Angel of the North Read online

  Angel of the North

  The daughter of a Durham miner, Annie Wilkinson now lives in Hull where she divides her time between supporting her father and helping with grandchildren.

  Also by Annie Wilkinson

  Sing Me Home

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster, 2013

  A CBS company

  Copyright © Annie Wilkinson, 2013

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Annie Wilkinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  222 Gray’s Inn Road

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  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47111-536-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47111-537-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47111-538-7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Every effort was made to contact the copyright holder to request permission to reproduce the extract from ‘Antigonish’ by Hughes Mearns. Any copyright holders should get in touch with Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  This book is dedicated to the firemen, engineers, rescue workers and medical and nursing staff of Wartime Hull.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to:

  Emma Lowth, my editor, Judith Murdoch, my agent,

  Authors:

  T. Geraghty, A North East Coast Town

  Rev. Philip Graystone, The Blitz on Hull

  Esther Baker, A City in Flames – A firewoman’s recollections of the Hull Blitz, which I highly recommend.

  Dr Barry C. Hovell, The Hull Royal Infirmary 1782–1982

  Dan Billany, The Trap – a novel, also highly recommended.

  Rex Needle, writer, researcher and photographer of Bourne, Lincolnshire, for his impressive website and CD. The people of Bourne housed 900 evacuees during the Second World War, keeping them safe from the bombing in Hull. Most of the children remained until the war ended and many made lifelong friendships. The infamous Mortons of my story are complete fictions, and bear no resemblance whatsoever to anyone in Bourne.

  Brian Pears of Gateshead, for permission to use information from his very informative website, North-East Diary, Bridget Renwick, Alumni Relations Administrator of Hymers College, for unstinting help with the wartime history of Hymers.

  Jean, of Keel Road, for sharing her memories.

  All the volunteers at the Carnegie Heritage Centre in Hull.

  The staff of Hull History Centre.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 1

  31 March–1 April 1941

  At the sound of the bombers Marie Larsen froze. The ominous thrum-thrumming of their engines was rapidly followed by the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. The doctor glanced up from cutting down through layers of fat in search of a suitable vein in his patient’s well-covered ankle.

  ‘You stay where you are, Nurse,’ he said. ‘We might just have enough time to get this job finished.’

  Typical of Dr Steele, Marie thought. She lifted her vivid blue eyes to his face. Just managing to keep the tremor out of her voice, she said: ‘I wasn’t going anywhere, Doctor,’ and turning to her patient gave him what she hoped was a look of reassurance that she was sorely in need of herself.

  ‘Soon be done,’ she told him. ‘A couple of pints of blood and you’ll feel like a new man.’

  The words were barely out of her mouth when the night sky was lit by the eerie white light of chandelier flares. Next, incendiaries would come clattering down and bursting into flames. High explosives and parachute mines would surely follow. With a mounting sense of dread, and praying that none of the bombs would hit the infirmary, Marie concentrated on holding the retractors steady.

  She had to live. All her fondest hopes, her most glorious visions of becoming Charles’s wife, of presenting him with his firstborn child, of becoming the mother of a large and happy family, had to be fulfilled. Now every time she heard the hum of a plane she thought of Margaret, killed stone dead in James Reckitt Avenue during just such a raid as this.

  Killed! It was the first time anyone really close to Marie had died, and the shock of it had knocked her sideways. She still couldn’t believe it – except that she surely did, because it had robbed her forever of that ‘it can’t happen to me’ sort of confidence. If it could happen to Margaret it could happen to Marie herself and now, as soon as the sky began to vibrate with the thrum, thrum, thrum of German aircraft, she trembled.

  The patient was not reassured by her words of encouragement. His fleshy cheeks were pale, and his eyes rolled skywards. Sweat stood in large beads on his forehead and upper lip. ‘How much longer?’ he moaned.

  ‘Not much,’ she said, forcing a show of confidence and raising her voice above the noise of planes and guns. ‘We’ll be all right. Only the good die young.’

  Through a gap in the screens she saw those patients who could, taking shelter under their beds, the other two nurses in the ward along with them. The impulse to do the same was nearly irresistible.

  The doctor gave her a sardonic smile. ‘I take it you’re not good, then, Nurse?’

  ‘Not too good to live, I hope,’ she said, steadying herself to hold the incision open, now with the rattle of incendiaries and the ack! ack! ack! of anti-aircraft guns sounding in her ears.

  The doctor had a vein. As he inserted the cannula the screech of a bomb preceded an earth-shattering blast, shaking the floor beneath their feet.

  ‘Keep calm,’ Dr Steele insisted. ‘I want this job out of the way. I don’t want to have to do this again.’

  Marie glanced up at his lined old face, its expression quite impassive. Dr Steele? Dr Nerves-of-steel, rather. Either he was very brave, or completely lacking in imagination. He had no bedside manner, there was not much sympathy to be had from him, but he was a good man to be with in a crisis. He left you very little time to think of the people being bombed, or to worry about any
of your friends or family being among them; no time to think about ruined houses, or wonder whether your own home was still standing. But very soon they might all be dead and then his retirement would be permanent. This might be the last time he’d ever have to do a cut-down to find a vein suitable for a transfusion; but he’d finish it.

  Marie ran the blood through the tubing as fast as it would go and hung the bottle on the drip-stand. The doctor attached the end of the tube to the cannula, and started to suture the incision.

  The noise of the first wave of aircraft receded. Now from the south came the drone of an approaching second wave, followed by a whistling scream and then the deafening crump of a bomb, shaking the hospital to its foundations, ripping off the blackout blinds, shattering all the windows and hurling lethal glass shards inwards with the speed of bullets.

  ‘Ouch!’ Marie almost jumped out of her skin when she felt a stinging in her left forearm, and saw that one of the smaller splinters had buried itself in her flesh.

  With a palpitating heart she pulled it out, gritting her teeth against the pain. A deep gash about half an inch long gushed blood onto the sheet.

  With his customary coolness the doctor took hold of her wrist and peered at the wound through his half-moon lenses. ‘That needs a stitch,’ he said, taking a lump of gauze from the trolley beside him and slapping it on the wound. ‘Hold that on it for now, and go and see who else is hurt.’

  Half a dozen bedfast patients were calling for attention, and the two other nurses on duty were hastening towards them. Pressing the gauze over her own cut, Marie went to make a swift inspection of their injuries. On passing the broken windows she hesitated for a moment, seeing searchlights crisscrossing the sky. Some of the buildings – mostly business premises – on the other side of Prospect Street were on fire. By the time she hurried back to report, the doctor had threaded another needle with black suture.

  ‘You manage to keep pretty calm,’ she said, shivering.

  ‘I’m a fatalist,’ he said. “If your name’s on it . . .” as people never stop repeating. And I’m an old man. I’ll soon be dead anyway. I might as well go out with a bang as a whimper. All right, Nurse, sit down and calm down. I’ll start with you, since you’ll be needed to help evacuate the patients.’

  ‘No local?’

  ‘No time. Unless I’m much mistaken, the house governor will soon cut the juice off, and we’ll have no lights. Be a brave girl. This won’t hurt a bit.’

  Marie looked him in the eye. ‘Won’t hurt you, you mean.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  A bit of a sadist, Dr Steele, everybody said so. Marie hissed, drawing in her breath at the sting of the suture needle, the pain magnified by her keyed-up state. This seemed to afford him a rare amusement, and he chuckled.

  ‘You must have been in your element when you were newly qualified, sawing people’s legs off with only a glass of rum for an anaesthetic,’ she said, after a minute or two of his excruciating needlework.

  His weary old eyes suddenly glinted up at her from under their bushy grey eyebrows. ‘But not as much as when I was giving my cheeky young assistant a good dose of the cat.’

  At that moment, the place was plunged into darkness, except for the lurid red light thrown by the flames that were consuming nearby shops and houses.

  ‘There, what did I tell you? Lucky I got your stitch in,’ the doctor said, covering the gash with a dressing by the light of the flames. He taped it in place. ‘Now get up and get on with it, Nurse. There’s plenty to be done.’

  Marie got on with it as best she could in the devastated ward, calming the patients and preparing them for the transfer to the lower floor, to another ward at best, or a place in a corridor, if the wards were crammed full. A porter rushed onto the ward with a trolley full of hurricane lamps and torches, and soon afterwards the night sister swept in to give them their marching orders.

  ‘It’s a miracle no one was killed,’ Marie remarked to Nurse Nancy Harding, as she kicked the brakes off the cut-down patient’s bed and began to push him in the direction of the corridor.

  Nancy walked alongside, holding the blood bottle in one hand and a hurricane lamp in the other. ‘Who’s the idiot?’ she asked, her face ashen. ‘Is it me that’s missing something, or is it the house governor? Shutting the lights off! What for? To me, it’s bloody stupid. We’ve got to maintain the blackout, in case they spot where we are? Hasn’t he noticed they’ve just been raining bloody bombs on us? They obviously know where we are! And I should think they could tell by their incendiaries now, if they didn’t know already with their flares. I bet they can see us from Berlin. Can you see any sense in it?’

  There it was again, that distant drone coming ever louder and nearer, a third wave of fire and blast borne on German wings.

  The hair rose on the back of Marie’s neck, and her suppressed tension escaped in a trill of near-hysterical laughter. ‘Nobody’s allowed to think these days, Nurse Harding. There’s a war on! You just do as you’re told,’ she said. ‘But maybe it’s not just the blackout. The windows have blown out, and we’ll soon have water coming in from the fire-hoses. Water and electricity, Nance? They don’t mix very well, now do they?’

  ‘Oh,’ Nancy said, with a shiver. ‘Anyhow, it doesn’t make our job any easier, does it? All these patients to move; all these beds to shift in the dark, with all this bloody glass and rubble in the way. And the dust! It’s enough to choke you. I don’t see what there is to laugh at.’

  ‘We’re still alive. That’s what there is to laugh at,’ said Marie, working off her nervous energy by rushing the bed along as if they were in a race. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Pattison?’

  The patient grunted, evidently not trusting himself to speak.

  ‘Not like Margaret, poor lass,’ Nancy went on. ‘It’s hard to believe it’s only two months since she died, and only twenty-five. It’s cruel, isn’t it? Bloody Germans, I hate them all.’

  They came to a halt outside the lifts, and Marie pressed the button, wondering for a moment whether they would be working. They were. The hospital governor might have cut the power to everything else, but the lifts were vital, at least until they got all these patients to the lower floors.

  ‘I know,’ said Marie. ‘I miss her like hell. But I seem to have lived a lifetime since then. Have you seen her husband since the funeral?’

  ‘Only once, in one of the fire engines just as I was leaving the hospital. Funny, I never thought Margaret would be the first of us to be married. I thought you’d be first. You were always leader of the pack.’

  Marie gave a little shake of her head. ‘Well, she was a couple of years older than us, so she had a right to take precedence. And I’m glad she was first, the way it turned out. I’m glad she had her six months of married bliss before she died. It’s not much to ask, is it? I’m not going to pip you to the altar either, by the look of it. Now you’re engaged, you’re sure to be next.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ Nancy said, and Marie knew that had her hands been free Nancy would have pulled the engagement ring out from its hiding place on the chain round her neck and she would have had to admire it, yet again. Marie inwardly congratulated herself on the startling success of her one and only attempt at matchmaking. She and George Maltby had almost been brought up together, their parents were such good friends. Contrary to all expectations, quiet, self-effacing George had done rather well for himself. He would make her best friend a good husband. Nancy would be well provided for.

  ‘’Course you’ll be next!’ Marie said. ‘Chas needs a squib up his backside. I know he loves me, but he’s taking so long over popping the question, I’ll probably die an old maid. I suspect his mother might have something to do with that. I don’t think she considers me top-drawer enough to be admitted into the Elsworth family.’

  ‘You’ll never be an old maid, and he’s a fool if he lets his mother stop him marrying you,’ Nancy said, as they steered the bed through the open lift doors.

  �
��You never know; families have a lot of influence,’ Marie said, smacking the button to take them down to the ground floor. ‘But I hope I shan’t be like Margaret: no sooner in my wedding dress than in my shroud. Oh, poor lass! I got the shock of my life when that happened. It’s never been the same since, without her.’ She paused, remembering the good times they’d shared with Margaret. ‘Do you remember how, when the three of us went dancing, she’d have half the hall watching her? And to watch her dance with Terry! What a team they were, like Rogers and Astaire. I thought of going to see him after the funeral, but – you know . . .’

  ‘I know. For one thing you don’t know what to say; you’re scared he might start crying or something, and what can you do, anyway?’

  ‘He’s got loads of friends at Central Fire Station, thank goodness.’

  ‘I know. There’ll be plenty of shoulders for him to cry on. Thank goodness.’

  Chapter 2

  Charles Elsworth’s mother pushed her spade into the soil, pulled herself up to her full five foot eight inches and fixed Marie with a severe stare. ‘His name,’ she said, ‘is Charles.’

  With her patrician features and her haughty manners, Mrs Elsworth was a doughty opponent. So, here was the challenge. Marie had seen little of the Elsworths in the eight months that she and Charles had been going out together. But his parents knew after this time that marriage might be on the cards and Marie saw that the pecking order was being established, right here and now. There had to be a winner and a loser and Marie did not intend to lose.

  She pushed her garden fork into the ground and accepted the challenge. ‘Hear that, Chas? Your name’s Charles,’ she said, with a sneaking suspicion that he enjoyed being the object of their rivalry.

  ‘Humph,’ he grunted, sweeping back a shock of wavy brown hair. His mouth, which almost always looked ready to break into a broad grin, was determinedly straight now, and his hazel eyes fixed themselves on some point in the middle distance. He was doing his best to ignore both women, remaining neutral as far as he could, keeping himself out of trouble. Then he seemed to rethink that strategy, and a second later pulled Marie close into him, lifting her off her feet, pressing his lips against hers in a smacking kiss. ‘I’ll be Chas if you like, or Sam, or Bill, or Ebenezer,’ he laughed, drawing back, ‘if you’ll ask me back to Clumber Street for a nightcap.’