The Blitz (5 page)

 

 

It's the same every night now. Bombs and more bombs, and they're getting closer. A house got hit in Sandringham Road last night. That's one over from Summerfield. Sometimes I feel frightened and sometimes it makes me angry. The Germans don't seem to care who they might kill. What's going through the minds of the pilots when they drop their bombs? Haven't they got wives and families? So how can they try to kill other people's children?

I mean, I understand why they might want to bomb a factory that's making guns. I can even understand why they might try to hit a power station. But what difference does it make to the war if they kill Mum, or Tom? Or me?

Eventually they
did
put out most of the fire in the docks, despite what Dad said, but it took them a few days. According to Dad, it pretty much had to burn itself out.

Life's gone a bit funny. Sort of upside down. The best time to sleep is in the early morning, and because Mum and Dad both have to be out quite often at night, they try to catch a bit of kip during the daytime. So I seem to end up doing even more dishes and tidying up than normal.
And
most of the shopping too! Even Tom lends a hand from time to time. Mum says it's our bit towards the war effort, and put that way we can't grumble, can we?

 

 

Mum came in on Friday night looking shaken up, eyes red as if she'd been crying. They'd been a bit short of wardens over at New Cross so she'd cycled up there to help out. There'd been a raid in the early evening, and a row of terraced houses had been hit – blasted to bits, Mum said.

“Sit down, Mum. I'll make you a cup of something,” I said helplessly. As she took the cup of tea, her hands had a life of their own. They couldn't keep still.

“I think I'm a bit shocked, that's all love,” she said. “Thanks for the tea, though. You're a good girl.” And she burst into tears.

I just sat and watched. Mum wasn't
ever
like this. She got cross, but she never cried. When they went to the pictures together, it was the family's standing joke that Dad was more likely to cry than Mum.

After a minute or two she said, “I shouldn't be telling you, Edie, but I've got to talk to someone or I'll burst.” She swallowed hard. “It was kids, you see. They were pulling kids out of the houses.”

Now I understood. It was as if it could have been Tom or me.

“Poor things. I hope to God they never knew what hit them.” She was crying again now. “We could hear a baby crying inside the rubble where a door had been. There was still a hole to get through but the blokes were too big. They said they couldn't ask me, but I knew what they wanted. I squeezed in all right, but she died in my arms. Poor little mite.”

“Oh, Mum,” I said and cuddled her. I didn't know what else to do. After a while she came to and asked, “Where's Tom?”

“I don't know,” I said. He went out to play with Jim Simmonds about an hour ago.

Mum went spare. “
Why
don't you know?” she shouted. “What do you think you're here for? You're old enough to take some responsibility. You can't just let him wander off on his own. Anyone would think you were born stupid. Go and find him. And if he's not back in a quarter of an hour you'll both have your dad to answer to.”

I didn't argue. Mum and I both knew what was going on. She'd been through a lot that day and she was taking some of it out on me, and that was all right this once. Tom was in the alley where I thought he'd be, kicking a ball around with Jim. He looked a bit surprised to see me, though – almost guilty – and Jim stuffed something deeper into his pocket so I couldn't see.

Something's going on between those two. Jim isn't a good influence on Tom.

 

 

Mum's been pretty quiet since the weekend, not saying a word more than she has to. But then the lack of sleep's getting us all down, lying in the shelter each night wondering whether it'll be “our turn”. That's the way people are starting to talk, like it's inevitable we'll all catch it in the long run.

Dad's trying to keep us all cheerful, but you can see in his eyes he's just so tired from working shift after shift. He's always kept himself fit and strong, but now he's so stiff and sore from all the work, he can scarcely lever himself out of his chair in the mornings.

In his time Dad must have seen some awful things. I shouldn't think you can avoid it if your job's putting out fires. He's never talked about it, and I shouldn't think he's going to now, but I wonder how much more even he can take.

Shirl isn't helping. She got in well after midnight on Wednesday evening. A party with friends from Chiesman's, she said. One
particular
friend, I reckon. It's that Alec, isn't it?

Dad gave her what for the next morning and told her not to do that again while she was living under his roof.

Shirl was very off-hand. “We might all be dead tomorrow,” she said. “Eat, drink and be merry, I say. What's the problem as long as no one gets hurt?”

“There's lots of ways of getting hurt, girl,” Dad said abruptly. “You're old enough to know that.”

 

 

Right from the word go Mum was different this morning. She was back to her old self, brisk and organizing, as if this was a bright shiny new day, rather than the wet and windy one we'd actually got.

“Life must go on,” she said. “It's what Hitler's after, isn't it – to have us moping around and thinking we can't cope. We've got to cope! ‘Don't let the beggars grind you down.' That's my motto for the week.”

And she took herself and the Mansion House polish outside to do the front step in the drizzle. Shirl, who has a late start at Chiesman's most Saturdays, raised a pencilled eyebrow at me.

There was a letter on the mantelpiece, tucked behind Mum's favourite china dog.

Shirl flicked it with a fingernail as she passed. “It's from Uncle Fred,” she muttered. “Not good news, I shouldn't think.”

But if it isn't, how come Mum's pulled herself together?

 

 

Today Mum got me organized helping serve lunch down at the church hall to people who've been bombed out. The WVS (that stands for Women's Voluntary Service, in case you didn't know) are in charge, and don't they let you know it! They're a right bunch of old battle-axes, but I suppose their hearts are in the right place.

A lot of the people there have only got left what they're stood up in. No more house, no more furniture, no more clothes. Everything smashed and burnt. You'd think they'd be miserable, but they were yakking away over their dumplings like nobody's business. They get bread and jam in the mornings and evenings and a hot meal at midday. All free. When they've finished eating in the evenings, they stretch out on camp beds to try and get some sleep in between the raids.

In a spare moment, I sidled up to Mum and asked her about the letter on the mantelpiece. Her face fell for just a moment, and then she said quickly, “Shirl saw me open it, didn't she? Doesn't miss anything, that girl.” She paused. “I won't kid you, Edie. It
is
bad news. Your Auntie Mavis died last Thursday. She went very quickly in the end.”

“That's very sad,” I gulped. “Are
you
all right?”

“I knew it was coming,” Mum answered. “I'd pushed it to the back of my mind, what with everything else. Then when the letter came I thought, Well we've got to get on with things while we can, haven't we? It made me cheer up, in a funny sort of way. Do you understand?”

I told her I thought I did.

 

 

When Shirl arrived for work at Chiesman's yesterday morning, she found one corner of the store missing, blown away the previous night by a bomb. All the windows were out and there was broken glass where you wouldn't think glass could get. Chiesman's weren't going to sell any china today or any ladies' hats and shoes, because they didn't have any, at least not in one piece.

“What did you do?” we asked Shirl.

“It's like you said, Mum. Don't let the beggars grind you down,” she grinned. “We cleaned up the best we could. They told us the building wouldn't come down round our ears, but we shouldn't let the customers in yet. So while the chippies put up wooden partitions, me and the other girls carried some tables on to the pavement. Then we wrote a big sign saying, ‘
CHIESMAN'S: EVEN MORE OPEN THAN USUAL
.' It got a few laughs, I can tell you! And we took a few quid, too!”

We laughed along with Shirl, but it's not so funny when you think about it.

 

 

It was Auntie Mavis's funeral yesterday, but only Mum made the trip down to Tonbridge. I wanted to go too, but Mum said with Dad working someone had to look after Tom. So that was me, wasn't it!

There'd been a heavy raid on Sunday night. The big bombs are bad enough, but the incendiaries are almost worse. They look like thin tin cans about eighteen inches long and they don't cause damage simply by blowing up, although I shouldn't think it'd do you much good if one landed on you from 10,000 feet. They just start fires everywhere, and the Fire Service can't keep up, Dad says. On bad nights, they don't know where to start. The Germans drop hundreds at a time.

There are delayed-action bombs too. They're really nasty, because they cause a mess when they land and then when people come to inspect the damage, the bomb goes off properly, taking anybody close-by with it. Every time Mum or Dad goes out I panic they're not going to come back.

When Mum had gone off to the station, looking sad and beautiful in her black dress, Tom hung around the house for a while, bored out of his skin, not helping with the cleaning. Then, about eleven o'clock, Jim Simmonds knocked on the door for Tom to go out and play. The two of them said they'd be up the alley as usual, pretending to be Charlton Athletic versus the Arsenal. I told Tom he should be back for lunchtime, and no messing about. If there was a siren, he was to come home at once.

Well, at 12.30 there wasn't a sign of them and after last time I started to worry.

Mum wasn't going to be back for hours, but if she ever knew Tom had been absent without leave she'd go off her rocker. At me as much as him!

I put Chamberlain on his lead and we walked up to the alley. It was empty.

“Tom, you little varmint,” I said to myself. “Why am I always getting you out of trouble?”

They could have gone anywhere. I counted off Tom's favourite nooks and crannies in my head. The trouble was, the bombs were changing the geography of Lewisham every day. The Germans kept making new and exciting places for boys like Tom to be. It even interested me the way that if you dodged the officials you could see familiar things from different angles.

It was a risk either way. If Tom arrived at number 47 now, and found it deserted,
he
might panic. On the other hand I couldn't
not
search for them, could I?

I half-walked, half-ran down towards Catford Bridge, across the main road and along the edge of the slight hill on the far side. They weren't at the recreation ground, or behind the church. I cut through an alley where you could slip into the overgrown garden of a boarded-up house. There were trees there we all liked to climb. No Tom or Jim! It was one o'clock now and reluctantly I thought I'd better make for home.

We crossed the dirty old stream at the bottom of Mount Pleasant Road, where some sheds along the bank had been laid flat by a blast. Wood and rubble were strewn everywhere. From the far side, out of sight, I heard a shout that sounded suspiciously like Tom. Chamberlain's ears pricked and he woofed in the direction of the shout. I climbed down carefully and picked my way across. Everywhere smelled horrible. Drains, with a whiff of gas thrown in! The remains of a wall blocked my view. I pulled myself up on the crumbling bricks to see, and sure enough there were Tom and Jim. On the ground in front of them was a crumpled metal canister like a large tin-can. They looked like they might be about to use it as a football.

I bawled at the two boys, “Get away from that! Now! It might be a bomb, you stupid little blighters!”

Tom looked startled out of his wits, and the horrified look on my face must have convinced them. They backed off from the canister at a rate of knots.

I told Jim he could come back and have some chips and rice pudding with us, and that kept them quiet for half an hour or so, before they were running up and down the back garden path again, pretending to be Hurricanes and Spitfires shooting down German aircraft over Kent. I didn't let on to Mum about what had happened. It didn't seem fair.

Was it a bomb? I don't know, but I hope it taught my idiot little brother a lesson!

Yes, I know! Rice pudding! I'll make it, but I won't eat it.

 

 

I don't know what's got into Tom. He was brought home by a policeman yesterday, of all things, and got a good hiding from Mum into the bargain. He and Jim and some other kids had been messing about on the running boards of what they thought was a disused van. Afterwards Tom said it was so covered with dust and dirt you couldn't see a thing through the windscreen. As if that made everything all right!

Well, the owner caught them, didn't he, and Tom was the one who couldn't run fast enough.

After she'd walloped him, Mum sent him upstairs and told him he couldn't go out for a week. She said she'd just about had enough of him running wild on the streets and she was getting to the end of her tether. She didn't want the neighbours thinking the Bensons were criminals. How dare he ruin the good name of the family!

I tried talking to him later up in his bedroom but he went all sulky on me, and in the end I gave up.

Last night Mum was still so upset she told the wardens she couldn't go in to work. She stayed in the Anderson with us, cuddling Tom through the raid and letting him know she loves him even though he is a complete donkey. We've made sleeping bags now, and with four of us in there it gets quite cosy. The one thing I like about it is the smell. It's a mixture of the paraffin lamp, and the grassy, damp earth.

Sometimes, in the odd moment when it's quiet – no guns, no bombs, no fire-bells, no planes – I can almost think we're having fun camping in the garden like we did before the war when I was a little girl. But the feeling never lasts long.