大象传媒

Aunt Mary's War

She was not only my great Aunt, she was also my godmother: she never wearied of telling how she had carried me through the snow one day in January 1936 to have me baptised. She also enjoyed recounting in detail how violently I had reacted to the process and she seemed particularly pleased with the consternation of the priest who had to struggle with me. Anyway, from then on Aunt Mary and I became very well acquainted, especially as she lived so near to us, i.e. in grandma鈥檚 house, which was only a few doors down the street, but in a room of her own. Indeed we were all part of one of those extended families, which, according to the sociologists, were ubiquitous in the past, and which, I must say, looking back, proved to be a great benefit to us all because the whole family seemed to be a co-operative venture. I can clearly recall Aunty Mary and grandma working together on washing-day, but maybe that memory is so fixed because that was the day that, as they tried to hang out the washing, Buller, Grandad's dog, grabbed the prop and managed to knock over both the old ladies. But Aunty Mary always seemed to be there and her room was a good place to go, if you were in trouble, or merely because you wanted something to do, or someone to talk to, especially as she was always pleased to see you.
Now, though I knew Aunty Mary very well already, it was when the war broke out that we became really good friends. I was too young to go to school and so was not evacuated with my brother and two sisters in September, 1939. I stayed at home with my mother who, at that point, managed to get a job. As a result of this, I spent most of my time at grandma's which was a great place for a three year old to be, especially as there were no rivals for the affection and indulgence of grandma, grand-dad, my mother's two younger sisters (one of whom was confusingly called Mary) Uncle Tommy, and, of course, great aunt Mary.

Though I can remember my grandfather and my uncles talking about the war, I think that in those early years of the conflict, I saw it largely through Mary's eyes. The most important reason for this was because she did the shopping and I always went along with her. As we progressed up the street and down the main road to the shops we would stop every few minutes to talk to her friends and acquaintances about the latest developments. What was remarkable, I now realise, was that whereas grand-dad's conversations were all about political or military affairs, Mary interpreted everything in terms of I ordinary people. The conversations in the butchers or in the chandler's, or the Co-op were all about husbands going off to war, or accounts of where the children were, and then later, of course about who was killed or wounded. And there was always the bombing, that is, at the beginning of the war before the novelty wore off and the real terror began.

Mary never struck me as being particularly morbid but she had to go and see every new bomb-site in the locality. This was at first when the devastation was fairly isolated. I still remember the smell of the soot at bombed houses and how the wallpaper seemed always to look as though the decoration had been neglected. People bombed out must have left as though they had been run over and taken to the hospital in tatty under clothes. But the wallpaper also seemed to have, in patches at least, quite unaccountable strength where occasionally it held on to an individual brick and kept it suspended in mid-air. Bedroom walls looked all wrong with no floors to keep them company and the chaos of beams and floorboards and heaps of bricks I found very disconcerting. We saw all sorts of houses, large and small, posh and mean, but I always felt the same sense of foreboding as Mary chatted away to the other gawpers about who was killed and who was injured, and they compared notes on the other bomb-sites and informed each other on how to get to the most devastated ones. One port of call everyday was the Co-op, Mary treated the shop as though it were a club and we seemed to spend hours there. Well, she did have shares in the institution and with a number as low as 3750, I reckon she felt like a founder member of the Liverpool Co-operative Wholesale Society.

Mary was in her element because she could gossip in the bacon queue, then in the bread queue and then in the grocery queue and so on. .

My grandfather had an Anderson shelter in his back yard and there we all assembled as soon as the siren went. I would have learned to hate that shelter even had it been palatial, but it was pokey and claustrophobic and the condensation ran constantly down the grooves of the corrugated iron, so it was not advisable to sit too close to the sides and we all had to huddle together towards the middle. You could have a light only if it were essential. As the only infant occupant, I was better provided for than the others: I lay on a bench with an old soft bolster as a mattress, even though this reduced considerably the space available to the others and there were always seven or eight adults in there. Though grandad was officially in charge because he held the spanner which released the panels to allow escape, should the door be blocked by debris, the scene was dominated by Aunty Mary. She led grandma and her other sister, Agnes, in the prayers which they rattled off incessantly. The rosary, as you would expect, was most popular with them, and though they could go through it at a great rate, I'm sure they were sincere, and they did try to contemplate the mysteries which each decade celebrates because this gave their minds something else to think about as the banging of the bombs and the guns, and the droning of the aeroplanes went on and on.

Occasionally, when a bomb landed close and the earth shook and the roar of the explosion was deafening, all three of them would fall on their knees simultaneously crying, "Jesus, Mary, and St Joseph", so that all the effort they had made to keep calm for my sake was wasted and their fear communicated itself to me and made my terror all the greater. Then they would climb back on their rickety old chairs and the praying would begin again until gradually the gentle rhythm would have its calming effect on all of us. Other things could interrupt the prayers. The most likely was the arrival of great uncle Johnny, Agnes' husband. He didn't care about the bombing or if he did, he didn't show it, but perhaps that was because on most occasions, he was drunk, much to Mary's disgust. Agnes didn't seem to mind too much. Johnny had not worked very often in the years immediately before the war, having lost his regular job at the wrong time of life, but of course, the war, for all its alarms, did lead to full employment and Johnny was not going to let Hitler spoil his newly recovered affluence. Every time he arrived late Mary would demand to know where he had been on such a night as this, with an air-raid raging all around, as though she had no inkling of the existence of pubs. Johnny would say nothing as his policy was to remain taciturn when the women were around. The exception was the occasion when he arrived very drunk and missed the steps down into the shelter altogether and fell in amongst us with a yell and then rolled about laughing and upsetting all the chairs so that the Aunts were also sent rolling round the floor too. They forgot all about the bombs while they kicked and grabbed at Johnny. They also forgot their prayers and called him names which genteel ladies shouldn't know the meaning of. At last they got him on to a chair and they all quietened down. However, Mary's attempt to set the prayers moving again failed because Johnny began to sing to Agnes in a very pleasant light, if wobbly, tenor voice: "You made me love you" but instead of "I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it", he sang "A penny on the bottle, a penny on the bottle" and clinked together the bottles of Guinness he had brought for grandad and himself. I thought this was great fun and so did grandad, but Mary was furious and began to tell him what she thought of him and his profligate ways. This upset Agnes who suggested forcibly that Mary should mind her own business. Then grandma broke in and told them both to shut up. And soon they were all raving at each other until yet another bomb dropped and this time in the next street and with such a cataclysmic noise that it shook the old ladies on to their knees again, "Jesus, Mary and St Joseph!" Even Johnny stopped singing - peace was restored!

The next day Mary was exactly the same as usual, as though nothing had happened. There she was in her long skirts and her lace-up boots, putting on her 'every-day' hat and calling to me to go with her on the messages (i.e. to do the shopping), but I didn't want to, because by this time, the air-raid shelters were being built in the street and there was sand and cement and water to play in.

On Sundays I could never refuse to accompany her because we would often go on a tramcar to the Pier Head or to Otterspool, or somewhere else. There was even a possibility that Mary would buy me an ice-cream or a packet of crisps. As we went along on the tram, on the top deck of course, she would comment on everything we passed. If the tram went through town we always saw lots of soldiers and sailors and Mary who was nearly 70 when the war broke out would look at them and say they were 'just bits o' kids'. On one occasion we went especially to the Pier Head to see a hospital ship which was tied up at Princess Landing Stage. Hundreds of people there waving to those of the wounded who were on the various decks visible from the front. Some of the injured soldiers and sailors were able to stand, others were in wheelchairs, but they all wore bright blue uniforms which I thought looked very odd. With hindsight, I realise that at that time I had no real idea of what it must have meant to be wounded and I wonder now if Aunt Mary did either, as she seemed to find it all very enjoyable - especially when we got home and I reported that all the wounded were 'just bits o' kids'. Sometimes our Sunday outings were specifically religious. In the Catholic Church in those days, and for a long time after the war (and maybe still in some dioceses), there was the practice of exposing the Sacrament for 40 hours at a time. This was known unsurprisingly as the Quarant Ore. It occurred in all churches in turn during the Summer and exactly where it was each week was published in the diocesan directory. The churches were always beautifully decorated on these special occasions with banks of flowers and candles and even I at the age of no more than 4, was impressed. Aunty Mary loved to travel to the various parishes outside Liverpool because they were easily reached, more often than not by tramcar. On one occasion, we visited one of the churches just up the coast from Liverpool. As it was a pleasant afternoon, and as the tram terminus was quite a way from the church, she decided that we would walk to it along the shore. To my delight, on the beach there was an anti-aircraft gun - looking very impressive glinting in the sun as it pointed out over Liverpool Bay from behind its high bank of sandbags. There was also a machine gun next to it. However, the best part was that it was guarded by a soldier in full battle dress, complete with steel helmet and a rifle with fixed bayonet. This soldier was motionless until we got about twenty yards from him and then suddenly he shouted, "Halt! Who goes there?" It came as quite a shock to me, but Aunty Mary seemed quite unaffected. She simply walked on. I grasped her hand more tightly and moved on too, but pulled behind her ample skirts. The soldier shouted again, jabbing his rifle at us even more menacingly but still she took no notice. Then again! Finally, when we were actually walking in front of the gun he dropped his rifle to his side, slumped into a very unmilitary bearing and said, "Madam, don't you realise, there's a war on? This is a military zone, and I could have shot you and that child". Mary at last seemed to notice both him and the gun emplacement. She fixed him with a beady look and retorted, "Aagh, don't be so bloody daft!", and we walked on leaving behind us a very perplexed young man.

Fortunately for me just before the worst bombing of Liverpool, the May Blitz of 1941, my mother and I left the city to join the rest of our immediate family, those evacuated earlier to Shropshire. It was as well that we had established this new base because in the same May Blitz, grandma鈥檚 house was bombed, and though nobody was hurt, they were all badly shaken. Grandma and her two younger daughters came to us, smelling, I remember, of soot, just like the bombed houses I had seen earlier. Aunty Mary would not move from Liverpool. She stayed with relations until grandad found another house and then he and grandma and Mary were together again.

Mary soon established her old pattern of life in another part of Liverpool. It was not long before she was known in all the shops, and she even discovered she knew personally the proprietor of the fish shop, which meant her gossip has more authority in that particular port of call each day. She did visit us briefly in our country cottage but our life there was not her idea of what it was all about: she needed bustling streets, where people jostled and abused each other, and not even the war had changed that very much in the shopping centres of cities like Liverpool.

However, when I went back to Liverpool in late 1944, I was shocked by what I saw and it was not the bomb-sites which upset me but the general air of tattiness: the whole city seemed to be run down, people were badly dressed; everywhere needed a coat of paint, streets did not seem to have been swept and there always seemed to be a smell of burning. Anyway it was not the same, and neither was the family. My grandparents and Aunty Mary were miles away; you had to go on the tramcar to see them. Our own house was full of other less familiar members of the clan who, also bombed out, had moved in while we were away. And even when the war was over, officially, the crisis seemed to go on and you wondered if anything would ever be the same again.

Then one day, something happened which made it seem to me that there was hope that things were changing for the better. It was a little after Easter and Aunty Mary and I were travelling from grandma's house to ours, but she had decided that we would not get the tramcar all the way: we would walk part of it to save some of the fare. It was a pleasant sunny afternoon so, though I was disgruntled at not having a long ride on the tram, I didn't really mind walking with Aunt Mary. We came probably not by chance, to St Sebastian's, and went in because Mary thought it was disrespectful to pass a Catholic church. I remember that inside it was very bright and clean, but that was not what caught the eye: the striking aspect of it all was the banks of daffodils everywhere you looked. It was as though the whole of the world was new, was young again - and clean. Mary said nothing but I'm sure she was deeply affected by it because she knelt and prayed earnestly for a long time. And though usually I would have become restless very quickly, on that particular day I didn't care if we moved or not. To sit quietly there was so nice and so safe. But this experience was not the one which marked the end of the war: that came a few minutes after we had left the church. In the same street there was the central dairy of the Coop, and even before we reached it we could hear the noise of a large crowd. Mary suddenly became more sprightly and headed towards the furore with a vigour I had not seen since the early days of the war when we visited the destruction caused by those first raids. However, when we got to the dairy we found no disorderly mob milling about but a properly organised queue - admittedly at least four deep and very animated but orderly, nevertheless. Mary joined on the end and asked what the fuss was all about - 'Ice cream' several people shouted together - "They're gonna be selling ice cream in a minute", so we were engulfed in this cheerful smiling mob and sure enough before long, people began to come away from the front - not with cornets and sandwiches I remember from my very young days but with big lumps of ice-cream held by cardboard. When it was our turn I realised why: the ice cream had been made in blocks about 8 inches long and 3 inches wide and the card simply held it together.
"How much is it?"
"Shilling a block, sixpence a half, and threepence a quarter"
There was a momentary pause, then Mary said "Aagh, give us 2 sixpenny ones".
So the woman cut a block in two with a big knife and gave one to me and one to Mary. Never have I tasted ice-cream so creamy, so sweet and so cold. And the texture was just right - not grainy, not slimy, but somewhere in between - perfect!

So there we were: Mary and I walking along in the Spring sunshine, licking ice creams down to the last milky drops which we sucked noisily out of the cardboard corners, and happier than we'd been in years. That was when the war ended for me
and Mary, and that was when there seemed to be a future.

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