The Girls They Left Behind (20 page)

‘I suppose we ought to go,’ Olive said reluctantly.

‘Oh, bother it!’ Diane had dropped her toffees. She bent and felt about on the floor. ‘Well, I’m not going. We’re just getting to the best bit.’

‘But the bombs ‘

‘They won’t be coming up here. It’s the Dockyard they’re aiming at. Look, they haven’t stopped showing the film, have they? So they can’t think it’s anything much.’

The film stopped suddenly and the lights came on. They looked at each other again and Olive started to get to her feet.

‘Wait a minute.’ Betty grabbed her arm. ‘Someone’s coming on the stage.’

Fascinated and half afraid, they watched. Perhaps the Germans had actually invaded. Perhaps this was a German, come to tell them what to do. Doubtfully, Betty wondered if an invading German would be likely to be dressed in a dark suit, and then realised that it was the cinema manager. She stifled a nervous giggle.

‘I’m very sorry, ladies and gentlemen. Hitler’s signature tune is on the air again.’ There was a ripple of laughter from the audience. ‘You are of course free to leave if you wish to, but the show is going on and you’re welcome to stay with us.’

He paused, then added, ‘Good luck, and thank you for coming this afternoon.’

There was a buzz of chatter. Everyone was asking each other the same question - shall we go or shall we stay? The wail of the siren had died away again and nothing could be heard outside. Perhaps Diane was right, Betty thought, and it was going to be just another false alarm.

‘I’m staying too,’ she said suddenly. ‘This is my last chance to come to the pictures here. I’m not letting Hitler spoil it for

The two older girls hesitated. Gladys shrugged. ‘Might as well. If we went outside now we’d never get into a shelter anyway. There was hundreds of people shopping. I reckon we’re as safe here as anywhere else.’

‘That’s right,’ Olive agreed. ‘And if they’re going to keep the film going, I think we ought to stay. That’ll show Hitler we’re riot afraid of him. I’m not going to run down a hole like a rabbit diving down its burrow just because he starts playing his music’

The others laughed. The film had started again and Dorothy Lamour and Robert Preston were now involved in the typhoon of the title. The wind howled and shrieked from the screen, and the building suddenly shook with the crash of thunder.

‘That was guns!’ Olive gasped, and grabbed at Betty’s hand.

They could hear the throb of the planes now, and their roar as they passed above. There was an explosion somewhere close by and a splintering sound from overhead. The audience looked up at the darkened roof and saw gaps of daylight appear. As one person, they scrambled towards the sides of the cinema and crouched down as the gaps widened and shrapnel rained down on to the seats they had just vacated.

‘Oh, my God,’ Gladys gasped. ‘They’re bombing us, Olive - Betty - they’re bombing us!’

Another explosion sounded from the car park outside, and the screen trembled and shook. Their laughter forgotten, the girls huddled together, staring with terrified eyes at the film, as if by watching the tumult on the screen they could somehow reduce the reality of what was happening.

‘We ought to have gone,’ Olive whispered. ‘We ought to have got into a shelter.’

‘We’d never have made it.’ Betty remembered the sight of the enemy flying like a black cloud overhead, as she had stood on Mrs Marsh’s garden path. ‘We’d have been caught out in the street.’

‘And if this place gets hit we’ll be buried alive. I’d rather take my chance out in the open.’

But the other girls shook their heads. They knew there was no escape now. Outside, they would be in even more danger than in here. They just had to sit it out and hope that the cinema would make a good shelter.

‘Well, at least we can see the end of the film,’ Diane observed as Preston and Lamour melted into an embrace. ‘I wanted to see him kiss her.’

A bubble of hysterical giggles rose into Betty’s throat and she heard Gladys snort. The cinema rocked again, and the music was drowned by a shattering thud. The audience was now pressed into a tight crowd at each side of the auditorium, but the film kept running and all eyes were fixed on the screen.

‘I wish we’d never come,’ Olive moaned, covering her head with her arms. Betty squeezed her shoulders.

‘It doesn’t matter where you are. You know what they say if a bomb’s got your name on it, it’ll find you. Look - the picture’s finished. At least we saw it all!’

Olive smiled weakly. The explosions seemed to have stopped now and she lifted her head and watched the last few shots. The music swelled and throbbed through the cinema and the last scene faded. There was a moment of silence.

The aircraft noise had died away. It was only five minutes since the first thunderous crash. The girls looked at each other uncertainly. They looked at the holes in the roof, at the fragments of shrapnel and the torn seats. Was it safe anywhere?

‘Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all,’ Betty said hopefully.

‘Well, we might as well see the programme to the end.’

‘Yes, we might,’ Gladys said. ‘D’you know what the little film’s called?’ .

They shook their heads. And then the title came up on the screen and everyone in the cinema laughed.

“Though Shalt Not Kill…’

It seemed funny when they were inside the cinema, with the manager declaring that the show must go on and a spirit of defiant bravado holding them together. It was less funny when they came out to bright sunshine and saw a crater in the car park, less funny when they realised that the houses behind the cinema had been demolished, not funny at all when they heard that the Princes Theatre in Lake Road had received a direct hit and eight people been killed. The thousand-pound bomb had crashed through the roof and exploded high above the auditorium, completely wrecking the interior and blowing seats out through the roof into the street.

‘That could have been you,’ Annie scolded her daughters when they arrived home. ‘It’s all very well saying Hitler’s not going to stop you enjoying yourselves - he can stop you. He can stop you living. Next time, get yourselves into a shelter.’

‘But I don’t suppose we could have done,’ Betty argued.

‘The shops were full of people - it was really busy down North End. The shelters would have been full before we got anywhere near them. Anyway, the bombs started almost as soon as the siren had gone off, we wouldn’t have had time.’

Annie sighed. She knew this was true - she’d barely got into her own shelter when the planes had come overhead.

And the whole thing had been over in five minutes.

Gladys Shaw had refused to hurry home with the other girls. Instead, she stopped to give a hand in the street behind the cinema. People had been killed and injured there and, like Frank Budd, she had been shocked and sickened by sights she hadn’t dreamed of.

She saw an old man sitting on the kerb, his arms folded over his head as he rocked to and fro. He was crying, his mouth loose and slobbery, his scant grey hair matted with blood. Gladys crouched down beside him, taking out her handkerchief to wipe gently at his head. He must have a very nasty cut.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it ain’t me what got hurt. That’s my Edie’s blood, that is.’ He looked at Gladys, his faded eyes as bewildered as a child’s. ‘We was just having a cup of tea when the siren went, and now she’s dead. She’s still in there, all crumpled up in her chair.’ Gladys followed his gaze to a small house. People were moving about inside, shifting debris, trying to ease something out from under a fallen beam. ‘It ain’t no good,’ he said with the flatness of despair. ‘She went straightaway, they might as well leave her at rest.’ He told Gladys this through hiccuping sobs, and then he told her again, and a third time when a stout woman in a tweed jacket brought him a mug of tea. He was still repeating it when they led him gently away.

There had been a children’s tea-party in the house next door. It had been to celebrate little Doreen’s seventh birthday, from the card Gladys found lying in the middle of the littered road outside. She helped one of the First Aid workers gather the survivors together and put her arms round them while they had cuts and bruises washed and bandaged.

Some of them were taken to hospital in an ambulance. She didn’t ask how many had been killed, nor whether one of them was Doreen herself.

She watched the ambulances drive away and turned back

to see what else she could do. A woman was sobbing in a shattered doorway across the street. Gladys stepped off the pavement to go to her and felt something soft against her foot.

She looked down, and felt the gorge rise in her throat.

It was a baby, no more than three or four weeks old. The tiny body had been split like a paper bag. It lay soaking in its own blood, its contents spilling out like those of a carelessly wrapped parcel.

Gladys stared at it. It shifted suddenly, horrifyingly, then blurred before her eyes. Her ears roared and she shook her head and turned away, her hands over her mouth. As she swayed, arms caught and held her, and the First Aider she had been helping spoke in her ear.

‘Come and have a cuppa,’ she said. ‘You’re not used to it,

‘Who is?’ Gladys asked, sitting down on a broken bit of wall. ‘Have you ever seen things like that before?’

The woman shrugged. ‘I was a nurse. I worked in Casualty.

There’s plenty happens in street accidents and such … But it’s never easy to take, specially not with kiddies.’ She handed Gladys a mug of tea. ‘Sip that, it’s good and sweet, it’ll make you feel better.’ The ambulances were beginning to return, and people were searching under the rubble for more survivors. ‘Get off home if you like. I’ll have to stay and help.’

‘I’ll stay too.’ Gladys gulped down the hot liquid. ‘But I don’t know that I’m much help. I don’t know any First Aid or anything.’

It didn’t seem to matter. There was still plenty to do, helping shift debris and giving what comfort she could to the people they did manage to dig out, some of them miraculously unhurt. But it was clear to Gladys that she could have been a lot more help, and by the time she reached home at last, she had made up her mind what to do.

‘I’m coming to Red Cross classes with you,’ she told her mother as she sank into a chair with a cup of tea. ‘I ought to have done it before. And I’m going to learn to drive.’

‘Drive?’ Peggy echoed. ‘What, drive a car, you mean?’

‘Well, I’m not going to drive a train,’ Gladys said with a weary attempt at humour.

‘But what will you drive? I mean, you’re not thinking of going on the buses, are you? Your dad’ll never ‘

‘I don’t know what I’ll do. Nobody knows what they’ll have to do in this war.’ Glady set down the empty cup and dragged herself out of the chair. She felt dirty and dog-tired and would have liked nothing better than to sink into a hot bath.

But that meant getting in the tin bath from the yard and turning on the geyser to fill it up, and then dragging it out again, and she didn’t have the energy. Besides, the family had had their weekly bathing session last night. ‘I just think driving’ll be a useful thing to be able to do. Oh, I’m so tired.’ It seemed a lifetime since she and the others had been sitting in the cinema watching Robert Preston.

‘You have a good wash, love.’ Peggy had been out during the raid too, and was almost as weary as her daughter, but she recognised the signs of shock and knew that Gladys needed comfort and warmth. ‘I’ll heat you up some of that pea soup that was left over from dinner. And then I reckon you’d be best off to get to bed early.’

Early? To Gladys, it felt as if the day had lasted for ever.

She went out into the scullery, took off her top clothes and ran some hot water into the enamel bowl. She stared at it and then, very slowly, washed herself.

The pictures of the typhoon that had seemed so dramatic on screen had faded from her mind. Instead, all she could see were an old man sitting on the pavement, a child’s birthday card fluttering in a shattered street and a baby’s body lying in the gutter.

I’ve got to do something about it, she thought. I’ve got to do my bit.

As soon as the Chapmans had finished their Sunday lunch of roast lamb - a smaller joint than they were used to, but Annie refused to lower her standards and have sausages instead, Betty set out to visit Graham’s parents in Gosport.

Charlie and Elsie Philpotts lived about a mile from the harbour. Betty caught a bus and got off by the Gipsy Queen, then walked up Carnarvon Road. There were several short cul-de-sacs running off the road on both sides, and the Philpotts’ lived in one of these. Charlie was pruning roses in his front garden when Betty arrived. He looked up at the sound of her voice and straightened his thin body, rubbing the small of his back with one hand.

‘Every picture tells a story … Come over to see the missus, have you? She’s somewhere indoors, or else out the back.’ He called out in his dry, sandpapery voice, ‘Elsie! We’ve got a visitor.’

Elsie Philpotts appeared, big and blowsy, her mauve satin blouse already parting company with her tight green skirt.

Her ginger hair had recently been permed, and clustered round her head in curls so tight they seemed afraid to leave go of each other. She had no stockings on, but had painted her legs with something brown and streaky. On her feet, she wore pink slippers.

‘Betty! Well, this is nice.’ She enveloped Betty in a hug. It was like being assaulted by two feather pillows. ‘Come over to see us on your last day, have you? I call that really nice, don’t you, Charlie?’

Her husband blinked at her. His blue eyes always looked

half dreamy, as if he was living in another world. ‘What d’you mean, her last day? She’s not being took off to prison, is she?’

Elsie Philpotts let out a shriek of laughter.

‘Took off to prison! What an idea! As if our Betty would do anything to be sent to prison for. You know what she’s doing, Charlie. I told you. Going for a Land Girl, she is, milking cows and feeding chickens and all that.’ She regarded Betty fondly. ‘Just think, this time next week you’ll be a farmer’s girl. Think you’re going to like it?’