The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [12]
Her father! Ruthie paused outside the gate of the neat red-brick semi, not daring to risk putting the gate on the latch just in case the noise might alert her mother to her departure. It hurt so much to think about the way Dad had died, crushed beneath the masonry blown apart by the German bomb that had devastated the Durning Road Technical College in the autumn of 1940. He had been on duty there as an air-raid warden. Her mother, Ruthie knew, would never recover from his loss; it hung over the small house like the pall of smoke and dust that had hung over the destroyed college. When the news had come her mother had insisted on them going down there, even though she had been advised not to do so. The rescue work had still been going on when they had arrived – what could be salvaged of once living, breathing human beings, tenderly and respectfully brought out of the carnage. Ruthie knew she would never forget what she had seen that night: a human hand and wrist – thankfully not her father’s – the watch on it still going, a baby’s rattle, a woman’s torso, images too horrible for her to want to recall.
Ruthie had reached the Edge Hill Road now and she continued down into the area of terraced streets that lay below it, once filled with people’s homes but now ravaged by Hitler’s bombers’ assault on the city during the first week of May 1941, when Liverpool had endured a week-long blitz that had destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed so many people.
Had she come to the right place? She wasn’t sure and she started to fret, her hazel eyes darkening with anxiety as she pushed a nervous hand into her soft mousy brown hair. How long would she have to wait? She stared into the half-light, her heart thudding. She still couldn’t believe she was actually doing this. Her mother would be so shocked and so unforgiving. She could almost see the sad, gentle look her father would have given her if he knew.
She could hear the sound of a bus coming up the road towards her. Automatically she stiffened. She flagged down the driver and it pulled to a halt.
‘Is this the bus for the munitions factory?’ she asked anxiously as she stepped onto it.
The interior of the bus was packed with women, and one of them called up sarcastically, ‘Course it bloody is. What does it look like – a ruddy chara trip to Blackpool?’
Ruthie blushed bright red as the women burst out laughing. A pretty redhead with a mass of curls and smiling eyes looked Ruthie over and then said determinedly, ‘Give over, Mel. The poor kid looks half scared to death. Just starting, are you, love?’ she asked Ruthie, making room for her on the seat next to her.
Ruthie nodded, feeling tongue-tied and uncomfortable.
A lot of people said that it was only the poorer sort of women who signed on to work at the munitions factory at Kirby, and Ruthie suspected from the coarse language and dress of those on the bus that it was probably true. But she needed a job, and not just because now that she was nineteen it was compulsory for her to do war work. She and her mother needed the money, and she had heard that the munitions factory paid good wages, even to unskilled, untrained workers like her.
‘I must be daft in me head tekin’ on a ruddy job like this,’ the woman who had mocked Ruthie grumbled. ‘Up at four and working ruddy long shifts, and tekin’ me life into my hands every day.’
‘Come on, Mel, it isn’t as bad as that,’ the redhead that had offered Ruthie a seat objected. ‘The wages are good, and then there’s them concerts that the management put on for us, and these buses…’
‘Oh, trust you to say that, Jess Hunt. A right little ray of ruddy sunshine, you are. What about the danger then? There was that girl last week had all of her fingers blown off, she did. You could hear her screaming three sheds away,’ Mel announced with relish, whilst Ruthie sucked in her breath and fought back the nausea cramping her stomach.
It had been three days before they had found her father in all the rubble.