Domestic Soldiers (6 page)

The period of ‘nuisance raids’ was over. After three nights of raids on Birmingham and Coventry, the Luftwaffe shifted its attention to Merseyside, which received heavy attacks on the last four nights of August. Over 1,000 people lost their lives in the raids across Britain in August alone. By the end of the month, the effects of regular air raids were noticeable, not only in the damaged landscape of Alice’s Birmingham, but also in the people around her. Stomachs flipped and churned, some bought phospherine tonic to calm their nerves, and everywhere emotions were raw. Bridges’ husband sulked and complained that in all the commotion, Alice had forgotten to pay attention to him. When he came down to the shelter during a raid on 30 August, he was in a huff that he couldn’t find his keys. ‘He was none too sweet … blamed me, how like a man,’ she told M-O. But she kept her calm and helped him search the house, until finally she asked him to try his pockets. ‘I was right, as usual. What a man.’

With nerves snapping and confidence slipping all around her, Bridges attempted to shore up morale. She taped a large sign to her window for all to see; it was
similar to one her husband, Les, had noticed on the way to work. It read: ‘
THERE IS NO DEPRESSION IN THIS
HOUSE AND WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN THE POSSIBILITIES
OF DEFEAT. THEY DO NOT EXIST
.’ The same day she made out her will. In admiration for her neighbours or as a mantra to bolster her own spirits, she told M-O that she was impressed with how others around her endured the Blitz: ‘
INDOMITABLE SPIRIT DOMINATES. THEIR CHEER
FULNESS IS WONDERFUL
.’

The focus of the German bombers shifted to London soon afterwards. After a RAF raid on 26 August killed civilians in Berlin, Hitler promised to raze British cities to the ground in revenge. ‘When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then’, he swore as a crowd of Germans erupted in frenzied applause, ‘we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300-or 400,000 kilograms’.
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To those in England who wondered when the invasion would begin, Hitler assured them, ‘Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’
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The London Blitz began on 7 September, just three days after Hitler promised to destroy British cities, and would continue uninterrupted for fifty-seven nights. Helen Mitchell endured the first night of the London Blitz playing cards ‘in a state of fright’ with her husband, son and friend in an underground coal cellar in Beckenham among other residents (whom Helen called ‘bodies’) of the flats where the Mitchells were living at the time. The next day, Helen’s husband left for Canada, and her son went off to the army four days later, abandoning her to face the Blitz alone. Unable to carry on she left the city a week later to stay with a friend in Epsom. A landmine later obliterated the flats.

From the end of August, German ships streamed towards the Dutch coast from ports in Lubeck, Stettin and Kiel. Soon, British reconnaissance reported a build-up of ships in the invasion ports of Holland, Belgium and France. By 8 September, most of the barges, tugs and trawlers slated for Operation Sea Lion were in place. More ominously, British intelligence believed that specially trained Gestapo troops had arrived at embarkation points on the 11 August. Intelligence reports announced that, ‘An expedition may be launched at any time now.’
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The Battle of Britain lasted until 15 September, when the RAF chased German fighters and bombers to the coast during a daylight raid on London, forcing the Germans to rely on night raids from then on. On the 17th, the RAF bombed Dunkirk and scattered the invasion fleet. Hitler now had little option but to postpone the invasion of Britain until the spring. Nonetheless, across the Channel, preparations for invasion continued to be reported by Allied intelligence well into October.

Bridges didn’t write for the entire month of September, but by October, when she resumed her diary, Birmingham was once again a target despite the heavy raids on London. Sleep was becoming a treasured commodity with each passing day and, although Alice had complained in August that her sleep was cut to a
mere
seven hours, it got considerably worse.

On the night of 4 October, it wasn’t the German bombers that deprived her of sleep, but her husband. He stumbled into the shelter late that night, drunk from a night out with his mates. She sent him back to the house for his dinner, but when she went in to check on him, Alice found he’d burned his meal and in a fit of
anger had thrown the plate across the kitchen against the wall she’d recently painted.

Defiantly, she said that she would evacuate Jacq to safety in the countryside and find a job instead of keeping house for him. He threatened to lock her inside the house so she couldn’t. She went to bed shaken, ‘I cannot afford rows … I can face bombing better.’

In the morning, she told him he could keep some of the housekeeping money and eat his dinners out, for she wouldn’t waste her time cooking for him. He balked, but then they patched things up. He admitted that he’d got drunk because he felt guilty that he was doing nothing for the war effort. She softened and defended him to M-O:

For most of October, Alice and her family rushed down to the shelter at around 8 p.m., the time when the sirens seemed to wail as if on schedule. Some nights were relatively ‘quiet’, but the roar of German planes could nonetheless be heard overhead as they bypassed
Birmingham and turned their wrath on another district. Bridges and her friends held their breath and hoped that Lord Haw-Haw, the British turncoat who broadcast on German radio with seemingly uncanny accuracy (though often this was little more than rumour spread after the fact), was right. Maybe Hitler really
would
spare Birmingham for his capital since he was determined to raze London to the ground, as Haw-Haw had asserted. But the hope was fleeting. In mid-October, the Germans returned to Birmingham for several nights.

At the start of these raids, on 15 October, Bridges had a difficult time convincing her husband to take cover. He was slightly deaf and swore she was too cautious: her ‘2 miles away is about 10 miles’, he mocked. Stubbornly, Les vowed not to move until he heard the bombs himself. Between the raids, she ran from the shelter through the garden, with ack-ack fire blazing nearby, to the house to beg him to come down, but it was no use. Finally, she absolved herself of all responsibility for him and ran back to the shelter. ‘He got terribly peevish, he’s a man that likes everything cut and dried and he thinks jerry shouldn’t come until he’s ready for him,’ she huffed to M-O from the safety of her Anderson shelter.

In his own good time, Les eventually came down to the shelter with a peace offering of coffee, but not without delivering a backhanded comment that he was right. The next morning, he learned that the bombs fell only a quarter of a mile away. Alice couldn’t help jesting: ‘I like your 10 miles.’ When the sirens went the next time, Les was in the shelter, wearing his tin hat.

On 24 October, Birmingham city centre endured a large raid that obliterated Marshall and Snellgrove’s department store. Bridges listened for bombs, ready
with cotton for her ears and a piece of rubber to pop in her mouth (to protect from the impact of nearby explosions) and hovered over her daughter, prepared to protect her if need be. When the bombs whizzed nearby, Alice flopped over Jacq, who was duly annoyed to be awakened. When they looked out of the shelter, the sky over town was fully alight and fires glinted across the horizon. The next night, the Carlton Cinema where she’d taken her daughter to see a George Formby movie only five days earlier was hit in a raid. That night 170 people perished throughout the city. Alice would later learn that some friends were among the nineteen casualties in the theatre. ‘My interest in pictures has evaporated,’ she wrote in her diary.

In November came the rain. To Bridges, the back garden and the Anderson shelter resembled the trenches of the Great War. Water poured relentlessly into the shelter from all sides. Alice and Les took turns baling out the shelter, but it was a losing battle. It wasn’t long before all of the families along Bridges’ street gave up and decided to brave raids in their houses, taking cover in their shelters only when absolutely necessary. At such times, they sat ankle-deep in water, watched the rain run down the walls of the shelter and waited anxiously for the All Clear, when they could dash up to their homes and escape both the bombs and the wet. In the damp, with fear and frustration mounting, Alice learned that not only ankles, but also nerves became raw. ‘My young man went out this morning peevish,’ she wrote, ‘blaming me for the wet in the shelter, the cough on his chest, the fact that he has to wash and shave in the morning, the fact that there is a war on.’ Two days of constant rain, baling, ducking for cover and foul moods finally led to a truce. They both
decided they must adapt to the situation and be civil to each other, ‘but if you could have conceived for one moment the hopelessness of our task’, Bridges sighed after she and Les endeavoured unsuccessfully to keep their shelter dry during the raid on 5 November.

The worst still lurked in the future. On 19 November, Bridges noted the fearful devastation that Coventry had suffered on 14/15 November. The shelter was still flooded, so she and her family were forced to endure the raid in their home.

But the night was Coventry’s, not Birmingham’s.

With the devastation wrought on Coventry that night, a new word was created: ‘Coventration’, or ‘to lay waste by aerial bombardment’.
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Around 500 tons of high-explosive bombs – five times the amount considered a ‘major raid’ – and 30,000 incendiary bombs obliterated the city centre. It took one woman a year to find where the Boots she had patronized for years used to stand. ‘It stood in the centre of the city on a corner, and the complete street … is gone,’ she told M-O. To her and others, though, after a year to heal, the destruction wasn’t entirely bad. On the anniversary of the bombing in 1941, the same woman wrote:

One might find a silver lining in the destruction of uninspiring ‘bricks and mortar’, but there was nothing more tragic than the 568 dead that night, many of whom were rendered unidentifiable after an explosion took the roof off the mortuary and two days of rain soaked the remains. The raids injured a further 1,200 people. Nearly everyone in Coventry, which was a relatively small industrial town, knew someone who died, had gone missing or had lost their home in the raid. Soon after, a team from M-O went there to report on the ruin wrought on the city. They found ‘more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis, than during the whole of the previous two months together in all areas’. Some were left dazed and speechless, others cried or trembled uncontrollably, and still others lashed out at rescue and support personnel. Over and over, the team of observers heard residents echo a feeling of hopelessness – ‘Coventry is finished,’ ‘Coventry is dead.’
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A few days later, on the night of 19 November, it was Birmingham’s turn. Sirens went at 6.50 in the evening, just as Alice was ready to serve dinner. Initially, the family took cover inside, but the bombardment became so hot and shook the house so violently that they ran down to the shelter, the gunfire shredding the air and the sky lit up as if it were day. As they settled into their Anderson shelter, the next-door neighbours, the
Brownings, came down looking for shelter. Seven of them huddled together under the corrugated steel and earth listening for hours on end to the ‘clack-clack of incendiaries falling’ and the shrapnel that ‘fell like hail round us’.

The electric fire that Les had fitted in the shelter warmed them and soothed their nerves somewhat, but when she heard a bomb falling – and much to her annoyance, her neighbours were quick to point out and comment on each one – Alice’s ‘tummy turned right over’. The noise was terrifying: according to one Londoner, bombs came down ‘with a tearing sound as well as a whistle; they did not fall, they rushed at enormous velocity’.
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Not until 2.30 in the morning did there seem to be a lull in the action, but when the Brownings decided to go back to the house, they were greeted by a massive blast. Two ‘landmines’ – parachute mines 8 feet long and 2 feet in diameter, which floated to the ground and caused extensive damage – landed in the street parallel to them. At the same time, a ‘breadbasket’ of incendiaries had fallen nearby, starting numerous fires.

The Brownings made it back to their house in safety, and, once quiet had descended, Alice mustered together her family and ventured back home too. Dinner had been left uneaten when the raid started eight hours before, and Alice’s first priority beyond safety was to feed her daughter. Once inside, Alice soon discovered that the gas was cut but, luckily, electric service was not disrupted. She breathed a sigh of relief for her electric cooker – an appliance for which she often expressed gratitude in the coming days.