All the Sweet Promises. Elizabeth Elgin
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weren’t coming. And now it seemed they weren’t, because nothing was happening.
Perhaps, though, it was all part of a war of nerves. Perhaps those bombers had flown up the river as they always did, just so the sirens would send Liverpudlians hurrying to the shelters for yet another night, then perversely they had turned inland and dropped their bomb loads on Manchester instead.
But they couldn’t be that stupid, Vi reasoned derisively as she nodded to Sister Annunciata and called, ‘Father says you’re to make the tea.’
Backs straightened, nodding heads shot up. Tea was a soother, a healer. It had been the blackest day of the war when the government announced the rationing of tea. Oh, yes, capture India, cut off the tea supply, and Britain would capitulate within a week, said the potman at the Tarleton.
‘Won’t be long now!’ The nun’s call coincided with the first of the bombs. It was a fair way off, but those who sensed it rather than heard it, those whose eyes became suddenly afraid, knew that two more would follow. Bombs came in threes, to those who counted.
There was a strained, listening silence, broken only by Father O’Flaherty’s startled feet as they took the stairs in record time. Then the briefest pause before he drew aside the curtain to enter with dignity and calm.
‘Well now, and just in time for tea,’ he beamed as a second and third bomb fell sickeningly nearer.
It wasn’t the noise so much. Vi pulled a dry tongue around dry lips. She had always imagined that an exploding bomb would have made an infernal, ear-splitting racket, but it didn’t. It crunched. You felt a bomb as much as you heard it. It shocked the earth it slammed into, and those shock waves slammed into the soles of your feet and raged through your body and paralysed your mind.
More bombs fell, and more, until the air was full of a strange continuous roaring and the earth shook as if it were afraid.
Vi sucked in her breath. They were nearer tonight than they had ever been. Any closer and they’d hit St Joseph’s. Mother of God, be with us.
Babies stopped crying, hushed by the fear around them. Eyes were wide in white faces; fingers and lips moved in silent, age-old prayer. Someone laughed hysterically.
The bombs stopped as suddenly as they started but the hollow screams of anti-aircraft shells continued without pause.
That’s it, lads. Let ’em have it. Shoot the bastards down. Make ’em wish they hadn’t come.
Was that to be it, then? Short and sharp tonight. Eyes turned again to the tea urn.
The big one dropped just as they began to relax. One bomb, not three, and a tearing, screaming explosion that set the lights swaying on their wires and filled the air with choking dust. Eyes swivelled upward, bodies tensed again. The roof would cave in. It would.
‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph,’ roared the priest.
The roof disgorged another shower of dust and rubble, and held fast. There was a ten-foot crack in it, wide enough to take a man’s fist, but it held.
The lights swayed more slowly. One of them flickered, then died with a ping.
‘Don’t any of yez dare to sneeze,’ ordered Father O’Flaherty, but no one laughed.
The all clear came with the morning light, high-pitched and steady, the sweetest sound in the world.
‘That’s it, then. Away to your homes the lot of you, and God go with you,’ called Father O’Flaherty.
Wearily, fearfully, they filed out to face the day. Vi smelled the desolation before she saw it: a mingling of dust and rubble and burning, water-doused timber. Somewhere, the bell of a fire engine clanged and men’s voices called urgently.
Then she was standing at the church gates and looking down Lyra Street; looking, but not understanding. She took several steps nearer, counting as she walked.
One and three, they were all right, but number five had gone, and number seven. And opposite, number four and number six. There was nothing there but a terrible, yawning gap. That last bomb had taken out those houses as if it had come with a great grasping fist and scooped them up and crunched them into rubble as easily as if they’d been made of matchsticks.
Number five. Mrs Norris. She’d still be in there, under the kitchen table, and number seven – Mother of God, that was hers!
Only then did she comprehend the implications of that great, obscene gap. They had hit her house, destroyed her home – hers and Gerry’s. A vicious pain slashed through her. She closed her eyes and opened her lips to a terrible moan.
‘No. Oh, no!’
She stood there, fighting for breath. There wasn’t a thing left. Not one thing. Just beams and brick rubble. Chairs and pots and pans all gone, and her lovely dusty-pink eiderdown. And four years of scrimping and saving and sweeping and polishing and loving that little house; the house Gerry came home to. If he could see it now …
But Gerry wasn’t coming home. He didn’t need this house any more. If she had polished and dusted till the crack of doom, it would have made no difference. Her husband was dead, her job had gone and now she had no home.
Hot, bitter tears rolled down her cheeks, and with them came back the noise of the street. A stranger’s arm encircled her shoulders.
‘Come away, pet, an’ I’ll make you a cup of tea. It’s only an ’ouse.’
‘Thanks,’ Vi whispered, ‘but leave me a minute.’
She took a step nearer, staring at the drunken heap of rubble. There was nothing there she recognized. Not one familiar chair or table top. And where was her gas stove and the red rose bush from the yard?
There wasn’t a yard. It probably wasn’t even her rubble, either. Hers from across the street, most likely. It was like that with bomb-blast. Sometimes it just rushed round things; other times it flattened all in its path then picked up the debris and flung it away. You could never tell.
She stood there retching. She needed to be sick. She wanted to go down on her knees in all the muck and dust and cry and cry until she was sick. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, because this wasn’t Vi McKeown standing here shaking, and it wasn’t Vi’s house that bomb had taken. All this was happening to someone else, so it was no use getting upset over what didn’t concern her.
A policeman with red-rimmed eyes and a stubble-covered chin was saying something.
‘You what?’ She looked at him vacantly.
‘I said, was you all right and do you know who lives here?’
‘Why?’
‘Because there might be people in there, that’s why.’
‘Her in number seven’s all right, but there’s an old woman in there, I think. Under the kitchen table.’ She nodded vaguely in the direction of number five.
‘Christ Almighty! Over here, lads! There’s a woman under that bloody lot!’
He took the arm of the girl who stared at him with shock-darkened eyes. ‘There’s the WVS women at the bottom of the street. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and tell ’em you need some sugar in it.’
But Vi didn’t move except to turn her back on the men with the picks and shovels. She didn’t want to look when they found Ma Norris. If they found her, that was. If there was anything left to find. She hoped the poor old thing had gone. It’d be a release for her. No more hiding from the post office boy who brought telegrams from the Somme each day.
Vi supposed she had better be going. Go where? But did it matter? She raised her eyes to the sky. It was a beautiful sky. Very blue, even through the smoke haze. The early-morning sun was there, too, as if last night had never happened.
Then she saw the wall – her bedroom wall. It stood out, jagged and broken like a decaying tooth, and