Annie Groves - The Heart of the Family

Here she was, going to work, and she had no idea if there would be a building still standing for her to work in, but as she turned the corner, and looked up Edge Hill Road, she saw to her relief that the Littlewoods building was still standing.

As had happened the previous day and the day before that, there were ominous gaps and empty chairs at some of the desks where girls had not turned up for work, but it was the empty chair next to her own that caused Katie’s heart to thump with anxiety.

She and Carole had been friends from Katie’s first day at the censorship office when Carole had taken her under her wing, and the fact that Carole was dating one of the men in Luke’s unit had brought them even closer.

Katie knew that Carole was living with her aunt, whose home was much closer to the docks than the Campions’ and, as she looked from the empty chair to her watch and then towards Anne, who was in charge of their table, a terrible thought was filling her mind.

‘Carole isn’t here yet,’ she told Anne unnecessarily, unable to conceal her anxiety.

‘I haven’t been told anything.’ Anne looked tired, dark circles under her eyes, and Katie felt a stab of guilt. Her brother was a merchant seaman, and with one of the convoys, and her fiancé was fighting overseas. ‘Try not to worry. With all the damage that’s been done and the trams and buses not running properly she might just have got delayed.’

Katie gave her a wan smile. Anne was right, of course, but it was still hard not to worry.

The disruption to the postal service caused by the blitz meant that the letters they had to check were only arriving sporadically; Katie tried not to look at the empty chair as she started work.

Theirs was important work – vital for the safety of the nation, as they were constantly being told – and it demanded their full concentration, but it was hard to concentrate on the constant flow of written words, checking them for any sign that they might contain an encoded message, when she was so conscious of Carole’s empty chair. Katie herself was involved – as part of her work – in correspondence with someone who was thought to be a possible spy.

She wasn’t really cut out for that aspect of her work, as she was the first to admit, but as her supervisor had told her more than once, they all had a duty to do whatever had to be done to protect their country from its enemies.

The door to the corridor opened. Katie’s head jerked towards it, her breath leaking from her lungs in a sigh of relief as she saw her friend.

‘I was getting really worried about you,’ she began as Carole sat down, only to break off as she saw the tears fill Carole’s eyes and then spill down her face.

‘What is it?’ Katie asked worriedly.

Carole shook her head, searching in her handbag for an already damp handkerchief before telling her, ‘It’s our Rachel, my dad’s brother’s eldest. She bought it over the weekend. Collapsed building. She’d bin up to London to see her hubby back off to camp. He’d bin home on leave. Seven months pregnant, she was, an’ all. I were her bridesmaid when she got married the year before last.’

‘Oh, Carole …’ Katie didn’t know what to say. It was plain that Carole was very distressed, and with good reason.

Anne looked towards them and said quietly, ‘Katie, why don’t you take Carole down to the canteen so that she can have a cup of tea? Don’t be gone too long, mind. We’re short staffed and there’s a backlog building up.’

Still crying, Carole allowed Katie to guide her back into the corridor and from there to the canteen where a sympathetic tea lady provided them both with cups of hot tea.

‘It will have to be without sugar,’ she warned them.

‘I can’t take much more of this, Katie, I swear that I can’t,’ Carole wept. ‘It’s really getting to me, them bombing raids every night, not knowing if I’m still going to be alive in the morning and not getting any sleep, and now this. Our Rachel was only twenty. Her dad, my uncle Ken, thought she was too young to get married but she said that she was going to be a wife to her George whether her dad let her say the words in church or not, just in case anything should happen to him with him being sent overseas, so her dad gave in. But now she’s the one that’s bin killed and her poor little baby with her. Oh, Katie, what’s going to happen to us and to this country? It’s all right Churchill saying we’ve got to stand firm, but it isn’t him that’s getting bombed every night, is it? I keep thinking that I might never see me mum and dad again, and I’ve a good mind to get out of Liverpool whilst I still can and go home.’

‘London’s being bombed as well,’ Katie felt obliged to point out.

‘Yes, I know, but not like this.’

Katie knew there was nothing she could say, and nothing she could do either, other than put her own hand over Carole’s in a small gesture of comfort.

‘Come on, lads, tea break’s over – back to work,’ Luke instructed his men.

They’d been working for over four hours, since six in the morning, helping to clear the debris from one of the main roads out of the city. A few yards away a group of men from the Liverpool Gas Company, aided in their work by men from the Pioneer Corps, had also been having their tea break, the tea supplied by volunteers from the WVS and their mobile canteen.

‘You’re Sam Campion’s lad, aren’t you?’ one of the older men asked Luke, nodding his head when Luke confirmed that he was, and saying triumphantly, ‘Thought you were. You’ve got a real look of your dad. Working with him the other day, we were, when the Salvage lot were helping us to get what we could out of Duke Street, after it got bombed.’

Now it was Luke’s turn to nod. The Gas Company’s mains’ records and control equipment had been housed in their Duke Street premises and it had been vitally important that they were salvaged.

The city had been lucky in that, despite a large number of electricity substations being damaged, with temporary repairs, the power company was still able to supply everyone with electricity.

‘Jerry can’t come back much more,’ the other man told Luke, handing his cup over to the waiting WVS volunteer. ‘There ain’t much left to bomb.’

Not much left to bomb and a hell of a lot of clearing up to do, Luke thought grimly, as he turned back to his own men.

They had been detailed to work alongside the men from the city’s Debris Clearance and Road Repair Service, shifting the rubble of bombed and collapsed buildings out of the way so that the damage to the roads underneath could be repaired and the roads made passable.

Unlike the previous Sunday when they had been working in the city centre, today they were working closer to Bootle, where the majority of the bombs had been dropped during the night.

Whilst one work party cleared the debris into a large mass, another transported the rubble by requisitioned lorries to temporary tips on Netherfield Road and Byrom and Pitt Streets, and a third was responsible for shifting this debris into the lorries.

It was backbreaking work – unless of course you were detailed to drive one of the lorries.

They’d been working for another half an hour when there was noisy commotion in the street behind them. Luke turned and watched grimly as a huge piece of machinery was driven down the road towards them.

He’d already heard all about the fun and games caused by the overenthusiastic help of the newly arrived detachment of American engineers and their heavy excavating and earth-moving equipment, sent to England under the new Lend Lease Act, along with the engineers who were to show the British how to use these monster machines.

In order to speed up clearing the rubble from the bombed buildings, the City Fathers had asked the Americans if they could help. Liverpool’s streets, though, were not designed for wide American machinery, and it had turned out that the instructors sent over with them had not actually driven the machines before themselves. There had been one or two unfortunate incidents, including one in which a machine had become stuck down a narrow street. The sight of such a thing lumbering towards them now had Luke’s men exchanging knowing looks.