The Luftwaffe made up for their one night’s absence with a particularly heavy raid on Liverpool the following evening. It began early, just after dark. All the family were in the back room eating supper and enjoying Forces Favourites on the radio when the sirens started.
Mum switched off the programme and they sat there in silence, listening. After a while they heard it, that chillingly ominous sound that was becoming all too familiar to them now – the steadily increasing drone of approaching enemy aircraft: German bombers, headed for Liverpool.
“It’s too late to get down to the pubic shelter now,” said Mum, doing her best to sound calm, like those people in the propaganda films with titles like Britain Can Take It! But her voice was a bit shaky and Joan could tell she was scared.
Mum turned off the lights, went over to the window, and peered out through a crack in the blackout blind. The rest of the family crowded behind her. They could see the searchlights springing to life and raking the sky over the city. Then the ack-ack barrage from the anti-aircraft guns began in earnest. There were sudden flashes of hectic white light from the flares that the enemy bombers were dropping to guide them to their main target, the Liverpool and Birkenhead docks.
Brian was keen to go outside and watch, but Mum shouted at him to stay where he was.
“You’d all better get under the stairs,” she said. This was supposed to be the safest place to be if the house got a direct hit. But there wasn’t really room for all four of them in there. Audrey refused point blank, saying she would rather go to bed. Judy, who was getting used to raids and often managed to sleep right through them, clung to Mum and started to cry.
In the end, Mum settled for getting the children into sleeping bags under the dining-room table while she sat up in an armchair, huddled in an overcoat. Joan wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. Sleep was totally impossible under these circumstances. She just lay there, trying to avoid Judy’s knees sticking into her back and listening to her miserable grizzling. They could hear the barrage steadily intensify, the guns on the high ground above Liverpool and Birkenhead keeping up a constant fire.
The crazy thing is, I just can’t believe that any of us are going to be killed, Joan thought to herself. But she knew very well that, although their suburb was supposed to be a relatively safe area with no military objectives, the German bombers often dropped their unused bombs at random on their way home, to lighten their load.
The raid seemed to go on endlessly. It was well after midnight when at last the all clear sounded. Judy had long since fallen into a deep sleep, and had to be scooped up and carried to bed by Mum. Audrey, yawning and stretching her cramped back and legs, followed. Joan and Brian were still wide awake. They hovered on the landing, and Brian, careful not to show a light, peered out of the window. The searchlights were gone now, leaving the sky over Liverpool a fierce, sullen red, heavy with smoke and reflecting flames from the burning docks.
“They must have dropped a lot of incendiary bombs,” said Brian.
“I’m glad it wasn’t on us,” Joan said, then stopped short, realizing what a heartless remark that was when so many people’s homes must have been destroyed. Heartless too, she thought, that even though she knew that people had died in those fires, the sight of them lighting up the sky seemed unreal somehow, like those paintings she had seen of infernos and shipwrecks at sea and visions of hell. But it would have been only too real if their home had taken a direct hit. Joan shivered.
Their little back garden and the golf links lay shrouded in darkness. It was high tide. All they could hear now was the sound of waves washing in peacefully beyond the sand dunes.
“Come on, you two,” Mum called out wearily. “Time you were in bed.”
Brian trudged off to his room, but Joan hesitated for one last look. Just before she turned away, she thought she caught sight of a movement near the fence – something like the figure of a man standing under the pear tree. But, when she looked again, he was gone.