A Strong Hand to Hold. Anne Bennett
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the black sky and with the crashes and thumps and explosions all around them, he said, ‘We’ll have to leave the rest; I can’t risk any more lives. There’s an unexploded bomb in the school playground and everyone has to be evacuated out of the area.’
Jenny was feeling very sick. She’d helped pull apart the buckled corrugated iron and burst sandbags of the Anderson shelter in the garden of the end house to get at the woman with the two little boys. She’d fought the nausea that rose in her throat as she pulled out the little crushed bodies, one little boy was just a baby, the other only slightly older. ‘Poor sod lost her man at Dunkirk,’ one of the neighbours said as she was being carried to one of the three ambulances standing by.
Oh God, Jenny thought, a whole family killed through this stupid, stupid war. She felt anger and hatred towards the German nation and in particular, the bombers, bringing such misery into people’s lives.
The first three houses were reduced to a mountain of rubble; the fourth had no upper floor, but part of one of the downstairs walls still stood; the fifth had been sliced clean in two.
‘Bleeding good job Beattie was out of the way tonight,’ the woman said as she passed Jenny.
‘Beattie?’
‘Beattie Latimer, her what lived next door to Patty Prosser.’
‘What, the woman who was killed?’
‘That’s the one,’ the woman said. ‘Reckon she’d have been a goner an‘ all, I do, but she’s been at her sister’s all afternoon. She told me herself when I met her coming in from work this afternoon, and her old man’s on nights down the Dunlop.’ She shook her head sadly and gathered her own two children closer to her. ‘Bloody shame it is. Proper shook me up, to see a family wiped out like that. I mean, it’s bad enough losing your house, ain’t it? You spending your life building it up like, and then it’s smashed to bits, but then you look at the likes of Patty Prosser and you thank God for what you’ve got left.’
‘Come on missis,’ Phil shouted. ‘Let’s get you and the babbies out of it. Hitler ain’t finished with us yet.’
And he hadn’t. Bombs still whistled from the sky, as they marshalled the women and children and a few men down Paget Road. The incendiaries that had fallen had set up pockets of flames that lit up the black sky, but did nothing to take the damp chilling coldness from it, and all the families shivered as they hurried along.
Jenny, watching them, shivered herself, and Gladys, a fellow warden, asked, ‘Are you all right, Jenny?’
‘Oh Gladys, how could anyone be all right after what we’ve just witnessed?’
‘God, don’t I know it,’ Gladys said. ‘But you’ve been quiet all night.’
‘So would you if you’d just learnt your brother had been shot down,’ Jenny could have said, but she didn’t. Too many people had been killed that night and she felt particularly sorry for the two little children who’d been crushed to death in the one place the government had promoted as a safe place to shelter. But she couldn’t say this either, or she would bawl her eyes out and she was glad the light was too dim for Gladys to see her face.
Gladys was one of the women Anthony had talked about. She drove the double decker buses around the streets of Birmingham and he’d been proud of her for doing a traditionally male job. Jenny didn’t know how she managed it because Gladys was no bigger than she was, though a lot stouter. But she’d said it was much easier to be out driving a bus than sitting at home worrying about her lads, who were both away fighting. Jenny guessed that work was as much a life saver for Gladys as it was for her, and so she gave a sigh and said, ‘I’m all right Gladys, just tired like everyone else.’
As the news came through to the post that night, it was obvious that the Luftwaffe was out to try and paralyse many of the factories making things for the war effort. One of the prime targets was the BSA, Birmingham Small Arms, where Peggy McAllister was working the night shift. She’d always told Maureen and Jenny that in the event of a raid, she’d be all right, for there was a large reinforced basement to shelter in.
However, earlier that day, smoke vapour had been dropped over the factory by a German plane, forming three rings over it, and when Peggy went into work, all those leaving the day shift were on about it. They said RAF planes were sent up to try and disperse the smoke rings but they had been unsuccessful. Then, as the raid began, the incendiaries dropped first made the ring more visible so the bomber was able to pinpoint the factory accurately. The one plane dropped three high-explosive bombs, with such precision that the badly damaged, blazing, four-storeyed building began to collapse into the basement.
Even the firemen, having exhausted the hydrants and drained the canal, could not contain the fire. They concentrated their efforts instead on getting people out. Many were trapped, some were buried by machinery, badly injured or burned. Peggy was one of the fortunate ones, although she had a number of cracked ribs and a deep gash on her head that needed stitching, and a mass of cuts and bruises. Later she lay in the General Hospital and remembered her friends and colleagues that had been badly injured and killed that night and knew she was lucky to have got off so lightly.
Jenny went home at seven o’clock on the morning of 20 November to wash and change her clothes. She met the accusing red-rimmed eyes of her mother as soon as she went in the door. ‘Here she is, the heartless bitch.’
Jenny was in no fit state for this after the traumatic night she’d had and she fought to control herself. ‘Mother, I know Anthony’s death is a shock and I’m heart sore about it myself. But last night was the heaviest raid I’ve ever seen. I was needed.’
‘There you go, you see,’ Norah said bitterly. ‘Other people are always more important than your own.’
‘What good would I have done, stopping here?’ Jenny asked. Her voice broke as she went on, ‘If I could do anything to bring Anthony back I would, but he’s gone. We … we must accept it.’
‘Accept it? I’ve sat up all night with bombs pounding around me and cried for my son.’ Norah glared at her daughter and burst out, ‘Oh, you’re a wicked selfish girl.’
Later, getting ready for work, Jenny wondered if her mother was right, for as yet, she’d shed no tears for Anthony. She really didn’t know how she would cope without him. But she was so shocked and stunned by the events of the previous night, she knew she wasn’t really thinking straight.
At work the supervisor looked at the white pallor of her skin and her black-ringed eyes and sent her home again. But Jenny didn’t want to go home, she needed to rest, to try and sleep for hours and hours, but she’d get no peace in the house with her mother and grandmother.
Instead, she found herself drawn to the wreckage facing the school. The unexploded bomb had been defused at two that morning, but the wreckage had been untouched.
There was another woman staring like she was. She was quite tubby and had a nondescript brown coat and a headscarf covering her frizzy grey hair. She looked completely flabbergasted. She turned to Jenny with anguished eyes, tears streaming down her face, as she said, ‘Bleeding mess, eh?’
Jenny nodded.
The woman pointed and said, ‘Used to be my house, that did.’
‘Then you’re Beattie, the one they told us was away?’ Jenny said.
‘That’s right. Was you here last night then?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny said. ‘When I have my other hat on I’m an ARP warden. I’m terribly sorry about your house.’
‘So am I duck,’ Beattie said. ‘Me and my Bert will have to lodge with our Vera, and the snobby cow can’t turn us away. But what I can’t get over is Patty and the nippers all gone like that and yet they were in a bleeding Anderson shelter. Lived right next door for years and never a cross word between us. God it’s hard,’ she wiped tears from her eyes and said, ‘And young