Put Out the Fires (43 page)

They stood together silently for a long rime, each woman preoccupied with her own thoughts. Then Ruth shoved her hands in the pockets of her cardigan and said casually, “I’ve got something to tell you. I’m getting married on Saturday.”

Sheila’s jaw dropped. She forgot, for the moment, all her various worries. “Y’what?”

“I’m getting married.”

“Who to?” It seemed a funny question to ask, “Who to?”, when you saw someone almost every single day of the week and they’d never even mentioned a man’s name, let alone been seen with one.

“Matt Smith. He’s a friend of your father’s.”

“Matt Smith! I remember him, he’s dead goodlooking, me dad brought him to our house on New Year’s Eve.

You’re a canny bugger, Ruth Singerman,” Sheila said incredulously. “I didn’t know you two were going out!”

“He started coming to Reece’s,” Ruth lied. “We got to know each other very well. It’s not exactly the romance of the century,” she added hastily, in case people noticed they weren’t all lovey-dovey the way newly married people usually were. “We just decided to try and make a go of things together, that’s all.” How had Matt put it? Like flotsam and jetsam thrown together on the shore. Although Matt hadn’t intended it to be, Ruth thought it sounded rather romantic.

“Well, I hope you do—make a go of things, that is.”

Sheila found it hard to keep the sympathy out of her voice. What a way to enter a marriage! Still, it took all sorts . . .

“I wondered if you’d pass the word round,” said Ruth.

“You know what the street’s like. It’ll be a registry office wedding, no guests, no reception, and I’d like people to know who Matt is when he moves in.” They’d decided it would be best if he slept in the box room, so they would have the same address and it would look authentic when she applied to adopt Michael legally.

“I’ll pass the word round, don’t worry.” Sheila could hardly wait. “What does your dad have to say? I bet he’s pleased.”

“I haven’t told him yet. It’s going to be a surprise,” Ruth said awkwardly. Every time she started to tell Jacob, the words died in her throat. He could see through her like no other person. The old gossip may well have told Jack Doyle she needed a husband, but it had probably been said as a joke. He’d be distraught if he knew she and Matt were marrying out of convenience. On the other hand, she thought with a smile, she could put the blame on him. “It’s your fault, Dad. It was you who put the idea in Matt’s head!”

“You know, luv,” Sheila Reilly said wistfully, “it’d be a shame to go without a reception. Pearl Street loves a wedding. We could all club together and make a few sandwiches. If it’s a nice day, we could set them out in the street

“Thanks all the same,” Ruth said quickly. “But Matt doesn’t want any fuss.” Funnily enough, she wouldn’t have minded taking Sheila up on her offer. At odd moments, she even found herself looking forward to sharing the house with Matt.

“Oh, well, if you change your mind . . . ” “That’s not likely.”

Sheila took a final look at the sky. “It’s a waste of time trying to go to sleep. I’ll make a pot of tea.” As they began to go indoors, Sheila went on, “I think I’ll go to six o’ clock Mass. I’ll take the kids to a later one. I’ve a feeling today’s the sort of day when it wouldn’t hurt to go to Mass twice in one morning.”

They closed the door, just as the All Clear went, and the high-pitched drone had never been so welcome.

The whole of Merseyside, from Birkenhead and Wallasey, across the city and out as far as the town of Bootle, had merged into one vast raging inferno. From horizon to horizon, the heavens were a canopy of bloody crimson, shot here and there with a hint of orange from the flickering flames and darkened by clouds of swirling black smoke. The few barrage balloons that still remained looked pretty, like silvery-pink flowers thrusting upwards into the sky.

On the ground below, there was utter pandemonium.

Fire engines and ambulances screeched this way and that on urgent errands of mercy, and the air was thick with ash and fluttering scraps of burning paper.

Shortly after the All Clear, Hilda and Eileen emerged from the garage into Marsh Lane with the canteen. The urn, operated by a gas canister in a cupboard underneath, was bubbling with freshly boiled water. The van’s tyres crunched over millions of fragments of glass which covered the road like a carpet of diamonds. Hilda stopped the van a few yards out and they stared, horrified, at the utter devastation that confronted them.

Landmarks, places which Eileen had known all her life, had completely disappeared, had been turned overnight into vast brickfields emitting clouds of dust and flames, with girders and joists protruding crazily. A piano stood in the middle of the street that faced them, slightly skewed, but undamaged, as if ready for someone to sit down and play a tune. Which street was it? Eileen couldn’t tell.

“This is inhuman,” she wept. “It’s nowt but sheer bloody carnage.” It was a scene from an unimaginable nightmare and she knew she would never forget it as long as she lived.

Everywhere was lit by a sinister red light and no matter which way she looked there was nothing but havoc and broken houses, broken lives. Even the places that stood were blighted, with half their roofs gone and no windows left, the curtains hanging limply outside. As she watched, the front of a burning house seemed to bend outwards, almost in slow motion, and topple to the ground in a heap of bricks. Several men standing nearby jumped swiftly out of the way. Incredibly, one of them actually laughed.

In the midst of this chaos, the ARP and Civil Defence workers beavered away, a look of gritty determination on their tired faces, as they tried to rescue the people trapped underneath the rubble. Several ordinary civilians worked alongside them, desperately throwing chunks of masonry and bricks to one side. Eileen could hear a woman’s terrified wail, “Our Sally’s down there. I’ve got to find our Sally.”

There was a shout, and a young boy was gently pulled out of the wreckage, placed on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance.

To the left of the van, two firemen were standing precariously on the top of the ruins of a house, their hoses directed through the windows of a shop Eileen knew well: a little sweetshop and tobacconist’s in which Tony used to spend his pocket money and which she herself had used as a child. The inside of the shop was burning as fiercely as a furnace, and she felt a searing sense of loss at the thought that the shop would never serve another customer.

It seemed as if she had been watching forever, but it must have been only a few seconds, because Hilda nudged her and said briskly, “I think there are a few people here who might like a cup of tea, don’t you?”

Daylight dawned. There might have been a sun behind the smoke and flames and dust that rose from Bootle that morning, but if so, it didn’t shine on that first Sunday in May.

Many streets were blocked by rubble and impassable, Hilda found, as she took the canteen from one scene of devastation to the next. She would park as close as possible, and as the weary rescuers came for a cup of tea to quench their thirst, Eileen began to wonder if her town would ever function again. She’d no sooner had this thought, when she saw two young girls coming along the street; well made up and smartly dressed, they were obviously on their way to work, their gasmasks slung over their shoulders. Then a woman came out of the front door of a house that had been left relatively undamaged, a georgette scarf tied around her curlers, and began to brush her step. Even more incongruously, a milk cart arrived, bottles jangling, the blinkered horse, at least, entirely unaware of the devastation all around him.

She realised that, no matter what happened, life would go on.

Mid-morning, they ran out of water, but when Hilda asked a Civil Defence worker where she could refill the boiler, to her consternation, she discovered there was no water to be had.

“The mains have been ruptured. There’s no electricity or gas, either. He suggested I drive out as far as Waterloo to fill up.”

“Do you mind if I pop round to Pearl Street while you’re gone?” Eileen asked. “Someone said it’d been hit.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” Hilda said. She was grimfaced and clearly fatigued, as was everybody, but showed no inclination to rest. “In fact, Eileen, I’d sooner you didn’t come back at all. I can always get someone else to help me out.” When Eileen began to protest, she said sternly, “Remember our little talk last night?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You’re very brave, but you’re also very foolhardy.

Once you’ve been home, I suggest you immediately make your way to Melling and join your sister. Promise?”

Eileen nodded and gave a little smile. “I promise.”

“Take care, dear.”

“You too, Hilda.”

So Eileen went back to Pearl Street, where she discovered Jacob Singerman was dead and there was a neat little space on one side of the street where her sister’s house and the two adjacent ones had been.

It was almost biblical, the exodus of people from Liverpool early that evening. With prams and handcarts piled high with precious personal possessions, not to mention the most precious of all, their children, they began to leave the city in their thousands, heading towards the relative safety of the fields and villages outside.

All they wanted was a good night’s sleep and a few hours of safety from the raids.

Eileen walked alone, carrying only her shopping bag with a few clothes and a toothbrush. There was nothing in Pearl Street she cared about if she lost her house that night.

By the time she reached Melling, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. Birds sang in the trees and the water in the stream which ran alongside Dunnings gurgled merrily over the white stones. The gardens of the houses in the High Street were full of flowers, and children played Tick in the churchyard. It was a beautiful, peaceful spring evening, and war, and all the suffering it brought with it, seemed a million miles away.

They were having their tea in the cottage.

“There you are!” Sheila breathed a sigh of relief when Eileen appeared. “How’s our dad? Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t seen him, but he’s okay, apart from a burnt hand. He’d been round to Pearl Street looking for me.”

She’d tell Sheila about her house later, there was something more important to deal with first.

Ruth Singerman was giving Michael his bottle. She looked at Eileen, smiling anxiously. “I suppose Jacob swore he slept through the whole thing?”

Eileen went over and knelt in front of Ruth’s chair. “I’m sorry, luv . . . ”

That night, everyone in Liverpool held their breath as the clocks ticked towards midnight. It looked as if they were to be allowed a respite, time to catch their breath and catch up on their sleep. But at five to twelve, the unearthly wail of the siren blared forth, and they went wearily to their shelters, and the various Civil Defence workers squared their shoulders in readiness for the terror about to begin. If it was anything like last night, there’d be nothing of the city left to bomb by tomorrow . . .

The raids on Liverpool continued, though on Monday and Tuesday, Glasgow and Tyneside were the main recipients of the enemy bombs. On Wednesday, the Luftwaffe targeted Liverpool and Boode yet again, to complete a week-long blitz. On that particular night, Marsh Lane Baths, which was being used as a temporary mortuary, received a direct hit. The bodies, including that of Jacob Singerman, were buried in a mass grave.

Jack Doyle, as brave as a man could be, felt convinced morale was at breaking point. There was just so much the human spirit could endure. He’d been into Liverpool to find the centre of the city reduced to little more than a wasteland, and the sight of so many beautiful old and treasured buildings, lost forever, had almost reduced him, a grown man, to tears.

“If this goes on much longer, we’ll snap,” he said one night in the King’s Arms, where the windows were boarded up and the only illumination came from candles on the bar, and according to Mack, the landlord, there wasn’t enough ale to last the week out. To some, this was the unkindest cut of all.

Wild and totally unsubstantiated rumours circulated, not surprisingly when you considered the chaos in which people lived: -without water, gas or electricity, without food and transport, without homes. Even worse, without the loved ones who’d been cruelly snatched from them during the seven nights of mayhem. It was said that martial law was about to be imposed, that the homeless had marched through the city waving white flags, that food riots had taken place.

All this proved to be untrue. The spirit of Liverpool may have been weakened, but the spirit was iron at the core and would never, never break.

Anyroad, miraculously, it was Hitler who decided he’d had enough and Wednesday night’s raid turned out to be the last—for the time being.

Chapter 19

That May was perhaps the blackest period of the war so far, a time when Hitler seemed unstoppable and the terrifying realisation dawned that the victory that had so far seemed inevitable, might turn out not to be theirs.

British and Allied troops continued their retreat in the deserts of North Africa, and those sent in aid of Greece when Hitler invaded were humiliatingly driven out with the loss of their equipment. The troops withdrew to Crete, and with almost breathtaking audacity, Hitler invaded the island from the air. More than three thousand paratroopers dropped from the skies, in what was thought might be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of the British Isles. In an evacuation considered even more inglorious than Dunkirk, fifteen thousand troops were forced to withdraw again, this time to Egypt, leaving behind many thousands to become prisoners-of-war. In the ensuing chaos,” three cruisers and six destroyers had been lost.

Whilst all this was going on, HMS Hood was sunk by the German pocket battleship Bismarck with the loss of thirteen hundred lives, a tragedy which somewhat overshadowed the subsequent sinking of the Bismarck itself.

There was minor jubilation when Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy, landed in Scotland, having fled from Nazi Germany alone. People hoped this was the first drip through the dam, that Hess knew the fight was lost and had decided to desert the sinking ship, but as they listened to their wirelesses or read their newspapers, it appeared Hess had come all this way just to complain about the food!