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Light Rescue.
By
George Highmore

Reg, my friend, and I were schoolboys during the Blitz. We lived in Surrey under one of the Luftwaffe routes to London. We were used to walking the four miles to school through leafy suburban streets. We hardly noticed the neatly trimmed hedges and, in the early mornings , the pint bottles of milk, delivered minutes before, already raided by the sparrows who had a way of piercing the tinfoil caps and scooping the delicious cream from the top, and, for maybe fifteen days out of twenty our journey would be uneventful and we could slip blissfully into an ignorance of the horrors of war going on around and above us. But we were actually living through the Blitz on London and a period when Britain came closest to defeat. On one memorable occasion we stumbled innocently upon a horror of the night before. In a matter of seconds our pre-pubescent innocence, was swept forward into the realism of war.
We turned a corner as we scuffed our way to school to see the road blocked with a criss-cross of debris scattered over and concealing much the road ahead. Some houses had taken a direct hit from a bomb. Emergency vehicles, including a fire tender and an ambulance, had been hurriedly parked in cleared spaces. A dozen people, some in uniform, some in work clothes and a couple in smart suits, were busy clearing the worst of the debris from the road, whilst more were working close to what remained of two houses. A pall of dust and the unique smell of newly turned earth and of ripped timbers snatched at our nostrils and gave evidence that the explosion had happened within the previous hour, or so.
There was no fire. There rarely was one to speak of in the suburbs when a bomb or a stick of bombs fell among the quiet orderly streets. It was all so unlike the newsreels of the Blitz on London The bombing we witnessed in the suburban streets and shopping squares was nothing by comparison. A very rare direct hit on a gas main might send up a vertical shaft of flame which would ignite adjacent buildings and plenty of gas pipes were fractured as the debris of a substantial house came tumbling down but the single flames would soon be extinguished, and the supply shut off by the Auxiliary Fire Service or the local Air Raid Warden. The acrid stench from gas seeping into the soft clay was common enough and everybody was extremely cautious and never allowed a naked flame to persist. Although nearly everyone smoked cigarettes or a pipe, they did it well away from danger.
We walked quickly and deliberately towards the piles of debris and groups of people. We could see that, as so often happened, the two houses had collapsed, mostly into what had been their front gardens. An ambulance and one green fire tender of the Auxiliary Fire Service, and a big van with ‘LIGHT RESCUE' painted on its side were pulled up as close as possible to the area where men and women were busily passing shards of timber and single bricks along a human chain as those at the front burrowed into a compressed gap between the ground floor living room and the debris of one of the bedrooms. The void, into which the rescuers dug with any implement to hand, was formed by the angle of a whole collapsed floor which sloped dangerously towards the group of rescuers at the head of the line. Reg and I joined the tail end of the human chain and set to placing chunks of debris well clear of the site. The first piece of any size to come our way was a crushed kitchen cabinet which still contained packets of food and some china jars and tins that rattled around and fell about us as we dragged it towards a clear patch of what was once a neatly tended front garden lawn and flower beds. We dumped the heavy load returned to the fray.
A whistle blew, a joist creaked, and everyone stood still whilst an ARP man, helped by a policeman, wedged a piece of stout timber under the joists of the floor that had collapsed to stop further slippage which might bury the rescuers. Everyone listened intently and I heard distant voices and responses from within the house. We were both surprised at the calmness with which the unintelligible conversation took place. We agreed later that we expected those people digging at the front to panic at the least sound of danger, but everyone, and thus ourselves were efficiently calm. The whistle blew again and work resumed with those working at the front carefully, like in some pick-up-sticks game, selecting debris, to remove and pass back to where we worked in safety.
Above us I noticed that one of the bedrooms was rudely exposed in a naked display of sheets, blankets, pillowcases and shredded linoleum, whilst a quite undisturbed framed print of a summer country scene remained hanging perfectly on one wall. The picture, which I guessed might have hung just above the big double bed I could now see at a jaunty angle in the front garden, hung perfectly square on that wall.
As I glanced at the former bedroom, the joists slipped just a little without invoking another whistle from the Warden, but it was enough to exaggerate the slope of the crazily tilted floor and a chamber pot slid incongruously across the exposed boards to dangle, half full of strong yellow urine, at the edge of the torn timbers. The ARP Warden, ever vigilant, balanced a long strip of timber over his head to topple the china pot so that it fell harmlessly to smash and spill its content over a pile of rubble. The small event raised a nervous giggle from some, but lent a grave dignity to the scene.
Without any need for instruction or direction from the civil defence workers in their meagre protective clothing and tin hats, we worked hard for hours at the rear of the rescuers. We cleared loose debris and passed along each massive sliver of roof timber or armful of bricks and broken plaster as it was sent back. We created a neat pile in the front garden as those in the vanguard burrowed a clear corridor through the tangle of what was once a home.
Us helpers at the rear heard about the people who were trapped and how everyone involved in front were hopeful of freeing them all. Reg and I straightened our backs in a moment of relief as the whistle was blown again and everyone stopped what they were doing. The rescue team leader called for silence and they once again heard distant voices calling and now moaning from inside the wreckage. Then, as an awful silence fell once more, the whistle blew again and everybody doubled their efforts.
About a half hour after the last whistle there was a small evidence of movement from the man-made burrow. We all stopped work, knowing the end was near. Then, in a solemn procession, three casualties emerged. One, a small boy walked unaided between the lines of helpers. He said nothing. His eyes were fixed on some point ahead and he kept one hand tightly gripping that of his blue uniformed escort. A woman, with wrinkled feet under transparent skin which poked out from a grey army blanket was carried past us on a stretcher toward the ambulance. I saw the ashen, bleeding face and shredded dress only half covering her skinny body, but her eyes, which looked up at the stretcher bearer, told me she was alive. Someone near the us reported that the last one was an old man who had been in the bedroom. As he went by on the stretcher he was completely covered and we guessed his fate.
School, and retribution for absence, was far from our minds as we worked on to help the final clear-up at the site. We continued passing pieces of broken furniture and bricks on to the big pile and as items of value or use were discovered they were passed to a man in a suit whom we recognised as one of our school masters. He had also been on his way to our school and who had volunteered to take charge of any valuable items and make an inventory. We were relieved that he would have been listed as absent too.
Only when the Civil Defence men gave the assurance that there would be no more casualties and no more effort was needed, did we leave the scene. The acrid and choking dust had dried our throats and made us choke and sneeze, but we were two very proud friends who made our way off the site. As we sipped a welcome mug of tea from the Womens’ Voluntary Service van, it was confirmed that the old man had been in the bedroom when the bomb fell.
I wondered if it was he who had last used the piss pot.
George Highmore
Wem, Shropshire
July 2005

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