All the Sweet Promises

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.

Babies stopped crying, hushed by the fear around them. Eyes were wide in white faces; fingers and lips moved in silent, age-old prayer. Someone laughed hysterically.

The bombs stopped as suddenly as they started but the hollow screams of anti-aircraft shells continued without pause.

That’s it, lads. Let ’em have it. Shoot the bastards down. Make ’em wish they hadn’t come.

Was that to be it, then? Short and sharp tonight. Eyes turned again to the tea urn.

The big one dropped just as they began to relax. One bomb, not three, and a tearing, screaming explosion that set the lights swaying on their wires and filled the air with choking dust. Eyes swivelled upward, bodies tensed again. The roof would cave in. It would.

‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph,’ roared the priest.

The roof disgorged another shower of dust and rubble, and held fast. There was a ten-foot crack in it, wide enough to take a man’s fist, but it held.

The lights swayed more slowly. One of them flickered, then died with a ping.

‘Don’t any of yez dare to sneeze,’ ordered Father O’Flaherty, but no one laughed.

The all clear came with the morning light, high-pitched and steady, the sweetest sound in the world.

‘That’s it, then. Away to your homes the lot of you, and God go with you,’ called Father O’Flaherty.

Wearily, fearfully, they filed out to face the day. Vi smelled the desolation before she saw it: a mingling of dust and rubble and burning, water-doused timber. Somewhere, the bell of a fire engine clanged and men’s voices called urgently.

Then she was standing at the church gates and looking down Lyra Street; looking, but not understanding. She took several steps nearer, counting as she walked.

One and three, they were all right, but number five had gone, and number seven. And opposite, number four and number six. There was nothing there but a terrible, yawning gap. That last bomb had taken out those houses as if it had come with a great grasping fist and scooped them up and crunched them into rubble as easily as if they’d been made of matchsticks.

Number five. Mrs Norris. She’d still be in there, under the kitchen table, and number seven – Mother of God, that was hers!

Only then did she comprehend the implications of that great, obscene gap. They had hit her house, destroyed her home – hers and Gerry’s. A vicious pain slashed through her. She closed her eyes and opened her lips to a terrible moan.

‘No. Oh, no!’

She stood there, fighting for breath. There wasn’t a thing left. Not one thing. Just beams and brick rubble. Chairs and pots and pans all gone, and her lovely dusty-pink eiderdown. And four years of scrimping and saving and sweeping and polishing and loving that little house; the house Gerry came home to. If he could see it now …

But Gerry wasn’t coming home. He didn’t need this house any more. If she had polished and dusted till the crack of doom, it would have made no difference. Her husband was dead, her job had gone and now she had no home.

Hot, bitter tears rolled down her cheeks, and with them came back the noise of the street. A stranger’s arm encircled her shoulders.

‘Come away, pet, an’ I’ll make you a cup of tea. It’s only an ’ouse.’

‘Thanks,’ Vi whispered, ‘but leave me a minute.’

She took a step nearer, staring at the drunken heap of rubble. There was nothing there she recognized. Not one familiar chair or table top. And where was her gas stove and the red rose bush from the yard?

There wasn’t a yard. It probably wasn’t even her rubble, either. Hers from across the street, most likely. It was like that with bomb-blast. Sometimes it just rushed round things; other times it flattened all in its path then picked up the debris and flung it away. You could never tell.

She stood there retching. She needed to be sick. She wanted to go down on her knees in all the muck and dust and cry and cry until she was sick. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, because this wasn’t Vi McKeown standing here shaking, and it wasn’t Vi’s house that bomb had taken. All this was happening to someone else, so it was no use getting upset over what didn’t concern her.

A policeman with red-rimmed eyes and a stubble-covered chin was saying something.

‘You what?’ She looked at him vacantly.

‘I said, was you all right and do you know who lives here?’

‘Why?’

‘Because there might be people in there, that’s why.’

‘Her in number seven’s all right, but there’s an old woman in there, I think. Under the kitchen table.’ She nodded vaguely in the direction of number five.

‘Christ Almighty! Over here, lads! There’s a woman under that bloody lot!’

He took the arm of the girl who stared at him with shock-darkened eyes. ‘There’s the WVS women at the bottom of the street. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and tell ’em you need some sugar in it.’

But Vi didn’t move except to turn her back on the men with the picks and shovels. She didn’t want to look when they found Ma Norris. If they found her, that was. If there was anything left to find. She hoped the poor old thing had gone. It’d be a release for her. No more hiding from the post office boy who brought telegrams from the Somme each day.

Vi supposed she had better be going. Go where? But did it matter? She raised her eyes to the sky. It was a beautiful sky. Very blue, even through the smoke haze. The early-morning sun was there, too, as if last night had never happened.

Then she saw the wall – her bedroom wall. It stood out, jagged and broken like a decaying tooth, and it was covered with pale pink roses. Roses Gerry had pasted there.

For a moment she gazed at her beautiful bedroom wallpaper then anger took her, shook her, slapped her into life again.

The bastards! The rotten, evil bastards!

Well, they weren’t getting away with it this time. They couldn’t take your man and your job and your home and not answer for it! She made her silent vow to the piece of wallpaper that flapped in the breeze.

I’ll have ’em for this, Gerry. On our mam’s grave, I’ll have ’em!

The piece of paper tore loose. She watched it slip and slide this way and that to fall at her feet. Tenderly she picked it up. It was all she had left of four years of happiness, and it was very precious. Special too, because it bore witness to her vow.

‘You all right, luv?’ the policeman asked again.

‘I’m fine,’ Vi said. And she was. And fighting mad, too.

‘Got somewhere to go, have you?’

‘Yes. To town – to London Road.’ To the recruiting office, that’s where.

‘Town? You’ll never make it. No trams, no buses, and the roads blocked with rubble. And two unexploded bombs in the Mile End Road. It’ll take all day.’

‘That’s all right.’ She’d got all day. All the time in the world, in fact.

‘Please yourself.’ He had better things to do than argue the toss.

Oh, she would please herself, all right. She would get down to the city centre somehow. Vi McKeown knew every back street and jigger north of the Liver Building, and she would get there. Things had gone too far. They had taken all she had, and nobody did that to a woman of Liverpool and got away with it. She was joining the fight. She wanted in, right in the thick of it. She was joining the Navy and she would go wherever they sent her. What she could do she had no idea; but she would stand on the cliff top at Dover and heave rocks at the arrogant sods, if that was what it took.

She sniffed away the last of her tears and slipped the piece of dirty, rose-covered wallpaper into her carrier bag. Her city was battered and burning. She was alone in the world and owned nothing but the clothes in which she stood, a small attaché case filled with important things and a brown paper carrier bag containing shoes, stockings, and two crystal goblets carefully wrapped in a pair of white cotton knickers.

It wasn’t a lot to show for twenty-five years of living and breathing, but at least she was alive. Now it was time to move on. Pulling back her shoulders, she walked, head high, out of Lyra Street.

This time, she did not look back.

The Countess of Donnington stood at the window of the first-floor sitting room, intent on the street below. She had spent a fear-filled night beneath a stone slab in the meat cellar and, what was more, completely alone. Now the air raid was over and still her husband and daughter had not come home.

Last night’s bombing had caught her unawares in the West End. Normally, to go out alone would have been unthinkable, but unoccupied men were thin on the ground now and invitations almost non-existent. She had gazed petulantly at a mantelpiece empty of deckle-edged cards, remembering the time when she had never wanted for an escort or a party. But most men of her acquaintance were in uniform now, and having the time of their lives, she shouldn’t wonder, with girls young enough to be their own daughters.

The alert last night had sounded just as Londoners were beginning to think that just for once there would be no air raid, and the first bombs fell as the last notes of the sirens gave way to an uneasy, brooding silence. Panic-stricken, she had made her way back to Bruton Street, her feet rubbed into blisters in flimsy evening slippers, wondering how taxis could disappear so completely whenever she needed one.

She could have found shelter, of course. Hotels and restaurants and clubs always opened their doors to anyone caught above ground when the bombing started. But if she was going to be killed, she had tearfully decided, it would be at her home in Mayfair. No one, but no one, would dig Kitty Bainbridge out of a communal shelter in Soho. For Soho was where she had been last evening, wondering what to do and where to go to fill the time; there, in Shaftesbury Avenue, she had seen Lucinda and the airmen. And it was then she had decided that war work or not, her daughter’s excursions with convalescent wounded must stop at once. She had felt quite peculiar and quite, quite shocked; how Lucinda could bring herself to do it was a complete mystery.

So she had made her fear-filled way home to spend another night in the cellar, her moods alternating between terror and self-pity, until the high, sweet sound of the all clear brought relief and anger. When Donnington got home in that ridiculous Home Guard uniform of his and her daughter had torn herself away from those men, then all hell would break loose. The Countess guaranteed it.

Lighting the last of her cigarettes, she inhaled deeply. The world had gone mad, with every capital city in Europe occupied by strutting Nazis. How soon before they were in London, too?

‘At last!’ She espied her daughter rounding the corner from Berkeley Square. Running quickly downstairs, she was waiting in the black and white tiled entrance hall long before the doorbell rang.

‘Sorry about this.’ Lucinda was pale and dust-stained, her eyes dark-ringed. ‘Are you all right, Mama?’

‘No, I am not all right!’ Pent-up emotions broke loose. ‘I have been alone all night! And might I ask where you have been until now?’

‘I’m sorry, truly I am, but I had to look after the boys. They’re still a bit wobbly, you know, and when the bombing got rough I thought I’d better find us all somewhere to go. We were fine in the tube, but it –’

‘Lucinda! Listen to me! I saw you last night, though you chose not to see me, and I cannot understand your casual attitude to life. You imagine this war gives you the excuse to disobey me and do exactly as you wish. You stay out all night. You think more of those creatures, it seems, than your fiancé. You –’

‘Creatures, Mama?’

‘Well, what else is one to call them? I was ashamed last night, deeply ashamed that my daughter should be seen in such company, such –’

‘Such what?’ Lucinda’s eyes flew wide with disbelief. ‘Sorry, but I don’t understand you.’

‘Well, they’re such a terrible sight, aren’t they? Their faces, I mean; so – so grotesque. You’d think they wouldn’t want to be seen in public; but no, there they are, living it up, and my own daughter aiding and abetting them as if she were doing something clever. That tall one, the one with his hands all over you –’

‘Mama, you don’t know what you’re saying.’ Bright red spots flushed Lucinda’s cheeks. ‘I’m not hearing this; I’m not!’

‘Stop playing the innocent with me, child. Sufficient to say I was deeply embarrassed, and the time has come to put an end to this absurdity. You will give up this so-called nursing immediately and you will give me a date for your wedding –’

‘Be quiet, Mama! Shut up and just for once listen to me!’

‘I – I …’ The older woman’s mouth sagged open and remained open. Lucinda, who had always been so obedient, speaking to her mother as if good manners had gone out of fashion?

‘You are without doubt, Mama, the most unreasonable, the most selfish woman I have ever met, and I am not in the least ashamed to be seen with those boys. I’m proud of them, in fact. Yes, they are a terrible sight. They were all fighter pilots and they got hit, you see. Oh, they managed to bale out, but not before their faces and hands had burned. No eyelashes, no eyebrows, no hair, no features any more. That was their reward for trying to keep the bombers away from London, away from people like you, Mama!’ She shook with outrage, her voice thick with unshed tears. ‘The tall one, mind, the one with his hands all over me – on my shoulders, actually, so I could lead him – well, he’s a bit luckier. He’ll never have to see himself day after day in a mirror and wonder if it was worth it because he’s blind, you see. His eyes burned, too!’

She was weeping now. Tears of anger and pity and pride ran down her face, making rivulets in the grime.

‘So don’t moan to me about your unhappy lot, Mama. You think this war was started just to inconvenience you. You whine and whinge and think of no one but yourself. You are a bitch, Mama; a selfish, bad-minded bitch, and it is I who am ashamed of you! I’m going out before I say something I’m sorry for.’

‘Lucinda! Come back and apologize at once. You can’t speak to me like that. I can’t believe my own ears!’

‘Then you’d better, because I meant every word of it.’

The front door slammed shut and the Countess collapsed on to the bottom step of the staircase, her legs useless. Her daughter had taken leave of her senses and her husband was never at home when he was needed. The world had gone completely mad.

Hubert James Bainbridge, tenth earl of Donnington, called out to his daughter as she passed him on the opposite side of the street, but she did not hear him. He’d have sworn she was crying, poor child. It was a terrible world for the young ones to grow up in. Not a lot for them to look forward to.

He watched her disappear round the corner of the street then, shrugging his shoulders, walked on, thinking again of that incredible whispered conversation at company HQ.

Such news, and so completely unbelievable. He would have to telephone around and see if anyone else had any titbits to add to the mystery. Better not tell Kitty, though. Kitty was totally preoccupied with the threatened invasion, and to tell her this would be asking for trouble. And the rumour might not be true, though it had come from Freddie Elton, who didn’t often get it wrong. But Hess, flying here in a Messerschmitt. Hitler’s deputy, no less, baling out over Scotland then surrendering amiably to a farmer and demanding to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton. It was a real kettle of fish and no mistake. The man must be a raving bloody lunatic even to think of coming to this bomb-happy island. Rudolf Hess, eh? Who next but the whole German army?

Carefully he opened the front door of his house, quietly he crossed the hall to the library and closed the door behind him. Then taking off his tunic and loosening his tie, he picked up the telephone.

The elderly admiral sighed and penned his name to yet another scrap of printed paper. It was all he did, these days; signing chits was all he seemed good for. Too old to be in uniform, really, so he supposed he should be grateful for the desk job in a small dark room at Admiralty House. He rose to his feet, genuinely pleased to see the pretty girl who smiled at him from the doorway.

‘Goddy, darling!’ Her kiss was warm. ‘It’s good of you to see me.’

‘Good of you to come, Lucinda.’ He held her at arm’s length. ‘But what on earth have you been up to, eh?’

Her face was tear-stained, her clothes creased and her pale blonde curls dull with dust.

‘It was the air raid, I suppose. Spent last night in the tube and it was, oh, awful getting here.’

‘What’s it like out there? Afraid I didn’t get home last night. Slept here, in the basement. Is it as bad as they say?’

‘It’s unbelievable, Goddy. Everything is at a standstill and so many people in the underground, just sitting there with nowhere to go. I walked here from Bruton Street and it was like a nightmare.’

‘A lot of casualties, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Over a thousand, I heard, and heaven knows how many more injured and homeless. What’s happening to us, Goddy?’

‘I don’t know for sure, girlie, but we’ll sort it all out in the end, just see if we don’t. They say the British lose every battle they ever fight, except the last one.’

The last battle. And how far away would that be? But there had been a full moon last night, a bomber’s moon, with all London laid out clearly for the Luftwaffe pilots. And this morning the devastation and burning had been terrible to see. Unexploded bombs everywhere; water for fire hoses almost non-existent; the acrid air thick with smoke and tiny pieces of charred paper swirling on the breeze. Poor, proud old London.

‘It’s wrong of me, but I wish I could be at Lady Mead, Goddy. It must be beautiful now, in Lincolnshire.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He clamped an empty pipe between his teeth. ‘I remember your christening. It was a May day just like now, and warm and sunny. The chapel at Lady Mead was full of flowers, and how you screamed and yelled. Nanny was pleased, I seem to recall. Said you’d cried the devil out of you, and that was good.’

‘Dear Nanny. She’s at Lady Mead, you know. The Air Force was very good. They didn’t throw us out entirely. Pa had all the good stuff stored in the Dower House when we had to leave, and Nanny’s there now, looking after it. She writes every week. But you must be very busy and I came here to ask a favour, a big favour. I hope you don’t mind?’