Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [153]
She had brought sandwiches and a flask with her, but she didn’t bother to stop to enjoy them. She would share them instead with Jack.
She exhaled with relief when she found the small village with the long and unpronounceable name, which was close to the farm where Jack was living. She stopped the car outside the post office and got out. It would be a good place to enquire which direction she should take out of the village to reach the farm.
As she walked out of the sunshine into the gloom of the low-ceilinged room, the half a dozen or so people waiting in a queue all turned to look at her, as people do when strangers arrive in close-knit communities.
‘I’m looking for the Thomases’ farm,’ Francine told them, feeling that some explanation of her presence was called for.
The people in the queue looked at one another and there was a groundswell of muted conversation in Welsh.
It was the woman behind the counter who answered her. ‘It’s down the road on the left as you go past the chapel, but you won’t find much of it left, not after what the Luftwaffe did to it last night. Dropped one of their ruddy bombs right on top of it, they did, see, and flattened the whole place.’
The singsong words danced inside Francine’s head, impossible surely to believe, for what reason could the Luftwaffe have for dropping bombs out here where there was nothing but sheep and a handful of scattered farms, and Jack.
Francine started to walk and then run from the post office towards her borrowed car.
The road up to the farm was potholed and narrow, and at the end of it lay what must have once been a building but was now a heap of rubble, over which hung a pall of dust and smoke from the still smouldering rafters.
A group of rescue workers, their faces smeared with smoke and their expressions bleak, stood silently beside a couple of battered trucks.
Francine got out of the car.
‘You can’t go over there, bach,’ a short burly-looking man told her, barring her way. ‘Too dangerous it is, see, with the building half collapsed already.’
‘Please let me past. My son was staying here. I have to know what’s happened to him.’
Something – pity, perhaps – came and went in the man’s eyes before he explained, ‘There was no one survived – took a direct hit, the place did, see. They reckon the pilot was after Liverpool but lost his way and had to turn back so he dumped his bombs in Wales. Half a dozen or more gone off last night, there was, so they say, but this was the only one that hit anything.’
‘He wouldn’t have known nothing, bach,’ another man told her gently.
‘Killed old Thomas’s prize dog, it did, an’ all. Promised me one of her pups, he had,’ a third mournful voice joined in.
Francine wished they would go away and leave her here on her own.
Jack. She couldn’t take it in that he was gone. Dead. Killed. Here in this burned-out wreckage of what had once been a home. She couldn’t visualise him here; not at all. When she created a picture of him inside her head she saw him in Liverpool, smiling up at her … and alive.
But he wasn’t alive. How could he be? Francine looked at the still smouldering wreckage and knew that the men were right and that no one, nothing could have survived. Jack. What she had previously thought of as emotional pain had been nothing. This now was real pain, and it had only just begun.
As she drove past the small stone-built chapel on her way back to Bangor she looked at the message written outside. It read, ‘God is with you.’
She started to laugh hysterically.
The now-familiar wail of the air-raid sirens brought Bella out of her sleep. She lay