The Clippie Girls Read online

  The war news in the early part of 1940 was depressing. In April the enemy invaded Norway and Denmark and when, at the end of May, Belgium and Holland fell, it seemed only a matter of time before France would be overwhelmed.

  ‘But our boys are over there,’ Rose said, wide-eyed with fear, as Grace read out snippets from the papers. ‘Walter’s probably there.’

  The answer came only a few days later when the great evacuation of troops from Dunkirk’s beaches began. Now every member of the household was fighting over Grace’s newspaper to read the latest developments. On 31 May the front page of the Daily Express showed an artist’s impression of a bird’s eye view of the fighting. ‘Look,’ Grace jabbed a finger at the paper. ‘See how they’ve got the English and the French trapped with their backs to the sea.’

  ‘What are those meant to be?’ Myrtle asked, leaning over Grace’s shoulder and pointing at the tiny shapes of ships in the Channel.

  ‘Boats taking the soldiers off the beaches.’

  ‘And those?’ Now she pointed to birdlike shapes.

  ‘Planes – but whether they’re meant to be the RAF or enemy planes strafing the beaches, I don’t know.’

  Mary sighed. ‘Both, probably.’

  ‘We’ve lost three destroyers already,’ Grace murmured, ‘but at least they’re getting our boys back home.’

  Though it was a defeat for the British army, the rescue operation was hailed as a miraculous victory. The soldiers arrived back to a rapturous welcome, the papers said. They were dirty – many of them had lost their boots, their jackets – but still they clung to their rifles. And they were hungry. The people of the south-coast towns where the ships landed the men turned out to wave flags and cheer them home, but most importantly they were ready with food and drink. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of soldiers back on British soil, snatched from beaches, which had been under constant attack from German dive bombers, caused Rose to say, ‘Oh, I wish I was there to help. Now I understand what made the Bradshaw boys go.’

  ‘Don’t you get silly ideas into your head about volunteering,’ Grace warned, suddenly afraid that her headstrong granddaughter would do something impetuous. ‘Your job’ll be dangerous enough if we get bombed.’

  Rose blinked. ‘We won’t get bombed here, will we? Not really? Oh, I know we’ve had to prepare, just like everyone else, but—’

  Her voice faded away as Grace eyed her. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Grace said quietly.

  ‘What?’ Rose stared at her and then sank down into a chair. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘We were bombed in the last war.’

  ‘Not – not here. Not in Sheffield.’

  Grace nodded. ‘Yes, here in Sheffield.’

  ‘But – but I didn’t think – I mean – how could their planes get this far?’

  ‘It was a Zeppelin raid. There were twenty-eight people killed and a lot injured.’

  ‘I – never knew. You’ve never said.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘We all wanted to forget about the war. The men who’d been to the Front would never talk about it. Your dad included. And we all wanted to put it behind us and believe what they said about it being the war to end all wars. This city lost a lot of men on the Somme and then, only just afterwards, we got bombed. No one was prepared – not really. They all thought the same as you’re saying – that they couldn’t reach us. But they did.’ Grace fell silent, lost in her own thoughts. Rose waited, biting her lip to stop the questions from tumbling out. Grace would carry on in her own time and at her own pace. She wouldn’t be hurried.

  ‘Of course your dad and mam weren’t married then. That was before he came home injured and your mam – oh well, enough said about that, I suppose.’

  ‘Tell me about the bombing,’ Rose whispered, morbidly fascinated. She didn’t want to hear about their city being attacked and yet she had to know.

  ‘The first bombs fell on the Burngreave Cemetery.’

  Rose gasped. ‘Where Dad and Grandad are buried?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘But that’s not far away from here.’

  ‘I know. We – your mother and me – watched it from the bedroom window and then we realized they might come our way, so we went down into the cellar.’

  ‘So that’s how you know the cellar will be the safest place?’

  Grace nodded again, this time her face grim with unhappy memories. ‘And now Hitler’s overrun France, he can get right to the coast just across the Channel. Not only can he invade the south coast, but his bombers can probably reach every place in the British Isles.’

  Rose gaped at her grandmother. For once in her life, she could think of nothing to say.

  Grace turned back to her newspaper. ‘They’ve rescued over three hundred thousand men from Dunkirk,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe it, can you? France is lost, but we live to fight another day. I do hope Letty’s boy is all right. She hasn’t been round for a couple of days. Maybe there’s been bad news.’

  Never one to shirk an unpleasant task, Rose said, ‘I’ll go round.’

  She came back in only a few moments. ‘Letty’s in floods of tears – ’ Grace looked up sharply – ‘but it’s all right. They’ve just had news that Walter’s safe. He’s down south somewhere – but back in England. They’ve been desperately worried for several days ’cos they knew he’d just gone out there. She says – ’ Rose grinned in anticipation of her grandmother’s retort – ‘she’s sorry she hasn’t been round.’

  Grace glanced up at her granddaughter. ‘I know just what you’re thinking. That I’m going to trot out one of my famous sayings. “It’s an ill wind . . .” and all that, but even I wouldn’t wish that kind of worry on anyone, let alone my neighbour. Oh, I know she irritates the life out of me some days and her two boys are little devils, but we could have a lot worse as neighbours, Rose.’

  ‘Yes, Gran,’ Rose said dutifully, stifling her laughter, especially when she saw Grace’s mouth twitching as she tried to stop herself laughing too.

  A fortnight later one of Grace’s newspapers showed a picture of German soldiers riding on horseback up the Champs-Elysées.

  ‘How dreadful,’ Rose murmured, with tears in her eyes. She could picture such a scene happening here in her own city and shuddered at the thought.

  Although the rescue operation from Dunkirk had been magnificent, there were sadly many casualties too and one amongst them affected both Rose and Peggy. Laurence approached them one morning when they reported for work.

  ‘Alice won’t be in today – probably not for several days. She’s had news that her husband was killed on the beaches. Evidently, he was up to his waist in the sea, waiting for one of the little ships to pick him up, when an enemy plane strafed them.’

  ‘Oh, poor Alice – I’ll go and see her,’ Rose said at once.

  Laurence shook his head. ‘No point. She’s gone down south to stay with her brother and his wife for a week or two.’

  It was a month before Alice returned to Sheffield and came back to work. After offering her condolences, Rose said, ‘We all thought you might stay down there.’

  Alice’s face was pinched with grief and she looked thinner than ever, but she smiled bravely. ‘I did think about it – all my family is there – but Derek’s parents live in Rotherham. I thought he’d’ve liked me to stay near to them – at least for a while.’ She paused and then burst out, ‘The worst is knowing I’ll never be able to have any children. It was all me an’ Derek ever wanted. But now . . .’

  There was nothing Rose could say. Words of comfort like, ‘Oh, you’ll meet someone else’ would sound hollow and somehow insulting to her beloved husband’s memory. All Rose could do was to keep an eye on her friend and be a sympathetic ear if ever Alice needed one.

  Through the summer of 1940 Peggy and Bob continued to see each other outside their working hours, but the romance did not seem to progress. They went out most weekends, held hands in the back row of the pictures and kissed good
night outside the front door when Bob delivered her home at the time demanded by Grace. He was the first young man Peggy had gone out with for any length of time. She’d been out once or twice with Walter Bradshaw when she was seventeen, but he’d met a girl from Rotherham and soon became engaged to her. Peggy had never felt as if she’d been jilted; their friendship had been just that and no more. She didn’t weep into her pillow over Walter. But now she wasn’t sure what it meant to be ‘in love’. She read romantic novels but felt nothing of the passion for Bob which the heroines obviously felt for their heroes. She liked him very much, was fond of him even. She was comfortable with him. He was kind and courteous, considerate and undemanding, but her heart didn’t beat faster at the sight of him or her pulses race when he kissed her gently. Being reserved herself, maybe Peggy needed someone more exciting, whilst Rose would have been ecstatic if Bob had even looked at her.

  Myrtle, however, had no problem defining her sister’s so-called romance.

  ‘He’s slow,’ she voiced her opinion to Rose as they undressed for bed one warm August night. ‘Everyone’s blaming Peggy, but he’s not exactly sweeping her off her feet, is he? If you ask me, he’s as dull as ditch water and as slow as a tram on strike.’

  ‘How dare you talk about Bob like that?’ Rose flared in an unguarded moment.

  ‘Ooo-er, touchy, aren’t we? Fancy him yourself, do you?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Rose snapped, angry for having left herself open to Myrtle’s shrewd remark. ‘I just think he’s a nice bloke who Peggy’s not being fair to.’

  ‘Whom.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s “to whom” she’s not being fair, not “who”.’

  ‘Oh, go to sleep,’ Rose muttered, jumping into her single bed and pulling the covers up and then immediately throwing them off again. ‘It’s so hot up here.’

  ‘Well, at least it’ll be nice and cool on your tram platform tomorrow.’

  ‘D’you know what?’ Rose said, changing the subject. ‘Mam’s volunteered for war work and there’s a fair chance she might be sent as a clippie. She told ’em she’d got two daughters who were clippies. Or is it “whom”, Miss Clever Clogs?’

  ‘No, no, “who” is correct in that context.’

  As Myrtle blew out the candle and climbed into bed, Rose smiled in the half darkness of the summer night. ‘We only want you and Gran to sign up and we’d have a full house.’

  But there was no sound from the next bed. Myrtle was one of those fortunate people who, the moment their head touched the pillow, fell fast asleep.

  Rose was left staring into the darkness and praying that by morning Myrtle would have forgotten all about her hasty retort regarding Bob.

  Towards the end of the school summer term, Myrtle had taken her School Certificate and had passed with the highest grades possible in all her subjects. Her family was justifiably proud of her. During the holidays she took over more of the household chores when Mary became a fully fledged clippie too, but Myrtle’s studies were not laid aside completely. Before the end of term she had ascertained the literature books she would need for the sixth form and, through the long, hot summer days, read all of them – and more.

  The sound of the air-raid sirens was becoming part of the city’s everyday life. There had been numerous false alarms and, even though there had been one or two minor raids, the public became blasé about the warnings and just carried on with whatever they were doing until they heard the sound of planes overhead.

  ‘You must not ignore the sirens,’ Laurence instructed his staff. ‘You should get all your passengers to the nearest public shelter on your route whenever you hear the warning.’ The motormen and the clippies did their best, but so many of their passengers refused to go into the shelters and grumbled if the tram stopped.

  ‘It’s nowt but a false alarm, love,’ many a traveller would say. ‘Just get us home.’

  But one Thursday evening towards the end of August, Peggy and Rose returned home looking worried and agitated.

  ‘Is Mam home?’

  ‘Not yet. Why?’

  The sisters glanced at each other and began to speak at once.

  ‘She—’

  ‘We—’

  Catching their anxiety, Grace crumpled the newspaper she was reading onto her knee. ‘What? Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  ‘No, no,’ Peggy said at once. ‘We just wanted to know she was all right, that’s all.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Grace’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is something, isn’t there? Come on, out with it.’

  ‘It’s just that we thought she might have been on the route today near where the bombs fell.’

  Grace’s wrinkled face turned pale. ‘What bombs?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear the sirens? Didn’t you go down into the cellar?’

  Grace looked sheepish. ‘We thought it was another false alarm.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t. Not this time,’ Peggy said shortly. ‘You should really be more careful, Gran.’

  ‘And did you get all your passengers into a shelter?’ Grace retorted defensively.

  ‘They refused to go. Like you, they thought it wasn’t serious. But when we heard the bombs dropping, they shot out of the car and down the nearest shelter like rats down a drainpipe.’

  ‘I’m going back to the depot,’ Rose said, ‘to find out what’s happened and where Mam is.’

  ‘I’ll come with you—’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘You stay here – with me, Peggy.’

  The sisters glanced at each other and then looked back at their grandmother. Though she would never have admitted it in a million years, they could both see that Grace was frightened and fearful of news that might be brought to her door. She didn’t want to be alone to hear it.

  ‘Myrtle’s here, isn’t she?’

  Grace ran her tongue round her dry lips and nodded. ‘But she’s only a kid. Besides, she’s upstairs in her bedroom reading. She says she can’t concentrate down here.’ Grace smiled wryly. ‘Says I keep talking to her. She’s right. I do.’

  ‘She’ll be sat on her bed reading.’ Rose knew Myrtle’s habits.

  There was a tense silence in the room until Grace said, ‘Off you go, Rose. Go and find your mam.’ Beneath her breath, she muttered, ‘If you can.’

  As Rose hurried out, Peggy said, ‘I’ll make a cuppa. Have you had anything to eat yet?’

  Grace shook her head. ‘We were waiting for you all to come home.’

  ‘Then I’ll get started on the tea.’

  ‘Myrtle’s got it all ready.’ Grace looked up, reluctant to let her go, but when Peggy said gently, ‘I’ll just be in the kitchen,’ the older woman nodded and picked up her newspaper again.

  The waiting was terrible. Grace did her best to sit quietly. At her age, she told herself, she ought to be used to dealing with the tragedies that life brought. She’d lived through the last lot, hadn’t she? She’d witnessed her neighbours and friends losing loved ones and had been there to comfort them as best she could when they’d received the dreaded telegram. She’d thought old age would bring tranquillity and the capacity to endure whatever life threw at her. But it hadn’t. She could no more accept that she might see one or more of her family killed or injured in this new kind of conflict, which wrought terror amongst the civilian population, than she’d been able to come to terms with the carnage of the trenches. It was all a needless waste of lives, this time brought on by a megalomaniac.

  Grace heard Peggy moving about in the kitchen, clattering pots and pans whilst she sat fidgeting in her chair by the fire, glancing up at the clock on the mantelpiece every few minutes. Myrtle, still blithely unaware of the anxiety of her family, read on in peace.

  Downstairs, the waiting went on.

  Ten

  It was over an hour later that they heard the front door open and Rose’s voice calling, ‘Here we are, all safe and sound.’

  Grace muttered a prayer of thankfulness and sniff
ed back her tears. It wouldn’t do to let them see how worried she’d been. In this house of women, she was supposed to be the strong one, head of the house and all that. And then Rose and Mary were in the room and Peggy was hurrying from the kitchen to hug them both, not even attempting to hide her anxiety. ‘Are you all right, Mam? What happened? Why are you so late home?’

  Mary reassured her quickly, ‘I’m fine. We got delayed, that’s all, because of the line being blocked. That route will be out of action for a few days until they get the debris moved away and the track repaired.’

  ‘Was it bad?’

  Mary nodded, her eyes still wide with exhaustion and shock. ‘As far as we know, no one was injured.’ But she could not wipe the images from her mind. The sight of homes reduced to a smouldering pile of rubble; of a woman standing before a bombed house weeping openly; of a man tearing at a heap of bricks with his bare hands, desperation on his face. She’d still been shaking when she’d got back to the depot, but Laurence had taken her to the mess room at once and given her a tot of brandy. ‘Medicinal purposes only,’ he’d said gently. How kind he’d been, she thought.

  ‘Sit down, Mam,’ Peggy said now. ‘Tea’s nearly ready.’

  ‘I don’t think I could eat anything. And I must wash. I feel so grubby.’

  As Mary left the room and went upstairs to the bathroom, the other three glanced at one another.

  ‘She’s had a nasty shock,’ Grace said. ‘You can see it in her eyes.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be working on the trams,’ Rose burst out. ‘It isn’t right at her age. Why couldn’t they find her some more suitable war work?’

  ‘What?’ Grace smiled. ‘Sitting by the fire knitting socks like me. That’s all I’m good for, but not your mam. She’s only young. Oh yes—’ Grace flapped her hand as Rose opened her mouth to protest. ‘I know she maybe seems old to you. At your age, young Rose, anyone past thirty is over the hill, but believe you me, your mother doesn’t see herself as old and she wouldn’t thank you for insinuating as much.’