Читать книгу Lime Street at Two - Helen Forrester - Страница 11

When attacking convoys, particularly at night, the Germans began to use packs of U-boats working in unison, rather than single submarines. Although the escort ships of the convoys now had a listening device, called Asdic, with which they could detect the presence of submarines, the noise of the convoy itself often confused the listeners and made it difficult to identify a submarine with certainty. It was also ineffective if the U-boat was on the surface.

To avoid the Asdic device, the U-boat commanders would come up steeply into the middle of a convoy, and, in a few moments, create havoc. Then, still on the surface, they would race away into the darkness, outrunning the escorting corvettes.

Once my first grief over Harry’s death had become more controllable, I again began to feel very deeply for the frantic mothers and wives of merchant seamen and Royal Navy men, alike, who died during September, October and November of 1940. The women threatened to overwhelm our little office, with its limited resources.

During one dreadful Saturday morning, when weeping women stood in the waiting room because all the chairs were full, and queued along the passageway and stairs, I was so distressed that something seemed to break inside me, and I cried out in fury to a startled voluntary worker, ‘It’s madness to send men to certain death like this!’

The words rang through the crowded, untidy room, and all the voluntary workers stopped their bustle and turned to stare at me. My weary colleague, Miss Evans, seated at her desk at the hub of the turmoil, put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone, and said sharply, ‘Miss Forrester!’

In the ensuing dead silence, I mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’

I snatched up a pile of files and began feverishly to put them back on their open shelves, my fury unassuageable. The tears coursed down my cheeks. ‘Why couldn’t seamen have enough sense to stay ashore?’ I raged inwardly. Most of them had skills which would have given them protected jobs in war factories. On the other hand, Harry had said that, if he had come ashore, he would have been called up, sooner or later, for the Army or the Navy; he might just as well remain a merchant seaman, and earn better wages.

Based on my utter frustration, a dull anger at Harry surged in me. He was old enough not to be amongst the first to be conscripted. We could have been married by now and had some happiness together; I could have been carrying his much desired baby. The fool! The stupid idiot, to go and get himself killed! I was terribly, unreasonably furious at him.

In those wild moments, I gave no thought to the fact that unless freighters went to sea, to carry on the country’s trade, we would soon starve. I also forgot that, though Harry often complained about the conditions under which seamen lived aboard ship, basically he enjoyed going to sea; like everyone else, he hoped the war would soon be over. Few civilians knew enough of the true situation to realise that it was bound to drag on for years. Wars are very easily started; the problem is in bringing them to a close.

Now Harry was gone, and I had not the faintest idea what to do, as I struggled to help women equally distressed. My mind refused to concentrate; my body longed for rest, preferably eternal rest. Normally I was always hungry; now I sometimes found it difficult to eat.

Even Mother noticed my unusual dullness and told me to stop looking so sulky. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you,’ she would say, so truly, ‘Cry, and you cry alone.’

‘It’s easier for her,’ I would think sullenly. ‘She’s doing quite nicely now.’ I forgot that she had been through an earlier war, a war which had been in many ways much worse.

‘Why aren’t you going dancing?’ Fiona asked.

I looked at her blankly for a moment, and then replied, ‘I’m too tired – the office is so busy.’

I don’t think that Father noticed anything much. He tended to live a life of his own amongst his friends from the office; Mother never accompanied him either to the public houses or to the concerts and plays to which he went. Sometimes he would inquire of Tony or Brian what they were doing in their spare time. Not infrequently, he had a tremendous row with Mother, usually on the subject of money.

He may possibly have noticed that, at that time, I was not quarrelling much with Mother, and consequently the house was quieter. I was too exhausted to face her verbal barbs, and no matter what she did, I accepted it and did my best to cope with the consequences.

On the Saturday on which I had exclaimed so explosively in the office about the lunacy of the war, I worked all day, and arrived home just as Mother was putting on her retrimmed, turban-type hat before going to the cinema. She was peeking at herself in the broken piece of mirror on the mantelpiece. It was still the only mirror in the house and was consequently very precious. During the war, mirrors were hard to obtain.

She nodded to me, buckled up the belt of her leather overcoat and picked up her handbag. ‘Back at eleven,’ she threw over her shoulder, as she went through the back door.

As I took off my own coat, I listened to the click-click of her high-heeled shoes on the stone flags of the back alley. I remembered how, as a child, I would lie in bed after Edith, our nanny, had tucked me up, every limb tensed, eyes screwed tight in case those clicking heels came upstairs. Nothing made her crosser than to find that Alan and I had failed to go to sleep promptly at six o’clock. An extremely nervous child, I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the flickering shadows made by the candle which Edith always left on the dresser, but, most of all, I was afraid of my stormy mother.

While I put together a meal for myself, Father leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was a habit he had acquired after a heart attack which he had suffered at the age of thirty-three. Now, he was dozing while he waited for the arrival of his friend, Tom, a school teacher, still in his late twenties. Before Tom had gone to attend a Teachers’ Training College, he had worked in Father’s office, and, despite the difference in age, they had interests in common, including Father’s long-standing study of French history; they also argued about politics by the hour.

I knew that they would go to town, to drink in The Vines in Lime Street and in other public houses. Ye Hole in Ye Wall was another of their favourite haunts. Once Tom took Father to Ye Cracke in Rice Street, and subsequently, if Father was alone, he always went there. It had a tiny parlour with a transom labelled The War Office over its entrance. Men used to sit there and refight the Boer War, and no doubt Father refought the First World War in the same place. He really enjoyed exploring the many quaint taverns in Liverpool. He would come in about eleven o’clock, gravely drunk, and proceed, with care, upstairs to bed, to sleep it off in time for his Sunday morning pint at nearby Peter’s, another of his favourite public houses.

Father woke up from his nap, and sat cracking his fingers for some minutes. He looked up at me. I was seated at the table, a sheet of cheap writing paper in front of me.

‘Are you not going to a dance?’ he asked.

‘No. I thought I’d write to Alan. He must be having a terrible time at Biggin Hill; it’s been bombed like anything.’

Father nodded agreement. Though he could write well and amusingly, he rarely wrote to any of his children while they were away, and I think that in many other houses this task was left to the womenfolk.

‘He’s ground staff; he should be able to take cover,’ Father said heavily.

I wondered at Father’s indifference to the danger his sons were in while they were in the Services. Perhaps, after the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, bombing, aerial combat and the dangers at sea seemed petty in comparison.

Mother had heatedly forbidden me to write to or visit our little evacuees while they were away. ‘You’ll do nothing but upset them,’ she had accused me.

Despite my protests, she was so vehement that I never did write.

Alan was my old and trusted friend, as well as my brother, and she knew better than to come between us. I wrote to him as often as I could. He did not always reply, for reasons which were painfully obvious from the headlines in the newspapers. The Battle of Britain was in scarifying flood. His base, Biggin Hill, was an airfield of crucial strategical importance and a frequent target of the Luftwaffe. He had continued to be trained as ground crew, had been promoted to Leading Aircraftsman, and did not normally fly. Our inadequate number of Spitfires and Hurricanes had, however, at all costs, to be kept in the air, and boys like him worked like devils to do it; at night he often slept under the aircraft on which he had been working, because time was so precious.

In the gorgeous summer of 1939, he went away a gangling youth. When we opened the door to him on his first leave in January, 1940, it was as if a young giant stood on our doorstep. He seemed to have grown a foot in height, his shoulders had broadened, and his face was that of a man. Though thin, he was healthier than I had ever seen him.

As we sat around our frugal fire, he told us that he had done six months of square-bashing, drilling very much as if he had been in the Army; then he had gone for further training in the maintenance of aircraft.

On his more recent leave, he had divulged, ‘Some of the crates we have to deal with look more like colanders than aircraft when they land. And we have to get them back up again within hours.’

‘And the crews?’ I asked.

‘We’re losing an awful lot,’ he replied, his face strained and sad.

I had guessed at the losses; we were getting Air Force families in the office, as well as those of seamen. Tears welled at the back of my eyes.

During his leaves, we gave all his clothing, which was usually soaked with oil, a thorough wash, and Mother fed him with everything she could cajole out of arrogant shopkeepers. He brought his own ration card, but it was inadequate, and, as well, we gave him our own rations of cheese, bacon and meat.

He seemed happy to be at home, and yet, by the end of the week, it was always apparent that he would be glad to return to his RAF station. Though war is horrifying, it brings excitement and drama into dull lives. As yet, he was only a Leading Aircraftsman, hardly trained, but his uniform gave him a certain prestige; and he always performed at his best when facing a high level of stress.

So, seated at the scratched, living-room table, I tried to forget my own pain and to put myself in his position. I wrote as cheerfully as I could about the neighbourhood, as yet little damaged by bombs. I told him about Nickie, our tan and white mongrel, who knew the sound of the air-raid warning and the all clear, and came and went, without any direction from us, to his own private air-raid shelter, which he had established in a little cupboard by the side of the fireplace.

My second brother, Brian, had brought the animal home, some years before. A publican had thrown it out of the door of his public house, and the tiny whimpering puppy had landed at Brian’s feet. Dreadfully upset at its obvious hunger, Brian brought it home to a house where hunger was endemic; yet we were unanimous in adopting it, and it shared our meagre meals and learned to eat anything. Faithful and intensely loving, it lay on my feet as I wrote.

I did not mention in my letters the nightly air raids we were enduring; they seemed small in comparison with the battles that the Air Force were fighting.

On the 30th and the 31st August, Biggin Hill received two dreadful poundings which nearly put it out of action. Planes were damaged on the ground, as well as in the air, and there were numerous casualties.

Alan, not yet twenty and with less than a year’s full-time experience, had, like all the other youngsters there, to cope with repairs that would in normal times have called for skilled engineers and mechanics. Above their heads, pilots who were no older, fought to break up the waves of German bombers and Messerschmitt fighters, as Goering tried to wreck the Royal Air Force, and thus open up Britain to the invasion armies then gathering in French ports.

The fall of France had been devastating for Britain. The German Air Force was now operating from French airfields just across the English Channel. Based in French ports, the U-boats could hunt the eastern Atlantic to their hearts’ content. As I wrote, I realised, with a pang, that it was probably one of those very U-boats from France which had caught Harry’s ship. I knew that Alan, too, was now in deadly peril; but letters must be optimistic.

Optimistic? Most of Britain was in a state of quiet despair. The British Army had been thrown out of Norway. Our men had been pushed out of France, though, to console us, the saga of the rescue from Dunkirk of the remnants of our army was on everyone’s lips – once or twice, I heard of men who had arrived on their mothers’ doorsteps, filthy, bloody, ragged and exhausted, rifle still in hand, having come straight home after landing; a few of them never went back – protected by their families, they simply deserted.

Now London was being bombed unmercifully, and there was a steady trickle of Londoners fleeing the capital. Some came to Liverpool, only to be caught in the lesser, though still frightening, raids on our city.

Almost everyone suffered nightmares at the thought of a German invasion, and superhuman efforts were made by the Home Guard and civilians to be ready for it. So that the Germans would not be able to find their way, signposts were uprooted and names of railway stations painted over. Nobody seemed to realise that a professional soldier would, in thirty seconds, make any hapless civilian he came upon say exactly where he was. All that happened was that, throughout the war, people got lost like pennies running down a sewer drain. Fortunately the Air Force did not need sign posts to know where it was; otherwise, they might have got lost, too, and the war would have had a different ending. The Army was not so fortunate, and many times, during my long walks in the Wirral, I directed lost, khaki-clad lorry drivers. Once I came upon a stranded tank, its flustered crew kneeling over a map at the roadside. They not only wanted to know where they were but where they could get a cup of tea!

There was a rap on the front door, and Father got up to let in his friend, Tom.

He came into the living-room and stood uneasily fingering his trilby hat, while Father put on his overcoat.

‘Good evening, Helen.’

I smiled up at him rather shyly. I did not like him, because I felt he was responsible for Father’s drinking so much. This was not fair, because Father had always drunk quite heavily, perhaps to soothe his shattered nerves when he returned from the First World War, a shell-shocked neurasthenic.

Tom was a big, heavily built man, a little under thirty years of age, extremely dark, his well-shaven chin still almost black from a threatening fresh growth.

He said to Father, ‘I got my call-up papers this morning.’ He ran the brim of his hat nervously through his fingers.

Father stopped buttoning up his coat. ‘Well, I’m blessed! Army?’

Tom did not look as if he regarded it as a blessing. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Have to report next week.’

‘Ah, well, I suppose it was bound to come. At least you’re single. No family to worry about.’

‘Mother’s very upset.’

‘I’m sure she must be.’ Father sighed, as he picked up his hat. ‘I shall miss you very much.’

Tom half-smiled. ‘Thanks. Are you ready?’

They both said goodbye to me, and left me to my letter. I could hear Avril laughing in the back yard, as she played a game of ball against the house wall, with another little girl. She did not laugh often enough, I thought.

Nickie put his nose on my knee and I patted him absently. Apart from the disintegration of my personal life, the further world around me was changing fast. The war kept nibbling at unexpected aspects of life. Men like Tom were being whisked away, and women like his widowed mother suddenly had to face a society which did not care much what happened to them, a society from which fathers, husbands and sons had given them a good deal of protection.

I tried not to think about my own unhappy situation, but the fact that I did not have the money for a stamp for Alan’s letter reminded me forcibly of my dire financial straits.

What should I do? What could I do when I had so little formal education?

I had recently been for two interviews for secretarial jobs. I was turned down immediately it was obvious that I had hardly been to day school at all. My experience in a charitable organisation did not, I discovered, rank very high. Charities were, in the minds of head clerks interviewing me, run by bumbling amateurs, do-gooders, cranks, a lot of old women. Humbled by the sharp tongues, I had thanked the gentlemen for their time, and had gone home.