watch for anything on the line.’ He hopped down on to the road again, and shouted up to the driver, ‘Now, mind you listen hard for me – and don’t, for God’s sake, run me down. You can see better than you think – it’s more steam than smoke now.’ Then his voice came more faintly from the cloud of vapour. ‘Couple o’ hundred yards and you’ll see all right. And they’ll have this bit o’ trouble damped down by the time you come back.’
Once again the tram eased forward. It seemed a very long two hundred yards.
When visibility improved, the warden left us with a brisk wave of his gloved hand, and the driver accelerated. Timber flamed and crackled, as we passed the yards, and sometimes waves of heat swept through the open door at the front.
I should have been frightened, and yet I was not.
I was let down at the stop nearest to the office, and, as I walked up the side road to the dilapidated building, I was thankful to find that the immediate area appeared undamaged. It was extremely quiet, and I met no voluntary workers hurrying up the road at the same time. These middle-aged ladies were normally extremely conscientious about being prompt, and I put down their absence to the transport system being disorganised by the raid. No clients were leaning against the front door, waiting for me to let them in. Sometimes, however, if the raid had been severe, they would come streaming in from the rest centres later in the morning.
I unlocked.
The postman did his morning round very early, so I emptied the letter box, and slowly climbed the stairs, sifting through the letters as I went.
I unlocked the rooms the organisation occupied and put on the lights. The silence oppressed me. The raid must have been so bad the previous night, that people were not yet able to move around, I decided, or were still having breakfast in the rest centres.
The mail consisted largely of Government circulars, which would have to be studied, so that we could advise our clients of the latest foibles of civil servants, on the subject of servicemen’s debts, rationing, pensions of every kind, and so on. Many civil servants were tucked away in huge mansions or commandeered hotels in different parts of the country, and were in a fair state of confusion themselves; this was reflected in the muddled bureaucratic gobbledygook of their epistles.
After the letters had been scanned and sorted, I wandered round the office and went into the waiting room, to open the only window which had any glass in it. Though the air that rushed in was smoky, it smelled better than the fetid atmosphere of the room, and I leaned out to see if the buildings at the back had been damaged.
Below me, amid the weeds of the brick-walled garden, squatted a solitary soldier. He was bent over, as if taking cover.
I smiled. From the back, he looked like a Home Guard practising guerrilla tactics, and I expected that in a moment I would see one or two more of them sneak over a broken part of the wall, rifles at the ready; retired men or men on night shifts would sometimes get together in the daytime to do this. Like mothers-in-law they were a favourite cartoonists’ joke, but they tried very hard to prepare themselves to face the Germans’ professional invasion troops.
The soldier stood up slowly and signalled with a wave of his arm to someone outside my line of vision. In response, two other soldiers appeared, carrying spades instead of rifles.
The first soldier moved aside. And then I saw the object of their interest.
A dull metal pillar box was resting half on its side, much of it buried in the earth. After circling slowly round it, the men with spades began very gingerly to dig it out.
A bomb disposal squad! And a very large unexploded landmine which, presumably, the first soldier had now defused.
But if it were damaged, it could still explode.
The instinct of self-preservation sent me across the room and down the stairs quicker than the bomb could have blown me. Coatless, hatless, out of the front door I flew into the cold, smoky road.
An unattended army lorry was drawn up by the side gate, presumably waiting to transport the bomb to an open area to be exploded.
In the middle of the road, I paused uncertainly.
An angry shriek came from further up the road. A warden beckoned me wildly. I ran towards him, where he stood behind a rope tied across the street.
He lifted the rope for me to duck underneath it, as if he believed that the rope itself would protect us from the possible blast.
Furiously, he thrust his thin, bespectacled face close to mine. ‘And how did you get down there? When we cordon off a place, it’s cordoned, and you’re not supposed to go there. You might be killed.’ He was genuinely concerned.
Gasping for breath, I muttered, ‘I came into work from the Derby Road side. I didn’t see any barrier. Perhaps the soldiers undid the rope to get their lorry in, and forgot to tie it across the road again. No wonder I didn’t have any clients or staff in the office. I think it’s defused now.’
‘Well, you stay right here, young woman, till they’ve taken it away. It can go off, defused or not defused, if some of its innards is ruptured.’
It is strange how strong the instinct to live is. I stood shivering by the warden for nearly an hour, until we saw the lorry roll slowly down the other end of the road, with its horrid burden in the back.
While I waited, I thought about Coventry, which, on 14th November, had been decimated in one enormous raid. I wondered if we would be the next victims.
Raids did continue, though none as heavy as that which destroyed Coventry. Amid the turmoil that they engendered, the problem of Christmas asserted itself.
We were determined to give the younger children the best possible Christmas. To Mother, it meant squeezing out of a reluctant butcher one of his few turkeys; to me, it meant contriving from nothing a gift for each child; and to all of us, it meant we could get a good sleep sometime during the daytime hours. The Germans, however, had other ideas. On the night of Friday, 20th December, we endured a very heavy air raid, with an even more severe one on the 21st. On the Sunday night, we shared a third intense raid with Manchester.
After the first raid, I went out and stood in the middle of our empty street, while the all clear howled eerily round me. Though there was no sign of damage in the street itself, the sky was suffused by the reflection of fires, and I wondered what would be awaiting me in the office that Saturday morning. Shivering with cold and apprehension, I went back into the house, to snatch a couple of hours of sleep before setting out on my long journey to work; I was thankful that my kind superior at the office had, at last, returned after her long battle with influenza. The raid had lasted ten hours, ten solid hours of bombardment. What a mess there would be for us to clear up. What a tremendous number of ruined lives to try to put together again.
Despite having to take several detours, the city bus and tram service was working very well. We passed scurries of activity where fires still burned, victims were being dug out, and dangerous, teetering walls pulled down. The Adelphi Hotel, the pride of Liverpool, had suffered badly from blast, and my fellow passengers on the tram viewed it with surprised exclamations, as if it should have been exempt from damage.
‘It was a land mine,’ the clippie told us. ‘Fell at the side of the building – in Copperas Hill.’
Copperas Hill was a narrow street of early 19th century houses, some boarded up as uninhabitable, a few used
