The Last Lifeboat, page 8
10
London. 10 September 1940
That night, Lily’s dreams returned. This time, she was trapped beneath rubble, pinned down by heavy masonry. A woman with a Scottish accent spoke quietly and calmly. A white W was painted onto the front of her steel helmet. ‘You’re at the ARP station, my love. UXB. One of the smaller bombs, thankfully.’ A casualty label was threaded through a buttonhole on Lily’s plum-coloured wool coat, the relevant lines struck out to indicate the severity of her injuries. ‘The children?’ she asked. ‘Where are the children?’ The woman shook her head and held Lily’s hand. ‘I’m sorry, dear. I’m very sorry.’ It was all so raw, so vivid, that when the air-raid siren woke her, it took a moment to leave the nightmare behind.
Half asleep, she went to the children’s bedroom to wake them, and stopped at the sight of their empty beds. She pulled the door gently to behind her. She never fully closed it because Arthur was afraid of the dark.
The siren was especially loud that night, wailing out across the cloudless sky.
‘Bomber’s moon,’ Mrs Hopkins said as the two of them hurried to the shelter. ‘London will be lit up like a West End stage for them tonight.’
The thud of a distant explosion emphasized her point.
A wave of dread placed a vice around Lily’s chest so that she could hardly breathe. She laid a hand against the shelter wall and leaned forward, her breaths thin and shallow.
Mrs Hopkins steered her to one side to make room for those coming behind. ‘They’re better off away from all this,’ she said, understanding the reason for Lily’s distress. ‘Better to be sound asleep on their big ship than scurrying into bomb shelters in the middle of the night.’ She added an encouraging pat to Lily’s hand, a salve of compassion and empathy.
It didn’t help. Nothing could make it better. The children hadn’t even been gone a full day and already it felt like weeks.
Lily looked at her neighbour through the light of the moon. ‘Thank you, Mrs H. For everything. You’ve been so kind since Peter …’ Always a pause, a trailing off. She couldn’t bear to finish the sentence.
Mrs Hopkins tightened the belt of her housecoat and waved Lily’s gratitude away. ‘Don’t be starting with that sentimental nonsense or you’ll have me all asunder. Think of them as swallows migrating for the winter. They’ll be back in the summer, full of chatter and stories, and a foot taller no doubt! That’s not so bad, is it?’
Lily said no, it wasn’t so bad. But it was. It was all terrible, and she couldn’t shake the nagging worry that they might forget her; might not want to come home in the summer, or whenever it was safe for them to return.
The shelter was busier than usual. Men, women and children huddled together on the low benches made from packing crates and pallets. The smell of Mr Kettlewell’s beef tea infused the musty air as the sounds of whispers, laughter and snoring filled the uneasy silence. There was a neat order to it all, everyone slotting into place, like washed cutlery put away after tea. Lily stepped over the tangle of stockinged legs and bags of knitting and rows of cards stretched out in games of Solitaire. She nodded a brisk greeting to neighbours she now knew by distinct traits: the snorers, the sleep-talkers, the helpers, the shirkers, the busy-bodies and worriers. Lily wondered how she was perceived, aware that people viewed her with a mixture of pity and scorn and that they talked about her behind her back. Did you know him? Did you hear what happened? They said it was an accident, but it all sounds a bit fishy to me …
At the back of the shelter, Lily stalled. Two children sat on the bench in Arthur and Georgie’s places. An attractive woman – presumably their mother – sat beside them. Lily stared at the woman’s copper victory rolls, her crimson Cupid’s bow and pencilled eyebrows, the delicate apple-green tea dress beneath her navy-blue wool coat. She looked out of place, dressed for the theatre more than an air raid.
Noticing Lily’s hesitation, the woman lifted the children onto her lap. ‘We have to make room for the lady,’ she said as they grumbled and complained. ‘Plenty of room for everyone, see.’
Lily squeezed into the thin gap. She felt like overworked pastry beside this extravagant dessert of a woman. The children in her arms only emphasized the awful absence of Georgie and Arthur. She wished she’d sat somewhere else and wondered if it would be rude to move.
‘Dreadful business, isn’t it?’ The woman budged up a bit more so that her thigh didn’t press against Lily’s. ‘I’m Elsie, by the way. Well, not Elsie By-The-Way!’ She laughed at her joke. ‘Elsie Farnaby.’ She held out a hand.
‘Lily. Nicholls.’ Lily wiped her hand on her coat and shook Elsie’s.
‘This is William, and this is Mary,’ Elsie continued. The boy scowled at Lily. The girl buried her face in her mother’s fur-trimmed coat.
‘I haven’t seen you here before.’ Lily didn’t mean to be curt, but then again, perhaps she did.
‘Only moved in this morning. Our house was bomb-damaged last night, out Finsbury High Street way. Still standing, thanks be, but structurally unsound according to the fire warden.’ Elsie rolled her eyes, as if to imply that the fire warden didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘We’re staying with my mother-in-law for the time being.’ She nodded toward an older woman opposite. She was asleep and snoring loudly.
Lily recognized the woman who lived across the road. Old Mrs Farnaby, as she was known to everyone.
The distinctive scream of a falling bomb saw everyone brace and pray for it to fall on some disused wasteland. Lily pressed her hands to her ears as the sound drew closer, and she breathed a sigh of relief at the muted distant thud. The shelter shook with the impact. A fine film of dust settled on coats and hats.
‘No little ones of your own?’ Elsie asked. ‘Don’t blame you. These two are a proper handful! Never give me a minute’s peace.’
‘Two, actually. Georgie and Arthur.’
‘Two boys! More than a handful!’
‘One of each,’ Lily corrected. ‘Georgie is my daughter. It’s short for Georgina. She’s named after my husband’s father, George. Arthur is named after my father.’ She was a burst dam, desperate to talk about them, to keep them beside her in words if not in physical form. ‘They’re being evacuated overseas.’
She waited for the tut of disapproval, aware that women who’d sent their children away were generally considered cowardly and unpatriotic by those who’d kept their children at home.
‘Ah! Seavacs!’ Elsie said without a hint of judgement. ‘They’d closed applications by the time I got round to doing something about it. Seems they could have filled the ships ten times over.’ The thump of another explosion, closer this time, pierced the tentative hush of the shelter. ‘Maybe they’ll send more if this keeps up. You were lucky to get your two away.’
‘I don’t think any of us could be called lucky, Elsie.’
Lily’s thoughts strayed beyond the shelter walls as the Farnaby boy kicked his sister’s shin and the girl complained that her brother was breathing too loudly. Lily didn’t hear Elsie say that she thought Lily was ever so brave for sending her children overseas, and that she worried, every day, if she’d done the right thing in keeping hers in London, what with the bombs falling every night, more and more of the bloody things. Lily’s mind was already far from the shelter, following the train tracks north toward Liverpool, to the boarding school where the children would sleep before setting out on their long Atlantic crossing to Canada.
It was probably just as well she’d had such short notice in the end. Just a day to pack their suitcases according to the strict CORB instructions. Warm coat + mackintosh, hat/beret/cap, 1 pair gloves, 1 suit (boys), 1 pullover, 2 shirts (coloured), 1 warm dress or skirt and jumper (girls), pyjamas, 1 towel, comb, 6 handkerchiefs, face flannel, toothbrush and paste, 1 suitcase, Bible or New Testament, ration card, identity card, stationery and pencil, sanitary towels, sewing kit, on and on. She didn’t know how she’d ever managed to tie the identification labels onto their coats, as if they were goods to be displayed in a shop window. She ached for them. Physically ached.
‘Did you meet their escort?’ Elsie asked. ‘I heard it was unbearably sad at the hotel where they all assembled.’
Lost in her thoughts, Lily took a moment to realize Elsie was talking to her. ‘I did. Yes.’ She was glad she’d asked for the children to be collected from home; glad she’d been able to close the front door and sink to her knees in the hallway, to process her anguish in private.
‘People are very kind, aren’t they?’ Elsie continued. ‘To go all that way with other people’s children. Very brave. Not sure I’d be up to it.’
‘Yes, very kind,’ Lily agreed. ‘Very brave.’
She’d only exchanged a few brief words with Alice King, but Lily hadn’t stopped thinking about her and the quiet, almost apologetic, way she’d taken the children. Now, as Lily listened to the whistle and boom of distant bombs beyond the shelter walls, she wondered what unsettling sounds Alice King was listening to, and who she was worrying about in the middle of the wretched night. She was the bridge connecting Lily back to her children, which was why, despite knowing hardly anything about her, Alice King was now one of the most important people in Lily’s life.
‘Suppose we should try to get some sleep,’ she said, although she knew she wouldn’t sleep at all. The barrage of bombs was relentless. They fell in strings of three, each one seeming to land closer to Elm Street.
Elsie yawned. ‘Suppose so.’
Lily pushed her hands into her coat pockets where her fingers found the magpie feather Arthur had picked up a few days ago. The phrase ‘One for sorrow’ perched in her mind. She imagined Peter saying, Two for joy! She’d found the feather in the shoebox beneath Arthur’s bed while she was packing the children’s suitcases. So many precious little treasures she was always too tired or too busy to stop and admire. In the uncertain dark of the shelter, Lily made a silent promise that when the children came home she would always make time to listen to their eager little soliloquies about found feathers and special sticks, because all that stretched before her now was an infinite sprawling sequence of quiet hours and hushed weeks; an empty calendar; an aching void.
The all-clear finally released them just before five. Outside number 13, halfway down the street, Lily saw Mrs H safely inside, and paused for a moment with her hand on the garden gate. Across the street, William Farnaby stamped on the flowers in Old Mrs Farnaby’s front garden. Lily frowned as she watched him, but she didn’t see William, she saw Arthur, knees bent as he picked a few blooms for a posy, and there was Georgie beside him, inspecting the same flowers for the insects that fascinated her.
‘Makes you feel guilty, doesn’t it?’ Elsie said as she caught up, having stopped to tend to a howling Mary who’d fallen and cut her knee. ‘Knowing others have lost everything during the night, and here we are, about to walk through the front door as if we didn’t have a care in the world!’
For a moment, Lily couldn’t reply. Elsie’s words carried such casual disregard for her own quiet agony, and stirred a deep sense of resentment. She gripped the top of the gate to steady herself. ‘I suppose it would be nice to have nothing to worry about. To have your children beside you. Not to have a care in the world.’
Elsie was shocked by the edge to Lily’s reply. Lily was also surprised by the depth of her anger.
Elsie pulled her daughter into the folds of her coat. ‘I just meant … I do have things to worry about … I just don’t …’
Lily didn’t have the energy for an argument. ‘I’m very tired, Elsie. I’ll no doubt see you later.’
The familiar rasping squeak of the garden gate was almost too much to bear. Aware that Elsie was watching, Lily walked briskly up the moss-covered path, turned the key in the lock, and stepped inside. Behind the closed door, she rushed to the kitchen and thew up in the sink.
She fell asleep at the kitchen table and was woken by the snap of the letter box. She sat up, stretched out her neck and shoulders and splashed cold water on her face at the sink. She didn’t hurry to pick up the post. The year had brought nothing but bad news and she approached the doormat with a sense of trepidation. But it was just another Ministry leaflet, Mrs Sew-and-Sew, advising on how to darn holes in socks and pullovers. It was a pity Mrs Sew-and-Sew didn’t have any advice for how to repair a broken heart. Lily tore the leaflet in half and added it to the basket beside the fire.
Suddenly ravenous for hot buttered toast, she lit the gas and put two slices of slightly stale bread under the grill. She wondered what the children would eat on the ship. She hoped Arthur wouldn’t run everywhere, and that Georgie wouldn’t encourage his antics. Her thoughts clattered about with all the things they might do, and might need, and might forget, and there was nothing she could do about any of it. The CORB escorts were responsible for them now, and then a different woman in Canada would dry their tears and patch up their grazed knees and remind them to wash their hands.
She took the butter dish from the pantry and groaned as she remembered she’d used the last scrapings yesterday teatime. She glanced at the clock. She still had a couple of hours before she needed to leave for The Beeches. Plenty of time to pop to the corner shop. She didn’t get waylaid as she used to. Nobody knew what to say to her now, so they pretended they hadn’t seen her, or just ignored her.
She pulled on her shoes, coat and hat, grabbed her purse and ration book and headed out.
At Fletcher’s corner shop, Mrs Fletcher wrapped a miserably small cube of butter in brown paper as Lily’s eyes strayed to the front pages of the morning papers. Stark headlines declared HORROR IN HULL! and SCENES OF DEVASTATION! from recent bombings across the country. Photographs depicted bleak images of lives and homes destroyed.
‘When are you expecting them to arrive, dear?’
‘Sorry?’ Lily stared at the web of scarlet thread veins that patterned Mrs Fletcher’s cheeks. For a moment she couldn’t remember what she was doing there.
‘The children?’ Mrs Fletcher tilted her head to one side the way people did when they were explaining something complicated. ‘When will they arrive?’
‘A week or so. It depends on the weather mostly.’ All she knew was that they were scheduled to depart on the twelfth. A book she’d found in the library had stated that the average sailing time from England to Canada was eight days. Lily placed her hands to her chest, their absence like a stuck lozenge in her throat.
Mrs Fletcher shook her head. ‘Poor things. So far from home. But you must be relieved they’re going somewhere safe.’
Was she relieved? Was there a sense of relief in any of this? The truth was, she felt as scraped out as the butter dish. She slipped her change into her coin purse. ‘I’ll be glad when the war is over and they’re safely home, where they belong.’
She took the long route back to Elm Street, past the duck pond, and sat for a while on the bench, imagining Georgie and Arthur beside her, shrieking with joy as the ducks pecked at the crumbs around their feet. She thought of all the times Peter had arrived home in his paint-spattered overalls to find the potatoes not peeled and the meat pie waiting to go in the oven. ‘We got distracted!’ she’d say, as he pulled the children onto his knees and asked them to tell him all about their day, and instead of a hot dinner they would have a picnic in the front room, and they would want for absolutely nothing because they had each other, and it was enough.
It was everything.
Lily did up the top button on her coat as a brisk breeze sent ripples dancing across the duck pond. She watched a young boy squeal with excitement as his toy boat was tossed around dramatically in the small waves, but as the breeze strengthened, the boat tipped onto its side and sank in the middle of the pond. The mother scooped up the distraught child, his forlorn little body cocooned against the curve of her hip as she carried him home.
Lily walked on, lost in her thoughts as a fire engine rushed past, bell clanging. She took no notice. Fire engines were ten a penny these days. But as she turned the corner at the top of Elm Street, she stopped. A crowd was gathered in the road, their faces staring up at a column of thick black smoke billowing from one of the houses halfway down the street. A house with an olive-green front door.
Lily dropped her basket, and ran.
1 January 1940
(Happy?) New Year. Rare sense of optimism about today. Everyone glad to see the back of ’39 and hopeful that we’ll soon see the end of Adolf bloody Hitler, too. Lovely to have the children back home, but forgot how noisy and messy they are. Keep threatening to send them back to the countryside! (Won’t – obviously.)
Mass-Observation, Diarist #6672
11
Liverpool. 13 September 1940
In a fusty dormitory bedroom of a boarding school on the outskirts of Liverpool, Alice lay awake on a lumpy mattress and stared at the ceiling. Her mind was too busy thinking about the journey ahead for her to sleep. In the bed beside her, Beryl Barnes, another CORB escort, snored loudly. Alice threw a pillow at Beryl, pulled the bedcovers over her own head, and waited for daylight.
Their departure had been delayed due to unexploded mines being discovered in the Mersey. It wasn’t the most auspicious start to their long journey across the Atlantic, and while Alice wasn’t usually superstitious, she couldn’t help dwelling on the fact that they were now scheduled to depart on a Friday, the thirteenth, in the middle of a war. At least they’d been spared the disruption of another air raid, unlike the first night. The children were unsettled enough as it was, and air raids certainly didn’t help.
