THE SISTERS' WAR TRILOGY BOOK 1

A WARTIME SUMMER

Chapter 1

Exeter, Devon, May 1942

‘Huh. So much for coming back to save our belongings. Look at it all. There’s nothing left. Those Jerry bastards have destroyed the lot.’

Staring in disbelief, May Warren fought back tears. Pearl was right. While the three of them had been cowering in that horrid little air raid shelter, up here the Luftwaffe had been flattening everything in sight. She’d guessed the damage would be bad, of course she had. After the best part of four hours spent clinging together in terror, none of them had been expecting to come up this morning and find everything just as they’d left it. But even as they’d sat, listening helplessly to bomb after bomb whistling its way down to Earth, every new explosion rattling their ribs, she’d consoled herself with the thought that even had the blasts blown out the windows and damaged the roof, they would still be able to rescue their belongings. At the very least, she’d pictured them salvaging the essentials such as clothes and shoes and ration books. Last year, when Plymouth had been blitzed, the newspapers had printed photographs of people carrying furniture from their bomb-damaged homes and stacking it in the street. Poor things, she remembered thinking as she’d peered with morbid curiosity at their possessions. But it was plain now that those were the households who’d got off lightly, the newspapers choosing not to print pictures of families whose homes had been completely razed, whose owners had been left with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. Despair of that sort was bad for the nation’s morale.

Swiping at the tears now spilling down her cheeks, she glanced about. It wasn’t just Albert Terrace that had caught it: the whole of Chandlery Street had been levelled – the old sail lofts, the coal yard, even the dairy. In fact, with the first proper rays of daylight now breaking through the haze of brick dust and ash, it was clear that this entire side of the city had been flattened, the only building seeming to have escaped being the cathedral, its twin towers rising like ghostly apparitions through the murk. Had the Germans deliberately avoided bombing it, she wondered, or had it been saved by a more divine power? After all, just across the green from it, the once grand façade of the Sovereign Hotel, where she had worked as a cleaner, was nothing more than a charred silhouette.

A few feet away, May’s sister, Clemmie, stood sobbing. ‘What are we… going… to do? Everything’s… gone. All of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Pearl piped up. Having pulled from the debris what appeared to be a fire poker, she was stabbing angrily at the rubble. ‘Ain’t so much as a matchstick to be saved from this lot.’

Pearl was right about that. The pile of blackened timbers suggested their home had been set on fire by an incendiary, its subsequent collapse likely down to a direct hit from a high explosive – or ‘HE’, as everyone had come to know them.

Desperate to be rid of the taste of smoke in her mouth, May forced a swallow. How was she supposed to look after Clemmie and Pearl now? What did she even say to them? To a passer-by, Albert Terrace had been just another old building, but to the three of them, and to the dozen or so other families living either side, it had been home, and the sight of it all smashed and broken made her want to rail at the unfairness and the cruelty. Look at it: a few feet in front of her was a brass finial from someone’s bedstead; a little further over, the iron door from their kitchen range. And by her feet, wet from the firemen’s hoses and muddied from their boots, a scrap of gaily patterned cloth that might once have hung as curtains at someone’s window or lain as a bedspread over their slumbers.

With a sharp sniff, she wiped a hand across her cheeks. It was all very well men like Churchill telling them they mustn’t lose hope, that no matter the hardships they must stay strong, but how the devil were they supposed to do that now? She would do her best, of course she would. As the eldest, she would take charge as she always had. But stay strong? After this? Huh. She defied even Winnie himself to do that.

‘I don’t suppose…’ Beside her, Clemmie’s voice was still choked by sobs. ‘…we’re in… the wrong… place. Only…’

May shook her head; of all the useful things she could do now, giving her sisters false hope wasn’t one of them. ‘No,’ she said, her voice scratchy from the dust in her throat. ‘We’re in the right place. I know it.’

In truth, what did it matter? This smouldering heap of rubble here, or that one over there, the upshot was the same: their home was gone. And yes, it might only have been two rooms on the ground floor of a building that ought more properly to have been condemned years ago, but it had been their shelter against the world, in it all the things that were dear to them: the few remaining pieces of their mother’s furniture; the last of her china; the tiny box with the inlaid lid that had contained locks of their hair from when they were babies. But now it was all gone. And for what? What had the three of them ever done to the Germans? As if making them homeless wasn’t enough, Hitler had snatched away her livelihood as well, and Clemmie’s at the bakery too, from what she could see through the smoke. In fact, given how few buildings were still standing, there wasn’t much hope for Pearl’s either. So thoroughly had the enemy done their job that the three of them were now destitute: without work, they would have no money; without money, they couldn’t pay rent. Rent? Huh. Where on earth would they find to rent now? With everywhere flattened, where would they even start to look?

‘You know…’ At the edge of the debris, Pearl’s prodding had taken on a desultory air. ‘There is one good thing…’

Struck by her sister’s tone, May turned to see a smirk on her lips. ‘Really? Not sure how you fathom that.’

‘Well, you got to think we’ve seen the last of Charlie.’

Dear God, yes. Mr Warren. When the siren had started up, he’d been slumped in one of his drunken stupors over the kitchen table, none of them daring to rouse him on their way past, which had to mean—

‘You think he were definitely still in there, then?’ Clemmie’s tone, as she asked, suggested she daren’t believe it. ‘You don’t think he could have got himself out before the bombs started falling? He couldn’t have… he couldn’t have woken up after we’d left and took himself off to shelter someplace else?’

May shook her head. Charlie Warren’s latest bout of inebriation had left him, as it always did, so deeply comatose that if the air raid siren hadn’t roused him, nothing would have. And the chance that he had survived what looked to have been a direct hit by an HE defied belief. No, Charlie Warren was gone. His reign of terror was over.

‘Think about it,’ she said, casting a glance to where Pearl – the only one of them to have Charlie Warren as her real father – was now clambering over the ruins. ‘When we crept out, he was snoring fit to wake old Mrs Tuckett on the top floor. So, no, I reckon that skinful he had yesterday was his last… and that when he came stumbling in, cursing and lashing out as usual, it was for the final ever time.’

‘Yeah,’ Pearl looked back at them to agree. ‘There’s no way he could have got out. He’s gone. Dead and buried. And I for one shan’t mourn his passing.’

‘But Pearl—’

‘Face it, Clemmie.’ Continuing to poke about in the rubble, Pearl was unrepentant. ‘That foul-mouthed bastard might have been my father but he were rotten through and through. And yes, I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but you’re also not supposed to tell lies, either. So, let’s none of us pretend we’ll miss him. You might have been the one to feel the back of his hand most often but weren’t none of us spared his wrath. It was me he swore at for fighting off the drunks he brought home. It was me he told not to be so prissy every time I complained about one of them putting a hand up my skirt or trying to reach inside my blouse. And if I can’t forgive him that, why would I mourn him? And you, May – don’t tell me you weren’t brassed off with him constantly helping himself to the coins from your purse…’

So what if I took some of your money, you sour-faced bint. This is my house. You don’t like it, you can leave. But try taking my girl Pearl with you and it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Don’t say I haven’t warned you.

‘Trust me,’ May said shortly, the memory of Charlie Warren’s bloated features making her itch with rage, ‘many’s the time I could gladly have taken the carving knife to that man—’

‘…or that you, Clemmie, weren’t browned off with him sending you out with your own money to fetch his booze or his fags.’

‘I daren’t never disobey him.’

‘See, that’s what I mean. So, no, I shan’t lose sleep over him being dead, and nor should either of you.’

‘It’s true,’ May said, watching Clemmie mop at her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘He don’t deserve to be neither mourned nor remembered.’ For the misery he’d brought upon their mother alone, that vile excuse of a man deserved to be entirely forgotten, his passing from this world going completely unmarked.

Still sobbing, Clemmie made to reply. ‘Even… so…’

‘Look,’ May said. She did wish Clemmie wouldn’t get so upset over things that weren’t worth her tears. Fragile as a china doll, Mum always said. She even looked it, with her pale wispy hair and their father’s blue eyes. ‘You’ve had a shock. You’re tired. We all are.’

‘Besides,’ Pearl added, rising to her feet and gesturing about her, ‘we’ve more important things than the demise of Charlie Warren to worry about. I mean, what the hell do we do now? Where do we even go?’

Before their discussion had turned to the fate of her stepfather, May had been wondering the same thing.

‘Well,’ she said, deciding there was only one thing they could do. ‘When we came up out of the shelter, that warden told us we were to go up the church and wait. So, I suppose we go there and see what the arrangements are – see if a rest centre’s been set up like that day Marsh Barton was bombed, and then go and find it. I don’t see as we have a choice. I mean, look about you. High Street’s flattened. Fore Street’s burned out. Even Bedford Circus is gone. There’s nowhere left.’

Feeling a fleck of ash landing on her cheek, she moved to wipe it away, only to then curse as it fell onto her lapel. She doubted her poor jacket, already peppered with smuts, would ever be the same again. And it was her second-best one, too; one of the few garments she’d owned that brightened her lacklustre complexion and set off her plain brown hair. And now it was ruined. She could weep at the unfairness of that alone.

Heaving a resigned sigh, she looked back up to see Pearl tugging something from the rubble. Glinting in the light, it appeared to be a tiny mirror – the sort that might hang in a birdcage. With Mrs Duncan in number seven having kept budgerigars, she supposed it had been one of hers.

‘So,’ Pearl said as she picked her way back towards them, ‘that’s what we’re going to do, is it? Go up the church?’

Reasoning that their most pressing task ought to be ensuring they at least had somewhere to sleep, May nodded. ‘It is. We’ll go and see what’s what… and we’ll do it now, early, before we’re left to traipse here, there and everywhere in search of any old place that’ll have us.’

‘Which makes me proper glad then,’ Pearl said, her lips curling into a grin, ‘that on the way down the shelter last night I thought to grab this.’ When she held aloft her vanity case as though she had just won it at a fair, May shook her head in dismay; Pearl and her bloomin’ make-up. ‘Because at least I shan’t be without my curlers or my toothbrush. Nor lipstick and mascara.’

‘Yes, because let’s face it,’ May said, glass crunching under her shoes as she turned her back on the remains of Albert Terrace, ‘looking your best really ought to be your biggest concern when you’ve just lost your livelihood, your home, and everything that was in it.’

***

copright Rosie Meddon 2022