Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys Read online

  Jack was left alone and George wandered back over.

  ‘Need a top-up?’ He poured more Scotch for Jack and leaned in to whisper. ‘Can you do me that favour? It’s nothing much, just delivering a packet to a mate of mine, needs to get there tonight, but I can’t do it – me breathing’s playing up.’ And he thumped his chest with a balled fist. ‘It’s on your way home…’

  ‘Oh, all right, can’t do no harm.’ Jack shrugged.

  George produced a small flat parcel and a handprinted address from his pocket.

  ‘Any time tonight. But don’t get too pissed and lose it!’ George slipped a ten bob note into Jack’s top pocket. ‘Get yerself some fags on the boat. Good luck, son,’ he said, walking off.

  Jack looked down at the photo of Joycie. ‘Sorry, darl,’ he said, ‘just one more job.’ When Norman came back Jack topped his glass up and toasted Joycie and May and whoever else came to mind, and when the bottle was empty, suddenly mindful of his early train the next day, pulled Norman to his feet. ‘Better go, mate.’

  Norman slammed down his glass, covering the photo of Joycie still sitting on the barrel top. They pushed their way through the noisy crowd and didn’t hear George calling out. ‘Jack, you’ve forgotten Joycie!’ He was waving the photo at their retreating figures.

  When they neared Norman’s home in Longley Street Jack stopped.

  ‘I think I’m going the wrong way,’ he said, twisting round in a full circle.

  ‘Well, I’m going this way,’ Norman said. He grabbed Jack’s hand and shook it vigorously. ‘Good luck, mate.’

  ‘You too, Norm.’

  As Jack walked away from his friend, he squinted at the address George had given him. He couldn’t see it in the pitch-dark of the blackout. Luckily, he’d read it at the lock-up: Bombay Street, a side turning off the Blue, not too far from their house in Southwark Park Road. Jack made his zigzag way along the Blue until he came to Bombay Street. It ran along the railway arches, which housed the usual lock-ups and garages. The blackness was even more intense here; no reflected light penetrated the shadow of the brick viaduct. He walked the length of it, inspecting each arch, but was unable to find the right one.

  Suddenly a rising wail split the night.

  ‘Shut up, moaning Minnie!’ he shouted at the siren. The part of his brain that wasn’t drunk urged him to take care – after all he had a fiancée to think about now. But he’d promised George and if he didn’t deliver the packet tonight he’d have no time in the morning. He shrugged up his coat collar and carried on, ignoring the siren’s warning. It didn’t help that he couldn’t walk in a straight line, and he collided with a carelessly placed tin dustbin halfway along the street. The bin clattered to the ground and, stumbling forward, Jack fell heavily to his knees.

  ‘Shit!’ he hissed as George’s packet flew out of his hand. He swept his hands in blind arcs over the slick road.

  ‘Sod it, where’s the packet? Where’s the bloody packet?’ he asked the impenetrable blackness. ‘George’ll kill me!’

  Jack was still on his knees when he looked up to the sky, almost as if for help. He saw the German bomber, clearly caught in one of the dancing searchlight beams, tilted his head back for a better view and the whole world exploded around him.

  *

  When the all-clear sounded in a bleak dawn, May found she’d been gripping the wooden bunk-edge so tightly that her hands had fixed into rigid claws. Her mother was first out of the shelter.

  ‘Let me get out of here and see if me boy’s all right. If he’s slept in that house all night, he’ll get the sharp end of my tongue!’

  ‘Careful, Mum!’ May caught her as she stumbled over a huge lump of shrapnel. But she shrugged May off in her eagerness to get into the house.

  As she emerged from the shelter, May saw how lucky they’d been. The blackened shell of the house opposite showed how close the bombs had come to them, but the only damage to her home was an incendiary bomb through the roof.

  ‘It’s still burning!’ Her father poked his head out of an upstairs window. He’d obviously returned from dealing with other people’s fires all night, only to be confronted with one in his own bedroom.

  ‘Is Jack up there?’ her mother called in a voice tight with anxiety.

  ‘No. Get the stirrup pump, May!’

  Her father had made sure they all knew the drill. She carted the pump and bucket of water upstairs, coughing and choking as phosphorous invaded her lungs. May’s father began pumping the stirrup, while she crept across the floor, spraying a jet of water into the burning bedroom. They were congratulating each other on a job well done, when they heard someone shouting outside. ‘John Bull Arch has been hit!’

  The John Bull Arch was the eleven-track railway viaduct which was their nearest public shelter. An iron gridwork of girders spanning Southwark Park Road, the pedestrian walkways beneath the brick arches were long enough to hold rows of bunks with room for more than a hundred people. May prayed that it hadn’t been a direct hit.

  Hastily dousing their own fire, she and her father hurried down to the end of the street to see if there was anything they could do to help. But already the area around the bombed arch was swarming with tin-hatted volunteers. Besides, the road was blocked off. Flo and her husband were already there.

  ‘Not many got out alive,’ Flo said, in a hushed tone. ‘Pitiful, pitiful, what they’re bringing out.’ And the woman bent her head, blowing her nose with a soot-stained handkerchief.

  ‘Oh gawd forgive ’em, May.’

  She shook her head, and the heavy-set woman’s shoulders heaved as her husband took her hand. ‘Come away, love, there’s nothing we can do here.’

  May and her father accompanied them in silence, back to their own damaged houses. The ack-ack guns in the park, which May glimpsed through the trees, were silent as well and she found herself wishing they’d been more effective. If only that one plane, whose bomb had hit the arch, hadn’t got through. She didn’t wish any German mother’s son dead – though the prevailing mood prevented her from ever voicing such a heresy – yet today, she would have traded one German boy for all those innocents crushed beneath the arch. That’s what war did to you. She was learning.

  May and her mother busied themselves cleaning up the fire-damaged bedroom and then helped Flo, whose house had come off worse than theirs. But as the day progressed and still Jack didn’t come home, her mother’s strength began to falter. Later, as the details of the bombing of the arch emerged and they found out that the bomb had gone straight through the railway line into the shelter below, killing almost everyone, she saw her mother quail. May had once seen a wall sucked out by a bomb blast. It bent, buckled, then sprang back into place. Now her mother’s whole body did the same. Outwardly she appeared steady and solid, but May had seen her dissolve.

  When Jack didn’t return home that day May began to fear the worst. Either he’d been caught in the raid or thought better of going overseas and deserted, though she couldn’t see Jack ever going AWOL. Her father called May aside; his ashen face filled her with fear.

  ‘It don’t look good, love. They can’t tell me anything at the incident enquiry point. I think we’ll have to start looking ourselves. Your mother’s in no fit state… will you come with me?’

  ‘Of course I will, Dad,’ she said, eager to do anything rather than sit at home with her mother and worry. She grabbed her coat and once out in the street suggested they go and speak to Norman. He was having his breakfast. He gave an involuntary grin at the sight of May, but their worried expressions wiped it from his face.

  ‘Were you with Jack Sunday night?’ her father asked.

  ‘’Course,’ said Norman, looking puzzled. ‘It was his last night home. Something happened… already?’

  ‘No, Norman. Well, we don’t know, but it’s not to do with the army.’ She fought to stop her voice from shaking. ‘Jack didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘Didn’t come home? What, you mean he went straight to
catch his train?’

  ‘No, we checked. They said he never reported in. Well, we know that – his uniform’s still at home.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’ her father asked.

  ‘Christ.’ Norman tapped his forehead. ‘I can’t bloody remember. We’d had a skinful… let me think. Oh God, what time did I leave him?’

  ‘Was it before the raid?’ May interrupted.

  Norman screwed up his face as he mined his alcohol-clouded memory of Sunday night.

  ‘Yes, I remember now, I’d been in about half an hour and the sirens started up.’

  May and her father exchanged looks.

  ‘Then Jack should have been home before the raid. It’s what, a ten minute walk from here?’ her father said.

  Norman suddenly looked sheepish.

  ‘Don’t worry about getting him in trouble, Norman, not now,’ May urged.

  ‘He was plastered. I should’ve seen him home. I’m sorry.’ He looked at her with such an anguished expression that she had to reassure him.

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ She put a hand on his arm.

  They left with Norman promising to let them know if he remembered any more details of that Sunday night, but May didn’t hold out much hope.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he come straight home?’ her father said, once outside.

  May shook her head. ‘Who knows, Dad. He could’ve fallen down dead drunk somewhere.’

  ‘Well, if he was in hospital, I think we’d have heard by now. May, I think we should go to the police.’ But at the police station, they had no news of Jack. They directed them to a nearby yard, where rows of bodies, wrapped in tarpaulin, filled the fenced-in space. Bile rose in May’s throat and tears pricked her eyes. Each little mound, a shattered family. She gripped her father’s arm tightly as a WVS helper, with a grey face and tired eyes, listened to Jack’s description. She was as gentle and tactful as she could be in the face of their imminent grief, but the unspoken truth was that, by this stage, if a victim hadn’t been identified, it simply meant that there was very little left of them.

  ‘We daren’t go back to your mother with no news,’ her father said, his body rigid with anxiety. ‘We’d better go to Guy’s ourselves.’

  So, with her arm through his, sometimes feeling the whole of his weight upon her, sometimes having to rely on his strength, they made the long walk to Guy’s Hospital. No buses or cars were running. The unusual quiet added a ghostliness to streets lined with blackened ribs of buildings and roads rippling with torn-up tramlines. At Guy’s they were directed to a basement casualty centre. Here, many of the wounded from John Bull Arch were being cared for. A busy staff nurse took down details, and after consulting a clipboard, went away to check each of the many beds crammed into the white-tiled room. After a short while, she came back with the news that none of the casualties from the arch matched Jack’s description.

  ‘You could try the other hospitals – it might be he was sent elsewhere. I know St Olave’s took some of the injured.’ Her tone was almost too sympathetic and May felt the nurse was merely applying another dressing, a tourniquet for their fear. She couldn’t blame her; the woman obviously had more than enough live victims to worry about, without having to worry about the dead.

  But Jack was not at St Olave’s, and on the way home May said, ‘Dad, do you think someone ought to let Joycie know?’

  Her father swallowed hard and nodded. ‘I’ll do it.’

  *

  But after another night with still no word of Jack, May could see the anxiety was draining the life out of her parents. Desperate to talk, May went to visit her elder sister Peggy. These days Peggy was apt to leave too much to May when it came to family problems, but now she needed help with keeping her parents’ spirits up. It was too easy for Peggy to put her head in the sand, pretend all this wasn’t happening. It irked that Peggy seemed to have abdicated all sense of responsibility to her husband, who, May’s mother said, treated Peggy like a princess.

  Peggy’s council flat, on the new Purbrook Estate, was small but pristine: George had provided his ‘princess’ with a home like a palace. The curtains and furniture were new, nothing like their own hotch-potch of inherited items. There was running hot water and even a bathroom. Bermondsey Council had been systematically demolishing the old slum streets, but when May’s mother’s chance had come to move into a new flat, nothing would persuade her to leave their old Victorian house. ‘I don’t want to live up in the air,’ she’d protested. ‘That’s for the birds. I’m staying put!’

  Now, sitting in her sister’s tidy little kitchen, drinking tea from her good china cups, May explained why she’d come.

  ‘Peg, you’ve got to come over and help me with Mum. She’s just sitting there, staring into space. And Dad’s wearing himself out. He’s been tramping the streets all hours, going from hospital to hospital. I can’t be with her twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, love – none of us can get on with our lives, not till we know what’s happened to him… for definite. I’ll come back with you now, if you like.’

  Her sister slipped her coat on and glanced quickly in the mirror. She was an attractive woman, but since marrying George her look had become far more sedate, almost old-fashioned. Once she’d loved to wear make-up and fashionable clothes, but now she looked almost middle-aged and her wardrobe, though of the best quality, was muted and plain. Perhaps that’s what happened when you got married, but May couldn’t help blaming George for the change and she was sad that the glamorous older sister, who she’d always admired, had faded as she settled into domestic life.

  It was pointless waiting for a bus – so many roads were impassable because of bomb damage or unexploded bombs. So they walked to Southwark Park Road, taking the back streets and bypassing the bombed arch. On the way they caught sight of George, touting for bets, and he gave them a wave.

  ‘George says business is booming,’ Peggy said, waving back. ‘Do you know, he told me they’re even betting on who’ll get bombed out next.’

  May shook her head. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Some people will bet on anything and George says if he didn’t take the bets, someone else would.’

  May was about to voice her disagreement, when they heard a scuffling behind them. They turned to see Flo’s grandson, Terry, dashing up at full pelt.

  ‘Coppers! Wide’oh’s doin’ a runner!’ he puffed. The local kids acted as lookouts for George, who was forever being hounded down by the local police for his illegal bookmaking.

  They whirled round to see a row of front doors all flung open at the same time. A chorus of ‘Wide’oh, in ’ere!’ came from several houses and George disappeared through the nearest one. No sooner had the door slammed behind him than a constable hurtled round the corner, blowing his whistle. Children, most of whom were George’s runners, scattered as he stopped short, looking around for his quarry. Peggy hissed at May, ‘Keep walking!’ They quickened their steps, while May glanced at a worried-looking Peggy.

  ‘I keep telling him to knock it on the head. He’s in no state to be legging it over the rooftops any more, not with his breathing.’

  George, afflicted as he was with a bad wheeze, was sometimes unable to finish a sentence without stopping for a few gasps. It gave him a very odd, clipped way of speaking, as if he resented wasting his breath on unnecessary words. Not being the fittest of men, he usually enlisted plenty of help from the punters. Anyone who heard the policeman’s whistle would fling open their doors, so that George could duck inside and nip over the garden fences, to emerge out of another house at the end of the street. If there were no gardens, he’d use the rooftops. It seemed likely he’d evade the police once more.

  When they arrived home, Flo was there keeping Mrs Lloyd company. She met them in the passage. ‘Your mum’s up in the bedroom, been crying all morning. Shall I get her?’

  ‘Thanks, Flo. Can you tell her Peggy’s here?’

  Just then they heard a cr
ash from the backyard and May rushed to the kitchen, in time to see George bursting through the back door. He flopped down on a chair, chest heaving, sweat pouring from his red face. Fanning himself with his brown trilby, he gasped, ‘Too old … this lark.’ A wheezing rattle ended in a coughing fit and May ran to the sink to get him water.

  ‘For gawd’s sake, George, you’ll kill yourself one day!’ Peggy said, loosening his tie.

  ‘Don’t fuss! Just need… catch me breath. Ta, darl,’ he said, taking the cup from May. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  But the noise of George’s arrival had already reached Mrs Lloyd, who came downstairs, white-faced, with red-rimmed eyes and flattened hair.

  ‘What was all the commotion?’ she asked, after Flo had said her goodbyes.

  ‘Just my husband, flinging himself over the garden wall!’

  Mrs Lloyd frowned. ‘You ought to be more careful, George, they’ll catch you one o’ these days!’

  ‘Can’t afford… get caught, your daughter, costs me… fortune!’ he wheezed, banging his chest. ‘Listen, had an idea about Jack, got on to a mate o’ mine. Tracked this down.’ George drew breath and dug into his inside pocket. Along with a number of crumpled betting slips, and a dog-eared black accounts book in which he meticulously recorded all his shady profits, he brought out an identity card. ‘Someone was tryin’ to flog it.’

  May took the identity card. ‘It’s Jack’s!’

  Her mother let out a small cry and took the card, staring at it as though she could extract Jack’s whereabouts from its mere presence in her hand.

  ‘But this is good news, Mum! He might be lying unconscious in hospital somewhere, and they wouldn’t know who he was.’ May felt hope surging through her, but her mother’s face didn’t show any relief.

  ‘He’d have to be in a terrible state not to be able to tell ’em his own name,’ was all Mrs Lloyd said.

  After George had got his breath back a little, he explained that his mate had ‘persuaded’ the black marketeer to reveal that the card came from a ring targeting bombed-out houses and bomb victims. This particular card, he said, had been stolen, along with a wallet, from the body of a young man found lying in a street not far from John Bull Arch.