The Heart of the Family

Copyright

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2009

Copyright © Annie Groves 2009

Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007265909

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007322695

Version: 2016-12-15

Dedication

For my readers who have so kindly and generously supported me. I hope you are all enjoying reading about the Campion family as much as I am enjoying telling their story.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

PART TWO

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

ONE

Wednesday 7 May 1941

It had just gone midnight. Conversation between the occupants of Jean Campion’s comfortable and homely kitchen slowed and stuttered, then died.

Jean’s twin daughters, Sasha and Lou, Katie, her billetee and her son, Luke’s, girlfriend, looked at one another.

Jean’s husband, Sam, who had been out working since eight o’clock that morning helping to remove what could be cleared of the devastation left by Hitler’s six nights of ferocious bombing, slumped in his chair, looking defeated. All of them were waiting for the dreaded and now familiar sound of the air-raid siren, warning them that Luftwaffe bombers were approaching the city, bringing yet another night’s destruction and death.

The tension caused by the heavy bombing of Liverpool had taken hold of them just as it had all those who were now virtually trapped in a city cut off from the rest of the country, its buildings destroyed, its people killed and maimed, a helpless victim now waiting for the deathblow.

Jean looked at the twins. They had been very subdued since Sasha had been rescued on Saturday night after becoming trapped in a bomb site. The young UXB soldier who had taken Sasha’s place beneath the bomb so that she could be rescued without the device being disturbed had become a hero to the whole family.

Without his bravery Jean was convinced that there would have been only one of the twins here now. Her heart missed a beat. She mustn’t think of what could have been. She must concentrate instead on praying that they would all survive what was happening now. The twins were growing up. Soon they would be sixteen – young women and not merely girls any more. Sixteen and on the brink of womanhood with their adult lives stretching ahead of them, if they survived Hitler’s onslaught on Liverpool.

Just gone midnight. If the bombers were coming then they would know soon. The siren had sounded around midnight for the last three nights.

Jean thought of her two eldest children – Luke in the army and stationed at nearby Seacombe barracks; her daughter Grace in her final year as a trainee nurse and on duty tonight in one of the city’s busiest and most vulnerable hospitals – and she prayed as she had done every night since the war had started that those she loved would all be safe.

Surreptitiously Katie looked at her watch. Nearly half-past midnight. Would tonight be yet another spent in the air-raid shelter, trying not to be afraid for Luke, whom she loved so much and whom she knew, as a serving soldier whose unit was on home defence duties, would be in far more danger than they were?

Jean couldn’t bear the tension any more. ‘I’ll put the kettle on—’ she started to say, and then stopped as it began: the shrill urgent call to protect themselves, the sound of which gripped a person by the throat and around the heart, a shuddering shocking exhalation of noise that warned of the terrible unbelievable horror that brought death raining down from the night sky.

They exchanged helpless, anguished looks.

‘Here we go again,’ Sam announced unnecessarily. ‘I’ll walk you down to the shelter and then I’d better go and report for fire-watching duty.’

‘But, Sam, you’ve worked from morning to night for the last six nights,’ Jean protested, as they all picked up the bundles containing the sleeping bags and everything else they would need for yet another night in the air-raid shelter.

‘Aye, well, at least I can still work, not like some,’ Sam replied grimly.

Jean felt her heart bump shakily. On Sunday morning, in the aftermath of Saturday night’s heavy bombing, two of his colleagues had been badly injured when a building had collapsed on top of them.

Fortunately, the shelter was only at the end of the road. Ash Grove nestled comfortably between the top end of Edge Hill, with its aspirational working-class inhabitants, and the bottom end of middle-class Wavertree, lying further inland to the east, and was far enough away from the docks and the city centre not to attract the main attention of the Luftwaffe. But not so far that the Campion family couldn’t in happier times walk down to the ferry in under half an hour when they wanted to visit Jean’s sister, Vi, and her family who lived across the water in Wallasey. And certainly close enough for Luke to take that same ferry home from the Seacombe barracks, which also lay on the other side of the river from the city.

Once they were outside in the street they were able to see what the blacked-out windows had protected them from.

Below the gentle rise that lifted Edge Hill and Wavertree above the city proper, the probing beams of the anti-aircraft batteries revealed ghoulish images of gutted buildings, still smoking from the fires of earlier bombing raids.

They had reached the shelter now. Sam gave Jean a swift hug and, unusually for such an undemonstrative man, turned to hug both the twins, then placed his hand on Katie’s arm and gave it a small squeeze before standing to one side to watch as they all filed into the shelter.

Jean prayed, as she always did, that her husband would return from his work safe and unharmed.

‘Not again.’

Grace heard the note of suppressed panic in the voice of the probationer who was new on the ward, and told her calmly, as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘I think Mr Williams has finished with his bottle now. Go and collect it from him and take it to the sluice room, will you? When you’ve done that come back and help me get the patients ready to take down to the shelter.’

After pausing to check that her calming words had had the right effect, Grace moved swiftly towards the end of the ward to start securing those patients who had to stay put. Straps hung down at the sides of the beds, ready to fasten over the patients when the siren went off, and the recent spate of attacks now ensured that everyone moved automatically to do what had to be done – even the new probationer, once Grace had calmed her fear.

Grace loved working on men’s surgical. The patients were for the most part absolute darlings – although of course there was always the exception, like her own cousin Charlie, who had been brought in on Saturday night suffering from concussion. Charlie was well on the way to recovery now, but not quite well enough to go home, and he was making a thorough nuisance of himself, expecting special treatment because his father was a member of Wallasey’s town council, and flirting with the other nurses, despite the fact that he was engaged and due to get married in June.

Now, as she paired up with the probationer so that they could secure the patients, Grace reflected that routine and having a job to do, as she had quickly learned, had a way of calming the nerves and making a person focus on necessities instead of worrying about what might happen – or thinking about the terrible raid three days ago when the hospital had been bombed, and staff and patients killed and injured.

Another bloody air raid. Determinedly Charlie avoided the look he knew his cousin Grace would be sending him. After all, why should he risk his own life pushing ruddy beds around, like those patients who were daft enough to get out of their beds to help the nursing staff? In this world a chap had to put himself first if he wanted to survive.

Whilst he might have been too badly concussed to be able to remember much of what had happened to him when he had originally been brought into the hospital, once he had started to recover, the memory of what had happened that night had come back to him. Naturally, Charlie had then been quick to edit the truth to show himself in the best possible light. In his version of events, the beating inflicted on him by the ex-soldier-turned-petty criminal who had been blackmailing him had become a tale of him being set upon by some unknown men, no doubt intent on robbing him when he had been on an errand of mercy to see an old comrade.

His mother had been too relieved that he was safe to ask too many questions, and Dougie Richards, the blackmailer, certainly wasn’t going to call his bluff, since he had been killed by the bomb that that been dropped on the pub he had made his headquarters.

As for the girl with whom he had spent the night, as an engaged-to-be-married man Charlie wasn’t going to tell his mother or anyone else about her, was he? As he joined the exodus of people hurrying down the stairs to the safety of the air-raid shelters, Charlie shrugged dismissively. What a chap did with that kind of girl had nothing to do with the respectable things in life, like getting engaged and married. The girl he’d bedded lived in a different world from the one inhabited by women like his mother and his fiancée, and those two worlds never could and never would meet. That was understood.

Pity he’d left his battledress jacket behind, though. If the discharge he was angling for, so that he could leave the army and return home to Wallasey to work for his father, didn’t come soon, he could end up having to fork out for a replacement. He’d got far better things to spend his money on than a piece of army kit he wasn’t going to wear.

Everyone who’d heard what had happened to him said how lucky he’d been to have left the pub where he’d gone to meet his ex-comrade, before it had been flattened by a bomb, killing everyone inside, but only he knew just how lucky he was, Charlie acknowledged. With Dougie Richards and his fellow thugs dead, Charlie was now free from the threat of blackmail.

Having assured his mother that his bruises looked worse than they were, Charlie had then told Vi that he didn’t want Daphne, so carefully protected from the realities of life by her doting parents, to be unnecessarily upset by the sight of them when she already had the wedding to worry about. The last thing he felt like doing right now was having to comfort Daphne whilst she wept all over him. That reluctance had nothing whatsoever to do with his memories of the passionate warmth in his arms of a girl who was not his fiancée. Of course it didn’t. Good Lord, the last thing Charlie wanted in a wife was passion. Daphne was the perfect wife for him.

Yes, he had a lot to congratulate himself about, Charlie decided, with a grin. Poor old Bella, his sister, had had her nose well and truly put out of joint by his sudden ascent to the throne of parental favouritism, and her own removal from it, on account of his upcoming marriage to Daphne.

Daphne’s parents not only possessed a double-barrelled surname and titled connections, Daphne’s father was a Name at Lloyd’s and, in Charlie’s father’s own words, ‘bound to be rolling in money, war or no war’.

Edwin was the kind of man who judged other men by one simple criterion – their financial status. Those like his wife’s twin sister’s husband, who didn’t have a hope of ever earning what Edwin did, he despised; those who threatened his supremacy in his own field, he made sure he kept where they belonged – several rungs below him on the ladder, by whatever means, dirty tricks included, if they were called for; those a few steps above him on that ladder he detested and consequently accused in public of using sharp practices, of a type abhorrent to him, of course, otherwise he would have been their equal. But those like Daphne’s father, who were members of the ‘professional class’, and who had family money, were so far above him in his estimation that he could only treat them with reverential awe. To have his son marry the daughter of such a man swelled Edwin’s chest with a pride that had had Edwin dismissing Bella’s claims on his paternal affections in place of Charlie’s. Edwin had decided that Bella was to hand over the keys to the smart house Edwin had bought for her on her own marriage so that they could be given to Charlie and his bride-to-be. What need, after all, did Bella, a widow with no children, have of a detached house, Edwin had asked pointedly. All she had done was fill it with refugees, he had reminded his daughter during the argument that had followed the announcement of his decision.

Remembering that row now, Charlie grinned. Poor old Bella indeed. His sister might be a stunning-looking girl, with her blonde curls and her large blue eyes, and the waist she swore measured only twenty-two inches, but her looks had no effect on their father and nor had her angry reminder that the refugees had been forced on her by the Government, and the council of which he was a member.

In fact, Charlie acknowledged, his future was looking pretty good. Or it would have been if it weren’t for this ruddy bombing. He pushed past a group of nurses who had had to adjust their walking pace to the slowness of the patients they were assisting, without stopping to offer to help, his thoughts fixed on his own bright future and securing a decent place in the air-raid shelter.

The night air was thick with the smell of burned wood, the smoke from the fires that had been put out hanging over the city like a November smog. His mother had had forty fits when she had come to visit him, complaining about the fact that it had taken her three hours to get to the hospital because of all the blocked roads.

‘They’ve bombed Lewis’s,’ she had told Charlie angrily, ‘and there were soldiers lolling around in the street, sitting on brand-new furniture that had been removed from some of the shops, and drinking bottles of beer. Disgraceful. I mean who would want that furniture now?’

Charlie could think of any number of people who’d no doubt be only too happy to acquire it, if only to sell it on through the black market, but of course he had known better than to say so to his mother, who wasn’t renowned for the acuteness of her sense of humour.

Without anything having to be said, the more senior of the trainee nurses such as Grace had taken it upon themselves to go in turn with those patients who, because of the severity of their wounds, were not only bed bound but also could only be moved very slowly.

Tonight it was Grace’s turn. She had seen the brisk nod of approval that Sister had given her when she had come quietly to the bed holding the most seriously injured of all their patients, a young soldier who had been caught in a blast from an unexploded bomb. His face and head were heavily bandaged. It was a miracle, according to the doctors, that he was still alive. Grace, who had been on duty the night he had come out of the morphine he had been given and who had heard him screaming in agony and then begging for death, found it hard to think there was anything miraculous about what he was having to suffer.

He couldn’t survive, they all knew that, and for that reason if no other they were all taking extra care to ensure that the fact that he was still alive was respected and that he was treated exactly the same as those patients who would survive.

Hannah, Grace’s closest friend from their original training set, had told Grace bluntly that had she been someone who loved him she would have been tempted to place a pillow over the bandaged face to ease his agony for ever.

As Grace and one of the porters slowly pushed his bed towards the exit, a bomb exploded close at hand, causing the patient’s body to contort in agonised fear. Automatically Grace reached for his hand to comfort him, holding it in her own.

Just as it had once seemed unbelievable that something like this could happen, now it seemed equally impossible that it would ever cease. The worst of the debris caused from Saturday night’s bombing had been cleared away but the scarred seared wall of the courtyard where so many had died, caught in the bomb blast, still stood as a stark reminder of the frailty of life. The patient, who had been trembling convulsively, suddenly went still, the grip of his hand slackening.

They were still several yards from safety and the shelter, but Grace realised she had something far more important to deal with now than her own safety.

Bending towards the bed, she told the porter quietly, ‘I think we need the padre, if you can find him for me, please, John.’

They said that you always remembered your first death, but for Grace each one brought her that same sense of loss and pain, and that wish that things could be different and that her patient might live.

What was easier now, though, was to hold tightly to the slackened hand and quietly recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Sister, in that calm all-seeing way of hers that Grace so admired, seemed to materialise on the opposite side of the bed out of nowhere, her own hands competent and professional as she reached for the dying man’s other hand, checking his pulse against her watch, then talking quietly to him once Grace had finished her prayer.

He had gone before the padre managed to reach them, but the formalities of respect had still to be gone through, the blessing said, and a doctor summoned, a space found for the ritual and respect accorded to the newly dead even in the midst of a bombing raid that could take their own lives at any minute. A well-trained nurse did not abandon her patient to protect her own safety.

Grace waited until the doctor gave the brief nod of his head that signalled that the body was to be taken to the morgue before accepting her own dismissal from Sister and continuing on her way to the shelter.

It was three o’clock. Her eyes felt dry and gritty from smoke, brick dust and uncried tears. When this war was over she would cry an ocean of them, but not now – not when, as their vicar had said from the pulpit on Sunday morning, with every strong heartbeat of hope and courage and the belief that they would prevail they were driving back the enemy, just as with every weak heartbeat of fear they were inviting defeat.

Now instead of thinking about the bombs and worrying about her own danger, she would think instead of Seb and how much she loved him. Like her, Seb was on duty tonight. He was based at Derby House, down near the docks. They tried to time their off-duty hours so that they could be together if at all possible. Nurses weren’t allowed to wear engagement rings, so Grace kept hers hidden, wearing it on a fine chain beneath her uniform. When she felt afraid, like she did now, just knowing that it was there and that Seb loved her was enough to calm those fears.

The air-raid shelter was crowded, but a nurse whom she vaguely recognised shuffled along to make room for her, welcoming her with a tired smile.

None of them had taken her full off-duty hours, snatching a few hours of sleep instead and then going back to work, knowing how desperately her skills were needed.

The remorseless throb of aircraft engines overhead made Grace want to cover her ears. They couldn’t go on like this much longer, being attacked night after night, everyone said so, talking about the effect the unrelenting attacks were having on people’s morale in low hesitant whispers. The unthinkable, the unbearable, had begun to drift into people’s minds, obscuring hope in the same way that the smoke-and dust-filled air was obscuring the sky.

‘Lord knows where we’re going to put them as gets injured tonight,’ the other nurse sighed wearily. ‘The whole hospital’s already bursting at the seams.’

Grace nodded. It was true, after all. Patients were already having to lie on makeshift beds in corridors. The operating theatres were working at full capacity, with extra surgeons coming in from surrounding towns, including Manchester, and now the staff were facing shortages of supplies, the hospital authorities unable to restock fast enough to cope with the demand. Some patients, like the boy who had died earlier, were so badly injured that there was nothing that could be done for them other than to try to relieve their pain, and even that wasn’t always possible. Word had gone round on the grapevine when Grace had been in the dining room earlier that with the city almost cut off from the rest of the country, morphine was to be kept for those patients who could survive and not given as palliative care to those who would not, for fear of the supply running out.

War was such a cruel thing, its horrors thankfully unimaginable to those who had not experienced them. Grace had seen people whose bodies were so badly damaged that if anyone had told her three years ago about such injuries she would have thought they were trying to frighten her.

She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the sound of the continuous waves of incoming bombers and focus instead on the bursts of gunfire from the ack-ack guns. How much longer could Liverpool survive such an onslaught? Not much longer, she suspected. The Germans were bombing the heart out of the city and its people, destroying its buildings, smashing its infrastructure, maiming and killing its people, knowing how much the whole country depended on the vital necessities – raw materials and foodstuffs – that those Merchant Navy convoys whose port was Liverpool struggled to bring in from across the Atlantic.