Читать книгу The Heart of the Family - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 9

Picking her way through the rubble littering the street, Katie stopped when something caught her eye, a bunch of May blossom, the kind that children picked from the hedgerow for their mothers. Its wilting flowers now lay in debris, its stems bruised and the flower petals covered in dust. As she bent down to pick it up tears filled Katie’s eyes. What was the matter with her? She hadn’t cried when she had seen the broken buildings, had she, and yet here she was crying over a few broken flowers. Where had they come from? Someone’s home? One of the houses that had stood in this street of flattened buildings? Katie touched one of the petals. A terrible feeling of helplessness and loss filled her. How many more nights could the city go on? And then what? Would they walk out of the air-raid shelters one morning to find them surrounded by Germans who had parachuted in during the night? That was the fear in everyone’s mind, but people would only voice it in private. Even Luke’s father, Sam, had started talking about the city not being able to hold out much longer.

She must not let her imagination run away with her. She must think of Luke and be strong. But she didn’t feel very strong, Katie admitted, as she picked her way carefully through the bricks and broken glass covering both the road and the pavement. It was just as well that she could walk from the Campions’ house on Edge Hill to the Littlewoods building where she worked as a postal censorship clerk, because there were no buses or trams running.

Everywhere she looked all she could see were damaged buildings, and the people of Liverpool exhausted by six long nights of air raids, each one destroying a bit more of their city and increasing their fear that Hitler was not going to stop until there wasn’t a building left standing.

The same people who five days ago had brushed the dust off their clothes and held their heads up high now looked shabby and pitiful. Her own shoes, polished last night by Sam Campion, who polished all his family’s shoes every night and included her own, were now covered in the dust that filled the air, coating everything, leaving a gritty taste in the mouth. Her cotton dress – the same one she had worn yesterday because it was simply impossible to wash anything and get it dry without it being covered in dust – looked tired instead of crisp and fresh. As she lifted her hand to push her hair off her face, Katie acknowledged how weak and afraid she felt.

Here she was, going to work, and she had no idea if there would be a building still standing for her to work in, but as she turned the corner, and looked up Edge Hill Road, she saw to her relief that the Littlewoods building was still standing.

As had happened the previous day and the day before that, there were ominous gaps and empty chairs at some of the desks where girls had not turned up for work, but it was the empty chair next to her own that caused Katie’s heart to thump with anxiety.

She and Carole had been friends from Katie’s first day at the censorship office when Carole had taken her under her wing, and the fact that Carole was dating one of the men in Luke’s unit had brought them even closer.

Katie knew that Carole was living with her aunt, whose home was much closer to the docks than the Campions’ and, as she looked from the empty chair to her watch and then towards Anne, who was in charge of their table, a terrible thought was filling her mind.

‘Carole isn’t here yet,’ she told Anne unnecessarily, unable to conceal her anxiety.

‘I haven’t been told anything.’ Anne looked tired, dark circles under her eyes, and Katie felt a stab of guilt. Her brother was a merchant seaman, and with one of the convoys, and her fiancé was fighting overseas. ‘Try not to worry. With all the damage that’s been done and the trams and buses not running properly she might just have got delayed.’

Katie gave her a wan smile. Anne was right, of course, but it was still hard not to worry.

The disruption to the postal service caused by the blitz meant that the letters they had to check were only arriving sporadically; Katie tried not to look at the empty chair as she started work.

Theirs was important work – vital for the safety of the nation, as they were constantly being told – and it demanded their full concentration, but it was hard to concentrate on the constant flow of written words, checking them for any sign that they might contain an encoded message, when she was so conscious of Carole’s empty chair. Katie herself was involved – as part of her work – in correspondence with someone who was thought to be a possible spy.

She wasn’t really cut out for that aspect of her work, as she was the first to admit, but as her supervisor had told her more than once, they all had a duty to do whatever had to be done to protect their country from its enemies.

The door to the corridor opened. Katie’s head jerked towards it, her breath leaking from her lungs in a sigh of relief as she saw her friend.

‘I was getting really worried about you,’ she began as Carole sat down, only to break off as she saw the tears fill Carole’s eyes and then spill down her face.

‘What is it?’ Katie asked worriedly.

Carole shook her head, searching in her handbag for an already damp handkerchief before telling her, ‘It’s our Rachel, my dad’s brother’s eldest. She bought it over the weekend. Collapsed building. She’d bin up to London to see her hubby back off to camp. He’d bin home on leave. Seven months pregnant, she was, an’ all. I were her bridesmaid when she got married the year before last.’

‘Oh, Carole …’ Katie didn’t know what to say. It was plain that Carole was very distressed, and with good reason.

Anne looked towards them and said quietly, ‘Katie, why don’t you take Carole down to the canteen so that she can have a cup of tea? Don’t be gone too long, mind. We’re short staffed and there’s a backlog building up.’

Still crying, Carole allowed Katie to guide her back into the corridor and from there to the canteen where a sympathetic tea lady provided them both with cups of hot tea.

‘It will have to be without sugar,’ she warned them.

‘I can’t take much more of this, Katie, I swear that I can’t,’ Carole wept. ‘It’s really getting to me, them bombing raids every night, not knowing if I’m still going to be alive in the morning and not getting any sleep, and now this. Our Rachel was only twenty. Her dad, my uncle Ken, thought she was too young to get married but she said that she was going to be a wife to her George whether her dad let her say the words in church or not, just in case anything should happen to him with him being sent overseas, so her dad gave in. But now she’s the one that’s bin killed and her poor little baby with her. Oh, Katie, what’s going to happen to us and to this country? It’s all right Churchill saying we’ve got to stand firm, but it isn’t him that’s getting bombed every night, is it? I keep thinking that I might never see me mum and dad again, and I’ve a good mind to get out of Liverpool whilst I still can and go home.’

‘London’s being bombed as well,’ Katie felt obliged to point out.

‘Yes, I know, but not like this.’

Katie knew there was nothing she could say, and nothing she could do either, other than put her own hand over Carole’s in a small gesture of comfort.

‘Come on, lads, tea break’s over – back to work,’ Luke instructed his men.

They’d been working for over four hours, since six in the morning, helping to clear the debris from one of the main roads out of the city. A few yards away a group of men from the Liverpool Gas Company, aided in their work by men from the Pioneer Corps, had also been having their tea break, the tea supplied by volunteers from the WVS and their mobile canteen.

‘You’re Sam Campion’s lad, aren’t you?’ one of the older men asked Luke, nodding his head when Luke confirmed that he was, and saying triumphantly, ‘Thought you were. You’ve got a real look of your dad. Working with him the other day, we were, when the Salvage lot were helping us to get what we could out of Duke Street, after it got bombed.’

Now it was Luke’s turn to nod. The Gas Company’s mains’ records and control equipment had been housed in their Duke Street premises and it had been vitally important that they were salvaged.

The city had been lucky in that, despite a large number of electricity substations being damaged, with temporary repairs, the power company was still able to supply everyone with electricity.

‘Jerry can’t come back much more,’ the other man told Luke, handing his cup over to the waiting WVS volunteer. ‘There ain’t much left to bomb.’

Not much left to bomb and a hell of a lot of clearing up to do, Luke thought grimly, as he turned back to his own men.

They had been detailed to work alongside the men from the city’s Debris Clearance and Road Repair Service, shifting the rubble of bombed and collapsed buildings out of the way so that the damage to the roads underneath could be repaired and the roads made passable.

Unlike the previous Sunday when they had been working in the city centre, today they were working closer to Bootle, where the majority of the bombs had been dropped during the night.

Whilst one work party cleared the debris into a large mass, another transported the rubble by requisitioned lorries to temporary tips on Netherfield Road and Byrom and Pitt Streets, and a third was responsible for shifting this debris into the lorries.

It was backbreaking work – unless of course you were detailed to drive one of the lorries.

They’d been working for another half an hour when there was noisy commotion in the street behind them. Luke turned and watched grimly as a huge piece of machinery was driven down the road towards them.

He’d already heard all about the fun and games caused by the overenthusiastic help of the newly arrived detachment of American engineers and their heavy excavating and earth-moving equipment, sent to England under the new Lend Lease Act, along with the engineers who were to show the British how to use these monster machines.

In order to speed up clearing the rubble from the bombed buildings, the City Fathers had asked the Americans if they could help. Liverpool’s streets, though, were not designed for wide American machinery, and it had turned out that the instructors sent over with them had not actually driven the machines before themselves. There had been one or two unfortunate incidents, including one in which a machine had become stuck down a narrow street. The sight of such a thing lumbering towards them now had Luke’s men exchanging knowing looks.

‘I guess you guys could use some help,’ the gum-chewing sergeant, who had clambered down from the cab of the vehicle along with four GIs told Luke laconically.

One of the tall, broad-shouldered black GIs grinned and commented, ‘Hey, Sarge, look at that. They’re using shovels. Ain’t that something?’

His tone was affable enough but Luke could see that his men were bristling slightly, and he could understand why. He wasn’t too keen on the big American’s manner himself, although he suspected that rather than being deliberately patronising, the GI simply wasn’t aware of the effect his words were likely to have on men who had had little sleep during five continuous nights of heavy bombing, and who had just spent the last four hours trying to deal with some of the aftereffects of those bombs.

‘Hey, buddy, we’ll have that truck filled for you in ten minutes flat,’ the sergeant told Luke.

‘Ten minutes. Hey, Sarge, I reckon we could do it in five. In fact I’m ready to bet on it. Ten dollars says we fill the truck in five.’

Luke frowned. He had no ideas of the rules governing the US Army but in the British Army gambling was forbidden. Some of the men might run illegal card schools but they would never have challenged a sergeant to a bet – especially not in public. The Americans were slouching against the cab of their vehicle, laughing and smoking even though they hadn’t been given permission to stand easy, and talking to their sergeant as though they were all equals and they had no respect for his rank at all. Luke’s frown deepened. He might only be a corporal but he knew how to make sure his men were a credit to their regiment and he would certainly never have tolerated such sloppy, unsoldierly behaviour.

The sergeant, though, far from castigating the soldier, was unbuttoning the flap on his pocket and removing a wad of notes, peeling some off and slapping them down against the shiny metal of the machinery.

‘Ten says you can’t and another twenty says you can’t do it in four minutes.’

‘Hey, boys, come and see the sarge lose his money,’ the private called out.

Laughing and whooping, the men crowded round, all of them peeling off notes.

‘You’d better have big pockets to match that big mouth of yours, Clancy,’ the sergeant derided the GI, ‘’cos you sure as hell are going to have to dig deep into them.’

The Americans were behaving more as though they were on a bank holiday outing than involved in the serious business of dealing with war-damaged buildings, but then of course this wasn’t their home country or their war, Luke thought bitterly, remembering that the American were still neutral and staying out of the war. Given the choice, his pride would have inclined him to turn his back on them and simply pretend that they did not exist. But of course he knew that he couldn’t.

‘OK, you guys, let’s get to work,’ the sergeant announced, stepping away from the machine so that the soldier he’d addressed as Clancy could climb up into the cab and set the thing moving.

The sound of it alone, rumbling down the road, was enough to bring down any unstable buildings, Luke thought sourly as he walked alongside it.

Luke took his role as corporal very seriously. His men, their safety and the proper execution of whatever work they were given to do were his responsibility.

Clancy brought the machine to a halt and then activated the large ‘shovel’ to grab some of the rubble, swinging it over to the waiting truck.

The American soldiers cheered as the claws opened and deposited the rubble into the lorry.

‘Hey, buddy, here’s twenty bucks says you can’t clear the lot in ten minutes,’ the sergeant yelled, as a second load was added to the first, and then a third.

‘He can’t do that,’ Luke protested. ‘There’s a weight limit on those trucks. The axles won’t stand up to them being overloaded.’

Strictly speaking the British driver of the truck wasn’t under Luke’s command and was in any case a civilian. Luke, though, wasn’t about to stand to one side whilst the truck driver was placed in danger, and he could see that that was going to happen.

‘Hey, buddy,’ the sergeant slapped Luke on the shoulder, ‘This is the US Army you’re dealing with now, and we say there ain’t no such thing as can’t.’

The American soldier in the cab of the earth-moving vehicle was grinning as he yelled back, ‘You’re on, Sarge. Watch this.’

Angry now, Luke warned the sergeant, ‘Look, you’ve got to stop this. There’s at least two full loads and maybe three there. It’s impossible to get it all into one truck.’

Ignoring Luke’s warning, the sergeant called up to the driver, ‘Go to it, Clancy. Let’s show these Brits what being American is all about.’

Luke was in danger of losing his temper. ‘Any fool can see that there’s too much there to go in one truck, and that it’s asking for trouble to try,’ he insisted.

‘Hey, buddy, you’re the one who’ll be asking for trouble. See these stripes?’ the sergeant told Luke. ‘They say sergeant in any man’s language. Now go watch how we clear the roads in America – and that’s an order, soldier.’

Luke could feel his face burning with humiliation and fury. They both knew that the American had no authority over him, but the damage had been done and he had humiliated Luke in front of Luke’s own men as well as his own.

Walking away from him Luke went over to where Andy was leaning on his shovel, watching grimly as the lorry was heaped with load after load of rubble.

‘Go and find whoever’s in charge of the nearest ARP unit for me,’ Luke told him. ‘Perhaps Mr Know-it-all back there will listen to him—’ He broke off as suddenly the lorry buckled and then tilted, calling out a warning to its civilian driver, who had been standing a couple of feet away, smoking. But it was already too late and the man’s screams as the lorry fell on top of him were filling the street.

Luke and his men ran towards the scene. The collapsed lorry had disgorged its contents, covering the street in the debris they had spent four hours clearing up, but none of them gave that a second thought as they rushed to the aid of the suddenly silent driver.

Luke had known that there would be nothing they could do – the full weight of the lorry had fallen sideways onto the driver – but he and his men still worked frantically to lift it.

The American sergeant’s voice was thin and strained with shock as he muttered, ‘How the hell did that happen?’

Luke turned to look at him, saying fiercely, ‘You killed him. You know that, don’t you, Sergeant.’

‘It was an accident. We were trying to help.’ For such a big man, now he seemed oddly diminished and very afraid, but Luke was in no mood to show him any mercy.

‘No, you were trying to win a bet,’ said Luke coldly.

Inwardly he was shaking with a mixture of savage fury and despair. Hadn’t the city lost enough lives without this? But what did these Americans know? How could they understand? They weren’t even in the war.