To Have and to Hold (32 page)

‘Go on.’

‘During one of those devastating raids at the hospital I began to fret about who would look after Beth if anything happened to me. I wanted it to be Ruby, but knew, if she was agreeable, I would have to draw it up legally. Anyway, she was delighted and I went to the solicitor recommended by the hospital that lots of nurses use. In the event of my death, or if I am incapacitated to such an extent that I can’t care for my child, Ruby and George will be her carers and you her legal guardian, if you wouldn’t mind that?’

‘Mind that?’ Jeff said gruffly, strangely hurt that his daughter-in-law should look outside the family for this type of thing. ‘I suppose I should be grateful that you thought of me in any capacity at all.’

‘You’re not offended?’ Carmel said in surprise. ‘Surely not? I am disappointed that you are looking on it that way. Look, I did this to protect Beth from my father and your wife, who would both harm her in their own way, and I thought you would see it that way too. I am trying to do the best for my child, and the way anyone else feels about it is secondary.’

Jeff hung his head. He knew that Carmel spoke sense and was ashamed of himself and his initial reaction. He said so and apologised.

‘It’s all right,’ Carmel said, kissing him on the cheek as she dried her hands. ‘I know how you love Beth, but I am relying on you, because if anyone tries to overturn this, then it will be your job to stop them. Course,’ she went on, ‘this is only if something happens to me and I haven’t any plans that way. And if you have finished those pots, we will join the others and I will get her ladyship up from her nap or she will never sleep tonight.’

Despite the raid in the very early hours of 1 January 1941, as the winter turned into spring, people were becoming more hopeful, for there was a lull in the bombing and any raids there were, were light and sporadic, reminiscent of those early in the war.

‘That’s it, I reckon,’ Sylvia said one day as the four friends sat eating their dinner in the canteen.

‘What d’you mean?’ Jane asked.

‘Well, I reckon Jerry has finished with us now,’ Sylvia said. ‘Threw all he could at us and couldn’t break our spirits.’

‘I flipping well hope you are right,’ Jane said. ‘The last thing I want is for some raid to spoil my wedding day.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lois with a laugh. ‘Maybe we should send a directive to Herr Hitler. Hold your hand on Saturday, 19 April, there’s a good chap, because our friend Jane Firkins is hoping to become Mrs Meadows.’

‘Oh, very funny.’

‘We’ll need one before that,’ Sylvia laughed. ‘We don’t want him muscling in on the hen night either.’

‘Oh, we are having a hen night then?’ Lois asked.

‘Course we are,’ Sylvia maintained. ‘However spartan and brief the wedding, Jane is going to be sent off by us in good style. What d’you say, Carmel?’

‘I say, hear, hear,’ Carmel said.

‘You won’t have any trouble getting a baby-sitter?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Carmel said. ‘Both Jeff and Ruby will likely be fighting each other for the privilege. Between the two of them they would have the child ruined if I didn’t put my foot down now and again.’

‘And you missed out on your own hen night, as I recall?’ Lois remarked.

‘Yeah, well, if you remember, Mammy and Sister Frances had just arrived and we were all staying at the convent and I didn’t think I could just go off.’

‘You mean they would have taken a very dim view of you coming back roaring drunk?’ Jane said.

‘Yeah,’ Carmel smiled. ‘Something like that.’

‘Ah, well, you’ll have to make up for lost time then,’ Sylvia said. ‘What d’you want to do, Jane, a meal, a pub crawl or what?’

‘Oh, I think both, definitely,’ Jane said. ‘If I can’t have the fairy-tale wedding I wanted like Carmel and Lois had, then I am determined to have a send-off to remember.’

‘If it is a good enough send-off there is a good chance you won’t remember the whole of it at all,’ said Sylvia with a sardonic grin.

The girls laughed together as Jane said, ‘You’re right, there.’ She raised her cup in the air. ‘Here’s to oblivion.’

The cups clinked together. ‘To oblivion,’ they chorused.

Jane’s eyes were suddenly moist as she looked around the table and she said softly, ‘I would just like to say here and now, and when I am stone-cold sober, that you are the best and dearest friends I have ever had. And now,’ she went on, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, ‘I best go back to the ward before I end up blarting my eyes out.’

Carmel knew exactly what Jane meant, for she too thought the world of the girls and regarded it a great thing that the first friends she had ever had should prove to be so stalwart and loyal.

When the sirens went again on 9 April at half-past nine at night, everyone went into air-raid mode without any sense of panic.

‘He’s giving out one of these every so often,’ said Jane, as she began erecting the cages over the bed-bound patients, with Aileen. ‘It’s just in case we should get complacent.’

‘Well, I hope he gets this one over early,’ Carrmel said, as she began rousing the patients that could walk, many of whom had begun to settle down for the night. ‘My shift should finish at eleven, and if Lois and myself are much later leaving here, we may have to walk home. It is quite a hike and not something I relish after a day here.’

‘Don’t blame you either,’ Sylvia said as Lois and Carmel began leading the way to the basement where the people soon settled to play cards, or read, or sit chatting together and waited for the raid to pass. However, it soon became apparent that this raid was no short skirmish. The people in the basement began listening intently, glad of the depth and thickness of the walls that muf
fled the whine and whistle of the descending bombs, the crash and boom of the explosions and the barking of the anti-aircraft fire.

And then there was a sudden enormous crash just above them, the walls shook, bits of masonry from the roof spattered down on them, the light flickered and went out, and people began to scream and panic. Carmel couldn’t blame them for being scared. It wasn’t pleasant sitting there in the pitch-black, tasting the plaster and brick dust from the ceiling and wondering if the whole building was going to collapse and entomb them. She ferreted feverishly in her bag for her torch.

Other nurses were doing the same and soon thin pencils of light were piercing the gloom, showing the faces of the people petrified with fear. Carmel played her torch on the walls and roof and saw that they seemed solid enough. It seemed safer to stay where they were for the time being, at least. She said this to the patients and tried to calm them as Lois and others lit the hurricane lamps left in the basement for just such an event. Soon the area was dimly lit by the lamps’ soft glow.

Carmel longed to know what had happened above them, but could hardly leave her distressed patients to go to find out. She would have to wait like everyone else.

After fifteen minutes or so, which seemed like an eternity, the door opened and a young nurse ran down the stairs, lamp held aloft. ‘Are you all right down here?’

‘We’re fine,’ Carmel answered. ‘What’s happened?’

The girl descended the stairs and Carmel saw the state of her: covered in grey-brown brick dust, her eyes full of tears in a face alive with terror.

‘It’s dreadful,’ she said, placing her lamp on the floor.
‘There was a bomb. Staff Nurse said she thinks it probably fell in Steelhouse Lane and we were caught in the blast. I was flung right across the room, but the others…oh God…’ And the young nurse covered her face with her hands.

‘What’s happened to them?’ Lois demanded.

The young girl raised her face and said, ‘They’re not there any more. One half of the room isn’t there any more either. Sylvia was thrown across the room with me, but Jane and Aileen and all the beds that side of the room have just gone.’

‘Gone!’ Lois and Carmel said in unison as the other nurses in the basement crept forward to listen too.

The nurse nodded. ‘They are searching the rubble for them now and they sent me down to see if you are all right here.’

‘They will be all right, though?’ Carmel asked the girl, seeking assurance. ‘They are just buried, aren’t they?’

The girl shook her head sadly and her eyes swam with tears. ‘No, I’m sorry. I thought you understood. They don’t expect anyone to have survived. I know that Jane was a special friend of yours and they brought her body out just before I came down here. She was quite, quite dead.’

Carmel just stared at the girl as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Numb with shock, she remembered that Jane had met her at New Street Station that first day, and how vibrant and full of life she was and the sense of fun she always had. And if the young nurse was right, there was Aileen too. Aileen who kept them constantly amused by the number of times she ‘fell in love’.

Carmel was aware of Lois weeping beside her as she felt the enormity of the tragedy began to seep into her too. Poor, poor Jane, looking forward to her wedding day. And poor Pete too. What a terrible and tragic shock he was going to get. Yet she felt unable to cry, though she comforted Lois, who was crying as if her heart was broken.

Later, when the all clear rang out, Carmel worked like an automaton, finding beds in other parts of the hospital and helping to settle the patients down for the night. A whole wing of the hospital had been caught in the blast and under the rubble they had found the bodies of two doctors and two nurses, one of whom was Aileen, and numerous patients. There were many injured too, and they were sent to Lewis’s basement, which is where Carmel and Lois found Sylvia.

They looked down from the top of the wide staircases, the steps full of bloodstained clothing. The pungent odour of blood permeated the air, and at the bottom of the stairs lay the injured, row upon row of them, on makeshift stretchers and covered with grey blankets so that only their faces, often powdered with brick dust, were showing. The keening and wailing of these poor people was constant and heartbreaking.

Sylvia, when they found her, looked not too bad when you discounted her panic-riddled eyes in a face as white as the bandage around her head, and the big black and blue bruise almost covering one cheek. She was pleased to see Carmel and Lois.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘What can you remember?’

‘Well, I know it was a bomb,’ Sylvia said. ‘I heard it
explode and then it was as if all the air was sucked from the room and next thing I woke up here.’

‘You must have passed out.’

‘I did. They told me that much.’ Sylvia said ‘That’s why I was brought in. Was it a direct hit or what?’

‘No,’ Carmel said. ‘The bomb fell in Steelhouse Lane. We saw the huge crater on the way here. Someone told us it had killed one policeman who was fire-watching on the roof, blinded another and nearly severed the foot of the chief inspector. The hospital was been caught in the blast.’

‘A young nurse told us that you were thrown across the room,’ Lois said.

Sylvia nodded. ‘That’s when I must have cracked my head. I think it was bleeding quite badly, because one of the nurses said it needs stitching when the doctors get around to seeing me, but he is so busy, as you can see. Apart from cuts and bruises I am all right really—a damned sight better than most of this lot, anyway. How are the others?’

Carmel couldn’t prevent the shadow flitting across her face and Sylvia grasped her arm. ‘Jane! Tell me Jane is all right?’

Carmel shook her head helplessly and Lois said gently, ‘She didn’t make it, Sylvia.’

Carmel took hold of Sylvia’s hands, which were plucking agitatedly at the blanket as the horror of it all registered on her face. Tears began to trickle from her eyes as she repeated almost in a whisper, ‘Not make it?’

‘The whole side was blown out of the ward,’ Carmel said softly, ‘No one who was there could have survived it.’

‘Are you sure?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Did you actually see for yourself?’

Carmel nodded. ‘We saw Jane’s body before we left. Aileen was there too, and all the patients, of course.’

‘Jane was my best friend.’

‘We know, love.’

‘There will never be another like her.’

‘We know that too.’

‘Poor Pete.’

‘Aye, poor Pete.’

The storm of weeping broke then within Sylvia. The tears flowed so fast and furious, it was as if a dam had burst. Lois took her in her arms and let her cry until she was calmer. Eventually the torrent of tears changed to hiccuping sobs and she pulled herself from Lois and wiped her eyes.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ Lois said huskily. ‘It broke my heart too when I heard.’

‘Will you let Pete know, and Dan?’ Sylvia said.

‘Of course.’

‘My address book is in my handbag in the staff room.’

‘We’ll see to it, don’t fret,’ Carmel promised.

Carmel and Lois arrived home as a pearly dawn was lighting up the sky, worn down by sadness and weary, and footsore after walking every step of the way. Carmel had expected Beth to be asleep in Ruby’s house and was surprised to see Ruby curled up on the settee in her lounge. She woke as the two girls came in and rubbed her bleary eyes.

‘Ruby?’ Carmel cried. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you,’ Ruby said, and she withdrew the telegram from behind the clock. ‘This came for you,’ she said, ‘but the raid was too fierce for me to leave the house.’

Telegrams seldom brought good news. Carmel felt as if she had had a surfeit of sorrow that day already and she sank into an armchair before opening the telegram with fingers that trembled slightly. It was from Michael.

‘Daddy dead of heart attack. Details later.’

‘My father’s dead,’ she said in a flat, expressionless voice. She passed the telegram over for Ruby and Lois to read. ‘And don’t even bother saying you are sorry. I’m not sorry, not one bit. I just wish he had done it sooner. And I don’t even know why I am crying.’

It was more then mere crying; the trauma and tragedy of the day had caused more an outpouring of grief as she mourned the deaths, particularly of Jane. And she wept for all the other senseless deaths she had witnessed since the war began, indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, the very old, very young and the vulnerable amongst them.

Her father’s death was just one more, and why should she care? He was the one man in the world she had hated above all others and yet the tears continued to pour from her eyes and the sobs shook her whole frame. Ruby, her arms clasped around Carmel, was confused about the remorse the girl was showing over the passing of a man she never said a good word about when he was hale and hearty—until Lois told what had happened to them both that day, and then she understood Carmel’s anguish.

‘I can’t possibly go, of course,’ Carmel said to Jeff the
following day when he called round. She was holding aloft the letter that had arrived that morning, giving details of the funeral.

‘Carmel, my dear, you can’t not.’

‘That man did nothing but terrorise me all the days of my life,’ Carmel retorted angrily. ‘I owe him nothing, but Jane, Jane was my friend.’

‘This is not for your father,’ Jeff said firmly. ‘And you will go to your father’s funeral and not shame your mother, and I will go too.’

‘You?’

‘I will go to represent my son,’ Jeff said.

‘You are determined about this?’

‘Oh, yes, my dear girl,’ Jeff said. ‘Will you take the child?’

‘Do you think I would be let in the house without her?’ Carmel said. ‘Mammy is dying to see her. But you know how Beth is now that she is mobile and taking life at a run. I think it will one body’s work to watch her, particularly on that boat, and I would be glad of another pair of hands and a person who is firm with her when she needs it.’