The Liverpool Trilogy (98 page)

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, Gloria?’

‘The Pendleburys kept rabbits. They may have a hutch.’

Marie beamed. ‘Telephone them, dear.’

‘No line, Mum. They’ve fixed most of Liverpool Road, so Dad’s locum has a phone at the practice, but we’re still out of order.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot. Would you go along and ask about a hutch?’

Gloria walked along silent roads. It was as if this cusp that divided Crosby from Blundellsands held its breath, no sound, no movement, no life. They were waiting to be bombed. She thought about
the truly threatened a few miles down the road. Saturdays were almost as holy as Sundays in Liverpool. Me mam and me dad came, as did our Auntie Flo with her new feller from the gasworks, Uncle
Fred with our Steve, our ’arry and our Edna, what was just out of jail for shoplifting what she never done, and it never rained but it poured, eh?

Floors of landing houses were scrubbed early on Saturday mornings. Even in wet weather, landing house kids were thrown out while the job was done. They could be picked out at a glance, shivering
in shop doorways, walking to the swimming baths with rolled-up towels whose original colours were long forgotten, or kicking a ball, or fighting in a tangle of limbs.

That was their culture, the rhythm they had invented, their own music, their own passion. Mel had often been heard to mutter, ‘It’ll be the poor who suffer most. They’re the
ones I’ll be batting for; not as a lawyer, but as a politician.’ Mel was right. They were sure as hell suffering now. Extended families were forced to separate, because houses were
gone, and people were becoming careful and wary. Saturday family gatherings were few and far between. A whole way of life had been stolen.

Mr Pendlebury promised to bring a hutch later on. ‘Go home, Gloria. The Bosch are getting confident, and I shouldn’t put it past them to arrive in daylight. They’ve been doing
that for months down south.’

She walked home. Soon, all windows would be blacked out, all doors closed. This wasn’t living; it was an existence, no more. Many children had never seen a banana, an orange, a pineapple.
Food was so scarce that hunger was a constant companion. Hemlines had ascended to knee level in a bid to save cloth. The cotton mills were concentrating on calico for shrouds, a thought that made
Gloria shiver.

She wasn’t to know yet that this was the day on which all levels of the
Divine Comedy
would be visible. The descending circles of Dante’s
Inferno
would be displayed,
all the way from its seething rim down into the deepest realms of torment. But Wabbit would have a hutch, a surrogate mother, some greens, and a carrot. For now, that was Gloria’s sole
concern.

For the people of Liverpool, Lewis’s department store was sacrosanct.

Blackler’s was high on the list, too, so the loss by fire of these two large emporia would be bemoaned for some considerable time to come. All seven storeys of Lewis’s were
destroyed, while Blackler’s, already seriously lacking in windows, was also burned to death. Among the shop’s contents, ten thousand pounds’ worth of fully fashioned silk
stockings had recently been delivered, and they melted alongside everything else in the building. This crime alone would be judged massive in the opinion of the city’s already angry
women.

Tom heard about these events, but he was on the dock road with several people who had been seriously hurt in a collision involving four vehicles. In truth, no one needed telling about the fires;
even from the edge of the city, the devastation was visible. More news arrived. The William Brown Library had been eradicated along with the music section, and every book had been consumed by
flames.

Tom placed two dead children on the pavement. They could wait there until an ambulance came. Minutes earlier, they had probably been sleeping in the car, but they would never wake again. His
stomach rumbled angrily, though he could not have eaten to save his life. Dead children had always been the worst part of his job. He patched up a couple of adults, stepped back when ambulances
arrived. At least three more were dead, but he could now leave them in safe, respectful hands. Because something was developing in the area of Huskisson Dock Two, and as he ran along the road his
eyes remained riveted to the sight.

At about a quarter past eleven, a burning barrage balloon had freed itself from its moorings and floated gracefully past Tom, the ambulances, the suffering and the dead. It landed, after a few
pirouettes, on the deck of SS
Malakand
and became entangled with the rigging.

‘Oh, bugger,’ said a nearby dock worker. ‘That ship’s packed with explosives.’ After a further fifteen minutes the fire had been extinguished by the crew, but here
came the Germans. They dropped firebombs and high explosives onto dock buildings, and burning debris fell on the steamer, igniting it from stem to stern. The order to abandon ship could be heard
above anti-aircraft fire and falling bombs.

There was nothing Tom could do but wait while the crew obeyed the captain’s orders. Many stayed on the quayside and fought to scuttle their ship, but she refused go down. He was probably
wasting his time, so he backtracked into the city. The wind was up, the water mains had been blasted out of existence, and fire-fighters stood with dry hoses, many of the men in tears. Tom touched
the arm of the nearest. ‘Can I do anything?’

The man allowed a hysterical laugh to leave his dry throat. ‘No. They’ve even burned Sammie, and all the fish boiled to death.’

‘The museum?’ Tom enquired.

‘What sodding museum? We haven’t got no museum no more. Even Sammie, poor little Sammie. All the kids loved him.’

Tom blinked. Sammie the seal had been everyone’s favourite. ‘I want to hit somebody,’ he whispered.

The fireman pointed to a colleague. ‘Hit him,’ he suggested. ‘He’s an Everton supporter.’

Fire raged and closed in on the city centre from all sides. And still a few loiterers circled, great iron birds spewing bombs, hatred and flame on a dry, windswept city. Over
six hundred incidents had been counted by the time SS
Malakand
blew in the early hours. She scattered herself just about everywhere within miles of her mooring, yet only four people died,
two of them a civilian couple on their way home via the dock road.

Tom, exhausted by lack of sleep and food, decided to call it a night. The all-clear had sounded, the city was a blazing wreck, and he had worked non-stop for five hours. The damage was
unbelievable, yet it was only too real. A total lack of water due to bombed mains, coupled with a skittish wind, had taken away the core of Liverpool. But not its heart, never its heart. The pulse
was in the people, in their intelligence, their humour –
Hit him, he’s an Everton supporter.
Even while they wept, even when their clothes were almost on fire, that cheeky,
confident banter floated to the surface. ‘God help them all,’ he muttered as he stepped into his car.

Forced to follow a tortuous route in near-darkness, he could only hope that the moon would continue to offer some glimmer of light. Roads that led directly to Crosby were not easily reachable;
every few minutes, Tom had to negotiate a way past rubble, craters, abandoned vehicles. Mel’s voice, mingled with Gloria’s laughter, echoed in the sad, dulled chambers of his mind.
I
miss Wagner
, she had said.
But it seems unpatriotic to listen to music favoured by a psychopath. I shan’t give up Beethoven, though, not even for England. And Pandora’s eating
one of your mother’s best shoes . . .
Mel summed up what he meant, what he felt about the people of this city. She was strong, passionate, smart and down to earth. As was her mother.

He stopped the car and closed his eyes. This going home business was too complicated for an exhausted man. While he nodded, the moon played hide-and-seek behind cloud or smoke, and as he neared
sleep Tom didn’t hear the ominous rumble, didn’t see the nearby wall of a house peel away from its foundations. He and his car were buried; and the moon came out to play once more.

Eileen, who resembled a question mark when standing, was now allowed to walk a few paces. According to Sister Mary Dominic, this would keep her blood on the move. ‘We
don’t want to be having an embolism now, do we?’

‘You can please yourself,’ was Eileen’s reply. ‘I am not having one; a bag of chips with plenty of vinegar will do me, ta.’

‘And you’d be straighter if you let us put the twins on the bottle. You’ve stitches, there could be adhesions—’

‘Give over,’ Keith advised. ‘She does what she does, and nothing shifts her.’

‘I’m learning that. She’s a madam, a bold girl.’

Eileen stood still. ‘Shut up, both of you. Wasn’t there enough noise in the night? You’ve half a ship planted in your rockery for a start. I’m telling you now,
we’re going home. I mean, look at us, six o’clock in the blinking morning, three hours’ sleep. Sister, go away. I’ve had enough. And no, I haven’t said me morning
prayers.’ Eileen’s mood was real; she wasn’t acting up on this occasion. Liverpool was gone. With a sky as red as last night’s, the whole of the centre must have been
destroyed.

The nun left the room, and Keith followed with towel, toothbrush and shaving equipment. The wing was full of women, of course, so his shower had to happen at the crack of dawn. But in the
corridor, Mary Dominic stopped him. ‘We’ve a . . . what you might call a situation, son. Away to the office. No one can hear us down there. You’ll be all right for one day without
the ablutions.’

A bemused Keith followed his new friend into the den of Mother Superior; Mother Superior, a fierce lady who always avoided him as if he were a pile of dog muck, was out, and Keith breathed a
sigh of relief.

His little pal almost disappeared from view when she sat in Mother’s chair. She moved a few things on the desk before speaking. ‘Keith, you know how we closed down public rooms here
and upstairs as our bit of war work?’

He nodded.

‘Well, we used just upstairs at first. We tried not to affect maternity, but upstairs got busy, so we had to bite the bullet and use every room we had. You see, those who come here are in
need of a priest or a vicar – we don’t mind which. Very few walk out. This must not be told to any of the new mothers.’

‘So they’re dying?’

She sighed. ‘We sometimes manage the odd miracle, because surgeons do their best in the theatres above. But, for the most part, our patients leave by a back door in a hearse and in the
night. That’s just to spare our mothers and babies. With this little lot down here at the start of their lives, it seems wrong to have the dead in the same building, but we have a Christian
duty. Now, pin back your ears, this isn’t going to be easy . . .’

Bad news travels fast, and truth hurts.

On Sunday, the fourth day in May, the whole Merseyside area of West Lancashire was in mourning. Many of the dead were still under rubble, as were several living souls. Even where fires had
burned themselves out, the fabric of crumbled buildings remained hot, sometimes too hot to touch.

This time, the BBC named the city. This time, nothing could be hidden, though the media did not go into too much detail. The most moving moments came when Manchester arrived in all kinds of
vehicles, and when North Wales emptied itself into the centre of Liverpool. People cared, and that mattered. A pair of proud Liver Birds supervised a city that was no longer there, a city to which
non-residents had come to help clear up.

It would have been easier to count the few buildings that remained, and most of those were singed. The cultural area was destroyed. The overhead railway, known locally as the Dockers’
Umbrella, was a tangle of metal. Wool and tobacco warehouses were no more, and Post Office engineers laboured with miles of wire, since the telephone exchange had been eliminated. Oil and fat works
continued to burn, and the destruction of Inland Revenue premises was the only occurrence that gave rise to subdued laughter. Unfortunately, an employee ventured inside and found all records intact
in a fire-proofed strong room. Fortunately, his excitement was so great that he ran out to spread the good news, forgetting to close the doors behind him. The strong room was burned out, and all
records were lost.

Into the city cycled Peter Bingley with his father’s camera. Dad hadn’t come home, so Peter had expected to find a mess, but this was . . . this was murder on a vast scale. Temper
rose like vomit in his throat, and he was forced to breathe through his mouth in order to still his stomach. There were no church steeples, no bell towers, and very few shops remained. Oxygen was
lacking, too. Where was Dad? How could he find him in the midst of such devastation? Taking photographs was no easy task, as his hands shook. But Phil Watson had to record this in his paintings.
‘And I’m giving up German,’ Peter muttered under his breath.

All punctuation marks, all points of reference had been removed. Where was he? Paradise Street, Lord Street, St John Street, Canning Place – all burned out of existence. The words
‘Turn left at Lewis’s’ would not be used for some time to come. ‘We’ll get you,’ he told a murky sky. ‘By God, you’re finished.’

He started to search for his father. He found bodies, injured people, bits of people, blackened, charred figures that had once been people – one of those might easily have been Dad. After
an hour or so, he became an automaton. Amidst the Welsh, the Mancunians and the people of Liverpool, he was just another silent worker. Occasionally, someone would shout, ‘Anybody in
there?’ Apart from that and shifting rubble, there was little sound, not even birdsong.

He went to the warden who was minding Dad’s camera.

‘All right, son?’

‘I have to go home, because my father’s missing and Mum’s frantic.’

‘You get yourself away and back to school tomorrow. We’re going to need brains like yours soon enough.’

‘Be safe,’ Peter ordered. ‘And it’s been a pleasure to talk to you.’

The man smiled through layers of soot. ‘They done us good and proper this time. Trial by fire, eh?’