The Willow Pool

Two

The first day of May had been like most other days. Ordinary. A postcard from Kip; Nell, who had seen the postman, demanding to know what he had pushed through the letter box; a fatless day, since Meg had used up her butter, lard and margarine, and would have to do without until rations were due again tomorrow. A boring day until a little after the nine o’clock news. Meg had carried out kitchen chairs, and she and Nell sat there, faces to the last of the evening sun, talking about the days when grocers’ shelves were piled high with food few could afford, and wasn’t it amazing that the minute unemployment dropped and people had money in their pockets for a change, They had rationed food!

‘Ssssh!’ All at once Meg tilted her head. ‘Listen …’

They heard no sound, yet there was no mistaking what was to be, because each had sensed the strange quiet that hung on the air before an alert sounded. People had come to recognize that silence: a stillness so complete they could sense it, taste it almost. It was like nothing else Meg knew; a void so all-embracing that it was as if the entire city waited with her, breath indrawn, for the stomach-turning wail.

The first siren sounded distantly and she whispered, ‘It is! It’s a raid, Nell!’

Her mouth had gone dry, fear iced through her. She ran into the kitchen, gathering up her handbag and Ma’s attaché case, throwing a coat over her shoulders, grabbing the woolly scarf that hung on the doorpeg. Then she turned the key in the lock and ran to the door of number 3, opening it without preamble.

‘Tommy! Be sharp about it!’

‘You two go on ahead!’ He hobbled across the room, lame leg swinging jerkily, gas mask over his arm.

‘We’re goin’ together!’ Nell slammed shut her front door. ‘There’s nuthin’ happenin’ yet. No hurry.’ It was a matter of principle that unless bombs were actually dropping, she walked to the shelter. Not for a big clock would she give bluddy Hitler the satisfaction of knowing how afraid she was; that every time the siren went she had an overwhelming need to pee. ‘Just poppin’ to the lavvy! Won’t be a tick!’

‘By the heck,’ said Tommy, as they hurried up Lyra Street towards St Joseph’s church, ‘that lot know when to come!’ He glared vindictively at a near-full moon rising low in the sky.

Father O’Flaherty stood at the church door, gathering in his flock. The crypt was deep and solid, and safe against anything save a direct hit. There were worse places to be when bombs were dropping than the crypt of St Joseph’s.

‘Evenin’, Father,’ Nell smiled. ‘God luv yer.’

‘Down ye go!’ None who lived in Tippet’s Yard were of the faith of Rome, yet they were always made welcome by the elderly priest.

‘Father.’ Tommy nodded, tipping his cap; Meg smiled her relief and thanks.

Already the crypt smelled of damp and body sweat, but it made no matter. They were safer than most, Meg thought thankfully, making for a corner seat, spreading her belongings either side of her, reserving places for Nell and Tommy.

A woman with three small children and a baby in her arms was helped down the twisting stone steps by an elderly nun; children, wakened from sleep, began to fret, only to be told to shurrup their whingeing, or big fat Goering would come and get them!

‘As quiet as the grave up there!’

The blackout curtain covering the door swished aside and Father O’Flaherty beamed reassuringly at all present, who smiled back, even though they knew it was only a matter of time before the bombs fell. Perhaps though, Tommy thought, it was all part of a war of nerves. Perhaps those bombers had flown in low up the river, just to make sure the sirens would send most of Liverpool to the shelters. After which, perversely, they turned south-east to drop their bombs on Manchester, instead. Them Krauts didn’t change.

‘Looks like they’re not coming.’ Nell’s whisper sounded loud in the strained, listening silence.

The flock turned, seeking out the optimist, warning her, unspeaking, not to tempt Fate.

The eyes of the pretty young nun found those of the priest, and she raised her eyebrows questioningly. Father O’Flaherty nodded, and she bent down to turn up the flame beneath the tea urn.

‘Soon be ready,’ she smiled, dropping a small calico bag in which tea had been carefully tied into the steaming water. ‘Dear sweet Lord, what was that?’

Accusing eyes turned once more to the tempter of Fate, then opened wide with fear as the company listened for the second bomb to fall, and the third, because bombs usually fell three at a time.

Indrawn breaths were let go noisily. The explosions were far enough away. Seemed like the docks were getting it, poor sods; the north-end docks, that was, and maybe too on the other side of the river, Birkenhead way. As long as they didn’t come any nearer it would be all right.

Feet shuffled; bottoms wriggled; the flock settled down to await the tea that would soon be passed round in thick, earthenware mugs. Mothers shifted sleeping babies to a more comfortable position; small, grubby thumbs slid into small, pink mouths; old men folded their arms and closed their eyes. Almost certainly the docks were the target, and the city centre. Again.

The all clear came with the dawn. It sounded high and steady; a promise that the skies above Liverpool were clear, the danger over. Now people could shuffle stiffly into the real world, get on with their lives as best they could; men wondering if there would be a tram to take them to a place of work which might not now be there, women to resume the task of looking after children, searching shops for off-the-ration food – if the bombers had left any shops standing, that was.

‘No damage up top that I can see!’ The priest’s booming voice filled the crypt. ‘They gave us a miss last night! Away to your homes now, and I’ll want volunteers for a bit of cleaning up down here after eight o’clock Mass!’

Heads lifted, shoulders straightened. No damage done to the streets around St Joseph’s. They still had homes to go to! Sad about the docks, mind, but a sup of tea was the first thing that came to mind, then washing away the stink of the crypt.

There was a brightening in the sky behind the crowd of warehouses at the distant dockside. A faint breeze blew in from the river, bringing with it the smells of destruction: the acrid stink of blazing timber doused with water, the stench of sewage, mingling with whiffs of escaping coal gas. All around them, the dust of bomb rubble was beginning to settle, reminding them that the danger had not been so very far away, and that next time …

‘You’ll be gettin’ a bit of a wash, then, and going to work?’ Nell said, matter-of-factly.

‘Suppose so …’ Meg’s eyes seemed full of grit and she smelled of sweat, but a night spent in the shelter was no excuse for being late for work.

‘I’ll be getting me head down for a couple of hours,’ Tommy said, calculating that the bombers would just about now be landing on aerodromes in Holland or France. ‘I hate Jairmans,’ he grumbled, still not able to forgive them for the last war, let alone for starting another. ‘One of these days, they’ll get what’s coming to them, and I hope I’ll still be alive to see it! Ta-ra well, each.’

‘I’ll make a brew.’ Nell unlocked her door. ‘Come to mine when you’re ready, queen.’ She had bread and jam; best see that Dolly’s girl had something inside her before she went to work, because God only knew how long it might take her to get there. It needed only one unexploded bomb or a few yards of mangled tram track to bring the city centre to a standstill. But ill winds, and all that. There’d be shovelling and clearing up to do; put a few quid into the pockets of the poor sods still on the dole, like as not. Funny that it should take a war to bring work. Liverpool folk had benefited from the war, even the prostitutes on Lime Street. Yet given a choice, they’d all have voted for poverty and peace. ‘And you’d better leave your ma’s case with me, in case bluddy Hitler sends them bombers back whilst you’re out!’

‘I’ll do that, Nell. And it’ll be early to bed for me tonight!’

She closed the door, slid home the bolt, then, drawing the kitchen curtains, turned on the tap above the sink to make sure there was water still in it. Then she took off her clothes and began to wash the stink from her body.

The cold water did little to revive her and she thought achingly of her bed in the slant-roofed bedroom. Tonight she would sleep and sleep.

Sleep was not to be. As the May-blue sky began to shade to apricot, the air-raid sirens wailed again.

‘Oh, no!’ Meg gasped. ‘Not two nights on the trot!’ She flung wide the door to find Tommy on the doorstep.

‘Come on, girl! They’re back!’

‘Where’s Nell?’

‘Said she was off out to see if she could find a few ciggies and a drop of the hard stuff. Reckon she’ll be at the pub …’

‘She’ll have heard the sirens, won’t she? She’ll make her way to the crypt?’

‘Happen. Mind, the pub has good cellars – she’ll find somewhere. And we’d best be off. You got everything, then?’

‘Think so.’ Ma’s case, a coat and scarf, her handbag and gas mask. ‘God, Tommy, but I’m tired.’

‘Aye.’ At least he and Nell had managed a few hours’ sleep. ‘Not like them to come two nights runnin’. They’ve never done it before. Maybe this one’s a false alarm.’

False alarms sometimes happened. Once it had been a V-formation of geese flying up the Mersey; another time it was fighters which turned out to be ours. Tonight might be another cockup, Tommy decided, and before the little nun had time to light the gas under the tea urn, the all clear would go and they’d shove off to their beds.

As Meg and Tommy walked carefully down the worn, twisting steps, they saw Nell sitting in the corner, waving, and beside her Kip’s sister, Amy.

‘Was just outside the church when the sirens went,’ Nell beamed. ‘Sit yourselves down.’

Her breath smelled of gin and there would be cigarettes in her pinafore pocket, Meg was sure.

‘I take it the pub came up with five,’ she smiled, relieved to see her neighbour.

‘No. Not the pub.’ Nell dipped into her pocket and brought out a packet – a twenty packet, would you believe – of Senior Service such as no civilian had seen these twelve months past. ‘I ran into a gentleman friend, just docked from the USA.’

‘Ah.’ Tommy nodded.

‘A friend,’ Meg said, then closed her eyes and leaned her shoulders against the rough stone of the wall, willing the all clear to sound by the time she had counted to a hundred and one.

Seconds later, bombs began to fall, and nearer to St Joseph’s tonight. Those who sheltered there felt the awful crunch as the first landed – slamming into the earth just a second before the explosion roared and raged directly above them – sensed the shock waves through the thick, rough stones of the crypt, as the bombs went to earth.

‘Jaysus, but that one was near!’ Father O’Flaherty gasped as years of gathered dust and flakes of plaster fell from the vaulted roof. Eyes widened in silent terror, fingertips fondled rosary beads; children, too afraid to cry, whimpered softly. ‘Ah, well, a miss is as good as a mile,’ the old priest roared defiantly. ‘And will you move yourself, sister, and light that tea urn? Aren’t we all just about choked with bliddy dust?’

Nell wrapped an arm around the shoulders of the girl who sat beside her, crossing her legs tightly, wondering if there was a lavvy in the crypt.

‘Bluddy Hitler,’ she muttered, wanting desperately to light a cigarette, knowing that if she took out the packet and broke the Cellophane wrapping, she would be expected to offer it round. ‘Want to get a bit of shuteye, girl? Ar, well, I suppose not,’ she shrugged when Meg shook her head, because who could sleep with all that lot going on above? ‘Bluddy Hitler,’ she said again.

Yet when the all clear sounded, those who had spent five fear-filled hours longing for it were all at once reluctant to climb the crypt steps; shrank from reality, because last night’s raid had been too near to home.

Meg rose to her feet, rotating her head painfully. There was a crick in her neck and every bone in her body ached.

‘What do you suppose it’ll be like?’ She offered her arm to Nell, needing her comforting closeness. ‘What if –’

‘If Tippet’s Yard has copped one, d’you mean?’

Meg nodded mutely. Through the open doors ahead she could see a square of pink and grey morning sky, though what she would find when they stepped into the world beyond, she did not know.

‘Well! Will you look at that!’ Clutching the gatepost for support because her legs had all at once gone peculiar, Nell gazed down Lyra Street.

‘Oh my God!’ Kip’s sister, her husband away at sea, lived in Lyra Street.

‘Looks like Amy’s is all right,’ Meg whispered, eyes scanning the rubble-piled street. Three houses had been bombed; one stood broken and jagged, with wallpaper flapping in the breeze and what was left of a chimney stack looking as if were ready to fall if someone sneezed. Of the other two houses, nothing remained. It was as if, Meg thought, some giant hand had scooped them out so cleanly and thoroughly that they might never have stood there. She turned to see Kip’s sister standing beside her, a baby over her shoulder, a small girl at her side.

‘It’s all right, Amy. They didn’t get yours …’

‘No, thank God,’ she breathed, her face crumpling into tears of relief. ‘What about Tippet’s?’

‘Dunno. Haven’t had a look yet, though it seems all right.’ Ahead, Meg could see slate roofs, gleaming black in the morning light. ‘I’ll push off, if you’re sure you’re OK?’

‘I’m fine …’

Tippet’s Yard was undamaged; not so much as a broken window pane to be seen.

‘Thanks be for small mercies,’ Nell muttered, her eyes ranging the roofs for missing slates, glad that the small, soot-caked huddle of buildings seemed not to have been worth a German bomb. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was hers and she called it home. She had even, she admitted, been glad when Liverpool Corporation had declared it a slum and placed a demolition order on it. Yet the Corpie was entitled to knock it down if the mood took them, Nell thought mutinously; the German Air Force was not! ‘You’ll not be goin’ in to work, Meg? You look like you’re asleep on your feet!’

‘Not this morning.’ She’d had to walk the best part of two miles yesterday to get to the store, only to find half the staff missing. ‘I’ll get a few hours’ sleep; maybe I’ll go in this afternoon.’ When she could think straight, that was; when she had washed away the smell of the crypt and had a couple of hours in bed.

Nell unlocked her door, calling down hell and the pox on Hitler, muttering that at least the Kaiser had been a gentleman and not a pesky corporal! ‘And if that lot come again tonight, I’m stoppin’ here!’

She couldn’t take another night of hard benches and air that almost choked you to breathe it. And she couldn’t stand one more night of whingeing kids, poor little sods, and the stink of pee and unchanged nappies. Tonight, Nell Shaw would sleep in her own bed, and Hitler could go to hell!

Tommy and Meg – and Nell, too – spent five more nights in the shelter of St Joseph’s church. Five nights more the sirens wailed. Liverpool was cut off from the rest of the country, railway stations out of action – no trains out, or in. Buses were thin on the ground; tram tracks lay in grotesquely twisted shapes, fires still burned on the docks either side of the river.

Poor old Liverpool, Nell sighed. How much more could it take? As much as bluddy Hitler could dish out, she decided, and then some, though what Meg would do now that Edmund and Sons had been flattened was another worry on her mind.

The girl had been lucky, for all that; had been given her pay packet only the day before, and the commission she had earned during the previous month. Meg wasn’t penniless, exactly; not for a couple of weeks.

‘What’ll you do – about a job, I mean?’ Nell asked a week and a day after that first raid. ‘I suppose you could sign on the dole …’ If the dole office was still standing, that was.

‘Suppose I could, though I don’t much care. All I know is that I’ve had just as much of this as I can take! Seven nights of it!’

‘Haven’t we all, queen? But there’s nuthin’ we can do about it! And you an’ me an’ Tommy are still alive and a roof over our heads!’

‘For how much longer?’ It was against the odds, Meg thought despairingly, for Tippet’s Yard to survive many more nights of bombing. Sooner or later it would be hit, and then they would join the homeless in makeshift rest centres and live from night to night, wondering when it would all end.

It was very soon to end, though those who waited wearily that Friday night with bags packed ready for the shelters did not know it. The moon was waning, Tommy had said cautiously, gazing into the sky. Soon the German bombers would be without the benefit of a city laid beneath them as clear as day, almost.

Not that they’d had it all their own way. Anti-aircraft guns blazed shells into the night sky and naval ships in the Mersey had elevated their guns and joined in the barrage too. Many Luftwaffe planes had crashed or been blown up in mid-air; it hadn’t been as easy as Fat Hermann thought.

‘They’re late.’ It was past the time they usually came; what trickery did they have in mind tonight, then?

‘Whisht what you say,’ Nell snapped. Like most of the people of Liverpool, she was tired and afraid, and wished she had relations in the country she could go to – if there had been a bus to take her there, that was. ‘Don’t do to go tempting fate, girl.’

At eleven that night, the sirens had still not sounded; at midnight Nell said cautiously that she was going to have one last ciggy, then be damned if she wasn’t going to bed.

‘Looks like you were right, Meg Blundell. Maybe they aren’t coming,’ Tommy ventured. Happen tonight some other city was to get Liverpool’s bombs. London perhaps, or Birmingham or Clydeside. ‘Think I’ll chance my luck and go to bed, an’ all!’

They weren’t coming, said the people of Liverpool in disbelief. To those who waited it seemed there was to be a reprieve. Watchers on rooftops searched an empty sky; fire crews and ambulance crews remained uncalled. In rest centres volunteers counted off another hour and said that maybe, perhaps for just one night, Liverpool was to be allowed to lick its wounds – and sleep.

This was the time, Meg thought, dizzy from so many hours of sleep, to take stock of her life. Of course, the bombers might return tonight and she would be back to square one again; but if they didn’t come, then top of the list was finding a job. Rumour had it that the city centre was in a mess, with roads blocked and ARP men still digging in the rubble for bodies, dead or alive. So maybe – if the Labour Exchange was still standing, that was – she could offer to help the rescuers. She was young and strong and could learn to handle a shovel. Or maybe they could do with help at the rest centres or at one of the hospitals. Just as long as the job paid money she wasn’t particular, and besides, she thought, it would be her way of giving a two-fingers-up to Hitler’s lot.