Home for Christmas

‘I was getting worried that I must have missed you,’ Agnes said breathlessly.

‘As if I’d let that happen,’ Ted replied with a grin, giving her that special look that made her heart do a somersault.

‘Come on, you two,’ he called out, reaching into the shadows behind him. ‘Come and say hello to Agnes.’

The two small girls who emerged to stand beside him had Ted’s brown hair and blue eyes. Their hair was neatly plaited and their eyes filled with apprehension as they pressed closer to their brother, whilst staring saucer-eyed at the crowd which was now pouring down the stairs in front of them.

‘Marie, Sonia, you hold tight to your brother’s hand. Ted, you just make sure you don’t let go of them.’

The small thin woman, who had now materialised on Ted’s other side, and who it was obvious from her looks was Ted’s mother, hadn’t looked at Agnes yet, but Agnes could understand that her first concern must be for her younger children, just as she understood the bashful shyness that kept the two girls themselves silent as they looked swiftly at her, then away again.

‘Don’t fret, Mum, I’ve got them both safe.’

The sound of the calm loving reassurance in Ted’s voice made Agnes’s heart swell with pride. He was so very much the man of the family, the one they all relied on, just as she had known he must be.

‘This is Agnes, Mum,’ Ted was saying, putting an arm protectively round his sisters’ shoulders as he reached for Agnes’s hand to pull her gently closer.

But although Ted had drawn them altogether like a proper family, and although he was saying with pride in his voice, ‘Come on, girls, give Agnes a smile. After all, she’s going to be your sister,’ neither of the girls would look at her, and Ted’s mother didn’t speak to her at all.

Agnes had been used to dealing with girls younger than she was at the orphanage, and she guessed that the girls’ reluctance to look at her sprang mainly from shyness, but Ted’s mother’s refusal to smile or extend her hand to her was another matter.

Instead of responding welcomingly to her, there was coldness and disapproval in Ted’s mother’s eyes when she looked at her, and hostility too, Agnes feared. But now wasn’t the time to do anything about that because suddenly the air was filled with the shrieking rise and fall of the air-raid siren, causing panic to descend on those still at the top of the steps.

‘Come on,’ Ted instructed his sisters, grabbing each of them by the hand. ‘Mum, you take Sonia’s hand, and, Agnes, you take Marie’s. Don’t let go, either of you,’ he warned his sisters as he hurried them down the steps. ‘Stay close to me, all of you.’

The crowd pressed in on them from all sides, and Agnes felt it was more by good luck than anything else that she managed to keep her feet on the steps. She was sure that she would have panicked herself, worried that she’d fall and be trampled underfoot, if she hadn’t had the role of looking after the elder of Ted’s two sisters. But she kept hold of the little girl’s hand and tried to protect her by keeping as close to her as she could.

They could already hear the planes and they weren’t even down at the bottom of the stairs. The dull menacing thrum of their engines became louder with every breath Agnes took, and she tried to ignore the sounds of panic behind her from those who had yet to make it inside, and the angry protests from those already safely installed, objecting to having to make room for more people.

‘Come on, this way,’ Ted urged his family and Agnes, hurrying them towards a doorway in the wall that led, Agnes knew, to a small storeroom.

‘It will be locked,’ Agnes told him, breathless with anxiety.

‘I’ve got the key,’ Ted responded with a grin. ‘Got it off Smithy this morning, only you’d better not let on to anyone else, otherwise we’ll be crammed in here like sardines in a tin. Do you fancy that, girls,’ he teased his sisters, keeping them in front of him as he let go of their hands to remove the key from his pocket, ‘being squashed like sardines?’

Agnes was very conscious of the fact that right now she was squashed up very close to Ted. It made her feel warm and safe and somehow very grown up to be this close to him in this kind of situation. The intimacy between their bodies was that of a couple bonded together by their need to protect the young lives of Ted’s sisters, just as one day they would protect their own children.

‘In you go, all of you,’ Ted told them once he’d got the door open just enough for them to slip in.

‘It’s dark inside, and I don’t like the dark,’ little Sonia piped up unhappily.

‘There’s a light inside, love, but I don’t want to switch it on until you’re all safely in there,’ Ted tried to reassure her.

Agnes guessed that he didn’t want to put the light on straight away and alert others to the existence of the small hideaway, so she smiled at the little girl and told her, ‘I’ve got my torch, look . . .’ She flashed it briefly ahead of her so that she could see inside what was little more than a large cupboard. About six feet square, with a washbasin inside, it had some hooks on the wall and three battered-looking bentwood chairs.

‘Come on, you two.’ Taking charge, Ted’s mother went into the storeroom, dragging her daughters with her, but still ignoring Agnes.

‘I’d better get back to the office,’ Agnes told Ted. ‘They’ll be expecting me there, seeing as I’m supposed to be volunteering to help out.’

‘I’ll walk you back there,’ Ted told her.

But as he reached for her hand his mother said sharply, ‘Ted, the girls are getting upset. You’d better get in here and help me calm them down.’

Agnes could see how torn he was, so she touched his arm and smiled reassuringly. ‘I’ll be all right You stay here.’

She could tell that he didn’t like letting her go on her own, so she added firmly, ‘When people see that I’m in uniform they’ll let me through.’

‘Ted, your sisters need you,’ Mrs Jackson announced in an even sharper tone.

‘Mum’s a bit on edge and not herself with all this bombing going on,’ Ted whispered apologetically to Agnes, giving her hand a little squeeze.

Agnes nodded. She hoped so much that he was right, she thought, as she made her way slowly and with great difficulty through the mass of people filling the platform and back towards the ticket office. She hoped so much that it was only because Ted’s mother was worried for her children that she had been so off with her, and not because she didn’t like her.

Sergeant Dawson and Dulcie were four houses away from number 13 when they heard the air-raid siren. Without a word the policeman took Dulcie’s crutches from her and, wrapping one strong arm around her waist half carried and half dragged her as he ran with her in the direction of her landlady’s front door.

Dulcie wasn’t the sort to show fear – of anything or anyone – not even to herself. It was a matter of pride, something she had set out to teach herself from the very first minute she had seen her mother gazing into the basket that contained her new baby sister, Edith, with a look of such love in her eyes. So she told herself now that the hammering of her heart was caused by her exertion and not by anything else.

‘I hope that they aren’t in their Anderson already,’ Sergeant Dawson muttered half under his breath as he made to knock on the door, but Dulcie shook her head.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

However, the door was already being opened by Olive, who exclaimed, ‘Thank heavens! I was beginning to worry that you’d be caught out in the open somewhere.’

‘Not twice in less than seven days I’m not going to be,’ Dulcie grimaced as she took her crutches from Sergeant Dawson, thanked him and hobbled inside. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over the sound of the sirens, yelling as though in warning to the oncoming bombers: ‘You aren’t getting a second chance to get me.’

‘Come on. I’ll help you both down to the Anderson,’ Sergeant Dawson told them, also raising his voice, as the noise of the planes’ engines vied for dominance with that of the siren.

‘You should be getting yourself to safety,’ Olive, who had her arm around Dulcie and was guiding her down the hall, protested as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

‘I’m on ARP duty. I’ll have to check the street and make sure that everyone’s left their houses, so I may as well start here.’

‘Where’s Tilly?’ Dulcie demanded when they reached the empty kitchen; the anxiety sharpening her voice touched Olive’s heart and reminded her of just how much her opinion of this young woman had changed in a year.

‘I sent her to the Anderson the minute we heard the siren,’ Olive told her.

Meaning that Olive had waited for her, Dulcie recognised. The tears she hadn’t allowed herself to cry with her mother now filled her eyes and made her blink determinedly to hide her emotion. Dulcie didn’t believe in having emotions, never mind giving in to them. Or at least she hadn’t done until the other girls living at number 13 had risked their lives to save hers when they had been caught in the open in the city’s first big bombing raid.

That night had bonded them together for ever and had completely changed how Dulcie felt about them and about living at number 13. But most especially it had changed how Dulcie felt about Olive.

Olive was glad of the carefully shielded beam of Sergeant Dawson’s torch after they had left the blacked-out house behind and were making their way down the unlit garden path to the Anderson, where, against all the rules, Tilly had the door open, the lit oil lamp glowing out from inside.

There was just time for her to thank Sergeant Dawson yet again before the sound of their voices was drowned out by the incoming bombers, so close now, surely, that Olive didn’t dare risk glancing up at the sky as she shooed Dulcie into the shelter ahead of her and then pulled the door closed behind herself.

‘Mum said that you’d make it back,’ Tilly greeted their lodger. ‘She’s made you some sandwiches in case you didn’t get round to having your tea, and there’s a flask here as well.’ She held up the flask to show Dulcie, who nodded her head.

It was not in Dulcie’s nature to thank others effusively for anything, but there was something in the smile she gave Olive that sent its own special message of all that she now felt for her landlady and her kindness.

‘How was your mother, Dulcie?’ Olive asked as they all settled themselves on the three bottom bunk beds that formed a U shape at the far end of the shelter. ‘Has there been any news about your sister?’

‘No. Mum’s convinced that Edith’s dead, though, and I suppose she must be. She and Dad have been round all the hospitals and the rest centres, and Mum reckons that as Edith would have let her know if she’s all right, she must be dead. She says she doesn’t want to stay in London any longer. Her and Dad are off to Kent in the morning. Dad’s got the promise of a job and somewhere to stay from Paul Dunham. He’s the builder Dad already works for, and he’s got contacts in Kent. We all used to go to Kent hop picking when I was a kid. Hard work it was as well.’

There was a wealth of bitterness in Dulcie’s voice when she talked about her mother that gave away her real feelings, but Olive felt it tactful not to say anything.

The increasing noise of the incoming bombers was now making conversation all but impossible. Tilly covered her ears, and they all looked upwards at the dark roof of the shelter.

‘It will be the docks they’ll be after again, not us,’ Dulcie mouthed.

‘At least we’ve got the ack-ack guns defending us now,’ Tilly mouthed back against the fierce pounding noise from the British gun batteries.

Of course, it was impossible for them to see what was happening as they daren’t risk breaking the blackout by opening the door, but they could hear a second wave of bombers directly overhead, whilst the shrill whistle of bombs falling from the first wave could be heard mingled with the dull heavy ‘whoomf’ sound of the explosions.

‘They were saying at work this morning that the docks were burning so fiercely the other night, the wood was reigniting even though the firemen had soaked it and put the fire out once,’ Tilly said. ‘I never thought before of fire being so dangerous. A fire used to be something I’d look forward to coming home to on a cold winter’s day, something that warmed you, not killed you, but now . . .’

‘At least the RAF are giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine,’ Dulcie replied, trying to lift Tilly’s spirits by reminding her of what they’d heard on the wireless of a night time raid Bomber Command had made on German cities earlier in the week in retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s attack on London.

‘Time we had those sandwiches, I think,’ Olive decided when a fresh crescendo of explosions had both girls looking noticeably pale-faced in the glow of the oil lamp. Olive couldn’t forget the danger they had already faced and from which, miraculously, they had escaped safely. They had made light of the experience since, but Olive wouldn’t have blamed them if they had shown far more fear now than they were doing.

‘Some East Enders we’ve had at the hospital have been saying that Hitler is only bombing the East End because he wants to get rid of it before he sets himself up in London,’ Tilly told her mother. ‘He doesn’t care how many people he kills and hurts.’

‘It’s the docks the Germans have been aiming for,’ Olive pointed out, ‘because they know how important they are for bringing in supplies to keep the country running.’

‘They’re bombing more than just the docks and the East End now,’ said Dulcie ‘although it’s true that the East End has been the worst hit. There’s whole streets gone; nothing left at all except half a house here and there. I saw one when I went to see my mother, where the whole side of the house had been taken off and you could see right into every room. Of course, the downstairs rooms had been cleared. There’s looters everywhere, Sergeant Dawson said, nabbing everything they can. But upstairs you could see the bed and all the furniture with a rag rug half hanging off the floor where the wall had gone. I’m glad it wasn’t my bedroom. Horrible, it was, with a really nasty green bedspread on the bed. I’d have been ashamed to call it mine.’

Olive reached for the sandwiches, carefully wrapped in a piece of precious greaseproof paper – precious because it was virtually impossible to buy it any more, thanks to the war – and then almost dropped them when the sound of a bomb exploding somewhere close at hand was so loud that both girls immediately clapped their hands over their ears. Putting the sandwiches aside, Olive opened her arms and immediately the girls came to sit one on either side of her so that she could hold them both close. The warmth of them nestling close to her reminded her of something she needed to say to Dulcie.

Olive placed her lips close to Dulcie’s ear and told her, ‘Dulcie, I’ve decided that whilst you’re off work with your ankle, you don’t have to pay me any rent.’

Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She had been worrying about paying her rent whilst she was off sick and on short wages, but she was a thrifty young woman and she’d worked out that if she was careful she’d got enough in her Post Office book to pay her rent for the six weeks she’d be in plaster. To have Olive tell her that she didn’t need to pay her anything for those six weeks wasn’t just kind, it was generosity the like of which Dulcie had never previously known.

For a few seconds she was too surprised to say anything, able only to stare at Olive with wide disbelieving eyes, before replying, ‘That’s ever so good of you, but I’d like to pay half of my rent. I can afford to, and it doesn’t seem right you letting me stay for nothing.’

Her offer touched Olive’s heart. She knew how difficult it was for Dulcie to be gracious and grateful to anyone, but especially to her own sex, so she gave her an extra hug and shook her head.

‘No, Dulcie. I’ve made up my mind.’

To Dulcie’s horror her eyes had filled with tears and now one rolled down her cheek to splash on Olive’s hand.

‘I’ve never known anyone as kind as you . . .’ Dulcie began, but what she wanted to say was silenced by the sound of more planes overhead.

There was no need for any of them to speak. They all knew what they were feeling. There were bombs dropping all around them, even though the docks, and not Holborn, were the bombers’ targets. Everyone knew that the planes dropped whatever they had left before turning homewards, and if you just happened to be underneath that bomb then too bad.

The night stretched ahead of them, filled with danger and the prospect of death. There was nothing they could do, certainly nowhere for them to run to. They could only sit it out together, wait and pray.

Chapter Four

When the sound of the all clear brought the three occupants of number 13’s Anderson shelter out of their fitful light sleep and Olive opened the door, the sight of the house still standing – and with it, as far as they could see, the rest of Article Row – was a huge relief. They trooped wearily and thankfully back indoors, ignoring the smell of burning in the air, the taste of brick dust, and the sight of the red glare lighting up the sky to the east.

‘Nearly four o’clock,’ Olive commented, seeing Tilly stifle a yawn. ‘That means we can have three hours’ decent sleep before we need to get up again.’

Olive had been intending to have a bed put up in the front room for Dulcie because of her broken ankle, but her lodger had insisted that she could and would manage the stairs, and she had been as good as her word. Secretly Olive had been relieved by Dulcie’s insistence about this. Olive was very proud of her front room. Upstairs in the bedrooms she still had the dark wood furniture she had inherited, with the house, from her in-laws, but in the front room she had replaced everything.

Olive had redecorated the room herself, painting the walls cream, and the picture rail green to match the smart, shaped plain pelmet, and curtains in a lighter green pattern of fern leaves. During the winter months, drawn over the blackout fabric, the curtains gave the room an air of cosy warmth, whilst in the summer they let in the light. Olive had made the curtains herself using a sewing machine borrowed from the vicar’s wife.

A stylish stepped mirror hung over the gas fire. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring, and over it was a patterned carpet in green, dark red and cream to match the dark green damask-covered three-piece suite. On the glass and light wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, stood a pretty crystal bowl, which she’d bought in an antique shop just off the Strand. Against the back wall, behind the sofa, was a radiogram in the same light wood as the coffee table.

Olive had been perfectly prepared to push her precious furniture to one side to put a bed up in the room for Dulcie, but Dulcie had gone up in her esteem for insisting on not ‘putting her out’, as she had called it.

In the ticket office Agnes heard the all clear with great relief. She hadn’t really slept at all, partly because of the bombs and partly because of her anxiety about Ted’s mother. Now she had to get up and get back to her voluntary duties. Not that she minded. Her truckle bed wasn’t very comfortable, and Miss Wood, who also worked in the office and had volunteered to come in overnight, had snored dreadfully.

People were already starting to make their way out of the underground, a small stream of yawning, tired-looking humanity: mothers carrying babies, fathers with children, on their shoulders, families with older children, their silence punctuated by the laughing and whistling of several men who staggered past the ticket office carrying bottles of beer.

Mr Smith, who had emerged from his office looking, Agnes noticed, every bit as spruce as though he had only just arrived at work and not spent the night there, glared after them disapprovingly.

‘Disgraceful, carrying on like that. And at a time like this,’ he told Agnes.

‘Perhaps they were trying to cheer themselves up,’ she replied.

‘Make a nuisance of themselves, more like.’

‘I’ve heard that at some of the undergrounds they’ve had people organising singsongs,’ Miss Wood confided to Agnes, when Mr Smith had gone ‘up top’ to see ‘what was what’. ‘I can’t see Mr Smith encouraging that here.’

Agnes didn’t like to think of how much more damage the bombs must have done overnight. The noise had been dreadful.

Would Ted have time to come into the office to see her? He’d want to see his family safely home, of course, and then he’d have to come back to work himself. She wasn’t going to think about Ted’s mother not speaking to her. Agnes swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Ted was her hero and she wanted so very much for his family to like her. There was no getting away from her shaming background, though. As one of the other children at the orphanage had told her, ‘If your ma leaves you outside the orphanage and then scarpers, that means that you’re a bastard and that you’ve got bad blood in you ’cos your pa didn’t want to marry your ma.’

Agnes had known from the way that Ted talked about his mother and their family life that being respectable was important to her. This thought brought another lump to Agnes’s throat, and her eyes began to sting.

It was daylight when Sally left the hospital, with the kind of misty smoke haze hanging over the city that September mornings could bring. But this was a different kind of haze: small black smuts and even hot cinders were floating down from the sky. She could smell burning in the air, a smell with which all Londoners were becoming familiar. This morning’s smoky haze smelled unpleasantly of tallow fat. In the direction of the docks a red glow lay on the sky like a painful raised weal on a patient’s flesh, betraying the savagery of the wound they had suffered.

Just as Sally had left, one of the theatre porters, also going off duty, had told her with real shock in his voice, ‘St Paul’s nearly got it last night. Dropped an eight-hundred-pound bomb on it, Jerry did. Landed right in front of the steps and would have blown the whole front to bits, but someone up there,’ he had gestured towards the heavens, ‘wasn’t going to let Hitler get away with that.’

Now Sally felt impelled to go and view the cathedral herself – just to make sure it wasn’t damaged.

Of course, the area around it had been cordoned off, and a crowd had gathered at a safe distance. From what she could see, soldiers, the Home Guard, policemen and fire fighters were all busy working by the steps.

‘Got to dig the bomb out, and that will take some doing,’ a man standing next to Sally informed her.

‘They’ll have the bomb disposal lot in, of course,’ another man put in, older and possibly ex-military himself, from his upright bearing.

As comments and opinions flew back and forth – East End accents mingling with upper class and the falsely ‘refined’ tones adopted by those who wanted to ‘better themselves’ – the fate of Sir Christopher Wren’s cathedral drew the people of the city together in a common cause.

Once she had assured herself that St Paul’s was undamaged, Sally started to make her way back to Article Row. At least working nights meant that she was avoiding the sleeplessness of night raids. She’d never thought it lucky to be doing night shifts before, she smiled to herself ruefully, acknowledging the shouted, ‘Watch out for the hoses,’ from a fireman with a nod of her head, as she stepped carefully over them.

From the evidence of the large basket on the other side of the street, incendiaries had obviously been dropped. These bombs were easy enough to put out if one was swift to collect them on a shovel and douse them in water or sand before the chemicals inside them exploded, but the baskets in which they were dropped contained hundreds, and even the most fleet-footed fire watcher couldn’t possibly extinguish them all. Once the fires took hold, no building was safe. Apart from shattered windows, the buildings either side of the road seemed to be intact, although from the evidence of so many hoses, their interiors would now be soaked and damaged, Sally thought sympathetically.