into action.

‘Out of my way!’ she screamed, pushing her way to the mouth of the Tube. ‘My friends are in there. I’ve got to help.’

But it was useless, with the weight of people forcing her back. It was bedlam: there must have been nearly three hundred people crushed in the stairwell and clamouring outside the entrance. The
distant clanging of ambulance and fire-engine bells arriving on the scene mingled with deafening screams.

In all her days, Sal had never witnessed scenes like it. Desperate men dived into the crowds to pull free their loved ones; shoes flew through the air; bodies lay tangled and jumbled. She even
saw a leg poking out of the crush, twisted round at an absurd ninety-degree angle. Others had climbed to the very top of the pile of bodies and were attempting to extricate loved ones from the
tangle of limbs and torsos.

Rescuers formed a human chain that started at the entrance to the Tube and snaked back along the pavement, in an organized bid to free people from the crush. Every now and again, a person would
be wrenched from the pile with such force their shoes would be left behind. There was no time even to take pulses, and bodies were being laid out by the railings to Barmy Park on Green Street, dead
or alive.

‘Go home, lady,’ ordered a fireman, as he rushed past Sal. ‘This is no place for a woman.’

‘Go home? Not bloody likely,’ she muttered. Sal hadn’t survived the Blitz and a marriage to Reggie to come over all faint at a time like this. ‘I’m helping and
that’s that.’

Gripping the arm of a passing ARP warden, she stopped him in his tracks. ‘I’m here to help. What can I do?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘We need transport to get people to hospital. Gather whatever you can find,’ he urged.

And so for the next two hours, Sal worked tirelessly in the dank darkness, flagging down cars, trucks, whatever means and method she could, to help to transport the dead and injured to hospital.
As the human chain of rescuers piled up the bodies against the railings, two things quickly became apparent. Firstly, no one knew if they were dead or alive. Their faces were so swollen and
disfigured and their breathing so shallow it was almost impossible to tell. And secondly, the body count far exceeded the transport available. In no time at all, there was a line of bodies snaking
along the road by the park. Sal watched in growing panic. If they hadn’t already died of their injuries, hypothermia from lying on a cold, wet pavement would finish them off.

‘Quick,’ she urged, leaping into the road and hammering on a passing car window. ‘You have to help get these people to hospital. Bethnal Green Hospital or the children’s
hospital.’

Sal did what she could, running to nearby rest centres and banging on strangers’ doors to gather as many blankets and as much water as she could find to tend to the survivors. Despite the
atrocities she was witnessing, a guilty feeling of relief nagged at the back of her brain. Thank goodness her boys were home safe with Vera. If she had not insisted on accompanying Poppy, the
chances were that they would all have been stuck down there in the crush of bodies. As for Poppy, Freddie, Archie, Ivy and Betty, she just prayed they had escaped in time and that the next dead
body she saw would not be one of theirs.

More and more people had come from their homes and were trying to help. It was all hands to the pump. Men and women ran down the middle of the street dodging cars, pulling handcarts and pushing
barrows to load bodies onto. ARP wardens in tin hats worked alongside housewives in aprons. Heartbreakingly, even children had pitched in to help, and Sal gasped when she saw two Boy Scouts barely
older than her Billy helping injured children onto barrows and running at full pelt with them in the direction of the hospital. Ambulance men, wardens and a lone doctor darted between the injured
trying to do what they could. Those that survived sat white-faced and dazed, shivering from cold and shock. They had no broken bones, but Sal was sure their mental scars would cripple them for
years and she tenderly covered them in what blankets she could find.

Bethnal Green was tending to its own, as she realized when the fireman working next to her issued a broken-hearted wail.

‘My Lil!’ he cried in sheer anguish as he pulled a body free from the crush. In that moment, he transformed from a tough fireman who’d battled a thousand Blitz fires to a
heartbroken husband as he hugged the body of his wife to his chest and rocked her in his arms.

‘No, no, no,’ he sobbed. Sal lost sight of the poor fella as he loaded his wife onto a stretcher.

One scene that felled her clean to her knees was a mother running along the line of bodies screaming for her daughter.