Soldier Girl (18 page)

‘Jesus Christ!’ Mr Radcliff exclaimed between coughs, his voice high-pitched as he babbled with shock. ‘That was us! That was bloody Cromwell Street, that was! It bloody was! Come on, Em – we’ve got to get out there!’

They moved to the door. Em was aware of her face coated with soot, and her mouth felt gritty and sour. The light seemed brighter outside. In seconds it was obvious why – there were fires burning further along the street, which was blocked with rubble. They could hear shouts, the crackle of flames, and further away, the guns, and the jangle of bells from fire engines and ambulances. There’d been a direct hit.

Em turned, looking wildly back towards Kenilworth Street. Hadn’t she heard something near that sounded as if it came from there? The house – Mom! She longed to go and see if they were all right, but she steeled herself to stay in control. She must stay for now and do her duty. A fire engine turned into the street behind her and edged along as far as it could go. The driver climbed out, grim-faced.

‘This is a bad ’un.’ He shook his head, looking at the ruins of one of the houses that had taken the hit. ‘I’ve ’ad a job getting here. You should see the middle of town. It’s a hell hole over there.’ He called orders to the crew. In seconds everyone was taken up with the sorry business of damping down the flames, seeing to the bombed wreckage and trying to establish if anyone had been inside the house. Em tried to put her own family out of her mind. If anything was wrong, someone would be helping, wouldn’t they? She had to do her job here. She mustn’t dwell on Norm either, and whether he was safe.

Not long had passed before everyone realized there were not enough people for the job – not anywhere near enough. Em and Mr Radcliff got stuck in with the firemen and some neighbours who appeared, all digging and pulling at the rubble. As time passed it seemed that one of the houses had been empty. As they dug into the other they could hear a voice calling out, ‘I’m under ’ere! Under the stairs!’

A toothless old lady was soon released from her cubbyhole, in great agitation.

‘They’re down in the coal cellar!’ she cried in a cracked voice. ‘My granddaughter and the babbies!’

Em gave the old lady a blanket. ‘I’ll go and give ’em a hand looking. You wait there a bit – I’m sure we’ll get them out for you, missus.’

It wasn’t long before the young woman, with a toddler and a baby in her arms, was released from below, black with coal dust. Em realized she must look much the same.

‘Oh Nana!’ the young woman cried, seeing the old lady waiting for them. ‘You’re safe – oh my God! Oh!’ She took in the sight before her. ‘Look at our house – what are we going to do?’

‘For now,’ Em said, ‘get yourselves over to Thimble-mill Lane, to Johnny Wright’s. They’ll look after you.’

The family disappeared, stunned, into the gloom.

‘Hope they’ll be all right,’ someone said. ‘God knows where they’ll go in the morning.’

There were still planes coming over, but now the houses seemed to have been cleared, Em was desperate to see if her own family were all right. ‘Mr Radcliff, can I just run round the road a minute?’

‘Go on, bab. Mind ’ow yer go.’

Em tore along to the end of Kenilworth Street. She felt sick with nerves and the strains of the night. With a jolt she saw that the street had been hit – rubble, confusion – and for a few seconds she could not take in the scene. Then she breathed more easily. Not number eighteen! Oh thank God, thank God!

Then she took in the rest of the scene. There were people at work, an ambulance.

‘What’s happened?’ She tore up to the wreckage, trying to make sense of it. Everything seemed out of place. She stopped, appalled. A dreadful, sick feeling rose in her at the sight. It was the Buttons’ house that had been hit, and the one next to it. She knew the warden, a Mr Birch, from down the street, and she hurried over to him. ‘Are they in there? Are they all right?’

Mr Birch was a small, sad-faced man in his sixties. He was shaking his head. ‘They was in bed,’ he said. ‘They’ve got him out all right.’

‘What, Mr Button – he’s alive?’

‘He’s in the ambulance – nowt much wrong with ’im – but her . . .’ He shook his head.

‘Mrs Button?’ Em was trembling. Kind, jolly Mrs Button. She thought of Molly, that she’d have to tell her.

‘Main beam came down, right onto ’er. You all right wench?’

Em brought her shaking hands up to her face to block out the sight of it.

By the time the All Clear went, it felt like the longest night Em could ever remember. Throughout that day, the reality of the night’s wounds became increasingly clear: bombs all over the inner wards of the city; damage to St Martin’s Church in the Bull Ring, which made Mr Radcliff gnash his teeth with fury; and the Midland Arcade in town had gone up in flames, as had several pubs and – a local disaster – the nuts and bolts factory, L.H. Newton’s. There was talk of a river of blazing tar flowing down towards New Street Station, of devastation everywhere, of gas and water mains smashed and people having to be fed in halls and schools.

At last, going home, numb in the cold morning, Em saw a figure coming towards her out of the dawn gloom.

‘Em?’

Norm?’ She found she was running along Kenilworth Street, jumping over bricks and hoses, glass crunching under her feet. She hadn’t known how overwrought she was, tears streaming down her face, her chest bursting with emotion. All she wanted was his arms around her. They hugged each other as close as they could, arms pressing into each other’s backs.

‘You’re all right,’ he said into her hair. ‘God, I’ve been so worried about yer. It’s been that terrible . . .’

‘I thought it was never going to end.’ She was still trembling, clinging to him. Norm looked round at the street, taking in what had happened. ‘Mrs Button?’ More tears came, all the fear and destruction of the night seeming to overwhelm her. ‘Oh Norm – I’ve been so stupid about everything.’ Life seemed so fragile, so absolutely precious.

He gave a fond laugh. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘About getting married and everything.’ She looked up at him with wet eyes. ‘Of course I want to marry you. I love you, Norm – you mean the world to me. Let’s do it as soon as we can.’

June 1941

Molly had caught the train soon after two o’clock. In the scramble to get aboard at Reading Station she had managed, with some determined use of her elbows, to get a seat by the window. She faced herself firmly towards it, lit a cigarette, then another, and watched their progress westward, while the weather alternated between brilliant sunshine, banking clouds and fast-falling rain. As they drew out of Bath, a rainbow straddled the sky as if trying to promise her that things were not as bad as she feared.

She could not bear the thought of talking to anyone today. Earlier, a civilian woman had tried asking her questions – ‘Oh I do think you’re all so
brave
–
do
tell us all about it!’ – only to be silenced by Molly’s monosyllabic replies. The conversations had washed over her from behind, the personal gossip, the usual moans about food and shortages and worries about elderly parents, and about the German attack on Russia. Hitler’s troops had invaded just days ago and were advancing east.

Molly’s mood was dark and disorientated. All day she had been unable to shake off the memory of her morning dream, which hung like a pall over her thoughts. It had contained an atmosphere of threat so powerful and repellent that she knew it had been about her grandfather. He had been waiting there at the edges of it, in the shadows where she couldn’t see him, as he always had been waiting, in the dark of the attic in Kenilworth Street, or in any of their temporary lodgings.

‘He’s gone for good, the filthy old bastard,’ she told herself bitterly, yet remembering the odd twist of her emotions when William Rathbone had died, away in hospital, gangrenous and stinking. She had wept when she heard. Why the hell had she done that? Mom had been crying, Mom who had been his victim too until she had handed him down a generation. She had sat by the grate with her apron over her face, howling with grief over him. And Molly cried because Mom was crying, because even though the old man had not an ounce of kindness or goodness in him that she had ever seen, he was familiar, had always been there, and now he was gone.

Back then she had not known the very worst of it, as she did now. Today, after the dream, all the things she had tried to forget, far away from home in the army, had come flooding in like foul water backing up from a blocked drain.
That was my father . . .
She had an acid taste in the back of her throat which even the cigarettes could not dispel. Was it really true? She still half doubted. Would Mom have invented something so vile just for the spite of it? She didn’t think even Iris was capable of making up something like that. Everything about it had carried the horrible ring of truth.

Where her fair colouring came from was a mystery, but in every other way, she and Iris and the old man were all so alike – tall, big-boned, big-featured. A shudder passed through her. Was that her birthright – just the two of them, both so cruel, with so little in the way of redeeming features? Was that all she was? How could there be anything in her that was good or worth loving, when the only blood relations she knew were those two – and Bert? Her brother Tom had been all right, but he made himself scarce years ago. A dark self-loathing enveloped her, and the approaching dusk only made her mood deepen. Scrabbling in the packet, she drew out her last cigarette.

They pulled into another station and passengers got off and on. ‘
KILL THE BLACK MARKET WITH YOUR RATION STAMPS
’, read a black-and-white poster. This also made her think of Bert, his dodgy dealings. She could never remember a time when he had been sweet natured or kind either. The acrid taste in her mouth increased at the thought of her brother. She knew he’d fooled his way into failing his army medical somehow, convinced them he had poor health. He was like a stoat or a weasel, sharp-toothed, mean, and bent on nothing but his own survival.

As darkness fell she felt more and more as if she was hanging in limbo. A camp on the South Wales coast was her next destination. There had been changes already: leaving Northampton and having to say goodbye to Lena and the others, the ache that Cath was already gone and that she had no idea where. She left there disappointed with herself, but resigned. What more could she expect? She was no good – not compared with all those others. The likes of Win and Ruth weren’t going to be cooks, were they? Or any sort of general duties staff. They would get the plum jobs while the likes of her did the drudgery of general duties, and what else could she expect? She should never have fooled herself into hoping for more.

She had spent a fortnight on the catering course, with lectures about supplies and cooking, learning the tricks of providing food for the huge numbers lining up before them. She experienced the joys of being up at five on a freezing February morning, trying to light a bloody-minded range with damp coal. She was not motivated and passed sulkily through the course, coming out graded as a B1 cook. From there she had been sent to cook at a training camp in the Berkshire countryside, and it was there, eventually, that she received Em’s letter about Jenny Button. The letter had done the rounds before it arrived there, as Em had sent it to the training camp at Northampton.

Molly had the letter in her pocket now, but she didn’t need to get it out to read it – she already knew it by heart.

By the time she received the letter she knew the funeral would have been long over, and as Jenny Button was not family she might not have got leave to go to it anyway. After she heard, Molly felt numb for days. She couldn’t seem to face up to it. Jenny Button had been a mom to her like no one else. It was impossible at first to take in that she was no longer there.

Gradually, grief built up in her. One night she had been out drinking with a lad from the camp. They’d walked a couple of miles to the nearest village pub and as they wove their way back between the dark trees of one of the country lanes, Molly grew more and more silent, unable to keep up the larky, joking front she usually put on.