There’d been a thick frost all day, but it did nothing to suppress the heat from the raging flames nearby. With relief, Rose noted they were not close enough to burn her, but they were fierce enough to make her skin tingle and sweat.
She set her mind to where she lay and which room she was in when the bombs had hit. She needed to work out an escape route before she suffocated. Fear raged through her tiny body, and a sense of loneliness overwhelmed her. She lay back with exhaustion and as she focused upon the light of the moon, questions raced around her mind.
Why hadn’t Mummy taken her to the shelter when they heard the siren sound out its warning?
Why, instead of running to safety like they usually did, did Mummy hum Rose’s favourite piano piece – Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – and twirl around as if showing off a new dress? She’d acted excited – strange.
With a sob, Rose remembered how her mother had screamed at her to keep playing, and how her voice had growled it out with such a fierce urgency it had frightened Rose. When Rose pleaded for them to go to the shelter her mother cuffed her around the ears.
Rose’s body started to tremble until she thought her limbs would never stop no matter how hard she tried to control them. She tried to shut out the screams she could hear around her. High pitched wails of wounded neighbours. The endless shouts and pleas from the street, the screams of other children calling for their parents. Not everyone had made it to the shelters, or if they had, the shelters had failed to protect them. Either way, Rose drew no comfort from knowing she was not alone with her struggle.
She tried to turn her head away from her mother’s contorted face. Rose knew she was dead. A tear trickled down the side of Rose’s face. She was alone.
Eventually, after what seemed like many lonely hours of trying, she released an arm and began clawing at bricks and rubble. Her cries for help were suffocated by the louder voices and frantic sounds of motor engines and fire-engine bells. Rose recoiled at the pain when she scraped her skin against the shards of shattered glass and cement, but after a while she ignored the pain of bruises and gashes in her skin out of sheer desperation to survive.
When she pulled at the last of the bricks, nothing prepared her for the moment she clambered free into devastation and despair.
The moonlight lit the path for a man as he staggered past calling out a woman’s name. He gave Rose a glance, shook his head, and she saw pouring blood running from a gaping hole in his forehead. She turned away and looked across at what she assumed was once the other side of their street but was now nothing more than rubble heaps and bonfires. Seated on an upturned tin bath, she saw a woman screaming into what looked like a ragdoll lying limp in her arms. She pleaded for it to come back to life.
Rose started towards the woman, she wanted to tell her that ragdolls weren’t real and that the woman needed to go somewhere safe, but she took no more than four steps when a noise from behind distracted her. Confused and bewildered, Rose turned around and stumbled back to the hollow she’d made for herself. She called through the opening.
‘Mummy? Mummy? It’s all right, I’m coming. I’ll help you.’
She tugged at the obstacles in her way. Furniture and twisted pipes, hissing in the night air hampered her movements. Her hands bled and burned against hot bricks and pipes. She inhaled air which dried her mouth with ash. And then, despite wanting to save her mother, she sighed with bittersweet relief when a fireman lifted her to safety.
‘Come on love, let’s get you seen to. You’re safe now, little one.’ His husky voice sounded tired.
‘Put me down. Please, go and get Mummy. She’s under the bricks. I need you to save her. Her name is Victoria.’ Rose begged and squirmed in his arms.
The fireman pulled her closer to his body, running. He paid little heed to her high-pitched pleas, and after they turned a corner, Rose never saw Stephenson Road, or her mother again.
Rose called out and tried to pound the chest of the fireman but the pain in her hands brought about only more screams.
Even the violet-perfumed, comforting arms of a plump lady from the Women’s Voluntary Service did nothing to stop the trembling and terrors which surged through her body. The woman crooned words of comfort as she carried Rose to a makeshift medical tent, and stroked her head before unhooking Rose’s gasmask from around her neck. Rose could smell the difference between her and the nurse who dressed her wounds.
The slightest hint of perfume from violets or the smell of disinfectant could still take her back to that night, even now, after seventy-eight years.
23rd November 2018
Wartime nightmares and memories often caught up with Rose during her afternoon naps, and she jerked herself awake from this latest one. She wiped away a thin layer of sweat from her top lip, and despite feeling warm, she shivered and pulled her cardigan around her. Her knees creaked as she rose from her chair and shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As she waited for the kettle to boil, she sat and remembered telling the woman her name and calling for Elenor.
‘Elenor. I want Elenor.’
‘Hush now, little one. We’ll find Mummy and your sister. You rest now.’
‘Elenor is not my sister. She’s on the farm. Mummy’s not coming back. I want Elenor.’
She remembered hearing the woman arrange for a cot-bed and blanket to be placed in the corner of the tent whilst she sought a place for Rose to stay until the rest of her family were found. Rose had tried to tell her she had no family and her daddy had died a long time ago, but the woman told her to rest. She’d lain there, clutching the wooden-framed photograph of her and her parents. The fireman who had rescued her brought it to the tent and Rose overheard him telling the nurse it was all that was left of her home and family.
The recollection of the cries of pain that had echoed around the tent, followed by the hushed voices of men taking away those who had not survived the night, never left Rose. One vivid memory was of how she had lain on the bed praying in hope she was not alone in the world. For the first time in her life, at nearly seven years old, Rose understood the pain of war and loss. She understood Elenor’s fears when the war was first declared, fears her mother brushed aside as a young woman’s hysterics.
A sob caught in Rose’s throat. She missed Elenor, the woman who’d given up her dreams to ensure Rose had a secure future.
For the first few years of her life, Rose knew Elenor more as a big sister than as the employer of her parents; or at least the niece of her mother’s employer. She’d filled Rose’s life with fun and laughter, and even today – 23rd November 2018 – on Rose’s eighty-fifth birthday, memories of birthday party fun were only of those which Elenor had arranged. Her parents had never bothered to celebrate her special day.
Food shortages and rationing were never obstacles for Elenor, and as Rose prepared to meet her own beloved children for a birthday feast, she smiled. Their vibrancy and love of life was passed on by her, but she’d only learned to live again thanks to the love of her adoptive parents.
In her bedroom Rose pulled on her favourite navy dress; a classic style in wool with the zip front for easy wear. She reached into her jewellery box and pulled out the piece which was known as her birthday gem. It was not an expensive piece but Elenor had designed it, and to Rose it was invaluable. It was a Celtic knot with a small maple leaf sitting in the centre and a rosebud resting in the middle of the leaf. There was also a small inscription on the back, C to C to C. This inscription connected her to the places she was born and brought up. Coventry, the town of her birth, Cornwall, her childhood home until she was nearly nine, and Canada, the country which had embraced and nurtured her through her last stages as a child, into her teenage and adult years. Sixty-four years had passed since the day she unwrapped the pewter brooch from her adoptive parents, Elenor and Jackson, for her twenty-first birthday.