Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (36 page)

Annie had too few pots and pans to donate to the war effort, but the railings along Racecourse Road soon disappeared, leaving an uneven iron stubble. No more satisfying rattle of sticks for Robin Hood during sword fights; Zorro would have to do without acoustics from now on.

Zorro is the flavour of the moment. Annie makes a cloak (two arm holes and a neck cut out of blackout cloth) and Cora swishes her way to school with garden canes complete with cardboard guards, one for herself and two for the conquistadores she'll do battle with at playtime. Walking there one morning, she passes the Infants' School to find the playground crammed with men. Some are sleeping, side by side, overshooting their canvas beds, their heavy boots obscuring scribbled hopscotch markings and the white lines painted on the ground for drill. One or two perch, knees to chin, on minuscule infant chairs.

There is something unsettling about this huddle of grown men. It is not just the sight of so many unknown adult faces, and in the wrong place, but their cumulative expressions conveying strain, exhaustion, relief. One man hands Cora two small coins: French, he tells her. Survivors from Dunkirk washed up in the most unlikely places.

Sewing could be done at any hour. Housework, shopping (queuing, mostly), collecting Provident: these had to be accomplished before blackout and so completed by 3.30 on winter afternoons. There was little time for sewing during daylight. My mum fell asleep to the sound of Annie's Singer, with Tommy Handley murmuring in the background.

The living room became a one-woman workshop of cutting, letting out and taking in. Mrs Sew-and-Sew had nothing on Annie. The women she sewed for were already well versed in Make Do and Mend, and needed no government ministry to advise them. Few neighbours presented Annie with fabric they wanted making up; more often, they arrived with a dress now required to do service as a blouse and skirt; a blanket to transform into a coat; or a man's
jacket to make over for his son. My grandma lost count of the number of contrasting or complementary panels she stitched into frocks to enlarge them. People were forever knocking on the door. In time, she became well known: ‘Take it to Mrs Thompson. She'll do it.'

There was a new addition to the household too: Annie's tailor's dummy. Though pigeon-chested Nellie was a relic of an earlier style, she was an essential dressmaker's tool. Clothes hung from every hook and inch of picture rail; those awaiting attention were piled on the piano, finished garments occupied the back of the sofa. ‘Oh, Mam,' became Cora's frequent greeting, coming in from school. No surface was without its pile of mending, cotton reels or pins. (Girl guides appealed for discarded bobbins: empty reels made useful holders for signalling wires.)

Sewing at all hours was how Annie came to be summoned for showing a light. Bundling her Bluebird Toffee tin of cottons on
to the window sill in a sleepy fashion one night, she disturbed the blackout blind. ‘Put that bloody light out,' an invisible voice shouted, as if on cue. Mr Woodruff, the warden, lived in the row of houses behind my grandma's. As they were near neighbours and this was her first (and last) offence, he could have issued Annie with a warning, but Mr Woodruff was a most punctilious warden. He reported her.

My grandma was charged that on 28 July 1940, at 11.30 p.m., she allowed a light to be displayed. The summons was signed by the Justice of the Peace, J.W. Thompson: Annie was called to appear before her brother-in-law. My mum accompanied her and waited in the corridor for the verdict. Jim issued the summons, fined Annie five shillings and promptly paid it.

Cora drew a succession of khaki soldiers. ‘Bless 'Em All'. Tall, short, thin: all stood to attention in her notebook. Hilda stepped out in her siren suit, clutching her gas mask and handbag. Toni, Pamela and Rosemary sported fashionable arrowed toques. Even Yvonne and Mary tackled the housework in water-coloured beads and neat frocks. Cora painted heart-shaped pockets, trim clutch bags and sharp-edged gauntlets. The war did not dim fashion sense.

The biggest excitement for the young women of Wheeldon Mill was munitions work, a repetition of their mothers' roles, though this time with stocking seams painted on with gravy browning, hair coiled tight in Victory rolls, overcoats with ‘Air Force' pleating, and two dabs of Max Factor pan stick (if they could find it in the shops).

Some linked up with servicemen stationed in the area. Pearl brought a paratrooper to meet Betsy and Eva, one of the young men stationed at Hardwick Hall, now commandeered as a
parachute training centre, its once ornate corridors scuffed by army boots. He came to the corner shop on several occasions, Pearl's blushes growing with each visit, and offered to lift jars and boxes from the highest shelves to save Eva getting out the steps.

Before he left for active service, Pearl brought her soldier to say goodbye. Slightly tearful but full of smiles, she told Betsy how, on his next leave, they planned to become engaged. The paratrooper was standing behind her. Pearl did not see him frown and shake his head. Odd – cruel too – that he wanted Betsy to know something he did not tell Pearl. Betsy would not be the one waiting for letters that did not arrive.

One Saturday morning, young Winnie Driver appeared in the shop. ‘I'm off then, Mrs Nash.' She'd been talking of it for days: her week in Blackpool with some Clark Gable lookalike in naval blue.

‘Have a nice time, then, Winnie,' said Betsy, who knew what was required of her even when she did not approve. ‘But where's your suitcase?'

‘It's alright, Mrs Nash.' Winnie produced her brightest smile. ‘I've a clean pair a' knickers in me handbag.'

Every Chesterfield company engaged in the production of iron and steel turned its capabilities to the war effort. Bomb and shell cases, landmines and gun barrels manufactured locally were said to be on every British fighting ship; the BBC reported on the town's inaugural production of high-explosive cylinders. The area within a few miles of my great-grandma's shop contained some key sites: Sheepbridge produced components for Rolls-Royce aircraft engines, while the Staveley Works manufactured anti-tank guns and the man-made fog that would help camouflage troops on D-Day. Far more sobering was Robinson and Son's production of
more than seven million dressings, 25 million bandages, 75,000 yards of bandage cloth and 450 tons of cotton wool. The Peak District played its own distinguished part: Ladybower Reservoir became the vital practice ground for the bouncing bombs used in low-level raids over Germany.

Ethel's son joined the RAF. She was pleased as punch, or so she insisted. And, of course, she was proud, her smart young man a pilot, the most glamorous job of all, but she was frightened too, and with good reason. Young Rolly was killed during the Battle of Britain. Her only child, shot down in a burst of flame, somersaulting into the endless blue.

The car seats from Jack Hardy's scrapyard were put to new use as makeshift beds in the Anderson shelter kindly neighbours erected for Annie and Cora. It was cold and damp in the shelter, with only night lights and candles for company and who knows how many spiders. But they had a piece of old carpet for the floor,
pillows and plenty of blankets, food, a thermos and, if they were lucky, a square of chocolate left over from the sweet ration.

Annie buys Cora an exercise book and suggests she record their experiences. For the first few weeks, Our Adventures are described each night until Cora is too tired to write; most episodes have to be completed the following day. She is soon bored with the project, however, finding nothing new to say about sitting in the dark every evening. Unlike one of the heroines in her
Girls' Crystal Annual
, Cora never chances to encounter and challenge a Nazi spy.

It is often dawn before the All Clear sounds. Giddy with tiredness, they stagger back to the house clutching their pillows and blankets. No matter how many times they emerge from the shelter, Annie is always amazed. Rubbing shoulders with the Sheepbridge plant and a railway line, let alone their proximity to Sheffield, she feels they are living beneath an arrow on the map.

My grandma was wrong, however. The family's only wartime casualty was Betsy's youngest brother, Jack, who died, probably as a result of shock, a few weeks after being flung to the ground when a bomb exploded in nearby Duckmanton. The closest anyone else came to a bombing raid was Annie and Cora's experience of the Sheffield Blitz.

Home to Vickers' steel works, which produced crankshafts for the Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain, Sheffield was said to contain a half-square-mile that was more essential to the production of munitions than anywhere else in the country. From the moment industry was targeted by German bombers, the city anticipated aerial attacks.

The evening of 12 December 1940 was crisp and clear; people were hurrying across the city, returning home after a day's work
or a little shopping, concentrating on how to make this, the first real Christmas of the war, feel as festive as any other year. Shortly before 7 p.m., an unmistakeable sound filled the sky. The first planes were heading for Sheffield, guided by a near perfect moon.

Over the next nine hours, three hundred planes bombarded the city. At this stage in the war, there were too few fire-watchers on duty to safeguard its buildings. Shops and offices blazed through the night; the city centre was almost obliterated. A direct hit on the Marples Hotel reduced this seven-storey complex to rubble. Offices, a concert hall, hotel rooms and all their furniture crashed into the cellars on top of sheltering guests. Seventy people died there; the search for survivors lasted twelve days.

Throughout that long unquiet night, Annie and Cora heard the planes overhead. Like everyone else, they had quickly learned to distinguish between Allied and enemy aircraft. They heard the bomb blasts too and hoped they were not next in line. The following morning, the whole neighbourhood was agog with tales of how Sheffield ‘got it' the night before; some neighbours had left their shelters to watch the inferno. Annie and Cora had no time to stop and compare notes, however: my mum was due in Sheffield for a ballet exam.

In true Blitz spirit, she and Annie caught the bus. They had no telephone, no means of verifying how bad the bombing really was and, anyway, exams were exams. Everyone knew what was required: Courage, Cheerfulness and Resolution.

Nothing prepared Annie and Cora for what greeted them as they walked into the city centre. Dust coated their throats; smoke rose from crumpled heaps of masonry. The doll's-house furniture shop (usually their first port of call) was still intact, but Walsh's department store was now rubble.

On a recent visit to Sheffield, Cora had admired an enormous panda in Walsh's window, his giant paws raised on strings, as if walking; his ears, soft caps of fur; his enormous head nodding up and down as his great, gentle strides took him nowhere. Confronted with this new and shocking sight, the first thing my mum considered, aged ten years old, was that big cuddly body, blasted to coiled wires and matted fur.

The Royal Academy of Dancing examinations took place on the outskirts of Sheffield. There was an unfamiliar bus to catch, which took them on a different kind of mystery tour altogether: past the gaping wounds of eviscerated buildings with cables dangling over plumes of smoke and uniformed men clambering over their remains. Street after street was cordoned off. They were driven past broken roads where roofs dangled perilously over collapsed houses and incongruous strips of wallpaper exposed the innards of people's homes, past zigzag markings delineating stairways where stairways no longer existed. A peculiar silence wrapped itself about them.