Annie Groves - As Time Goes By

They were already into September and the home front was destined to became harder. At the end of the October the double daylight saving time, introduced so that the country could make the most of the long summer daylight hours, would come to an end and they would be plunged back into the misery of the blackout. Then they would have the winter to live through with only a meagre amout of fuel allowed for fires, and the dreariness of thin soups made from whatever bones and scraps of meat could be had, thickened with whatever winter vegetables were available.

They were fortunate on Chestnut Close, Sally recognised, in that one side of the Close backed on to a row of allotments, maintained in the main by the Close’s residents.

Albert Dearden, Molly’s dad, had always been kind enough to help out Sally with veggies and the like from his own allotment, treating her almost as though she were another daughter, and her two boys his grandsons.

Yes, the residents of Chestnut Close had pulled together right from the start of the war, when they had set to to erect their communal air-raid shelter, Sally acknowledged half an hour after leaving the Grafton, as she got off the bus and crossed Edge Hill Road to turn into the Close. Not that it had always been plain sailing or happy families. There had been a fair few fall-outs since the war had begun in September 1939, none more spectacular perhaps than those between June Dearden, as she had been then, and her widowed future mother-in-law, Doris Brookes.

Poor June, she had never really taken to Doris, nor Doris to her, and yet really you couldn’t have wished to meet two more decent sorts.

It had been Doris, a retired midwife, who had delivered Sally’s own first baby, commandeering Molly to help her when Sally had gone into early labour. Doris had refused to seek shelter for herself, despite the warning wail of the air-raid alarm, which had everyone else rushing for the protection of the newly erected shelter. Instead she had bustled Sally upstairs to her spare room, where she had given birth. On that occasion the air-raid warning had simply been a practice drill, but they had all had plenty of opportunity to make use of the air-raid shelters in the second half of 1940, especially in December, and in the May of 1941, when Liverpool had been well and truly blitzed in a week of nonstop bombing, and poor June had been killed.

Sally was on her way to Doris’s now to pick up her sons. Littlewoods provided nursery facilities for its workers but the number of places was limited, and whilst Sally had been offered a place for Tommy she had not been able to get one for Harry as well. She wasn’t going to have her boys separated, so she had to rely on the kindness of Doris, who luckily worked a day shift at the hospital, and who had offered to have the boys sleeping in her spare room whilst Sally was at work.

What a long day it had been – the factory, the Grafton, now the boys to see to and, always at the back of her mind, worry about Ronnie.

TWO

Betty the conductress might have thought she was doing Sam a favour by warning her not to try to walk through the worst of the bombed-out heart of the city, but the truth was that all she had done was increase Sam’s desire to see it. Not that she could see very much now that it was growing dark. A thin drizzle had started to fall, mixing with the fret of mist coming in off the sea and the dusk, so that when she peered down streets flattened to the ground apart from the odd half-destroyed building, the uninhabited emptiness took on an almost ghostly otherworldliness that shifted shape around her. Her footsteps echoed in the mist as she walked down cobbled streets, mentally reckoning the direction she was taking so that she wouldn’t get lost. So long as she kept the sea on her left she knew she must turn right to get back to Lime Street Station, which was the only real reference point she had, but when she decided she had had enough and that she might as well go back, the first street on the right she came to was closed off with sandbags and a sign that read ‘Danger Unexploded Bomb’.

Well, if it was still unexploded then it wasn’t that dangerous, was it, Sam decided, and to judge from the faded paint on the sign, the bomb had been around for a while. The main reason the authorities put up such signs was to deter children from playing where it was dangerous – everyone knew that. Besides, this was the only right-turning street she had come across in ages, and she needed to get back.

Determinedly Sam hopped over the sandbags, ignoring the sign.

This street seemed to have suffered less bomb damage than the street she had just been in, with only one large gap where houses had once been. There was just enough light left for her to see the wallpaper hanging from what must have been the bedroom walls of the boarded-up houses either side of the empty space, rubble from the bombed houses spewing out on the pavement and into the street. She had seen newsreel images of streets like this, which, in the secure environment of Aldershot, were as close as she had got to the reality of bomb damage, and naturally she was curious to take a closer look. The street was deserted, and there was no one to see her wriggling past the second ‘Danger Unexploded Bomb’ warning, to clamber over the mound of broken bricks and wooden beams. She had with her the small torch such as everyone carried around with them because of the blackout, and as soon as she was close enough she felt in her pocket for it, removing it and switching it on.

There below her, and much deeper than she had expected, was the bomb crater, a hole in the ground easily wide enough for a person to fall into.

And be buried alive there? Immediately Sam recoiled, sending some loose pebbles and soil falling noisily into the hole. Thanks to her brother, Russell, and his friends she had an intense and secret dread of being trapped underground, and sometimes still had nightmares about the original cause of that dread. Russell and his friends hadn’t meant any harm, of course, when they had persuaded her to crawl into a tunnel they had been digging, which had then collapsed on top of her. Fortunately a neighbour had realised what had happened and quickly dug her out, but it had left her with a terror of being trapped underground and dying there that she knew she would never ever lose.

‘Hey, you! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you read?’

The sound of an angry male voice from inside the crater startled her so much that she lost her footing, dropping her torch as she did so, and then realising to her dismay that the debris on which she was standing had started to move, the bricks slipping from under her feet, carrying her down into the crater. Her fear was engulfing her now, a feeling of sickness filling her stomach and her heart thudding.

‘Don’t move. Keep still unless you want to blow us both to kingdom come.’

Did he really think she had any choice in the matter, Sam wondered frantically as she tried to remain calm and to find a secure foothold in the gathering force of the sliding bricks. She must not panic. She must not . But she couldn’t stop herself from sliding closer and closer to the crater’s edge. Then suddenly the breath was jolted out of her body and she was thrown forward and knocked to the ground onto the rubble by the weight of a man hurling himself on top of her, somehow miraculously stopping her slide.

Relief, dismay, shock and a guilty awareness that she had brought what had happened on herself – Sam was experiencing them all.

It was just as well she was wearing her greatcoat otherwise her skin would have been cut to ribbons on the rubble, she decided almost light-headedly, but as she struggled to voice this fact to the man who was now lying on top of her, he shook his head and placed his hand over her mouth.