Now instead of thinking about the bombs and worrying about her own danger, she would think instead of Seb and how much she loved him. Like her, Seb was on duty tonight. He was based at Derby House, down near the docks. They tried to time their off-duty hours so that they could be together if at all possible. Nurses weren’t allowed to wear engagement rings, so Grace kept hers hidden, wearing it on a fine chain beneath her uniform. When she felt afraid, like she did now, just knowing that it was there and that Seb loved her was enough to calm those fears.
The air-raid shelter was crowded, but a nurse whom she vaguely recognised shuffled along to make room for her, welcoming her with a tired smile.
None of them had taken her full off-duty hours, snatching a few hours of sleep instead and then going back to work, knowing how desperately her skills were needed.
The remorseless throb of aircraft engines overhead made Grace want to cover her ears. They couldn’t go on like this much longer, being attacked night after night, everyone said so, talking about the effect the unrelenting attacks were having on people’s morale in low hesitant whispers. The unthinkable, the unbearable, had begun to drift into people’s minds, obscuring hope in the same way that the smoke-and dust-filled air was obscuring the sky.
‘Lord knows where we’re going to put them as gets injured tonight,’ the other nurse sighed wearily. ‘The whole hospital’s already bursting at the seams.’
Grace nodded. It was true, after all. Patients were already having to lie on makeshift beds in corridors. The operating theatres were working at full capacity, with extra surgeons coming in from surrounding towns, including Manchester, and now the staff were facing shortages of supplies, the hospital authorities unable to restock fast enough to cope with the demand. Some patients, like the boy who had died earlier, were so badly injured that there was nothing that could be done for them other than to try to relieve their pain, and even that wasn’t always possible. Word had gone round on the grapevine when Grace had been in the dining room earlier that with the city almost cut off from the rest of the country, morphine was to be kept for those patients who could survive and not given as palliative care to those who would not, for fear of the supply running out.
War was such a cruel thing, its horrors thankfully unimaginable to those who had not experienced them. Grace had seen people whose bodies were so badly damaged that if anyone had told her three years ago about such injuries she would have thought they were trying to frighten her.
She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the sound of the continuous waves of incoming bombers and focus instead on the bursts of gunfire from the ack-ack guns. How much longer could Liverpool survive such an onslaught? Not much longer, she suspected. The Germans were bombing the heart out of the city and its people, destroying its buildings, smashing its infrastructure, maiming and killing its people, knowing how much the whole country depended on the vital necessities – raw materials and foodstuffs – that those Merchant Navy convoys whose port was Liverpool struggled to bring in from across the Atlantic.
Cutting off that vital lifeline would be like cutting off the flow of blood to a patient’s heart – and only death could follow.
Down in the protected underground buildings beneath Derby House, Seb couldn’t help worrying about Grace. He loved her so much and she was so very brave, as he already had good cause to know, never flinching from putting the safety of her patients first.
Derby House was the Headquarters for Joint Strategic Planning, a combined operation involving both the Navy and the RAF, and Seb had seen the devastating losses the conveys were suffering thanks to the speed and accuracy of Hitler’s U-boats.
Churchill had given orders that no effort must be spared in capturing from the Germans one of their Enigma machines. These cipher machines sent signals between the U-boats and their HQ close to Paris, using special codebooks, and if one could somehow be acquired, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park would be able to decipher singals and so warn convoys of the U-boats’ whereabouts. But thus far no Enigma machine had been captured and the shipping losses continued to be very heavy.
Seb was part of a secret RAF Y Section, set up to listen in on and speedily record enemy Morse code messages, and he was waiting for the particular sender he was currently monitoring to start transmitting again. It was at times like this, with an air raid going on, the city devastated by what it had already endured, and other men putting their lives at risk to protect what was left of it, that Seb wished that he was playing a more active role in the country’s defence himself.
At the beginning of the war when he had been approached to work for SOE, using his radio operator’s skills to teach French Resistance cells the skills they would need, Seb had been working in the field in France in conditions of such personal danger that he had truly felt that he was doing his bit. But then with the German invasion of France and the BEF being driven back to Dunkirk, Seb had been recalled to England.
Dunkirk, everything it had been and everything it now represented for the way in which, by some miracle, tens of thousands of soldiers had been rescued from the beaches of northern France, was etched on his soul for ever. He had been lucky, but so many had not.
Back in Liverpool he had expected to be handling Morse code messages sent from France by members of SOE secretly landed there and from the groups of French Resistance he had helped train. Instead he had been put in charge of some newly trained Y Section recruits, dealing with military messages passed between the enemy.
Churchill insisted on seeing every day the transcripts of the messages monitored the previous day, a habit he had begun, so Seb had heard, when he had been First Lord of the Admiralty. The work demanded the highest level of concentration, and the kind of quick mind that could speedily recognise the variations in the ways different operators touched the keys of their machines. As Seb always said when he was lecturing new recruits, a wireless operator’s touch on the keys was as individual as a voice.
What they were doing was the other side of war, the hidden side. Where the glory boys of the RAF pursued their targets in full view through the skies, those members of the RAF employed on Y Section duties tracked theirs through countless recordings of Morse code messages. It took concentration, dedication and a special instinct to be able to recognise and follow a specific message sender; to recognise his or her ‘way’ of tapping out the Morse, to be able to block out the crackles, hisses and jamming devices used by the enemy as though they did not exist and to sense that moment when the sender was about to change frequency and plunge after them to keep track of them.
On a night like this one, though, when your girl was in danger and you weren’t, translating Morse code messages didn’t really feel much like a proper man’s work.
Seb looked at the clock on the wall in front of him. Just gone half-past three. With any luck the raiders would leave before it started to get light. As soon as he went off duty he could go up Edge Hill to Mill Road Hospital where Grace worked to check that she was all right.
Nearly four hours they’d been at it now, Luke thought bitterly, as he lay sleepless on his hard narrow army cot bed listening to the bombers sweeping in.
The defiant night fighters of 96 Squadron, based at Cranage, had been screaming overhead but had as yet failed to turn back the incoming waves of the raiders.
Luke and his men would be on duty at first light as they were part of a work party of three thousand soldiers detailed to help in the clear-up operations after the bombers had left, work they’d been engaged in every day since Sunday.
Tonight it sounded as though it was Bootle that was getting the worst of it. Thank heavens his family lived well away from the docks, up at Edge Hill, and Katie with them, although nowhere was safe.
From his vantage point on the roof of a building close to the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company, off Edge Lane, where he was doing his turn on fire-watching duties, Sam Campion could see as