Elizabeth Elgin - The Willow Pool

‘I’ll do that, Nell. And it’ll be early to bed for me tonight!’

She closed the door, slid home the bolt, then, drawing the kitchen curtains, turned on the tap above the sink to make sure there was water still in it. Then she took off her clothes and began to wash the stink from her body.

The cold water did little to revive her and she thought achingly of her bed in the slant-roofed bedroom. Tonight she would sleep and sleep.

Sleep was not to be. As the May-blue sky began to shade to apricot, the air-raid sirens wailed again.

‘Oh, no !’ Meg gasped. ‘Not two nights on the trot!’ She flung wide the door to find Tommy on the doorstep.

‘Come on, girl! They’re back!’

‘Where’s Nell?’

‘Said she was off out to see if she could find a few ciggies and a drop of the hard stuff. Reckon she’ll be at the pub …’

‘She’ll have heard the sirens, won’t she? She’ll make her way to the crypt?’

‘Happen. Mind, the pub has good cellars – she’ll find somewhere. And we’d best be off. You got everything, then?’

‘Think so.’ Ma’s case, a coat and scarf, her handbag and gas mask. ‘God, Tommy, but I’m tired.’

‘Aye.’ At least he and Nell had managed a few hours’ sleep. ‘Not like them to come two nights runnin’. They’ve never done it before. Maybe this one’s a false alarm.’

False alarms sometimes happened. Once it had been a V-formation of geese flying up the Mersey; another time it was fighters which turned out to be ours. Tonight might be another cockup, Tommy decided, and before the little nun had time to light the gas under the tea urn, the all clear would go and they’d shove off to their beds.

As Meg and Tommy walked carefully down the worn, twisting steps, they saw Nell sitting in the corner, waving, and beside her Kip’s sister, Amy.

‘Was just outside the church when the sirens went,’ Nell beamed. ‘Sit yourselves down.’

Her breath smelled of gin and there would be cigarettes in her pinafore pocket, Meg was sure.

‘I take it the pub came up with five,’ she smiled, relieved to see her neighbour.

‘No. Not the pub.’ Nell dipped into her pocket and brought out a packet – a twenty packet, would you believe – of Senior Service such as no civilian had seen these twelve months past. ‘I ran into a gentleman friend, just docked from the USA.’

‘Ah.’ Tommy nodded.

‘A friend,’ Meg said, then closed her eyes and leaned her shoulders against the rough stone of the wall, willing the all clear to sound by the time she had counted to a hundred and one.

Seconds later, bombs began to fall, and nearer to St Joseph’s tonight. Those who sheltered there felt the awful crunch as the first landed – slamming into the earth just a second before the explosion roared and raged directly above them – sensed the shock waves through the thick, rough stones of the crypt, as the bombs went to earth.

‘ Jaysus , but that one was near!’ Father O’Flaherty gasped as years of gathered dust and flakes of plaster fell from the vaulted roof. Eyes widened in silent terror, fingertips fondled rosary beads; children, too afraid to cry, whimpered softly. ‘Ah, well, a miss is as good as a mile,’ the old priest roared defiantly. ‘And will you move yourself, sister, and light that tea urn? Aren’t we all just about choked with bliddy dust?’

Nell wrapped an arm around the shoulders of the girl who sat beside her, crossing her legs tightly, wondering if there was a lavvy in the crypt.

‘Bluddy Hitler,’ she muttered, wanting desperately to light a cigarette, knowing that if she took out the packet and broke the Cellophane wrapping, she would be expected to offer it round. ‘Want to get a bit of shuteye, girl? Ar, well, I suppose not,’ she shrugged when Meg shook her head, because who could sleep with all that lot going on above? ‘Bluddy Hitler,’ she said again.

Yet when the all clear sounded, those who had spent five fear-filled hours longing for it were all at once reluctant to climb the crypt steps; shrank from reality, because last night’s raid had been too near to home.

Meg rose to her feet, rotating her head painfully. There was a crick in her neck and every bone in her body ached.

‘What do you suppose it’ll be like?’ She offered her arm to Nell, needing her comforting closeness. ‘What if –’

‘If Tippet’s Yard has copped one, d’you mean?’

Meg nodded mutely. Through the open doors ahead she could see a square of pink and grey morning sky, though what she would find when they stepped into the world beyond, she did not know.

‘Well! Will you look at that!’ Clutching the gatepost for support because her legs had all at once gone peculiar, Nell gazed down Lyra Street.

‘Oh my God!’ Kip’s sister, her husband away at sea, lived in Lyra Street.

‘Looks like Amy’s is all right,’ Meg whispered, eyes scanning the rubble-piled street. Three houses had been bombed; one stood broken and jagged, with wallpaper flapping in the breeze and what was left of a chimney stack looking as if were ready to fall if someone sneezed. Of the other two houses, nothing remained. It was as if, Meg thought, some giant hand had scooped them out so cleanly and thoroughly that they might never have stood there. She turned to see Kip’s sister standing beside her, a baby over her shoulder, a small girl at her side.

‘It’s all right, Amy. They didn’t get yours …’

‘No, thank God,’ she breathed, her face crumpling into tears of relief. ‘What about Tippet’s?’

‘Dunno. Haven’t had a look yet, though it seems all right.’ Ahead, Meg could see slate roofs, gleaming black in the morning light. ‘I’ll push off, if you’re sure you’re OK?’

‘I’m fine …’

Tippet’s Yard was undamaged; not so much as a broken window pane to be seen.

‘Thanks be for small mercies,’ Nell muttered, her eyes ranging the roofs for missing slates, glad that the small, soot-caked huddle of buildings seemed not to have been worth a German bomb. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was hers and she called it home. She had even, she admitted, been glad when Liverpool Corporation had declared it a slum and placed a demolition order on it. Yet the Corpie was entitled to knock it down if the mood took them, Nell thought mutinously; the German Air Force was not! ‘You’ll not be goin’ in to work, Meg? You look like you’re asleep on your feet!’

‘Not this morning.’ She’d had to walk the best part of two miles yesterday to get to the store, only to find half the staff missing. ‘I’ll get a few hours’ sleep; maybe I’ll go in this afternoon.’ When she could think straight, that was; when she had washed away the smell of the crypt and had a couple of hours in bed.

Nell unlocked her door, calling down hell and the pox on Hitler, muttering that at least the Kaiser had been a gentleman and not a pesky corporal! ‘And if that lot come again tonight, I’m stoppin’ here!’

She couldn’t take another night of hard benches and air that almost choked you to breathe it. And she couldn’t stand one more night of whingeing kids, poor little sods, and the stink of pee and unchanged nappies. Tonight, Nell Shaw would sleep in her own bed, and Hitler could go to hell!

Tommy and Meg – and Nell, too – spent five more nights in the shelter of St Joseph’s church. Five nights more the sirens wailed. Liverpool was cut off from the rest of the country, railway stations out of action – no trains out, or in. Buses were thin on the ground; tram tracks lay in grotesquely twisted shapes, fires still burned on the docks either side of the river.

Poor old Liverpool, Nell sighed. How much more could it take? As much as bluddy Hitler could dish out, she decided, and then some, though what Meg would do now that Edmund and Sons had been flattened was another worry on her mind.