The Angels of Lovely Lane (3 page)

The noise of the air-raid siren ripped through the air without any warning.

‘Run,’ screamed Maisie, as the sickening sound of an explosion made their ears ring as the shop window shattered and shards of glass filled the air. They had never heard or witnessed anything so terrifyingly close and for a split second everyone in the queue dropped their bags and, covering their faces with their hands, froze to the spot. A moment of silence followed as the last splinter of falling glass dropped to the floor. The shopkeeper was the first to move, yelling for everyone to leave.

‘We’re too close to the bloody docks here,’ Maisie said breathlessly as they ran back towards the street.

‘Here, into the shelter, Emily. Maisie, come on,’ shouted a neighbour. It was the man who partnered up with Emily’s da in the Home Guard, checking every house at night to ensure that everyone had shut their blackout curtains properly. Not a shaft of light passed either of them by. He was standing at the entrance to the communal shelter, already joking with the children as they ran in.

‘I can’t. I need to get back to the kids and me mam,’ Emily shouted back.

‘Wait, Emily.’ Maisie grabbed her by her hand. ‘Rita will take the kids to the shelter at the other end of Arthur Street and your da will get your mam down somehow. He’ll carry her if he has to. Me mam will take our Pammy, so we’re safest here. Come on, queen – it sounds really close this time, the little bastards.’

Emily looked towards the shelter and then back down the street towards home. The bombs were falling early. She knew, if she sprinted fast, she would be home in less than three minutes.

‘They will all be under cover in a min. Best we do what Tom here says.’ The siren continued and Emily could hardly hear Maisie above the noise, but when the older woman suddenly grabbed her by the arm again she knew that this time it was not to reason with her. The grip was too hard and urgent. Maisie Tanner’s face was distorted in pain.

‘Is it the baby?’ asked Emily in alarm.

Maisie nodded, and Emily watched the pain fade from her face as quickly as it had come. ‘It can’t be, though. I’m only seven months, and I know that’s right because I know when Stan was on leave. I’ll be all right. It will stop.’

Emily had taken part in the street rehearsals run by the Home Guard half a dozen times. She knew that Rita and the boys would be stumbling along George Street towards the communal shelter any second now. Rita had a routine practised with the kids and they would probably already be on their way, the two younger boys piled into the pram with Richard and Henry standing on the carriage holding on to the handlebar while Rita pushed. They would be heading away from where she now stood. Rita would encourage the children to pretend that they were playing the train game. ‘Choo choo,’ the children’s voices would whisper into the dark. ‘All aboard the shelter train,’ Rita’s voice would ring back.

Before they ducked into the entrance Maisie and Emily turned towards the sound of another explosion and looked down towards the river’s edge. The skyline was a vivid red from the flames which leapt into the air.

‘Oh my God,’ said Emily, clasping her hand to her mouth. ‘It looks like one of the ships has been hit. The sky is on fire.’

Maisie followed her gaze down towards the Mersey and was speechless.

‘Come on, girls. You coming in or what?’ Tom sounded nervous and was becoming impatient.

And then came the stillness. The heavy, oppressive stillness during which no one spoke. The hairs on the back of Emily’s neck rose in fear as her skin tightened, and as she looked around her she saw that everyone had stopped and was standing, dead still, waiting. Then it came. The whistling sound that pierced her ears and an explosion so loud it deafened her, as George Street took a direct hit.

*

It was morning, cold and misty, and the fires still burned as she walked down the street she no longer recognized. In a daze, she refused to allow panic to take hold and tried her best to remain calm as she took deep breaths, in and out, in and out. The woman who had delivered Maisie’s baby girl – not the boy Maisie was convinced she was carrying – had run on ahead to Arthur Street, calling the name of Maisie’s mam, just as Maisie herself had done for most of the night. She had tried her hardest not to scream out in pain as they heard the bombs continually falling. Fear had gripped Emily’s heart during the long night while she sat holding Maisie’s hand. ‘It’s bad out there,’ one of the women had said.

Tom, whose duty shelter they were in, replied, ‘It is, it’s bad.’

Even though it was now daylight, the sky glowed a deep burnt orange through the airborne dust and smoke. The noise of a solitary woman shouting and running was surreal and confusing.

‘Where are the houses and the shop? Where has the shop gone?’ said Emily to no one. The fire tenders blocked her way down the street and the men working on the gas main shouted to her to stop.

‘Where are you going, love?’ a young man called out to her as she squeezed through the barrier which had already been erected. ‘Oi, stop. Are you mad or what? You can’t go down there.’

‘But I have to. I live there. I have to go home,’ Emily replied, in a daze. ‘Rita has the kids.’

‘You can’t do that, love. There’s been a direct hit on the street. It’s too dangerous.’ The man took her arm, looking at her with eyes loaded with sympathy. ‘Which side of the street did you live on, love?’ he went on.

Emily turned to face him. ‘We live on our side,’ she said, confused. ‘This side.’ She was looking at where the houses had once stood, where now there seemed to be nothing but rubble, and that was when she saw her mother. She shook her head in disbelief. Her mind refused to accept what her eyes could see although it was there before her, as clear as the flames leaping from the pile of rubble that had once been their home. She rubbed her eyes. The dust and smoke were distorting her vision. This was a nightmare. She would wake. This could not be true. It could not be real, but it was. It was real. It was her mother.

‘Oh, God, no, no,’ Emily screamed, and a man she had never seen before, his face covered with dirt, emerged through the smoke and ran towards them.

‘Are you all right, love?’ he shouted. ‘You need to get away from here. We have to make the gas mains secure first before anyone can go down the street. Does she live here?’ he asked the fireman who was holding Emily’s arm.

Emily wasn’t listening. She was looking at the face of her mother, who was lying on the roof of the house opposite where their own had once stood. Her arm dangling, she was looking directly into the street, her eyes open, free of pain at last.

‘You all right, love? Seriously, I’m going to have to move you away from the gas.’ The man was in front of her now, but she could not turn her head to look at him.

‘Mam,’ she whispered.

His eyes followed her own. ‘Jesus! Fecking hell,’ he muttered, putting his arm across her shoulder and trying to lead her away.

‘We have to get my mam. I’m coming, Mam,’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘Richard! Henry! Richard!’ she screamed into the heap of dust and rubble. ‘Rita!’

She tried to move forward, but now more hands were pulling her back.

‘Get her to the end of the street. Her da’s there, he’s still alive,’ she heard a voice say. ‘They won’t let him down here because of the gas.’

‘But Rita has the kids. She has to go with Mam to the hospital today. I’m coming, Mam. We’ll get you down now.’

‘Come on, love,’ said a man she recognized from the Home Guard. He put his arm around her, holding her tight, so she couldn’t move. ‘No one can do anything. You don’t need to go to any hospital now. No doctor can help. They’re all gone, love. Everyone in that row of houses. We’ve been searching through the rubble all night. There’s no one left except your da. He was on his way to fetch you when the bomb came down. Let’s get you back to your da.’

She heard the conversations of firemen nearby, oblivious of her presence. The voices came from somewhere within the dust and flames, from the men searching the rubble.

‘It was a bad one. A big bastard. Reckon there’s a woman in here and maybe four or five kids, could be more, all dead.’ For a moment the smoke cleared, and Emily saw that the speaker was standing in what had only the previous evening been Rita’s kitchen.

‘I have her coupons,’ Emily whispered through her tears, knowing that, of the children he referred to, two were her own little brothers. ‘I have her coupons,’ she sobbed again.

St Angelus Hospital, Liverpool, December 1951

St Angelus had begun life as a workhouse, proudly facing out towards the Mersey and across the Atlantic. It was built of a dark sandstone brick which had long since succumbed to smog and smoke and the dribbling black soot that ran down the exterior walls like icing on a cake. The many tall chimneys spewed out their lung-clogging smoulder from the basement furnaces which heated the Florence Nightingale wards.

Through the centre of the hospital ran a long, polished corridor that began at the main entrance and ended at the back door. The theatre block, the school of nursing, the medical school, the mortuary and the kitchens were housed in separate buildings dotted around the grounds and had been built at varying times over the past two hundred years. Some were constructed of brick, some more recent post-war additions, such as the prosthetics clinic erected to meet the upsurge in demand for false limbs, had been hurriedly thrown together from prefabricated units and covered with tin roofs.

Each area of the hospital, except those where patients slept, was scrubbed by an army of night cleaners, who shuffled along on housemaid’s knees with metal buckets and brushes. They worked from dusk until dawn for five shillings a shift. St Angelus gleamed brightly and smelt strongly of Lysol, a smell so distinctive it struck fear into the hearts of the weak and anxious.

*

Martha O’Brien was the maid in the consultants’ day sitting room at St Angelus and therefore, to anyone of any significance, was entirely invisible.

Martha knew it was her own fault.

That’s what they would say, anyway. She had broken the rules. What did she expect? A person of no consequence. Laying the fire, clearing away the newspapers, plumping up the cushions and preparing the consultants’ lunches for one o’clock on the dot. That was her job. She was meant to serve tea, not sympathy, they would tell her. But she had done it because she had felt sorry for him, not because she knew what the effect would be. If she had known, she would have run a mile in the opposite direction as fast as her legs would carry her, or better still, just kept her mouth shut. She had watched him, day after day, sitting in the chair, troubled and worried, and had wondered what it was that ailed him. It wasn’t until Mr Mabbutt popped in for a cuppa and goaded him that the mystery was revealed.

‘So, there are to be two consultants on gynae. Well, that’s something. Yours will be the only department in the hospital with two firms.’

Mr Mabbutt, the orthopaedic surgeon, was addressing Mr Scriven, the obstetrician and gynaecologist. Mr Scriven shuffled in his chair and turned the page of the newspaper he was reading so sharply that it almost ripped. Martha knew all their names and what they specialized in, and given that she was a bright girl and they talked a lot when they met in the sitting room she knew far more about their personal lives than they might have imagined. Apart from Dr Gaskell, who had been at St Angelus for so long no one could remember a time when he was not there, Mr Mabbutt and Mr Scriven were the two longest-serving consultants. The reverence in which they were held by every nurse and doctor in the hospital conferred a godlike status upon both men.

They played golf together on Thursday afternoons, when they had finished their rounds on the private wing, otherwise known as ward five. Once a month, they also took turns to host a dinner, for other hand-picked surgeons, aspiring doctors and their ambitious wives. Due to the length of his tenure and his position on the hospital board, Mr Scriven was regarded as the senior consultant, second only to Dr Gaskell, who was chair of the board. Dr Gaskell sat on the regional TB committee and was respected and revered by all, and his word with regard to St Angelus was law. Mr Scriven had reach, undoubtedly, but not long enough to ensure that the board consulted him before deciding he must share the base of his power and source of unceasing adoration, otherwise known as ward two.

Neither man batted an eyelid while Martha wheeled over the tea trolley, or even appeared to notice her as they waited for a cup and saucer to be placed in their outstretched hands. There were nine consultants at St Angelus and Martha had only ever needed to be told once how many sugars they took, or how they liked their tea. Martha took her job very seriously. She dressed with care, her apron and frilled cap always spotlessly clean. Her long dark hair was coiled carefully and tightly into a bun, with every strand tucked neatly under her cap.

‘Anyone would think you were the one operating yourself, you’re that fussy,’ her mother Elsie often shouted as she left the house to catch the ten past six bus every morning. It was true: Martha was as proud of the sitting room as her ma was of the parlour back at home.

Mr Mabbutt had collapsed into the comfortable brown leather armchair in front of the fire, opposite Mr Scriven, who, much to Martha’s dismay, still wore his wraparound operating robe, instead of the day suit he wore for clinics and ward rounds. There were two theatres on the top floor of St Angelus, and the two men had been operating simultaneously before finishing for the afternoon, leaving the registrars and housemen to deal with the post-operative checks on the wards.

Mr Scriven’s gown remained gruesomely spattered with blood. None of the other doctors arrived to take their tea in blood-spattered gowns and Martha lived in hope that one day, maybe, one of the consultants would find the habit as offensive as she did and mention that he might like to be a little more respectful towards the room she spent her life polishing and cleaning and making comfortable. Not that she had ever said anything; that was not her place.