THE SISTERS' WAR TRILOGY BOOK 1

A WARTIME WELCOME

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.’

Clemmie Warren stared in disbelief. Pearl was right. There was nothing left of Albert Terrace except a mound of charred timbers and smashed masonry, here and there among the smoke and the debris the sorry remains of people’s possessions: an iron bedstead; someone’s tin bath; the mangled frame of a lady’s bicycle. That last item she recognised as the old boneshaker Mrs Dawes rode home on from her job at the public baths every evening and then left propped overnight against the front wall. As a little girl, she’d warned the old dear that one day someone would steal it and she’d have to go to work on foot. Granny Dawes had laughed. Folk on Chandlery Street might not have much to their names, she’d said as she’d bent low to pinch her cheeks, but they respect one another’s property. It was more than could be said of Jerry.

Her eyes continuing to scan the devastation, Clemmie gave in to a despairing sigh. After two and a half years of war, and more false alarms than anyone could reckon, the drone of bombers last night had come as a shock, it taking her a while to recognise the low and oscillating hum for what it was. Even when the first incendiaries had come whistling out of the night sky, their elder sister May had tried to play down the danger. The Luftwaffe, she assured them, were only interested in places like the quayside and the railway yard; being some way up the hill meant Albert Terrace was unlikely to suffer anything worse than the odd shattered windowpane and a few dislodged roof tiles. Having seen pictures in the newspapers from the time Plymouth was bombed, she claimed this as fact.

Clemmie had wanted to believe her. But when the incendiaries had stopped and, in the eerie silence that followed, the crrrrrrump of the first HE to explode nearby had made her ribs rumble, she’d sensed it was going to be worse than May was letting on. And now, in the smoke-filled light of day, it was plain her doubts had been well-founded: Jerry hadn’t given a damn where the bombs fell, much less for the families whose homes and livelihoods they obliterated.

Her head pounding from lack of sleep, the back of her throat dry from the dust, she heaved another despair-laden sigh. Four hours they’d cowered in that dank little public shelter on the corner of Friar Street, forced to listen, helplessly, to the destruction raging overhead: to the boom of explosions; the crashing of glass; the rush of masonry collapsing into the streets. Four hours she’d clung to her sisters, praying with each ragged breath that it wouldn’t be her last; that, against all the odds, they would live to see another day. But standing there this morning, she had to wonder what it was they’d been spared for. With neither home nor belongings, what were they to do? Where would they even go?

As the reality of their plight sank in, she started to cry. How could this be fair? What had the three of them ever done to the Germans? If a single stray bomb had flattened just Albert Terrace, then the three of them might have found refuge with neighbours. But even with a veil of brick dust hanging in the air like a November smog, Clemmie could see that the rest of Chandlery Street was gone too; even Mundy’s the bakers, where she’d worked six mornings a week selling bread. To make matters worse, all she could make out of the Sovereign Hotel, where May had been employed as a cleaner, was a blackened outline of the facade. Pound to a penny the Plaza had been destroyed too, leaving Pearl without her job as an usherette. If none of them had work, how would they buy food? Essentials of any sort? They had nothing but the clothes they stood up in.

Catching May looking across at her, Clemmie reached into the pocket of her jacket, pulled out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘What are we… going… to do? Everything’s… gone. All of it. All of it…’

‘Yeah.’ Stabbing at the rubble with what looked to be a fire poker, Pearl agreed. ‘Ain’t so much as a matchstick to be saved from this lot.’

Unusually for May, her response offered little comfort. ‘No.’

Dearest May. When illness had left their mother too frail to continue to care for them, without questioning the fairness or otherwise May had quietly assumed responsibility for everything, from paying the rent to looking after their ration books, from putting meals on the table to ensuring they had clean clothes. For all her pragmatism and determination, though, Clemmie imagined even she was going to struggle to make things right this time. Where would she even start? Those two rooms on the ground floor of that crumbling old terrace might have been rat-infested and damp, but they’d been their home, within its walls what precious few belongings they’d so far avoided having to sell. 

‘You know…’ At the edge of the debris, Pearl’s prodding had lost some of its vigour. ‘There is one good thing…’

Clemmie frowned. Amid all this devastation, there was a good thing?

Beside her, May looked equally puzzled. ‘Really? Not sure how you fathom that.’

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

Dear God, yes, her stepfather, Mr Warren. When the air raid siren had started up its nerve-shattering wail, they’d crept past him slumped over the kitchen table, reeking of the Stoker’s Arms and snoring like a hog. Was it wicked to pray that Pearl was right – to hope the Luftwaffe really had put an end to him? Given his habit of showing up more times than a bad penny, she doubted they could be so lucky.

Desperate for reassurance, she turned to May. ‘You think he were definitely still in there, then? 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?’

‘Think about it,’ May said as she cast a glance to where Pearl – the only one of them to have Charlie Warren as her real father – was now clambering over the rubble. ‘When the three of us left, 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.’

Pearl was of the same mind. ‘Yeah. There’s no way he could have got out. He’s gone. Dead and buried. And I for one shan’t mourn his passing.’

To hear Pearl talk so coldly about her own flesh and blood made Clemmie wince. ‘But—’

‘Face it, Clem.’ Continuing to poke about in the rubble, Pearl was unrepentant. ‘That foul-mouthed bastard might have been my father, but he was rotten through and through. And yes, I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but you’re 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, then 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…’

‘Trust me,’ May said stoutly, ‘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 fags or his booze.’

To Clemmie, that hadn’t been the worst of it. ‘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.’

Clemmie dabbed her eyes. While Pearl might have a point, it still didn’t seem right for the man’s own daughter to wish him dead.

‘It’s true,’ May picked up again. ‘He don’t deserve to be neither mourned nor remembered.’

But if Clemmie was to rest easy, she needed to know, beyond all possible doubt, that Charlie Warren really had drawn his last breath. ‘Even so…’

‘Look,’ said May. ‘You’ve had a shock. You’re tired. We all are.’ 

‘Besides,’ Pearl went on, 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, Clemmie had been wondering the same thing.

‘Well,’ May replied. ‘When we came up out of the shelter, that warden told us we were to go up the church and wait there. So, I suppose we go and see what the arrangements are – see if a rest centre’s been set up, like that time last month when those stray bombs fell on Marsh Barton. 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.’

Turning her attention back to Pearl, Clemmie watched her tug something from the rubble. As it glinted in the light, she recognised it as the sort of little mirror to hang in a birdcage. She supposed it must have belonged to Mrs Duncan upstairs, what with her keeping budgerigars.

Letting the mirror drop from her fingers, Pearl picked her way back across the rubble. ‘So,’ she said, brushing the dirt from her hands, ‘that’s what we’re going to do, is it? Go up the church?’

May nodded. ‘It is. We’ll go and see what’s what. And we’ll do it now, early, before every other soul does the same and 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, and with which Clemmie noticed her half-sister’s lips curl into a grin, ‘that on the way down the shelter last night, I thought to grab this.’ When she held aloft her pink vanity case, the sight of her sister’s most cherished possession made Clemmie start crying again. ‘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 away from the ruins, ‘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.’

Turning to see her sisters picking their way over the firemen’s hoses snaking up from the river, Clemmie risked a final glance back at the ruins. Dare she believe Mr Warren was dead? Had they really seen the back of him? She supposed only time would tell.

***

copright Rosie Meddon 2022