Moonlight and Ashes (34 page)

It was on the tip of Maggie’s tongue to tell her mother that it would do her good to get out for a while. But mindful that it could cause yet another argument if she did, she simply nodded and stayed tight-lipped.

 

As Maggie prepared to go to the shops later that afternoon she was shocked to see the date on the ration books. It was 14 November already, which meant that Christmas was racing towards them all. Her brow furrowed at the thought. Things had been quiet in Coventry recently; there had been no air raids for weeks, for which Maggie was grateful. The thought of having to drag Lucy out to a freezing cold shelter in the dead of night didn’t bear thinking about. Even so she was quite aware that the city might have been lulled into a false sense of security. Every day the newspapers were full of the latest atrocities of war and she knew that it was a long way from being over. Her hopes of having the twins home for Christmas were dashed as the days passed with no sign of the war abating. The thought of spending it apart from them brought tears stinging to her eyes. It felt like years since she’d seen her children. It didn’t matter that she was merely one of many parents in the country who were in exactly the same boat; the knowledge brought her no comfort and she missed Danny and Lizzie more with every day that passed.

Pulling herself together with an enormous effort, she began to put her coat on. Her mother would be over at any minute to look after Lucy, and Maggie had no intention of letting Ellen find her crying. She still had Lucy to worry about and she must make her a priority until such a time as it was safe to have the twins home again. As she had discovered, life went on - even with a war raging all around them.

 

As evening descended on the city, a thick mist began to form across the pavements, turning the icy paving slabs into a skating rink.

‘You’ll be lucky to get there and back without goin’ yer length,’ Ellen told Maggie and Jo as she settled herself into the fireside chair.

Maggie laughed. ‘You’re about right there, Mam, especially as we’ve to jiggle this box between us.’

Crossing to an enormous cardboard box that she’d managed to scrounge from the corner shop, she opened the lid and she and Jo began to carefully fold the wedding dress into it.

‘Christ, do yer reckon it’s big enough?’ Jo remarked. ‘An’ fancy deliverin’ such a lovely dress in a box that were used fer packin’ soap powder.’

Maggie eyed the OMO logo with amusement. ‘Well, this was the only one I could get that were big enough,’ she explained. ‘The other boxes were all too small, an’ the dress would have been creased to high heaven by the time we got it there.’

Once the train had been carefully folded in to Maggie’s satisfaction, she closed the lid. ‘Right, that’s it. I dare say we’d better get off. There’s a rare frost settling already so the sooner this is done the better. Are you quite sure you’ll be all right with Lucy, Mam?’

‘Huh! Why wouldn’t I be? We’re always all right, ain’t we, me darlin’?’

Lucy snuggled down into her gran’s lap, clutching her dolly and smiling up at her adoringly; as Maggie looked at them in the glow from the fire, love for them both made her heart sing. She and Jo grabbed the box between them and started towards the door. It was almost six o’clock.

‘We should be back fer half seven at the latest, Mam. See yer later.’ Suddenly dropping her side of the box, she hurried back to kiss them both soundly. ‘I know I may not say it often, but I do love you both,’ she whispered.

Ellen blinked away tears at the unexpected show of emotion. ‘Get off wi’ yer, yer daft ha’porth,’ she said shakily. ‘You’ll have me blartin’ in a minute.’

Maggie hurried back to where Jo was waiting for her, and in no time at all they were on their way. The box was as light as a feather but awkward to manoeuvre round corners, which had Jo cursing in no time as they struggled along the almost-deserted streets. High above the city, the barrage balloons bobbed on their strings like enormous grey elephants and the spire of the Cathedral stood proud.

It took them nearly half an hour to reach Godiva Lane, by which time their hands were so cold that they’d turned blue.

‘It would be just our bloody luck if we got there an’ they weren’t in,’ Jo grumbled.

‘They’ll be in,’ Maggie assured her as she peered at the house numbers. Stopping outside one, she rapped at the front door and was rewarded by the sound of footsteps.

The mother of the bride-to-be answered the door and beamed when she saw Maggie standing there. ‘Why, is it all done?’ she asked excitedly, and when Maggie nodded, she ushered her and Jo inside. ‘You couldn’t have come at a better time,’ the woman assured her. ‘Betty is just in from work so she’ll be able to have a final try-on before the big day.’

When Maggie and Jo left the house later, Maggie was beaming from ear to ear. The bride had looked truly breathtaking in the dress and it had fitted her like a glove, which was a huge relief. Better still was the fact that Maggie’s wages were tucked deep in her coat pocket, with a couple of pounds extra as a bonus.

‘I can afford to buy the twins a little present now,’ she confided to Jo.

‘Why don’t yer treat yerself fer a change?’ Jo suggested. ‘Every spare penny yer get goes on either the kids or the house, from what I can see of it.’

Now that they no longer had to balance the box between them, Jo had sunk her hands as far down in her coat pockets as they would go, but she was still shivering with cold.

‘There’s nothin’ I need,’ Maggie told her. Jo was just about to come back with a caustic reply when the sound of sirens suddenly pierced the air.

‘Oh no,’ Maggie groaned. ‘We’re still a good half an hour away from home an’ me mam’s there all alone with Lucy.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ Jo assured her. ‘I bet even now she’ll be bundlin’ her up an’ headin’ fer the shelter. Yer mam ain’t daft.’

‘I’m well aware of that,’ Maggie snapped, far more sharply then she’d meant to. Instantly contrite, she reached across to squeeze Jo’s arm. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just want to get home, that’s all.’

They quickened their footsteps, but they had gone no more than two streets on when the sound of the ack-ack and Bofors guns burst into life as the first planes droned overhead in the moonlit sky. All around them, doors were opening and banging shut as people scurried past them to seek the safety of the shelters, and in no time at all the previously deserted streets were echoing with the sounds of children crying as distraught parents tried to soothe them.

‘We need to get to a shelter,’ Jo gasped as she pressed her hand into her side to ease the stitch there. ‘I don’t think I can run much further.’

Maggie felt as if she were being torn in two. She longed to get home to her mother and Lucy, yet didn’t want to leave Jo all alone. Even as she struggled with her dilemma, the sky suddenly lit up with parachute flares that the planes had dropped to highlight the city below. They hung above them like great white iridescent chandeliers. Maggie gazed up in wonder, which quickly turned to horror as the first phosphorus exploding incendiary bombs came hurtling towards them. They looked like falling stars but Maggie knew that once they hit the ground they would burst into flames, which would act as targets for the planes overhead to drop the more deadly bombs on.

‘’Ere, you two. Don’t get standin’ there like lumps o’ lard. Do yer want to get yer ’eads blown off? Me an’ the missus are goin’ to the shelter at the end o’ the street. Yer can tag along with us.’

The speaker was an elderly man with his braces dangling round his waist, accompanied by an old woman whose head was covered in a brightly coloured head-square.

Without waiting for a reply, he grasped her elbow and she felt herself being tugged along behind him. By the time they reached the end of the street she was breathless. He shoved her into the communal shelter in front of him before turning to usher his wife and Jo in after her. The shelter seemed to be teeming with people, as Maggie tried to adjust her eyes to the gloom. The air smelled damp and the children’s cries echoed off the cold stone walls as the old man struggled to pull the shelter door shut. The sound of it clanging to sounded like the closing of a prison cell door and Maggie began to sob as she thought of her mam and Lucy all alone back at home.

Jo placed her arm around her as the second wave of planes sounded in the sky overhead. Then suddenly the children’s cries were drowned out and the shelter seemed to shake as the first bomb exploded nearby. The Coventry blitz had begun, and for most of the people huddling there that night, life would never be the same again.

As Maggie and Jo huddled together, a continuous stream of bombers passed overhead and they felt their city shake with the force of the raid. They had assumed that the main targets would be the industrial factories, so were shocked to hear the bombs falling so close to them. Some minutes later they heard a hammering on the door and the same old man who had led them to the shelter struggled to open it. A young man almost fell into the shelter before the door clanged shut behind him.

‘They’re targetin’ the city,’ he gasped. ‘Saint Michael’s Cathedral has taken a hit already. The fire-fighters are there but the roof’s on fire an’ they reckon it’s useless. The centre is like an inferno; some o’ the fire-fighters are dead already.’

A horrified silence settled on the people in the shelter as they tried to absorb what the young man was telling them. To everyone there, the Cathedral was the heart of the city and they couldn’t envisage the fall of such a fine building.

‘It’s mad out there,’ he went on with a catch in his voice. ‘There’s houses goin’ down like nine-pins. Whole streets wiped out just like that, as if they’d never been.’ A particularly close explosion silenced him as the shelter shuddered again. But once it had settled the young man gabbled on, ‘They’re usin’ landmines now an’ all. At this rate there’ll be nothin’ left standin’ by the time we get out o’ here.’

‘
Shut up!
’ The old man saw that the young man was becoming hysterical. Somewhere at the back of the shelter, a woman began to pray, and for Maggie the whole event took on an air of unreality. She knew only too well the devastation landmines could cause. They took the form of a large metal box that would slowly and silently float down on a parachute to explode above ground level with a deafening roar, flattening anything and everything that happened to be beneath it. What if one of them was to fall on her house? Would the shelter be enough to protect Lizzie and her mam?

Suddenly she knew that she couldn’t just sit there. She had to get home to them. Pulling herself away from the wall, she began to wade through a sea of people towards the door as ear-shattering explosions sounded in her ears. But when she reached the door and attempted to open it, hands reached out to stop her.

‘What yer tryin’ to do - get us all killed?’ a man barked at her accusingly. ‘Move back there an’ try to stay calm, can’t yer?’

Maggie sagged against the damp wall as tears slipped down her cheeks, and in that moment she felt totally useless. All she could do now was add her prayers to those of the woman at the back of the shelter.

The raid went on and on, and as the hours passed, the spirits of the people in the shelter sank lower and lower.

‘What time do yer think it is?’ Jo whispered in her ear after what seemed like a lifetime.

Maggie shrugged. It was too dark in the shelter to see the face of the cheap watch on her wrist, even with the flickering candles that someone had managed to light.

As the night wore on, there was little resistance from the ground, for many of the defence stations had run out of ammunition, but still the raid continued with no let-up.

By now a silence had settled in the shelter. Outside, the only sounds were the fire engines’ sirens mixed with the crash of explosions.

At last, at around five o’clock in the morning, the first bombardment began to abate and at six fifteen, the all clear finally sounded.

Slowly, the people in the shelter began to emerge into the streets, or what was left of them. Shocked and tired they stood silently in the drizzle as they tried to take in the aftermath of the attack. What was left of their once fine city lay in ruins beneath a great black cloud of smoke. The city centre was ablaze, and many of the factories had been burned to the ground. In parts, flames as high as a hundred feet licked into the sky, and all around, the suburban streets were littered with rubble that only hours before had been people’s homes.

As they stood there gazing about them in stunned disbelief, an Army truck rumbled towards them and troops began to pour out of the back of it armed with picks and shovels.

On legs that felt as if they had turned to jelly, Maggie staggered towards a weary-looking soldier and grasped his arm. ‘Please - can you tell me, is Clay Lane still standing?’

Hearing the urgency in her voice he sadly shook his head. ‘I couldn’t tell you, love. We’ve just come from trying to put out the fire at Saint Nicholas’s Church, or I should say what’s left of it, in Radford. I ain’t never seen nothing like it in me life. There were people shelterin’ in the crypt there, for Christ’s sake. Huh! Some sanctuary that turned out to be, didn’t it? Even the House of God ain’t safe from this bloody war. They were still diggin’ out the dead when they ordered us to come here.’ He shrugged Maggie’s hand from his arm and staggered away, leaving her to stare after him in open-mouthed horror.

The houses on one side of the street were completely flattened, and injured people sat on the kerbs in a daze waiting for the ambulances to arrive. Others were wailing and digging at the rubble with their bare hands as they frantically searched for loved ones.

‘Come on, love.’ Jo’s voice brought Maggie out of her trance-like state. ‘Let’s try an’ get back home. Happen everything will be fine there. There’s nothing we can do here.’