A Strong Hand to Hold

Beattie drained her cup of tea and getting to her feet she remarked with a laugh, ‘Well, now I’ve cheered you up right and proper, I’ll go and do the same to me old man. Bye, all.’

Linda saw Beattie out, and as she came back in Patty remarked, ‘Right little ray of sunshine, ain’t she, our Beat?’

Linda laughed and took the tray of cups back into the kitchen, but it was really no laughing matter. She didn’t know what Beattie was on about anyway because Hitler had already gone for them. Maybe not as bad as Coventry, but bad enough all the same. The raids in August, the start of the bombs in Birmingham had been quite frightening enough she’d thought at the time, but they had got much worse through September and those in October and the early part of November had been really scary. They had all hid away in the Anderson shelter and she had joined in with her mother singing songs to the children to calm them down. Eventually they both would become drowsy enough to be laid in the bunks made ready for them, but Linda had no such release for she would be so anxious for them all. she would feel as if she had lead in her stomach and her throat would become as dry as dust.

She gave herself a mental shake. What was she doing, worrying about things before they had happened, getting nervous because of something Beattie had said. Her mother was right, she was a prophet of doom all right was Beattie. She saw George looking at her frowning face and wondered how much he had understood of Beattie’s words. No need for him to be worried anyway and she smiled at him and said, ‘D’you want a drink of milk, George?’

The lad nodded his head. ‘Can I have summat to eat and all?’

‘In a bit,’ Linda told him. She knew both boys had a cooked meal at the nursery. ‘Tell you what, I’ll do you some toast on the fire later and I’m sure we’ve got a bit of jam left in the jar.’

‘I’m hungry now though,’ he complained.

Linda poured some milk into a cup and handed him one of the apples they’d got from the market on Saturday. ‘Have this for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll get your tea later.’

Mollified, George sat up at the table cuddling Tolly in his arms and swinging his legs as he watched Linda bustling around, preparing a nourishing meal for her mother. ‘D’you think we’ll be bombed, Linda?’ he asked. ‘Beattie does.’

‘She’s Mrs Latimer to you,’ Linda said sharply. ‘And I don’t know, George. But we’ll be all right – we’ve got the shelter, haven’t we?’

Her brother wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t like that shelter, it’s smelly and cold and dark,’ he whined.

‘It ain’t dark, George,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve put a hurricane lamp in there and that will soon light the place up. We can take blankets to wrap ourselves in if we have to go down there. ’Fraid I can’t do much about the smell.’

She ruffled his dark hair and said, ‘But why are you worrying, eh? It might never happen. Hitler’s probably finished with us now. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn.’

She didn’t believe it, but George did. In a way Linda wished she was still small and could be reassured so easily. But at least she’d taken the worry away from her little brother’s eyes and she bent and planted a kiss on the top of his head.

THREE (#ulink_95b770e9-7ca5-51f6-8f44-6b8e4c71ac5b)

Jenny realised almost as soon as the door clicked behind her that night, that she’d forgotten her torch. No wonder – she’d been in such a state of agitation after the row, when she’d insisted on reporting for duty that night. The point was, it was a disaster not to have any light at all on those blacked-out nights, for you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. Instead of going back indoors and facing her family again, she began to pick her way cautiously over the ground.

So many people had been killed on the roads during the first months of the war because of the blackout that Stan Walker, who worked with her at the warden post, said he reckoned it was Hitler’s secret weapon. ‘He ain’t gonna fight us at all,’ he said with his wheezy laugh. ‘He’s just going to let us kill ourselves in the bleeding ’orse road.’

White lines were painted along the kerbs and on the running boards of cars and, though they were now allowed shielded headlights, it had made little difference. There were few cars on the Pype Hayes Estate anyway and the white lines were barely visible on a dark moonless night.

Everyone hated the blackout. Norah never stopped going on about it and made no effort to comply with regulations. She would have sat by uncurtained windows, the light shining like a beacon outside, and eaten the entire butter ration in one meal if Jenny hadn’t watched her. Ignoring the blackout carried a fine of £200 and Jenny couldn’t afford to indulge her mother.

As usual though, pangs of guilt began to stab at her as she made her way to the ARP post and she wondered whether she should have stayed at home that night with her mother. She hoped that Norah and Eileen would be all right but she doubted, even if there was a raid that night, that they’d use the Anderson shelter in the garden which her brothers had erected before they went away to war. Being sunk into the earth, it was inclined to flood; her next-door neighbour Mr Patterson had helped Jenny to pump it out just the previous week. He’d floor-boarded it for her too, as he’d done his own at the beginning of the war, and put a seat one side and two bunks at the other. He’d even loaned her his old oil-heater to warm the place up, and she had bought a kerosene lamp that lit the shelter up well enough and while it wasn’t the most comfy place in the world, it wasn’t that bad.

Her mother was adamant, however, that she would not go grubbing in some underground tin shack like an animal, and that was that! Eileen felt the same. The two women had taken shelter under the stairs in the pantry that opened off the living room when the bombs came a little close. People said you were just as safe there – and maybe you were. Jenny was powerless to do anything about it, anyway. She could hardly force them to take shelter if they didn’t want to.

She hadn’t quite reached the post when the siren wailed out a warning. Before it had faded away she saw the planes approaching, though in the dark it was the drone of them that alerted her first. They were nearly overhead before she saw the shapes of them in the sky. The first planes dropped incendiaries, making the blackout irrelevant as the night was suddenly lit up like daylight; now she saw the second column of planes flying in formation behind them. She actually saw the bomb doors open and the bombs topple out fins first and then nose down towards their targets. She heard the first crashes and crumps and, remembering where she was supposed to be making for, she increased her pace.

Jenny knew with a dread certainty that there would be more grieving families before the night was over. She also knew that the news of Anthony’s death had to wait. This was not the time for the luxury of tears.

Linda was toasting bread for her brothers’ tea with a long-handled toasting fork over the glowing embers in the grate when the siren went off. She jumped so suddenly, the toast fell off the fork and dropped into the fire. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘What’s up?’ Patty called from the kitchen, where she was boiling a kettle.

‘I’ve dropped the perishing toast.’

‘They wouldn’t have had time to eat it anyway,’ Patty said struggling into her coat. ‘Go and get the hot-water bottles out of the boys’ beds, will you, love? That shelter will be perishing. I’ll fill the flask up with hot tea.’

Linda looked at her mother with concern. She was right, the shelter would be freezing – the very last place Patty should be spending the night. She scuttled hurriedly upstairs and hoped the raid wouldn’t go on very long and they’d be able to come back inside soon.

The bottles would keep them a bit warmer anyway, she thought, and she tugged the blankets off the beds for good measure. Downstairs, her mom was pouring the contents of the teapot into the flask. She smiled at Linda and said, ‘Nothing’s so bad if you can have a cuppa, eh?’

‘Not half.’

Yes, it would be nice to have hot tea, Linda thought. The vacuum flask was a wonderful invention and very expensive, but Patty had come home with one a few weeks before, bought from someone at work with contacts.

‘Take all that lot down the shelter, Linda,’ Patty said, handing her the flask as well. ‘Then come back and give me a hand with the babbies.’

‘You’d better turn the gas off under the stew, too,’ Linda said, and hoped the raid wouldn’t last long because her stomach was growling with hunger. It was as she was returning to the house that she saw a fleet of bombers heading their way. ‘Hurry, Mom,’ she said as she ran in.

‘I’m coming,’ Patty said. ‘I’ve got Harry’s bottle ready and a packet of biscuits I put by in case this might happen. Get your coat on. I’ll do Harry, you see to George.’

She went into the pantry and could hear the drones of the planes get louder and she looked at Linda in sudden fear. There sounded like hundreds over their heads. Both boys picked up the tension of their mother and sister, and Harry started to grizzle as Patty struggled to fasten him into his suit. But she took no notice and then she picked him up and handed him to Linda. ‘Take him down,’ she said. George trailed after his mother, dragging his beloved teddy bear Tolly behind him, his coat flapping open because Linda hadn’t had time to fasten it.

A resounding crash, terrifyingly close, startled Patty. Her hand closed around the biscuits on the top shelf of the pantry. The sooner they were under cover the better, she thought, and she turned with such suddenness, she almost tripped over George who was clinging to her skirt. The intensity of the raid had unnerved her totally and she screamed, ‘Let go, George, let go! Come on, let’s get to the shelter quick.’

George was too scared to loose his mother’s skirt and, as another bomb landed too close for comfort, he gave a yelp of terror. Patty bent to pick him up with a suddenness that took him by surprise and Tolly fell from his arms on to the pantry floor.

‘Tolly,’ he cried, but Patty wasn’t stopping for no threadbare teddy. She dashed after Linda out of the back door and into the comfortless shelter in the back garden.

Warmed by the hot-water bottles and wrapped in the blankets, they sat huddled on the bench. It was bitterly cold. Patty doled out biscuits by the light of the hurricane lamp she’d hung from a protruding screw on the shelter wall. ‘We can’t eat them all now,’ she told George as he clamoured for more. ‘We might be here some time.’

‘Can we have a cup of tea? I’m gagging,’ Linda asked.

‘Not yet,’ Patty said. ‘This could go on for hours and it would be daft to have drunk it all then.’

Linda said nothing, but her stomach continued to rumble; the biscuits had done little to fill her up and a cup of hot tea would have been comforting. The crashes and explosions all around them were frightening the boys and Linda began to rock Harry to and fro as she and her mom started to sing to the boys as they’d done before to calm them down. They started on all the nursery rhymes they’d ever known to encourage George to join in, and then all the rousing war songs to counteract the explosions and the tremors they felt even through the shelter. In time the lateness of the hour, Linda’s rocking motion and the sucking of the warm milk caused little Harry’s sobs to ease and his eyelids to droop. But George suddenly sat up straight, all sleepiness forgotten as he said, ‘I want Tolly.’

Linda raised her eyes questioningly to her mother, who said, ‘He dropped it on the pantry floor when I picked him up to run in here.’

Linda knew of George’s devotion to Tolly. ‘He’ll be all right, George,’ she told him. ‘He’s looking after the house.’

George lifted a tear-streaked face and said, ‘No he ain’t, ’itler will bomb him.’

‘No, he won’t, George.’

‘Yes, he will. Else why we in ’ere?’

Linda couldn’t answer that and as George began to cry again, she said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.’

Patty unscrewed the flask and poured out a half-cup for George. ‘Here,’ she said to Linda, ‘see if this will shut him up.’

Patty took Harry from Linda and tucked him in the bunk with a hot-water bottle and a blanket, and left him sucking the last of his warm milk while Linda was blowing the hot tea until it was cool enough to give George.