The September Girls (26 page)

The platform was crowded with excited young women and their less than excited relatives - most looked extremely tearful. A train was chugging out, discharging clouds of grey smoke. The smell reminded Brenna of the cellar where they’d once lived and the fumes from the fire, which had so badly affected her baby daughter’s chest. And now that same daughter was tall and lovely and about to leave home for a new and quite different life. It wasn’t often these days that she prayed to the Blessed Virgin, but she did so now, imploring her to keep her precious Cara safe and well.

Cara, with her mane of red-golden hair and bright red frock, was easily spied halfway along the platform. Fergus and Tyrone had already arrived, having taken time off work to bid their sister goodbye. The train hissed and snorted, steam rising from underneath, like an impatient dragon anxious to escape the confines of the station and fly off to some strange, foreign land.

‘Mam!’ Cara threw her arms around Brenna’s neck and then embraced her father. ‘I’ll write and let you know how things are as soon as I can.’

‘You’d better had!’ Brenna threateningly. ‘If we don’t hear from you by the end of the week, your dad’ll drive to Lincolnshire looking for you. Have you saved yourself a seat, girl?’

‘I’ve put me bags on one, Mam.’

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, sis,’ Fergus joked. The last few weeks, he’d been on top of the world and it was Tyrone who was down in the doldrums. Brenna thought how unpredictable life was. The son she’d thought she’d have at home was going away, and the one she’d expected to go was staying.

Cara said, ‘Mam, Sybil Allardyce is over there with her mam and dad. Nancy and Jonathan are there, too.’

‘I’d forgotten Eleanor would be here.’ Brenna went over to say tara to Sybil. She’d never particularly liked her, but this wasn’t the time to let it show. The girl was dressed up to the nines in a navy-blue linen costume and white hat, gloves and bag. She kissed her and urged her to look after herself. ‘You and our Cara are like family. The September girls must try and stick together if they can,’ she advised.

‘Yes, Mrs Caffrey,’ Sybil said curtly. Like the train, she looked impatient to be off.

Eleanor and Nancy came back with Brenna to say goodbye to Cara. ‘All these goodbyes,’ Nancy sighed. ‘They make me feel restless. If I was young enough, I’d join the Army meself.’

‘Is Mr Allardyce coming down with something?’ Brenna asked. ‘He doesn’t look very well.’

‘He’s upset that Sybil’s leaving,’ Eleanor explained, ‘and it doesn’t help that she’s being so horrid to him.’ She shook her head disapprovingly. ‘Sometimes my daughter can be a real bitch.’

Minutes later, the guard blew his whistle and there was a brief commotion as the girls piled on to the train. Cara’s head appeared at a window and she waved madly at her family. ‘Tara Mama, tara Dad.’ She blew kisses at Fergus and Tyrone. ‘Tara, everyone.’

‘Tara, Cara,’ Brenna cried. ‘Take care of yourself, me darlin’ girl.’

The train gave a massive snort and the wheels began to move. Brenna ran along the platform, dodging in and out of the waving crowds, determined to stay as close to her daughter for as long as possible, but Colm caught up and put his arms around her waist, holding her back.

‘Let her go, luv,’ he whispered.

‘I don’t want to let her go, Colm. I want her here with us.’ She began to cry - huge, painful sobs that threatened to tear her guts apart. She remembered then that in another forty-eight hours, she would have to go through the same desperately horrible experience when Fergus left.

‘Every mam and dad on the platform probably feels the same.’ By now, the train had disappeared and only the smoke remained, melting into wisps and puffs that floated away in front of their eyes. Colm led her towards the exit. ‘Come on, Bren, let’s go home.’

 

Marcus stood and waited until the train could no longer be seen or heard. Only then did he turn and join the crush to leave. Everybody seemed subdued and dejected. Ahead, Brenna and Colm walked, their bodies pressed close together. Fergus and Tyrone waited at the entrance to the platform for them to catch up. Eleanor linked Jonathan’s arm - he was an overweight, unhealthy-looking boy - and Nancy was on her other side, all three involved in an animated conversation that appeared to demand lots of waving of hands.

He seemed to be the only person alone. Would he feel better, he wondered, if he had someone to share his all-consuming misery, someone he could tell how much he missed Sybil, who would know exactly how he felt because they would miss her too? Eleanor hadn’t been too concerned to see her daughter leave - she was happy enough with Jonathan and her lodgers - but Nancy had lost most of the people close to her, who’d either died or gone away: her parents, her brothers, Herbert Wallace and his wife, Anthony, now Sybil and Cara Caffrey, whom she’d helped to deliver nearly nineteen years ago in the basement of the house in Parliament Terrace. She would surely understand how he felt.

Marcus quickened his pace until he caught up with the trio. ‘I thought I’d go home for a while rather than back to the factory,’ he said to Nancy. ‘I wondered if you’d like a lift?’

‘Oh, but I wasn’t . . .’ She looked into his face. ‘That’s very nice of you. I’d like a lift home, thank you.’

He was aware of the sympathy in her eyes. She had clearly intended going somewhere else, but had changed her mind because she felt sorry for him. His face stiffened. He hated the thought of looking so wretched that he invited compassion. ‘I’ve just remembered, ’ he said harshly, ‘I have an important appointment this afternoon. I won’t be going home, after all.’

‘That’s all right,’ Nancy said kindly, and he could tell she’d seen right through him and it made him feel even worse.

 

It seemed to Brenna that the entire country took a collective breath and held it in while they waited for something to happen. Eleanor had an Anderson air raid shelter built at the bottom of her garden, as did everyone who had a house with a garden. But the Caffreys only had a yard and were required to go to the nearest public shelter if there was a raid. Brenna had no intention of doing any such thing. She cleared out the cupboard under the stairs, which would probably be just as safe, although a bit squashed once she, Tyrone, Maria and the lads were inside.

They’d moved into the Caffreys’ house a few days ago. The lads loved having a room to themselves and Maria said it was the first time she’d slept the whole night through in ages. Brenna had never realized what an admirable person her daughter-in-law was: a loving mother to her two little sons and patience itself with Tyrone, who’d been in a desperately dark mood ever since the Army had rejected him. She insisted on doing her own washing and her share of the housework at which she was inclined to be a bit slapdash, but Brenna put the blame for that on Mrs Murphy for not showing the girl a good example - she’d like to bet the Murphys’ house was a tip.

‘Are you going to let the lads be evacuated to Southport, darlin’?’ Brenna enquired one day. ‘Me and Eleanor are helping to organize it.’

‘I’d sooner not, least not straight away. I’d sooner wait until the raids start, that’s if they ever start at all.’ Maria’s pretty face was grim. ‘And if they do have to go, I’m going with them. I’m not having strangers looking after me kids.’ Which was exactly what Brenna would have done had she been in Maria’s position.

Government leaflets poured through the letterbox: how to tape your windows, use a stirrup pump, take your gas mask with you everywhere . . .

Brenna duly taped her windows and put up the blackout curtains. From outside, every house looked like a funeral parlour. Some people she knew just disappeared, having gone to stay with relatives in the country or to another country altogether: Australia, Canada, the United States . . . Shops and a few small firms closed down, the owners having been called up for military service: the young milkman was replaced by his father and the postman gave way to a postwoman.

Cara wrote to say that once she had finished her basic training she was going to Bedford on a driving course, and Fergus telephoned the Allardyces to say he’d just been informed he was being sent to France early the following day and didn’t have time to write. Nancy came hurrying round to Shaw Street with the news and told them Mr Allardyce said they could use his telephone any time they wanted.

‘That’s kind of him,’ Brenna said, touched, although she’d always had free use of Eleanor’s phone.

The air raid siren was tested several times during the day, scaring the living daylights out of the population who tried not to imagine what the inhuman wail would sound like in the middle of the night bringing the ugly message that a raid was about to start and bombs would drop from the sky at any minute.

The weather in August was the finest that Brenna could remember: each golden day followed by another just as lovely, yet bringing the threat of war even closer.

On the final day of August, the threat seemed more like a promise when it was announced that mass evacuation would take place the following day.

Half a dozen coaches waited at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, gleaming in the morning sunshine, when Brenna arrived the next morning. Eleanor was already there as well as a straggling line of children, most accompanied by mothers who were loudly cursing Hitler for having to send their children away because Liverpool was about to become a place where it was no longer safe to be.

‘How long will it be for?’ one demanded angrily of Brenna.

‘I don’t know, darlin’,’ she confessed. ‘No one does, not even the good Lord himself.’

She helped the alternately brave, weeping or giggling children on to the buses. Some were dressed in their best clothes, but she pitied the families who’d be landed with the poor little ragamuffins whose mothers hadn’t bothered to come and who smelled as if they hadn’t had a wash in weeks. They’d brought nothing with them: no clothes, not even a toothbrush.

The last coach was about to leave when Maria arrived with Joey and Mike and a giant suitcase. ‘I’ve decided to go after all,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It doesn’t seem fair on the kids to stay.’

‘Tara, darlin’.’ Brenna took the girl in her arms. ‘I’ll miss you and the lads something awful. You’ve hardly been there five minutes, but the house won’t seem the same with the three of you gone.’

There was a lump in throat as she watched the coach drive away, Joey and Mike on the back seat waving furiously. This was the third time she’d had to say goodbye to people she loved and she prayed it would be the last.

That was the day the blackout began and that night a nightmarish darkness fell over the city. For the first time, Colm left to take up his official role as an air raid warden, and Tyrone went to the pub, driven half-mad with despair at the way things had turned out - people had already started to ask when he would be called up.

‘What am I supposed to tell them, Mam?’ he’d asked.

‘The truth, darlin’.’

‘I don’t want to tell them the truth and if I did, they’d probably never believe me. They’ll think I’m just a shirker, too scared to fight.’

Brenna sat alone in the house, pulling the curtains tightly closed when it grew dark, unable to hear the faintest sound outside. On such a warm night, there’d normally have been plenty of people about. The street lights would be lit by now, women would be jangling on their doorsteps, children still playing out. But most of the children had gone away and the women were, like her, shut inside wondering what on earth the world had come to. She was unwilling to turn on the wireless, worried what awful news she might hear.

The next day, Friday, Hitler invaded Poland, a signal that all hell was about to break out, and at ten o’clock on Sunday morning it was announced on the wireless that the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, would speak to the nation at quarter past eleven.

‘This is it, Bren,’ Colm said ominously.

‘I’ll invite in some of the neighbours.’ They were one of the few houses in the street that had a wireless. Brenna wondered if her old neighbour, Katie MacBride, would have predicted the war in the leaves had she still been alive, but Katie had passed away years ago.

By quarter past eleven, the house was full to bursting with people standing in the hall and sitting on the stairs. They heard the prime minister tell them that their country was now at war with Germany, finishing with, ‘May God bless you all. May He defend the right, for it is evil things that we shall be fighting against - brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution - and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

Sybil buried her head beneath the bedclothes, but the voices were only slightly muffled by the stiff-as-a-board sheet and blankets so coarse you could have struck matches on them. The pillow felt as if had been stuffed with cobbles.

‘Bleedin’ hell,’ someone groaned. ‘I wanna pee already. I only went just before lights out. I’ll never find me bleedin’ way to the bog in the dark.’

‘Pee out the winder,’ someone else suggested. ‘Some lucky soldier will get a great, big hard-on if he spies your arse hanging out.’

‘Yeah! But what’ll
she
get,’ asked a third someone.

‘The clap?’

There was a burst of laughter. ‘The clap’ was another term for venereal disease and Sybil could see nothing funny about it. Since she’d joined the Army, she had lost all sense of humour and was convinced it wouldn’t return until she left. She would never understand how Betsy Billington-Clarke had managed to become a WAAF. It was rumoured that the RAF and the Navy took all the superior girls, leaving the dregs to the ATS. Sybil preferred to think it was all the luck of the draw, otherwise where did that leave her? Or, come to that, Cara Caffrey, who was a bit rough, but could hardly be described as ‘dregs’, like most of the common-as-muck girls in the billet to whom it had come as a shock to find they were expected to shower every morning. ‘At home, I only had a bath once a month,’ one had said. They didn’t go to the lavatory, but to the bog, ‘for a pee’, or even ‘a piss’, and they never washed their hands afterwards. They came out with swear words that Sybil had never heard before.