Lime Street at Two

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Small financial problems which, looking back, seem laughable, presented me with dreadful headaches.

In the early part of the autumn I forgot to switch off the cloakroom light before leaving the office.

The room had no blackout curtaining, and the light blazed forth across the old, walled garden at the back of the building. Our outraged warden reported it, and the Society was fined seven shillings by the local magistrate. This amount was deducted from my wages at the rate of one shilling a week, and for nearly two months my already penurious state was reduced to near disaster; I remember being torn between a decision to walk to work and thus wear out my precious stockings, which would have to be replaced, or nurse my current pair of stockings along, by hooking up the ladders with a fine crochet hook and darning and redarning, so that I could ride on the tram to work. It was a very long seven weeks.

It always astonished me that Mother never got fined for similar offences. The warden frequently remonstrated with her about the lack of curtaining over our back bedroom windows and the consequent glow of candlelight through them, a glow which in his opinion would guide the Luftwaffe straight to us. Perhaps because he was a neighbour he was loath to report her. Towards the end of the war, she did buy some second-hand curtains and put them up, but I suspect that she rather enjoyed baiting the unfortunate warden.

It was on a foggy day in late November that, after a heavy raid, I was very tired and decided to travel the whole distance to work by tram. On the first tram I took, to the city centre, the clippie told me that the whole system had been disorganised by the air raid, and that I might get a tram to Bootle more easily from the Pier Head.

At the Pier Head, the Transport Supervisor was about to dispatch a tram to my destination. It was evidently the first tram which would travel along Derby Road that morning, and I heard him tell the driver, ‘The police say the timber yards is burnin’ fierce. I tried to telephone, but the wires must be down ’cos I couldn’t get through, and nobody seems to know what’s really happening. So you mayn’t get to the end of the line.’ He paused uncertainly, and then ordered, ‘Go as far as you can. There’s no end of people as will be going on and off shift at the other end.’

The driver, his face almost purple from constant exposure to the elements, wound a huge scarf round his neck and climbed wearily on to his unprotected platform. He tinged his bell irritably with the toe of his boot, and his clippie threw away her cigarette end and skipped quickly on to the back platform. I followed her more sedately. The rush hour had not yet begun, so I was the only passenger.

The clippie was a gaunt woman in a navy-blue uniform, too short at the sleeves. She collected my fare and handed me a ticket. Then she closed the door of the passenger compartment and sat down opposite to me, to have a cosy gossip on the hardships and dangers of being a tram conductor.

‘I’m that scared sometimes at night, with no proper lights, like, and the pubs let out. It’s all right if they’re merry drunk, if you know what I mean; the worst that’ll happen is that they’ll be sick all over the floor. But if they’re bevvied and ready for a fight, or if they start to slobber all over you, well! And me man away in the Army, an’ all.’

I sympathised with her. I wondered if I could do her job. Cope with drunks, and the impertinence she would endure as a woman doing a man’s job? I doubted it.

While, out of the corner of her eye, she watched the scenes of destruction that we passed, she smoked incessantly. ‘Lot of fires,’ she remarked, and then added with a sigh, ‘I’d rather be in an air raid, at times, than face some of the men as gets on this tram.’ With the heel of her flat, laced-up shoe, she ground a cigarette end into the floor.

‘Couldn’t you get a better job?’

‘Well, it’s handy, ’cos I do split shifts, and in between I can get home to see to the kids. And the pay’s good – for a woman.’

When the tram slowed, at a point where men were still hastily clearing pieces of debris from the tram lines, she got up abruptly.

‘I’ll ask Hisself how he’s doin’,’ she said, and strode forward between the bench seats, which faced each other the length of the vehicle. She shoved back the door which connected with the driver’s platform, and smoke rolled into the passenger compartment; the poor driver must have been nearly blinded by it. I hastily pulled out a cotton handkerchief and dabbed my smarting eyes. In seconds, I could barely see anything myself.

The tram stopped.

Shadowy firemen and wardens bobbed round the vehicle and shouted up to the driver. As the result of their encouragement, the driver edged the tram forward, tinging his strident bell persistently.

As we sailed slowly past, a warden called up to him, ‘The overhead wires is still up all the way. It’s a bloody miracle.’

The tram stopped again. From behind the hanky pressed to my nose, I peeped at the stout back of the driver. A warden had swung himself up on to the platform beside him. The warden’s face was black with soot, his eyes and mouth a startling red.

‘I can’t see a thing in front of me,’ the driver protested.

‘I’ll get down and walk in front of you,’ the warden offered. ‘I’ll 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 as offices, the rest still lived in by very poor people, who would that morning be a lot poorer – if they were still alive.

Feeling physically and mentally drained, I left the office very late that Saturday evening. The Luftwaffe had already been extremely busy for some hours.

I dithered on the office steps. The roar of flames, the whistle of bombs, seemed concentrated in Bootle and in the north end of Liverpool itself. I would have to pass through the area in order to get home.

Miss Evans had decided to work later, to catch up with her records, and then to sleep in the office. She insisted, however, that I should go home. ‘There isn’t much you can do to help me now – you’ll be safer at home,’ she said.

She was very brave. Looking up at the sky, all too full of shrieking, diving planes, it seemed likely that the office would not survive. Very reluctantly, I left her in the cold, empty building.

I walked up to Stanley Road, to see if, by chance, there was still a tram running to town.

The whole normally busy road was almost deserted, though in the distance I could hear the bells of a fire engine and, as I crossed the street, a van nearly ran me down. I listened for the answering guns in their emplacements in Bootle, but could not hear them. The searchlights were busy, though, flicking like metronomes across the sky.

In the light of flares, fires, tracer bullets and searchlights, it was easy to see. I felt cross; I was not going to be kept from home by any German planes. I began to walk.

When the even explosions of a stick of bombs seemed to be coming very close, I dodged into doorways, pressing myself tightly against whatever door presented itself. Twice I found a public shelter, crowded with people, some singing, some praying, rosaries in hand, and was urged by wardens to remain there. But I was obsessed with the need to get home, and immediately there was a slight pause in the racket, I slipped out and pressed onwards. At several points, the raid passed right overhead at a time when there seemed no place to hide. I went down on my knees in the road and then flattened myself against the kerb, face tucked into the tiny corner of protection that it offered; and listened to hasty footsteps running on the pavement, as others tried to find a refuge, while I eased myself slowly along the gutter. Further down the road, I heard someone cry out in pain and the sound of anxious voices, as a person was struck, presumably by flak. A series of bombs appeared to hit the next street, and I was suddenly glad that I had been faced with a blank wall on my side of the street, and was consequently, sprawled in the gutter; if there had been a house or shop-doorway in which to shelter, I could well have been speared by glass slivers bursting from the win-dows.

On the theory that a moving object was harder to hit than a stationary one, I ran like a frightened alley cat, in the hope of avoiding an incendiary bomb or heavy piece of debris falling on me. Incendiary bombs, though quite small, were deadly if they fell on someone, and flak from our anti-aircraft guns or flying pieces of rubble and glass from bombed buildings, were more of a menace than the chance of being caught directly by an exploding bomb. Another great danger was from falling power lines, still live and spitting like angry dragons.

At the junction of Cazneau Street with Scotland Road, which is the continuation of Stanley Road towards the city, I hesitated. The violence of the raid had momentarily decreased, and the blackout appeared to have taken over again. If I went up Cazneau Street, I could bypass the city centre which was probably under attack. Cazneau Street was, however, a fearsome slum with which I was not familiar, and I feared that once I crossed London Road, a main artery which bisected that particular line of streets, I would get lost. Mind made up, I trotted along Scotland Road. I was shivering with nervous determination to outwit the Luftwaffe and get home safely.

As I neared the city centre, there was more traffic about and more pedestrians; raucous male voices called after me as they glimpsed the outline of a young female. I increased my speed and panted onwards towards the Old Haymarket, a vast open space into which the Mersey tunnel debouched from under the river.

‘I’ll cross William Brown Street, where the Picton Library is, and skirt around the wall of St John’s Garden. It’ll give me a bit of protection,’ I told myself. By doing this I avoided the wide-open spaces of this handsome part of Liverpool and would be less likely to be hit. I would also bypass most of Lime Street, still the main walk for prostitutes in the city, where I had no doubt it would be business as usual, blitz or no blitz; it was not the ladies I feared, but their pimps and hangers-on.

The city was in turmoil, with service vehicles zipping recklessly through the battered streets. There seemed to be a very big fire at the beginning of Dale Street, and behind the buildings past which I ran up to the far end of Lime Street, there was obviously another heavy conflagration, which I afterwards was told was St John’s market burning. Roasted in it were most of the turkeys which Liverpudlians had dreamed of eating on Christmas Day, and to hear the talk in the shopping queues after the holiday, one would imagine that the loss of the turkeys was more deeply mourned than the loss of three hundred and fifty-six men, women and children who died during the three days of the blitz.

As I ran, incendiaries fell like rain, and magnificent St George’s Hall was alight; I was told later that there were hundreds of people sheltering in the cells underneath it, unaware that the building above them was in flames. Though I was aware only of a blizzard of bombs, flak and hazardous litter on the pavements, a short distance away a bomb fell in front of the Court Theatre, and a fire engine, racing to a call, fell into the crater, killing the entire crew of seven; so much for speed in such a situation. I was lucky that I did not fall over something or into something myself.

I felt naked as I left Renshaw Street behind me, and climbed the hill towards Catherine Street. To my right, the Anglican Cathedral was outlined against a rosy sky. It seemed less noisy here, and was totally deserted. The quiet rage, which had sustained me through the city, began to drain, and I was aware of intolerable fatigue.

There were several hospitals at the top of the hill, where cars and ambulances were coming and going steadily. I wondered if I should give up, and take refuge in one of them. But I was very close to home, and hospitals could be hit, too. In fact, during that night the Royal Infirmary and the Mill Road Infirmary were severely damaged.