We'll Meet Again

Sheila stood and looked at the pile of rubble, her mind and body so numb she could not think, could not cry, could not even move. Her home, which had stood near the corner of Mile End Road and White Horse Lane, was gone. She couldn’t take it in.

The day had started out so well too. Although it was the beginning of September, it had been more like midsummer with the blue, cloudless skies and a sun beating down on a population making plans for the evening. Her friend Janet, who worked alongside her at Morton’s general store in Hackney, had suggested going to a dance – they both loved dancing – and they had, between customers, been deciding what to wear. Being wartime, there wasn’t much choice, but whether the evening would be as warm as the day and they could wear summer frocks or if the going down of the sun might bring a chill to the air and they would be better in a skirt, blouse and cardigan was the gist of their conversation, not Hitler and his bombs.

‘Bert will call for me and we’ll meet you outside,’ Janet had said. ‘Chris will come too, won’t he?’

‘I expect so. He’ll be at the football match this afternoon, but he’ll be back by the time we leave off. I’ll call on my way home and ask him.’

Sheila had known Christopher Jarrett since schooldays, as she had Janet and Bert Harris, and they often went about as a foursome. Whether Chris would end up being her permanent boyfriend, she didn’t know. He was good-looking with his fair hair and blue eyes, and she liked him a lot but was that enough? Ma said they were both young and there was plenty of time to find Mr Right, which had made her laugh because Ma had married Pa when she was only seventeen and theirs had been a true love match.

She had just finished serving a customer when the air raid siren went, but apart from looking up from adding up the lady’s bill, she took little notice. At the beginning of the war, that banshee up-and-down wail had driven them all to the shelters as soon as they heard it, but they had become blasé about it now and only went down to the basement when they heard aeroplanes overhead and the uneven drone of their engines told them they were German. Sheila and Janet saw no reason to panic. There had been raids before, a few bombs dropped here and there, but nothing to what the airfields around the capital and the south coast had endured, and in due course the All Clear had sounded and they went on working with hardly a pause. At going home time, they might see a bomb crater where once a house or shop had stood, and houses with windows and doors blown out, and they might wonder about casualties but, so far, that had been all.

This Saturday was different. Almost before the siren had stopped its wailing, they heard the drone of aeroplanes and had gone to the shop door to see the sky filled with a mass of bombers, too many to count. An ARP warden had cycled up the road
blowing a whistle and shouting, ‘Take cover! Take cover! It’s going to be a bad one.’

‘Down to the cellar, you two,’ Mr Morton had said, coming up behind them. ‘And don’t forget your gas masks.’

Even as they turned to obey, they could see the bombs leaving the aircraft and spiralling earthwards. Grabbing their gas masks and handbags they had clattered down the stone steps into the basement, normally used to store stock. There among the shelves and boxes a space had been cleared for a few chairs and a table on which stood an oil lamp and some matches.

Mr and Mrs Morton had followed them down a minute or two later. He was carrying a canvas bag of money taken from the till, and she had a flask and some mugs. They sat drinking tea and listening to the thuds and bangs, feeling the earth shake and speculating on what was happening above them. ‘I’m worried about Mum and the kids,’ Sheila had said, trying not to sound scared when an extra large bang made the table rock and they saw the walls bulging. Miraculously they settled back without crashing down. ‘I hope they’re all right.’

‘They’ll be in a shelter, won’t they?’ Janet said.

‘I hope so. The kids might have been out playing, but they’d have run home when the siren went, I expect.’ Sheila’s family was a large one, each sibling a little less than two years younger than the one above. At seventeen Sheila was the oldest, then Charlie, not quite sixteen, who worked at the docks with their father. The rest, five of them, were still at school. Mum had refused to let them be evacuated with the rest of the school, saying if they were going to be killed, they might as well all die together. ‘Pa and Charlie will be at work.’

‘Where does your father work?’ Mrs Morton asked.

‘At the Commercial Docks, in the office. But he’s a part-time
fireman, so he might have to go on duty. Charlie works down there too, as a messenger.’

‘My pa’s in the Merchant navy,’ Janet told them. ‘He’s at sea.’

‘I don’t envy him that,’ Mrs Morton said.

‘He said he’d rather drown than be shot or wounded in the trenches, and besides, the sea is the only life he knows. It’s great when his ship comes in, we have a grand time, going out and about.’

‘There’s the All Clear,’ Mr Morton said as the steady wail penetrated the walls of the cellar. It was six o’clock. They made their way up the steps behind him. Something had fallen against the cellar door and he could not open it. It looked as though they were trapped but by dint of much shoving and pushing, he opened it far enough for them to squeeze through. Treading on broken glass, they stood and surveyed the scene. The shop window had blown in and glass, vegetables and daily papers were scattered everywhere. It was one of the display shelves that had fallen and blocked the cellar door; tins of foodstuffs, flour and bags of precious sugar which had been stacked on it were strewn over the broken glass. The shop door was lying out on the pavement.

Over to the south-east, flames reached above the roof tops, casting the sky in a pinkish orange glow, suffused by smoke and grey-brown dust which hung in the air and blotted out the sun. Everyone was coming out of their houses and shops and standing about mesmerised, many were coughing on the dust.

The warden they had seen before came cycling back. His clothes were so covered in dust they were a dirty brown colour, as was everything about him including his face. ‘Any casualties down here?’ he asked.

‘No. Where did they hit?’ Sheila called out to him.

‘The docks,’ he said, dismounting to answer her. ‘Everything
down there is a shambles. The West India docks are alight from one end to the other and the timber stacks are burning on the Commercial docks. There’s rum, oil and molten pitch from the tar factory running all over the road. Ships and barges are on fire on the river. There are bits of blazing wood flying all over the place and starting new fires. You can’t get near it. God knows how the firemen will deal with it.’

‘I must get home,’ Sheila said, turning to Mr Morton. ‘Mum will be out of her mind.’

‘Go on then. You too, Janet. Me and the missus will clear up here. Thank God tomorrow’s Sunday.’

Sheila thought she knew every inch of every road in the district. It was her home, had been her playground, was where she worked, but it was a nightmare trying to find her way round blocked-off roads, rubble spilling into streets, and a cityscape changed almost beyond recognition. The nearer she came to home, the worse it was. And then she had stopped, transfixed.

This street of rubble had once been a row of terrace houses. Now you couldn’t tell one from the other. Stones, bricks, bits of wood, broken roof tiles, twisted water pipes, smashed furniture, scraps of cloth and shattered glass were piled up like some giant bonfire. ‘Mum,’ she murmured, unable to take it in.

‘Sheila. Sheila Phipps.’ The voice was almost against her ear, but it hardly penetrated her confused brain. ‘Sheila.’

She turned to face Bob Bennett. He was in his thirties, wearing an armband that told everyone he was ARP and a tin hat on which was stencilled ‘Air Raid Warden’.

‘Mr Bennett. Where’s Mum? And the kids? And Pa? Where are they?’

He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Your mum and the children were at home when it happened.’

‘Under that?’ She nodded towards the rubble that had once been their house.

‘I’m afraid so. It got a direct hit. They wouldn’t have known anything about it. The rescue squad got them out. They were taken to the school to be made ready for identification and burial.’

‘All of them? Every single one?’

He nodded. ‘Annie was still alive when we dug them out, but she died on the way to hospital.’

‘Oh.’ She was too numb to shed tears. She felt as dry as the dust that lay thick over everything. It was still very warm but she felt cold as ice and could not stop shivering. She found her voice with a monumental effort. ‘And Pa? And Charlie?’

‘We haven’t seen either of them. They’d be at work, wouldn’t they?’ Since the beginning of the war, they had been working longer shifts and free Saturday afternoons had become a thing of the past. Bob, who worked in a munitions factory when he wasn’t being an Air Raid Warden, was working every other Sunday.

‘Yes. They’d be due home at half past six, except Pa is in the AFS.’

‘He’d be putting out fires then?’

‘I suppose so. P’rhaps Charlie stayed with him.’

‘Very likely. You can’t stand here, you know. You need to report to the Rest Centre to register as homeless. The WVS will give you a cup of tea and a bite to eat and find you some clothes and a bed for the night.’

‘I don’t want to rest. I want to see Mum and my brothers and sisters.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very well. I’ll take you.’

He took her to the local school where the bodies were laid on
the hall floor in rows, covered with sheets. If the rescuers knew who they were, they were carefully labelled, though in some cases, they could not be identified. Sheila, following Mr Bennett up and down the rows, thought she must be in the middle of a terrible nightmare. He stopped and bent to read a label. Then slowly drew the sheet back from the face.

Mum looked so peaceful, serene almost. Usually she was dashing about cooking, washing, sweeping up and shouting at one or the other of them for not tidying away their things or getting under her feet, flapping at them with a damp tea towel while wisps of auburn hair escaped its pins. Now she slept a final sleep and the lines of worry had gone from her face and she looked like the beautiful woman she had been on her wedding photograph. No wonder Pa had fallen in love with her.

‘That is your Mum, isn’t it?’ Mr Bennett queried, though he knew the answer very well.

She nodded without speaking. He covered the face again and went on to the next and the next. They were all there, except Charlie: Dickie, Dorrie, Maggie, Bobby and little Annie, who had only this term joined her brothers and sisters at school. Tonight the school was a morgue.

‘We found them all huddled together,’ he said. ‘Your mother was lying on top of them, trying to shield them. Of course she couldn’t, but it was brave of her to try.’

‘I should have been there,’ she said dully. ‘I should have been with them. Ma said we’d all die together.’

‘She couldn’t have known that, could she? What with your father and Charlie and you all at work.’

‘I expect she thought if there were raids, they’d be at night when we were all at home. I don’t know what Pa is going to say. He doesn’t know, does he?’

‘We’ve sent someone to find him. Now, are you ready for the rest centre?’

‘I ought to go and look for Pa.’

‘Leave it to us, my dear. You can’t go into that inferno and he wouldn’t want to lose you too, would he?’

‘No, I s’pose not.’

He took her to the South Hallsville school which had been utilised for bombed-out families. They were lying on mattresses all over the floor. Some were asleep, some crying, some staring in bewilderment, unable to take in what had happened to them. Some women were breast-feeding babies, others nursing minor wounds; those with more severe injuries had been taken to hospital. The children’s reactions were as diverse as the adults about them. They cried, they laughed, they dashed about shouting and pretending to be aeroplanes with arms outstretched. Some, who had lost parents, sat huddled in corners looking petrified or weeping heartbrokenly. At the end of the assembly hall, a couple of tables had been set up and here Civil Defence and the Women’s Voluntary Service worked side by side, taking names, suggesting places to go for the night, handing out tea and sandwiches.

Mr Bennett took her to one of the tables and introduced her, then left. He looked exhausted but Sheila knew he wasn’t going home, not yet, not until he had accounted for everyone on his patch. He had a list of the occupants of every house and business for which he and his men were responsible and he was duty-bound to match bodies and survivors against his list.

‘Sheila Phipps, that’s your name, is it?’ the lady in the WVS uniform queried.

‘Yes.’

‘Your address?’

She told her, told her the names of her mother and siblings, of
her father who worked at the docks and her brother who worked in the same office as a messenger. She heard her voice but it didn’t seem to be her voice; it seemed far away, like an echo. This nightmare must surely end soon and she would wake up in her bed and the sun would be shining again and her mother would be bustling about getting breakfast, singing as she did so. Ma had a lovely voice. Thinking of that was her undoing. The ice melted and swamped the dryness in her mouth. Tears welled in her eyes and rained down her cheeks.

‘Oh, you poor dear,’ the woman came round the table and took the girl into her arms. ‘There, you have a good cry. Don’t mind me.’

After a couple of minutes, the weeping stopped as suddenly at it had begun and Sheila’s back stiffened. For the first time in her life she felt hate, hate for Hitler and everyone who fought for him, hate so intense her fists were balled. If she met a German now she would kill him with her bare hands. ‘I’m worried about Pa,’ she said, stuffing her handkerchief back into the pocket of her dress. ‘This will break his heart.’

‘Have you got any relatives or neighbours you can go to until your father comes?’