Elizabeth Elgin - All the Sweet Promises

Then she was standing at the church gates and looking down Lyra Street; looking, but not understanding. She took several steps nearer, counting as she walked.

One and three, they were all right, but number five had gone, and number seven. And opposite, number four and number six. There was nothing there but a terrible, yawning gap. That last bomb had taken out those houses as if it had come with a great grasping fist and scooped them up and crunched them into rubble as easily as if they’d been made of matchsticks.

Number five. Mrs Norris. She’d still be in there, under the kitchen table, and number seven – Mother of God, that was hers !

Only then did she comprehend the implications of that great, obscene gap. They had hit her house, destroyed her home – hers and Gerry’s. A vicious pain slashed through her. She closed her eyes and opened her lips to a terrible moan.

‘No. Oh, no !’

She stood there, fighting for breath. There wasn’t a thing left. Not one thing. Just beams and brick rubble. Chairs and pots and pans all gone, and her lovely dusty-pink eiderdown. And four years of scrimping and saving and sweeping and polishing and loving that little house; the house Gerry came home to. If he could see it now …

But Gerry wasn’t coming home. He didn’t need this house any more. If she had polished and dusted till the crack of doom, it would have made no difference. Her husband was dead, her job had gone and now she had no home.

Hot, bitter tears rolled down her cheeks, and with them came back the noise of the street. A stranger’s arm encircled her shoulders.

‘Come away, pet, an’ I’ll make you a cup of tea. It’s only an ’ouse.’

‘Thanks,’ Vi whispered, ‘but leave me a minute.’

She took a step nearer, staring at the drunken heap of rubble. There was nothing there she recognized. Not one familiar chair or table top. And where was her gas stove and the red rose bush from the yard?

There wasn’t a yard. It probably wasn’t even her rubble, either. Hers from across the street, most likely. It was like that with bomb-blast. Sometimes it just rushed round things; other times it flattened all in its path then picked up the debris and flung it away. You could never tell.

She stood there retching. She needed to be sick. She wanted to go down on her knees in all the muck and dust and cry and cry until she was sick. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, because this wasn’t Vi McKeown standing here shaking, and it wasn’t Vi’s house that bomb had taken. All this was happening to someone else, so it was no use getting upset over what didn’t concern her.

A policeman with red-rimmed eyes and a stubble-covered chin was saying something.

‘You what?’ She looked at him vacantly.

‘I said, was you all right and do you know who lives here?’

‘Why?’

‘Because there might be people in there, that’s why.’

‘Her in number seven’s all right, but there’s an old woman in there, I think. Under the kitchen table.’ She nodded vaguely in the direction of number five.

‘Christ Almighty! Over here, lads! There’s a woman under that bloody lot!’

He took the arm of the girl who stared at him with shock-darkened eyes. ‘There’s the WVS women at the bottom of the street. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and tell ’em you need some sugar in it.’

But Vi didn’t move except to turn her back on the men with the picks and shovels. She didn’t want to look when they found Ma Norris. If they found her, that was. If there was anything left to find. She hoped the poor old thing had gone. It’d be a release for her. No more hiding from the post office boy who brought telegrams from the Somme each day.

Vi supposed she had better be going. Go where? But did it matter? She raised her eyes to the sky. It was a beautiful sky. Very blue, even through the smoke haze. The early-morning sun was there, too, as if last night had never happened.

Then she saw the wall – her bedroom wall. It stood out, jagged and broken like a decaying tooth, and it was covered with pale pink roses. Roses Gerry had pasted there.

For a moment she gazed at her beautiful bedroom wallpaper then anger took her, shook her, slapped her into life again.

The bastards! The rotten, evil bastards!

Well, they weren’t getting away with it this time. They couldn’t take your man and your job and your home and not answer for it! She made her silent vow to the piece of wallpaper that flapped in the breeze.

I’ll have ’em for this, Gerry. On our mam’s grave, I’ll have ’em!

The piece of paper tore loose. She watched it slip and slide this way and that to fall at her feet. Tenderly she picked it up. It was all she had left of four years of happiness, and it was very precious. Special too, because it bore witness to her vow.

‘You all right, luv?’ the policeman asked again.

‘I’m fine,’ Vi said. And she was. And fighting mad, too.

‘Got somewhere to go, have you?’

‘Yes. To town – to London Road.’ To the recruiting office, that’s where.

‘Town? You’ll never make it. No trams, no buses, and the roads blocked with rubble. And two unexploded bombs in the Mile End Road. It’ll take all day.’

‘That’s all right.’ She’d got all day. All the time in the world, in fact.

‘Please yourself.’ He had better things to do than argue the toss.

Oh, she would please herself, all right. She would get down to the city centre somehow. Vi McKeown knew every back street and jigger north of the Liver Building, and she would get there. Things had gone too far. They had taken all she had, and nobody did that to a woman of Liverpool and got away with it. She was joining the fight. She wanted in, right in the thick of it. She was joining the Navy and she would go wherever they sent her. What she could do she had no idea; but she would stand on the cliff top at Dover and heave rocks at the arrogant sods, if that was what it took.

She sniffed away the last of her tears and slipped the piece of dirty, rose-covered wallpaper into her carrier bag. Her city was battered and burning. She was alone in the world and owned nothing but the clothes in which she stood, a small attaché case filled with important things and a brown paper carrier bag containing shoes, stockings, and two crystal goblets carefully wrapped in a pair of white cotton knickers.

It wasn’t a lot to show for twenty-five years of living and breathing, but at least she was alive. Now it was time to move on. Pulling back her shoulders, she walked, head high, out of Lyra Street.

This time, she did not look back.

The Countess of Donnington stood at the window of the first-floor sitting room, intent on the street below. She had spent a fear-filled night beneath a stone slab in the meat cellar and, what was more, completely alone. Now the air raid was over and still her husband and daughter had not come home.

Last night’s bombing had caught her unawares in the West End. Normally, to go out alone would have been unthinkable, but unoccupied men were thin on the ground now and invitations almost non-existent. She had gazed petulantly at a mantelpiece empty of deckle-edged cards, remembering the time when she had never wanted for an escort or a party. But most men of her acquaintance were in uniform now, and having the time of their lives, she shouldn’t wonder, with girls young enough to be their own daughters.

The alert last night had sounded just as Londoners were beginning to think that just for once there would be no air raid, and the first bombs fell as the last notes of the sirens gave way to an uneasy, brooding silence. Panic-stricken, she had made her way back to Bruton Street, her feet rubbed into blisters in flimsy evening slippers, wondering how taxis could disappear so completely whenever she needed one.