Daughters of Liverpool

Unlike Andy, Luke had not made any attempt to keep his voice down, and Katie, overhearing Luke’s comment, could feel her ears burning.

Well, let him think what he liked, she decided defensively. She didn’t care, and she didn’t have to explain herself to him either.

It was a cold night, and those girls lucky enough to be queuing with a partner were snuggling up close, whilst several groups of girls were shivering and complaining that their feet would be so numb they wouldn’t be able to dance. Sensibly Katie was wearing her stout work shoes and carrying her borrowed dance shoes in a drawstring canvas bag. She was still conscious of feeling cold, though, and hoped that her nose had not gone too obviously pink.

‘I’m freezing,’ Carole complained.

‘You can have a borrow of my coat, love,’ the cheeky soldier behind them announced, overhearing Carole’s complaint, ‘but you’ll have to share it with me.’

‘Ooohhh.’ Carole pretended to complain, but Katie could see that her eyes were shining and she was smiling.

The army boys were, of course, trying to look as though the cold wasn’t affecting them and that they were far too tough and manly to be affected by a bit of winter weather. Actually, their corporal looked as though he wasn’t affected by it, Katie admitted, watching him hunch one shoulder and turn out of the wind as he lit himself a cigarette.

It had just gone twenty past six when Katie and Carole finally got inside, and handed over their coats to the cloakroom attendant.

‘Here, can you keep my ticket with yours?’ Carole asked her. ‘Only your bag is bigger than mine.’ Her eyes widened as she gazed at Katie’s frock. ‘Oh, you look ever so nice, Katie. Proper smart and stylish.’

‘It isn’t mine,’ Katie felt obliged to admit, sensing that Carole was just a little bit put out by the elegance of Katie’s outfit. ‘All I had was the black frock I wear when I go out with my dad, so my landlady very kindly let me borrow this. It belongs to her sister, but she’s with ENSA – you know, the Entertainments National Service Association, whereby entertainers join up and go out to entertain the troops – and she’s touring somewhere at the moment.’

To Katie’s relief her explanation had obviously mollified Carole because she told her generously, ‘Well, it looks ever so glamorous, it really does. It makes you look proper posh and no mistake.’

People were just starting to make their way into the ballroom, and out of habit Katie looked towards the band in their alcove next to the dance floor. She had already seen from the programme pinned up in the foyer that the band leader was a Mrs Wilf Hamer. Katie didn’t think she’d met her; for one thing she suspected that her father, who was inclined to be old-fashioned about such matters, would not have approved of a female band leader. She had forgotten all about the army boys in the queue now and the hostility of the tall dark handsome one, as she focused on the band, or so she told herself.

* * *

It was a pity the boy was so weak. Emily would have liked him to walk a bit faster so that they could get away from the theatre, just in case they were seen.

They’d almost reached the end of the alley when the boy stopped walking and went rigid.

Now what was wrong with him? Emily wondered what on earth she could do to get him to move and then looked back over her shoulder, keen to get away before anyone came out of the theatre and saw them.

Had those bullies hurt him worse than she had thought? Was he in some kind of pain?

‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ she began, only to stop when he suddenly looked up at the sky in terror.

Then Emily heard it: the low droning sound of approaching bombers, quickly followed by the shrill anxious scream of the air-raid warning.

A thrill of fear went through her, rooting her to the spot, followed by a sense of urgency as she cast a frantic look around herself for an air-raid shelter. The only one she could remember was two streets away on the far side of Roe Street.

‘Come on, we need to get ourselves into a shelter,’ she told the boy, her head down as she broke into a lumbering run towards Roe Street, dragging the boy with her.

Already the night sky was alight with the first crop of incendiary bombs, exploding into the darkness and, as they did so, illuminating the destruction they were causing. Emily froze in horror as one landed on the roof of a building in the next street, and then exploded, sending up a shower of bricks. Woven into the hellish noise of the devastation were the sounds of running feet, cries of warning, and screams of fear and pain as people fled the building and tried to escape the bombs.

Breaking free of the horror transfixing her, Emily started to run for the safety of the air-raid shelter, somehow managing to dodge the shards of flying glass from blown-out windows.

Overhead she could still hear the drone of engines, the bombs falling in a seemingly neverending hell of explosions, followed by the collapsing of buildings. It looked as though the whole of the city and the sky above it were on fire.

As she looked up, desperately trying to track the downward fall of a cluster of incendiaries, one she hadn’t seen fell into a neighbouring street, blowing out the windows of the buildings ahead of them. Instinctively Emily grabbed the boy, swinging him round in front of her and protecting him with her own body as she turned her back to the blast.

When she turned back again she was shaking so much she could hardly move. But they had to move. She had to, for the boy’s sake. She had to think about him and not give way to her own fear.

Picking her way through the broken glass and ignoring the cacophony of fearful sounds all around her, Emily hurried on.

They had almost reached Roe Street when suddenly the boy tried to pull out of her hold, digging in his heels.

‘What is it?’ Emily asked him, desperate to get them both to the safety of the air-raid shelter. The street they were in now was virtually empty, and Emily’s instincts were urging her to run for safety, but she couldn’t leave the boy. An air-raid warden standing at the crossroads ahead of them yelled out, warning her to get off the street, but his words were lost behind the noise from the exploding incendiaries raining down from the sky, as a fresh wave of bombers roared in overhead and attacked the docks and the waterfront. The clamour of bells from the fire engines racing to put out the fires made Emily’s heart pound dizzily.

‘Come on,’ Emily begged the boy, tugging him forward, only to stop and gasp in fear at the sound of a plane so low overhead, it hurt her ears. Instinctively Emily pushed the boy to the ground and then flung herself down on top of him. As she lay there, hardly daring to breathe, an enormous explosion shook the ground, followed by a flash of searing heat. Emily could hear buildings collapsing all around her. Dust and smoke were stinging her eyes, and clogging her throat and nose. Something, Emily didn’t know what, a brick perhaps, thumped down on top of her, followed by another. The sky was raining debris and death.

Katie and Carole were just sitting down at the table they had secured right on the edge of the dance floor when the air-raid siren went off. The two girls looked at one another in mutual consternation, whilst Luke, who had been watching his lads head for the bar, martialled them all together, ready for whatever action might need to be taken.

All in all Luke reckoned there were about two hundred people in the ballroom.

The shrill scream of falling bombs had everyone who could including Katie and Carole diving under the tables for cover.

Katie, who was hoping that her borrowed dress would survive such rough treatment, managed to resist the childish urge to clap her hands over her ears when the ballroom reverberated to the sound of a bomb exploding above their heads, followed by the terrifying sight of a hail of shrapnel coming through the plaster ceiling. The lights flickered and dipped but mercifully managed to stay on.

Katie could see the band leader, Mrs Hamer, diving for cover under the piano, as the shrapnel seemed to chase her, scoring deep marks in the dance floor and marking it right the way across, almost up to the bandstand itself. It all happened so quickly, the shrapnel travelling at such speed, that Katie could only shudder and marvel at the band leader’s lucky escape, whilst saying an automatic prayer for her own father and his safety far away in London, where he too would be working tonight.

‘It’s the theatre next door that’s been hit,’ a fire watcher, who had come running into the building from outside, yelled out. ‘But the explosion’s taken off half the Grafton’s roof.’

Some band members, emerging from cowering under their seats, briefly struck up a rousing tune, quickly applauded by the dancers huddled under the tables.

‘I’m scared,’ Carole wailed to Katie. ‘I want to go.’

‘It’s too late for us to go anywhere now, with bombs still dropping. We’ll all have to stay here until they sound the all clear,’ Katie told her.

They could hear bombs exploding close at hand, and then abruptly the lights went off. Katie held her breath but they didn’t come back on again.

‘We’ll be killed if we stay here.’

Katie could feel Carole trembling, and she could hear in her voice that she was close to tears.

‘No we won’t,’ Katie told her stoutly. ‘They’ll leave us alone now, just you wait and see.’ Behind her own back Katie had her fingers crossed. She was every bit as scared as Carole but there was no point in saying so. She was practised at reassuring her mother in air raids and slipped easily into the role of being the strong sensible comforter.

‘Listen, the band’s started playing,’ she encouraged Carole. ‘You stay here. I’m going to see if there’s any candles.’ Katie took from her handbag the torch such as they had all learned to carry since the blackout laws had come into force, and crawled out from beneath the table, trying not to damage her borrowed dress.

Luke, having used his own torch to ensure that his men were all unharmed, and knowing that they couldn’t leave the dance hall until the all clear had gone unless they wanted to risk being caught in the open whilst bombs were being dropped, caught sight of a very harassed-looking Mr Malcolm Munro, the Grafton’s manager. He went up and introduced himself, offering the services of himself and his men.

‘I’d be grateful to you for whatever you can do, Corporal,’ Mr Munro told him gratefully. ‘We’ve lost nearly half the roof, by the looks of it. Not that you can see much with the power gone.’

‘We’ve all got torches so we can go and take a look at the ceiling to make sure it’s safe. If you happen to have any tarpaulins around we could try and secure the roof for you until you can get summat proper sorted out.’ Luke had to raise his voice to make himself heard above a group of screaming girls who were having hysterics.

He looked round the ballroom. Already someone was moving about quietly, lighting candles and placing them on the tables. Luke frowned when he realised that it was the snooty girl from the queue. Somehow she hadn’t struck him as the sort who would get stuck in in such a quiet and efficient way.

It didn’t take long for Luke and his men to confirm that the ceiling wasn’t in any immediate danger of collapsing onto the dance floor, despite the shrapnel damage, but Mr Munro had been right about the roof. And they didn’t need their torches to show them how much damage had been done. The arc lights from the anti-aircraft batteries, combined with the light from the fires burning in bombed buildings, provided more than enough for them to see where a whole mess of timbers and slates had fallen inwards into the roof space, leaving a gaping hole where the roof itself had been blown right off.

Luckily the ballroom manager had taken the precaution of providing himself with a good set of extending ladders and some tarpaulins, ‘just in case, like the ARP lot told us we should do,’ as he explained to Luke.