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Blitz

It must have been about the third day of the May blitz that we were invited to volunteer to look for bodies. Work was impossible anyway, as the anatomy department had had a direct hit and the reader was mourning the loss of a lifetime’s research. We piled into a three-tonner together with a crowd of noisy engineers and went down singing ‘The One-Eyed Reilly’ to a street at the back of the old Stanley Hospital.
The lorry stopped in a part of the street that was still standing after a fashion, though windows and many slates had gone. Our singing died away in deference to the old biddies in their black shawls who stood at their doorsteps. They egged us on to more, but we had suddenly lost our enthusiasm when we looked to the far end of the street which seemed to end in an enormous shapeless brickyard. I had never realised before just how many bricks must go to make a house. We walked over a carpet of bricks past heaps of bricks above head height to the remains of a house perched on the edge of an enormous brick-lined crater. It must have been a parachute mine, one of those many-horned monsters that I had heard swinging down through the night with their great ‘swoosh-swoosh’. They were intended for shipping in the Mersey but the wind often blew them over land. Underneath one of them you would hear death approaching quite slowly.
We were supposed to be looking for a woman and her child. The job looked hopeless from the start. The top floor and roof had fallen into kitchen and living room We had no proper tools and were reduced to throwing bricks aside with our hands. I found nothing of either of them except the girl’s school drawing book. She had not been conventionally talented, but the drawings of birds and butterflies overflowed with life. One particular fabulous and active yellow creation seemed to be trying to escape over the edge of the page.
After a while her brother turned up; he wore a bomb disposal flash and had obviously come on compassionate leave. Although the Army had put some flesh on him one could see underneath the outlines of the barefoot street urchin he had once been. He looked at us: ‘Find anything?’ I shook my head: ‘Only this’, handing him the book. He looked at it then stuffed it into the blouse of his battledress. We were curiously embarrassed to be caught picking over the remains of his house, invaders of what was left of his privacy. but soon a Heavy Rescue team arrived and we were glad to be able to leave.
About day five or six we were sent to an open-air mortuary that had been established in a school playground in Everton. Although screened off by hessian, in the warn May morning it announced its presence a hundred yards away. The dead were laid out in rows on the asphalt and the men’s job was to go down the lines searching for evidence of identification. The women in our year had the worst of it. They worked in another area where the dead who had been identified were laid on trestle tables and had the task of showing round the relatives who came to view and confirm identity.
We worked steadily and arrived at where the twisted body of a policeman lay half embracing that of a small boy. The policeman had been caught in the fire after the ammunition ship blew up in Canada Dock; his brain had boiled and split his skull. With hollow bravado I gave an impromptu demonstration of cerebral anatomy.
We carried on until evening. As we came away I went to the corner tobacconist hoping for cigarettes, a scarcity at the time. At the sight of my white coat she reached under the counter and produced a packet, saying nothing. Coming out, I saw the brother of the girl we had been looking for two days ago as he left the playground. In reply to my silent enquiry he said: ‘Found me mam but not ‘er’. He did not choose to speak his sister’s name. I offered him a cigarette and we walked back down the hill together in silence.

Dr M.K.Alexander, born Birkenhead 23rd September 1922. Medical student at the University of Liverpool.

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