and she would watch them all until they were silhouetted against the dying sun, small and graceful in an apricot sky.
She counted twelve green lights, blessed twelve Halifax bombers on their way. In less than half an hour they were all airborne and Rob was flying on his seventeenth raid over occupied Europe.
Take care, my love. Come home safely.
God, but she was so afraid.
At the door of St Joseph’s church, Father O’Flaherty waited impatiently and importantly.
‘Down ye go, Theresa.’ He always used Vi’s second name, declaring that the name of a flower, however sweet and modest, must give precedence to that of a saint.
‘Thanks, Father.’
Vi walked carefully, eyes on the trailing habit of Sister Cecilia, who negotiated the twisting downward steps with a child beneath each arm.
The crypt was damp and smelled of the occupation of the past six nights. Benches and chairs had been placed around the walls, and biscuit mattresses, still folded, were stacked in the corner nearest the stone steps. Not for sleeping on, it was stressed, but for direst emergencies only, such as dying, birthing or suspected heart attack. Opposite, alongside a loudly dripping tap, Sister Annunciata topped up the already bubbling tea urn, switched on, Vi suspected, without the priest’s permission.
Vi took a corner seat farthest away from the door. Tonight she didn’t want to talk. Tonight Gerry had died, really died. After the letter came she had hoped for a miracle and prayed for one, too, but Richie Daly’s visit had snuffed out that hope in one short sentence. Gerry was dead, because no seaman, not even a little toerag like Richie Daly, would lie about a thing like that.
She closed her eyes. No more tears, Vi, she told herself. You and Gerry had four good years. Just be thankful you didn’t get the baby you wanted so much. No fun for a kid, is it, growing up without a da. Better face it, Vi, you’re on your own, now. There’s only Mary and the sisters you haven’t seen for ten years, if you can count them. Margaret and Geraldine had gone to Canada as domestics in the early thirties and married Canadian husbands, and wouldn’t come back to Liverpool, they wrote, for a big clock.
They’d been good to Mam, though, sending her money when they could. Neither had been able to get home for her funeral, but they had telegraphed a big wreath and paid their fair share of the undertaker’s bill, after which the letters and dollars stopped and Vi and Mary had grown even closer.
A child cried and was silenced with a bottle of orange-coloured liquid. Lips moved without words, fingers counted rosary beads. Tonight, everyone seemed to be waiting. Two hours gone and still nothing had happened. Weren’t they coming, then, and if they weren’t, why didn’t the all clear sound?
Sister Annunciata caught the priest’s eye and held up a packet of tea, but he shook his head and pulled aside the blackout curtain at the foot of the circular staircase. Vi jumped to her feet and followed him to the door of the church, wincing in the sweet, cold air.
‘Father, can you spare a minute?’
‘What’s to do, Theresa? Go back down, where it’s safe.’
‘Just a word, Father.’
She followed his upward gaze. The sky was dark, with only the outlines of dockside warehouses standing sharp on the skyline. Long, straight fingers of light searched the sky in sweeping arcs, meeting, touching briefly as if in greeting, then sweeping away again to circle the brooding night.
‘Almost beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘It is, Father.’
‘And what’s on your conscience, Theresa?’ The priest’s eyes followed the wandering searchlights.
‘It’s Gerry. He – he’s dead, it seems certain now. Someone who was there came to tell me tonight.’
‘Dead-is-it-God-rest-his-soul.’ Father O’Flaherty’s thumb traced a blessing.
‘Will you say a Mass for him?’ Two half-crowns, warm from her fingers, changed hands. ‘Tomorrow, Father?’
‘I’ll do that, Theresa, and I’ll pray for you, child. Now go back down and tell the Sisters to make tea. It’s too quiet up here. Too bloody quiet by half, so it is …’
She said, ‘Thank you, Father,’ and began the uneasy descent. It was always worse going down, and spiral stairs were the very devil in the dark if you had big feet. It meant you had to walk sideways, almost, like a crab. Vi wished the good Lord had endowed her with size fours, but it wasn’t anybody’s fault, really. Her feet were big because she hadn’t worn shoes till her third birthday, or so Mam had said.
She stood for a moment behind the thick black curtain, unwilling to pull it aside. Added to the musty crypt smell there would be the stink of sweat and unchanged babies, all mingling with the stench of fear, because tonight everyone was more on edge than usual. Maybe because tonight the warning had been a long time sounding, had started its tormented wailing just when everyone began to think the bombers weren’t coming. And now it seemed they weren’t, because nothing was happening.
Perhaps, though, it was all part of a war of nerves. Perhaps those bombers had flown up the river as they always did, just so the sirens would send Liverpudlians hurrying to the shelters for yet another night, then perversely they had turned inland and dropped their bomb loads on Manchester instead.
But they couldn’t be that stupid, Vi reasoned derisively as she nodded to Sister Annunciata and called, ‘Father says you’re to make the tea.’
Backs straightened, nodding heads shot up. Tea was a soother, a healer. It had been the blackest day of the war when the government announced the rationing of tea. Oh, yes, capture India, cut off the tea supply, and Britain would capitulate within a week, said the potman at the Tarleton.
‘Won’t be long now!’ The nun’s call coincided with the first of the bombs. It was a fair way off, but those who sensed it rather than heard it, those whose eyes became suddenly afraid, knew that two more would follow. Bombs came in threes, to those who counted.
There was a strained, listening silence, broken only by Father O’Flaherty’s startled feet as they took the stairs in record time. Then the briefest pause before he drew aside the curtain to enter with dignity and calm.
‘Well now, and just in time for tea,’ he beamed as a second and third bomb fell sickeningly nearer.
It wasn’t the noise so much. Vi pulled a dry tongue around dry lips. She had always imagined that an exploding bomb would have made an infernal, ear-splitting racket, but it didn’t. It crunched. You felt a bomb as much as you heard it. It shocked the earth it slammed into, and those shock waves slammed into the soles of your feet and raged through your body and paralysed your mind.
More bombs fell, and more, until the air was full of a strange continuous roaring and the earth shook as if it were afraid.
Vi sucked in her breath. They were nearer tonight than they had ever been. Any closer and they’d hit St Joseph’s. Mother of God, be with us.
