The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [137]
‘Oh, aye, that’s right. Mind you, I’ve just heard summat about one of them women working there starting it all by sneaking out for a smoke. Chucked her fag down when she thought she were going to get caught by the foreman, right into some ruddy TNT.’
Jess knew, of course, that what she was being told was only supposition but, even so, a chill of horror ran down her spine. One small explosion of TNT would have led to more and bigger ones, and the girls in the shed wouldn’t have had a chance, especially if it was true and the girl who had caused the initial explosion had been standing just outside the doorway. Unwanted and violent images were already forming inside her head, the faces of those she knew she would never see again, not laughing and joking as she knew them but instead contorted with horror and fear, knowing what they were facing. How many seconds of that terror had they had before that final explosion that had blown them to pieces? Ten? Twenty? She had gone icy cold but sweat was pouring down her body. And what if there hadn’t been one final explosion but several smaller ones, whilst they ran screaming and desperate, seeking some way of escape…?
As though she had read her thoughts, Mabel suddenly told her grimly, ‘Lord knows but they must have bin desperate, trapped inside there. I know how I would have felt. We was in number five shed when we heard the explosion and our foreman had us outta of there that fast, and thank God he did.’
‘I heard one of the women from six shed saying as how she’d heard that they was taking women down to the ambulances wot had tried to get through the fire. She said that they was coming all on fire and that their skin was hanging off their bones, and that the smell…’
Jess put her hand to her clammy forehead. She felt sick and faint and filled with a huge, furious burning anger. She lurched away from the women, ignoring their calls to come back as she dodged past an ARP man, who had turned away to talk to an exhausted fireman.
‘Called in the bomb disposal lot, they have. Much good they can do,’ Jess heard the fireman saying grimly. ‘If this fire gets round to that shed where they’ve got all them shells stocked the whole of ruddy Liverpool will be going up in smoke.’
‘We was told they’d brought in as many lorries as they can to get them shells out,’ the ARP man was saying.
‘Aye, well, they’ve sent the bomb disposal lot round that side. Rather them than me. They’ll be the first to cop it if the fire spreads over there. If we get a ruddy early onshore evening wind, that will be it. It will fan the flames and we’ll have no chance.’
The bomb disposal men. That meant Billy.
Oblivious to everything and anyone else, Jess started to make her way round to the storage area for the shells, muttering under her breath as she did, ‘That Billy, he’s got no more sense than to go and try to be a ruddy hero. What does he know about TNT or shells? All he’ll be thinking about is going down the Grafton and telling some daft girl about how he saved the munitions factory. Huh, how he blew himself to bits, more like, although how he’s going to be telling anyone that once he’s gone and got himself killed I don’t know…’
The men working to control the blaze were too busy to notice her, and her knowledge of the factory enabled her to reach the shed where the shells were stored without being stopped.
As she rounded the corner of one of the other sheds and looked towards it, she came to an abrupt halt. Where she had expected to see the familiar sight of several of the factory buildings, there was now only rubble and an empty space into which fire hoses were pumping arcs of water.
On the other side of this devastation she could see where several men, wearing the insignia of the Royal Engineers, were grouped together. One of them was bending over,