CONNIE STARES IN SILENT shock. She pulls the dress around her but the shivering won’t stop.
Nothing of her home is left. It’s buried behind a pile of rubble.
She looks back at the bus conductor. ‘What’s going on? You’ve put me off at the wrong stop!’ The air is freezing, bits of dust hanging motionless in it, and she hacks, bending over.
The conductor puts a hand on her shoulder, fatherly. Not that her actual pa ever does any such thing, unless he wants to borrow a few bob for the club.
‘Got hit last night, love. Thought you must have heard the news and stayed away deliberate.’
She clings still to the metal pole whilst she searches up and down the street. He’s got it wrong; this isn’t Hillview Road. Where’s the club at the end, by the bingo hall? Come to that, where’s the bingo hall?
‘You’ve put me off at the wrong street, mister,’ she insists, frantic now.
The conductor still looks at her, that expression unchanged. In answer he points at the crumpled metal plate on the ground beside her. It can’t be the street sign. That is nailed to the side of Number One. This is only a pile of rubble.
‘We need to get moving, love.’
Connie stares at the conductor. He gestures at the road. What else is there to do? She steps down onto ground that seems to shake beneath her. The conductor rings his bell and is swallowed into a cloud of ash. Bombs are nothing new in Coventry. In a couple more days this stop will be taken off the route.
Connie’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth and she coughs again into this filled, frigid air. Brick dust is everywhere, and a stink of burning. Beyond a pile of smoking rubble ARP wardens are calling to each other. She can’t see them through the blanketing dust. She gags, her eyes streaming, and lifts her bag up to her mouth in a fruitless attempt to keep out the grime. Her mood has crumbled like the buildings either side of her, toppling sharply down into despair as she picks her way through. Corners of walls stand tall and protected like a grotesque forest of concrete, rubble forming the forest floor. She strains to listen out for Mam, for Linda and Barbara, even for Dad, but the ringing in her ears blocks anything that might be there to hear.
She’d marched down the middle of this street only last week, after yet another row with Mam about not being stuck in minding her damn sisters. She’ll find them now, and she’ll look after them all week – all year – whatever Mam wants. The dust layers thickly over her like fear, stifling all thoughts, the ringing in her ears louder and the wall-trees shrinking as her vision tunnels with panic. She’s small again now, coiled up.
She’d give anything to scarper, to winkle out Don from his cosy barracks and stay in their world of unknowing a little bit longer. But she can’t.
Connie walks slowly, as slowly as she dares, making each step tiny. Shivers take her again and she wobbles off course. But eventually there she is. Number 27.
Connie sways. Her bag drops into the dust in front of her. Someone’s having her on. This can’t be Hillview Road, can’t be home. There’s nothing left of it. She wants to shriek, turns around in horror for someone to scoff, tell her she’s seeing things, it’s the lack of sleep and one too many gins last night. She clamps her hand over her mouth and bites down hard but nothing’s working. She can’t feel her teeth against her finger, can’t trust her eyes.
Everything’s gone.
No, that’s not quite it. It’s like someone’s dropped a doll’s house. Their front door is gone. The walls facing the street are gone. The roof, the window frames … She stares, and the more she takes in, the bigger and more unmanageable it gets. It looms in front of her and she can’t grab it, can’t make it make sense. Everything has shut down.
Where Mam and Pa’s room should be, a wardrobe hangs open, grotesquely out of place, half over the gap at the front where the wall should be. Is that Mam’s dress with the blue spots on? The one she’s always saving for best?
Connie’s legs go now and she plonks down on the road, pulls her knees tight up to her chest. The ground is cold, goosebumps appear straight away on her skin, and she looks at them as if they’re nothing to do with her.
Her bag is open beside her, but who is there here to steal anything? The scavengers will be along soon, clambering up after Mam’s dress and whatever else they can get their hands on, but even they haven’t copped on yet. For now the only noises are the sharp scrape of shovels against brick. There are no cries from under the rubble, no sign at all that people have ever lived here.
Connie’s hair droops into her eyes and she rests her head on her knees. Weariness cloaks her. She closes her eyes but when she opens them it’s all still here. Now she does scream, again and again, sending signals out into the dust. Her family do not hear her.
‘Constance Granger? Is that you?’ Old Mrs Cole. Is that one of Mam’s best teacups in her hand? Is she planning a tea party here in the middle of the street? Connie raises her head but doesn’t get up.
But Mrs Cole is crouching down beside her, trying to get her arms round Connie. She isn’t the hugging type; more likely to throw her prayer book at you than come for a cuddle. That’s when Connie knows.
Mrs Cole stopped being an old baggage and showed the first kindness Connie ever knew from her. She’d been off visiting her sister when she’d heard the raid, knew from the searchlights where it must be. She’d raced back at the dawn’s light to see what could be salvaged and found the whole street gone, wiped out. She’d stayed to see who they found.
Nobody.
Nobody was brought out alive from here. Got the lot, that raid.
Shards of brick bite into Connie and she welcomes them. Good. Let her feel something, let there be pain. It’s better than this awful realisation. Anything to hold that off. She rocks backwards and forwards, arms hugging her knees tightly to her.
‘Won’t they have made it to the shelters?’ She won’t believe it. They’d have been fine. Mam would have got them out, would have come back from the boozer when she heard the sirens. They’ll have a right cob on them but they’ll be fine.
Mrs Cole picks at a nail sticking out at an angle from a bit of wood. ‘The shelters flooded when the water main burst.’
Connie gags. She’s seen those bodies be pulled out before, purple and swollen. Beside her, Mrs Cole waits, saying nothing for perhaps the first time since Connie has known her.
‘Right sudden, that one was,’ the warden tells them, joining them in their awkward mid-road huddle.
‘Jerry was at us before we’d drawn breath, the first bombs down before we’d even got the sirens sounding. Weren’t even supposed to be bombing up here as far as we can tell; word is that one of their lot lost their way and wanted shot of some leftover bombs before they got back across the water. Couldn’t get a soul out alive. They were just too quick for us.’
Connie has to wait for an hour for a bus and, when it comes, she gets on without knowing where she’s going, makes her way back to the factory with unseeing eyes. None of it’s real. It can’t be. She clocks herself in and rescues her overalls from the peg in the lavs where she’d left them. Once she’s done her shift she’ll try again, will go back to Hillview Road on a different bus and it will all be all right. It has to be. She won’t go to the dance tonight and then, when she gets home, they will all be there. Maybe she’ll even go via the chippy and surprise them – she can afford it with all this overtime she’s been doing.
Connie reaches her place on the line and there’s someone there. The other girl looks at her.
‘What you up to?’
‘Working.’
‘We’re halfway through a shift and you’re not working today, love.’ The girl looks more closely. ‘You’re covered in dust. Are you right?’
She’s taken into the foreman’s office and given a cup of tea with four sugars. One for each member of her family, she thinks, and the sugar won’t revive them any more than it will revive her. Eventually someone gets hold of Cass and she hurries in, takes Connie by the elbow as if she’s feeble-minded and ushers her out. ‘You can stop with us for a bit, Mam won’t mind.’
Connie can’t cry, not during any of those empty, merciless nights dossing in with Cass in her lumpy bed, and she can’t make it stick. Night after night her eyes refuse to close and she stares up at the brown lampshade, that night playing out over and over again like a Pathé newsreel. Come dawn she drops off just before the bed creaks with Cass leaving to get to work. On her days off, she takes the bus back to Hillview Road. She stands outside number 27 in the hope that maybe someone’s got out, got word to her about where they’re kipping now. She keeps as still as she can and tries to hear Linda upstairs singing, Mam bawling at her to keep the bleeding racket down. Outside her home is the only place the tears will come and she returns over and again, tears falling into the dust, waiting for them to return.
One day she shows up and the looters have been. Mam’s best dress has gone, the kids’ clothes, even the drapes. The tears won’t stop that day.
The factory sacks Connie in the end for never showing up; but she can’t blame them. A few weeks later, Cass’s mam makes it clear that she needs Connie gone too. Connie accepts it with none of her old fight; what is there to care about now? Cass’s mam doesn’t know her from Adam and can’t find it in herself to worry about yet another homeless factory worker in a city full of them. Perhaps she’d have hung on to Connie for a couple more weeks, though, if the shock of it all hadn’t caught up with Connie in quite such a nasty way. She can’t stop being sick. Though Connie tries to brazen it out, Cass’s mam is repulsed – and fair enough. ‘Ain’t you got no family you could stay with?’ she asks one morning, watching Connie sluice the back steps as she stands in her headscarf, one elbow crooked to banish the fag smoke. But she doesn’t; Mam and Dad kept themselves to themselves. She’s on her own now.